(BETWEEN A.D. 522 AND 590.)
[English and Gallican Martyrologies. Through a strange confusion,
S. Cadoc of Wales has been identified with S. Sophias of Beneventum
in Italy; because S. Cadoc appears in the Martyrologies as S.
Cadoc, at Benavenna (Weedon), and S. Sophias or Sophius Bishop of
Beneventum being commemorated the same day, the life given by
Bollandus, with hesitation, is a confused jumble of these two
saints into one. The best account of S. Cadoc is in Rees "Lives of
the Cambro-British Saints;" and in La Ville-marqué's La Légende
Celtique. There is also a poem composed in honour of S. Cadoc, by
Richard ap Rhys of Llancarvan, between 1450 and 1480, published in
the Iolo MSS., p. 301, and the sentences, proverbs and aphorisms of
S. Cadoc are to be found in Myvrian Archaeology, iii. p. 10. The
following epitome of his life is from M. de Montalembert's Monks of
the West, with additions from M. de Ville-marqué and corrections
from Rees.]
Immediately after the period occupied in the annals of Wales by King
Arthur and the monk-bishop David, appears S. Cadoc, a personage
regarding whom it is difficult to make a distinction between history and
legend, but whose life has left a profound impression upon the Keltic
races. His father Gwynllyw Filwr, surnamed the Warrior, one of the petty
kings of South Wales, having heard much of the beauty of the daughter of
a neighbouring chief, had her carried off by a band of three hundred
vassals, from the midst of her sisters, and from the door of her own
chamber, in her father's castle. The father hastened to the rescue of
his daughter with all his vassals and allies, and soon overtook
Gwynllyw, who rode with the young princess at the croup, going softly
not to fatigue her. It was not an encounter favourable for the lover:
two hundred of his followers perished, but he, himself, succeeded in
escaping safely with the lady. Of this rude warrior and this beautiful
princess was to be born the saint who has been called the Doctor of the
Welsh, and who founded the great monastic establishment of Llancarvan.
The very night of his birth, the soldiers, or, to speak more justly, the
robber-followers of the king, his father, who had been sent to pillage
the neighbours right and left, stole the milch cow of a holy Irish monk,
who had no sustenance, he nor his twelve disciples, except the abundant
milk of this cow. When informed of this nocturnal theft, the monk got
up, put on his shoes in all haste, and hurried to reclaim his cow from
the king, who was still asleep. The latter took advantage of the
occasion to have his new-born son baptized by the pious solitary, and
made him promise to undertake the education and future vocation of the
infant. The Irishman gave him the name of Cadoc, (Cattwg,) which means
warlike; and then, having recovered his cow, went back to his cell to
await the king's son, who was sent to him at the age of seven, having
already learned to hunt and fight. The young prince passed twelve years
with the Irish monk, whom he served, lighting his fire and cooking his
food, and who taught him the rudiments of Latin grammar. Preferring the
life of a recluse to the throne of his father, he went to Ireland for
three years, to carry on his education at Lismore, a celebrated
monastery school, after which he returned to Wales, and continued his
studies under a famous Roman rhetorician, newly arrived from Italy. This
doctor had more pupils than money; famine reigned in his school. One
day poor Cadoc, who fasted continually, was learning his lesson in his
cell, seated before a little table, and leaning his head on his hands,
when suddenly a white mouse, coming out of a hole in the wall, jumped on
the table, and put down a grain of corn; then Cadoc rising, followed the
mouse into a cellar, one of those old Keltic subterranean granaries,
remains of which are found to this day in Wales and Cornwall. There
Cadoc found a large heap of corn, which served to feed the master and
his pupils for many days.
Having early decided to embrace monastic life, he hid himself in a wood,
where, after making a narrow escape from assassination by an armed
swineherd of a neighbouring chief, he saw, near a forgotten fountain,
where a white swan floated, an enormous wild boar, white with age,
coming out of his den, and make three bounds, one after another,
stopping each time, and turning round to stare furiously at the stranger
who had disturbed him in his resting place. Cadoc marked with three
branches the three bounds of the wild boar, which afterwards became the
site of the church, dormitories, and refectory of the great abbey of
Llancarvan. The abbey took its name, "The Church of the Stags," from the
legend that two deers from the neighbouring wood came one day to replace
two idle and disobedient monks who had refused to perform the necessary
labour for the construction of the monastery, saying, "Are we oxen, that
we should be yoked to carts, and compelled to drag timber?"
The rushes were torn up, the briars and thorns were cut down, and S.
Cadoc dug deep trenches to drain the morass formed about the fountain he
had discovered. One day, when the chapel he was building was nearly
completed, a monk came that way, bearing on his back a leather pouch
containing tools for working metal, and some specimens of his
handicraft. His name was Gildas. He was the son of a chief in
Westmoreland, and his brother, Aneurin, was one day famous among the
bards of Britain.[122] Gildas opened his bag and produced a bell. Its
form was that of a tall square cap, and it was made of a mixture of
silver and copper, not molten, but hammered.
Cadoc took the bell and sounded it, and the note was so sweet that he
greatly desired the bell, and asked Gildas to give it him. "No," said
the bell-maker; "I have destined it for the altar of S. Peter at Rome."
But when Gildas offered the bell to the Pope, the holy father was unable
to sound it; then Gildas knew he must give it to the Welsh monk; so he
returned to Britain, and offered it to Cadoc, and when he held it, the
bell rang sweetly as heretofore.
