SACRED SPACE AND THE NATURAL WORLD THE HOLY WELL

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AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION ANNUAL MEETING 2007 SACRED ECOLOGIES AND

“AUTHENTICITY ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE SACRED” ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY 2002 75
CHURCH OF THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS AND ST
CULTIVATING NONCONFORMITY THE MUSE THE SACRED FOOL AND THE

Sacred space and the natural world: a case study of the Welsh shrine at Penrhys

Sacred space and the natural world:

the holy well and shrine of the Virgin Mary at Penrhys.



In recent decades, the received wisdom among landscape historians has been that medieval perceptions of landscape and the natural environment – and indeed medieval understanding of the meaning of words like “landscape” and “natural” – were fundamentally different from our own. In particular, there has been a broad assumption that, while modern Western society values landscapes which we perceive as wild and remote, medieval society valued landscapes which were ordered, tamed and productive. This perspective was outlined in 1967 by Lynn White, who rooted the medieval perception explicitly in the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition.1 In the same year, Roderick Nash provided a fuller discussion of the same themes.2 While these studies may now seem unduly simplistic, the same ideas were explored in a more nuanced form and for the post-medieval period by Keith Thomas in his seminal Man and the Natural World,3 and were revisited as recently as 2007 in Gilbert LaFreniere’s The Decline of Nature.4

By the 1980s, though, the work of these authors was being challenged. David Herlihy’s 1980 overview is normally cited in support of the White/Nash perspective. However, while the main thrust of his article was that for most of the medieval period nature was seen as something to be feared and controlled, he did give some weight to the idea of nature as recreation and refreshment.5 Environmentalist Susan Power Bratton’s Christianity, Wilderness and Wildlife was a more explicit challenge to White and Nash, rigorously academic but rooted in her own openly expressed Christian beliefs and spiritual experiences.6 Her main focus was on the Biblical significance of wilderness but in this book and in earlier articles she also discussed perceptions of the natural environment in the writings and vitae of the early Irish monks.7 She further developed this historical perspective in Environmental Values in Christian Art, moving away from her earlier focus on sacred text to conside what art and material culture can tell us about changing Christian attitudes to the natural world.8 Meanwhile, Joyce Salisbury, David Salter and Dominic Alexander have discussed the dangers of applying modern understanding of concepts like “nature”, “the natural world”, “the natural environment” to medieval perspectives,9 and Aron Gurevich has argued that the conscious antithesis of nature and human society was foreign to the medieval mind.10

It is within the context of this debate that we need to situate a discussion of attitudes to the natural environment as exemplified by descriptions of pilgrimage routes and sites. Studies of medieval pilgrimage, even those based on itineraries and descriptive accounts, seldom focus explicitly on the pilgrims’ perceptions of the natural landscape. In an illuminating study of medieval pilgrimage to Rome, for example, Debra Birch discusses motivation, the actual routes taken, timing, the logistics of transport and accommodation and the obligations and privileges of the pilgrim, but makes only passing mention of the natural environment as an aspect of the dangers of pilgrimage.11 Sumption says rather more about the natural dangers on pilgrimage routes but only discusses attitudes to the natural landscape in the context of early medieval penitential pilgrimage.12 Describing the route to Compostela as recorded by medieval pilgrims, Colin Smith simply assumes that

Probably nothing in their intellectual formation would have disposed them to take much of an interest in the (to us) magnificent scenery they would traverse ...13

Nicole Chareyron says rather more in her study of medieval accounts of the route to Jerusalem, but references to the landscape are scattered through the book and there is no explicit analysis.14

As with more general attitudes to landscape, representations by pilgrims have changed over time. Chareyron suggested a typology of pilgrimage beginning with later Roman and Byzantine pilgrimage attracted by the asceticism of desert life, followed by pilgrims in search of miracles, millenarian penitents, crusaders and intellectuals. In particular, she distinguished between the Crusading purpose to defend the world by force of arms and the ideal of contemptus mundi.15 Only at the end of the medieval period was this replaced in some pilgrims by a sense of curiositas, in which “the pilgrimage itself, the motivation underlying the deed, was accompanied by an interest in everything experienced while making it”.16

Sumption also suggested that contempt for civilised society and a rejection of urban values as corrupt and worldly was a fundamental strand in earlier medieval Christianity, inspiring both desert mystics and early pilgrims.17 This, he argued, was particularly exemplified by St Jerome, who described himself “forsaking the bustling cities of Antioch and Constantinople so as to draw down upon myself the mercy of Christ in the solitude of the country”. For him and his followers, the purpose of pilgrimage was to leave Rome and Antioch rather than to reach Jerusalem. His disciples Paula and Melania spent most of their pilgrimages wandering in the deserts of Egypt, where they visited the communities of hermits who had retreated there. 18 However, neither Jerome nor his followers saw the natural landscape as a place of beauty: rather, it was a place for penitential austerity and self-exile

Michael Goodich has pointed to a comparable ambivalence in later medieval attitudes to the natural world: on the one hand it is seen as a threat, on the other hand the rejection of its beauty is part of the contemptus mundi of the ascetic. But at the same time the desert or wilderness was still seen as a place of refuge from persecution and retreat for monastic contemplation.19 He suggests that the natural world was actually perceived as more of a threat in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as a result of a series of natural catastrophes, the breakdown of frameworks such as drainage systems by which the natural environment was controlled and tamed, and the re-encroachment of forest on farm land (though as he admits, this tendency cannot be precisely correlated with the demographic crisis of the fourteenth century).20

Modern pilgrimage is perhaps less focused on the penitential and more on spiritual development, and modern pilgrims are expected to enjoy the natural environment as part of the experience:

... every beautiful glen and mountain has been photographed by the hikers. From wild thyme along the Road to T-shirts festooned with pilgrimage motifs for sale in the villages, pilgrims partake of the natural and commercial as they hike their kilometers.21

As with the literature on medieval pilgrimage, there is little explicit discussion of responses to the natural landscape in accounts of modern pilgrimage. However, the whole concept of pilgrimage as sacred space (as distinct from the sacred space at the objective of the pilgrimage) is still a matter for debate among social anthropologists. If (as Victor Turner suggests) pilgrimage is a liminal experience, one which takes the pilgrim completely out of his or her daily experience and even subverts established social structures,22 then one might expect a wilderness experience – whether idyllic or penitential – to be part of the liminal process. The natural landscape was an implicit part of the liminal quality of the pilgrimage to Compostela for Ellen Feinberg:

