The Monastery at Mynyw

The monastery David founded at Mynyw (Latin Menevia) in Glyn Rhosyn, the Vale of Roses, in the far south-western tip of Wales — the site of the present cathedral city of St Davids — is the institutional heart of his cult and the centre of everything later tradition attaches to his name. The foundation is described almost entirely by Rhygyfarch’s Vita Sancti David (c. 1090), a tendentious text composed to defend St Davids’ claim to metropolitan rank, which credits David with founding twelve monasteries, dramatises the hard winning of the Glyn Rhosyn site against the local chieftain Boia, and presents the house as a citadel of austerity. This file sets out what the Vita says, how securely the site can be located, and why this remote western promontory became one of the great cult centres of medieval Britain.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; patron of Wales)

The Site: Glyn Rhosyn and Mynyw

The monastery stands in the valley of the river Alun, in the extreme south-west of Wales, on the peninsula of the old kingdom of Dyfed (later Pembrokeshire). The Welsh name of the place is Mynyw, latinised as Menevia; the immediate site is Glyn Rhosyn, “the Vale of Roses” (Latin Vallis Rosina in Rhygyfarch, who glosses the name), a small wooded hollow running down to the sea (Rhygyfarch, Vita Sancti David §15; ed. and trans. Sharpe and Davies, in Evans and Wooding 2007). The location is striking for a major ecclesiastical centre: it lies at the very end of the land, exposed to the Irish Sea, far from the Roman roads and towns of the south-east, on a coast that looks across to Ireland rather than inland toward Britain.

That orientation is not incidental. The promontory was a node on the western seaways that bound together the Irish-Sea world of the early medieval period — the maritime routes along which monks, scholars, relics and ideas moved between Wales, Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany and beyond (Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons 350–1064, 2013, on the seaways and the saints’ familiae). A house at Mynyw sat not at the margin of that world but at one of its crossing-points, which helps explain how a foundation so remote from the old Romano-British heartland could acquire a reputation reaching far beyond Dyfed.

The modern name of the place — St Davids, in Welsh Tyddewi, “David’s house” — preserves the identification of the site with the saint. The medieval cathedral and the ruined Bishop’s Palace stand in the valley today, and the continuity of the cult site, whatever the discontinuities of building and institution, is one of the firmer points in an otherwise legend-laden record (Heather James, “The Geography of the Cult of St David,” in Evans and Wooding 2007).

David as Founder of Monasteries

Rhygyfarch does not present Mynyw as David’s only foundation. Before bringing him to Glyn Rhosyn, the Vita has David establish a series of monasteries across southern Britain, listing among them such houses as Glastonbury, Bath, Crowland, Repton, Leominster, Raglan and Llangyfelach, and stating that he founded twelve monasteries in all (Rhygyfarch, Vita §11–13; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007; J. W. James, Rhigyfarch’s Life of St David, 1967). The number twelve is patently schematic — it evokes the apostolic college and casts David as a kind of apostle of the Britons, planting churches as the Twelve planted them — and several of the named houses are well-known English foundations with no credible early-Welsh connection, included to magnify the saint’s reach (Sharpe, “Which text is Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David?”, in Evans and Wooding 2007).

The historical kernel beneath the list is genuinely uncertain. That David founded or refounded a community at Mynyw is the central and least disputable claim; that he was the founder of a wider monastic paruchia, a federation of houses owing him allegiance, is the kind of claim a federation makes about its founder once it exists, and the Vita is precisely the document of such a federation asserting itself (Wendy Davies, Wales in the Early Middle Ages, 1982, on the clas church and the saints’ familiae; Charles-Edwards 2013). The list of twelve is therefore best read as the eleventh-century church of St Davids drawing the map of its own ambitions backward onto its founder, not as a sixth-century itinerary. [Disputed: the historicity and scope of David's foundations — Sharpe (in Evans and Wooding 2007) and Charles-Edwards (2013) read Rhygyfarch's catalogue of twelve houses as largely a c. 1090 construction serving St Davids' metropolitan claim, while a more conservative reading allows a genuine memory of David as the founder of a real, if smaller, group of Dyfed houses (cf. Davies 1982 on the reality of early Welsh monastic federations).]

The Winning of the Site: David and Boia

The most developed episode in the foundation narrative is the conflict with Boia, a local Irish chieftain (Scotticus, “Irish”) whose stronghold overlooked Glyn Rhosyn. The whole of this story is Rhygyfarch’s, and its details should be pinned to him as the narrator rather than treated as recoverable sixth-century event (METHODOLOGY §3.5 and §5; Rhygyfarch, Vita §15–19; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007).

When David and his companions came to the valley and kindled their first fire, the Vita relates, the smoke rose and spread over the whole region. Boia, watching from his fort, fell into a rage, declaring that the man who had lit that fire would possess all the land the smoke had covered, and he set out with his men to drive the newcomers off (Rhygyfarch, Vita §16; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007). The aggressors are struck down with fever, and Boia’s livestock die; reduced to seeking terms, Boia grants David the site, and the cattle are restored to life (Rhygyfarch, Vita §16–17; James 1967). The narrative then turns darker: Boia’s wife, hostile to the monks, sends her maidservants to bathe naked and provoke the brethren with lewd words and games in an attempt to drive them out by lust, a temptation the monks are urged by David to withstand (Rhygyfarch, Vita §18; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007). The wife afterwards lures her own stepdaughter, Dunawd, to a wooded spot and cuts her throat as a pagan sacrifice — a spring is said to have burst forth where the girl’s blood fell — after which the wife disappears, Boia’s fort is consumed by fire from heaven, and a raiding rival named Lisci kills Boia himself (Rhygyfarch, Vita §19; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007; James 1967).

