In 1081, William the Conqueror visited St Davids to pray, and thus recognised it as a holy and respected place.

In 1365, Bishop Adam Houghton and John of Gaunt began to build St Mary's College and a chantry.

In 1540, the body of Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond and father of Henry VII, was brought to be entombed in front of the high altar from the dissolved Greyfriars' Priory in Carmarthen.

The establishment of the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell greatly affected many cathedrals and churches, and was particularly felt in St Davids.

There is a pronounced slope to the floor of the cathedral, amounting to a height difference of nearly four metres between the east and west ends, and the building is still shifting minutely.

[4] The Welsh architect John Nash was commissioned to restore the west front in 1793 to repair the damage done two hundred years previously.

Eclectic in style (with Gothic and Perpendicular characteristics – the latter attributed partly to his destruction of the windows of the chapel of St Mary's College in order to reuse that tracery for his west front), his work soon proved to be substandard (as had his previous work on the chapter house).

It was dedicated by Archbishop Edwin Morris in 1966 and the inaugural event was a poetry reading by the poet R. S. Thomas, who served as a vicar in the Bangor diocese.

[citation needed] First, the British Government decided to reinstate the title of "city" to St Davids and this was formally conferred by Queen Elizabeth II on 1 June 1995.

The St Davids Cathedral Festival runs through the Whitsun school holiday each year and showcases some of the world's best performers.

Sarah Caroline Rowland Jones (born 8 September 1959, Stoke-on-Trent)[19] was instituted as Dean of St Davids on 5 May 2018.

[22] She served in South Africa, 2003–2013 (where she also married Justus Marcus, late Regional Bishop of Saldanha Bay, Diocese of Cape Town), then returned to Wales as Priest-in-Charge of St John the Baptist Church, Cardiff until her appointment to the Deanery.

[19] Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis) in the 13th century relates the strange story of a marble footbridge leading from the church over the Alun rivulet in St Davids.

The effort of speech had caused it to break, despite its size of ten feet in length, six in breadth and one in thickness.

This bridge was worn smooth due to its age and the thousands of people who had walked over it, however the superstition was so great that corpses were no longer carried over it.

[24][25] Another legend is that Merlin had prophesied the death on Llechllafar of an English king, conqueror of Ireland, who had been injured by a man with a red hand.

King Henry II, whilst on a pilgrimage to Saint Davids, having come over from Ireland, heard of the prophecy and crossed Llechllafar without ill effect.