The Latin and Welsh Lives

Almost everything that the later Middle Ages and the modern Church believe they know about St David of Wales descends from a single text: the Latin Vita Sancti David composed by Rhygyfarch ap Sulien at Llanbadarn Fawr about 1090, some five centuries after the saint’s death. This file traces the textual tradition that grows from that root — the manuscript recensions of Rhygyfarch’s Life, the late-twelfth-century reworking by Gerald of Wales, and the Middle Welsh Buchedd Dewi that translates and adapts the Latin into the vernacular — together with the modern critical editions that have tried to recover what Rhygyfarch actually wrote.

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

The Single Root: Rhygyfarch’s Vita Sancti David

The entire literary tradition of St David flows from one author and one moment. Rhygyfarch (Latinised Ricemarchus) ap Sulien, son of Bishop Sulien of St Davids, wrote a Latin Life of David — Vita Sancti David — at the clas (mother-church) of Llanbadarn Fawr in Ceredigion around 1090, roughly five hundred years after the saint he commemorated had died (Richard Sharpe, “Which text is 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, 2007; T. M. Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons 350–1064, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, ch. on the cult of saints). Rhygyfarch belonged to the most learned native dynasty of the late-eleventh-century Welsh Church: his father Sulien had been bishop of St Davids, and the family was steeped in Latin learning and the documentary archive of the see (J. R. Davies, The Book of Llandaf and the Norman Church in Wales, Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003; Charles-Edwards 2013).

That an author of c. 1090 stands at the head of the tradition is the governing fact for everything that follows. A hagiographical vita is never a transcript of its subject’s life; it is the construction of a later community, and the gap between David (conventionally died c. 589) and Rhygyfarch is a chasm of five centuries across which the documentary, liturgical, and oral materials available to Rhygyfarch cannot now be securely reconstructed (Sharpe 2007; the political and ecclesiastical motives shaping the work are treated in The Political Uses of the Life). What survives of David as a historical figure must be sifted out of a text written to assert the dignity and autonomy of the see of St Davids at the moment Norman power was reaching into Wales (Sharpe 2007; J. R. Davies, “The Saints of South Wales and the Welsh Church,” in Alan Thacker and Richard Sharpe, eds., Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

The substance of Rhygyfarch’s narrative — David’s birth foretold, his monastic foundation at Mynyw (Menevia, the Vallis Rosina of the Life), the austere “rule of the watermen,” the Synod of Brefi, the confrontation with Pelagianism, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and the saint’s last words — is examined in its own section (see The Vita Davidis). The concern here is not the content but its transmission: what physical texts carry Rhygyfarch’s Life, how they differ, and how editors have tried to determine which of them lies closest to what he composed.

The Manuscript Recensions

Rhygyfarch’s Life does not survive in his own hand or in any single authoritative copy. It is preserved in several manuscript recensions that diverge from one another, and a long scholarly debate has turned on which of these stands closest to the lost original (Sharpe, “Which text is Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David?”, in Evans and Wooding 2007). The principal witnesses can be grouped as follows.

The fullest and, on the dominant modern view, the most primitive text is preserved in British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A. xiv — the so-called Vespasian recension. This manuscript, a collection of saints’ lives associated with the Welsh and Breton churches, carries a long version of the Vita David that recent scholarship treats as the closest surviving representative of Rhygyfarch’s composition (Sharpe 2007; the text is edited and translated in Richard Sharpe and John Reuben Davies, “Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David,” in Evans and Wooding 2007). Against this stands a family of abbreviated versions, including the texts in British Library, Cotton MS Nero E. i and in the Bodleian Digby manuscripts (the Nero/Digby group), which present a shorter, reworked form of the Life. Older scholarship, following the great edition of A. W. Wade-Evans, had given particular weight to the Nero text; the trend of more recent work has been to treat the Nero/Digby form as a secondary abridgement rather than as a witness to a more original short Life (Sharpe 2007; cf. A. W. Wade-Evans, Life of St. David, London: SPCK, 1923, and his Vitae Sanctorum Britanniae et Genealogiae, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1944).

