Illtud

Saint Illtud was a Welsh abbot of the sixth century, founder of the monastery and school at Llanilltud Fawr (Llantwit Major) in Glamorgan. His school is held to be the earliest centre of learning in Britain, and it trained many of the great saints of the age. The Church remembers him on 6 November.

Sources for his life are few. The earliest mention is in the Life of Saint Samson, written at Dol in Brittany around 600. According to it Illtud was the disciple of a bishop Germanus and the most accomplished of the Britons, well versed in the Old and New Testaments and in every branch of learning, including geometry, rhetoric, grammar and arithmetic. He is also said to have had the gift of foretelling things to come. A Life written about 1140 calls him the son of a Breton prince and a kinsman of King Arthur, but these claims cannot be checked.

The same Life relates that his parents brought him up for the service of the Church, yet he first chose a soldier's career in the service of chieftains in Wales, which earned him the name Illtud the Knight. He was married to Trynihid. According to tradition, a disaster during a hunt on the lands of Saint Cadoc, in which his companions perished, led him to repentance, and Cadoc urged him to leave the world. By an older account the couple lived for a while as hermits until an angel commanded him to part from his wife. Illtud then lived as a hermit in the Vale of Glamorgan, for a time under the guidance of Saint Dubricius.

Disciples gathered around him, and he founded the monastery at Llantwit, the first great monastic school of Wales and a hub of Celtic Christianity. Among his pupils tradition counts Samson of Dol, Paul Aurelian and Gildas, and David is believed to have spent time there. Miracles are told of him too: that he was fed from heaven when he fled the anger of some chieftains, that he raised a fallen wall, and that he sent grain to Brittany to rescue it from famine.

Some say he died at Dol, where he withdrew in old age, others at Llantwit or at Defynnog. Another tradition places his burial near Brecon at Mynydd Illtud, where a standing stone called the "Grave of St. Illtud's Eve" was long the place of a vigil before his feast. St Illtud's Church in Llantwit Major stands on the supposed site of the monastery, and many churches in Glamorgan and Brittany bear his name. In Brittany, at Locildut, the great pilgrimage called the pardon of Ildut is held on the last Sunday of July.