The Twelfth-Century Norman Foundation
The remains of buildings that can be seen on the site today belong to the monastery founded early in the twelfth century by Robert fitz Martin, the Anglo-Norman lord of Cemais. Cemais included a large part of the Preseli area and was at that period somewhat insecurely held by the fitz Martin family from their castle at Nevern.
To the Anglo-Normans the pre-Conquest monasteries of Wales, with their strange customs and hereditary monks, epitomized all the defects which the newly reformed French orders had been created to put right. It is not surprising, therefore, to find Robert fitz Martin, within a few years of succeeding to his lordship, replacing the ancient monastery of Llandudoch with a community drawn from one of the new orders. In order to accomplish this, Robert had first to visit the mother abbey of Tiron (Eure-et-Loir) in northern France. He did this in 1113, returning with thirteen monks and a prior and was thus able to found a priory at St Dogmaels, presumably on the site of the old monastery. Five years later he visited Tiron once again and came back with another thirteen monks and with permission to raise the priory to the status of an abbey. At about the same time a small priory of Benedictine monks was founded two mile (3.2km) away on the opposite bank of the Teifi at Cardigan. This is today Cardigan's small hospital alongside the new by-pass bridge.
St Dogmaels appears to have been formally established as an abbey on 10th September 1120, with the enthronement of Fulchard as the first abbot, by the bishop of St Davids. It remained a daughter house of Tiron, subject to the jurisdiction of the mother house, with the ties between the two clearly defined. Every three years, the abbot of St Dogmaels had to cross the English Channel to Tiron at the feast of Pentecost, "for the sake of strengthening and confirming our religion and of visiting the brethren". St Dogmael's abbey continued to owe its allegiance to the mother house at least until the beginning of the 16th century and probably up until its dissolution in the 1530s.(CADW 1992)