I was happy to sleep out in the fresh, sweet country air. Away from city lights and city pollution, we saw the Milky Way, spreading its starry trail like a protective blanket over us.23

Even the title of Feinberg’s book suggests a radical shift in perspective, one which is perhaps so deep-rooted that it escapes discussion. It is ironical that so many modern pilgrims consider themselves to be “getting away from” the modern world and back to a simpler, more traditional way of life in reconnecting with the natural environment, when this is not something which most medieval pilgrims would have recognized. But if (as Michael Sallnow argued in 1981) pilgrimage is “simply a setting in which social interactions can take place ex novo”,24 then by extension the pilgrimage also becomes a space for competing perspectives on the natural world.25

The general absence of analysis of attitudes to the natural environment in discussions of medieval pilgrimage may in part be a reflection of the sources and their purpose. Itineraries were functional, guides to the route and to the attractions of the destination. The fourteenth-century Franciscan Niccolò of Poggibonsi made only brief reference to the natural features he saw – the mountain of the Transfiguration, the mountain where Noah built the Ark – but gave specific details of the indulgences offered there to pilgrims.26 Inevitably, most of the focal points of pilgrimage were structures rather than natural features, and the guides to the route tended to focus on problems to be overcome rather than on scenery which might distract the pilgrims from their purpose.27 Whatever motivated individual pilgrims to make a record of their experiences, one might expect their priorities to be the same. The pilgrimage journey was meant to be penitential: as Jacques de Vitry explained in his famous sermon on pilgrimage, as the pilgrim had sinned with all his limbs, so he must make reparation with all of them. Nothing was to distract him from his path; tiredness and sore feet were to be his delight.28

If we consider in detail some of those medieval pilgrimage narratives which do mention the natural environment, we will find that most seem to belong squarely in the traditional paradigm of fear of wilderness and, if they mention the natural environment at all, see it as part of the penitential aspect of the pilgrimage. One of the most detailed of such descriptions, that of the route to Compostela in the Codex Callixtinus, is full of references to dangerous rivers, poisonous waters and difficult territory. The land of the Bordelais is described as

tellus omni bono desolata, pane, vino, carne, piscibus, aquis et fontibus vacua; villis rara, plana, sabulosa ... faciem tuam studiose custodi a muscis immanissimis, que guespe vel tavones vulgo dicuntur, qui maxime ibi habundant, et nisi diligenter pedem obseruaveris, in arena marina que ibi habundant usque ad genua velociter lapsus fueris.

(a country devoid of all good things, lacking in bread, wine, meat, fish, water and springs, sparse in towns, flat, sandy … take care to guard your face from the enormous insects commonly called guespe [wasps] or tavones [horse-flies], which are most abundant there; and if you do not watch carefully where you put your feet, you will slip rapidly up to your knees in the quicksand that abounds there.)29

The Basque country is “wooded and mountainous, devoid of wine, bread and bodily nourishment”, and “all the rivers between Estella and Logroño have water that is dangerous for men and beasts to drink, and the fish from them are poisonous to eat”. There are a few references to good features in the natural landscape – the Gascon country is “healthy on account of its woods and meadows, rivers and pure springs”: but the author’s praise for the landscape is usually on purely utilitarian grounds. Water is good because it is clear and drinkable; the Gascon landscape is good because it is “bountiful in white bread and excellent red wine”; Castile and Campos are “full of riches, gold and silver, blessed with fodder and very strong horses, well-provided with bread, wine, meat, fish, milk and honey”.30

This contrasts with the rapturous descriptions of the built landscape, particularly (but not exclusively) Compostela itself and the “perfect beauty” of the great cathedral:

In eadem vero ecclesia nulla scissura, vel corrupcio invenitur ... qui enim sursum per naves palacii vadit, si tristis ascendit, visa obtima pulcritudine eiusdem templi, letus et gavisus efficitur.

(In truth, in this church, no fissure or fault is found ... whoever visits the naves of the gallery, if he goes up sad, having seen the perfect beauty of this temple, he will be made happy and joyful.)31

Even the mountain pass of Port de Cize, so high that “to him who ascends it, it seems that he can touch the sky with his own hand”, is notable mainly for what humans have done at the summit, the Cross of Charlemagne:

... super illum securibus et dolabris et fossoriis ceterisque manubriis Karolus cum suis exercitibus in Yspaniam pergens, olim tramitem fecit signumque Dominice crucis prius in eo elevavit ...

(… it is here that, with axes and picks and spades and other implements, Charlemagne, going to Spain with his armies, once made a road, and he raised on it the sign of the cross of the Lord …)32

A similar focus can be found in descriptions of pilgrimage routes in the Middle East by fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writers such as Ogier d’Anglure33 and Pietro Casola.34 Even the River Jordan failed to inspire Casola: it was

not wider than our Naviglio, which comes to Porta Ticinese. It is deep and the mud is high and sticky, almost like bath mud; and the water is muddy, like that of the Po. When it is purified it is beautiful to look at. Many drank it from devotion, and I let them drink.

(In other words, even the Jordan, the river in which Christ was baptized, had to be improved by human hands before it was really safe or beautiful.)

We returned by the same way by which we had come. It was very clear, and we could see well and examine the country, which is flat as far as Jericho. There is not a fruit tree to be seen, nor any other plant save abominable thorns, both large and small. I made acquaintance with them, for the mule I was riding carried me off the road among those thorns, and they tore my mantle and doublet.35

D’Anglure said even less about the Jordan: in a brief and prosaic note he described it as “very turbulent and white, and the current is quite strong”.36 His main concern was to enumerate the relics he saw on his journey, and to follow in meticulous detail the tour around the buildings mentioned in Biblical narratives.

