St. David's Cathedral (Ty Dewi)

In 73l, the great English churchman and historian Bede wrote:

There are in Britain, in harmony with the five books of the divine law, five languages and four nations -- English, British, Scots and Picts. Each of these has its own language, but all are united in the study of God's truth by the fifth, Latin. (Historia Ecclesiastica Anglorum)

Bede, not the first Englishman to show his prejudices against the native peoples, then added:

The Britons for the most part have a natural hatred for the English and uphold their own bad customs against the true Easter of the Catholic Church; however, they are opposed by the power of God and man alike.

Despite the words of the venerable churchman, it is hard to believe that such missionaries as St. David (Dewi Sant) of the ancient Celtic Church was opposed by anyone, God or man. Though his evangelical zeal was largely confined to the people of his native country, David did undertake pilgrimages into western England and is credited with founding religious centres at Glastonbury and Croyland. Bede, however, claimed that the Welsh had no desire to Christianize the pagan English; subsequently, this task was left mainly to the Irish missionaries, and later to St. Augustine. Bede added:

It is to this day the fashion among the Britons to reckon the faith and religion of Englishmen as naught and to hold no more converse with them than with the heathen. (Bede: Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, 73l).

At Whitby, however, in Northumbria, in the year 664, King Oswy had called a synod to implement throughout Britain the Roman way brought by Augustine, rather the Celtic way of those such as David of Wales, Columba of Iona, and Aidan of Lindisfarne. The Welsh Church reluctantly was forced to follow suit though, as noted by Bede, it took more than a century to bring its practices in line with those being preached at Rome.

Wales did not adopt St. David as its patron saint until the l8th Century, with the reputed date of his death March lst chosen as the day of a national festival, but very little is known about him for certain except that he lived in the 6th Century and probably died in 589. Information concerning his life comes from the Latin The Life of St. David written in the late llth Century by Rhygyfarch but supplemented by Geraldus Cambrensis around l200.

Rhygyfarch describes the visit of Saints Teilo, David, and Padarn to the patriarch of Jerusalem to be consecrated, David receiving the archbishopric (later disputed by Pope Innocent III), in a Celtic church that still looked to the east, to Jerusalem, not to Rome, for its authority.

There are many legends concerning Dewi, as the saint is known in Welsh. In his Life it is claimed that he was the son of mother Non and father Sandde, whose father, in turn, was the King of Ceredigion. Non later became a nun in Britanny where she is buried. Tradition has David's birth at St. Non's Bay (where some believe that St. Patrick was also born). Because of his frugal diet of bread and water, Dewi was known as Aquaticus (Water man). One story is, while he was preaching at the Synod of Llanddewibrefi, that the ground rose up beneath him so that all present could see and hear him.

The humble cleric's fame as a missionary reached Ireland and Brittany, and from the early l2th Century the church named for him at Ty Dewi (St. David's) became a place of pilgrimage. In ll20 he was officially recognized as a Catholic saint by Pope Calixtus who declared that two pilgrimages to St. David's equaled in merit one visit to Rome. Three visits to St. David's equaled one to Jerusalem itself. In l398 Archbishop Arundel ordained that March lst, Dewi's feast day, be kept by every church in the Province of Canterbury. Signified by the wearing of a leek (some deign to wear a daffodil), It is solemnly celebrated by Welsh people all over the world.

For many centuries, St. David's remained one of the most important and most visited sacred places in the whole of the British Isles. Even the Norman overlord of the whole of Britain, William the Conqueror, came here to worship. The shrine of St. David also attracted Geraldus Cambrensis, who sought the bishopric and who made three unsuccessful appeals to Rome to get it. His appeals were denied by a Pope not anxious to see a Welsh Church independent of Canterbury: Bishop Houghton, Lord Chancellor to King Edward III who earned his fame by being excommunicated by the Pope whom he in turn excommunicated from the cathedral steps; Henry II, who prayed there for victory on his way to Ireland and who returned to give thanks for his successes; Bishop Ferrar, who was burned at the stake during the reign of Mary, and Bishop Davies, who procured the first Welsh translation of the Bible.

