Fagan

Fagan (; ), also known by other names including Fugatius, was a legendary 2nd-century Welsh bishop and saint, said to have been sent by the pope to answer King Lucius's request for baptism and conversion to Christianity. Together with his companion St Deruvian, he was sometimes reckoned as the apostle of Britain.

King Lucius's letter (in most accounts, to Pope Eleutherius) may represent earlier traditions but does not appear in surviving sources before the 6th century; the names of the bishops sent to him does not appear in sources older than the early 12th century, when their story was used to support the independence of the bishops of St Davids in Wales and the antiquity of the abbey at Glastonbury in England. The story became widely known following its appearance in Geoffrey of Monmouth's pseudohistorical History of the Kings of Britain. This was influential for centuries and its account of SS Fagan and Deruvian were used during the English Reformation to support the claims of both the Catholics and Protestants. Geoffrey's account is now considered wholly implausible, but Christianity was well-established in Roman Britain by the third century. Some scholars therefore argue the stories preserve a more modest account of the conversion of a Romano-British chieftain, possibly by Roman emissaries by these names.

Fagan is the patron saint of a number of churches, and gives his name to the village St Fagans near Cardiff, now the home of a Welsh National History Museum. His feast day does not appear in any medieval Welsh calendar of the saints and is not observed by the Anglican, Catholic, or Orthodox churches in Wales.

Name St Fagan's name appears as "Phagan" in William of Malmesbury's work On the Antiquity of the Glastonbury Church, Wade-Evans proposed that the name was a confusion with the Italo-British rhetorician Bachan or Pachan who appears in the life of Saint Cadoc.

The entry on Pope Eleutherius in Petrus de Natalibus's late 14th-century collection of saints' lives gives Fagan's name as "Fugatius", an emendation subsequently copied by Platina and many others. These names were further misspelled in later sources in a variety of ways. or by the 9th-century History of the Britons traditionally credited to Nennius. William of Malmesbury's 'third edition' of the Deeds of the Kings of the English records of the priests sent to Lucius that "the rust of antiquity may have obliterated their names".

However, the work On the Antiquity of the Glastonbury Church, initially written by William between 1129 and 1139, and Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain both include the names of Fagan and his companion. A contemporaneous or even earlier source is the letter of the convent of St David's to Pope Honorius II preserved in Gerald of Wales's Book of Invectives which appears to date from the 1120s. Geoffrey claimed to have derived his own account from a 6th-century treatise by St Gildas on "the victory of Aurelius Ambrosius"; Baring-Gould, Rees, and Mullins modify this somewhat: while admitting misinformation in the account of Geoffrey, they suggest that the names of Fagan and his companions were probably genuine but that—in the absence of more detailed surviving records—they had been taken up and added to the legendary accounts of King Lucius. William of Malmesbury's cautious account in the Deeds of the Kings of the English allows that St Philip may have reached the island but quickly leaves such "vain imaginations" in favor of praising the ancient wattle chapel of St Mary erected by Pope Eleutherius's nameless missionaries, which he called "the oldest I am acquainted with in England". The two accounts were later combined, so that Elfan and "Medwy" are sent off and honored in Rome and then return with Fagan and Deruvian. Fagan and Dyfan were also sometimes credited with the initial establishment at Congresbury, which was removed in 721 to Tydenton (present-day Wells). "Dyfan" is then made the first bishop of Llandaff and the martyr at Merthyr Dyfan. Fagan is then made his successor at Llandaff. (Baring-Gould refers to the pair as chorepiscopi.) Bartrum replied such dedications must be assumed to post-date Geoffrey's popularity. (This is now a Grade II* listed building.) The 16th-century antiquarian John Leland recorded in his travel notebooks that a nearby chapel remained dedicated to Fagan and was sometimes also used as the parish church, but this was in ruins by the time of the English Civil War a century later.

St Fagan's Church in the village of Trecynon near Aberdare in Glamorgan was a new foundation erected from 1851 to 1853. It was destroyed by fire in 1856. which had been dedicated to St John the Baptist prior to the completion of St Elvan's in 1852.

The festival of St Fagan does not appear in any surviving medieval Welsh calendar of the saints, Late sources place it on 3 January (with St Dyfan) at Glastonbury; on 8 August; although in fact St Fagan's Day is currently unobserved by any of the major denominations of Wales. His feast day is listed, with a link, under Wikipedia's Eastern Orthodox Liturgics for May 26.