The Rule of the Watermen

Rhygyfarch’s Vita Sancti David (c. 1090) describes the monks of David’s monastery at Mynyw as the Aquatici, the “Watermen,” because they drank only water — a discipline that gave David himself the Welsh byname Dewi Ddyfrwr, “David the Water-drinker.” The rule the Vita sets out is one of extreme rigour: water only and no wine or beer, hard manual labour with the brethren yoking themselves to the plough in place of oxen, the renunciation of all private property down to the books they used, silence, fixed hours of prayer, and a diet of bread, vegetables and salt — a regime self-consciously modelled on the asceticism of the Egyptian desert and the Christian East. This file sets out the rule as Rhygyfarch describes it, the Eastern character he gives it, and the scholarly question of how literally so tendentious a text should be read.

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

The “Watermen” and the Name Dewi Ddyfrwr

The most memorable feature of David’s monasticism is summed up in a nickname. Rhygyfarch reports that David and his monks drank nothing but water, abstaining altogether from wine, beer and every intoxicating drink, and that for this reason they were called Aquatici — “the Watermen” — David himself being likened to one who, like the desert fathers and the prophets, lived on water and was filled instead with the Holy Spirit (Rhygyfarch, Vita Sancti David §21; ed. and trans. Sharpe and Davies, in Evans and Wooding 2007). From the same discipline comes the saint’s enduring Welsh epithet, Dewi Ddyfrwr, “David the Water-drinker,” by which he is still known in Wales (Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons 350–1064, 2013; Heather James, in Evans and Wooding 2007).

The abstention is not presented as mere dietary preference but as a spiritual programme. By renouncing the cup the monks renounce the consolations of the body and embrace a sobriety meant to keep the mind clear for prayer; the Vita glosses the water-drinking with the language of being filled with the Spirit rather than with wine, echoing the apostolic contrast of Ephesians 5:18 (“be not drunk with wine … but be filled with the Spirit”) (Rhygyfarch, Vita §21; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007). The whole of the rule that follows in the Vita should be read, per the methodology, as the discipline Rhygyfarch attributes to David’s house — pinned to the c. 1090 text as its source, not assumed to be a verbatim sixth-century constitution (METHODOLOGY §3.5; §5).

Labour: The Monks at the Plough

If water marks the diet, manual labour marks the day. Rhygyfarch’s monks live by the toil of their own hands, and the Vita‘s most arresting image is of the brethren ploughing without draught animals: they put no trust in oxen but, harnessing themselves, drag the plough through the soil by their own strength, each man his own ox (Rhygyfarch, Vita §22–23; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007; J. W. James, Rhigyfarch’s Life of St David, 1967). They carry the implements on their own shoulders, dig the ground, and wring their food from the earth by sweat, so that the monastery is sustained by labour and not by the gifts or endowments on which other houses leaned (Rhygyfarch, Vita §22–24; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007).

The point is ascetic before it is economic. Self-imposed labour mortifies the body, fences out idleness — the classic enemy of the monk in the Eastern tradition — and binds the community to a poverty that no benefaction can soften. The Vita underlines that the brethren laboured without complaint and in silence, the work itself becoming a form of unceasing prayer (Rhygyfarch, Vita §22–24; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007). The refusal of oxen is the symbolic centre of the whole regime: where another community would yoke beasts, David’s monks yoke themselves, making their bodies the instruments of their poverty.

“Not Even a Book Is ‘Mine’”: The Renunciation of Property

The rule’s poverty is absolute and is policed at the level of speech. Rhygyfarch reports that no monk might call anything his own; to say “my book” or “my anything” was counted a fault, and a brother who so much as let the word “mine” pass his lips in claiming a possession was subject to penance and correction (Rhygyfarch, Vita §24–26; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007; James 1967). The example of the book is pointed in a community of literate ascetics: even the tools of study, the most defensible of personal possessions for a monk, are held in common, so that the renunciation reaches the very objects a scholar might most wish to keep (Rhygyfarch, Vita §26; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007).

Entry into the community is correspondingly demanding. The Vita describes a hard probation: a postulant who sought admission was made to wait many days at the door, knocking and being refused, tested by harsh words, before he was received — a testing of resolve that recalls the trials imposed on those who came to the elders of the desert (Rhygyfarch, Vita §25; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007). Once admitted, the monk surrendered whatever he brought and entered a life in which nothing was his own — neither goods, nor will, nor time (Rhygyfarch, Vita §24–26; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007).

Silence, Prayer, and the Daily Diet

The interior of the day is given to prayer and silence. Rhygyfarch’s brethren keep silence at their work and at table, speaking only what necessity demands, devoting themselves to reading, prayer and labour in turn; after the work of the day they pass to prayer and vigil, the night divided so that the praise of God is unceasing (Rhygyfarch, Vita §22, §26–28; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007). The horarium is austere and fixed, the brethren passing from church to field and back, with prayer framing every interval (Rhygyfarch, Vita §26–28; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007; James 1967).

