St David's Day is celebrated in Wales every year on 1st March, in honour of Dewi Sant or St David, the Patron Saint of Wales.

St David is rather a mystery even though he is the Patron Saint of Wales.

Wales is custodian of the oldest rocks in the British Isles from which much of the national cathedral is built of and is also home to one of Europe’s oldest gene pool dating back many thousands of years. Recent research has indicated that those Cambrians of dark brown eyes and dark hair are descended from migrating ancients who first colonised North Wales from their Iberian homeland. Archaeology suggests that these people traded with their Iberian and possibly Breton contemporaries and with customers as far away as the Danube. Their expertise in quarrying and stonework may also have helped to build Stonehenge as geologists tell us that certain sections of stone could only have come from Wales. The early Welsh like their counterparts today were a proud race and the ferocity with which they defended Anglesey against the all conquering Roman army in the 1^st century so astonished the Romans that their own historians bothered to record the fact along with gruesome and salacious details of the Druids’ religious practices that justified in their eyes the Romans brutal suppression. These descriptions continue to distort and obfuscate these priests reputations, a spectacular example of history being written by the victors: a phenomenon with which their descendants would become wearily familiar.

But what of St David?

It is likely that he was a local aristocrat whose adoption into the church was typical of his kind. Perhaps their early adoption of Christianity was, in part, due to rapid withdrawal of their Roman oppressors who left settlements and spouses in obscene haste. This religion evangelised by Irish and Angles alike, promised bulwarks on earth and in heaven on the following of Jesus of the Cross’s simple, but very demanding principles. The Christian chroniclers tell us that St David ardently embraced these principles, renouncing all wealth and privilege, a model of Christian piety and asceticism and yet with a worldly leadership sufficient for Irish ecclesiastical authorities to confer a bishopric upon him. With this he founded St David’s as the centre of Christian culture, in husbandry and learning throughout Wales.

Welsh Christians needed such leadership as all monasteries, Irish, Welsh and Cumbrian, sustained heavy casualties, some almost to obliteration, at the hands of the marauding Norseman. St David and his followers had to contend with Norse invasions from Ireland, the Isle of Man and other parts of Wales as kingship and thraldom between warring Norse aristocracy ebbed and flowed. Given these circumstances it would seem likely that St David spoke the mother tongue as how else could he have protected, exhorted and educated his followers for them to become so loyal to his memory that he became the Patron Saint of wales. The patron saint of Wales, St. David is believed to have died on the 1^st march 589.

His beatification was confirmed by papal authority in the 11^th Century allowing his monastery to thrive, flourish and expand. This growth was carefully nourished by his Norman successors, especially the 13^th century bishop Henry De Gower, much of whose work at St David’s still stands. The good burghers of St David’s must have been especially delighted when the pope declared, as part of beatification, that two pillgimages to St David’s were worth one to Canterbury!

So what of the Leek and daffodil that is also associated with Wales and St David’s day?

Shakespeare, in one of the War of the Roses plays, claimed that Welshmen had worn it since time immemorial! Or maybe it was the choice of the saint himself, knowing of the fecundity of the valleys, its toughness in Cambrian springs and its joyous optimism in all its vigorous shades. The Leek is easier to explain as it arises from an occasion when an army of Welsh were able to distinguish each other from an army of English enemy dressed in similar fashion by wearing leeks.

In the 18th century St David’s Day was declared a national day of celebration in Wales. Today although the date is not a bank holiday in Wales discussions continue with the aim of making it so. A petition in 2007 to make St. David's Day a bank holiday was rejected by the then prime minister Tony Blair but with the new coalition government looking at bank holiday dates it is possible in time it will become one.