The recension question is genuinely contested, and the disagreement bears directly on what can be claimed about the earliest recoverable form of the tradition:

[Disputed: which surviving text stands closest to Rhygyfarch's lost original. Richard Sharpe, "Which text is Rhygyfarch's Life of St David?" (in Evans and Wooding 2007), argues that the long Vespasian (Cotton Vespasian A. xiv) text is the most faithful witness to Rhygyfarch's c. 1090 composition, and that the shorter Nero/Digby and related forms are later abbreviations and adaptations; the edition of Rhygyfarch's Life by Sharpe and J. R. Davies in the same volume proceeds on this basis. Earlier scholarship — notably A. W. Wade-Evans (*Life of St. David*, 1923; *Vitae Sanctorum Britanniae*, 1944) and the tradition behind J. W. James, *Rhigyfarch's Life of St David* (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967) — gave greater authority to other witnesses and reconstructed the text on different principles. The result is that the precise wording, and even the extent, of Rhygyfarch's original Life is not fixed beyond dispute.]

A further strand of the manuscript tradition is sometimes labelled the “Cottonian” tradition, after the several Cotton manuscripts (Vespasian, Nero, and others) in which Welsh saints’ lives were gathered and copied in England in the later Middle Ages. These collections are themselves significant evidence: they show that Rhygyfarch’s David, like the lives of other Welsh and Breton saints, circulated within an Anglo-Norman and English hagiographical milieu, copied and recombined by scribes far from St Davids (Sharpe 2007; Charles-Edwards 2013). The transmission is therefore not a single line of descent but a branching tradition, in which the Life was copied, abbreviated, expanded, and reworked over several centuries before it reached the editions on which modern readers depend.

Gerald of Wales’s Reworking

Late in the twelfth century the tradition received its most famous literary reshaping at the hands of Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis, c. 1146 – c. 1223), who produced his own Latin Vita Sancti David (Sharpe 2007; on Gerald generally, Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales: A Voice of the Middle Ages, Stroud: Tempus, 2006). Gerald was no neutral transmitter. A member of the mixed Cambro-Norman aristocracy of south-west Wales and twice a frustrated candidate for the bishopric of St Davids, he had a personal and political stake in the dignity and the claimed metropolitan status of that see, and his Life of David is shaped by the same campaign for the autonomy of St Davids that had animated Rhygyfarch a century earlier (Sharpe 2007; Bartlett 2006; on the metropolitan claim see The Political Uses of the Life).

Gerald’s Vita is essentially a rhetorical refashioning of the Rhygyfarchian material: he takes the existing Life, smooths and elaborates its Latin, and recasts the narrative in the polished style of a learned twelfth-century author (Sharpe 2007; Bartlett 2006). For the historian of the cult Gerald’s Life is therefore a witness at one further remove — valuable for what it shows about how David was understood and deployed in the high-medieval campaign for St Davids’ independence, but not an independent source for the saint himself. It presupposes the Rhygyfarchian tradition and stands downstream of it (Sharpe 2007).

The Middle Welsh Buchedd Dewi

Alongside the Latin tradition runs the vernacular one. The Middle Welsh Life of David, the Buchedd Dewi, is preserved most notably in the Book of the Anchorite of Llanddewibrefi (Llyfr Ancr Llanddewibrefi), a manuscript compiled in 1346, and in other Welsh manuscripts of the later medieval period (D. Simon Evans, ed. and trans., The Welsh Life of St David / Buchedd Dewi, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988; D. Simon Evans, Buched Dewi, Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1959). The very name of the manuscript — the Book of the Anchorite of Llanddewibrefi, “the church of David at Brefi,” the site of the great synod in the Life — binds the vernacular text to the geography of David’s own cult.

The Buchedd Dewi is, in the main, not an independent Welsh tradition but a translation and adaptation of the Latin Life of Rhygyfarch into Middle Welsh prose (D. Simon Evans 1988, introduction; Sharpe 2007; Charles-Edwards 2013). It follows the Rhygyfarchian narrative — the prophecy of David’s birth, the foundation at Mynyw, the rule of the watermen, the Synod of Brefi with the rising of the ground beneath the saint, and his death — and renders it for a Welsh-reading or Welsh-hearing audience. Its value is twofold. As a witness to the Latin tradition, it can help control the recensions, since it reflects a particular form of the Latin text that its translator had before him (D. Simon Evans 1988; Sharpe 2007). And as a monument of Middle Welsh religious prose it shows how David’s Life lived in the vernacular devotion of late-medieval Wales, no longer the property of Latin-literate clergy alone but recast for the broader Welsh-speaking faithful (D. Simon Evans 1988; Charles-Edwards 2013).

