That there was an anchoritic tradition in the region known as Cymru to many of its current inhabitants, and Wales to the rest of the non Welsh-speaking world, is beyond doubt; and that it was overwhelmingly male seems also to have been the case in the face of little or no extant evidence to suggest otherwise. There are more than sufficient material and textual traces to corroborate the popularity of the solitary religious life for men, although, as is the case in both Ireland and Scotland, the type of detailed records we find within the English tradition are sadly missing. This present essay, therefore, is an attempt to open the debate on the Welsh anchoritic experience, outlining some of the most useful sources and pointing the way forward for more concerted and detailed study which may lead to discoveries so far unenvisaged.

Reclusion and early Celtic Christianity in Wales

Without doubt, the lack of source material on a par with that of England and elsewhere comes as a direct result of the histories of English colonization and conquest which besieged Ireland, Scotland and Wales during the later period, resulting in protracted socio-religious upheavals and regroupings throughout much of the Middle Ages. But, as is frequently the case in such turbulent circumstances, memories are passed down through the generations via oral tradition: hagiographies, folklore, popular practices, myth and legend, prayers, place names etc. As such, they become embedded within a culture and that culture's ‘collective psyche’ and practices, what Pierre Bourdieu would term the habitus, taking on a life which, even if disappeared from view, nevertheless refuses to be eradicated completely.

This aspect of collective memory is something also acknowledged by Oliver Davies in his book on Celtic Christianity which focuses specifically on Wales. From the outset, Davies takes pains to contextualize the romantic appeal that the notion of a golden-age ‘Celtic Church’ still holds for a twenty-first-century audience, which often likes to re-imagine it as some kind of unified body standing in opposition to an apparently hegemonic Roman Church. For Davies, this is typical of the type of exploitation which the so-called ‘Celtic world’ has been subject to since the eighteenth century and, as he emphasizes most categorically, ‘such an entity is fiction’.