Gudwal of Brittany
Our Father among the Saints Gudwal, Bishop and Abbot, of Wales and Brittany
Venerable · Bishop · d. c. 650
Commemorated 6 June — Repose of the Welsh bishop and monastic founder of the Breton coast
Gudwal — Gurval in Breton, Gudwall in the older English books — was a Welshman of noble family, ordained early and made bishop, who in the seventh century led a great company of monks (the tradition says 188) out of Britain across the sea to found monasteries on the coasts and islands of the Channel. He is remembered as a founder and abbot rather than as a diocesan bishop, in the manner of the Celtic hierarchs of his century, and his houses are placed variously in Cornwall or Devon, in Brittany, and at Cormont in Picardy. He reposed about 650; his body was carried to Montreuil, and in the middle of the tenth century his relics were translated to the abbey of Blandinium (Blandinberg) at Ghent, whence his cultus spread through Flanders and, by way of the relics kept there, to Worcester in England. He is commemorated on June 6.
Origins in Wales
The tradition makes Gudwal a Welshman of noble parentage who was given to the Church young, entered the priesthood early, and was consecrated bishop while still a young man. This is the ordinary shape of a Celtic episcopal career of the sixth and seventh centuries, in which the bishop's dignity attached to a man rather than to a territory and was ordinarily held within a monastic community — so that a bishop could be, without contradiction, the abbot of his own house and a wanderer for Christ's sake.
The crossing
The single fixed point of his legend is a migration by sea with a great company of monks: the Bollandist life gives the number as 188, and has him lead them across to Cornwall, where he founded a monastery "not far off" — the site is variously placed in Cornwall or over the Tamar in Devon. Other strands of the tradition carry him further, to the Breton coast and its islands, where his Breton name Gurval is anciently attested, and to Cormont in Picardy, where a foundation was likewise ascribed to him.
The migration is the substance of his sanctity as the Middle Ages understood it: the peregrinatio pro Christo, the deliberate exile of a monastic family from its homeland, which was the characteristic ascetic act of the Celtic Church and the means by which Brittany, Cornwall and the Frankish coast were monasticised.
Repose and relics
Gudwal died about 650. His monks carried his body to Montreuil in Picardy, where it was venerated; and about 955–959 the relics were translated to the great abbey of Blandinium (Blandinberg / St Peter's) at Ghent, in the movement of relics northward and inland that followed the Norse raids on the Channel coast. From Ghent his cultus spread through Flanders, and portions of the relics went to Yèvre-le-Châtel and Pithiviers in the Gâtinais. A relic came to England, to Worcester, and it is from this that the older English calendars — and OrthodoxWiki's June 6 entry — style him "abbot of Worcester," a title he never held in life.
His name survives on the ground in Gulval, the parish beside Penzance in Cornwall dedicated to him, where there is a holy well bearing his name; the ancient oratory there is gone.
Feast and commemoration
June 6 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 19). Gudwal is kept on this day in the Western martyrologies, in the Orthodox calendars of the British Isles, and in the Greek lists of the day, where he stands at the end of the company as the one Western saint among the Byzantine and Egyptian fathers — with Hilarion the New of Dalmatia, Bessarion and the rest — and beside the Latin virgin-martyrs of Salerno, Archelais, Thecla and Susanna. At Ghent, where his relics lay, his feast was kept with an octave in the Middle Ages; at Gulval in Cornwall his name is still borne by the parish and its well. No Byzantine office is appointed; the common of a venerable hierarch is used.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable hierarch and founder)
Thou didst leave thy country and thy kindred for the love of Christ, and didst lead thy company over the sea as Israel through the wilderness, planting monasteries on barbarous shores, O hierarch Gudwal; and though thy bones were carried far from the place of thy labours, thy prayer abides with the churches thou didst found: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Gudwal has no Byzantine iconographic type, and none of the medieval images from Ghent or Montreuil is known to survive. Where he is represented in the Orthodox iconography of the Western saints made in the last century, the formula used is that of a Celtic bishop-abbot: a tonsured or grey-bearded hierarch in the phelonion and omophorion, or else in the monastic habit with the omophorion over it — the compound dress by which Orthodox painters render a bishop who was an abbot — blessing with one hand and holding the Gospel; attributes drawn from his legend are the ship or the company of monks in a boat, for the great crossing, and the model of a monastery. Because all such images are modern works of living or recently deceased iconographers, none can be stored here.
No pre-1900 image of Gudwal has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with the other Gudwal (Gurval), an Irish monk, disciple of St Brendan, who became the second bishop of Saint-Malo in Brittany. The two are distinguished in the Breton sources, and their acts have been conflated repeatedly; the Irish Gudwal's feast is sometimes given as January 6, and where a calendar prints "Gudwal, January 6" it is almost certainly the disciple of Brendan and not the Welshman of June 6.
- Where his monasteries were. Cornwall, Devon, Brittany and Picardy are all claimed, and the claims are not reconcilable as a single itinerary. It is likely that a genuine Welsh-Breton founder acquired, through the travels of his relics, the foundation legends of houses in each of the regions where he came to be venerated.
- The number 188. The figure comes from the medieval vita written by a monk of Blandinium in the twelfth century — that is, some five hundred years after the events, and at the house that then possessed the relics. It is the kind of precision that medieval hagiography supplies rather than inherits, and no earlier witness confirms it.
- The date. "Flourished about 650" is as close as the sources allow; no year of birth or of death is transmitted.
- A Western saint in the Orthodox calendars. Gudwal belongs to the undivided Church and is kept in the Orthodox calendars of the British Isles and in the synaxaria compiled for Western Rite and diaspora use, on which basis he appears in the Greek lists of the day as Ἅγιος Gudwall (Οὐαλός), "Gudwal the Welshman." He has no Byzantine office and no Eastern cultus of his own.