The legend of Saint Gwen of Brittany and Dorset

The church of Whitchurch-Canonicorum in Dorset is dedicated to Saint-Candida (a.k.a Saint-Wite). Below the east window there is an altar tomb with three openings which allowed devotees to reach inside the shrine in the hope of a miraculous cure for whatever ailed them. On the top of this there used to be a 14th century coffin built into a slab of local marble.

When the local vicar opened it in 1848 he found a stone box. Inside the stone box he discovered a Saint's relics. When the coffin was examined again in 1899 another vicar found teeth, a lot of  bones resembling those of small, forty year old woman and an inscription:

Here lie the relics of Saint Wite

What was even more extrordinary about this find was that all relics such as these had been destroyed during the Protestant Reformation. The only other collection of saint's remains still extant were those of St Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. Perhaps this shrine looked more like a tomb then a reliquary and that is what saved the bones.
But who did bones belong to? And who was this Saint-Wite or Saint Candida? 

Sabine Baring-Gould, writing in 1910-11, thought Saint-Gwen, a 5th century Breton saint, was the answer to both questions. So how did the relics of a Breton saint end up in a Dorset Church?

Saint-Gwen (Gwen Teirbron) was born in Brittany. Her name comes from  Breton: gwen(n)/wenn ‘white’, ‘blessed’ [Old Cornish: guyn; Welsh: gwyn]. In France,  she is also known as Sainte-Blanche or Sainte-Candide. 

Her grandfather was Audren (Aldroen) of Brittany, a 5th century king of Brittany, who lived at Châtelaudren, in the castle he had built and which was named after him. Her father, Emyr Llydaw, a Breton Chief, still lived there and this was where Gwen was born. 

Saint Cadfan

She first married Eneas Lydewig in Brittany and had her first son, Saint Cadfan.  After her husband died she married Brychan (Fracan), cousin of Cador (Cado), Duke of Cornwall, and migrated with him back to Brittany.

They had two children, Saint-Jacut (see Saint-Jacut of Brittany)and Saint Guethenoc. After arriving in Brittany, they had two more, Saint-Winwaloe (who founded the Abbey at Landévennec) and Saint-Clervie. Saint-Gwen was called Teirbron, the 'three-breasted', because she had been twice married and had children from two husbands.

Her ‘royal’ connections in Brittany allowed her to make a claim for tribal land which she enclosed  at Pléguien, just north of Châtelaudren and northwest of her husband's plou ('parish') at Ploufragan.

Gwen's name appears in three other settlements: at Saint-Guen near Mur-de-Bretagne (in Central Brittany) and at Lesguen (where Fracan built a castle) in the parish of Plouguin (near Brest in the far west) - twenty-nine hours apart by foot (according to Google). 

According to this version of the legend Saint-Gwen's connections with Dorset are largely posthumous: it was only after her death that her remains were transported to Dorset and all because of the Vikings.

In the  9th and 10th centuries, Breton princes and priests fled  in the wake of Viking invasions. They carried with them Saints' relics for safe-keeping. Some went inland, but many others went across the sea to England. The English kings welcomed them and sent the refugees and their relics to a selection of British-speaking places in the southwest. Inscriptions with Breton names have been found in Dorset -evidence of how far east the refugees finally settled with their relics.

Gwen is 'white' in English and it is possible that she becomes Saint-Wite in England, just as she is  Saint-Blanche in France. And she is also Saint Candida at Whitchurch, a  name that was first given to her in Brittany. There must be a connection here.

 

  Saint-Wite at Whitchurch

.At Saint-Cast in Cotes d'Armor, Sainte Blanche can be found in chapel overlooking the town of Saint-Jacut on the other side of the bay. The streets surrounding the chapel are appropriately called Santez Gwen and rues Fragan, Gwenole and Guethenoc

Chapelle Saint-Blanche, Rue Fragan, St. Cast

According to a Breton legend Saint-Gwen was carried off by pirates to England. She managed to escape by  climbing down the side of the ship, but not before one of the pirates with an axe had chopped off two of her fingers.  The myth may have been told to symbolise the removal of her relics to England. At Whitchurch,  interestingly, there are sculptures of both a ship and an axe both of which seem to recall this particular legend -the legend of Saint-Guen of Brittany and Dorset.

The ship and the axe at Whitchurch