caption canonized_date feast_day imagesize title patronage image article_title name
ss merthyr dyfan & nbsp ; dyfan & teilo 's in pre-congregation usually unobserved 300px bishop & `` martyr '' merthyr dyfan -lrb- mistakenly -rrb- llandyfan -lrb- mistakenly -rrb- merthyr dyfan parish church.jpg deruvian
 saint deruvian
deruvian

deruvian -lrb- -rrb- , also known by several other names including damian , was a possibly legendary 2nd-century 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 fagan , he was sometimes reckoned as the apostle of britain .
king lucius 's letter -lrb- in most accounts , to pope eleutherius -rrb- 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 glastonbury abbey 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 was 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 .
probably mistakenly , deruvian 's story has been given to the obscure st dyfan thought to have been the namesake of merthyr dyfan and llandyfan .
his feast day does not appear in any medieval welsh calendar of the saints and is not presently observed by the anglican , catholic , or orthodox churches in wales .
