St Cenydd's was built as a priory under the authority of the abbey of St Taurin, Evreux, but the site has a longer history still - see the slab of interlace now standing in a niche beside the chancel arch but long associated with the traditional burial place of the patron saint in the chancel. St Cenydd was a hermit from the 'Age of the Saints' living on the nearby island of Burry Holms. There imitating the Dessert Fathers he became a 'Miles Christi' - a soldier of Christ contending against 'the world, the flesh and the devil'. As I wrote of St Guthlac, 'Making Catharsis on the path to Theosis.' Both saints remind me of Bede's description of St Cuthbert as a 'beata Christi athleta', referring in part to St Paul's description of fasting etc as 'askesis' or athletic training. 'Miles Christi' was one of a whole number of descriptions of ascetics and their striving for union with God in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: militum Christi/spiritualis, agon, certamen, conluctatio. Words denoting conflict, warfare. (Not, when one thinks of it, words that denote passivity, but activity.) Athanasius, the Egyptian bishop who during his exile in the Western Roman Empire introduced monasticism to the West (he, not Benedict, is the Father of Western Monasticism), described monasticism as a sort of prolonged martyrdom. On the village green is a small holy well dedicated to Cenydd. A minor place of pilgrimage then.
Always small, the priory was suppressed in 1414 along with all the other alien monastic houses in England and Wales.
The church consists of a long, aisle-less nave and chancel with a austere tower attached to the north of the nave. The parts make a very picturesque whole, but the interior, it has to be said, is a disappointment. The light blue colour does not help neither the drastic restoration by J B Fowler which raised the floor level by 4ft.
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