Like its counterpart at Llandaff, St. David's has also suffered he ravages of time and human folly. The cathedral building itself, the largest and most impressive among its Welsh counterparts, sits in a hollow (Glyn Rhosyn) through which runs the river Alun. It is believed by many that the placing of the cathedral was to hide it from Viking raids as it cannot be seen from the sea, but the founding of the religious settlement dates back much farther than the time of the Norsemen. In 55 AD, David is said to have transferred his monastery from Whitesand Bay to the little valley of the Alun.

In l088, despite the secluded, half-hidden situation, the little settlement suffered the indignity of being sacked by Vikings, raiding up and down the Welsh coast at will; at various time in later years she also suffered grievous damage from earthquakes. No traces remain from the early founding, however, much of the present church dating back only to ll80. Less than forty years later the central tower collapsed, destroying the transepts and choir, but these were soon rebuilt. Bishop Gower (l328-l342), the remains of whose magnificent palace can be visited on the Cathedral grounds, added much to the church, including decorated windows and part of the restored central tower. He is also responsible for the magnificent Rood Screen and is buried inside the church.

During the English Civil War, Cromwell's troops were busy in their usual iconoclastic manner destroying much of the cathedral and its contents, and it was necessary for rebuilding programs undertaken by John Nash in the late eighteenth century, and by Sir Gilbert Scott (who else?) in the nineteenth. Neither architect was able to do much about the slope in the floor which rises l4 feet from the West door up to the high altar (local legend says the slope was deliberately planned to get the congregation nearer to heaven). The entrance to the cathedral is through an impressive, ruined gateway and down a steep flight of stone steps known locally as the 39 Articles.

There is much to see and ponder over at St David's, and thus a guidebook is essential. The cathedral contains the shrines of St. Caradog and St. Justinian as well as St. David (though the latter may not actually be buried there according to recent scientific tests of the bones). It also houses one of the only surviving medieval Bishop's thrones in Britain. Edmund Tudor, father of Henry VII is also commemorated here by an impressive altar-tomb. In addition to the remains of Bishop Gower's opulent residence, the cathedral grounds also contain the ruins of St. Mary's College, for secular priests, which John of Gaunt helped found in l377. Bishop Gower built his palace in l340; two hundred years later, another bishop had the lead from the roof slowly stripped away to provide dowries for his five daughters --all of whom married later bishops!

Before leaving the area of the cathedral, we should visit the ruined chapel and holy well of St. Non, reputed to be David's mother. To get there, we must travel about a mile up a narrow lane to the very edge of the steep cliffs skirted by the pathway that is part of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. Here, just down the hill from an ugly gray building that serves as a religious retreat, in a field usually full of cattle or horses, are the scanty remains of the ancient chapel. Nearby, almost hidden in the undergrowth is St. Non's Well. Not visited by many these days, and full of muddy, brackish water, the well was an important place of pilgrimage for many centuries; its supposed healing powers were second only to those at St. Windifred's at Holywell in North Wales.

Also on the coast, not too far from the city of St. David's, wedged into a tiny crevice in a steep cliff is another sacred spot, the tiny chapel of St. Govan, built in the l3th century on the site of the cell of a 6th century Celtic monk. Here the hermit St. Govan, from Wexford in Ireland, and abbot there, reportedly hid from his pagan persecutors in a niche in the rock that miraculously opened and closed behind him. The modern visitor slim enough to turn around in the niche is assured of good luck and the fulfillment of his wishes. A former well on the chapel floor was supposed to cure many diseases. A huge boulder outside the chapel is also said to hide a silver bell, stolen by pirates (or Vikings) from the chapel tower, but recovered by angels and now kept safe in the rock.

On the way down to the tiny chapel, a steep flight of stone steps has to be navigated; legend has it that the number counted going down never matches the number reached on the way up. The whole experience is one of mystery; the site being almost inaccessible from land and sea (especially now that the Government uses much of the land approaches to the shrine as a firing range for the military).