Legacy and Assessment

Of all the saints of the Welsh church, David alone became the patron of a nation. His feast on 1 March — Dydd Gŵyl Dewi, St David’s Day — is the national day of Wales, kept with leeks and daffodils, school eisteddfodau, and the wearing of the national emblems; and his memory was made a focus of Welsh identity above all in the national revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This file traces David’s place in Welsh national consciousness, examines the folk-etymological and contested origins of the leek and the daffodil as his emblems, and closes the whole collection with a sober assessment: that behind a tendentious eleventh-century Life the historical David is largely inaccessible, yet that he was a genuine early monastic founder of real and lasting influence, whose ascetic ideal and cult are historically and spiritually significant within the one pre-Schism Church.

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

Dewi Sant, Patron of Wales

David — Dewi Sant in Welsh — is the national patron saint of Wales, the only native patron among the saints of the British Isles to be a man of the country he patronises (Patrick was a Briton in Ireland, Andrew and George were imported). His patronage is not a modern invention but the maturing of a cult already pre-eminent in medieval Wales: among the very numerous saints of the Welsh church, David’s was the cult that the see of St Davids and, later, the Welsh nation, raised above the rest (T. M. Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 350–1064, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013; J. Wyn Evans and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds., St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007). The reasons lie partly in the prestige of his monastery and shrine at Mynyw, partly in the literary promotion of his cult by Rhygyfarch’s Life of about 1090 and by Gerald of Wales a century later, and partly in the metropolitan claims of his see (see The Political Uses of the Life and Pilgrimage to St Davids).

That David should become the figure around whom Welsh identity later crystallised owes something to the form his cult took. His was an austere, native, monastic sanctity, rooted in a specific Welsh place and remembered in a specific Welsh-language hagiography, the Buchedd Dewi (the Welsh “Life” derived from and adapting Rhygyfarch’s Latin), which carried his story to a Welsh-reading public in the later Middle Ages (the Buchedd Dewi, ed. D. Simon Evans, The Welsh Life of St David, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988; see The Latin and Welsh Lives). A saint at once ascetic, native, and textually well served in the vernacular was apt material for a later national symbolism.

St David’s Day — Dydd Gŵyl Dewi

David’s feast falls on 1 March, the day assigned by tradition to his death, and is kept across Wales and the Welsh diaspora as Dydd Gŵyl Dewi, St David’s Day. The date is given by the medieval calendars and Lives, and the feast was observed liturgically in the medieval Welsh and wider British church well before it acquired its modern national and patriotic colouring (the feast and its date are treated in the Life tradition and the cult records; see The Cult Records, and on the calendar The Church Calendar). For an Orthodox reckoning of pre-Schism Western saints the commemoration likewise falls on 1 March (see The Orthodox Reception).

The customs now associated with the day — the wearing of leeks or daffodils, the holding of school and chapel eisteddfodau, concerts of Welsh song, the dressing of children in traditional costume, and processions and parades in the towns — are in their present form largely a growth of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, layered over the older religious observance. The wearing of the leek as a Welsh badge on St David’s Day is the older of the two emblematic customs and is already attested in the early modern period; Shakespeare alludes to the Welsh wearing of the leek as a national badge in Henry V (Act IV–V), which shows the custom established by about 1600 (the literary allusion is conventionally cited in discussions of the emblem; for the social history of the day and its customs the standard reference literature should be consulted, and the origins flagged where uncertain). The day is now a major focus of Welsh cultural expression, and there have been repeated modern campaigns to have 1 March recognised as a public holiday in Wales.

The Leek and the Daffodil

Two national emblems are worn on St David’s Day, the leek (cenhinen) and the daffodil (cenhinen Bedr, literally “Peter’s leek”), and the relation between them, and the origin of each, must be handled with care, because the popular explanations are folk-etymological and the early evidence is thin.

