Cadoc

According to his Vita (composed at Llancarfan, attributed to Lifris shortly before 1086), Cadoc was born c. 497 or earlier; the Vita narrates preternatural portents surrounding his birth (strange lights, cellars filled with food), an angelic announcement and the summoning of the hermit Meuthi to baptize and teach him. The Vita presents these events as signs marking him out for a consecrated religious career; the account also relates a period of study in Ireland and training under a rhetorician from Italy prior to his monastic foundations.

Surviving sources contain no sustained physical or iconographic description of Cadoc. Hagiography emphasizes miraculous signs tied to his life (lights at his birth; a well springing up at his baptism that thereafter flowed with wine and milk) rather than corporeal detail.

The Vita attributes to Cadoc a range of hagiographical miraculous activities: portentous signs surrounding his birth, the miraculous springing of a holy well for his baptism, and thaumaturgical interventions (for example, an episode in which a pursuing wild boar 'miraculously disappeared' after threatening him). He is credited by tradition with founding and endowing a monastery and college at Llancarfan, forming monks and teachers (Illtud is said to have studied under him in one account), and establishing chapels and churches across Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and Scotland. Local tradition in Brittany records invocation of Cadoc for cures (explicitly noted at Gouesnac'h for curing the deaf). These capacities are presented in the sources as ecclesiastical and miracle-working functions rather than as folkloric magical arts described in ritual manuals.