Welsh Journals

Rhygyvarch and St. David. By J. Arthur Price, M.A. I HAVE read with great interest Mr. Wade Evans' book on St. David,* and my friend Professor Lloyd's interesting review thereof. It is not my intention to attempt a second criticism of Mr. Wade Evans' work, but the perusal of the volume suggests some re- flections both on Dewi and his first biographer, Rhygyvarch. Rhygyvarch's "Life," which Mr. Wade Evans has given to Wales in accessible form and in an excellent translation, is the charter of Welsh ecclesiastical liberties. As Mr. Wade Evans says, it is a "remembrance" to the ages that "Canterbury is not the rock from which she was hewn nor the hole of the pit from which she was digged." Rhygyvarch lived and wrote at St. David's in its last free days, when its Church was in every sense a Welsh Church, a Church that looked to the country of the Scotti, that is the land of Ireland, rather than to Canterbury, or perhaps even to Rome, for its culture and inspiration. For he was the son of that famous Bishop Sulien; known as the wise, who, after he had held and resigned the see of St. David's, was again called back to it by the wish of the people. Rhygyvarch only lived forty-two years, being born in 1057 and dying in 1099. In his childhood days he must have heard of Harold's march through Wales, and of the fall of Gruffydd ap Llewelyn. He doubtless saw the landing of Gruffydd ap Conan at Porth, Clais, the harbour of St. David's, and he must often have beheld Rhys ap Tewdr, the exiled prince, whose name long lingered in St. David's. He had grown to manhood's years when William the Norman rode into the Vale of Roses and knelt at St. David's shrine. And later on Rhygyvarch saw the entry of the Norman freebooters into the fair land of Wales, the seizure of Morgannwg and Brecheiniog, and the fierce attack of the ecclesiastical liberties of this country by Norman Canterbury. It is clear that Rhygyvarch thought little of the Norman marauders, whether military or ecclesiastical. "They increase our burdens and consume our goods," he writes in a fine patriotic ooem, some part of which Mr. Evans translates. It was natural that the high claims of the Norman Church, linked though they were with the Hildebrondian Papacy, should not appeal to him. He tells us that St. David's had received its ecclesiastical honours from the Patriarch of Jerusalem, the representative of Christ, honours that no See in the west, even though it owed its foundation to St. Peter, could take away. When we remember how modern history has vindicated the truth of much in the story of St. Life of St. David. By A. W. Wade-Evans. (S.P.C.K. Translations of Christian Literature). 7s. 6d. Patrick that seemed purely legendary, we must take the Jerusalem story seriously. Onei'act should be remembered. St David lived before the Saracen conquest of Jerusalem. In fact, he died before the Hegira of Mahommed. Jerusalem in his time was still a city of the Christian Roman Empire of the East. A pilgrimage to its holy places would not have been the difficult task that it afterwards became. It is significant that in the story that our historian tells, while we hear of the presence of Jews in Jerusalem not a word is said of the presence of Turks or Saracens, whom a legend-maker of the twelfth century would certainly have introduced. This fact seems to show that the story, whether true or false, is far older than the days of Rhygyvarch. If, however, we imagine that he invented it, we must regard it as an allegory which the initiated would have understood. Against the claims of Rome's St. Peter's See St. David's stood with Christ for its founder. Leaving this interesting episode, let us look for a moment at the ideas of the author of the life. In those far-away days when Basil Jones and Freeman wrote of the book, they turned away from it with the scorn of the Victorian age. There was not much about St. David in it, they told us, that was reliable. But it had its interest, however-it showed what the superstitious eleventh century thought about him. To us, who have seen what modern civilisation has made of the world, the sneer is almost incomprehens- ible. Few who read the life in a religious spirit will deny that in many ways Rhygyvarch stands for a higher civilisation than our own. The fact that strikes us as we read the book is that, how- ever much Rhygyvarch hated the Norman bishops and priests, yet essentially their ideas if civilisa- tion were similar. Both despised wealth. Both believed that the highest ideal of Christianity could be realised bv example and not by force, by a self-sacrificing life rather than by an agitation for Draconic laws. The most interesting feature, however, in St. David's life, as described bv Rhygyvarch, is its note of intense self-denial. There is nothing like it in our own age. The aim set forward by most modern educationalists is earthly success. The aim of the social reformer is to increase the area of comfort and respectability. That riches are in themselves an evil, though fully sanctioned by Holv Writ is a doctrine which few care to preach. To the Socialism of to-day the misfortune of the world is the poverty of the maiority, to Dewi it was the sin of all mankind. Unlike the modern social reformer, Dewi did not seek to set the world right by force, he preferred following the example of the Founder of Christianity, to correct it bv example. But here a criticism suggests itself. Must we not yet say that the monastic life in the Vale of Roses was too severe for mortal man? Unquestionably to most of us it would have been an impossible life. May