The food matches the rest. The diet the Vita allows is bread with vegetables seasoned by salt, and water to drink — no flesh, no wine, nothing that would gratify rather than merely sustain (Rhygyfarch, Vita §21–22; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007). Meals are taken once the day’s labour is done, in silence and in measure, the body given only what will keep it serviceable for prayer and work. The whole pattern — water, bread and herbs, silence, labour, vigil, common ownership — composes a single discipline whose aim is the stripping-away of self that the Eastern fathers called apatheia, the freeing of the soul for God (on the monastic ideal, see Monasticism).

The Egyptian Pattern: An Eastern Rule in the West

Rhygyfarch presents this regime not as a local invention but as the desert come to Wales. The features he assembles — water-drinking, manual labour, absolute poverty, silence, harsh probation, unceasing prayer — are the recognisable marks of Egyptian and Eastern monasticism as the West knew it, above all through the writings that carried the desert to the Latin world (Charles-Edwards 2013; on the diffusion of the Eastern model, see Welsh Asceticism and the Desert).

The channel by which that model reached the British and Irish churches runs through Gaul and the texts of John Cassian, whose Institutes and Conferences transmitted the discipline of the Egyptian monks to Western readers and shaped the ascetic ideals of the Celtic churches; the rigour of the Welsh houses is intelligible as a Western reception of that desert tradition (Charles-Edwards 2013; see St John Cassian, the key figure for the desert’s transmission to the West). The Mynyw rule, in Rhygyfarch’s telling, stands self-consciously in this lineage: David is cast as a Western Antony or Pachomius, his house a desert laura set down in a sea-girt Welsh valley, his brethren living the life of the Apophthegmata (on the wider current of Eastern reception, see The Orthodox Reception; on the undivided Church of the period, Pre-Schism Church). The kinship is real at the level of ideal: the same renunciations, the same suspicion of comfort, the same conviction that the body must be subdued so the spirit may pray, that animate the Greek and Coptic fathers animate the picture of David’s monks (on the desert fathers within the patristic tradition, see The Church Fathers).

How Literally Should the Rule Be Read?

The rule is vivid, but its source is a single, late, and interested witness, and that imposes caution. Rhygyfarch wrote around 1090, when the church of St Davids was pressing its claim to metropolitan rank against Canterbury and when reforming ideals of strict observance were in the air; a founder whose monks ploughed by hand, drank only water, and owned not even a book was an ornament both to the see’s antiquity and to the reformers’ cause (Sharpe, “Which text is Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David?”, in Evans and Wooding 2007; Charles-Edwards 2013; see The Political Uses of the Life). The austerity is therefore doing rhetorical work, and the historian must weigh how much of it is sixth-century memory and how much eleventh-century idealisation.

[Disputed: whether the Watermen's rule reflects sixth-century practice or eleventh-century reform ideals — a conservative reading takes the regime (water-drinking, hand-ploughing, radical common ownership) as a genuine memory of an exceptionally rigorous early-Welsh monasticism in the Egyptian mould, consistent with the desert character of the Insular churches (Wendy Davies, *Wales in the Early Middle Ages*, 1982; the Eastern parallels in Charles-Edwards 2013), while a sceptical reading treats much of the detail as a c. 1090 construction projecting contemporary reform ideals and St Davids' metropolitan ambitions back onto the founder (Richard Sharpe, in Evans and Wooding 2007).]

Two further qualifications belong to an honest reading. First, the literary shaping is undeniable: the topoi of water-drinking, self-yoked ploughing, and the forbidden word “mine” are partly conventions of ascetic hagiography, drawn from the common stock of the genre, not necessarily reportage (Sharpe, in Evans and Wooding 2007). Second, and against over-scepticism, the Vita‘s rigour is not anomalous: the early Welsh and Irish churches really were marked by a severe, desert-inspired asceticism, so that a strict rule at Mynyw is historically plausible even if Rhygyfarch’s particular details are not independently confirmable (Charles-Edwards 2013; Davies 1982). The proper conclusion is the methodological one: the Watermen’s rule is reported here as the discipline Rhygyfarch’s Vita attributes to David, faithfully Eastern in its ideals and entirely characteristic of the ascetic imagination of the Insular Church, while the question of its literal sixth-century application is left open and named as open (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

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 Aquatici / “Watermen” and water-drinking at §21; the diet of bread, vegetables and salt at §21–22; the monks yoking themselves to the plough at §22–23; labour and silence at §22–24; the renunciation of property and the forbidden “mine” at §24–26; the harsh probation at the door at §25; the horarium of prayer and vigil at §26–28.)
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 of the monastic rule.)
Evans, J. Wyn, and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds. St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007. (Richard Sharpe on the text, its date, and its tendentious purpose; Heather James on the cult.)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. Wales and the Britons 350–1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (The desert character of Insular monasticism, the transmission through Cassian and Gaul, and the byname Dewi Ddyfrwr.)
Davies, Wendy. Wales in the Early Middle Ages. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982. (Early Welsh monastic practice and its plausibility.)
The Holy Bible. Ephesians 5:18 (the contrast of wine and the Spirit underlying the water-drinking discipline).