Rhuddlad of Llanrhyddlad

The record of Rhuddlad is a church dedication and a calendar date, and this Life can say only that.

She is the patron of Llanrhyddlad, at the foot of Moel Rhyddlad, one of the highest hills of Anglesey; the parish church there still bears her name. September 4 is given as her festival in the calendars in Peniarth MS 172 and Additional MS 14,882, in the Iolo MSS, in the Allwydd Paradwys, and in the Welsh Prymers of 1618 and 1633. The usual Achau'r Saint — the Welsh genealogies of the saints — have nothing to say of Rhuddlad or Rhyddlad, as Baring-Gould and Fisher note. That is the whole of the early record; its poverty is the finding.

Two further claims attach to her name, both weakly grounded. Henry Rowlands (Mona Antiqua Restaurata, 1766) supposed her a daughter of a king of Leinster — "but on what authority it does not appear," as Baring-Gould and Fisher remark in reporting it; the same Rowlands supposed that the neighbouring saint Rhwydrys came from Ireland to Anglesey at the same time as Rhuddlad. Both claims rest on Rowlands as reported by Baring-Gould alone, and are recorded here as conjecture. Second, the styling "virgin," used in this entry's classification, is that of the modern hagiographical lists which carry her; none of the early sources consulted assigns her any style at all.

The "7th century" of the calendar line is likewise conventional: Orthodox England prints it with a query ("? 7th cent."), and no source consulted dates her. If the Leinster parentage were true she would belong to the age of the Irish settlements and missions in Anglesey, but that is inference from conjecture, not record.