Welsh Journals

A NOTE ON RHIGYFARCH'S LIFE OF DAVID THE purpose of this note is to comment on a single aspect of the Vita Davidis, namely, those passages in the Life of David which bear on the metropolitan dignity of the church of St. David's. In 1951 Dr. H. D. Emanuel opened up a new phase in the study of medieval Welsh hagiography with his analysis of the stages in the composition of Lifris's Vita Cadoci in B.M., Vespasian A. XIV,1 the very important manuscript of Welsh saints' Lives from either Brecon2 or Monmouth3 and dated to the thirteenth century. Studies of Rhigyfarch's Vita Davidis have been largely dependent hitherto on the text of the Life of David in the same manuscript or upon its derivatives.4 The edition of a new text of the Life of David by Chancellor J. W. James of Bangor Cathedral, based on the mid- twelfth-century manuscript, B.M., Cotton, Nero E. I, and the slightly later Bodleian text, Digby 112, has made far clearer the degree to which the original Vita by Rhigyfarch has been augmented by subsequent interpolation.5 Chancellor James would date the original composition by Rhigy- farch to 1093-95, on the grounds that Wilfrid, bishop of St. David's, having supported the Welsh in the warfare of 1093-95, was tem- porarily suspended by Archbishop Anselm, and this attack on the ecclesiastical independence of the see of St. David's could well have inspired the Life of David. These events, it is suggested, provide a likely background to the account in the Vita Davidis of David's journey to the patriarch of Jerusalem. The church of St. David's in the time of Bishop Bernard (1115-48) possessed two copies of the Vita, which lie behind all recensions and texts. There is always the possibility, as Professor W. H. Davies has reminded US,6 that Rhigyfarch himself revised his original text, but what is particularly 1 H. D. Emanuel, 'An Analysis of the Vita Cadoci', National Library of Wales Journal, VII (1951-52), 217-27; for a different view of the Vita Cadoci, see C. N. L. Brooke, 'St. Peter and St. Cadoc', N. K. Chadwick (ed.), Celt and Saxon (1963), pp. 258-322, and esp. pp. 283 ff. 2 A. W. Wade-Evans, Vitae Sanctorum Britanniae et Genealogiae (Board of Celtic Studies, University of Wales, History and Law series, no. 9, 1944), p. x. 3 S. M. Harris, 'The Kalendar of the Vitae Sanctorum Wallensium'. Journal of the Historical Society of the Church in Wales, III (1953), 3-53 (especially 5 ff.). Wade-Evans, op. cit., pp. 150 ff; D. Simon Evans, Buched Dewi (1959). 5 J. W. James (ed.), Rhigyfarch's Life of St. David (1967); reviewed for the Welsh History Review, IV (1968), 183-85, by Professor J. E. Caerwyn Williams. Chancellor James distinguishes in his edition between subsequent additions and the original text, and he comments briefly in his introduction on the stages of development. This new edition will give rise to vigorous debate not only about the growth of the Vita Davidis, but about the whole process of hagiographical writing in Wales in the twelfth century. 6 In a review of J. W. James (ed.). Rhigyfarch's Life of St. David. in Archaeologia Cambrensis, CXVI (1967). 216-17.