Here: Local Saints and the Sanctity of Place: Saints of the South West and Brittany

A trip to Cornwall and Devon (my homeland) produced another rich crop of local saints and churches with interesting dedications.

St Sidwell

St Sidwell is the patron saint of Exeter, my hometown, but is virtually unknown anywhere else. Her story is very much disputed. She may have been a Romano- British woman from the fourth or fifth century or an Anglo-Saxon from the eighth century, or may not have existed at all!

According to her legend, which is very ancient, she was murdered by one of the reapers in her father’s fields on her jealous stepmother’s orders. He beheaded her with a scythe, which her images often show her carrying. Her body lay undiscovered but for the next three nights a bright light was seen shining down on the spot where her body lay. Eventually, on the third night, someone went to investigate and found the body, with the head lying beside it, at which point, Sidwell stood up, picked up her head and walked several hundred yards to the place where the church dedicated to her was eventually built . There she lay down again, dead once more. In the morning, her body was found to be whole again, her head miraculously reattached. (There is a whole category of saints whose stories include them carrying their own heads. They are known as “cephalophores” – literally “head carriers”!)

St Sidwell: stained glass in St Sidwell's church

The remains of Sidwell's holy well, excavated in Well Street

Modern statue of St Sidwell in Sidwell Street, Exeter

St Sidwell’s church and the well which sprung up at the place she was killed became major sites of local pilgrimage. The church was destroyed in the Exeter Blitz , but a modern church was built on the site, which is now used mainly as a community centre. At the place where Sidwell was killed a spring is said to have miraculously arisen, and became a place of pilgrimage in its own right during the Middle Ages, along with the shrine in the church. The well was incorporated into the ancient water system of Exeter, but recent excavations uncovered the original medieval well head in a house in Well Street (a bit of a giveaway there!), in the basement of what is now a vegan café. A fake well has been incorporated into the design of the café upstairs, so Sidwell’s story lives on!

Christow and St Thomas Beckett Bridford, Devon
A stay at the Society of Ss Martha and Mary, a retreat centre for clergy near Exeter, gave me a chance to explore the surrounding countryside, on the edge of Dartmoor National Park. While the saints to which the local churches were dedicated weren’t local, there were interesting stories attached to them.

Devonshire hills!

St James' Christow, originaly dedicated to Christina

Old, half sized box pews.

The nearest church, now dedicated to St James, was in the village of Christow. The village got its name from its original dedication, to St Christina, a third century martyr from the Italian town of Bolsena. How did a village church in a remote village in Devon come to bear her name? No one knows for sure. Maybe devotion to her was brought back by Crusader knights who owned land around this area. At some point, however, probably at the Reformation, the dedication was dropped, Maybe this was because Bolsena was also the site of a miracle connected with the Roman Catholic belief that the bread of the Eucharist literally became flesh during the Mass, a doctrine which was rejected by the Reformers.
At some point the church was rededicated to St James, a New Testament saint, and therefore far safer as a patron, according to Reformed theology!

There is now no mention of Christina in the church, as far as I could see.

St Thomas Becket, Bridford
The next village to Christow is Bridford, high up a steep hill, very much off the beathen track. Its church is one of eleven in Devon dedicated to St Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury murdered by four knights in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, in response to King Henry II’s exasperated plea “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest.” It is said that one of the four knights, William de Tracy, came from the de Tracy family, who owned land in Devon, including Bridford, and that the church was built in reparation for the murder. Whether this is true or not is contested, but it is one of several churches whose dedication to this saint has survived in Devon, while many others elsewhere were rededicated at the Reformation and shrines, like the one at Canterbury completely destroyed, since Henry VIII had a great antipathy to his very popular cult, the cult of a man who had opposed a king.
While Bridford Church kept its dedication, it didn’t escape the Reformation unscathed. Its Tudor rood screen, was literally defaced – the carved saints which adorn it have all had their faces hacked off.

St Thomas Beckett, Bridford

A defaced saint on the Tudor rood screen

The spiral staircase leading to the top of the rood screen.
Candles would have been lit on top of the screen around the rood (the cross), before the Reformation.

A patchwork of old glass, probably part of that destroyed at the Reformation.

St Materiana, Tintagel
Wandering on to North Cornwall, we investigated some of the many local saints there. When the
pagan Anglo-Saxons invaded Engand in the fifth century, the resident Romano-British inhabitants, among whom Christianity had taken root during the Roman occupation, were pushed to the fringes of the British Isles, to Wales, Ireland, the North and the South West. Their form of Christianity developed semi-independently of the Christianity of Rome and Southern Europe. There were many links between what we would now call the “Celtic” countries on the Western edge of Europe, however, and the sea was a highway for missionaries as well as traders. What might seem like out of the way places to us now were on busy and well connected trade routes at the time.

St Materiana is said to have been a princess from Gwent in Wales, the eldest of three daughters of the fifth century King Vortimer the Blessed, who, after her father's death, ruled over Gwent with her husband Prince Ynyr. She took refuge in Cornwall when Gwent was attacked, and founded a convent at nearby Boscastle, bringing Christian faith with her to Cornwall.

