In the last decade of the eleventh century, Rhygyfarch ap Sulien of Llanbadarn Fawr described in his Vita S. Dauid how the Patriarch of Jerusalem advanced David to the ‘archbishopric’; later, at the synod of Brefi, David's ciuitas is ‘declared the metropolis of the whole country, so that whoever might rule it should be regarded as archbishop’. Rhygyfarch's literary efforts to promote the cult of St David and the dignity and privileges of the bishopric were a prelude to the sustained, and ultimately unsuccessful, campaign for metropolitan status begun in the 1130s by Bishop Bernard and continued into the thirteenth century by Gerald of Wales. The historical reality of an archbishopric of St Davids in the early middle ages, to which Rhygyfarch, Bernard, and Gerald all appealed, has in fact a fairly solid grounding in the sources. There may be no evidence of metropolitan status, but the nature of the bishopric's former archiepiscopal rank can be illustrated by reference to the native Welsh law-codes.

In six versions of Cyfraith Hywel, there is a section on the seven bishop-houses of Dyfed. Here we seem to have evidence for the nature of ecclesiastical organisation in Dyfed before the end of the ninth century. Thomas Charles-Edwards has shown that we may infer from this tract that each constituent cantref of Dyfed (which represented territories once ruled by local petty kings) had its own bishop.