The Vespasian Life of St Teilo and the Evolution of the Vitae Sanctorum Wallensium

Abstract

St Teilo is one of only three Welsh saints whose Lives survive in multiple versions written in more than one language. The others are David, the great episcopal saint of south-west Wales, with Lives in Latin and Welsh, and Winifred, the martyr whose well endures even today as a popular pilgrimage destination, with Lives in Latin, Welsh and English. Teilo stands apart from these other saints in that his cult suffered a major dislocation prior the writing of his extant Lives. Saints’ cults are prone to wander, as the cults of David and Winifred show: the centre of David’s cult may have moved from Hen Fynyw in Ceredigion to its present location at St Davids at some point during the early Middle Ages, while a morally dubious twelfth-century relic translation introduced Winifred’s cult to Shrewsbury Abbey, many miles distant from both the site of her martyrdom at Holywell and her later burial place at Gwytherin. Yet the Lives of both these saints reflect fundamental continuities in their traditions and the communities associated with them. Not so with Teilo. No surviving hagiographical text reports the communal traditions of the original centre of his cult at Llandeilo Fawr in Carmarthenshire. Instead, all three extant Teilo Lives were in some sense products of the diocesan centre of Llandaf in Glamorgan.