Y Llyn Llwyd
by Michael Arram
XX
Review by Dr Michael Arram (School of Archeo-History, Willem-Stanislas VI Universität, Glottenberh, www.arram@glottenberh.ac.rn) of the edition of Vita Beati Urbani Castri Legionis, ed. I.M. Hanes (2 vols, Brepols, 2026-7), with an appendix of the Vita sancti Dubricii a Fausto presbytero. Reproduced with permission, Welsh Historical Review (Vol 33.2).
The fortuitous discovery of the text of the Vita Beati Urbani by Professor Iolo Hanes of the University of Swansea is a story worth telling, barely credible though it is, and still treated by some as an academic hoax of monumental hubris. Yet in a dusty cache of 17th-century antiquarian papers in the Archives Départementales at Lille, whose provenance has since been established as stray MSS from the library of the Bollandists at Douai, Professor Hanes did unearth transcripts of lost and unsuspected works of medieval Gwentian clerks of more than local significance to South Wales.
Let me say first that I have no doubts of the authenticity of the Lille MSS. Hanes's critics have had to concede that the existence of some of the quite obscure characters of the Vita Urbani can be authenticated from the historical record: for instance, Prince Morgan ap Morgan ab Owain lord of Llefnydd (here Morganus niger) is a character who turns up in the Pipe Rolls of the early years of King Henry II. That would have been enough authentication for Bishop Stubbs. Urban himself is missing from the record, though his existence is referred to tangentially in the otherwise exiguous early sources for the diocese of Llandaff. Bishops Uthred and Nicholas are certainly documented, and although the Vita Urbani contradicts modern accounts of the fall of Bishop Uthred, it is not at odds with other early evidence. The picture the Vita Urbani gives of the reign of King Morgan of Glamorgan, Urban's generous first patron and friend, may well be disputed on the grounds of bias, yet it contradicts nothing of what has previously been known.
It's not Hanes's fault that most of the criticism he has endured comes from the copy of the 5th-century Vita sancti Dubricii he also found in the Lille MSS. One could only wish that its direct mention of King Arthur of the Britons as an historical character had never been made. For Arthur is the patron saint of Celtic fantasists. Yet we are where we are. Hanes did not make or endorse the sensationalist TV documentaries that made nothing of his scholarly caution, one accusing him of fabricating the Vita with the help of an AI bot.
The unfortunate consequence of all the Arthurian fuss around Hanes's edition is to obscure parts of it which may be less sensational but open vast new panoramas of the 12th-century church and the society it served. What has gone largely unremarked is that the Vita Urbani is at its most compelling not in its account of Urban's rise, but in its quiet and mildly troubling narrative of his final days, following the Canterbury settlement of the succession in 1148. Urban of Caerleon was in a position of extraordinary power after his final settling of the English succession question at Canterbury, the settlement that came into effect in 1154 on the death of King Stephen, and the peaceful succession of Henry II in 1154. The Vita also gives us the clues to account for the abrupt rise to power in England of Master Thomas of London (otherwise Thomas Becket) as Chancellor. For we see him already in a close relationship with the teenage Henry Plantagenet in 1147, before he succeeded his father as Duke of Normandy. The future king's visit to South Wales and the court of King Morgan in his great progress around the British Isles of 1153 is all the more accountable. However, one may legitimately suspect that the Vita's assertion that Henry's visit to Caerleon implied his recognition of Urban as Archbishop of Wales is more hagiographical than historical.
In fact things like the promotion of Wales as an archiepiscopal see were far from Urban's mind in his later years, much though the idea preoccupied the minds of his father's generation, which hailed the Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth as a true historical source for early British history. Urban was one of those contemporary scholars who knew it for fantasy fiction, even though the Vita tells us that he had many years of friendship with Geoffrey and praised him for his historical use of many lost sources for early Welsh history in his Historia. The Vita Urbani helps answer the old question of what those early sources were, one seems to have been the Vita Dubricii which Urban himself found amongst the records of the Gwentian minster of Llantrisant on Usk which King Morgan endowed him with in 1136, and which Urban erected into a major centre of Welsh learning, and of which the learned Master David, the author of the Vita Urbani, was a canon and magister scholarum.
