Fagan (saint)

St Fagan's name appears as "Phagan" () in William of Malmesbury's work On the Antiquity of the Glastonbury Church, Wade-Evans proposed that the name was a confusion with the Italo-British rhetorician Bachan or Pachan who appears in the life of Saint Cadoc. The entry on Pope Eleutherius in Petrus de Natalibus's late 14th-century collection of saints' lives gives Fagan's name as "Fugatius", an emendation subsequently copied by Platina and many others. These names were further misspelled in later sources in a variety of ways. ==Sources==

Accounts of St Fagan and his companion Deruvian joined a long-standing narrative concerning King Lucius of Britain and his conversion to Christianity around the time of the Roman Emperors Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, a time of general tolerance towards the religion. St Gildas had described the first apostles as arriving during the reign of the emperor Tiberius. William of Malmesbury's cautious account in the Deeds of the Kings of the English allows that St Philip may have reached the island but quickly leaves such "vain imaginations" in favor of praising the ancient wattle chapel of St Mary erected by Pope Eleutherius's nameless missionaries, which he called "the oldest I am acquainted with in England". The two accounts were later combined, so that Elfan and "Medwy" are sent off and honored in Rome and then return with Fagan and Deruvian. Fagan and Dyfan were also sometimes credited with the initial establishment at Congresbury, which was removed in 721 to Tydenton (present-day Wells). "Dyfan" is then made the first bishop of Llandaff and the martyr at Merthyr Dyfan. Fagan is then made his successor at Llandaff. (Baring-Gould refers to the pair as chorepiscopi.) A fourth lists the following triplet among the "Sayings of the Wise": ::Didst thou hear the saying of Fagan ::when he had produced his argument? ::'Where God is silent, it is wise not to speak.' ==Life==

Arguing in favor of a partial historicity to these figures, Rees noted that all but Elfan had long-standing associations with parish churches in the area around Llandaff, though he admitted none seemed as grand or preëminent as one might expect were they actually the apostles of Britain. Bartrum replied such dedications must be assumed to post-date Geoffrey's popularity. ==Legacy==

St Fagans, a village near Cardiff in Wales, continues to bear his name, (This is now a Grade II* listed building.) The 16th-century antiquarian John Leland recorded in his travel notebooks that a nearby chapel remained dedicated to Fagan and was sometimes also used as the parish church, but this was in ruins by the time of the English Civil War a century later. St Fagan's Church in the village of Trecynon near Aberdare in Glamorgan was a new foundation erected from 1851 to 1853. It was destroyed by fire in 1856. which had been dedicated to St John the Baptist prior to the completion of St Elvan's in 1852. The festival of St Fagan does not appear in any surviving medieval Welsh calendar of the saints, Late sources place it on 3 January (with St Dyfan) at Glastonbury; on 8 August; although in fact St Fagan's Day is currently unobserved by any of the major denominations of Wales. His feast day is listed, with a link, under Wikipedia's Eastern Orthodox Liturgics for May 26. ==References==