St Davids Cathedral and the Relics

The cathedral church of St Davids stands in the narrow valley of Glyn Rhosyn (the Latin Vallis Rosina), on the site that tradition and the early sources identify as David’s own monastery of Mynyw, in the far south-west of Wales. The present building is a Norman and later-medieval structure begun under Bishop Peter de Leia in 1181, raised on a site repeatedly sacked by Viking raiders and rebuilt as the focus of one of the great pilgrim cults of the medieval West; it preserves a shrine of St David, a fifteenth-century reliquary, and a quantity of disarticulated human bone whose modern radiocarbon dating has shown it cannot belong to the sixth-century saint. This file sets out what the site is, what the relics are, how the medieval cult was confirmed by the papacy under Pope Callixtus II, and how a sober reader holds the gap between the cult’s claims and the physical and documentary evidence.

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

The Site at Glyn Rhosyn

The cathedral occupies the floor of a steep, narrow valley a little inland from the coast of the St Davids peninsula in Pembrokeshire (medieval Dyfed), at the south-western extremity of Wales. The early sources place David’s principal monastery here, calling the place Mynyw in Welsh and Menevia in Latin, set in the vallis Rosina — Glyn Rhosyn, “the little marsh-valley” — and Rhygyfarch’s Life makes the founding of the monastery in this valley the central act of David’s career (Rhygyfarch, Vita Sancti David §§ 12–15, ed. and trans. Sharpe and Davies, in Evans and Wooding 2007; cf. the older edition of J. W. James, Rhigyfarch’s Life of St David, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967). The choice of so remote and inconvenient a spot — low-lying, hidden, far from any centre — is itself part of the ascetic programme the Life ascribes to David, and the cult that grew up there inherited the place rather than choosing it (on the foundation, see The Monastery at Mynyw; on the Life as a source, The Vita Davidis).

The settlement that surrounds the cathedral is, by long custom, called the smallest city in Britain: St Davids holds city status by virtue of its cathedral and its bishop, though its population is only of the order of two thousand, a distinction confirmed by royal letters patent in 1994 after the status had earlier lapsed (the point is one of British civic law rather than of David’s own age, and is noted here only because it is the form in which the place is most often described). The cathedral itself sits below the level of the surrounding town, sunk into the valley, so that a visitor descends to it down a flight of steps — a topography that has its origin in the monastic site and not in any later planning.

The Viking Raids

The remote and undefended coastal site that made Glyn Rhosyn attractive to an ascetic made it dangerously exposed once the Norse began to raid the Irish Sea. The Welsh annals record a long series of attacks on St Davids across the tenth and eleventh centuries. The Annales Cambriae and the related Welsh chronicles note the plundering of Mynyw repeatedly: the see and its church were ravaged on several occasions, and more than one bishop of St Davids was killed in the course of these raids — Bishop Morgenau is recorded as slain by the Norse in 999, and Bishop Abraham in 1080 (Annales Cambriae, ed. and trans. in J. Williams ab Ithel, Annales Cambriae, Rolls Series, London, 1860; and Brut y Tywysogion, trans. Thomas Jones, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1952, s.a.; the raids are surveyed in Heather James, “The Cult of St David in the Middle Ages,” and in J. Wyn Evans’s contributions to Evans and Wooding 2007). The cumulative effect of these attacks was the destruction of whatever early buildings, books, and shrine-furniture the monastery possessed, so that nothing of David’s own century survives above ground on the site, and the documentary record of the early community is correspondingly thin (on the loss of the early record, see The Cult Records).

This history of repeated sacking is important for the question of the relics. A site burned and plundered over and over, its clergy killed and its treasures carried off, is precisely the kind of place where continuity of physical remains from the founder’s lifetime is least to be expected, and where later generations would have had every motive to reconstitute a shrine from such bones as were to hand. The archaeology of St Davids must be read against this background of disruption (Heather James, in Evans and Wooding 2007).

The Norman Rebuilding under Peter de Leia

The cathedral as it now stands is overwhelmingly a structure of the Norman period and after. Following the Norman penetration of south Wales, the see was reorganised, and the building of the present church began under Bishop Peter de Leia, who held the see from 1176 and commenced the new cathedral in 1181 (J. Wyn Evans, “St Davids Cathedral,” in Evans and Wooding 2007; Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, An Inventory of the Ancient Monuments in Pembrokeshire). The nave, with its great cylindrical piers and its distinctive purple-grey local sandstone, belongs to this late-twelfth-century campaign; the tower partly collapsed and was rebuilt, and the building was extended and remodelled across the later Middle Ages, including the addition of the presbytery, the Lady Chapel, and the intricately carved Irish-oak ceiling of the nave. The famously sloping floor and leaning piers of the nave testify to the unstable, water-laden valley floor on which the church was raised.