Llantrisant had an unsuspected Golden Age in the 12th century, but that is not to add to the criticisms of the authenticity of the Vita Urbani. After the publication of Professor Hanes's edition, work by the British Academy's Acta Comitum Britanniae project has confirmed the existence of a rural market centre the Vita frequently mentions, called Brekennyo (or Brechenneu), on the tidal Usk below Llantrisant. This was the seed of the later borough of Newbridge on Usk, which was eventually to eclipse the village of Llantrisant up the hill in the Wentwood. The later decline of Llantrisant into a simple parish church was inevitable once the generation of Urban and its patronage had passed. But if the recovery of the Vita Urbani has done nothing else, it has established the literary eminence of Gwentian clerks in the mid 12th century and the respect in which they were held by the Church as far away as Rome, where two popes, Innocent II and Eugenius III, counted Welsh bishops as friends and allies. And we have the assertion by the Vita's author, Master David, or Dewi, that he was called to tutor the boy Henry Planagenet in history and indeed the Welsh language, at Bristol in the 1140s, joining the team of scholars Earl Robert of Gloucester recruited, which otherwise included the natural philosopher, Adelard of Bath, and the philosopher and grammarian, William of Conches.
Master David tells us that after Urban's Canterbury synod of 1148, which cemented the decree of the Council of Bath in 1140, and guaranteed the succession of Henry Plantagenet to King Stephen, Archbishop Urban retired quietly to Gwent, making few other national interventions. He issued an excommunication against Count Eustace, the eldest son of King Stephen, who attempted to murder his cousin Henry Plantagenet during his visit to Britain in 1149, and who rejected the Peace of Canterbury. Eustace's death by enteric infection in 1153, before his father, was seen by many, certainly by Master David, as the consequence of Archbishop Urban's curse. More recent studies blame the pandemic of 1151-3, which killed so many across Northern Europe, peasants and noblemen alike.
It may perhaps have been the mass mortality of the early 1150s that turned Urban's mind inwards. For he made no attempt to promote Wales as a metropolitan province of the Britons in those years, though it was within his power as legate to do so. His legatine commission from Eugenius III did not expire till 1153. He remained active as a suffragan bishop in Gwent, based at a collegiate church in Caerleon as some sort of pro-cathedral, despite the fact that he was indeed an archbishop, his legitimate claim to that rank decisively asserted by the pallium awarded him by Pope Eugenius. Any possible tension in the situation was doubtless avoided because Bishop Nicholas of Llandaff, the diocesan, was his elder brother and their close fraternal affection is well attested.
Master David's prose turns increasingly spiritual as he moves to describe Urban's last years. He entitled it after all the 'Life of the Blessed Urban' and the word 'blessed' (beatus) was in his day applied to men or women thought worthy of canonisation or already being honoured popularly as saints. David had already noted the conversio animi that Urban and his friend Morgan the Black had undergone in their youth at Llangorse Lake (the stagnum quoddam in silvis positum, noted by the Vita S. Dubricii; the mystical stagnum glaucum, or 'grey lake' of Master David). So it seemed by his rhetoric all but foreordained that when King Morgan died in 1158 in an ambush in upland Glamorgan in his doomed campaign to subdue the lordship of Senghenydd, and was buried before the high altar of Urban's great church of St Dyfrig at Caerleon, Master David would deliberately make his characters turn their eyes away from the things of this world and toward futurity.
Morgan Ddu ap Morgan ab Owain resigned his lordship of Llefnydd to his son, Cynan, and took the cross, not opposing the succession of his uncle Iorwerth to his father's kingdom, even though Iorwerth abandoned the title of king of Glamorgan, which Morgan Ddu might have claimed by default as King Morgan III. His fate in the Holy Land, if indeed he reached it, is unknown. Cynan ap Morgan himself followed a very profitable military career as one of the leading mercenary captain-contractors of the reign of Henry II of England, his career spanning campaigns from the Pyrenees in the south, to Scotland in the north, and Byzantium in the east. He is said finally to have taken ship in the Atlantic in search of the Insula Avallon in the far west, as his brother Cyngwin's surviving paean to his memory asserts, and Cyngwin hints that his brother sleeps now in Avalon in company with Arthur's knights. Several Victorian anthropologists asserted on that evidence that Cynan indeed reached the Americas and claimed that there were as a consequence traces of Welsh to be found in the languages of native American tribes.