The leek is the older emblem. By the early modern period the leek was firmly established as the Welsh national badge worn on David’s feast, as the Henry V allusion attests. Its connection with David himself, however, is explained only by late and legendary stories — most famously the tale that David advised the Britons to wear leeks in their caps in a battle against the Saxons (sometimes located in a field of leeks) so that they could distinguish friend from foe, a story for which there is no early authority and which has every mark of an aetiological legend invented to explain an emblem already in use. Other explanations connect the leek with the plain monastic diet of bread, water, and vegetables ascribed to David’s community in Rhygyfarch’s Life (Rhygyfarch, Vita Sancti David, on the austere fare of the monks; ed. Sharpe and Davies, in Evans and Wooding 2007) — an attractive link, since David’s monks were indeed remembered as living on bread, herbs, and water (see The Rule of the Watermen), but one that is a modern rationalisation rather than a documented origin. The honest statement is that the leek was the Welsh badge by c. 1600 and that its specific attachment to David rests on late legend, not on early evidence.

The daffodil is a later association, and its rise as a St David’s Day emblem is essentially a phenomenon of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The most commonly given explanation is linguistic: in Welsh the daffodil is cenhinen Bedr, “Peter’s leek,” and shares the word cenhinen with the leek, so that the two plants are linked by a pun and the more decorative, less pungent daffodil came to be worn as a genteel substitute for the leek. This explanation is itself a piece of folk etymology, and while the shared Welsh vocabulary is real, the claim that the daffodil “replaced” the leek by simple confusion of the two words oversimplifies a change of fashion that also owed much to Victorian and Edwardian taste and to the promotion of the daffodil as a tidier patriotic flower; the elevation of the daffodil is sometimes associated in the popular accounts with the early-twentieth-century vogue for the flower and with figures of the period, but the precise mechanism is not securely documented.

[Disputed: the origin of the leek and daffodil as emblems of St David and Wales — these are folk-etymological and legendary traditions and no single secure origin can be asserted. (a) The leek is the older badge, attested as the Welsh national emblem by c. 1600 (the allusion in Shakespeare, *Henry V*, IV–V); its connection to David is explained only by late aetiological legends (David advising leeks worn in battle against the Saxons) or by the austere vegetable diet of his monks in Rhygyfarch's *Vita Sancti David* — neither is early evidence for the emblem's origin. (b) The daffodil is a later, chiefly nineteenth- and twentieth-century association, popularly explained by the shared Welsh word *cenhinen* (leek) / *cenhinen Bedr* (daffodil), a pun rather than a documented historical cause; the change also reflects Victorian–Edwardian fashion. The popular origin stories for both emblems should be reported as folk tradition, not asserted as fact].

David and Welsh Identity

David’s transformation from a medieval cult-figure into a national symbol belongs to the wider story of the modern construction of Welsh identity. In the Middle Ages his cult was great but local-ecclesiastical, bound up with the see of St Davids and its claims; the wider patriotic David is a creation of the centuries that followed, and above all of the cultural revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The romantic recovery and reinvention of Welsh antiquity in that period — the antiquarian and Druidic enthusiasms associated with figures such as Iolo Morganwg, the reorganisation and national elevation of the eisteddfod from the early nineteenth century, the rise of Welsh-language publishing and Nonconformist chapel culture, and the patriotic societies of the Welsh at home and abroad — furnished the setting in which David became the embodiment of the nation rather than merely the patron of a see (the modern national myth-making around David is examined in several of the essays in Evans and Wooding 2007; the wider phenomenon belongs to the well-studied history of the “invention of tradition” in the period).

This is not to dismiss the modern cult as fabrication. The patriotic David of St David’s Day grew from a genuine and ancient veneration, and gave a real, native, Christian focus to Welsh self-understanding at a time when the language and culture were under pressure; but the historian must distinguish the layers — the sixth-century founder, the eleventh-century literary saint of Rhygyfarch, the medieval pilgrimage cult, and the nineteenth-century national emblem — and not read the latest back into the earliest. Much of what is popularly “known” about David, including the emblem-legends, is the deposit of the most recent layer (on the layered tradition, see The Latin and Welsh Lives and The Cult Records).

A Sober Final Assessment

This collection has insisted throughout on a single discipline: to separate what the sources allow us to know from what the cult and the later nation built upon it, and to name the attestation of every claim rather than to repeat it as fact. At the close, that discipline yields a measured judgement of David himself.

