14 - The Episcopal Framework

Summary

The seventh-century Church

The fullest available picture of the southern Welsh churches in the sixth to seventh centuries comes from the Breton-Latin Life of St Samson, bishop of Dol (fl. ca 561), written about a century after his death (probably) and dedicated to a Bishop Tigernomalus, perhaps a person of this name who died in 707. Though the author writes from a Breton perspective, and follows literary models, including Venantius Fortunatus's Life of St Paternus of Avranches (near Dol), he has visited places associated with Samson in Wales and Cornwall and has obtained information from an old man of nearly eighty whose uncle, Henog, a cousin or kinsman of Samson, had obtained information from Samson's mother Anna. Thus the Life gives us a rare contemporary glimpse of the seventh-century Welsh Church and offers memories of the sixth century, when monasticism was starting to take hold in Britain, as already seen in the writings of Gildas. It suggests a context for the more austere data in the charters.

According to the Life, Samson and his father were from Dyfed and his mother was from the – at that time – adjacent province of Gwent. Both parents were of high status and had fostered kings in their respective provinces (I.1 and 6). Samson's father's name, Amon, has been held to suggest sympathy with Egyptian asceticism. He and his wife, Anna, took their first-born, Samson, aged five, together with the customary entry fees (I.9), to ‘the school of the famous master of the Britons’, Illtud (Eltutus), a disciple of St Germanus, who was believed to have been ordained priest in his youth by Germanus himself. The Breton author, who praises Illtud's curriculum, has visited Illtud's ‘magnificent monastery’, presumably Llantwit, and has gathered stories about Illtud from the brothers there (I.7–8). Illtud, we learn, arranged for Samson to be ordained deacon and priest by Bishop Dyfrig (Dubricius) when he visited; we are not told what see Dyfrig came from, or even that he had one (I.13 and 15), but evidently Llantwit did not have a resident bishop. The only named office is that of pistor (‘cook’ or ‘cellarer’, I.16), the office occupied by one of Illtud's nephews.