When my children were much younger....and me too, we had many a happy holiday in Wales. We stayed in a little village called Gorrig, near LLandysul. Our host for all these great times were the late Sally and Cerdin Jones. Sadly missed.
We visited Kidwelly, to see the Castle there. We were unaware that once upon a time, there was a monastery there.
It was never a large complex. In fact it was one of the smallest Benedictine Cells founded by the Normans in Wales. It was a daughter of Sherbourne in Dorset, but throughout its existence it remained an remote and little known monastery.
It was the Norman Bishop of Salisbury who founded the monastery. Before that though, there had been Christian activity. Saint Cadog and Saint Teilo had worked in this area. There were ancien Holy Wells in the surrounding area.
The Welsh people are a proud people. Monasteries of the "Celtic" style were well thought of by the Welsh, but they were distinctly unhappy about the new Latin style Benedictine monasteries.
I
n the 12th century, when St David was bishop, The Lord of Kidwelly granted to God, to the monks of Sherbourne and to st Mary's Kidwelly, 12 acres of land around the Church of St Cadoc, which adjoined the Lands of St Mary's.
From then, till the dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, the small group of tenacious monks held on to their possessions till Sherbourne was dissolved.
The Church building was still needed as a Parish Church, as happened throughout Wales with many Benedictine Churches. So the townspeople retained control of the nave of the Church.
But perhaps the most astonishing thing about Kidwelly is the survival to the present day of an alabaster statue of the Madonna and Child.
At one point, the minister, unhappy at the reverence shown to the statue, and seeing it as a vestage of popery, had it buried in the graveyard.
Such was the outcry that it was dug up again.
Since 1971, it has been in a niche in the East window.
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