by Kemmis Buckley MBE, DL, MA

Llandeilo Llwydiarth is a little hamlet in Pembrokeshire which lies at the foot of the Prescelly Mountains. It consists of a chapel, a very few houses, and a well and a tiny ruined church both dedicated to St Teilo; and it is one of the few places left where it can truthfully be said that ‘peace comes dropping slow’. The object of this essay is to record something about the well and to relate the remarkable history of the skull which became associated with it.

School children used to be taught that the personal pronoun should never be used in an essay. I have broken this rule if only because it will enable me to record my thanks to those [1] who enabled me to follow the trail of the skull when it seemed to have disappeared without trace. I will, however, confine any intrusions to the beginning and end of the essay.

I had known of the existence of the skull and of its relationship to the well for many years and, as a child, had lived in the next-door parish to Miss Lon Melchior whose family had for centuries been keepers of the relic. But the immediate impulse to trace its present whereabouts resulted from a talk on St Teilo which the present Dean of St Davids and I gave to the Carmarthenshire Antiquarian Society. Every work I consulted said that it had disappeared or been lost; and Miss Lon Melchior could say only that she remembered it being taken away by a Mr Mathews but she had no idea who he was or where he came from. Eventually, knowing that St Teilo was Bishop of Llandaff and that one of his bodies [2] was said to be buried in the Cathedral, I approached the then Dean; and the remainder of this essay records the story which his introductions have helped me to tell.

For nearly five hundred and fifty years the skull of St Teilo was held in the keeping of two families, the Mathews and the Melchiors. The Mathews of Llandaff were descended from Gwaethvord Vawn who died about 1057 and in the course of time they became regarded as hereditary keepers of the tomb of St Teilo in Llandaff Cathedral. In 1403 the tomb was pillaged and desecrated by a band of ruffians from Bristol who had mounted an amphibious operation. According to Adam of Usk:

The men of Bristol under Captain James Clifford and William Rye Esquire invaded the ports of Glamorgan and pillaged the church of Llandaff but being beaten by the country people, through a miracle of Saint Teilaw, they were driven back with no small loss.

Shortly after this Owen Glyndwr sacked both the Cathedral church and the Bishops’ Palace and the necessary work of restoration to the Saint’s tomb was undertaken by Sir David Mathew presumably because his family had come to be thought of as its keepers. As a reward for this act of devotion, the Bishop gave Sir David the skull of the saint, set in a costly reliquary, to be an heirloom in his family [3].

The reliquary remained in the hands of the Mathew family for seven generations until William Mathew died without issue at Llandeilo Llwydiarth in 1658. We do not know why he moved to Pembrokeshire and, indeed, all we know of him is that he was possibly the brother of Edward Mathew of Llandaff who was father of Thomas Mathew, Admiral of the Red who rebuilt the ‘three decker’ house which is now the Cathedral School. Before he died William handed the skull, by that time taken from its reliquary, to the Melchior [4] family who owned Llandeilo farm; and it remained in their possession until this century [5].

A few hundred yards from the farm is St Teilo’s Well (Ffynnon Deilo). Water falls from a spring into a shallow cistern measuring some 2.5 ft x 2.5 ft and in present times is piped to a tank further down the slope. The cistern is now covered with a large stone slab to prevent insects and impurities entering it. The water, which is bland to the palate, has recently been tested and found to be drinkable. In earlier times the overflow must have fallen into a pond, the outlines of which can still be seen; and it is said that the well was at one time protected by an enclosure [6] but this can be discerned only by the eye of faith.

     Once St Teilo’s skull and St Teilo’s well had become associated it was inevitable that a cultus should grow up around them. The water was said to be particularly effective in the treatment of chest complaints and it was doubly so if it was drunk out of the skull. The height of efficacy came when the skull, filled with well water, was handed to the sufferer by the hands of the hereditary keeper himself [7]. After he had acquired the skull many years later Gregory Mathews wrote an article entitled ‘Romance of St Teilo’s Skull’ [8] in which he quotes from a work entitled Wales and the Welsh by Asaph Dar:

The faith of some of those who used to visit the well was so great in its efficacy that they were wont to leave it wonderfully improved. An old inhabitant of the district, Stephen Evans (Hifyn Ifan) used to relate a story to the effect that a carriage drawn by four horses came over to Llandeilo. It was full of invalids from the cockle village of Penclawdd, in the Gower Peninsula, who had determined to try the waters in the well. They returned, however, no better than they came; for though they had drunk of the well they had neglected to do so out of the skull. This was afterwards pointed out to them by somebody and they resolved to make the long journey to the well again. This time, we are told, they did the right thing and departed in excellent health. Such is the great persistence of primitive beliefs that while the walls of the church have long fallen into decay [9] the faith in the well continues in a measure intact.

It would be interesting to know for how long this faith in the efficacy of the well persisted. Francis Jones quotes [10] an old man, alive in 1906, who remembered people coming to the well who ‘were cured by faith’, and said that as a boy he and two other lads were cured of an illness after drinking the water out of St Teilo’s skull early in the morning. It would, however, be surprising if votaries did not visit the well for years after this. The nearby Ffynnon Beswch [11], which, as its name implies (peswch, ‘cough’), was also alleged to cure chest complaints, was certainly patronised until after World War II. It was the custom of supplicants to inscribe their initials on slate slabs together with the year of their visit; and one such slab bears the date 1947. It should also be mentioned that there is said to be evidence, in the form of a bottle [12], which indicates that the Melchior family bottled and possibly marketed the water from St Teilo’s Well, but the date of this is uncertain.

