The cathedral churches of the four bishoprics of the Welsh, the reformed episcopal sees that emerged in the eleventh and twelfth centuries at Bangor, St Davids, Llandaf, and Llanelwy, had at their heart the cult of local founding bishops. All were rebuilt in the first half of the twelfth century; and for three of them – St Davids, Llandaf, and Llanelwy – posterity has handed down demon strations of major new activity around the cult of the patron saints. The shrines of the holy bishops honoured as founders, their secondary relics, and the formalised accounts of their lives – the accessories of the cult – were the focus for the objectives of the reforming bishops of the twelfth century; and each of these aspects of the cult was managed with judicious consideration.

St Davids

The best continuously documented of the cathedral churches of Wales is at Mynyw (Latinised as Meneuia), the place associated with St david (dewi Sant). Mynyw was subject to a series of devastating attacks during the tenth and eleventh centuries, from vikings as well as Mercians. On the cusp of the millennium, in 999, Danish pirates killed the bishop, Morgeneu: judgement for having been the first bishop since Dewi himself to eat meat. Eight decades later, in 1080, another bishop of Mynyw, named Abraham, was killed by vikings; this bishop's death demanded the calling back from retirement of his predecessor, the renowned and learned Bishop Sulien, who in 1078 had withdrawn to his old home in Ceredigion, the clas-church of Llanbadarn fawr, after five years as bishop of Mynyw.