A Dictionary of Celtic Saints

Elizabeth Rees

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780752463056
• eBook ISBN: 9780752490175
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Throughout the Celtic world, in Britain, Ireland and France, the early Christian saints left a profound legacy to the history and culture of Northern Europe. This is the first ever dictionary of Celtic saints and is fully illustrated with photographs of where each saint lived and worked, ranging from ruined monasteries to holy wells, and from caves to Roman and Celtic forts. The reader is therefore drawn into the beautiful world which these men and women inhabited, while also being able to trace the history and legend surrounding these early British Christians. Easy to use, with an Introduction and maps to pinpoint the sites described in the text, A Dictionary of Celtic Saints will appeal to anyone interested in history, landscape or spirituality. Based on sound scholarship, it will also be helpful to students of civilisation and culture.

THE SAINTS

Adomnán

The ninth abbot of Iona, Adomnán (624–704) was born in his father’s homeland of Donegal, and came from the royal family of the northern Uí Néill. He first trained as a monk under Columba’s nephew, Ernán, and became abbot of Iona in 679 at the age of 55. In his early years as abbot, a bishop from Gaul named Arculf visited Iona when he was shipwrecked off the British coast on his way home from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Adomnán welcomed him and wrote a book about the holy places, using information from Arculf and other sources. Adomnán presented a copy of his book to the King of Northumbria; Bede drew upon this guidebook, which became widely used throughout Europe.

In 688 Adomnán went to the monastery of Jarrow in Northumbria, where he spent at least a year, and would have met Bede. In the four years after his return to Iona from Northumbria, Adomnán worked on his Life of Columba. In 692 he went back to Ireland, where he challenged his former friend, King Finnachta, over an annual payment of cattle tribute. Adomnán cursed King Finnachta, who died three years later. As the ruler of Columba’s monasteries in northern Ireland, Adomnán returned in 697 to take part in the synod of Birr. He proposed a law to exempt women, children and clergy from taking part in warfare; his new law also applied in Scotland. Penalties for transgressing it were to be paid to the Columban monasteries.

Adomnán was responsible for the oversight of all the Columban foundations and travelled extensively. On the Scottish west coast, he is honoured on North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, and a chapel was dedicated to him on the Isle of Bute, at Kildavanan. Adomnán spent time among the Picts, east of the Grampian Mountains; he maintained a good relationship with the Pictish royal house and is commemorated throughout Pictish lands, especially in Aberdeenshire, Banff and Forfar.

In his old age, Adomnán is said to have worked among the Picts in Glen Lyon, one of the Highland routes leading eastwards towards Loch Tay. Beside the River Lyon, near the Bridge of Balgie, is Milton Eonan (‘Mill town of Adomnán’). The nineteenth-century church at Innerwick, on the other side of the bridge, contains a Celtic hand bell, known as the Benrudh Bell; it is said to have belonged to Adomnán. It was lost for 200 years in the churchyard and then recovered. Eight miles to the east, where the valley broadens, the church of Dull is dedicated to him. There was a famous monastery here, possibly founded from Iona; it remained a centre of learning for many centuries. Closer to Innerwick is a small hill named Camusvrachan, traditionally the place where, when plague struck, Adomnán prayed with the people and sent them up to their summer shielings, away from the polluted river; the plague then ceased. Adomnán returned to Iona, and died shortly after his final visit to Ireland.

Wheel-headed cross, Old Kirk Lonan, Isle of Man.

In Ireland and Scotland, Adomnán’s name was shortened to ‘Onan’, and Old Kirk Lonan in Onchan parish on the Isle of Man is a medieval dedication to Adomnán. In the churchyard an impressive wheel-headed cross stands in its socket stone, probably in its original position; it is decorated entirely with interlacing, knots and plaitwork. It stands 1.5m high and measures 1m across; it dates from the ninth or tenth century.

Aidan

Aidan of Lindisfarne (d. 651) was largely responsible for introducing Christianity to Northumbria; our chief source of information about him is Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Writing in about 731, Bede was able to draw on the knowledge of elderly monks in his community when he describes Aidan’s work. Bede tells us how he arrived from Iona at the king’s request to convert his subjects:

When King Oswald asked for a Scottish bishop to preach the gospel to himself and his people, first another man was sent, an austere man who was unsuccessful. The English people ignored him, so he returned home, and reported to the assembled council that he had been unable to do any good among the people to whom he was sent to preach. They were uncivilised, stubborn and barbarous. (Bede, bk 3, ch. 5)

The monks gathered on Iona, discussed what to do, and an Irishman named Aidan suggested that the previous missionary bishop might have been too severe. The community therefore decided to consecrate Aidan as bishop and sent him to Northumbria instead.

