Pilgrimage to St Davids

By the central Middle Ages the remote shrine of David at Mynyw — St Davids, in the far south-west of Wales — had become one of the great pilgrimage destinations of the British Isles, dignified by a famous saying that two journeys to St Davids were worth one to Rome, and (in some versions) that two to St Davids equalled one to Jerusalem. Kings came: William the Conqueror in 1081 and Henry II on his way to and from Ireland. This file sets out the pilgrimage tradition, the saying and its wording, the question of papal recognition, the royal visits, and the shrine, relics, and routes — weighing throughout how securely each element is attested.

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

The Remoteness That Became Prestige

St Davids lies at the very western tip of the Welsh peninsula of Dyfed, on a windswept site near the sea — the Mynyw (Latin Menevia) where David had set his monastery (see The Monastery at Mynyw). Its remoteness, which had once suited an ascetic founder, became in the Middle Ages a paradoxical asset: the difficulty and danger of the journey, the exposure to the Irish Sea and to raiders, gave the pilgrimage the character of a genuine labour and penance, while the antiquity of the saint and the see lent it prestige (J. Wyn Evans, in St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation, ed. Evans & Wooding, 2007; Heather James, “The Geography of the Cult of St David,” in the same volume). The Anglo-Norman bishops of St Davids, and above all Bishop Bernard (1115–1148), worked deliberately to raise the see’s standing, securing David’s formal canonisation and promoting his cult; it was under and after Bernard that the pilgrimage reached its height (Charles-Edwards 2013; James 2007).

“Two to St Davids for One to Rome”

The single most celebrated expression of St Davids’ prestige is the saying, repeated for centuries, that two pilgrimages to St Davids were equal in merit to one pilgrimage to Rome. The Latin tag in which it is usually quoted runs:

Roma semel quantum / dat bis Menevia tantum —
“Rome once gives as much as Menevia [St Davids] twice.”

That is, one journey to Rome and two to St Davids were reckoned of equal spiritual value (Evans & Wooding 2007; the tag is widely transmitted in late-medieval and early-modern St Davids tradition). Some versions extend the comparison to the greatest goal of all, the Holy Land, holding that two pilgrimages to St Davids equalled one to Jerusalem — placing David’s shrine, by this reckoning, in the very front rank of Christian destinations (James 2007; Evans & Wooding 2007).

The saying must be handled with the care the methodology requires of a tradition whose early attestation is thin. It expresses, and was meant to express, the claimed dignity of the shrine; it is not a quotable papal decree with a date and a text. [Disputed: the antiquity and authority of the "two-to-one" tradition are uncertain — it is repeated as established by the later medieval and early-modern St Davids records and is taken by some as reflecting a genuine high-medieval indulgence (J. Wyn Evans, in Evans & Wooding 2007), while others treat the precise couplet and the Jerusalem variant as later crystallisations of the cult's self-promotion whose earliest secure attestation post-dates the period of greatest pilgrimage (Heather James, in Evans & Wooding 2007); the underlying claim of a major indulgence is more firmly grounded than the exact wording or equivalence]. What can be said without hesitation is that by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries St Davids was understood, in Wales and beyond, as a pilgrimage of the first importance, and that the saying crystallised that understanding.

Papal Recognition

Behind the saying lies the question of formal recognition by the papacy — both the canonisation of David and the granting of indulgences to those who visited his shrine. Tradition and the later records of the see hold that Pope Calixtus II recognised St Davids as a pilgrimage destination and granted that two visits there should equal one to Rome; this recognition is usually dated to the 1120s, in the episcopate of Bishop Bernard, who had actively sought Rome’s confirmation of David’s sanctity and the privileges of his church (Evans & Wooding 2007; Charles-Edwards 2013). The canonisation of David is likewise attributed to this period and to Calixtus II’s pontificate.

Here too caution is owed. [Disputed: the papal recognition of St Davids is securely placed in the early twelfth century under Bishop Bernard and is generally associated with Pope Calixtus II (Evans & Wooding 2007; Charles-Edwards 2013), but the exact instrument, its date, and whether it explicitly enacted the "two journeys equal Rome" equivalence — rather than a more conventional indulgence later remembered in those terms — are not firmly documented; the canonisation of David is itself part of this same imperfectly recorded process rather than a single dated act on the modern model]. The substance — that St Davids enjoyed papal favour and the standing of a major indulgenced shrine from the early twelfth century — is well grounded; the precise legal form is not.

The Royal Pilgrims

The prestige of St Davids is confirmed, more solidly than by any saying, by the kings who travelled to it. William the Conqueror came to St Davids in 1081. The visit is recorded in the Welsh annals; though it carried an evident political dimension — a display of Norman reach into the far west, and an occasion on which the native ruler Rhys ap Tewdwr came to terms with William — it took the form of a pilgrimage to the shrine of the saint, and it set a royal precedent (Charles-Edwards 2013; the Brut y Tywysogion and Annales Cambriae note William’s coming to Menevia in 1081).

