Mawgan of Bardsey

What survives of Mawgan with certainty is his veneration, and it is extensive. The little church of Llanrhydd in Denbighshire — originally the mother church of Ruthin — is dedicated to him, as is Llanfeugan in Breconshire, which the Taxatio of 1291 records as Eccl'ia de S'c'o Mengano: the earliest documentary attestation of the cult. In Anglesey a Capel Meugan stood near Plas Meugan in the parish of Llandegfan, keeping his festival on September 25, and decayed only after the founding of the chantry of Our Lady of Beaumaris. His deepest imprint is in the Pembrokeshire deanery of Kemes: St Meugan's chapel in the parish of Llanfair Nant Gwyn drew pilgrims in such numbers that the Privy Council ordered it pulled down in 1592 because of the "superstitious pilgrimages" to his shrine; another Capel Meugan in the parish of Bridell was used for solemn processions on holy days; and the great fair called Ffair Feugan, held at Eglwyswrw on the Monday after Martinmas (Old Style) and again at St Dogmaels, was still being held when Baring-Gould and Fisher wrote. Place-names — Gorsedd Meugan, Trevigan, Pistyll Moygan and others — extend the trail. This cult, with the calendar entries below, is the whole secure record; no early Life of the saint exists.

The biographical tradition is late, and rests where it is fullest on tainted authority. The genealogies making Meugan a son of Gwyndaf Hen ab Emyr Llydaw by Gwenonwy, daughter of Meurig ab Tewdrig — and thus a brother of Henwyn (Hywyn), patron of Aberdaron, and a first cousin of St Samson — appear in no pedigree except the Iolo manuscripts, the compilations of Iolo Morganwg, whose Welsh genealogical material this corpus treats as contaminated unless independently attested. The same manuscripts state that he was a monk of Illtyd's college at Llantwit and afterwards of Dyfrig's at Caerleon-on-Usk, where his father was his superior; that he kept his own college, Cor Meugant, on the banks of the Wye; and that in old age he retired to Bardsey, where he lies buried. Baring-Gould and Fisher, who print these statements, themselves warn that "the authorities for these statements, it must be remembered, are late." Orthodox England's notice — "a disciple of St Illtyd who lived as a hermit and reposed on the Isle of Bardsey in Wales" — is this tradition in brief, and its dating of the saint to the sixth century agrees with the generation the genealogy implies. Nothing else is transmitted of his life.

A poem in the twelfth-century Black Book of Carmarthen is sometimes attributed to a Meugant supposed to be the saint, "but on what authority it does not appear" (Baring-Gould and Fisher); two further poems ascribed to Meugant stand in the Myvyrian Archaiology. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Mauganius, made bishop of Silchester by King Arthur, and his Maugantius, the scholar consulted by Vortigern about the birth of Merlin, are legendary figures whom Baring-Gould and Fisher judge improbable identifications.