Aidan arrived with 12 companions in 635. Bede describes Aidan with affection and admiration. He did not approve of the Irish bishop’s method of calculating Easter, but he praised his love of prayer and study, his gentleness and humility, and his care for the sick and the poor. Bede’s unusually lavish words may have been intended as a reproof for the lax bishops of his own time. He relates:

When [Aidan] arrived, at his request the king gave him the island of Lindisfarne for his bishop’s seat. Here the tide ebbs and flows twice a day, so the place is surrounded by the sea and becomes an island. Again twice a day, the shore becomes dry and is joined to the land … The bishop was not skilled at speaking English, and when he preached the gospel, it was most delightful to see the king himself interpreting God’s word to his commanders and ministers, for he had learnt to speak fluent Gaelic during his lengthy exile. (Bede, bk 3, ch. 3)

Oswald had spent his youth on Iona, when his uncle seized the throne in 616. King Oswald lived in a fortress on a rocky outcrop at Bamburgh, 15 miles south-east of the present town of Berwick-upon-Tweed. From Bamburgh, Aidan’s island monastery of Lindisfarne was just visible, 6 miles up the coast. Oswald ruled for only eight years; at the age of 38 he was killed in battle by the pagan King Penda of Mercia.

Lindisfarne priory ruins.

Bede tells us how Bishop Aidan lived: he preferred to travel on foot rather than on horseback, and engaged people in conversation. If they were pagan, he taught them about Christianity; if they were believers, he encouraged them. Aidan spent each Lent on the Farne Islands, about 2 miles offshore, for 40 days of solitude. He was on Farne when King Penda ravaged Northumbria and reached the royal stronghold at Bamburgh. His soldiers set fire to the fortress, and Aidan, seeing the flames from his cell on Farne, prayed until the wind changed direction and the flames engulfed Penda’s troops, who were forced to retreat. Among Aidan’s friends and followers were a number of women, including Oswald’s half-sister, Princess Ebbe, who became a nun at the double monastery for both men and women at Coldingham. Another of Aidan’s friends was Hilda, who became abbess at Whitby, where her double monastery became a centre of learning and the arts. Aidan became ill and died in his church at Bamburgh. He had been bishop of Northumbria for 16 years.

Little survives on Lindisfarne from Aidan’s day: the monastery was destroyed by Vikings in 793 and the monks left the island a generation later, dismantling their wooden church and taking its timbers with them. The surviving priory ruins date from the twelfth century. The nearby parish church of St Mary may stand on the site of a second Anglo-Saxon one. South-west of the priory is a rocky islet which Cuthbert used as a retreat. At low tide it is 10 minutes’ walk from the priory, but at high tide it is cut off from the mainland. There are remains of a medieval chapel on the island; its ruined walls are covered with pink thrift and yellow birdsfoot trefoil in summer. At its east end, a tall wooden cross marks the site of the altar. More fragmentary stones may be the remains of Cuthbert’s hermitage.

Asaph

Asaph was the grandson of Pabo Post Pryden, King of north Britain. He is known largely through a late Life of Kentigern, whose disciple he became as a youth. His dedications are chiefly found in Flintshire, where Llanasa may have been his base. When Kentigern left Wales and returned to Strathclyde in the late sixth century, we are told that he placed Asaph in charge of his monastery of Llanelwy, later named St Asaph. At a time when waterways were as important as roads, Llanelwy was in a key position at the junction of the rivers Elwy and Clwyd; it is near the north Welsh coast and 5 miles south of Rhyl, and was therefore also easily accessible from the sea.

According to Kentigern’s twelfth-century biographer, Jocelyn of Furness, he ‘went through the area, exploring different places, bearing in mind the air quality, the fertility of the soil, the suitability of the fields, pasture and woodland, and the other requirements for a monastic site’. Once the location was chosen, ‘some cleared the ground and levelled it, while others dug the foundations. They chopped down trees, transported them and hammered planks together to build a church following Kentigern’s plan, and made wooden polished furniture, for the British did not yet build in stone.’ In the twelfth century, the Normans made St Asaph the cathedral of a diocese centred upon the kingdom of Powys. The present building dates mainly from the thirteenth century; it is set on the hillside above the river valley.

