This series introduces readers to the saints who lived in England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland before 1054. In that year, the Great Schism marked the lasting breach between Rome and the Orthodox East, and the unity of the first-millennium Church was grievously broken.
For the first thousand years of Christian history, the Church in these islands belonged to the same Orthodox tradition as the rest of the Christian world. We know the names and feast days of at least 950 holy men and women from Britain and Ireland. Most were honoured locally or regionally; many became known far beyond their homelands. They were rich and poor, simple and learned: scholars and theologians, martyrs and hermits, abbots and abbesses, priests and bishops, kings and queens, sailors and preachers, nuns, consecrated virgins and ordinary faithful Christians.
Not all the saints of Britain and Ireland were British or Irish by birth. Many came from elsewhere. In the same way, many missionaries and "enlighteners" left these islands for other parts of Europe, where they preached the Gospel and founded monasteries.
The saints served the Lord in many ways. Some were missionaries who brought the light of Christ to new peoples and regions. They founded churches and monasteries, raised crosses, and gathered communities of prayer. Devotional tradition also remembers healing springs associated with their prayers. Many travelled abroad to preach in other lands. Large parts of what are now Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands and Portugal received the Christian faith through Irish and English missionaries, who founded monasteries, schools and centres of learning across Europe.
Others gave themselves to the poor, the hungry and the sick. They showed mercy in practical ways, founding hospitals, shelters and places of hospitality. In the Middle Ages, the Church played a central part in learning, medicine and charity, and many of the first hospitals, universities and almshouses grew from Christian foundations.
Many saints devoted themselves to teaching. They founded schools, copied manuscripts, wrote chronicles and composed the lives of holy men and women. They also created works of sacred art, illuminated manuscripts and icons. Among them were theologians, poets, writers and musicians, as well as students of geography, mathematics and astronomy.
Others gave their lives wholly to prayer. They lived in forests and marshes, on bare rocks, in caves, in mountains and on remote islands. Some dwelt in tiny beehive cells, bearing with harsh conditions for the sake of Christ.
Many holy places connected with these saints still stand across Britain, Ireland and the surrounding islands, more than a thousand years later. There are great cathedrals, abbeys and churches; ruined monasteries and small chapels; hermits' cells, holy wells, tombs, relics, ancient crosses and caves of prayer. These places still carry a deep sense of holiness, shaped by the prayers of generations.
Orthodox Christians began to honour these saints more widely again in the twentieth century, thanks in large part to the work of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia and especially to St John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco. Today they are venerated by Orthodox Christians of many jurisdictions throughout the world. Pilgrims travel from many countries to the holy places of Britain and Ireland. Icons are painted, prayers, services and akathists are written, and the lives of the saints are published. Orthodox parishes are dedicated to them, and the faithful give their children their names at baptism.
In the first century after the birth of Christ there was no England, but there was Britain, inhabited by Celtic peoples, including the Britons. According to ancient Christian tradition, several apostles and close disciples of the Lord came to Britain: Aristobulus of the Seventy, Simon the Zealot, the chief apostles Peter and Paul, and the righteous Joseph of Arimathea. The faith also spread through Roman soldiers, merchants and travellers.
Roman rule in Britain lasted from AD 43 to 410. Ireland, where Celtic peoples, including the Scots, lived, remained outside the Roman Empire. During the Roman period, Christianity spread slowly but took root. Early Christian writers, including Tertullian, Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, St Dorotheus of Tyre, Blessed Theodoret of Cyrrhus and St Symeon Metaphrastes, refer to apostolic preaching in Britain or to the early presence of the Church there.
Under the Emperor Diocletian, Britain saw its first martyrs. Soon afterwards, St Constantine the Great, Equal-to-the-Apostles, was proclaimed emperor in York in 306. Tradition also links his mother, St Helen, Equal-to-the-Apostles, with Britain and with early Christian foundations at Colchester, the first capital of Roman Britain, and Abingdon. After Constantine, the Church in Britain flourished for a time. British bishops took part in councils at Arles, Serdica – now Sofia – and Rimini.
