11 - St David in the liturgy: a review of sources

Summary

Coming across an article, an excellent recent article, on ‘The cult of St David in the middle ages’, and unaware that the author was an archaeologist, some readers might be disappointed to find in it nothing about liturgy. Its one passing reference to liturgy is however a precious one, from the letter written to Thomas Cromwell by Bishop Barlow in 1538. William Barlow, the radical Reformer, complained that ‘the people’ (meaning no doubt the good folk of his chapter) wilfully solemnized the feast of St David and ‘set forth relics in defiance of his admonition and the King's injunctions’. The relics consisted of ‘two heads of silver plate enclosing two rotten skulls’ and ‘a worm-eaten book covered with silver plate’. Barlow was not to appreciate that by way of recompense to us for the destruction of the relics which he no doubt managed to achieve soon afterwards he was providing the most precise reference we have to a Welsh metal-covered binding. Such a binding, we can safely say, would have been no later in date than the twelfth century, and was probably on a gospel-book. Had Barlow been a Matthew Parker and not a William Barlow, this book, ‘the St Davids Gospels’, might, who knows, have become Wales's answer to the Book of Kells.

My subject is not the archaeological monuments of the cult of St David but an incorporeal element of the cult of St David in the middle ages, its liturgy. What survives of liturgy is at best something that might be regarded as its libretto, together, sometimes, with something by way of a score. The performance is of course lost. The medium for what survives is books. The title of this paper is borrowed from and is a tribute to that admirable small volume by Silas Harris, Saint David in the Liturgy, published in 1940. Harris observantly covers the ground and offers a framework which remains definitive. My offering is merely an up-to-date view of the relevant sources now available, some of them unknown in Harris’s time.