History

The Christian foundation at St Asaph dates to the 6th century, when a church was established here by Saint Kentigern, a missionary bishop later associated with Glasgow. Tradition holds that Kentigern’s disciple Asa — venerated as Saint Asaph, and said to be a grandson of the Welsh nobleman Pabo Post Prydain — succeeded him and gave the diocese its lasting name. Little is known in detail of the earliest buildings on the site.

The cathedral’s medieval fortunes were shaped by Wales’s wars with the English crown. The stone cathedral standing in the 13th century was burned by soldiers of Edward I during the Second Welsh War in 1282, and a new building was begun on the same site soon after — the core of the structure visitors see today. Further damage came during the rebellion of Owain Glyndŵr in the early 15th century, after which the cathedral reportedly stood in a state of disrepair for roughly seventy years before adequate repairs were carried out.

St Asaph’s later history is closely tied to the Welsh Bible. William Morgan, appointed Bishop of St Asaph, completed the first full translation of the scriptures into Welsh from the original Greek and Hebrew, published in 1588 — a translation that helped secure the survival of the Welsh language into the modern era. In 1930, a subterranean stream caused serious subsidence beneath the tower, prompting urgent engineering repairs finished by 1935, and the cathedral underwent further restoration through the Victorian period and into the 20th century.