Welsh Journals

Historia Divae Monacellae, too, may have been intended for a wider, educated, audience, both lay and clerical, at least in Powys and the borders.71 Above all, it is clear that Pennant Melangell was attracting pilgrims by the late Middle Ages; offerings at the saint's relics amounted to the not insubstantial sum of £ 2 16s 8d. by 1535.72 Of course, it does not necessarily follow that the cult remained entirely local until its first attestation in a wider context in the fourteenth century, for this could simply be an optical illusion created by the sparseness of the surviving written record. After all, the construction of the saint's shrine in the twelfth century might well imply a response to, or at least an attempt to encourage, the devotion of pilgrims. However, there can be little doubt that it was in the parish of Pennant Melangell that the memory of the saint was cultivated most vigorously. This was certainly the case in the post- Reformation period. Thus in the late seventeenth century Thomas Price recorded the following customs in Pennant Melangell parish: And till of late yeares no man would offer to kill a hare in that parish, who they tearmed wuyn Melangel (S. Monacella her lambes), and it is observed to this day there that when a hare is persued by dogges, if any cry God & S. Monacella bee wth thee, shee is sure to escape.73 In the eighteenth century Thomas Pennant (1726-98) visited Pennant Melangell and likewise noted that the saint was the patroness of hares, relating the same traditions about killing and pursuing 'St Melangell's lambs' as those recorded by Price. In addition, Pennant recorded other details regarding the local cult of the saint, for example, that 'her hard bed is shewn in the cleft of a neighboring rock.' He prefaced his account with a version of St Melangell's legend closely resembling that of the Historia (and thus quite possibly influenced by that text), albeit in an abridged form and with the additional detail that 'when the huntsman blew his horn, it stuck to his lips. 174 Nor was Pennant the only traveller to take an interest in the legend of the saint and the hare. By the early nineteenth century the legend also appealed to the romantic sensibilities of English literati such as Robert Southey, who went to Pennant Melangell in 1820 and later wrote a poem about his visit. 75 The saint and her sanctuary remained the subject of a rich folklore in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. By then, however, it seems that the legend had changed. An informant recorded by the Welsh Folk Museum claimed to have heard, as a child at the end of the 71Cf. above, pp. 25, 30-1. 72 Valot- Ecclesiasticus temp. Hem: VIII ed. J. Caley, (Record Commission. London, 1810-34), vol. 4. 451a. 73NLW MS 3108B, fo. 34'. Rhys (ed.) 1883 op. cit. (note 61). vol. 3, 163-4. As Tristan Gray Hulse has pointed out to me. the detail may represent an oral elaboration of the scene on the late fifteenth-century screen at Pennant Melangell church depicting the huntsman with a horn to his lips and thus need not, as suggested by Baring-Gould and Fisher, op. cit. (note 1), vol. 3.464 n. 2, have 'formed part of the original legend.' If in fact the scene on the screen was merely intended to show the huntsman blowing his horn. this could explain the absence from the Historia of the episode first recorded by Pennant. D.R. Thomas, Montgomeryshire screens and rood- lofts, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 6th ser. 4 ( 1 903). 1 09-1 1 See also Part 7, footnote 8. It is also worth noting that attempts were made to establish a feast for St Monacella (as the saint is consistently referred to in the relevant correspondence), and to procure a copy of her Historia, in the early eighteenth century at the Jesuit college at Saint-Omer: The Letter Book of Lewis Sabran, SJ. (Rector of St Omers College). October 1713 to October 1715, ed. G- Holt, S.J., (Catholic Record Society Publications (Record Series), vol. 62, 1971), 8, 36-7, 53, 58, 66. 95, 96, 99, 101, 109, '10, 112, 272, 277. 1 owe these references to Tristan Gray Hulse, who has undertaken important research, as yet unpublished, on this aspect of St Melangell's cult.