Welsh Journals

REVIEWS THE ST DAVID OF HISTORY. DEWI SANT OUR FOUNDER SAINT by E. G. Bowen. Aberystwyth, 1982. pp. 34. £ 1.00 I do not know when the custom was initiated of celebrating the centenary anni- versaries of the building of St. David's Cathedral by Bishop Peter de Leia in 1181, but the celebration last year (1981) was given added significance because the Friends of the Cathedral had the good sense to invite Emeritus Professor E. G. Bowen to give a lecture on the founder, St. David, and to extend their auspices to its publication. Professor Bowen established himself as an authority,-indeed, the authority-on the Ages of the Welsh Saints many years ago, and he has not ceased to publish on the subject but to my knowledge this is the first time he has written a monograph on our national saint, and it goes without saying that it would have been a great loss to scholarship, had he not written it, for here he brings us not only the results of his own lifelong researches but also those of other scholars, and as he himself remarks, there has been a remarkable increase in our knowledge of the Saint during the last quarter of a century, due in the main to a method pioneered by himself, involving the combin- ation of disciplines as varied as folklore and archaeology, proto-history and geography, history and literary criticism. He begins with some of the earliest references to St. David, including those in the Catalogue of the Saints of Ireland, the Martyrologies of Oengus the Culdee and of Tallaght, the Life of St. Paul de Leon, and, of course, in Armes Prydain Fawr, but naturally he gives pride of place to the inscription reported by Edward Lhuyd but now irreparably lost with the stone on which it was found in Llanddewi Brefi. "The experts on the epigraphy of Early Christian Inscribed Stones are unanimous that the style of writing belongs to the early seventh century. This is fully two hundred years or more earlier than the date now assigned to the Catalogue of the Saints of Ireland which was previously thought to contain the earliest reference to St. David, and cannot be more than a few decades later than the death of the Saint himself, or, possibly contemporary with his old age. The fact that we have his name inscribed in this way on a near con- temporary stone memorial at Llanddewi Brefi, undoubtedly his "second capital", is, indeed, of the greatest significance". Apart from such early references, Rhygyfarch's Life of St. David, written in Latin about the year 1095, is the source of most of what we know of the Saint, but, written as it was some 500 years after his death, it needs to be scrutinised very carefully to separate the grains of truth from the mass of pseudo-history so characteristic of the Lives of the Saints, as a genre and it is in doing this that Professor Bowen is at his best, combining, as he does, the expertise of the geographer, the archaeologist, the proto- historian and the historian. Considerations of space might have tempted him to give us only a cursory summary of his conclusions, but fortunately he is too good a teacher (and lecturer) to yield to this temptation, with the result that on several points he gives the evidence as well as the conclusions. Unfortunately, this does not make the absence of evidence on other points easier to bear. That is why we hope that he will return to this subject and write a full-length book on it. Professor Bowen believes that Rhygyfarch's Latin Life of St. David points us in the right direction in at least five respects (i) the importance it attaches to Hen Fynyw (Vetus Rubus) as the scene of the Saint's early life and education (ii) the indication which it gives of the extent and the direction of the Saint's missionary activities (iii) its portrayal of the confrontation between the faith represented by St. David and the paganism represented by Baia, the chieftain of the Irish settlers (iv) its insistence that St. David played a role in the opposition to the Pelagian heresy, a role