The episode performs recognisable hagiographical work. It is a foundation legend of the classic type: the holy man wins a contested place from a hostile, pagan, and pointedly Irish possessor, and the land is consecrated by the saint’s victory and by the blood of a martyr-virgin, the spring marking the spot as the topography of cults so often does (on the Boia episode as foundation-legend, see Charles-Edwards 2013 and Heather James in Evans and Wooding 2007). The motif of the kindled fire whose smoke claims the land has Irish parallels and belongs to a shared Insular stock of such stories (Charles-Edwards 2013). For an Orthodox reader the proper posture is the methodological one: the contest with Boia is reported as what Rhygyfarch’s Vita attests, dramatising the cost at which a holy place is wrested from a hostile world, not as a chronicle of events independently verifiable (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Austerity of the Foundation

Rhygyfarch frames Mynyw from the first as a place chosen for hardship. The brethren are made to win the ground by labour, and the regime David imposes is deliberately severe — the famous discipline of the “Watermen,” treated in its own file, in which the monks drink only water, hold no property, keep silence, and yoke themselves to the plough in place of oxen (Rhygyfarch, Vita §21–31; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007; see The Rule of the Watermen). The remoteness of the site is part of the same programme: a hollow at the end of the land, exposed to the sea-wind, is the British answer to the Egyptian desert, a wilderness sought out for the sake of withdrawal (on the desert ideal in Welsh monasticism, see Welsh Asceticism and the Desert and Monasticism).

How literally this austerity should be read is itself contested, and the dispute matters for understanding the foundation. The Vita was written around 1090, at a moment when the church of St Davids was both asserting its metropolitan dignity against Canterbury and standing on the edge of the reforming currents that would soon reshape the Welsh church; an idealised picture of a primitive, ferociously ascetic founder served the reformers’ purposes as much as it served the see’s antiquity (Sharpe, in Evans and Wooding 2007; Charles-Edwards 2013). [Disputed: how far the *Vita*'s austerity reflects sixth-century practice — some read the Mynyw regime as preserving a genuine memory of an exceptionally rigorous early-Welsh monasticism modelled on the desert (Davies 1982; the Eastern parallels noted in Charles-Edwards 2013), while others judge the portrait substantially a c. 1090 construction projecting reform-era ideals back onto the founder (Sharpe, in Evans and Wooding 2007).] Either way, austerity is constitutive of how the Vita wants Mynyw remembered.

Why the Western Tip Became a Great Cult Centre

The puzzle the site poses — why a remote, hard-won hollow at the end of Dyfed became one of the most important cult centres in the medieval British Isles — has several converging answers. The first is the seaways: Mynyw’s position on the Irish-Sea routes made it accessible to exactly the traffic of pilgrims, scholars and ecclesiastics by which a cult is spread, so that its remoteness from the old Roman south-east was an advantage rather than a handicap in the maritime culture of the western saints (Charles-Edwards 2013; Heather James in Evans and Wooding 2007).

The second is the institutional ambition crystallised in Rhygyfarch’s Vita itself. By the late eleventh century St Davids was claiming archiepiscopal status and an honour above the other Welsh churches, and the Life was a weapon in that claim, magnifying David and his foundation precisely in order to ground the see’s pretensions in the deep past (Sharpe, in Evans and Wooding 2007; see The Political Uses of the Life). The cult and the see grew together, each lending the other authority.

The third is the long afterlife of the pilgrimage. By the twelfth century, in the account associated with Gerald of Wales, two pilgrimages to St Davids were reckoned the equivalent of one to Rome — Roma semel quantum, bis dat Menevia tantum — a measure of how thoroughly the western promontory had been written into the sacred geography of Latin Christendom (Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Kambriae; cf. Heather James in Evans and Wooding 2007; see Pilgrimage to St Davids). The relics housed there, and the cathedral that rose over the valley, made permanent what the Vita had asserted (see St Davids Cathedral and the Relics). The remoteness that the foundation legend dramatised as hardship became, in the end, part of the site’s holiness: a place at the edge of the world, won from a hostile possessor, kept in austerity, and sought out by pilgrims for exactly those reasons.

References

Rhygyfarch (Rhigyfarch). Vita Sancti David (c. 1090). Edited and translated by Richard Sharpe and John Reuben Davies in J. Wyn Evans and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds., St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Studies in Celtic History 24. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007. (The Vale of Roses / Vallis Rosina at §15; the foundations and the number twelve at §11–13; the Boia episode at §15–19; the discipline of Mynyw at §21–31.)
James, J. W. Rhigyfarch’s Life of St David: The Basic Mid-Twelfth-Century Latin Text. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967. (Latin text and translation; the catalogue of foundations and the Boia narrative.)
Evans, J. Wyn, and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds. St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007. (Essays by Richard Sharpe on the text and its purpose, and by Heather James on the geography and archaeology of the cult.)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. Wales and the Britons 350–1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (The western seaways, the saints’ familiae, and the reading of the foundation legends.)
Davies, Wendy. Wales in the Early Middle Ages. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982. (The clas church and the reality of early Welsh monastic federations.)
Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis). Itinerarium Kambriae / The Journey through Wales. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. (St Davids in the twelfth-century sacred geography; the two-pilgrimages tradition.)