03 — The Date Problem
The flagship source-critical study of this collection. No source fixes the year of Alban’s martyrdom, and the witnesses disagree about the persecuting emperor: Bede places it under Diocletian (303/304); Gildas assigns it to the same persecution but flags his own dating with “as we conjecture” — and the contemporary testimony of Lactantius and Eusebius that Constantius Chlorus killed no Christians in the West undermines that placement; the Turin manuscript of the Passio Albani names the emperor “Severus,” on which John Morris built a case for c. 209; and others have argued for Decius or Valerian in the 250s. The scholarly spread covers nearly a century. Per METHODOLOGY §4.2 this section is strictly evidential: all positions and proponents named, ranges honoured, nothing adjudicated.
Tradition: Western (pre-Schism, Roman Britain)
This is the problem the whole collection is organized around, treated in two files. The first lays out the evidence itself, piece by piece: what each source actually says about when Alban died, and what independent facts (above all the tetrarchic government of Britain) bear on each option. The second maps the scholarship: Morris’s Severan thesis, Frend’s and Thomas’s mid-third-century readings, Sharpe’s textual findings and caution, the defenders of the traditional Diocletianic date, and the skeptical positions — ending with the one fixed point, the feast of 22 June, which no dating argument touches.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| the-evidence.md | The dossier: Bede’s Diocletianic placement; Gildas’s ut conicimus; the Constantius Chlorus problem (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 15.7); the Turin Passio’s “Severus”; the Decian/Valerianic possibility; what each piece can and cannot bear. |
| the-scholarly-positions.md | The spread with proponents: Morris (c. 209), Frend and Thomas (250s), the traditional 303/304 and its defenders, Sharpe’s textual argument, the agnostic conclusion — and the independence of the 22 June feast from the whole question. |
See Also
- Verulamium and the Persecutions — the persecution chronology presupposed here
- The Earliest Witnesses — the texts whose readings the debate turns on
- The Attestation Ledger — the dating problem within the full source inventory
- METHODOLOGY.md — §4.2, the both-sides rule governing this section
References
- Bede. Historia ecclesiastica I.6–7, ed. Colgrave and Mynors (Oxford, 1969).
- Gildas. De excidio Britanniae 9–11, ed. and trans. Winterbottom (Phillimore, 1978).
- Lactantius. De mortibus persecutorum 15.7, ed. and trans. Creed (Oxford, 1984).
- Meyer, Wilhelm (ed.). Die Legende des h. Albanus (Göttingen, 1904); Sharpe, “The Late Antique Passion of St Alban,” in Alban and St Albans (Maney, 2001), 30–37.
- Morris, John. “The Date of Saint Alban.” Hertfordshire Archaeology 1 (1968): 1–8.
- Frend, W. H. C., in Barley and Hanson (eds.), Christianity in Britain, 300–700 (Leicester, 1968); Thomas, Christianity in Roman Britain to AD 500 (Batsford, 1981).