Jerome had valued the desert as a refuge from the corruption of human society. However, most of the later medieval pilgrims who travelled beyond Jerusalem to explore the holy places of Syria, Jordan and Egypt regarded the desert as a place of deprivation, precisely because it was devoid of human habitation.37 The thirteenth-century pilgrim Thietmar saw the desert as a terrifying place to be crossed in search of sacred sites – the place where Aaron died, the place where the Ark of the Covenant was hidden: but the desert itself was terrifying, with “dreadful valleys and fearsome depths”, full of wild animals. He much preferred the domesticated space of a garden.38 For Riccoldo da Monte di Croce, too, the climb up the Mount of Temptation was of interest for the contrast between the harshness of the mountain and the lush vegetation of the cultivated plain with its sugar cane, palm trees and roses: this, he thought, was how the Devil tempted Christ in Matt. 4:9: “All these things I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me”.39

What some of these accounts find of value in the natural environment is linked to the spiritual meaning of specific features, in the same way that animals were valued as analogies for spiritual values. Giacomo da Verona travelled with tools to remove rocks from the Hill of Calvary; an anonymous pilgrim in 1420 found “trees bearing thorns, and of a like tree and thorn Our Lord was crowned in his Passion”. 40 Even the bananas of the Mount of Temptation were a sign: “if you cut this fruit crosswise into ten slices ...”, Ogier d’Anglure wrote, “you will always see the image of the crucifix clearly in each slice”.41

By the late fifteenth century, Chareyron suggested, the spirit of curiositas had become a component of some pilgrimage narratives, encouraging an interest in natural phenomena as well as in art, architecture and ethnology. The German Dominican friar Felix Fabri claimed that the motivation for his pilgrimage was to improve his understanding of Scripture.42 Describing his two journeys to the Holy Land he chose at first to emphasize their difficulties and dangers, saving his praise for the towns he visited. On Cyprus, though, he was enchanted by “the shrubs of that land [which] breathed forth the sweetest fragrance, for almost all the herbs of that isle are spices of divers sorts, which smell by far sweetest in the night time, when they are moist with dew”.43 Like most of his companions he valued cultivated and fruitful landscapes and was disappointed by the arid hills between Joppa and Jerusalem:

I myself said secretly in my heart: ‘lo, now! this is that land in which is said to flow with milk and honey; but I see no fields to bring forth bread, no vineyards for wine, no green meadows, no orchards. Lo! it is all stony, sunburned, and barren.' While I thus silently communed with myself, ere long the answer came to me, to wit, that this barrenness, drought, and roughness is the curse laid upon it by God because of the breaking of His commandments ...44

On his way to Sinai he eventually succumbed to the fascination of the desert: “I confess that, for my own part”, he wrote, in language reminiscent of Jerome, “I felt more pleasure in the barren wilderness than I ever did in the rich and fertile land of Egypt, with all its attractive beauty”.45 For most of his account, though, it is the cities and the customs of their inhabitants which fascinate him.

A more direct contrast with the typical descriptions of pilgrimage routes can be found in the surviving Welsh poetry to the shrine of the Virgin Mary at Penrhys in the Rhondda valleys of south Wales, which has a clear focus on the natural setting of the shrine. The poetry is difficult to interpret and translate: it is written in the traditional Welsh verse form which involves a fiercely complex structure of rhythm, internal rhyme, alliteration and assonance called cynghanedd (literally “singing together”). In all but the most skilled hands this can result in the poetry deteriorating into formulaic repetition as the writer is forced to choose words to fit the sound rather than the sense – and it has to be said that none of the poets who wrote about the shrine at Penrhys was of the first rank. The poetic language can also be obscure, relying as it does on the piling up of metaphor and reference, language which depends on resonance to create a “thick text” of description by allusion - what one of the Penrhys poets, Gwilym Tew, called ei diolch, wead odl a chywydd, “the woven thanks of ode and poem”.

Nevertheless, this vernacular poetry provides us with an important source for the mentalité of late medieval Welsh society, and the general meaning is usually discernible. While one might have expected poetry focused on the shrine rather than the route to foreground the built landscape, the reverse is true in this case. When Gwilym Tew described the shrine –

Ynys yw Pen-rhys yn nhrwyn y fforest
Bara ‘fferen a dŵr swyn46

- by fforest he may have meant a hunting preserve or (more likely) a wooded area. The word ynys is even more ambiguous: it is cognate with Gaelic Inish/Inch and derives from the Latin insula but in Welsh it can mean either “island” or “water meadow”. Penrhys is not an island: but it stands on a high ridge between the two Rhondda valleys which could be thought of poetically as surrounding it. Nor is there any evidence of water meadows there, though the shrine in its clearing could be described as being in a meadow.

The island or promontory monastery is a commonplace of early medieval church history in the Atlantic region.47 Traditional interpretations of this pattern emphasise the island as a place of isolation and austerity.48 More recent historians have suggested the possibility that the Latin insula could mean a small monastery.49 Jonathan Wooding has challenged this in the context of Caldey but has found a number of later medieval examples elsewhere of insula/ynys meaning “monastery”.50 The word clearly has a spiritual resonance, meaning a place which is literally sacred, set apart. But it is a holy place which is set apart by the landscape, not a building or a walled holy city: it is part of the landscape through which the pilgrim will travel, an accessible heaven, set apart but not remote. The remainder of Gwilym Tew’s description is clearer: Penrhys is yn nhrwyn y fforest, on the nose of the forest (this is still how the modern village appears from a distance, a cleared area below a wooded ridge) and the landscape is blessed by the sacraments, bara ‘fferen a dŵr swyn, “the bread of the Eucharist and holy water”.

Some of this imagery is implicit in the nature and history of the shrine. Penrhys was a grange of the Cistercian abbey of Llantarnam near Cwmbran in Gwent. It may in fact have been briefly the home of a monastery. At some point in the middle of the twelfth century, the Welsh lords of upland Glamorgan gave land to the monks of Margam (itself an emphatically Norman foundation in the lowlands) to found a daughter house. A charter from the late 1150s granted land to “the brethren of Pendar”, suggesting that the daughter-house had a brief existence as a separate community. Increasing tension between Welsh and Anglo-Norman lords probably explains the failure of the foundation. It reverted to the status of a grange and was eventually passed to the (emphatically Welsh) community at Llantarnam.51 It has unfortunately been impossible to locate Pendar: the name means “Oakhead” and could have described virtually any location in the hills around the Rhondda. However, Penrhys was clearly the location of a major grange establishment by the beginning of the fourteenth century and could have been the site of the short-lived monastery.

