Cynfarch

Saint Cynfarch (Kingsmark) of Wales

Righteous

Cynfarch (in later English lists "Kingsmark") is a Welsh saint of the fifth century whose feast of September 8 stands in the old Welsh calendars and is kept in the British Isles and Ireland layer of the Antiochian calendar. The surviving record is thin: church dedications and calendar lines, behind which the Welsh evidence distinguishes two figures of the name — Cynfarch Oer son of Meirchion, a northern British chieftain of the line of Coel and father of Urien Rheged, counted a saint in the later Welsh lists; and Cynfarch of Chepstow, a disciple of St Dyfrig (Dubricius), remembered in the Book of Llandaff. The modern lists that commemorate "Kingsmark" blend the two, and this entry records the commemoration without resolving the identity.

What survives of St Cynfarch is dedications and calendar entries, and the Life can honestly say little more than what they attest.

The oldest documentary witness belongs to the southern saint. The Book of Llandaff names a church "Ecclesia Cynmarchi discipuli Dubricii Sancti" — "the church of Cynfarch, disciple of St Dubricius" — that is, a Cynfarch who was a disciple of St Dyfrig at Hentland on the Wye. His llan gave its name to the old parish of Llangynfarch, within whose bounds the present town of Chepstow in Monmouthshire stands, and the place-name St Kynemark (Kinmark) near Chepstow, the site of a later medieval priory, preserves his memory to this day.

The figure the later lists chiefly describe, however, is northern. Cynfarch Oer (also Cynfarch Gul), son of Meirchion of the race of Coel, appears in the genealogical tract Bonedd Gwŷr y Gogledd ("Descent of the Men of the North") as a Brythonic chieftain of the Old North — the British lands of what is now southern Scotland and northern England, whence the later shorthand that he "came from Scotland" — husband of Nyfain, daughter of Brychan of Brycheiniog, and father of Urien Rheged, the celebrated king praised by Taliesin. Only in the later Welsh saint-lists is this warrior counted among the saints; Baring-Gould and Fisher note that the Achau'r Saint pedigree naming him stands in the Iolo manuscripts, a collection contaminated by the forgeries of Iolo Morganwg, so that the genealogical material must be treated with caution (the older Bonedd Gwŷr y Gogledd itself is genuine, but it is a secular pedigree, not a saint-list). The Iolo material further claims he "founded a church in Maelor, called Llangynfarch, destroyed by the pagan Saxons at the time of the battle of Bangor Orchard" (613) — a claim Baring-Gould alone reports from that tainted source, and which he himself doubts: the church meant is evidently Hope in Flintshire (its modern dedication is to SS Cynfarch and Cyngar), but the parish was formerly called Llangyngar, and its wake fell in November at the festival of St Cyngar, so the Cynfarch attribution there is likely a mistake. A firmer trace is the church of Llanfair Dyffryn Clwyd in Denbighshire, formerly dedicated to a St Cynfarch and re-dedicated in Norman times to the Blessed Virgin Mary; a figure of "Sanctus Kynvarch" once stood in one of its windows.

The festival of September 8 occurs in the calendars of the Iolo manuscripts and in the Welsh Prymers of 1618 and 1633. Baring-Gould observes that the day is also the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and may have been entered as Cynfarch's festival from its being the wake-day of Llanfair Dyffryn Clwyd — the church that passed from Cynfarch to the Mother of God.

The Book of Saints of the Benedictines of Ramsgate (1921) carries him as "Kingsmark (Cynfarch)", a fifth-century saint: "said to have been a Scottish chieftain" who came to Wales where, "remaining in the world, he sanctified himself and acquired such popular repute for holiness as after his death to have been at once canonised by the clergy and people," and who married a granddaughter of the famous Brychan of Brecknock (the Welsh sources say rather Nyfain, Brychan's daughter). Fr Andrew Phillips's Orthodox England list, the named upstream of the York calendar, gives the same figure in one line: "By tradition a saint who came from Scotland but lived in Wales, where churches are dedicated to him." Both notices join the northern chieftain's person to the southern saint's churches; the record permits no more than to say so.

Feast and commemoration

September 8 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 21), in the British Isles and Ireland layer of the Antiochian calendar on the witness of the St Constantine York calendar, following the old Welsh calendars (the Iolo MSS calendars and the Prymers of 1618 and 1633). The day is wholly governed by the Great Feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos, and Baring-Gould's caution that the saint's date may itself derive from the Llanfair wake of that feast is recorded above. No other Orthodox jurisdiction's calendar was found keeping him this day (the OCA's September 8 listing, consulted live, does not carry him).

Iconography

No icon of St Cynfarch is known. The single recorded image is the lost window figure of "Sanctus Kynvarch" formerly at Llanfair Dyffryn Clwyd in Denbighshire, reported from an earlier survey and no longer extant.

Disputed questions

One saint or two. Baring-Gould and Fisher conclude "there was a Welsh saint belonging to North Wales and another to South Wales bearing the name of Cynfarch": the northern Cynfarch Oer ab Meirchion of the saint-lists and the Llandaff Cynfarch, disciple of St Dyfrig, at Chepstow. The modern calendar notices ("Kingsmark") conflate them. This entry serves the September 8 commemoration and records both strands without resolving them.
The styling. The York calendar styles him "missionary"; nothing in the surviving record shows missionary activity. The Ramsgate notice describes a layman sanctified "remaining in the world" — hence the classification righteous here — while the Llandaff Cynfarch, a disciple of Dyfrig, would have been a monastic.
Not to be confused with St Cynfarwy (Cynwarwy), patron of Llechgynfarwy in Anglesey, a distinct saint kept in November; nor with St Cyngar, whose church at Hope came later to carry Cynfarch's name as well.