In 1093, not far from Brecon, the ‘French who were inhabiting Brycheiniog’ killed the king of Deheubarth. For Sir John Edward Lloyd, the death of this native ruler, Rhys ap Tewdwr, ‘opened the flood-gates of Norman rapacity in South Wales’. In John of Worcester's chronicle, this was the day from which ‘kings ceased to bear rule in Wales’; and a Welsh cleric of the time judged that ‘the kingdom of the Britons was overthrown’.

On the west coast, near Aberystwyth, in the ancient community of St Padarn at Llanbadarn Fawr, the renowned scholar Rhygyfarch ap Sulien composed a poetic lament on the ravages wrought by the Norman invasion. ‘Nothing is of any use to me now’, he wrote, ‘the people and the priest are despised by the word, the heart, and the work of the Normans … Patriotism and the hope of self-government flee; liberty and self-will perish.’

By this time Rhygyfarch – viewed by the annalists as ‘the most learned of the learned men of the Britons’ – was head of an ecclesiastical dynasty that had dominated the Church in south-west Wales for at least two generations. In Planctus – his ‘Lament’ – he set his face against the Normans. Rhygyfarch, best known for his Life of St David, was the eldest son of Bishop Sulien. Twice bishop of St David's (in 1073 and 1080), and twice resigning the see after an incumbency of five years (first in 1078, and again in 1085, dying in 1091), Sulien was himself also offspring of a clerical family.