The Norman rebuilding was undertaken not as a mere replacement of a ruined church but as the architectural expression of an ambitious cult. The bishops of St Davids in this period — most conspicuously Bishop Bernard (1115–1148) and, a generation later, Gerald of Wales as a thwarted candidate for the see — pressed the claim that St Davids was the metropolitan church of Wales, independent of Canterbury, with David himself as its founding archbishop (Gerald of Wales, De Invectionibus and The Life of St David [Vita Sancti Davidis], in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer et al., Rolls Series; on the metropolitan campaign see The Political Uses of the Life). The grandeur of the new cathedral and the promotion of the relics within it were instruments of that campaign as much as acts of devotion.

The Shrine and the Relics

Within the cathedral, on the north side of the presbytery, stands the medieval shrine of St David, a stone base of the thirteenth century (built under Bishop Richard Carew, c. 1275) designed to support a feretory — the portable reliquary containing the saint’s bones — and pierced with recesses in which pilgrims could kneel close to the holy relics (Heather James, “The Cult of St David,” and J. Wyn Evans, in Evans and Wooding 2007; the shrine base survives and has in recent years been restored and repainted with images of David, Patrick, and other saints). Medieval St Davids records and the testimony of Gerald of Wales attest the presence of relics of David, together with those associated with his companions, as the focus of the pilgrimage that drew offerings and royal visitors to the church across the Middle Ages (Gerald of Wales, The Journey Through Wales, trans. Lewis Thorpe, London: Penguin, 1978; on the pilgrimage, see Pilgrimage to St Davids).

A separate portable reliquary survives in the cathedral: a metal-bound casket, conventionally of the later medieval period, which by tradition held the bones of David and of St Justinian, his companion and (in the legends) his confessor, whose own cult was centred on the nearby coast. After the Reformation, when the medieval shrine was stripped and the cult officially suppressed, surviving bones were at some point gathered and walled up; in the nineteenth century a quantity of disarticulated human bone was recovered from a recess behind the high altar and came to be displayed in this reliquary as the relics of David and Justinian (Heather James, in Evans and Wooding 2007; W. B. Jones and E. A. Freeman, The History and Antiquities of Saint David’s, London, 1856, on the post-Reformation history of the site and its bones). It is these bones that modern science has been able to examine.

The Radiocarbon Study

In the early twenty-first century the bones held in the cathedral reliquary were subjected to osteological and radiocarbon analysis. The results were decisive on one point and disappointing to devotion on another. The examined remains proved to belong to more than two individuals, and the radiocarbon determinations placed the bones in the twelfth century or later — centuries too late to be the remains of a man who, on any reckoning, died in the sixth century (the dating and its implications are reported and discussed by Heather James, the principal authority on the archaeology of the cult, in her studies of St Davids; see James, in Evans and Wooding 2007, and her subsequent published accounts of the relic analysis). The honest disposition of this finding is that the bones now venerated in the cathedral as those of St David and St Justinian are not, on the scientific evidence, the physical remains of the sixth-century founder.

[Disputed: the bones in the St Davids reliquary as the relics of the sixth-century saint — A (against authenticity): osteological and radiocarbon analysis of the cathedral bones, reported by Heather James (in Evans and Wooding 2007, and subsequent published accounts), found remains of more than two individuals dated to the twelfth century or later, i.e. far too late for a sixth-century David; B (for continuity of cult, not of bone): the medieval shrine and the documented pilgrimage attest an unbroken cult on the site of David's own monastery from at least the eleventh century, so that the relics function as the focus of a genuine and continuous veneration even where the specific bones cannot be the founder's — the gap is between cult-continuity and bodily authenticity, and the sources do not allow the second to be asserted].

This result should be received soberly and from both sides. It does not, in itself, impugn the existence of David, the antiquity of the cult, or the holiness of the place: the cult is independently and amply attested long before the bones in question were assembled, and a site sacked repeatedly by Vikings and stripped at the Reformation is exactly where one would expect the original relics to have been lost and a later shrine reconstituted from available bone. What the radiocarbon study establishes is a negative — that these bones are not David’s — and not the positive claim that David never existed or that no relics ever did. For an Orthodox reader the veneration of relics rests finally on the communion of the saint with the living Church and not on the forensic identification of any particular fragment of bone; the science clarifies the provenance of the present relics without disturbing the cult’s theological ground (on the principle, see The Orthodox Reception; and on what can and cannot be known of the man, What Can Be Known). Hagiographical and cultic claims are pinned here to their attestation and not asserted as forensic fact, in keeping with the verification standard (Methodology §§ 3.5, 4).

