RHYGYFARCH (RICEMARCHUS ; 1056/7-1099).
He was the eldest of the four sons of the learned Sulien (q.v.), his father being a native of Llanbadarn-fawr and twice bishop of S. Davids. Apart from the fact of his belonging to a clerical family of good birth, little if anything is known about his life. His only teacher, it is said, was his father. Very probably he was a priest at S. Davids (not bishop, as Annales Cambriae, MS. C, states). Among his extant works are a Life of S. David, some Latin verses in a psalter at Trinity College, Dublin, and a ‘Lament’ (ascribed to him in B.M. Cotton MS. Faustina C. i). This latter is a short Latin poem bewailing the increasing oppression of the Welsh by the Normans. His chief work, the Latin Life of S. David, was probably written about A.D. 1090, to advocate the claims of S. Davids to be the metropolitan church of Wales, independent of Canterbury. The author drew his material for the sixty-eight chapters of the Life proper ‘from very old manuscripts (Vita, chapter 66), found chiefly at S. Davids itself. Its style is turgid, its contents a hazardous mixture of the miraculous and the historical. He d. in his forty-third year, leaving a son SULIEN (d. 1146), who was brought up by the clergy of Llanbadarn Fawr, and gained fame as a teacher there.
Bibliography:
- Wade-Evans, Life of St. David, 1923;
- Hist. W., ii, 459-61;
- Ann. C.;
- B.T.
Author:
Professor William Hopkin Davies, M.A., Aberystwyth
