The Saints of Wales
Saints populate the landscape of Wales in place-names, church dedications and holy wells. From St Fagans to Llandudno, St Davids to Pennant Melangell, the names of saints are familiar but are not always recognised. Some, like David and Deiniol, are well known, but many are much more obscure, their traditions forgotten.
This website aims to provide information about some of the saints who were once so important in medieval Wales. Many of the saints venerated in Wales were known from early Christian writings familiar across Christendom, while others may have only been known locally as the founders of churches in particular parts of Wales. Some saints, such as Cybi, Non and Cadog, were known across parts of Wales as well as in Ireland, Cornwall and Brittany. Others, such as Gwenfrewy (Winefride), Dyfrig (Dubricius) and Samson, are known from hagiographic texts – the medieval stories that were written about them centuries after the time when they were thought to have lived – but rarely found in place-names or church dedications.
For over a century, the best place to look for traditions of the saints of Wales has been the four-
volume compendium The Lives of the British Saints, prepared by Sabine Baring-Gould and John
Fisher and published between 1907 and 1913. The books are a treasure trove of facts and stories
associated with the early saints of Wales (and elsewhere in Britain). They remain a valuable quarry
for information today, although the assumptions of the authors are now questionable. The authors
sometimes conflated unrelated saints with similar names, and weaved detailed narratives based on
misconceptions and guesswork from poorly edited versions of medieval saints Lives and romantic
forgeries.New editions of medieval poems and texts, many of which have been prepared as the result of two research projects on Welsh and Latin literature relating to saints, provide fresh insights into the understanding of the importance of saints in Wales from the eleventh century and into the early modern period. Barry Lewis’s recent publication on the Bonedd y Saint (2023) is also full of detail about dozens of saints listed in the genealogies.
Insights from this research have been added to the pages on this site, and brought together with
new research on the places associated with saints by David Parsons, mapping the medieval cults of
many saints in Wales for the first time. Modern church dedications are also mapped, indicating the
popularity of certain saints as patrons in the nineteenth and twentieth century.
Only a small proportion of the imagery of saints survived the iconoclasm of the Reformation and the Civil War. However, modern perceptions of saints are displayed in more recent images of saints, mainly found in churches across Wales. Summaries of the visual representation of saints are given on these pages, with links to a database of the imagery of saints in Wales prepared by Martin Crampin.
The information presented on this website remains a work in progress. Information about other saints, and more details about the saints currently on the site, is being added. We will be providing fuller bibliographies, along with references to saints from a wide range of medieval sources.
Select a saint from the list above, or go to Advanced Search to create maps of the cults of selected saints.
For editions of saints Lives and poetry addressed to saints, and further information about the Cult of Saints in Wales projects, visit saints.wales.