By the fifteenth century, Penrhys had one of many miraculous statues of the Virgin Mary, said to have been found in a oak tree and to have refused to be taken from the spot where it was found.52 Similar stories attached to the statue of Our Lady at Oak, Norwich, and the possible original, Our Lady of Le Puy. By the time the poets wrote about it, the statue was accommodated in a chapel on the hill top, presumably either the grange chapel or (more likely) a chapel built by the monks for their lay tenants. Excavations in 1913 and 1946-7 located a building which was almost certainly the chapel. A little of its stonework still survives above ground, built into the wall of the car park by the modern statue. This building had buttresses and a stone cross wall which has been interpreted as the foundation of a narrow chancel arch. It was damaged by fire and rebuilt, probably in the fifteenth century, and the cross wall removed and replaced by a timber screen.53 Christine James has suggested that the archaeological evidence and the folk traditions about the shrine are consistent with a punitive raid by English forces during the Glyndŵr uprising (possibly in reprisal for the abbot of Llantarnam’s support for Glyndŵr) and that this hypothesis might also explain the concealment and subsequent (re)discovery of the statue.54

By the sixteenth century, the shrine was the focus of a substantial settlement (substantial in the context of the Welsh uplands, where late medieval settlement was usually dispersed). As well as the grange farm and the hospice there was what the sixteenth-century writer John Leland described as a village:55 and Leland was from lowland England where villages were large and nucleated. A seventeenth-century survey indicates that the area was still well farmed, though no archaeological evidence has been found for the actual location of housing.56 There was thus a built landscape around the shrine, and some of the poets did refer to it by implication. Huw Cae Llwyd, a poet from north Wales, addressed a poem to “Sir David of Penrhys”, presumably the priest in charge of the shrine, praising his hospitality. The poem implies the existence of a hospice for pilgrims at the shriine (and we have evidence of this from other sources) but Huw Cae llwyd says nothing about the buildings: his interest is in the location and its people.57

Most of the poems to the shrine emphasize the natural as well as divine origins of the statue. On the one hand, according to Lewys Morgannwg,

Llyna’n wir ei llun o nef

Ni wnâi angel yn nengair

oi ddwylaw fath y ddelw Fair


(There truly is the image from Heaven.

An angel in the Decalogue

would never with his hands make the image of Mary)


but the poet goes on to say that


Fry o’i chuddygl, ferch addwyn,

O fôn dâr ni fynnai’i dwyn 58


(From her shrine of oak trunk

she, gentle maid, would not be taken)

Possibly predating the statue was a holy well, which provides much of the natural imagery relating to the shrine. There is a clear contrast between Rhisiart ap Rhys’s
description:

Y mrig craig y mae eirw crych
yn iach anaf a’i chwennych 59

(At the top of the rock are foaming waters
Farewell to every defect that desires them!)

and the description of the fountain at Compostela in the Codex Callixtinus:

In fine vero graduum eiusdem paradisi, fons mirabilis habetur, cui similis in toto mundo non invenitur ... Que etiam flumina postquam egrediuntur ab oribus leonum ilico labuntur in eadem conca inferius, et ab hinc exeuntes per quoddam eiusdem conque foramen, subtus terram recedunt. Sicut videri nequit unde aqua venit, sic nec videri valet quo vadit ... In prefata vero columpna he littere scripte hoc modo ...

EGO BERNARDUS BEATI JACOBI THESAURARIUS HANC AQUAM HUC ADDUXI ...

(At the foot of the steps is a marvellous fountain which has not its like anywhere in the world ... the water coming from the lions’ mouths falls into the basin below, and from there it flows away through an opening in the basin and disappears underground, Thus it cannot be seen where the water comes from, or where it goes ... Round the column runs the following inscription ...

‘I, Bernard, treasurer of St James, brought this water here ...’ )

The spring at Penrhys is natural, simple, bubbling up from the rock. The fountain at Compostela is intricate, constructed, the natural origins of the water hidden in favour of the human actions of Bernard the treasurer. Of course, much of the difference can be accounted for by the vastly greater resources and international popularity of the shrine at Compostela. However, there is no suggestion in any of the poetry that the simplicity of the shrine and well at Penrhys is anything other than appropriate.

Like so many other Marian shrines, Penrhys was on a mountain.60 The surrounding landscape forms part of the natural imagery in descriptions of the shrine. In Llywelyn ap Hywel ab Ieuan’s description,

Lle da yw’r wyddfa o’r all[t]

A lle gwŷr gerllaw gorall[t]

Llun y trŵn, lle enaid rhydd,

Llannerch i bum llawenydd

(A goodly place is the summit and its wooded slope
and a virgin sanctuary beside the high wood)61

According to Lewys Morgannwg,

Amla’ man ymyl mynydd
Gwrthiau Fair gwrthfawr a fydd 62

(The mountain’s brow is the place where most frequently
Great Mary’s miracles are precious)

and Rhisiart ap Rhys referred to

Miragl waith ym rig y lan 63

(a miraculous work at the top of the bank)

In understanding this imagery we need to bear in mind the highly localised nature of cult veneration in medieval Wales. As well as the numerous “saints” of the Welsh tradition (few of them ever formally canonized), saints of the international tradition were ascribed to sacred locations in Wales. There were legends that both Mary and St Margaret of Antioch had visited Wales. Mary was reputed to have visited Cydweli, Aberdaron, Rhiw and Llanfair, on the coast south of Harlech. From Llanfair she was believed to have walked inland to Hafod-y-llyn, and where she knelt to pray the prints of her knees could be seen in the rock and a holy well sprang up. At Aberdaron pilgrims on their way to Bardsey Island drank from a well where she was supposed to have left a handprint.64 Penrhys was also presented by the poets as a place where Mary has come to earth – as Lewys Morgannwg put it,

Yna daethost, fendith fawr,

I’r lle hwn o’r nef i’r llawr65


(Then you came, great blessing,

To this place, from heaven to the ground)

The poets thus use imagery drawn from the shrine’s precise location to construct a clear sense of place and the natural environment in descriptions of both the route and the shrine, presenting the natural world as blessing rather than challenge, and sometimes developing natural imagery to make quite complex theological points. Gwilym Tew links Mary of the well with Mary Queen of Heaven:

Mae mewn eirw mam y nawradd 66

(She is in foaming water, the mother of the nine spheres)

Lewis Morgannwg draws on the same image to describe the nawnef mewn un ynys (that problematic word ynys again, “nine heavens in one island/meadow”) at the shrine and invokes the Virgin as Mair i’m hynys, “O Mary of my island/meadow”.67 After his lines about the location of Penrhys and the holy bread and water to be found there, Gwilym Tew offers a complicated and sometimes frankly obscure description of the shrine. The lines

O’r llwynau gorau eu gwŷdd
Y wyry Fair a’i harferodd
Y wen weddw, nef winwydden,
Brenin hen y brenhinedd 68

(Of groves, its are the best of trees -
The Virgin Mary has used them;
The blessed maid, Vine of Heaven,
The ancient King of Kings)

link Mary’s blessing of the trees with the image of the True Vine (though here it is Mary rather than Christ himself who is the vine of Heaven): possibly in view of the following line the reference is to the Tree of Jesse, often depicted in later medieval iconography as a vine. Rhisiart ap Rhys picks up this imagery of vines and grapes with his description of the “foaming waters” of the well:

Gwin gwyn drwy’r rhewyn a red

gŵyr lladd gwaewyr a lludded 69


(White wine runs in the stream

that can kill pain and fatigue)


The wine is not precisely Eucharistic since it is white, but there is a clear link with Gwilym Tew’s bara ‘fferen, Eucharistic bread, and with the dŵr swyn, the holy water of baptism. The description of the well also resonates with the image of Mary as the fons signatus of the Song of Solomon.

