Saint Gwinear

Saint Gwinear, known also as Fingar, Guigner, Gwinnear, and in Brittany as Eguiner or Guigner, is a saint of the early medieval Celtic Church venerated in Cornwall and in Brittany. Contemporary historical documentation for his life is lacking; what is known derives from later medieval hagiography, from church dedications, and from place-names. He is the patron saint of the parish of Gwinear in west Cornwall, a dedication that gives its name to the present civil parish of Gwinear-Gwithian, and he is likewise the eponym of Pluvigner (Plou-Guigner) in the Morbihan in Brittany. The principal narrative source is a Latin vita ascribed to a certain Anselm, a writer sometimes linked with the monastery of St Michael's Mount and generally dated by modern scholars to the twelfth or thirteenth century.

According to that Life, Gwinear was the son of an Irish king and was converted to Christianity by Saint Patrick. After his conversion he is said to have distributed his goods and to have left Ireland as a missionary, accompanied by a numerous company that included his sister Piala (or Phiala). The vita gives the number of companions as seven hundred and seventy-seven, a clearly legendary figure; other traditions speak of a small band of followers. The party is described as having sojourned in Brittany, where the parish of Pluvigner preserves his name, before crossing the Channel to Cornwall and making landfall at the estuary of the Hayle in the district of Penwith.

There they met the opposition of the local ruler, King Teudar (also called Theodoric), a figure who appears as a persecutor of Christians in several Cornish saint legends, including those associated with Saint Ia and Saint Uny. Teudar is said to have ordered the killing of Gwinear and his companions. Cornish folklore attached to the martyrdom recounts that when Gwinear was beheaded his severed head struck the earth three times and that a spring of water rose at each place of impact; one of these springs is identified with Saint Gwinear's Well near the parish church. The church of Saint Gwinear became the centre of his medieval cult in Cornwall. Whether Teudar corresponds to any historical fifth- or sixth-century ruler cannot be demonstrated, and the story as a whole belongs to the common repertoire of early Celtic missionary-martyr legends rather than to independently verifiable history.

Gwinear's feast day is observed on 23 March. He was not the subject of a formal papal canonization of the type that developed in the later Middle Ages; his cult is of the pre-congregation kind, resting on local and episcopal recognition typical of the Celtic saints of western Britain and Brittany. No secure list of wider patronages of trades, illnesses, or social groups is recorded beyond the two principal places that bear his name. If a historical individual lies behind the legend, he would have belonged to the so-called Age of Saints in the south-western British peninsula, a period of Irish, Breton, and Cornish contact whose written traces are sparse. What can be affirmed with reasonable confidence is that a church and holy well dedicated to Gwinear were established in west Cornwall by the high Middle Ages, that a corresponding cult existed in Brittany, and that a written legend was later composed to account for those dedications.