Today, 1st March is the feast day of St David, patron saint of Wales. Yet the relics of the 6th century holy man are sadly missing following years of destruction of the cathedral and the Reformation.
According to the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan (Vita Griffini Filii Conani) in 1081 Gruffudd ap Cynan (c. 1055–1137) king of Gwynedd and Rhys ap Tewdwr (c. 1040 – 1093) king of Deheubarth went to the church of David to pray and swore on the relics. What these relics are is not made clear, it may have been St David’s remains or personal possessions associated with the Saint. There are accounts of his bell once kept at Glascwm, Montgomeryshire, and his staff was preserved at Llanddewi Brefi, in Ceredigion. Yet no early accounts have survived of the relics of Saint David who was active in the 6th century.
The cult of St David at Menevia had become extensive in the 8th and 9th centuries. By the 10th century David is portrayed as spiritual leader of the Welsh in the vaticinatory poem Armes Prydain Fawr (The Great Prophecy of Britain), the earliest reference to St David in (extant) Welsh literature. As the cult of David was seen as a focus for resistance against the Normans they invested heavily in the site and promoted the cult in the 11th and 12th centuries to raise its status among the Welsh bishoprics.
The best known account of Saint David is Rhygyfarch’s 11th century Life of David (Buchedd Dewi) but this simply records that after David died he was buried at his monastery in Menevia, the Latin name for St David’s. The name Menevia is supposed to be derived from ‘Menapia’ the Roman name of the settlement; alternative claims suggest it may be derived from the Welsh ‘Mynyw’ or Irish for ‘thorny place or thicket’. However, the name Menevia has been used for centuries to identify the area of Pembrokeshire including the monastery, the bishopric and associated religious features, forming the Diocese of Menevia.
Typical of an early monastery the site of St David’s cathedral is built on isolated low lying marshland, the historic core thought to be around the transept of the modern cathedral. Yet excavation has so far failed to uncover any evidence of pre-Norman structures with all archaeological finds being of medieval date. However, the north chapel is slightly off-line to the main axis of the cathedral which suggests that it may have been aligned to earlier structures.
The early monastery was attacked and destroyed many times. The Brut y Tywysogion (Chronicle of the Princes) records the following:
810 – Menevia was burnt
904 - Menevia was destroyed
981 - Godfrey, son of Harold, devastated Dyved and Menevia
987 - the Pagans devastated Llanbadarn, and Menevia, and Llanilltud, and Llangarvan, and Llandydoch.
991- Edwin, son of Einon, with Eclis the Great, a Saxon prince from the seas of the South, devastated all the kingdoms of Maredudd, to wit, Dyved, and Ceredigion, and Gower, and Cydweli; and a second time took hostages from all the territory; and devastated Menevia a third time.
998 - Menevia was depopulated by the Pagans.
1011 - Menevia was devastated by the Saxons,
1020 - Eilad came to the island of Britain, and Dyved was devastated, and Menevia was demolished.
1071 - the French ravaged Ceredigion and Dyved, and Menevia and Bangor were laid waste by the Pagans. And then Bleiddud, bishop of Menevia, died
1078 - Menevia was miserably devastated by the Pagans; and Abraham, bishop of Menevia, died
1079 - William the Bastard, king of the Saxons and the French and the Britons, came for prayer on a pilgrimage to Menevia.
1088 - the shrine of St. David was taken by stealth out of the church, and was completely despoiled close to the city.
1089 - Sulien, bishop of Menevia, the wisest of the Britons, and illustrious for his religious life, died …. And then Menevia was demolished by the Pagans of the Isles.
1095 - Gerald the steward [Gerald of Windsor, Grandfather of Gerald of Wales] to whom had been assigned the stewardship of the castle of Pembroke, ravaged the boundaries of Menevia.
The Life of Caradoc records that owing to the attacks by the pirates from the Orkneys, possibly the ‘Pagans of the Isles’ of the 1089 entry in the Brut, St David’s was almost uninhabited for seven years and a visitor took almost a week to arrive at David’s tomb ‘because of the thorns and briars’ that now covered the deserted site.
Yet years of destruction could not extinguish veneration of St David who was still held in special reverence. In 1123 Pope Callixtus II granted a special privilege to St Davids declaring that two pilgrimages to the Cathedral were equal to one journey to Rome.
