Protomartyr of Britain

Alban’s deepest mark on his country is on the map: Roman Verulamium — one of the great cities of the province — is gone, and the city that stands beside its ruins is called St Albans, the martyr’s name having outlasted and replaced the city that killed him. This file follows the protomartyr through the national memory: the place-name, the title and its receptions, the cathedral and the modern pilgrimage, and Alban’s place in the company of the island’s saints.

Tradition: Western (pre-Schism, Roman Britain)

The City That Took the Martyr’s Name

Toponymy is the quietest and most durable form of veneration. Verulamium was among the largest and most important towns of Roman Britain (Tacitus, Annals 14.33; Niblett, Verulamium: The Roman City of St Albans, Stroud: Tempus, 2001); today the name survives only as the label of a park and an archaeological site. The living city stands on the hill across the Ver, grown up around the martyr’s church, and bears the martyr’s name — a transfer already under way in Bede’s time, who notes that the English called the place Verlamacæstir or Væclingacæstir (Bede, Historia ecclesiastica I.7, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, Oxford, 1969), and complete by the high Middle Ages, when abbey and town alike were simply Sancti Albani, St Albans. The sequence — attested in the sources and legible in the ground — is the Alban dossier’s whole argument in miniature: the Roman city died; the grave outside it did not; the new settlement crystallized around the grave; and the map now records which of the two — city or martyr — proved permanent (Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle, “The Origins of St Albans Abbey,” in Henig and Lindley, eds., Alban and St Albans, Leeds: Maney, 2001; see The Abbey and the Shrine). No other major British town so cleanly owes its existence and name to a martyr’s cult; it is Britain’s counterpart to the Saint-Denis and San Sebastián of the continental map.

The Title and Its Receptions

“Protomartyr of Britain” — protomartyr Britanniae — is not a modern honorific but the tradition’s own logic: Alban stands first in the island’s roll of martyrs in Gildas (“St Alban of Verulamium” heading the list, with Aaron and Julius following — De excidio 10, ed. Winterbottom, Phillimore, 1978), first in Bede’s narrative of insular Christianity (HE I.7), and first in Fortunatus’s line as Britain’s offering to the universal catalogue of martyrs (Carmina 8.3.155). Each subsequent Christian community in the island has received the title in its own key. The medieval English made him protomartyr Anglorum, the premier saint of the premier abbey — the adoptive usage this collection flags but does not begrudge (see Bede and the Protomartyr). The Reformation destroyed his shrine but could not delete him: uniquely among the English shrine-saints, Alban kept his place in the reformed calendar (the BCP’s 17 June, an error for 22 June, but a commemoration nonetheless — see Orthodox Britain and the Feast), because a martyr of the pre-papal, pre-monastic persecutions offended no Protestant principle. The modern Church of England keeps him as a major festival of its calendar and its St Albans cathedral as a pilgrimage church. And the Orthodox Church receives him as what he was from the beginning: a martyr of the one undivided Church, formally entered in the Russian calendar in 2017 (see A Pre-Schism Western Saint). Four Christian dispensations, one cult: the protomartyr has proved to be the one saint every Christian Britain could keep.

The national memory extends beyond the ecclesiastical. The martyr’s name is scattered across English institutional life — the diocese (1877), the city (city status 1877), schools, churches, and dedications throughout the country and the former empire; the dukedom of St Albans sits in the peerage; and the story itself — the pagan who died for a hunted priest — has held its place in every era’s retelling of British origins, from Matthew Paris’s illustrated legend to the children’s histories of the modern age (on the medieval imagery, Wogan-Browne and Fenster, trans., The Life of St Alban by Matthew Paris, Tempe: ACMRS, 2010; on the cult’s history through the centuries, Levison, “St Alban and St Albans,” Antiquity 15 (1941): 337–359, and the studies in Henig and Lindley 2001).

The Living Pilgrimage

The cult is not a heritage exhibit. Since the restoration of the shrine (rededicated 1993 — see The Abbey and the Shrine), St Albans Cathedral has rebuilt the martyr’s June festival into the annual Alban Pilgrimage: a procession through the city around the feast of 22 June, with giant carnival figures of the story — Alban, the priest, the executioner whose eyes fell out, the rose-strewn way — culminating in worship at the shrine, and drawing thousands (St Albans Cathedral, pilgrimage literature). Orthodox Christians take part in the veneration at the shrine in their own idiom; the Cologne relic rests in the pedestal; candles burn where the medieval feretory stood. A visitor on the feast can watch the whole dossier of this collection walk past in effigy — legend, correction, and bedrock together — and then see the one thing the sources cannot show: the veneration itself, continuous in substance with what Germanus paid in 429.

Among the Saints of the Isles

Alban stands at the head of a company this repository holds together, and the connections are worth drawing as links. Bede (673–735) wrote him into permanence and shares with him the patronage of English Christianity’s memory (St. Bede the Venerable). Patrick (5th c.), the Romano-Briton who evangelized Ireland, is his nearest kin in the repository — a saint of the same vanished Romano-British church, received into the same 2017 calendar (St. Patrick of Ireland). Columba (521–597) and Cuthbert (c. 634–687) carry the island’s sanctity into its Irish and Northumbrian chapters (St. Columba of Iona; St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne). And across the Channel, Genevieve of Paris (c. 420–c. 502) is bound to him by the person of Germanus of Auxerre, who blessed the child at Nanterre on the same journey that brought him to the protomartyr’s tomb (St. Genevieve of Paris; see The Visit of Germanus). In the Orthodox reading, this company is one thing: the sanctoral inheritance of the undivided West, of which Alban is the British firstfruits — the protomartyr not only in time but in logic, the seed from which the island’s whole crop of saints, in the ancient image, grew (Tertullian, Apologeticum 50.13).

See Also

References

  • Bede. Historia ecclesiastica I.7, ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (The English place-names; the narrative primacy.)
  • Tacitus. Annals 14.33. — Niblett, Rosalind. Verulamium: The Roman City of St Albans. Stroud: Tempus, 2001.
  • Gildas. De excidio Britanniae 10, ed. and trans. Winterbottom. Chichester: Phillimore, 1978.
  • Venantius Fortunatus. Carmina 8.3.155.
  • Levison, Wilhelm. “St Alban and St Albans.” Antiquity 15 (1941): 337–359.
  • Biddle, Martin, and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle. “The Origins of St Albans Abbey.” In Henig and Lindley (eds.), Alban and St Albans. Leeds: Maney, 2001.
  • Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, and Thelma S. Fenster (trans.). The Life of St Alban by Matthew Paris. Tempe: ACMRS, 2010.
  • St Albans Cathedral. Alban Pilgrimage and shrine literature (the modern June pilgrimage; the 1993 rededication).
  • Tertullian. Apologeticum 50.13.