An even more complex and intractable image seems to refer to Gwilym Tew’s route to the shrine. He begs the Virgin:

A’r dail a’r dŵr, famaeth emprwr, fy maith ympryd;

Wrth lân gyffes, galw o’m hanes, gael ‘y mhenyd
Offrwm prif un rhif o eirw rhyd, graean
O aur ac arian ar ei gwryd 70


(With the leaves upon the water, emperor’s nurse, my long fast;

Through holy confession, call forth my history so that I may have as my penance
A chief offering as numerous as the foaming waters of the stony ford
In gold and money upon her fathom rood)


Ward suggests that the leaves may be a divination ritual; there are examples of similar practices at other holy wells, in Wales and elsewhere.71 The reference to the ford is probably to the one Gwilym Tew would have crossed on his way from the west. He came from Tir Iarll, the area around modern Maes-teg. A well-evidenced medieval trackway ran over the hills above Maes-teg, past Bwlch Garw and Bwlch y Clawdd, to cross the Rhondda Fawr near the present town of Ystrad Rhondda, the medieval Ystradyfodwg. Another route from Maesteg led to the same crossing through Llandyfodwg, where the church still has a medieval stone carving of a pilgrim.72 By 1540 there was a bridge across the Rhondda Fawr where these two routes met, but the bridge appears to have been built by the monks of Llantarnam to meet the needs of pilgrims (once the shrine was destroyed the bridge soon fell into decay) and was presumably on the line of an earlier ford. Gwilym’s route to the shrine is penitential, but the rituals of penance are suffused with natural imagery and (I would suggest) nature is seen not as threat or punishment but as blessing, something to be offered gladly.

Even the wildlife of the hills around the shrine is drawn into the imagery in another very obscure passage:

A’i Mab ar ei dwrn, medd swrn a sydd

Ymyl ei hadain mal ehedydd 73

(literally “With her son on her fist, her ankle,

Close to her wing, is like a lark”)


The imagery here is so difficult to interpret that it is tempting to suggest that the text has actually been corrupted. However, it seems that the infant Jesus is being likened to a hawk and either Mary or Jesus is compared to a lark. The use of birds as symbols for holiness was of course a medieval commonplace: the Welsh poet Iolo Goch likened Mary to an eagle,74 and the goldfinch symbolised Christ’s Passion.75 The range of meanings suggested for hawks and larks is unfortunately so wide that it is impossible to interpret Gwilym Tew’s complex image. However, the key point for our argument is that hawks and larks are specific to the location of the shrine. Wild hawks were common in the upland woods of south Wales and, if captured, were a prerogative of lordship. And larks still sing on the moorland above the Rhondda.

Penrhys was a healing shrine and the natural environment is also presented as offering healing: according to Gwilym Tew,

hon yn dangos yn gnawd effros 76

(she [i.e. Mary] is revealed in euphrasy flesh)

Effros is eyebright, euphrasia officinalis, which was used as an eye medicine. (This image of the Virgin Mary manifesting in a healing herb is reminiscent of her appearance to the Good Empress with the herb which will cure leprosy;77 and some of Lewis Morgannwg’s claims for her powers also seem to be pointing to lost miracle stories – something which I hope to explore elsewhere.) The shrine was notable for healing blindness as well as other illnesses.

Gwilym Tew is clear that it is the natural setting of the shrine at Penrhys which provides healing:

Ym Mhen-rhys, eiriol mewn rhos irwydd

Y di anafir pob dyn ufydd 78


(At Penrhys is intercession in a moor of green trees
Every man that exists is made whole).

We are getting dangerously close to suggesting that there is something “Celtic” about the attitudes to the natural world exemplified in these poems. Susan Power Bratton’s revisionist studies began with an article on Celtic monasticism,79 and her more recent work also relies heavily on Irish evidence. This raises the very contested issue of “Celtic” spirituality and identity. Wendy Davies’s demolition job on the whole concept of the “Celtic” church80 has left some historians reluctant to use the word at all. Oliver Davies has argued for “common patterns of religious sensibility and belief” in earlier medieval society in Wales and Ireland, and suggested that one of those common patterns was a distinctive attitude to the beauty of the natural world. 81 However, more recently, Ian Bradley has counselled caution and suggested that to identify “Celtic” Christianity as “green” is both anachronistic and an oversimplification.82

We have unfortunately few “Celtic” pilgrimage accounts to compare with those of the Codex Callixtinus and the numerous descriptions of the Jerusalem pilgrimage. The account of the Holy Land which Adomnán of Iona attributed to an otherwise unknown bishop, Arculf, may not be an account of an actual pilgrimage. Thomas O’Loughlin has made a convincing case for regarding it as a work geared to explaining sacred topography in order to facilitate exegesis.83 Nevertheless, as O’Loughlin points out,84 what distinguishes De Locis Sanctis from its predecessors (such as Eucherius’s De Situ Hierusolyme) is its appeal to evidence from observation. The description is presented as being verified by Arculf’s experience of pilgrimage. In this context it does not matter whether Arculf “really” existed or whether this is a “real” pilgrimage. What matters is that this is how Adomnán felt a traveller would have experienced the landscape: “it allows us to see how Adomnán imagined his world at the time, and how he then presented it to others”.85 This is not necessarily to argue that Arculf is merely a literary device: but as a character he is elusive and inconsistent and may even be a mosaic of different travellers.

