Confessor David

Saint David, known in Welsh as Dewi Sant, was a sixth-century monastic founder and bishop in western Britain and is honoured as the patron saint of Wales. Virtually no contemporary documentation of his life survives. The principal medieval source is the Latin Life composed by Rhygyfarch, a priest of St Davids, about 1090, five centuries after the period it describes. That vita, written to exalt the ancient see of Menevia, combines possible local memory with miracle accounts. Later authors including Giraldus Cambrensis expanded the legend. Tradition names his father as a prince called Sant of Ceredigion and his mother as Saint Non. His birth is placed either at Henfynyw in Ceredigion or near the site of the later cathedral in Dyfed, during a storm; a spring is said to have appeared, and a holy man prophesied the infant's destiny.

Educated under Saint Paulinus, David founded or reformed several monasteries, the most important at Mynyw, later called St Davids. The community followed a notably austere rule: monks performed heavy manual labour, including drawing the plough themselves, observed strict silence, and lived on bread, vegetables and water, abstaining from meat and intoxicating drink. Hagiography records that he took part in the Synod of Brefi, convened against Pelagian teaching. When the crowd could not hear him, the earth is said to have risen into a hill under his feet while a dove alighted on his shoulder; he was thereupon chosen bishop. A further tradition that he journeyed to Jerusalem and received consecration from the patriarch is regarded by historians as legendary.

David died at his monastery on 1 March; later chronicles give the year as 589 or 601. He was buried in the church that became St Davids Cathedral, which developed into one of the principal pilgrimage centres of medieval Wales. Two pilgrimages to St Davids were popularly held equal to one pilgrimage to Rome. In the early twelfth century Pope Callixtus II is traditionally credited with confirming David's cult, an act often described as his canonization. The feast on 1 March has long been a national observance in Wales, associated with the wearing of the leek or daffodil. Because of the vegetarian regimen of his monks, popular devotion sometimes regards him as a patron of vegetarians. He lived as a celibate monk and bishop and is not recorded as having married or had children.

David is customarily depicted with a dove on his shoulder or standing upon a raised mound, alluding to the miracle at Brefi. While the precise facts of his biography remain uncertain, place-name and archaeological evidence support the existence of an early and important monastic settlement at St Davids, and his cult is attested from the eighth or ninth century onward. He occupies a central place in Welsh religious and national identity.