Tintagel Castle was closed when we were there, because they were building a new
bridge, but the views were still stunning.

St Materiana

St Materiana's church, Tintagel

St Enodoc

One of the oddest churches we visited, was the little church of St Enodoc, near Padstow. It is now situated in the middle of a golf course, and was, for many years, almost entirely swamped by sand dunes. It is said that the vicar had to be lowered in through a hole in the roof to take the annual service which was required so that it was legally permitted to collect tithes.
It is supposedly on the site of a hermitage in which St Enodoc lived, but absolutely nothing is known about this saint, not even Enodoc's gender, though the balance of opinion seems to be that Enodoc was female, and may have been Welsh, and called Qendydd . It would not have been unusual in the early Middle Ages for a hermit to have chosen a spot like this. Hermits saw themselves as spiritual warriors, called to isolated, inhospitable places, where they could do battle with the spiritual forces, and with themselves, so that they could grow closer to God.
It is the last resting place of the poet Sir John Betjemen.
When we visited a wedding rehearsal was in progress, and from the list of weddings posted in the porch, it looked like a popular spot!
It is also handy for a quick round of golf after church!

St Enodoc's church

Decorated for a wedding

The church is surrounded by sand dunes.

Sir John Betjemen's grave

BRETON SAINTS
St Goustan
Our final trip during my Sabbatical took us on our annual musical holiday to the seaside town of Le Croisic, now in the Loire Atlantique department of France, but really part of Brittany.

St Goustan in a window in Notre Dame de Pitie, Le Croisic

Le Croisic’s patron saint has a colourful story. Goustan was born in the late 10th century in Cornwall, where he is known as Gulstan. He was captured by pirates, and became a pirate himself – if you can’t beat them, join them! This piratical lifestyle came to an end, however, when he injured his foot, and was abandoned to fend for himself by his so called colleagues on the island of Ouessant, off the coast of Brittany. His legend says that he survived by catching a large fish. Each day he ate a portion of it, but miraculously, the next morning the fish would be whole again. He is often pictured carrying a fish. He was rescued and healed by St Felix of Rhuys, bishop of Nantes, who had gone to live as a hermit on Oessant. Goustan was so impressed by Felix that he became a Christian and eventually a monk. He was sent on a missionary trip by boat down the coast of France, but was shipwrecked off the coast of Le Croisic. He struggled to shore, and, it is said that when he reached the rocks, he lay down to rest, and the granite softened to form a bed for him. The people of Le Croisic were converted through his ministry, and built a small chapel, the first place of worship in Le Croisic, which enclosed the rock on which he had lain, which still bore the imprint of his body. The chapel is now in private hands, and inaccessible to the general public, but it can be seen over the wall!

St Goustan's chapel, Le Croisic

St Guénolé ( Winwalloe or Gwenole 460 – 532)

A delicious speciality of the area is the range of biscuits produced at the local biscuiterie of Saint- Guénolé. But who was Saint Guénolé? He was a monk, called Winwalloe in English and Gwenole in Breton, who founded an abbey at the very tip of Brittany, just south of Breste at Landévennec.

The place where death was impossible

Landévennec. Abbey ruins
Par Rundvald — Travail personnel, CC BY-SA 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46453423

According to the earliest life of St Guénolé , written by Wrdisten, his monastery at was such a holy place that spring came early there, and autumn late “It is a kind of paradise prepared by God for his servants, and, as it is rich in the fruits of the earth, so it is rich in heavenly fruits.” As St Guénolé and the first monks grew old, however, they came across a problem; they were unable to die.This was a great inconvenience, as they simply grew older and older and “longed to be released from the their crumbling frame of clay”. In a vision, they discovered why. There was an opening in heaven of
exactly the same size as the monastery. Somehow the monastery was both in earth and heaven, in time and in eternity, so that the normal rules of earthly time could not function. The monks suggested to the Abbot that the only solution was to pull down the monastery and move it. He agreed, and the monastery was moved a little nearer the shore. The monks were able to die, but only, said Wrdisten, of old age!
Of course, death is now assured if you eat enough of St Guénolé’s biscuits, which are delicious, but probably not terribly good for your health…

St Philbert of Noirmoutier c. 608–684
The Ile de Noirmoutier lies on the Atlantic coast south of Le Croisic, in the Vendée. It is connected to the mainland by a causeway at low tide, but most of the time must be reached by a bridge.

It is now largely a holiday island, with many beautiful beaches, but it was once the site of a monastery founded by St Philbert . He was born into a noble family, and educated by St Oeun or Audoin. He founded an abbey at Jumièges, but seems to have fallen out of favour with St Ouen and the king, and was exiled to Noirmoutier, but there founded another abbey.

When he died he was initially buried at Noirmoutier, but in 836 the monks abandoned the abbey in the face of Viking raids - Noirmoutier is in a key strategic position and has been invaded many times. They took Philberts body with them to Tournus, in Saône-et-Loire. Some of his vertebrae have now been returned to Noirmoutier, and are displayed in the church which stands next to the castle there. Philbert gives his name to the Filbert nut, a species of hazelnut, which ripens around August 20, his feast day.