Thus, “Arculf’s” emphasis on the built landscape of the Holy Land is entirely consonant with the purpose of the book, to provide a topographical framework for the Biblical narrative. While there are occasional references to the natural landscapes of the Bible – the Mount of Olives, the river Jordan, the Sea of Galilee – the descriptions are generally brief and practical. The region north of Jerusalem is rough and stony but to the west are level plains with olive groves. The Mount of Olives has vines and olives and a luxurious growth of corn and barley.86 The river Jordan, site of Christ’s baptism, is remarkable mainly for its churches and the bridge by which pilgrims cross; and the waters of the numinous Sea of Galilee are good for drinking and fishing.87 There is a more lyrical description of Mount Tabor, “herbosus valde et floridus; in cuius amoena summitate ampla planities silva pergrandi circumcincta habetur” (exceedingly grassy and flowery, on whose beautiful summit is a wide plateau surrounded by a very large wood), but the main part of the description is devoted to a discussion of the monastic buildings and churches and their relationship to the three taberbnacles of the Transfiguration.88 However, it has to be said that most of Adomnán/Arculf’s descriptions are austerely factual: this is a handbook of Biblical topography, not an impressionistic description of a journey. The same factual approach is to be found in the narrative of the fourteenth-century Anglo-Irish Franciscan Simon Fitzsimmons, who referred briefly to the mountains between Gaza and Jerusalem “where the country is very beautiful to see” and “the most beautiful mountains on the most fruitful valleys of Jerusalem” but reserved his highest praise for the buildings of Egypt and the Holy Land and the relics they contained.89

One possible explanation for the apparent difference in values and perceptions between descriptions of Compostela and Jerusalem and descriptions of Penrhys lies in the nature of the shrine and its sacred landscape, with its focus on the holy well as much as the chapel and statue. Jim Bugslag has pointed to the importance of chthonic elements – the grotto, the water source – in many Marian shrines in both Eastern and Western traditions.90 Eastern examples he cites include the Blachernae church in Constantinople and the monastery of Mega Spelaion in Greece. Western examples include Chartres itself with the Puits de Sts Forts and the statue of Notre Dame de Sous-Terre in the crypt of the church.

Bugslag goes on to discuss the ways in which these natural elements – specific natural features, the spatial composition of the sacred landscape and its setting – are incorporated into the built environment of the shrine by a process of socialization and appropriation by ecclesiastical institutions so that the natural elements become a key part of the distinctive pilgrimage experience. Nor are these chthonic elements confined exclusively to Marian shrines, though the tendency is more marked there than elsewhere. However, in most medieval descriptions, it is the built environment which has priority. Describing the Virgin Mary’s tomb in the valley of Jehoshapahat, Ogier d’Anglure mentioned the “beautiful fountain in a beautiful spot” but went on to say

In this place there is a very large and deep vault ... in this vault there is a very noble, sacred and very worthy place, for the sepulchre of the Blessed Virgin Mary is enclosed there in a little chapel ... And know that this tomb is well vaulted and well made, and there is a good fountain within the vault from which people drink as an act of devotion, and there is also an altar right in the tomb.91

There is a suggestion in Sumption that valuing of the natural world in the context of pilgrimage may have parallels elsewhere in the Atlantic tradition. He draws parallels between the urban-rejecting pilgrimage to the desert of Jerome and his followers and the religious wandering, peregrination pro amore Dei, of early Irish mystics. This was recognized by contemporaries as a specifically Irish practice: isolated examples can be found in England and continental Europe as late as the twelfth century but they are usually traced back to Irish inspiration.92

Comparable imagery from the natural world can be found in poetry to other Welsh Marian shrines. An anonymous cywydd to the image of the Throne of Grace at Llanystumdwy in Gwynedd speaks of

Llys Dduw yn llawes y ddol

Llys bradwys lle ysbrydol

Down i’r lann dirion ar wledd

Mair …

Llann vaen wenn lliw nef waneg

Ystyndwy ywch ystyn deg


(God’s court on the edge of the meadow

Court of paradise, a spiritual place.

We come to the gracious river bank on Mary’s feast …

White stone church, the colour of a heavenly wave

Above the fair meander in the river)93

Much of the imagery is, nevertheless, of a tamed and domesticated landscape: in an image resonant with the Song of Solomon and its enclosed garden with an orchard of pomegranates, Gwilym Tew described Mary as berllan bêr, an orchard of pears.94 In a poem written in English but using strict Welsh metre, the Welsh student poet Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal described Mary as a “fruit-bearing blossom”.95 There may also be a link between the focus on fruit trees and the image of Aaron’s rod which bore leaves, flowers and fruit without water, an image which was used to describe Mary’s virginal conception.

Lewys Morgannwg’s image of the “nine heavens in one meadow” may also relate to the constructed landscape of monastic farming around the pilgrim hospice. The productive medieval garden was divided into raised beds with paths between. Stephen Briggs has identified an example of a nine-rig plot at Bwlch-yr-Oerfa, which he suggests was either the site of Strata Florida’s Cwmystwyth grange or one of its main holdings.96 While the nine-plot design and Lewys Morgannwg’s image clearly derive from the same symbolic framework, it is also possible that he was referring specifically to the hospice garden (and possibly to the plot where euphrasia officinalis was grown for the needs of pilgrims?).

Nor did medieval Welsh religious poetry always present nature as a blessing. According to an anonymous fifteenth-century cywydd, “Mair a’n tyn o’r mieri” – Mary will pull us from the briars [of sin and condemnation].97 And poetry to the statue of Mary at Pwllheli (also Gwynedd) has a little more to say about the built environment: the shrine is

Dinas …Daear i Fair yw’r dre’ wen

(A citadel … this holy town is Mary’s ground)98

We are not therefore looking at a simple contrast between “Celtic” awareness of the beauty of the natural world and hostility elsewhere in Europe. It could also be argued that we are not comparing like with like: poetry to a holy well and shrine in the remote Welsh hills will always have a different discourse from descriptions of the churches in Jerusalem or Compostela. What this article suggests, though, is that vernacular poetry (where it exists) may enable us to widen our understanding of the assumptions which underlay medieval pilgrimage and even to reconsider some of our generalisations about medieval perceptions of sacred space and the natural environment. A possible next step is a reconsideration of the substantial corpus of Welsh and Irish poems to the pilgrimage shrines of the international tradition, in order to explore whether they too reflect appreciation of landscape and the natural environment.






1 Lynn White, Jr., ‘The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis’, Science, 155 (10 March 1967), 1203-7.

2 Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).

3 Man and the Natural World: changing attitudes in England, 1500-1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983)

4 Gilbert F. LaFreniere, The decline of nature : environmental history and the Western worldview (Bethesda, MD; London: Academica Press, 2007).

5 ‘Attitudes towards the Environment in Medieval Society’ in Historical Ecology: Essays on Environment and Social Change, ed. Lester J. Bilsky (Port Washington, New York: National University Publications, Kennikat Press, 1980), 100-16, esp pp 113-5.

6 Susan Power Bratton, Christianity, wilderness, and wildlife : the original desert solitaire (Scranton, PA; London: University of Scranton Press; Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1993).

7 ‘The original desert solitaire: Early Christian monasticism and wilderness’, Environmental ethics 10(2) (1988), 31-53; ‘Oaks, wolves and love: Celtic monasticism and northern forests’, Journal of Forest History 33(1) (1989), 4-20.