A New Shrine
Construction of the cathedral we see today was started in 1181 by the Norman Bishop Peter de Leia. In response to demand for physical relics of the Saint, David’s body was ‘discovered’ after appearing in a dream by the Prior of Ewenny in Glamorgan. Accordingly, a new shrine was constructed in 1275 by Bishop Richard de Carew after the original was destroyed by Vikings in 1089. It is supposed that a reliquary within this new shrine contained a small casket with the relics believed to be St David’s, miraculously discovered outside the Cathedral. Shrines were usually placed behind the altar but at St David’s it is placed in the north arcade of the choir facing the bishop’s throne. The new shrine was highly coloured and adorned with paintings and a decorated canopy.
Following the conquest of Gwynedd, King Edward I and Queen Eleanor visited the new shrine in 1284 and were presented with arm bone of Saint David. Edward later placed a relic of St David on the high altar of the church of Great St Helen, London.
In 1328 Henry Gower was appointed Bishop of St David’s, a rare appointment of a Welshman during the Norman period. Gower carried out extensive remodelling works including the nave, the choir and the ornately carved Gothic stone screen which now houses his tomb effigy. Gower also commissioned the Bishop’s Palace next the cathedral. The palace was home to the Bishop’s of St David’s until the Reformation in the 16th century.
During the Reformation William Barlow the newly appointed bishop of St David’s seized the relics of St David when they were brought out for display on St David’s Day, 1st March 1538. Barlow also did away with the shrine of St David and destroyed or dispersed all the relics and treasures held by the cathedral. He wrote to Thomas Cromwell, chief secretary to King Henry VIII, and described the relics as “two heads of silver plate enclosing two rotten skulls studded with putrefied cloths: Item, two arm bones and a worm eaten book covered with silver plate.”
Barlow’s successor Bishop Robert Ferrar, “burnt all ye Martyrologies, portiforiums, & antient Mis-sales of ye Cathedral Church of Saint David, with their calenders, wherein were entered ye names of ye Bishops & ye days and years of their entrance & death or translation ” apparently on the command of the king.
Elis ap Howel a church sexton had hidden away “masse books, hympnals, Grailes, Antiphons, and suche lik” belonging to the cathedral. In 1571 these were found by a ‘Mr Chanter’ who tore them to pieces.
But not quite all was lost when two texts associated with Saint David’s cathedral came to light in recent years. The first was five lecciones Sancte Nonite, consisting of thirty-eight lines of text provides the only surviving material from an office for the feast of Saint Nonita, or Non, mother of St David. The second text consists of the accounts of eleven posthumous miracles effected by Saint David between about 1215–29 and 1405, collected by William of Worcester (1415-c.85) and survived in an obscure British Library manuscript.
In the 1920s it was thought that some bones discovered behind the Cathedral’s high altar in 1866 could be the remains of St David. Seventy years later Wyn Evans, future Bishop of St Davids, had the remains radiocarbon dated and they were found to to date to the 12th and 14th centuries and therefore could not be the bones St David who died on the traditional date of 1st March 1589.
St David’s relics remain elusive yet surprisingly the 13th century shrine has survived. Compare with the shrine of Thomas Becket that has been completely removed from Canterbury Cathedral, all that remains today are the steps worn by thousands of pilgrims to the site of the shrine where a single candle burns for the martyr.
In 2012 St David’s shrine was restored with new icons painted by Sarah Crisp drawing on techniques dating back to the medieval period. The three icons at the front of the shrine depict from left to right St Patrick, St David and St Andrew while at the rear are two icons which depict St Non, the mother of David, and St Justinian.
Sources:
Michael Curley, The Miracles of Saint David, Traditio, Vol. 62 (2007), pp. 135-205
Elizabeth Rees, The Celtic Saints of Wales
Brut y Tywysogion, translated by William ab Ithel - Mary Jones, Celtic Literature Collective, https://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/brut_y_tywysogion.html
John Crook, ‘The Shrine of St David’ in Jonathan Wooding and J Wynn Evans (ed.), The Condition of Menevia: Studies in the History of St Davids, UWP, 2024).
Photographs: Edward Watson