The historical David is, to a remarkable degree, inaccessible. Almost everything narrated of his life comes from Rhygyfarch’s Vita Sancti David, written about 1090 — some five centuries after David’s lifetime — by a cleric of St Davids with a transparent purpose: to glorify the saint, to defend the antiquity and independence of his see against the encroachments of Canterbury and the Normans, and to assert David’s archiepiscopal dignity (Rhygyfarch, Vita Sancti David, ed. Sharpe and Davies, in Evans and Wooding 2007; on the Life‘s tendentiousness and its political programme, see The Vita Davidis and The Political Uses of the Life). The miracles, the prophecies of David’s birth, the synods, the journey to Jerusalem, and the elaborate biography are the work of an interested eleventh-century author drawing on legend and serving an agenda, and cannot be taken as a record of the sixth century. Even David’s dates are uncertain, the year of his death being variously placed (the Annales Cambriae offer a date, but the early chronology is insecure), and the famous “last words” come to us only through the late tradition (see What Can Be Known and The Last Words).

And yet behind the literary saint there stands a real one. That a monastic founder named David established a community at Mynyw in the sixth century, that he was remembered as a teacher and ascetic of exceptional rigour, and that his foundation became a centre of the Welsh church of lasting importance, are not in serious doubt: the cult is too early, too geographically rooted, and too widely diffused — David is named in early Welsh and Irish material independent of Rhygyfarch — to be a pure invention (Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 350–1064, 2013; the early attestations are surveyed in Evans and Wooding 2007). The aquaticus tradition — David and his monks as “watermen,” living by their own manual labour on bread, vegetables, and water, drinking no wine, yoking themselves to the plough in place of beasts — preserves, even within the legendary Life, the memory of an authentic and severe monasticism comparable to the most austere asceticism of the East (see The Rule of the Watermen and, for the Eastern parallel, Welsh Asceticism and the Desert).

The just verdict, then, is double and must be held whole. David was a genuine early monastic founder of real influence, a father of the British church whose ascetic ideal was authentic and whose foundation shaped Welsh Christianity for a thousand years; and at the same time his individual historical figure is largely lost behind an eleventh-century Life that we cannot use as biography. His cult, his shrine, and his ascetic example are historically and spiritually significant precisely as what they are — a continuous veneration of a holy ascetic of the undivided Church, rooted in a real place and a real memory, however thickly the centuries have overlaid the man. For the Orthodox reader David belongs among the saints of the pre-Schism West who witness, from the far edge of the world, to the same monastic and ascetic faith held in the deserts of Egypt and the cells of Athos — a witness no less real for being, at the level of biographical detail, beyond recovery (see The Orthodox Reception; on the wider ascetic tradition, Monasticism). Such is the man the sober reader is left with: not the wonder-worker of Rhygyfarch’s pages, nor merely the emblem of a modern nation, but a real ascetic father of the early British church, venerable in the strict sense — and the proper object of veneration on his day.

References

Rhygyfarch (Rhigyfarch). Vita Sancti David (c. 1090). Ed. and trans. Richard Sharpe and John Reuben Davies, in J. Wyn Evans and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds., St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007. Also J. W. James, ed. and trans., Rhigyfarch’s Life of St David. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967. (The tendentious eleventh-century Life; the austere diet of the monks.)
Evans, J. Wyn, and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds. St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007. (The cult, the see, the modern national symbolism, and the early attestations of David.)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. Wales and the Britons, 350–1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (The historical David, the early Welsh church, and the place of his cult.)
Evans, D. Simon, ed. and trans. The Welsh Life of St David (Buchedd Dewi). Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988. (The medieval Welsh-language Life adapting Rhygyfarch.)
Shakespeare, William. Henry V (c. 1599). (The wearing of the leek as the Welsh national badge, Acts IV–V — evidence that the leek-emblem was established by c. 1600.)
Annales Cambriae. Ed. and trans. John Williams ab Ithel. Rolls Series. London, 1860. (The early Welsh chronology and the dating of David’s death.)