The Vita Davidis

The Vita Sancti David of Rhygyfarch ap Sulien, written at Llanbadarn Fawr about 1090, is the earliest narrative life of St David and the source from which almost the whole later tradition of the saint descends. It was composed nearly five hundred years after David’s death, by the son of a bishop of St Davids, in a generation when the Welsh church was being drawn under the authority of Canterbury — and it was written to serve a case. This file establishes what the Vita is, who made it and within what learned milieu, how it is built and what sources it claims, and how named modern scholars weigh what may rest on older tradition against what is eleventh-century construction.

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

The Problem Stated

The historical study of St David begins with a hard fact: there is no contemporary record of him. David (Welsh Dewi) is conventionally dated to the sixth century and traditionally to a long life ending in 589, but no source from his own age describes him, and the early references are slight — an entry in the Irish Catalogus Sanctorum Hiberniae, a handful of allusions, and his appearance in the genealogies and church-lists of the Welsh saints (Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 2013, pp. 585–588). The first sustained account of his life, and the fountainhead of everything later, is the Vita Sancti David written by Rhygyfarch ap Sulien around 1090 (Sharpe and Davies, “Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David,” in Evans and Wooding, St David of Wales, 2007, p. 107). Between the saint and his biographer lies a gap of close to five centuries — a gap longer than that which separates the present day from the Reformation.

This makes the Vita the organizing problem of the David dossier. It is at once indispensable and untrustworthy: indispensable because almost nothing about David can be said without it, untrustworthy because it was composed for a purpose that shaped every page. As T. M. Charles-Edwards puts it, the Life is a work of its own moment, and the David it presents is in large measure the David that the church of St Davids needed in the late eleventh century (Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 2013, pp. 586–587). To read it well is to read it as argument, not as report — and then to ask, carefully and source by source, what older material may yet lie beneath the argument.

Rhygyfarch and the House of Sulien

The author names himself in the work, and he is no anonymous monk. Rhygyfarch (Rhigyfarch; Latin Ricemarchus), who lived c. 1057–1099, was the eldest son of Sulien, twice bishop of St Davids (c. 1073–1078 and 1080–1085), and a member of what was the most distinguished family of Welsh ecclesiastical scholars of its day (Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 2013, pp. 586, 642–644; Sharpe and Davies in Evans and Wooding, 2007, pp. 107–108). Sulien was renowned for his learning, said to have studied in Ireland, and he transmitted that learning to his sons: besides Rhygyfarch there were Ieuan (John), a scribe and Latin poet who copied and adorned manuscripts at Llanbadarn Fawr, Daniel, and Arthen. The family’s seat was the clas (the native Welsh mother-church and community of clergy) of Llanbadarn Fawr in Ceredigion, and from it issued a small but real flowering of Latin verse and scribal art — among the most accomplished Latin writing produced in Wales before the twelfth century (Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 2013, pp. 642–650).

Two consequences follow for the Vita. First, its author was equipped to write learned Latin hagiography on the continental and Irish models, and to deploy scriptural and patristic colour with deliberation; the text is the product of a literary culture, not of folk memory set down raw. Second, its author was personally and dynastically bound to the see of St Davids: he was the son of its bishop and a man of its episcopal family, writing about its patron saint at the moment its independence was most in question. The Vita’s special pleading is not incidental to its authorship — it is of a piece with it.

Date and Occasion

The Vita can be dated with unusual precision for an early medieval text. Internal references and the family’s circumstances place its composition around 1090, during the episcopate of Wilfrid (Wilfre) of St Davids, and within the lifetime of Rhygyfarch (who died in 1099) (Sharpe and Davies in Evans and Wooding, 2007, pp. 107–109; Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 2013, p. 586). The 1080s and 1090s were a moment of acute pressure on the Welsh church. The Norman advance into south Wales was under way; in 1081 William the Conqueror himself came to St Davids, ostensibly on pilgrimage; and the see of Canterbury, under Lanfranc and then Anselm, was asserting a primacy over all the churches of Britain, the Welsh sees included (Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 2013, pp. 586–587, 599–600).

