Dewi Sant, to give St David his Welsh name, was canonised by Pope Callixtus in 1120. Although it appears that St David owed more to the ascetics of the Egyptian desert than to the popes of Rome, being around about a millennium before the Reformation did nothing to distance him from the Catholic Church. This presented a problem for the predominantly Protestant Welsh. Not only were the Welsh Protestants, the Religious Census of 1851 showed that the majority were Nonconformists. Even as the saint’s day was growing in popularity during the 1890s, some speakers distanced David from his sainthood by stressing that he was commonly simply called Dewi sans the Sant.[2] This is not to say that all Nonconformists did not celebrate the day. It was just that many of them, like those who gathered at a Congregational Chapel at Bootle in 1895, chose to leave the saint out of the proceedings altogether.[3]