The openness of Master David to discussing the homosexual relationships of his leading characters may partly explain how his Vita Urbani suffered centuries of obscurity before coming to the attention of the Bollandists, who apparently obtained a copy from a Jesuit priest who ministered to recusant squires in 16th-century Monmouthshire. It would also explain how the Bollandists conveniently 'lost' it and omitted Urban of Caerleon from their calendar of saints of the Church. The homosexuality of Urban himself is never glossed over in the Vita, and his lifelong relationship with Lifris or Leofric of Llantrisant is simply an accepted fact. What has drawn most attention from historians, of course, is Master David's startling reporting of the sexuality of young Thomas Becket, whom he knew as Thomas of London. The affair of Thomas with the charismatic and beautiful Prince Morgan Ddu – 'a man of great renown whom God had fashioned with incomparable beauty and endowed with matchless wisdom and graced with bravery and renown' – decisively shaped the early career of Thomas and Urban and introduced Thomas to the notice of the young Henry Plantagenet a whole decade earlier than previously suspected.
So in 1159, Leofric and Urban made a barefoot pilgrimage to the shrine of St Dyfrig on the banks of Llangorse Lake, and were never to leave it. Being who he was, Urban's settlement there had consequences. Many great folk visited Urban at Llangorse seeking his counsel and blessing: King Henry II, the Lord Rhys of Deheubarth, the Young King Henry, Bishop Roger of Worcester and many others, less well known. Their patronage and his own not inconsiderable wealth led to the refoundation of the shrine by Archbishop Urban as a priory of a dozen Premonstratensian white canons dedicated to St Dyfrig, which after Urban's death was to relocate to Talley, near Carmarthen, a place less given to local flooding. Urban was never himself to take office as prior of Llangorse, a responsibility he resigned to his beloved Leofric.
There is a whole final section of the Vita which lists the many supernatural events that occurred at Llangorse during Urban's years there, between 1159 and his death in 1172. It serves perhaps as a Miracula catalogue to support his candidacy as a saint and confessor of the church, though it does not resemble the usual register of miracle stories in contemporary Vitae, but rather the outpourings on the subject of wonders, natural and unnatural, of David's contemporary, the Cistercian monk, Caesarius of Heisterbach, and the macabre tales of the Yorkshire canon, William of Newburgh. Perhaps the most familiar of these is the tale of the waterfowl of Llangorse. It resembles the tale told of Llangorse some years later by Gerald of Wales in his Itinerarium Kambriae, which indicates that Gerald had himself read the Vita Urbani in his time as archdeacon of Brecon. But unlike Gerald, who fixed on the role of the birds of Llangorse in hailing the new king of Glamorgan, Master David highlighted them as messengers of St Dyfrig. In Caerleon, Llantrisant and elsewhere geese were the iconographical attribute of Dyfrig, which Professor Hanes (I think ironically) notes may have as much to do with the proximity of Dyfrig's feast day to Martinmas as the cult of Llangorse.
So with Master David of Llantrisant we have the rare experience of hailing a genuinely new and unknown medieval author. He gives us some biographical information. He was a boy of nine when Urban arrived as the rector of Llantrisant in 1136, so he was born in or around 1127, when Henry I was king of England. He was born a hereditary Welsh house slave to the church, as was his older brother Grono. They were liberated from their servile status when Urban ordained the pair to minor orders. Urban selected David for training in the grammar school he established at Llantrisant. David was ordained to higher orders and eventually became himself magister of Llantrisant's notable school, which attracted sons of local noblemen, not least the poet-prince Cyngwin ap Morgan Ddu, author of the no-longer-extant Welsh language panegyric on his elder brother, the warrior Cynan ap Morgan. Cyngwin was himself ordained deacon of Llantrisant church and became dean of the college of St Dyfrig at Caerleon and a canon of Llandaff cathedral.