It is against this background that the Vita must be read. Rhygyfarch wrote, as Sharpe and Davies argue, to assert the dignity, antiquity, and autonomy of St Davids — to show that its patron had been the foremost saint and even the archbishop of the Britons, and that his foundation owed obedience to no later English see (Sharpe and Davies in Evans and Wooding, 2007, pp. 107, 124–126). The Vita is, in this reading, a foundation charter in narrative form, produced precisely when the foundation’s standing was threatened.

The Shape of the Life

The Vita follows the conventional arc of the saint’s life from prophecy of his birth to his death, but its emphases are pointed. The principal movements are these (chapter numbers follow the edition of Sharpe and Davies in Evans and Wooding, 2007; the older edition of J. W. James, Rhigyfarch’s Life of St David, 1967, is the standard text):

Prophecy and birth. David’s coming is foretold thirty years before, an angel announces him to St Patrick, and he is born of Sant (Sanctus), a prince of Ceredigion, and the holy Non; his birth is attended by signs (Vita Davidis 1–7; James 1967). The motif of being foretold to Patrick himself is significant: it subordinates the apostle of Ireland to the patron of St Davids.
Education and foundation. David is taught by Paulinus, performs early miracles, and founds churches, culminating in the establishment of his great monastery in the western promontory at Mynyw (Menevia, Vallis Rosina, “the valley of the little marsh”), under a rule of extreme austerity (Vita Davidis 8–31; James 1967). (On the foundation see The Monastery at Mynyw; on the discipline, The Rule of the Watermen.)
Trials and miracles. The Life recounts conflicts — with the chieftain Boia, with the proposed poisoning of David, with rivals — and a series of wonders, including the raising of a dead boy and the curing of the blind (Vita Davidis 15–44; James 1967).
The Synod of Brefi. The narrative’s centrepiece is the great synod at Brefi (Llanddewi Brefi), summoned against the Pelagian heresy, where David, reluctant to come, at last attends; as he preaches the ground rises into a hill beneath him and a dove settles on his shoulder, and the assembled bishops acclaim him their leader (Vita Davidis 49–55; James 1967). (See The Synod of Brefi and The Synod of Victory and the Pelagian Question.)
Primacy, pilgrimage, and death. A second synod (the “Synod of Victory”) confirms David’s decrees; tradition associated with the cult holds that two pilgrimages to St Davids are worth one to Rome and one to Jerusalem; and the Life closes with David’s foreknown death, his last exhortation to “do the little things” (gwnewch y pethau bychain), and his burial at his own church (Vita Davidis 56–67; James 1967). (On the death-scene, see The Last Words; on the pilgrimage claim, Pilgrimage to St Davids.)

The architecture is itself an argument. Two of its load-bearing elements — the acclamation of David’s primacy at Brefi, and the equation of pilgrimage to St Davids with pilgrimage to Rome — are exactly the materials that the twelfth-century campaign for St Davids’ metropolitan status would later require (see The Political Uses of the Life).

The Sources the Vita Claims — and the Sources It Used

Rhygyfarch asserts that he is not inventing but compiling. In his prologue and closing remarks he claims to draw on older written materials: scattered and worm-eaten manuscripts, “very old documents of our country, and especially of his own monastery,” partly consumed by age and the depredations of bookworms and the repeated ravages of pirates and time (Vita Davidis, prologue and colophon; James 1967, pp. 1–2, 45–46; discussed by Sharpe and Davies in Evans and Wooding, 2007, pp. 109–110). The claim is a hagiographical commonplace — the appeal to ancient, decaying records is a topos found across the genre — and it cannot be taken at face value as proof of genuine early sources. But it cannot be dismissed out of hand either: a clas such as St Davids or Llanbadarn might well have preserved church-lists, genealogies, dedications, and notes of property and tradition on which a learned compiler could draw (Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 2013, pp. 587, 643).

