ABSTRACT
St David (Dewi Sant),1 who died in or around 601 (festum 1 March),2 is the most renowned of the Cambro-British saints to be commemorated in the Hereford calendar.3 His cult is distinctive in that it ‘survived the transition from native Welsh belief to the more diverse loyalties of the Anglo-Norman world’.4 His feast, however, was not promulgated for observance throughout the province of Canterbury, to which Wales belonged from the twelfth century, until 1398,5 though it was celebrated locally at Hereford, Exeter, Glastonbury, and even Canterbury itself long before that date.6 The cult is of considerable antiquity and was well established by the late eighth century, according to the early Irish martyrologies.7 Ancient church and chapel dedications, place-names, and the archæological evidence of ‘Dewi’ sites particularly in south-west Wales, however, indicate
Welsh Saints (1987), 31−73; and J. R. Davies, ‘The saints of south Wales and the Welsh church’, in Thacker & Sharpe (eds.), Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West (2002), 361−95, at 375−8, 387−90 et passim. For the date of David’s death, see J. M. Wooding, ‘The figure of David’, in Evans & Wooding (eds.), St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation (2007), 1, and J. R. Davies, ‘The archbishopric of St Davids and the bishops of Clas Cynidr’, ibid., 298. other aspects of the life and cult of St David are discussed extensively in Evans & Wooding’s important collection of essays by various authors, which provides an invaluable basis for further research in a number of fields, historical, archæological, and liturgical, as well as hagiological. In particular, the famous work of Silas Harris, St David in the Liturgy (1940), is brought up to date by recent developments discussed by Daniel Huws, ‘St David in the Liturgy: a review of sources’, in Evans & Wooding (eds.), Saint David of Wales, 220-32. See also Evans, ‘St David and St Davids: some observations on the cult, site and buildings’, in J. Cartwright (ed.), Celtic Hagiography and Saints’ Cults (2003), ch. 1.