The Papal Recognition under Callixtus II

The medieval cult of David received, at a crucial moment in its expansion, a form of papal confirmation. The tradition — well attested in the medieval St Davids sources and in Gerald of Wales — holds that during the episcopate of Bishop Bernard the cult of St David was confirmed by Pope Callixtus II, conventionally dated to about 1120 (some accounts give 1123), and that this papal act was the foundation of the great pilgrimage privilege expressed in the saying Roma semel quantum dat bis Menevia tantum — “St Davids twice equals Rome once” (Gerald of Wales, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera; the tradition is set out and weighed in J. Wyn Evans and in Heather James, in Evans and Wooding 2007; and treated in this collection at Pilgrimage to St Davids).

Precision is required about what such a confirmation meant in the early twelfth century, because the modern word “canonization” is anachronistic and misleading if applied to it without qualification. In the early Middle Ages there was no centralised papal process of canonization of the kind developed only from the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries onward, when the formal reservation of canonization to the Holy See took shape. What a pope did in David’s case was not to create a saint by judicial process but to confirm and authorise an existing cult — to recognise officially a veneration already long established locally, and to attach to it the privileges (here, the pilgrimage indulgence) that such recognition carried. To speak of David being “canonized by Callixtus II” is therefore loose; the accurate statement is that the pope confirmed a cult that the Welsh church had maintained for centuries, and that this confirmation served the ambitions of Bishop Bernard and the see of St Davids as much as it served devotion (on the development of papal canonization, the standard account is E. W. Kemp, Canonization and Authority in the Western Church, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948; cf. André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

The evidence for the Callixtus II tradition is itself a matter for source-critical care. It is not preserved in an extant papal bull from St Davids but rests chiefly on later medieval testimony — above all on Gerald of Wales, writing in the late twelfth century, who had every motive to magnify the antiquity and papal sanction of the see whose bishopric he coveted — and on the cult records of St Davids, which were the productions of the same interested community.

[Disputed: the papal recognition of David's cult under Callixtus II — A (the cult-tradition): the medieval St Davids sources and Gerald of Wales (in *Giraldi Cambrensis Opera*, Rolls Series) report that Pope Callixtus II confirmed David's cult c. 1120 under Bishop Bernard and granted the pilgrimage privilege (*Roma semel… bis Menevia tantum*), and modern historians of the see (J. Wyn Evans; Heather James, in Evans and Wooding 2007) treat a papal confirmation of the cult in Bernard's episcopate as historically credible; B (source-critical caution): no contemporary papal bull survives, the tradition is transmitted by parties — Gerald and the St Davids community — with a direct interest in the metropolitan and pilgrimage claims, and "confirmation of an existing cult" must be sharply distinguished from "canonization" in the later, formal sense, which did not yet exist (Kemp, *Canonization and Authority*, 1948; Vauchez, *Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages*, 1997)].

Held together, the picture is coherent: an ancient and genuine local cult of David, maintained at his own monastery through centuries of disruption, was given papal recognition and a lucrative pilgrimage privilege in the early twelfth century, in a form proper to its age and serving the political designs of a reforming Norman bishop — and the present cathedral, with its shrine, its reliquary, and its bones of uncertain origin, is the lasting monument of that recognition rather than a guarantee of the relics’ antiquity (see further The Cult Records and Legacy and Assessment).

References

Rhygyfarch (Rhigyfarch). Vita Sancti David (The Life of St 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 foundation of the monastery in Glyn Rhosyn, §§ 12–15.)
Evans, J. Wyn, and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds. St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007. (Essential collection; includes J. Wyn Evans on the cathedral and the see, and Heather James on the archaeology of the cult, the relics, and the radiocarbon dating.)
James, Heather. “The Cult of St David in the Middle Ages.” In St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation, ed. Evans and Wooding (2007), and subsequent published studies on the archaeology of St Davids and the relic analysis. (The principal authority on the archaeology of the site, the shrine, the relics, and their dating.)
Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis). Giraldi Cambrensis Opera. Ed. J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock, and G. F. Warner. 8 vols. Rolls Series. London, 1861–1891. (Includes the Life of St David, the De Invectionibus, and the metropolitan case; the Callixtus II tradition.)
Gerald of Wales. The Journey Through Wales and The Description of Wales. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. London: Penguin, 1978. (The shrine, the relics, and the pilgrimage.)
Annales Cambriae. Ed. and trans. John Williams ab Ithel. Rolls Series. London, 1860. And Brut y Tywysogion (The Chronicle of the Princes), trans. Thomas Jones. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1952. (The Viking raids on St Davids; the slaying of Bishops Morgenau (999) and Abraham (1080).)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. Wales and the Britons, 350–1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (The see of St Davids and its place in early Welsh ecclesiastical history.)
Kemp, E. W. Canonization and Authority in the Western Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948. (The development of papal canonization; what “confirmation of a cult” meant before the formal process.)
Vauchez, André. Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages. Trans. Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. (The emergence of centralised canonization in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries.)
Jones, W. Basil, and Edward A. Freeman. The History and Antiquities of Saint David’s. London, 1856. (The post-Reformation history of the cathedral and the recovery of the bones.)