To conclude our little Umberto Ecco-like review, I am in the happy position of being able to report what the Church Times announced this week, that the present Archbishop of Wales, herself a woman in a relationship with another woman, has established a commission to consider revising the calendar of the Church in Wales to include a feast day of Saint Urban ap Gwrgan, bishop and confessor. As a historian I can suggest in parallel what Professor Hanes has not yet done: an entry for David in any future revision of the late Richard Sharpe's magnificent Handlist of Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540.
227 David of Llantrisant (1127––† after 1172)
Vita Beati Urbani Castri Legionis , ed. I.M. Hanes (2 vols, Brepols, 2026-7).
–– Vita Beati Urbani Castri Legionis et Vita sancti Dubricii a Fausto presbytero
Archives d é partementales du Nord, Lille, IIG233 Fonds du prieur é de St-Etienne de Lille. Collection Marcy (s. xvi)
VITA SANCTI DVBRICII EPISCOPI ISCANENSIS
(Faustus Presbyter, c. AD 550)
Incipit.Tempore quo Romana potestas in Britannia languescebat et gentes barbarorum fines urgebant, genitus est puer quidam nobilis nomine Dubricius, matre Romana, patre ex gente Silurum, viris laudatis ortus.
A primis annis ingenium fidei sapientiaeque monstravit, et litteras in Venta Silurum didicit sub presbytero Victore, viro religioso.
Cum esset iuvenis, solitudinem quaesivit in locis silvestribus non longe ab Isca Legionis, et ibi ieiunavit quadraginta diebus iuxta stagnum quoddam in silvis positum, quietum valde et aquarum limpido lumine refulgens.
Et factum est, cum sol occumberet, lumen magnum apparuit super aquas, tamquam columna ignea, et vox audita est dicens:"Accipe curam huius populi, et esto pastor Britannorum per dies tribulationis."
Et in ipso loco coronam de iuncis invenit super caput suum, quam nullus hominum posuerat; quod multi signum divinae electionis iudicaverunt.
Reversus est ad Iscam, ubi presbyteri et cives eum elegerunt in episcopum iuxta vetus consuetudinem Romanorum.
In die consecrationis, aquam de eodem stagno in vas parvum attulit, et eadem aqua altare primum unxit; unde multi crediderunt virtutem Domini ibi habitare.
Erat eo tempore dux bellorum Artorius, qui adversus Saxones pugnabat pro salute insulae.
Ipse Artorius venit ad Dubricium in Isca rogans benedictionem antequam bellum cum hostibus iniret.
Et Dubricius, imposito signo crucis, dixit:"Dominus corroborabit manus tuas, si ecclesias ac pauperes tuos defendes."
Postea Artorius ad Bellum Badonis pervenit, et victoria magna data est Britannis.
Dubricius autem multos annos rexit ecclesias Gwentiae et Erginiae, sanans infirmos, praedicando pacem et iudicando causas.
In senectute sua ad idem stagnum silvestre rediit, ubi ei vox prius locuta fuerat, et ibi per triduum oravit.
Et scriptum reliquit:"Postquam gens ista humiliabitur sub tribulationibus, surget iterum dux de aquis, non ferro sed sapientia regnaturus."
Quibus dictis, ad Iscam reversus, in pace dormivit.
Explicit vita sancti Dubricii.
Postscriptum
Words of thanks and acknowledgement need to be said here, principally to Charles for his knowledgeable advice and friendly proof-reading. I should also inform the reader that most of the characters who featured in this tale are historical, though those of lesser social status not usually so. Leofric, Kneithir and Godwin are thus fictional, sadly, though 12th-century Gwent did have such characters and their racial mix. Urban son of Bishop Urban himself is only inferred by some genealogical indicators. But Morgan, son of King Morgan, called here the Black, Lord of Llefnydd, was a real historical personage, though probably nicer than the character portrayed here. The brutal assassination at Grwyne Fawr in 1136 actually happened, as did the Battle of Lincoln in 1141. Llantrisant, Llangorse Lake, Newbridge, Caerleon and St Gwynllyw are likewise real locations in and around the beautiful Valley of the Usk
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