Between about 450 and the early seventh century, pagan Germanic peoples – Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians – crossed the sea and conquered much of Britain. Some Britons were killed, some were absorbed, and others were driven westwards into Wales and Cornwall. The Anglo-Saxons established several kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Wessex and Sussex. The Angles eventually gave their name to England.
Some Britons crossed to Armorica, in north-western Gaul, and founded the land later known as Brittany, where Celtic Christianity also flourished. In the far south-west of Britain, the native Cornish preserved the kingdom of Dumnonia, covering much of modern Cornwall and Devon.
During the seventh century, the light of Christ reached the English kingdoms one by one. The work came from two directions: from Irish missionaries in the north, and from St Augustine of Canterbury, a disciple of St Gregory the Great, who came from Rome. By the end of the eighth century, England had entered a golden age of Christian culture, monastic life and learning. Saints shone forth in every region. Monasteries were founded in great numbers, and the people embraced a vigorous and deeply rooted faith. Early England drew first on the traditions of Rome and Gaul, and then powerfully on Ireland.
Ireland received the Orthodox faith in the fifth century, above all through St Patrick, a Briton who had studied in Gaul, including at Lérins, and through other saints. Church life, sacred art, monasticism and missionary work flourished there for centuries. Ireland gave the Church hundreds of servants of God and became known as the "island of saints and scholars". The Celtic saints were marked by hospitality, wisdom and a tender love for creation. They lived simply and practised strict self-denial, yet they also carried a strong spirit of adventure and a readiness to travel for Christ.
Holy life also blossomed in Wales – Cymru in Welsh – and in Scotland from the fifth to the seventh centuries. Wales was then home to several Celtic kingdoms. Scotland was inhabited by Picts and by Irish Scots, who founded the kingdom of Dalriada in the north-west. These lands too gave the Church hundreds of saints.
The churches of Wales and Ireland drew deep inspiration from the Egyptian Desert Fathers and from the monastic traditions of Syria and Palestine. This ascetic spirit also shaped Dumnonia, including modern Cornwall. That is one reason why so many Cornish towns and villages still bear the names of local saints. The Church in Scotland developed in close connection with Ireland and shared much of its monastic character.
From the early eighth century, England and other parts of Britain sent missionaries to mainland Europe. Many Irish monks also set out across the sea in simple boats, seeking to "wander for Christ's sake". They reached the Hebrides, Orkney, the Faroe Islands and Iceland; Irish monks appear to have been among the first settlers there. Later traditions even speak of voyages as far as North America.
The ninth century brought repeated Viking raids. Scandinavian raiders plundered monasteries, killed monks and nuns, and destroyed what they could not carry away. Christian life suffered badly. In the tenth century, after Alfred the Great and his successors helped to unite England, a renewed "silver age" of Christian life began. Yet further Viking invasions in the late tenth and eleventh centuries weakened the country and prepared the way for the Norman Conquest of 1066.
After the conquest, the older Anglo-Celtic Christian civilisation gradually faded. England was drawn more firmly into the Latin West. The Normans brought a new ruling class, a feudal social order, the French language of the court, and a new architectural style. In church life too, older local traditions were increasingly reshaped by the reforms and structures of medieval Roman Catholicism.
England venerates the Great Martyr George the Trophy-Bearer as its patron saint; its second patron is the holy King Edmund the Martyr. Scotland's patron is the Apostle Andrew the First-Called. Relics associated with him were kept from the fourth century at St Andrews, and today a small relic rests in Westminster Cathedral in London. Wales honours St David of Menevia as its patron, and Ireland honours St Patrick, Equal-to-the-Apostles.
The early saints of Britain and Ireland left their names across the landscape: in towns and villages, roads and schools, hospitals and churches, bays and mountains. Their memory remains woven into the history and geography of these islands.
On 21 August 2007, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church blessed the veneration of all the saints who shone forth in the British Isles and Ireland. It also established an annual feast in their honour.
The commemoration of all the saints of Britain and Ireland is now celebrated on the third Sunday after Pentecost. The Synod decreed that their names would be added to the calendar of the Russian Orthodox Church once their lives, works and the history of their veneration had been studied.
By Dmitry Lapa
