Bede and the Protomartyr

Bede did not merely record Alban’s story; he installed it — deliberately, near the head of the Historia ecclesiastica — as the fountainhead of insular Christianity, sealing it with a sixth-century Gallic poet’s testimony that “fruitful Britain brings forth Alban the illustrious” (Albanum egregium fecunda Britannia profert, Venantius Fortunatus, Carmina 8.3.155, quoted at HE I.7). This file reads Bede’s theology of the protomartyr: the confession as creed, the martyr as foundation, and the delicate irony that the English received their first saint from the Britons whose failure to evangelize them Bede elsewhere condemns.

Tradition: Western (pre-Schism, Roman Britain)

Where Bede Puts the Story

Placement is argument. The Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum — the history of the English people’s church — opens not with Augustine’s landing in 597 but with the island itself (I.1), Caesar (I.2), the Roman province (I.3–6), and then, as the first extended narrative of the whole work, the passion of Alban (I.7) (Bede, HE I.1–7, ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). Before a single Englishman enters the story, the island has a martyr; before the English Church exists, its soil is consecrated. Bede is doing consciously what the whole patristic tradition did with its martyr-narratives: grounding a church’s legitimacy in blood witness — semen est sanguis Christianorum, “the blood of Christians is seed,” in Tertullian’s formula (Tertullian, Apologeticum 50.13) — and giving the English Church a pedigree that runs behind Canterbury to the age of the persecutions, and through it to the universal Church of the martyrs (on Bede’s historical design see the introduction to Colgrave and Mynors 1969; and this repository’s treatment of the Historia’s architecture in The Historia Ecclesiastica).

The chapter’s ending makes the foundation-motif explicit: when peaceful times returned, a church “of wonderful workmanship, worthy of his martyrdom” arose at the site, where “the healing of the sick and the frequent working of wonders cease not to this day” (Bede, HE I.7). For Bede the martyr is not past but present tense — a living patron whose power operates in the writer’s own eighth century, in a church building that physically links Roman martyrdom to English devotion.

The Confession as Creed

At the centre of Bede’s chapter stands the confession, and it repays reading as theology rather than mere dialogue. Asked his name, Alban answers: “I am called Alban by my parents, and I worship and adore the true and living God, who created all things” (Bede, HE I.7, trans. Colgrave and Mynors). The sentence is a two-clause catechism. The first clause surrenders what Caesar may have — the name, the family, the civic identity. The second confesses what Caesar may not touch, and it does so in credal language with a precise dogmatic edge: the true and living God against the idols (cf. 1 Thessalonians 1:9), the God who created all things against every dualism and every deified creature (cf. the first article of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed: “Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible”). Earlier in the interrogation, Bede’s Alban dismisses the sacrifices offered “to devils” (daemonibus) — the standard patristic reading of pagan cult (cf. Psalm 95:5 LXX: “all the gods of the nations are demons”; 1 Corinthians 10:20). A catechumen of days, in the narrative’s chronology, dies confessing the faith of the councils; that is the Passio-writer’s and Bede’s point, and it is why the confession became the liturgical heart of the cult — the words by which the Church remembers him (see Orthodox Britain and the Feast).

“Albanum Egregium”: The Fortunatus Line

Bede then does something a modern scholar would recognize as citing an authority. He interrupts his narrative to quote a poet: Alban is the martyr “of whom the priest Fortunatus, in the Praise of Virgins, in which he mentions the blessed martyrs who came to the Lord from every part of the world, says: Albanum egregium fecunda Britannia profert — ‘fruitful Britain brings forth Alban the illustrious’” (Bede, HE I.7, quoting Venantius Fortunatus, Carmina 8.3.155, the long poem De virginitate written at Poitiers c. 570). The line is verifiable in Fortunatus’s transmitted works (Venantius Fortunatus, Carmina 8.3, line 155, ed. F. Leo, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi 4.1, Berlin, 1881), and its evidential value is real: it shows that by the later sixth century, in Merovingian Gaul, Alban’s name stood in a catalogue of the world’s great martyrs alongside the famous names of the East and of Italy — independent, continental confirmation that the cult the Germanus tradition brought to Gaul had taken root there (Levison, “St Alban and St Albans,” Antiquity 15 (1941): 337–359; see The Visit of Germanus).

