A lot of the early Welsh saints had atrocious tempers. Cadoc was probably
the worst (he's the one who morally blackmailed his parents into taking
vows of chastity within marriage - they used to bathe in the waters of the
local river to quell their fleshly lusts. When that failed to work, his
mother, the princess Gwladus, removed herself to the mountains, where she
founded a nunnery. )
Cadoc:
1. blinded King Rhun, whose servants had taken some of Cadoc's milk
2. punished a disciple who had lost one of Cadoc's books: the disciple was
drowned looking for it, but the book was miraculously returned unharmed
(candidate for patron saint of librarians?)
3. wreaked a horrible revenge on a peasant who looked at the tombs of
Cadoc's Scottish disciples when he was told not to: his eye burst and the
optic nerve hung down his face.
There are a lot more stories of saints punishing those who infringed their
rights, but these seem the most petty. Patience is emphatically not a
saintly attribute at this period! There are obvious reasons for the
ferocity of the saints' acts in defence of their territories and rights.
Most of these vitae were being written up as the Normans were sweeping
across south Wales, threatening church endowments and organisations, and
the vitae are in part an attempt to record what was being lost and in part
a desperate attempt to deter the invaders. However, there are so many
parallels in the lives of saints elsewhere, and even in the apocryphal
infancy gospels of Christ, that there is obviously more to it.
Maddy
Dr Madeleine Gray, in the foothills of God's golden county of Gwent
(Department of Humanities and Science
UWCN Caerleon Campus
PO Box 179
Newport NP18 3YG
http://www.newport.ac.uk)
'Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought'
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