Caution is required, however, in treating the Buchedd as evidence for anything earlier than the Latin Life it translates. Because it descends from Rhygyfarch, it cannot supply independent confirmation of the historical David; where it differs from the Latin, the differences are most economically explained as the translator’s adaptation, abridgement, or expansion rather than as access to an older and better tradition (D. Simon Evans 1988; Sharpe 2007). The vernacular Life is a precious witness to the reception of David in medieval Wales, not a second window onto the sixth century.

The Modern Critical Editions

Modern study of the textual tradition rests on a small number of scholarly editions, and the history of those editions is itself part of the story of how the recension question has shifted.

For the Latin Life, J. W. James, Rhigyfarch’s Life of St David (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967) provided for a generation the standard edition and English translation, presenting a reconstructed Latin text with facing translation and commentary. James’s edition made Rhygyfarch’s David accessible to scholars and remains a frequently cited point of reference (J. W. James 1967; Sharpe 2007 discusses and revises its textual conclusions).

The decisive modern intervention came with the volume J. Wyn Evans and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds., St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), which gathered the leading scholarship on David and included a fresh edition and translation of Rhygyfarch’s Life by Richard Sharpe and John Reuben Davies, prefaced by Sharpe’s reassessment of the manuscript tradition (“Which text is Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David?”). Sharpe’s argument for the priority of the Vespasian text reframed the editorial problem and is now the standard starting point for work on the Life (Sharpe and Davies, in Evans and Wooding 2007; Sharpe 2007).

For the vernacular tradition, D. Simon Evans’s edition of the Buchedd Dewi is foundational: his Welsh edition Buched Dewi (Cardiff, 1959) and his later The Welsh Life of St David (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988), with English translation and introduction, established the text and its relation to the Latin Life (D. Simon Evans 1959; 1988). Between James (1967), Sharpe and Davies (2007), and D. Simon Evans (1988), the reader has access to both the Latin and the Welsh tradition in critical form — and, crucially, to the apparatus that makes the layers of transmission legible rather than collapsing them into a single seamless “Life of St David.”

What the Textual Tradition Permits

The upshot of this transmission history is sobering and clarifying at once. There is no early Life of David — nothing from the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, or tenth century survives as a narrative of the saint. The tradition begins, for us, with Rhygyfarch c. 1090, and everything else (Gerald’s reworking, the Buchedd Dewi, the abbreviated recensions) stands downstream of his work (Sharpe 2007; Charles-Edwards 2013). What can responsibly be said about the historical David must therefore be argued out from this late and tendentious base, supplemented by the non-narrative evidence of dedications, calendars, and annals examined in the companion file (see The Cult Records; on the limits of historical knowledge, What Can Be Known). The textual tradition does not give us the sixth century directly; it gives us how the eleventh and twelfth centuries remembered, and used, the sixth.

References

Evans, J. Wyn, and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds. St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007. (Collected scholarship on David; contains Sharpe’s essay on the recensions and the Sharpe–Davies edition and translation of Rhygyfarch’s Life.)
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, 2007. (The argument for the priority of the Vespasian recension over the Nero/Digby abbreviations.)
Sharpe, Richard, and John Reuben Davies. “Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David.” In Evans and Wooding, eds., St David of Wales, Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007. (Critical edition and English translation of the Latin Life.)
James, J. W., ed. and trans. Rhigyfarch’s Life of St David. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967. (Earlier standard edition and translation of the Latin Vita.)
Evans, D. Simon, ed. and trans. The Welsh Life of St David (Buchedd Dewi). Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988. (Edition and translation of the Middle Welsh Life and its relation to the Latin; see also his earlier Buched Dewi, Cardiff, 1959.)
Wade-Evans, A. W. Life of St. David. London: SPCK, 1923; and Vitae Sanctorum Britanniae et Genealogiae. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1944. (Earlier editions of the Latin Life and related Welsh saints’ lives.)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. Wales and the Britons 350–1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (The historical setting of the cult and the Lives; the dating of Rhygyfarch and the limits of the tradition.)
Bartlett, Robert. Gerald of Wales: A Voice of the Middle Ages. Stroud: Tempus, 2006. (Gerald’s career, his stake in St Davids, and his reworking of the Life.)
Davies, John Reuben. The Book of Llandaf and the Norman Church in Wales. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003. (The documentary and ecclesiastical milieu of the Welsh sees in Rhygyfarch’s and Gerald’s day.)