But to return to the skull: at the time when it was handed over to the Melchiors an ‘aged woman’ went on record as saying:

Misfortune will fall on the house of Mathew for over 200 years and then the skull of St Teilo will be restored to the last male of the line, and their luck will turn again, and those that kept the skull will get a double blessing. He who restores the skull to the Mathews will see St Teilo, the Bishop, riding on a pure white stag and St Teilo will bless their apple trees so that their next bearing will be very vast [13].

The restoration, when it eventually took place, was made to a branch of the family who had by that time added an ‘s’ to their name and were living in New South Wales. This branch was descended from Sir David Mathew’s brother Robert of Castell y Mynych and had migrated to Co. Antrim in 1599. Eight generations later they moved to Australia and it would appear that they first discovered the whereabouts of the skull in 1897 [14]. But it was not until 1927 that their correspondence with the Melchiors resulted in the purchase of the skull by Gregory Macalister Mathews from Miss Dinah Melchior for £50. At the time of the transaction she signed an affidavit in these terms:

I know and am well acquainted with the stories and legend connected with the skull of St Teilo, which for several centuries has been used to take water from St Teilo’s well at Llandeilo for the use of sufferers from whooping cough, it being an old belief that those who drink water from this well out of the skull of St Teilo are cured of the complaint.

The said skull of St Teilo is, I am informed, reputed to have been taken from St Teilo’s Tomb in the fifteenth century by Bishop Marshall and to have been given by him to Sir David Mathew and to have remained in the Mathew family until the year 1658. It is reputed to have been kept in Llandeilo by one, William Mathew, a descendant and on his death that year to have been given into possession of the family of Melehior, to which family I belong.

It has certainly been in the possession of the Melchior family for a very considerable period, and has been for eight years past in my possession and during the whole of my recolection (sic) at Llandeilo.

It have (sic) been agreed to sell the said skull to Gregory Macalister Mathews desendant of the above named Sir David Mathew for the sum of £50 [15].

When he had received the skull Gregory Mathews had it examined by Sir Arthur Keith, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, ‘who pronouced it of undoubted antiquity, of Welsh origin and of a small man between fifty and sixty years of age’ [16]. Having done this he had the relic set in a reliquary and caused to be engraved on the mounting the words, ‘Presented by Bishop Marshall of Llandaff to Sir David Mathew in 1450’. In fact, he subsequently changed his mind as to the name of the donor and attrtbuted the gift to Bishop Nicholas Assheby [17]. If the presentation was in truth made in 1450, his second thoughts would be correct because the succession of bishops ran as follows:

Nicholas Assheby 1440-1458;

John Hunden 1458-1476;

John Smith 1476-1478;

John Marshall 1478-1496.

It is a curious fact that whereas the whereabouts of the skull were widely known from 1450 to the time Gregory Mathews acquired it in 1927, it became progressively more difficult to trace thereafter. This may well have been because Gregory Mathews and his son Alister both lived in England and their ties with Wales were loosened. But a Miss Constance Allen mounted a determined search both before and after World War II. She seems to have been a lady of wide interests as the first indication we have of her quest for the skull is a letter from her to the Bishop of Rochester in which she raised two matters which interested her: Dick Whittington and St Teilo’s skull. She eventually borrowed a collection of papers, the contents of which have been invaluable in the writing of this essay, from Alister Mathews who had by that time succeeded his father as Hereditary Keeper. He insisted that she should give them back, which she appears not to have done, and asked her not to communicate their contents to the press. She seems, too, to have been somewhat strident in her approach as in a further exchange of letters he ended by saying that the skull ‘is not here but in the vaults of a bank, so I could not show it to you’. The bank was possibly in Bournemouth where he lived.

When I began the search in 1991, the trail had gone completely cold and I began to think I would have to make inquiries in Australia as the relic might well have gone to the descendants of Gregory Mathews’ brother who was mentioned in his will. In fact the skull had gone to Australia: Alister Mathews had died in 1985 but before this he had sent the relic to his cousins in New South Wales.

This remarkable story ends when the present Dean of Llandaff, the Very Revd. John Rogers, rang me up in early February this year to say that Captain Robert Mathews, the Hereditary Keeper, would be coming from Hong Kong to present the skull to the Cathedral at Sung Eucharist on St Teilo’s Day, 9 February 1994. It was a very moving experience to be present at this service which was attended by members of the Mathews family from Australia, the Far East and the United Kingdom. After years of wandering from Llandeilo Llwydiarth,to a bank in Bournemouth and to Australia, the skull had come home for the first time since 1450.

And to some of us present the most exciting moment came when the Chancellor in his address told us that it would eventually be placed in a reliquary in St Teilo’s Chapel.

Notes

Text © Kemmis Buckley (1994) | Illustration of skull relic © David Taylor (1994)

Designed & Maintained by Richard L. Pederick (© 1999) | Created 26/11/99