Non

Saint Non (also known as Nonna or Nonnita) is a Welsh saint of the early medieval period, traditionally placed in the fifth and sixth centuries, and is venerated principally as the mother of Saint David (Dewi Sant), the patron saint of Wales. Almost nothing about her life can be established from contemporary records. The surviving portrait of Non derives from later hagiography, above all from Rhygyfarch’s late eleventh-century Latin Life of St David and from medieval Welsh genealogies such as Bonedd y Saint. In these sources she appears as a woman of Dyfed, often identified as the daughter of the local chieftain Cynyr Ceinfarfog of Caer Goch, near the later cathedral settlement of St Davids in Pembrokeshire.

According to Rhygyfarch, Non was a nun or consecrated virgin when she was raped by Sant (Sanctus), a prince or king associated with Ceredigion, and conceived David. The Life describes her giving birth during a violent storm on a coastal cliff in Dyfed. A stone on which she is said to have leaned during labour was afterwards marked with the imprint of her hands, and a spring burst forth at the site. These legendary features were later attached to St Non’s Chapel and St Non’s Well on the cliffs south of St Davids, which became a medieval pilgrimage destination. The ruined medieval chapel and the well remained places of local devotion, and the well was visited for healing into the modern period.

After the birth of David, traditions about Non’s later life diverge and cannot be reconciled with certainty. Welsh material generally keeps her in Dyfed in association with her son’s monastic foundation. A strong Breton tradition, however, holds that she crossed to Armorica and ended her life at Dirinon in Finistère, a place-name interpreted as “oak of Non.” The parish church there long claimed her tomb and preserved a cult, with a recumbent effigy identified as the saint. In Cornwall the village of Altarnun (“altar of Non”) and its church dedication likewise attest an early cult, though whether this reflects a sojourn by Non herself or the later spread of her son’s legend remains uncertain.

Non was never the subject of a formal papal canonization; her cult is of the pre-congregation type typical of early medieval Celtic saints. She is commemorated on 3 March in Welsh and many other calendars, a date adjacent to the feast of St David on 1 March. Churches, wells, and place-names in Pembrokeshire, Cornwall, and Brittany remain the principal evidence of her historical veneration. Because the medieval sources are late, legendary, and sometimes contradictory, her biography cannot be reconstructed as a sequence of verified events, but the cult itself is well attested across the Irish Sea and the Channel from the Middle Ages onward.