Modern scholarship distinguishes several strata in what Rhygyfarch worked with:

Genealogical and onomastic tradition — David’s descent, his parents’ names, the names of associated saints and places — is likely to preserve older material, since such lists were transmitted independently of the Vita and are partly corroborated by the saints’ genealogies and the dedication-pattern of churches to Dewi across south Wales and the south-west (Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 2013, pp. 587–588).
Continental and Irish hagiographical models shaped the miracle-stories and the literary frame; the influence of Irish saints’ lives, with which the Sulien family was familiar, is detectable in the texture of the wonders (Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 2013, pp. 643–645).
Eleventh-century construction accounts for the tendentious set-pieces, above all the Brefi primacy and the pilgrimage-equation, which answer the needs of Rhygyfarch’s own day rather than any demonstrable sixth-century event (Sharpe and Davies in Evans and Wooding, 2007, pp. 124–126; J. R. Davies, “The Cult of St David and the Bishopric of St Davids,” in Evans and Wooding, 2007).

Reliability: the Verdict of the Scholars

Because the Vita is the source on which David’s fame rests, its assessment is not a marginal technicality but the heart of the matter, and four scholars set the terms of the present discussion.

Richard Sharpe addressed first the prior question of which text we are even assessing. In “Which Text Is Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David?” (in Evans and Wooding, 2007, pp. 90–106) he subjected the manuscript tradition to fresh analysis and argued for identifying the form of the Vita that best represents Rhygyfarch’s original against the later, expanded and reworked versions. His work makes plain that one cannot pronounce on the Vita’s reliability without first deciding what its eleventh-century words were — and that several of the most-quoted features come into focus only when the recensions are sorted out (Sharpe in Evans and Wooding, 2007, pp. 90–106).

John Reuben Davies, co-editor of the standard text, situates the Vita squarely within the institutional interest of the see. In his study of the cult of David and the bishopric (in Evans and Wooding, 2007) he reads the Life as a document generated by and for St Davids, designed to underwrite the church’s status and especially its claim to stand outside the ordinary metropolitan order; the primacy-motifs are, on his account, the church speaking through its saint (Davies in Evans and Wooding, 2007).

T. M. Charles-Edwards, in Wales and the Britons 350–1064 (2013, pp. 585–600, 642–650), gives the fullest historian’s appraisal. He treats the Vita as a sophisticated and datable product of the Sulien circle, valuable as evidence for the late eleventh century and for what could then be claimed about David, but a weak witness to the sixth. He nonetheless allows that beneath the construction there is a residue — the antiquity of the cult, the dedication-pattern, the genealogical placing of David — that supports a real, if dimly seen, sixth-century founder (Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 2013, pp. 587–588).

J. Wyn Evans, long associated with St Davids itself and co-editor (with Jonathan Wooding) of the collected studies St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation (2007), frames the volume around exactly this tension between cult, church, and nation: the Vita as a witness less to a man than to the institution and the people that venerated him (Evans and Wooding, St David of Wales, 2007, introduction).

The consensus that emerges is sober and consistent. The Vita is a first-rate source for the self-understanding and ambitions of St Davids around 1090, and a poor source for the events of c. 500–589. What may be old in it is the bare scaffolding — David’s existence, his association with Mynyw, the extreme asceticism of his foundation, the antiquity of his cult — much of which is independently supported. What is demonstrably of Rhygyfarch’s own making, or at least of his own purpose, is the architecture of primacy: the subordination of Patrick, the acclamation at Brefi, the metropolitan dignity, the pilgrimage-equation.

[Disputed: how much of the *Vita* rests on genuine older tradition — Charles-Edwards (*Wales and the Britons*, 2013, pp. 587–588) allows a real sixth-century cult and genealogical core beneath the construction, while Sharpe and Davies (in Evans and Wooding, 2007, pp. 109–110, 124–126) stress that Rhygyfarch's appeal to "very old documents" is a hagiographical topos and that the primacy-material is eleventh-century in purpose; the most cautious reading treats only David's existence, the Mynyw foundation, the ascetic rule, and the cult's antiquity as probably pre-Rhygyfarch.]

