[1] A native of Brecknockshire,[note 1] Caradoc obtained a place at the court of Rhys ap Tewdwr who ruled much of South Wales in the late eleventh century.
[5] At St David’s he was ordained a priest and displayed supposed healing powers when, by a touch of his hand, the edema of a young woman was dispersed.
Caught in a downpour of rain during one hunt, Richard sought shelter with Caradoc but, despite much shouting and coaxing, was unable to persuade his hounds to enter the holy man’s habitation.
[9] It is said that, in April 1124 while he was preparing for Easter, two men in glittering stoles entered his church; between them they carried a golden altar on which was written “Follow us, we have meat to eat that thou knowest not of.” To Caradoc’s question of when he would feast with them, they replied that it would be “at the Lamb’s high banquet.” He was taken with fever four days later and died on Low Sunday.
[note 5] Tancred promptly fell ill and, fearing his sickness was retribution for the seizure, ordered release of the corpse; he immediately recovered but it was only after this sequence of events had been twice repeated that Caradoc’s remains proceeded to St David’s.
[12] A few years later it was exhumed for transfer to a newly-built church in the settlement[note 7] and was reportedly found in a remarkable state of preservation, “uncorrupt and undefiled”.
The bones were subsequently placed in a casket and buried beneath the Cathedral’s floor, and in the 1920s a belief sprang up that they might be the remains of Saints David, Justinian of Ramsey Island and Caradoc.
[17] In May 1200 Gerald of Wales obtained from Pope Innocent III a letter commissioning inquiry into the qualifications for canonisation of “the Venerable Caradog whose honourable behaviour during his life and the miracles performed after his death have long since come to the notice of the Holy See”.
[18] In his Epistola ad capitulum Herfordense de libris a se scriptis, Gerald claimed to have written a Life of Saint Caradoc (Vita Sancti Karadoci).
[25] Folklore supplements ancient record in present-day portrayal of Caradoc and, though the saint was once a musician at the court of a Welsh prince, there is no authority for claiming he afterwards enjoyed celebrity as a harpist.