Gwen ‘Teirbron’ the Saint-Bearer of Brittany and Dorset

Saint Gwen Teirbron

The eighteenth of July is the feast of the sixth-century Saint Gwen Teirbron of Brittany. Her cognomen, ‘Teirbron’, means ‘three-breasted’, and she has had far more names than breasts. Having devotions in France and England as well as Wales and Brittany, she is known variously by Gwenn, Alba, Blanche, Candida, Ceridwen and Hwíta (or Wite) – most of which are cognates of her Breton name. She is noteworthy also in that her relics, housed in a small reliquary tomb in Dorset, somehow managed to survive the harrowing of the monasteries in the Reformation – being rediscovered behind a wall by a the parish vicar of Whitchurch Canonicorum in Dorset in 1848. It was one of two reliquaries in England which survived the Reformation; the other belonged to Éadweard the Confessor.

At any rate, this buxom Breton lass was the daughter of Budic II, King of Brittany. She first married a Breton, Eneas Ledewig; and she had a son by him named Cadfan. After Eneas’s death, she married Saint Fragan [also Bracan or Brychan], King of Cornwall, the cousin of King Cado of Dumnonia and brother of Saint Cybi. She bore him four children. The first two, Gwyddnog and Iago, were born in Cornwall. A plague broke out in Devon in 507 and Fragan took his wife with him to Brittany, along with a number of Cornish refugees. There she bore him another son, Gwenolau, and a daughter, Creirwy. This is how Welsh sources have it, anyway. English and French ones seem to offer the opinion that she married Fragan first and then Eneas Ledewig. All five of her children, by both husbands, also became saints. It was apparently common for a widow who remarried to be called ‘three-breasted’, but this cognomen of hers was taken quite literally in Catholic devotional art, statuary and hagiography – where her third breast was a miraculous symbol of her fertility and saintly motherhood. Her icon above shows her cradling her three sons by Saint Fragan.

While she lived in Brittany, so the legend goes, she was kidnapped twice by heathen pirates from the kingdom of Sussex. Both times, however, she successfully fled her captors and wondrously walked on the waters of the Channel back to Brittany. After her second husband died, Saint Gwen retired from this-worldly life and became an anchoress. She returned to Britain and took up a small cell in the Marshwood Vale. She lived there for many years in quiet prayer and solitude, often setting up beacons along the shoreline to protect sailors. However, her hermitage was attacked by Saxon pirates, who plundered her home and murdered her.

Intriguingly, after the conversion of the Saxons to Christianity, they developed a fond local cultus for the saint their forebears had killed. This seems to be the same impulse that drove the newly-converted Danelaw Danes to patronise the cults of Saint Éadmund and Saint Ælfhéah, or the newly-converted Slavs came to celebrate Pokrov. The Church of Saint Candida and Holy Cross indeed dates back to the reign of Saint Ælfrǽd the Great, who founded the Hwítan Cyrican on the site of Saint Gwen’s hermitage. ‘Saint Wite’ of Dorset – who likely was Saint Gwen Teirbron – had a holy well and wondrous healings associated with her shrine long before the Norman Conquest, and was a particular patron of nursing mothers. Holy mother Gwen, bearer of many saints and noble-hearted anchoress, pray unto Christ our God for us sinners!

O noble exiles Fragan and Gwen
who fled to Brittany in troubled times:
you established churches to God's praise and glory;
your children brought joy and gladness to the Breton people.
We praise you, glorious Saints!

Chapelle Sainte Blanche, France