This study considers the concept of spiritual martyrdom as it came via the ‘Desert Fathers of Africa, via the Church in Gaul to Wales and Ireland
It is possible Tegfedd’s quiet estate(podum,villa), where the consecrated widow retired to end her days seeking salvation in penance, was polluted by an attack by bandits, possibly Saxons only out of greed for the treasures which may have been in her chapel. Her spiritual martyrdom of tears-her ‘glas’ or blue martyrdom thus became a ‘red(bloody)’ martyrdom, when her life was taken . It has been claimed by Bradney that her body was kept as a relic, as a bone was found walled up, when the Church was restored.
St Derfel, seems to have spent most of his life and a charismatic and powerful soldier. It should be remembered he and his brothers were taught by one of the greatest Christian abbots in Wales, St Illtyd at Llantwit Major. He may indeed have been a warrior monk, or priest, and since Illtyd himself had been both of Breton extraction and a soldier and may have encouraged Derfel to literally fight the pagans, who had destroyed all churches in their wake in the Borderlands of Wales. The story of Camlan is well known, although its location is uncertain. Tristran Grey Hulse believes it took place at North Wales at the River Camlan in Eifionydd, now part of Gwynedd. We know the story of Gwynhwyfar’s adultery, not with Geoffrey’s fanciful French ‘Lancelot’, but his own nephew, (or possibly even own son,) Medrot.(Meuddredd or Mordred) The Battle of Camlan seems to have been victorious, but nothing was solved. No vita has survived for Derfel, but he appears in the Bonedd ,and the bards kept his deeds in memory with stirring poems about his ‘red hand’..There is a reference to ‘Dorfil’ in the hills around Camlan, which may have been a residence, and of course he did spend time in Llandderfel, Merionethshire, North Wales, but we have no way of knowing the sequence of the chronology of his life.