The church at Llanasa, whose name means ‘church site of Asaph’, is dedicated to saints Asaph and Cyndeyrn; Cyndeyrn is Welsh for Kentigern. The village is in a sheltered valley near the north Welsh coast, 6 miles east of Rhyl. The present double-chambered church was built in the fifteenth century; an asymmetrical bell turret was constructed at this time. In 1540, when the monasteries were dissolved at the Reformation, two fine stained-glass windows were brought to Llanasa church from Basingwerk abbey in Holywell. The window over the altar depicts four saints, including Beuno dressed as a bishop. The saint to his right is Beuno’s niece, Winifred, with a scar round her throat, although she is named, probably incorrectly, as St Catherine. The church also contains the fourteenth-century tombstone of the father of Owain Glyndwr, the last Welsh fighting prince who rose against the English and died in 1416.

Bell turret, Llanasa.

Bega

Bega was a legendary seventh-century Irish nun; St Bees on the Cumbrian coast is named after her. Her cult may have arisen from the bracelet preserved until the twelfth century at her shrine in St Bees, that was said to have healing properties. Its Old English name, beag, may have suggested the saint’s name. She may or may not be the nun Begu (d. 660) of Hackness in north Yorkshire who, according to Bede, saw in a vision the death of Hilda, who founded the communities of both Hackness and Whitby. A hymn in a fifteenth-century book of hours in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, describes Bega as an Irish chieftain’s daughter who vowed chastity. She escaped before an arranged marriage and fled across the sea, landing at St Bees, where she founded a convent. There is a church dedicated to Bega beside Lake Bassenthwaite, at the foot of Skiddaw (see colour plate 23), and a church and holy well are named after her at Kilbucho in the Upper Tweed valley. She is also honoured at Dunbar on the coast, east of Edinburgh. Bega is the subject of the novel Credo by Melvyn Bragg, which conveys a lively impression of the society in which the Celtic saints lived and worked.

The Norman priory of St Bees on the Cumbrian coast was founded by monks from the great Benedictine abbey of St Mary’s, York. Norsemen arrived here in the eleventh century and called the settlement Kirkeby Begoc (‘the village near Bega’s church’). The fine west door of St Bees priory is decorated with chevrons and beak-heads of grotesque birds or beasts; it was built in about 1160. Inside, the nave pillars date from around 1220. There is an early Christian cross in the graveyard, opposite the great west door, and inside is the stump of a fine carved cross dating from the tenth or eleventh century. An hour’s walk westward around the cliffs brings one to Smuggler’s Cave in Fleswick Bay. According to legend, this is where Bega took shelter after reaching the Cumbrian coast in her flight from Ireland.

St Bega’s cave, Fleswick Bay.

Beuno

Beuno is one of the few known Celtic monks who lived and worked in north Wales. His Life survives only in a fourteenth-century translation of a lost Latin original, but some elements in it appear to be genuine. Beuno was born of a noble family in mid Wales in the second half of the sixth century. He was said to have trained for the priesthood in one of the great monasteries of south Wales, and returned to his father’s territory of Powys. According to Beuno’s Life, after his father’s death, a local prince gave Beuno the small settlement of Berriew, 5 miles south-west of present-day Welshpool, as a site for his first monastery. Its name (Aber Rhiw in Welsh) indicates that Berriew grew beside the River Rhiw where it flows into the Severn, near the Roman road to Wroxeter. Beuno’s church is set in a Celtic oval churchyard; it was rebuilt in the nineteenth century.

There is a monolith known as Maen Beuno (‘Beuno’s Stone’), a pointed Bronze Age standing stone in Dyffryn Lane, a mile from Berriew church. This perhaps marked the settlement’s ancient holy place and here, according to tradition, Beuno preached to the people at the beginning of his missionary career. To reach it, drive through Berriew, passing the Red Lion Inn on your right. At the junction with the A483, continue across the main road into Dyffryn Lane (unsigned), past a few houses and a layby. Beuno’s Stone is on the right, beside the hedge.

Beuno’s chest, Clynnog Fawr.

Beuno’s Life describes how he remained in Berriew for some years until he was frightened by the sight of a Saxon warrior patrolling on the far side of the Severn. In the face of the advancing English, he decided to move to safety, and travelled north-west through the Berwyn Mountains into the valley of the River Dee. Here there is a cluster of dedications to him around the village of Gwyddelwern, where he is said to have founded a community.

There is another group of churches and holy wells named after Beuno near the Flint coast. Beuno was said to be the uncle of Winifred and, according to her Life, he obtained land from her parents at Holywell, where he also built a church. His Life recounts how he later travelled 50 miles wes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• The Saints
• Maps
• Further Reading
• Plates
• Copyright