8 Environmental values in Christian art (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008)

9 Joyce Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 1994); David Salter, Holy and Noble Beasts: encounters with animals in medieval literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001); Dominic Alexander, Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008)

10 Aron Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. G. L. Campbell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985 edn.), 45, 56-66.

11 Debra J. Birch, Pilgrimage to Rome in the Middle Ages: continuity and change (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998); see esp ch 2, ‘The journey to Rome’.

12 Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: an image of medieval religion (London: Faber & Faber, 1975, republished as The Age of Pilgrimage: the medieval journey to God, Mahwah, New Jersey: HiddenSprings 2003; page references are to the original 1975 edition), 175-84, 94-7.

13 Colin Smith, ‘The Geography and History of Iberia in the Liber Sancti Jacobi’ in Maryjane Dunn and Linda Kay Davidson, eds., The Pilgrimage to Compostela in the Middle Ages (New York and London: Routledge, 2000 edn.), 23-41, quote on p 24.

14 Nicole Chareyron, Les Pèlerins de Jérusalem au Moyen Age. L'aventure du saint voyage d'après Journaux et mémoires (Paris, Imago, 2000); trans. W. Donald Wilson as Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

15 Chareyron, Pilgrims to Jerusalem, 3

16 Chareyron, Pilgrims to Jerusalem, 25

17 Sumption, Pilgrimage: an image of medieval religion, 94-7.

18 Sumption, Pilgrimage: an image of medieval religion, 95.

19 Michael E. Goodich, Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century: private grief and public salvation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 106-10

20 Goodich, Violence and Miracle, 103-6.

21 Maryjane Dunn and Linda Kay Davidson, eds., The Pilgrimage to Compostela in the Middle Ages (New York and London: Routledge, 2000 edn.), xvi.

22 see for example Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978).

23 Following the Milky Way: a pilgrimage across Spain (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989), 206.

24 Michael Sallnow, ‘Communitas reconsidered: the sociology of Andean pilgrimage’ in Man 16, 163-82; see also idem, Pilgrims of the Andes: Regional Cults in Cusco (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987).

25 for a fuller discussion of these issues see John Eade and Michael Sallnow, eds., Contesting the Sacred: the anthropology of pilgrimage (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, paperback ed. 2000); M. Gray, 'The pilgrimage as ritual space' in Holy Ground: theoretical issues relating to the landscape and material culture of ritual space, ed. A.T. Smith and A. Brookes (Oxford : BAR Archaeopress, 2001), 91-7

26 T. Bellorini and E. Hoade, ed. and trans., Fra Niccolò of Poggibonsi. A voyage Beyond the Seas (1346-1350) (Jerusalem:Franciscan Printing Press, 1945), 63, 81.

27 Chareyron, Pilgrims to Jerusalem, 14-15.

28 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Latin MS 3284 f 129, cited in Birch, Pilgrimage to Rome 1-2, 70; see also idem, ‘Jacques de Vitry and the Ideology of Pilgrimage’ in J. Stopford, ed., Pilgrimage Explored (York: York Medieval Press, 1999), 79-94 .

29 The Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela a critical edition. Vol II: the text. Annotated English translation by Paula Gerson, Annie Shaver-Crandell and Alison Stones with the assistance of Jeanne Krochalis; Latin text collated, edited and annotated by Jeanne Krochalis and Alison Stones (London: Harvey Miller, 1998), 22-23. I have modified the use of u and v in accordance with conventional Latin orthography.

30 Gerson et al, Pilgrim’s Guide, 22-25, 30-31.

31 Gerson et al, Pilgrim’s Guide, 68-71.

32 Gerson et al, Pilgrim’s Guide, 26-27.

33 Roland A. Browne , trans. and ed. , The Holy Jerusalem Voyage of Ogier VIII, seigneur d’Anglure (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1975).

34 Canon Pietro Casola's Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Year 1494. trans. Mary Margaret Newett. Manchester: The University Press, 1907.

35Canon Pietro Casola's Pilgrimage, 268.

36 The Holy Jerusalem Voyage of Ogier VIII, 38.

37 Chareyron, Pilgrims to Jerusalem, 139.

38 Chareyron, 128.

39 Chareyron, 105.

40 Chareyron, Pilgrims to Jerusalem, 75, 147.

41 The Holy Jerusalem Voyage of Ogier VIII, 40

42 In his “Epistle Dedicatory”: see Aubrey Stewart, trans. The Book of the Wanderings of Felix Fabri (Circa 1480-1483 A.D.) (2 vols. London: Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society, 1892-6), vol I (i), 2.

43 Stewart, Wanderings of Felix Fabri, I (i), 194-5

44 Stewart, Wanderings of Felix Fabri, I (i), 274-5

45 Stewart, Wanderings of Felix Fabri, II (ii), 512

46 A. E. Jones, ‘Gwilym Tew: astudiaeth destunol a chymharol o’i lawysgrif, Peniarth 51, ynghyd a gyndriniaeth a’i farddoniaeth’ (University of Wales Ph D thesis, 1981), 447

47 For a discussion see Jonathan Wooding, ‘Island and coastal churches in medieval Wales and Ireland’ in Karen Jankulak and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds., Ireland and Wales in the Middle Ages (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), 201-28. I am grateful to Rachel Gray for this reference.

48 see, e.g., Heinrich Zimmer, The Celtic Church in Britain and Ireland, trans. A. Meyer (London: D. Nutt, 1902)

49 e.g. Robert Fawtier, La Vie de Saint Samson: essai de critique hagiographique (Paris : H. Champion, 1912), 43; Pierre Florent, ed., La vie ancienne de St Samson de Dol (Paris : CNRS, 1997), 179.

50 In discussion at the session ‘Sacred Springs: Natural Water and the Spiritual World’ at the Leeds International Medieval Congress 2008, and in subsequent personal communication.

51 F. G. Cowley, The Monastic Order in South Wales, 1066-1349 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1977), 23-4, 27; D. H. Williams, The Welsh Cistercians (Leominster: Gracewing, 2001), 4; Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales, An Inventory of the Ancient Monuments in Glamorgan. Volume III: Medieval Secular Monuments. Part ii: Non-defensive (London: HMSO, 1982), 295-6.

52 M. Gray, ‘Penrhys: the archaeology of a pilgrimage’, Morgannwg 40 (1996), 10-32, and references therein.

53 J. Ward, ed., ‘Our Lady of Penrhys’, Archaeologia Cambrensis 6th series, 14 (1914), 357-406; G. J. Jenkins, pers. comm.