Llancarvan became a great workshop, where numerous monks, subject to a
very severe rule, bowed their bodies under the yoke of continual
fatigue, clearing the forests, and cultivating the fields when cleared;
it was besides, a great literary and religious school, in which the
study of the Holy Scriptures held the van, and was followed by that of
the ancient authors, and their more modern commentators. Cadoc loved to
sum up, chiefly under the form of sentences in verse and poetical
aphorisms, the instructions given to his pupils of the Llancarvan
cloister. A great number of such utterances have been preserved. We
instance a few. "Truth is the elder daughter of God. Without light
nothing is good. Without light there is no piety. Without light there is
no religion. Without light there is no faith. The sight of God, that is
light." "Without knowledge, no power. Without knowledge, no wisdom.
Without knowledge, no freedom. Without knowledge, no beauty. Without
knowledge, no nobility. Without knowledge, no victory. Without
knowledge, no honour. Without knowledge, no God." "The best of attitudes
is humility. The best of occupations is work. The best of sentiments,
pity. The best of cares, justice. The best of pains, peacemaking. The
best of sorrows, contrition. The best of characters, generosity." When
one of his disciples asked him to define love, he answered, "Love, it is
Heaven." "And hate?" asked his disciple. "Hate is hell." "And
conscience?" "It is the eye of God in the soul of man." "The best of
patriots," said S. Cadoc, "is he who tills the soil."
When a chief at the head of a band of robbers, came to pillage
Llancarvan, S. Cadoc went against him with his monks armed with their
harps, chanting and striking the strings. Then the chief recoiled, and
left them unmolested. Another chief, enraged at Cadoc receiving his son
into his monastery, came with a force to reclaim the youth and destroy
the cloister. Cadoc went to meet him, bathed in sunshine, and found the
chief and his men groping in darkness. He gave them light, and they
returned ashamed to their homes.
Cadoc had the happiness of assisting in the conversion of his father. In
the depths of his cloister he groaned over the rapines and sins of the
old robber from whom he derived his life. Accordingly he sent to his
father's house three of his monks, to preach repentance. His mother, the
beautiful Gwladys, was the first to be touched, and it was not long
before she persuaded her husband to agree with her. They called their
son to make to him a public confession of their sins, and then, father
and son chanted together the psalm, "Exaudiat te Dominus"--"The Lord
hear thee in the day of trouble." When this was ended, the king and
queen retired into solitude, establishing themselves in two cabins on
the bank of a river, where they worked for their livelihood, and were
often visited by their son.
The invasion of the Saxons obliged S. Cadoc to fly, first to the island
of Flat-holmes in the Bristol Channel, and then into Brittany, where he
founded a new monastery, on a little desert island of the archipelago of
Morbihan, which is still shown from the peninsula of Rhuys; and to make
his school accessible to the children of the district, who had to cross
to the isle and back again in a boat, he threw a stone bridge four
hundred and fifty feet long across this arm of the sea. In this modest
retreat the Welsh prince resumed his monastic life, adapting it
especially to his ancient scholarly habits. He made his scholars learn
Virgil by heart: and one day, while walking with his friend and
companion, the famous historian Gildas, with his Virgil under his arm,
the abbot began to weep at the thought that the poet, whom he loved so
much, might be even then perhaps in hell. At the moment when Gildas
reprimanded him severely for that "perhaps," protesting that without any
doubt Virgil must be damned, a sudden gust of wind tossed Cadoc's book
into the sea. He was much moved by this accident, and, returning to his
cell, said to himself, "I will not eat a mouthful of bread, nor drink a
drop of water, till I know truly what fate God has allotted to one who
sang upon earth as the angels sing in heaven." After this, he fell
asleep, and soon after, dreaming, he heard a soft voice addressing him,
"Pray for me, pray for me," said the voice, "never be weary of praying;
I shall yet sing eternally the mercy of the Lord."
The next morning a fisherman brought him a salmon, and the Saint found
in the fish the book which the wind had snatched out of his hands.
After a sojourn of several years in Brittany, Cadoc left his new
community flourishing under the government of another pastor, and
to put in practice that maxim which he loved to repeat to his
followers:--"Wouldst thou find glory? march to the grave." He returned
to Britain, not to find again the ancient peace and prosperity of his
beloved retreat of Llancarvan, but to establish himself in the very
centre of the Saxon settlements, and console the numerous Christians
who had survived the massacres of the Conquest, and lived under the
yoke of a foreign and heathen race. He settled at Weedon, in the county
of Northampton;[123] and it was there that he awaited his martyrdom.
One morning, when vested in the ornaments of his priestly office, as he
was celebrating the Divine Sacrifice, a furious band of Saxon cavalry,
chasing the Christians before them, entered pell-mell into the church,
and crowded towards the altar. The Saint continued the sacrifice as
calmly as he had begun it. A Saxon chief, urging on his horse, and
brandishing his lance, went up to him and struck him to the heart.
Cadoc fell on his knees; and his last desire, his last thought, were
still for his dear countrymen. "Lord," he said, while dying, "invisible
King, Saviour Jesus, grant me one grace,--protect the Christians of my
country!"
[Illustration: S. Paul, after a Bronze in Christian Museum in the
Vatican.]