05 — David and the Celtic Church

The ecclesial world to which David of Wales (Dewi Sant, c. 500–589) belonged: the ancient British church, continuous with Roman Britain, that kept the catholic faith while observing its own usages of Easter, tonsure, and baptism — and the medieval prestige that made David’s remote shrine at Mynyw one of the great pilgrimage destinations of the West. These files set David in his church before the Augustinian mission of 597 and trace the later fame of his cult, insisting throughout that the so-called “Celtic Church” was not a separate body but the one pre-Schism Church present in Celtic lands with regional customs.

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

David did not stand apart from the Church; he stood within it, as a monastic father of the British church that had survived the fall of Roman Britain and been pressed westward into Wales. That church was orthodox in faith and in communion with the wider body, but it kept an older reckoning of Easter, a distinctive tonsure, and certain customs of its own — usages, not doctrines, which would later bring it into a famous but non-doctrinal clash with the Roman mission of Augustine of Canterbury, sent by Pope Gregory the Great. This section first establishes what that British church was and corrects the romantic but mistaken notion of a separate “Celtic Christianity,” then turns to the later medieval flowering of David’s cult: the pilgrimage to St Davids, the saying that two journeys there equalled one to Rome, the papal favour the shrine enjoyed, and the kings who made the long journey to the edge of Wales.

Files in This Section

File	Description
The British Church Before Augustine	The independent British church continuous with Roman Britain; its 84-year Easter cycle, tonsure, and baptismal usages; Germanus and the Pelagians (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica I.17–21); the clash with Canterbury when Augustine met the British bishops c. 602–604 and they refused to conform or evangelise the English (Bede, II.2); the long road to conformity; and why modern scholarship rejects “the Celtic Church” as a separate body, treating its features as regional usages within the one pre-Schism Church.
Pilgrimage to St Davids	The medieval pilgrimage to David’s shrine at Mynyw; the saying Roma semel quantum dat bis Menevia tantum — two journeys to St Davids for one to Rome, and (in some versions) to Jerusalem; the papal recognition under Bishop Bernard and Calixtus II; the royal pilgrimages of William the Conqueror (1081) and Henry II (1171–1172); the shrine, the relics, and the pilgrim routes; with the attestation of each tradition weighed.

See Also

• The Age of the Welsh Saints — the monastic British church of David’s generation
• The Monastery at Mynyw — David’s foundation, later the site of the shrine
• The Synod of Victory and the Pelagian Question — the British church amid the wider controversies
• The Political Uses of the Life — the promotion of David’s cult and the see’s claims against Canterbury
• The Orthodox Reception — David as a venerated pre-Schism saint of the West
• The Collection on Gregory the Dialogist — Pope Gregory the Great, who sent Augustine to the English
• Saint Columba of Iona — the insular church that kept the older Easter until 716
• Saint Patrick of Ireland — the parallel insular church
• The Pre-Schism Church — the one catholic Church within which the British usages stood
• The Church Calendar — the principles of the Easter computation
• Methodology — the citation and verification standard governing these files

References

• Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum). Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Germanus and the Pelagians, I.17–21; Augustine and the British bishops, II.2; the Easter question, III.25.)
• Charles-Edwards, T. M. Wales and the Britons, 350–1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Davies, Wendy. Wales in the Early Middle Ages. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982.
• Hughes, Kathleen. “The Celtic Church: Is This a Valid Concept?” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 1 (1981): 1–20.
• Evans, J. Wyn, and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds. St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007.
• Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis). The Journey Through Wales and The Description of Wales. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. London: Penguin, 1978.