Henry II visited St Davids twice, in 1171 and again in 1172, on his way to and from his expedition to Ireland. The fullest description comes from Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis), the great twelfth-century churchman and writer who was himself born nearby at Manorbier and who knew St Davids intimately, having striven (unsuccessfully) to be made its bishop and to raise it to metropolitan status. Gerald describes Henry’s devotions at the shrine and the ceremony of his reception (Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Kambriae / The Journey Through Wales, II.1; trans. Thorpe, Penguin 1978). That two of the most powerful kings of their age made the long journey to this remote corner is the strongest single testimony to the rank the shrine had attained.

The Shrine, the Relics, and the Routes

The object of all this devotion was the shrine of David within the cathedral church at St Davids — the great Norman and later-medieval building raised on the site of David’s monastery. The surviving stone shrine base, on the north side of the presbytery, dates from the thirteenth century (commonly associated with the early 1270s) and would have supported a feretory and reliquary containing the bones venerated as David’s, together with relics associated with his companion Justinian (Heather James, in Evans & Wooding 2007; the standard architectural accounts of the cathedral). Pilgrims approached the shrine to pray, to make offerings, and to seek the saint’s intercession and healing; the cult, like all such shrine-cults, was sustained by reported miracles and by the tangible presence of the relics (on the relics and the cathedral, the companion file St Davids Cathedral and the Relics treats the later history).

The provenance of the bones is itself a topic rather than a certainty. The relics enshrined in the medieval cathedral were venerated as those of David and Justinian, but the medieval shrine was disturbed at the Reformation, and the bones recovered in the cathedral in later centuries cannot be securely identified with the saint: [Disputed: a set of bones long kept at St Davids and re-enshrined in the modern period was traditionally held to be David's, but radiocarbon analysis has indicated that the principal surviving remains are too late to be the sixth-century saint's, so that the physical relics' identity is, on present evidence, not established (Heather James and the cathedral's published reports, in and following Evans & Wooding 2007)]. The pilgrimage’s force never depended on settling that question; it depended on the shrine as the recognised place of David’s intercession.

Pilgrims reached St Davids by sea and by land. Coastal routes brought pilgrims from Ireland and from along the Welsh and English seaboard to the little harbours near the cathedral; overland routes converged on the peninsula across south Wales, marked by subsidiary chapels and holy wells dedicated to David and to associated saints, and by the chapel of St Justinian on the headland opposite Ramsey Island, where Justinian was venerated as David’s confessor and martyr companion (Heather James, “The Geography of the Cult,” in Evans & Wooding 2007). The cult thus organised a whole sacred landscape around the shrine — a network of lesser sites that both fed and advertised the central pilgrimage.

What the Pilgrimage Meant

The pilgrimage to St Davids belongs to the wider medieval economy of shrines, indulgences, and sacred travel, and it shared the political uses to which such cults were always liable: the Anglo-Norman bishops promoted it to dignify their see and to press St Davids’ claim — never granted — to be an archbishopric independent of Canterbury (on this political dimension see The Political Uses of the Life). But the devotion it expressed was real and lasting. Long after the medieval shrine was stripped at the Reformation, the memory of David as the patron of Wales and the goal of pilgrimage survived, and in the modern period the shrine has been restored and pilgrimage to St Davids renewed. For the Orthodox reception of David, the pilgrimage tradition is significant precisely as evidence of the unbroken veneration of a pre-Schism saint of the West, honoured at the place of his own ascetic labour (on this reception, see The Orthodox Reception).

See Also

References

  • Evans, J. Wyn, and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds. St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007. (The cult and pilgrimage; the “two to St Davids” tradition; the papal recognition under Bishop Bernard and Calixtus II; the geography of the cult.)
  • James, Heather. “The Geography of the Cult of St David: A Study of Dedication Patterns in the Medieval Diocese.” In Evans & Wooding, St David of Wales, 2007. (The pilgrim routes, subsidiary chapels and wells, the St Justinian site, and the shrine and relics.)
  • Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis). The Journey Through Wales (Itinerarium Kambriae) and The Description of Wales. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. London: Penguin, 1978. (Henry II at St Davids, II.1; Gerald’s account of the see and its claims.)
  • Charles-Edwards, T. M. Wales and the Britons, 350–1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (William the Conqueror’s visit of 1081; Bishop Bernard and the promotion of the cult; the canonisation of David.)
  • Brut y Tywysogion (The Chronicle of the Princes) and Annales Cambriae. (The notice of William the Conqueror’s coming to Menevia in 1081.)
  • Davies, Wendy. Wales in the Early Middle Ages. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982. (Context for the early cult and the church of St Davids.)