The Lives of the Saints, Volume 01 (of 16): JanuaryBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Religion
The Lives of the Saints, Volume 01 (of 16): January
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Christian saints
Cadoc found a large heap of corn, which served to feed the master and
his pupils for many days.
Having early decided to embrace monastic life, he hid himself in a wood,
where, after making a narrow escape from assassination by an armed
swineherd of a neighbouring chief, he saw, near a forgotten fountain,
where a white swan floated, an enormous wild boar, white with age,
coming out of his den, and make three bounds, one after another,
stopping each time, and turning round to stare furiously at the stranger
who had disturbed him in his resting place. Cadoc marked with three
branches the three bounds of the wild boar, which afterwards became the
site of the church, dormitories, and refectory of the great abbey of
Llancarvan. The abbey took its name, "The Church of the Stags," from the
legend that two deers from the neighbouring wood came one day to replace
two idle and disobedient monks who had refused to perform the necessary
labour for the construction of the monastery, saying, "Are we oxen, that
we should be yoked to carts, and compelled to drag timber?"
The rushes were torn up, the briars and thorns were cut down, and S.
Cadoc dug deep trenches to drain the morass formed about the fountain he
had discovered. One day, when the chapel he was building was nearly
completed, a monk came that way, bearing on his back a leather pouch
containing tools for working metal, and some specimens of his
handicraft. His name was Gildas. He was the son of a chief in
Westmoreland, and his brother, Aneurin, was one day famous among the
bards of Britain.[122] Gildas opened his bag and produced a bell. Its
form was that of a tall square cap, and it was made of a mixture of
silver and copper, not molten, but hammered.
Cadoc took the bell and sounded it, and the note was so sweet that he
greatly desired the bell, and asked Gildas to give it him. "No," said
the bell-maker; "I have destined it for the altar of S. Peter at Rome."
But when Gildas offered the bell to the Pope, the holy father was unable
to sound it; then Gildas knew he must give it to the Welsh monk; so he
returned to Britain, and offered it to Cadoc, and when he held it, the
bell rang sweetly as heretofore.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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