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Biography

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Tewdrig (also rendered Tewdric or, in Latin, Theodoricus) was a ruler of the early medieval Welsh kingdom of Glywysing, in the southeast of what is now Wales, traditionally assigned to the sixth or early seventh century. Welsh genealogical tracts present him as the son of Teithfallt and as a descendant of the legendary Glywys, from whom the kingdom took its name. Glywysing occupied territory corresponding in large part to later Glamorgan, adjoining Gwent. Almost nothing that would satisfy modern standards of contemporary documentation survives for his life; the principal narrative of his later years and death is preserved in the Book of Llandaff (Liber Landavensis), a twelfth-century compilation that incorporates earlier charters and hagiographical material connected with the see of Llandaff. In that tradition he is both a king and a saint, remembered as a man who laid aside royal power for the eremitical life and who subsequently died of wounds received in battle against Saxon invaders.

According to the Llandaff account, Tewdrig, after a period of rule, abdicated in favour of his son Meurig ap Tewdrig in order to withdraw from the world. He took up the life of a hermit at a site by the River Wye, commonly identified with the neighbourhood of Tintern. The decision to resign the kingship in old age and to live in religious retirement is a motif found in other early British royal saints' lives, and it is presented as the setting for the events that led to his death. When Saxon forces pressed into the region, Meurig is said to have sought his father's counsel and presence. Tewdrig left his hermitage, resumed a military role, and led or accompanied the native army to a ford on the Wye, often associated with a crossing near Tintern.

The battle was won, but Tewdrig received a mortal wound from a Saxon spear. The hagiography relates that he asked to be conveyed away, and that the vehicle in which he was carried halted at a spot where a spring of water burst forth. There he died. The place of his death and burial became known as Merthyr Tewdrig, meaning the martyrdom or burial place of Tewdrig, later Mathern, near Chepstow in Monmouthshire, on the Welsh side of the historic border with England. His son Meurig is credited with founding or endowing a church on the site. Tewdrig was thereby honoured as a martyr, not because he died in a purely religious persecution, but because he had left the hermitage to defend his people and perished of wounds suffered in that cause, an interpretation of martyrdom found in other early medieval Celtic contexts.

Later tradition at Mathern maintained that the saint's body rested in the parish church, which bears his name, the Church of St Tewdric. In the early seventeenth century Francis Godwin, Bishop of Llandaff, recorded that a stone coffin had been opened in the church and that a skeleton within it showed a wound to the skull, which local belief identified with Tewdrig. The historicity of that identification cannot be proved, but it attests to a continuous local cult. Tewdrig's feast has been observed on 1 April in calendars of Welsh saints. He was never the subject of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval or modern type; his cult belongs to the older, locally rooted veneration of British saints. He is not recorded as having held any patriarchal or papal office. Beyond the dedication at Mathern and his place in the royal genealogy of Glywysing and Gwent through Meurig and later descendants, few independent details of his career can be verified. Dates of birth and death remain uncertain, and reconstructions that assign him to a precise year rest on later chronological schemes rather than on contemporary records.

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