04 — Rhygyfarch’s Life
Almost everything later ages have told about St David of Wales (Dewi Sant, c. 500–589) descends from a single document: the Vita Sancti David written by Rhygyfarch ap Sulien around 1090, nearly five centuries after the saint’s death. This section examines that text directly — what it is, who wrote it and why, which of its claims may rest on older tradition and which are eleventh-century construction — and then traces how the Life was deployed as a weapon in the long jurisdictional struggle between St Davids and Canterbury. The reliability problem of the Vita is the organizing problem of the whole David dossier, and it is set out here.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; patron of Wales)
The David of devotion and the David of history are separated by a literary chasm. No contemporary account of the saint survives; the earliest narrative life is Rhygyfarch’s, composed at Llanbadarn Fawr around 1090 by the son of a bishop of St Davids, in a generation when the Welsh church was being absorbed under the metropolitan authority of Canterbury after the Norman advance. The Vita Sancti David is therefore not a neutral record but a purposeful, learned, and strongly tendentious work, written to magnify David’s foundation and to underwrite the claim that St Davids was an archbishopric answerable to no English see. Reading it requires holding two things at once: that it is the indispensable source for David, and that it was built to argue a case.
This section establishes that double character. The first file treats the Vita as a text — its author and the famous Sulien family of scholars, its structure and claimed sources, its recensions (the Vespasian and Nero versions and Gerald of Wales’s later reworking), and the assessment of named modern scholars (Richard Sharpe, J. R. Davies, T. M. Charles-Edwards, J. Wyn Evans) on what may be old and what is new. The second file follows the Life into the courts of the twelfth century, where Bernard of St Davids and then Gerald of Wales pressed the metropolitan claim at Rome, and shows how the Vita’s set-pieces — the primacy of David at the Synod of Brefi, the two pilgrimages to St Davids equalling one to Rome — served that campaign.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Vita Davidis | Rhygyfarch’s Vita Sancti David (c. 1090): its author Rhygyfarch ap Sulien and the learned Sulien family of Llanbadarn; the structure and claimed sources of the Life; its tendentious purpose; the assessment of Sharpe, Davies, Charles-Edwards, and Evans on what rests on older tradition versus eleventh-century construction; and the recension question (Vespasian, Nero, and Gerald’s reworking). |
| The Political Uses of the Life | The Vita as an instrument in the Canterbury-versus-St-Davids jurisdiction fight: the post-Conquest absorption of the Welsh church, the metropolitan claim that St Davids was an independent archbishopric, the campaigns of Bishop Bernard and of Gerald of Wales at Rome, and how the Life’s Synod of Brefi primacy and two-pilgrimages tradition supplied the historical ammunition — with both-sides judgement on genuine memory versus polemical construction. |
See Also
- The Synod of Brefi — the Vita’s central set-piece, and the seat of its primacy claim
- What Can Be Known — the historical residue left once the Vita’s tendency is discounted
- The Latin and Welsh Lives — the wider transmission of David’s hagiography, Latin and vernacular
- Pilgrimage to St Davids — the cult the Vita was written to promote
- St Gregory the Dialogist — origin of the Canterbury mission whose later metropolitan claims the Vita resists
- St Brendan the Navigator — another Celtic saint whose fame rests on a much later, tendentious text
- Church Fathers — the patristic and hagiographical sources of the tradition
- The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church to which David belongs
- Methodology — the citation and verification standard governing this section
References
- Rhygyfarch (Rhigyfarch). Vita Sancti David (Life of St David), c. 1090. Ed. and trans. Richard Sharpe and John Reuben Davies, “Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David,” in J. Wyn Evans and Jonathan M. Wooding (eds.), St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007, pp. 107–155.
- James, J. W., ed. and trans. Rhigyfarch’s Life of St David. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967.
- Sharpe, Richard. “Which Text Is Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David?” In Evans and Wooding (eds.), St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007, pp. 90–106.
- Davies, John Reuben. “The Cult of St David and the Bishopric of St Davids.” In Evans and Wooding (eds.), St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007.
- Charles-Edwards, T. M. Wales and the Britons 350–1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
- Evans, J. Wyn, and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds. St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007.