54 Christine James, ‘Penrhys: mecca’r genedl’, in Hywel Teifi Edwards, ed., Cwm Rhondda (Llandysul: Gomer, 1995), 27-71. There are clear parallels with the ‘Shepherd’s Cycle’ legends discussed by Victor Turner, a series of legends concerning the miraculous discovery of statues of the Virgin in Spain, centuries after they had been hidden from the Arab advance in Iberia. Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, [1978] 1995), 41–42.

55 Toulmin Smith, Lucy. The Itinerary in Wales of John Leland ... (London: George Bell, 1906), 19.

56 Glamorgan Archive Service, D/D Xcu 5/1

57 Leslie Harris, ed., Gwaith Huw Cae Llwyd ac eraill (Cardiff : University of Wales Press, 1953), 37-9. For the hostel see the National Archives (London) E318/2445.

58 A. Cynfael Lake, ed., Gwaith Lewys Morgannwg. 2 vols. (Aberystwyth: Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, 1998), ii, no 103 (p 507).

59 John Morgan Williams and Eurys I. Rolant, coll. and ed., Gwaith Rhys Brydydd a Rhisiart ap Rhys (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1976), no. 5 (p 13).

60 For a discussion of this pattern see David Blackbourn, Marpingen: apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), esp p 397.

61 Nest Scourfield, ‘Gwaith Ieuan Gethin ab Ieuan ap Leision, Llywelyn ap Hywel ab Ieuan ap Gronw, Ieuan Du’r Bilwg, Ieuan Rudd a Llywelyn Goch y Dant’ (University of Wales, Swansea, M. Phil. thesis, 1992), 53; D. H. Williams, The White Monks in Gwent and the Border (Pontypool: Hughes and Son, 1976), 80.

62 Lake, Gwaith Lewys Morgannwg, ii, no. 103 (p 507).

63 Williams and Rolant, Gwaith Rhys Brydydd a Rhisiart ap Rhys, no.5 (p 13).

64 Jane Cartwright, Feminine Sanctity and Spirituality in Medieval Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), 65-6.

65 Lake, Gwaith Lewys Morgannwg, ii no. 102 (p 503); cf Cartwright, Feminine Sanctity and Spirituality, 54-5.

66 Jones, ‘Gwilym Tew’, 434.

67 Lake, Gwaith Lewys Morgannwg , ii, no. 102 (p 504).

68 Jones, ‘Gwilym Tew’, 447.

69 Williams and Rolant, Gwaith Rhys Brydydd a Rhisiart ap Rhys, no.5 (p 13).

70 Jones, ‘Gwilym Tew’, 448.

71 Ward, ‘Our Lady of Penrhys’, 404; cf Francis Jones, The Holy Wells of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992 ed.), 107-14.

72 Royal Commission, Glamorgan III (ii), 356-7: RO23.

73 Jones, ‘Gwilym Tew’, 449.

74 Cartwright, Feminine Sanctity and Spirituality, 17.

75 The goldfinch feeds among thistles and thorns and was believed to have plucked a thorn from the Crown of Thorns; the red feathers on its head were said to have been stained with Christ’s blood. H. B. Werness, ed., The Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in Art (New York: Continuum, 2004), 198.

76 Jones, ‘Gwilym Tew’, 448.

77 C. Heffernan, ed., Le Bone Florence of Rome (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976); cf Miriam Gill, ‘The Wall Paintings in Eton College Chapel: the making of a late medieval Marian cycle’ in Phillip Lindley, ed., Making Medieval Art (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2003), 173-201.

78 Jones, ‘Gwilym Tew’, 449.

79 ‘Oaks, wolves and love: Celtic monasticism and northern forests’, Journal of Forest History 33(1) (1989), 4-20

80 In, for example, ‘The Celtic church’, Journal of Religious History 8 (1974-5), 406-11.

81 Oliver Davies, Celtic Christianity in Early Medieval Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), 1, 60-3, 84-8.

82 Ian Bradley, “How Green was Celtic Christianity”, Ecotheology 4 (1998), 58-69; idem, Celtic Christianity: Making Myths and Chasing Dreams (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999).

83 T. O’Loughlin, Adomnán and the Holy Places (London: T & T Clark, 2007)

84 O’Loughlin, 47, 55-61

85 O’Loughlin, 144

86 Denis Meehan, ed., Adamnan’s De Locis sanctis (Scriptores Latini Hiberniae, iii; Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1958), 62-5

87 Meehan, Adamnan’s De Locis Sanctis, 86-93

88 Meehan, Adamnan’s De Locis Sanctis, 96-7

89 Eugene Hoad, ed. and trans., Western Pilgrims: the itineraries of fr. Simon Fitzsimons (1322-23), a certain Englishman (1344-45), Thomas Brygg (1392), and notes on other authors and pilgrims (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1952), quotes on p 43

90 James Bugslag, ‘Pilgrimage to Chartres: the visual evidence’, in Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe, eds., Art and architecture of late medieval pilgrimage in Northern Europe and England (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 135-83, esp pp 182-3.

91 The Holy Jerusalem Voyage of Ogier VIII, 25.

92 Sumption, Pilgrimage: an image of medieval religion, 95-7.

93 Cartwright, Feminine Sanctity and Spirituality, 63.

94 Jones, ‘Gwilym Tew’,

95 Raymond Garlick and Roland Mathias, Anglo-Welsh poetry: 1480-1990 (Bridgend: Seren, 1992), 45.

96 Stephen Briggs, ‘Garden archaeology in Wales’, in A. E. Brown, ed., Garden Archaeology (CBA Research Report 78: London, 1991), 138-59, plan and discussion of Bwlch-yr-Oerfa on 140 (consulted online at http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/cbaresrep/pdf/078/07811005.pdf on 09.10.08). I am grateful to Stephen Briggs for drawing this to my attention and discussing its significance. See also Lewys Glyn Cothi’s poem, possibly about Aberglasney, in E. D. Jones, ed., Gwaith Lewis Glyn Cothi: y Gyfrol Gyntaf (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1953), 185, discussed in Briggs, 'Aberglasney: the theory, history and archaeology of a post-medieval landscape’, Post-Medieval Archaeology 33 (1999), 242-284.

97 Cartwright, Feminine Sanctity, 53.

98 Cartwright, Feminine Sanctity, 65.

24



DATE 01032019 THE THREE SACRED MONTHS THE SEASON OF
DEVOTION TO THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS IS IT
GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL SAUL (1739) AN ORATORIO OR SACRED


Tags: natural world:, springs: natural, world, natural, sacred, space