For Bede the quotation does double work. Rhetorically, it enrolls Britain among the fecundae — the fruitful provinces of the universal Church, each bringing forth its martyr as its offering. Apologetically, it lets a Gallic authority testify that Britain’s protomartyr is no local legend but a saint of the whole Church’s calendar. The tag Albanus egregius — “Alban the illustrious/excellent” — passed from Fortunatus through Bede into the liturgical and literary tradition of the medieval cult, where the protomartyr’s epithets (protomartyr Anglorum, Albanus egregius) adorned the office and the abbey’s self-presentation (on the medieval cult’s literary apparatus see the studies in Henig and Lindley, eds., Alban and St Albans, Leeds: Maney, 2001).

The Briton’s Crown on an English Head

There is an irony in Bede’s appropriation, and Bede — a subtle writer — did not hide it. Alban was a Briton; the gens Anglorum of Bede’s title are the Germanic peoples who conquered the Britons; and Bede’s severest judgment on the Britons is precisely that “among other most wicked deeds… they never preached the faith to the Saxons or Angles who inhabited Britain with them” (Bede, HE I.22, trans. Colgrave and Mynors). The English, on Bede’s own telling, owed the Britons no debt of evangelism — yet their island’s first and greatest saint is a Briton, inherited with the very ground. Bede resolves the tension theologically rather than ethnically: the martyr belongs to the place and to the universal Church, not to the failed nation; God, who “did not deprive his Britain of the lamp of martyrs” (the image is Gildas’s — De excidio 10, ed. Winterbottom, Phillimore, 1978), preserved the lamp for whoever should hold the island in faith. The English took up the cult without embarrassment — Offa’s royal foundation is its monument (see The Abbey and the Shrine) — and the title protomartyr Anglorum, “protomartyr of the English,” attached in medieval usage to a man who never knew an Englishman [Corrected: strictly, Alban is the protomartyr of Britain (Britanniae), a Romano-Briton; “protomartyr of the English” is the medieval abbey’s and nation’s adoptive usage, accurate about the cult’s heirs rather than the martyr’s people].

For the Orthodox reader this dynamic is familiar and instructive: it is the same logic by which Kievan Rus’ took Byzantine saints for its own, or by which the Orthodox diaspora in Britain now takes Alban — sanctity attaches to the Church and the land, and each new people that comes to the faith in a place inherits the place’s saints (see A Pre-Schism Western Saint). Bede is, in this sense, the first theologian of the reception of British saints by a newcomer church — the precedent, mutatis mutandis, for the Orthodox reception twelve centuries later.

Bede’s Own Devotion

Bede’s engagement with Alban was not confined to the Historia. His martyrology included the British protomartyr among the saints of 22 June, and his chronicle set the British martyrs in the world-history of the persecutions (Bede, De temporum ratione 66; on Bede’s martyrology and its Alban entry see Levison 1941, with the standard edition of the martyrology by Dubois and Renaud). The date Bede transmits — die decimo kalendarum Iuliarum, 22 June — became the feast throughout the medieval West and remains the feast in Anglican, Roman, and Orthodox calendars today (Bede, HE I.7; see Orthodox Britain and the Feast). It is one of history’s quieter symmetries that England’s first historian, a monk-saint himself venerated in Orthodoxy (see St. Bede the Venerable), should be the man who fixed the liturgical memory of England’s first saint: the protomartyr reaches the whole later Church, East and West, through the pen of the Father of English History.

See Also

References

  • Bede. Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum I.1–7, I.22, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (The placement of Alban; the confession; the Fortunatus quotation; the church and its miracles; the judgment on the Britons.)
  • Venantius Fortunatus. Carmina 8.3 (De virginitate), line 155, ed. F. Leo, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi 4.1. Berlin, 1881. (Albanum egregium fecunda Britannia profert, c. 570.)
  • Bede. De temporum ratione 66 (the world-chronicle); the Bedan martyrology, ed. J. Dubois and G. Renaud, Édition pratique des martyrologes de Bède, de l’Anonyme lyonnais et de Florus. Paris, 1976.
  • Tertullian. Apologeticum 50.13. (Semen est sanguis Christianorum.)
  • Gildas. De excidio Britanniae 10, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom. Chichester: Phillimore, 1978.
  • Levison, Wilhelm. “St Alban and St Albans.” Antiquity 15 (1941): 337–359.
  • Henig, Martin, and Phillip Lindley (eds.). Alban and St Albans: Roman and Medieval Architecture, Art and Archaeology. Leeds: Maney, 2001.
  • Scripture and creed: 1 Thessalonians 1:9; 1 Corinthians 10:20; Psalm 95:5 (LXX); the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, first article.