It is around fourteen hundred years since the death of St David (Dewi Sant), notable early holy man, monastic founder and patron saint of Wales. the fourteenth centenary was marked by commemorations at Lampeter and St Davids which, in default of a more certain date, were held to coincide with the 175th anniversary of the opening of St David's College Lampeter; these in turn inspired the present volume. Our calibrations of St David's obit lack certainty to the extent that we might have celebrated the fourteenth centenary in 1989 or 2001, or, if we move beyond the witness of the annals, one of a number of other calculations. In fact the most that we can say with certainty is that St David's death occurred in some year fairly adjacent to AD 600. We are on surer ground in holding that his death occurred on 1 March. The Bollandists hold that feast days of saints, notwithstanding the actual year, tend to be enduring ‘co-ordinates’ in tradition. If 1 March might still seem a suspiciously ‘tidy’ date, hyperscepticism can be countered by the observation that people are as likely to die on the first of the month as any other day.

Such questions concerning the co-ordinates of a historical St David are not a central concern in most of the contributions to this volume, which reflect the trend in studies of Celtic saints toward concentration upon the more substantial evidence of the cults of early saints, away from the less historically substantial figures that they celebrate.