The Recensions and Gerald’s Reworking

The Vita does not survive in a single fixed form, and this is itself part of the reliability problem. The text is preserved in more than one recension, conventionally distinguished by the British Library manuscripts that carry them — the Vespasian recension (Cotton MS Vespasian A. xiv) and the Nero recension (Cotton MS Nero E. i) chief among them — which differ in wording, in fullness, and in the presence or development of certain episodes (Sharpe in Evans and Wooding, 2007, pp. 90–106; James 1967, introduction). Establishing which of these stands closest to Rhygyfarch’s original of c. 1090, and which represent later expansion, is the burden of Sharpe’s essay, and the question is not finally closed.

[Disputed: the relation of the recensions — James (*Rhigyfarch's Life of St David*, 1967, introduction) edited the text from a particular manuscript base, while Sharpe ("Which Text Is Rhygyfarch's *Life*?", in Evans and Wooding, 2007, pp. 90–106) reassessed the tradition and argued for a different account of which surviving form best represents Rhygyfarch's original as against the longer reworked versions; the edition of Sharpe and Davies in Evans and Wooding (2007, pp. 107–155) is the current standard.]

A century after Rhygyfarch, the Vita was taken up and rewritten by Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis, c. 1146–1223), himself a passionate champion of St Davids’ metropolitan claim. Gerald produced his own Life of St David, a polished Latin recasting of Rhygyfarch’s material that smoothed the style and adapted the substance to the renewed campaign of his own day (on which see The Political Uses of the Life). Gerald’s version is therefore a witness not to David but to the twelfth-century afterlife of Rhygyfarch’s text and to the continuity of the cause it served; he reworked the Life in the very years he was pressing the case for St Davids’ independence at Rome (on his autobiographical and polemical works for that case, see The Political Uses of the Life). The Vita also passed into Welsh: a Middle Welsh life, the Buchedd Dewi, descends from the Latin tradition and carries it into the vernacular (see The Latin and Welsh Lives).

An Orthodox Reading

For an Orthodox reader the source-critical verdict need not be received as a deflation of David. The pre-Schism Church of the Britons venerated David as a great ascetic founder and confessor, and the antiquity of that veneration is one of the things that survives the critical sieve (Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 2013, pp. 587–588; on the undivided Church to which he belongs, see The Pre-Schism Church). What the Vita teaches the careful reader is the methodological lesson of the whole David dossier: that the saint is honoured rightly when his cult is distinguished from the eleventh-century arguments later attached to it, and when the miracle-stories are reported as the claims of Rhygyfarch’s text rather than asserted as bare fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5). David is honoured in the Church not because the Vita is reliable history but because the living tradition received him; the Vita is the form that reception took at a particular, and partial, moment.

References

Rhygyfarch (Rhigyfarch). Vita Sancti David (Life of St David), c. 1090. Cited by chapter. 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. (Prologue and colophon on the “very old documents”; the birth and Patrick prophecy at 1–7; Mynyw foundation at 8–31; Brefi at 49–55; Synod of Victory, pilgrimage, and death at 56–67.)
James, J. W., ed. and trans. Rhigyfarch’s Life of St David. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967. (Standard older Latin edition and translation, with introduction on the manuscripts and recensions; the prologue’s claim of decayed ancient sources at pp. 1–2.)
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. (Analysis of the manuscript tradition — the Vespasian and Nero recensions — and the question of which surviving form best represents Rhygyfarch’s original.)
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. (The Vita as a product of the institutional interest of the see and its metropolitan claim.)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. Wales and the Britons 350–1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (Esp. pp. 585–600 on David and the Vita, and pp. 642–650 on Sulien and his learned family; the historian’s appraisal of what is old and what is eleventh-century.)
Evans, J. Wyn, and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds. St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007. (The collected studies framing David’s Vita within cult, church, and nation.)
Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis). Vita Sancti Davidis (Life of St David). In Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vol. 3, ed. J. S. Brewer, Rolls Series, London, 1863. (Gerald’s late-twelfth-century reworking of Rhygyfarch’s Vita.)