The Relics and the Feast Through History

St. Martin of Tours died on 8 November 397 and was buried at Tours on 11 November; over his grave rose successive basilicas, and his tomb became one of the chief pilgrimage shrines of the Latin West. This file traces the long and partly insecure history of those relics — the early shrine and Gregory of Tours’ great basilica, the Norman sack and rebuilding, the medieval church, and the destruction and dispersal of the relics in the French Revolution, with the rediscovery of the tomb in 1860 and the new basilica consecrated in 1925 — and then the feast of Martinmas (11 November) with its customs: the Martinmas goose, the onset of winter, “St Martin’s summer,” and the old pre-Christmas fast called “St Martin’s Lent.” Throughout, the attestation for each stage of the relic-history is named, and later claims are not asserted beyond what the sources will bear.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; father of Western monasticism)

The Death and the Grave

Sulpicius Severus, who knew Martin personally, reports the bishop’s death at Candes, on the edge of his see, and the carrying of the body up the Loire to Tours; the date of the death is fixed by the tradition to 8 November 397, and the burial at Tours to 11 November — the day that would become the feast (Sulpicius Severus, Epistula 3, To Bassula; trans. Roberts, NPNF 2nd ser. 11). Sulpicius describes the great concourse at the funeral, the monks and virgins and townspeople who followed the bier, and the contention between the people of Poitiers and of Tours over which city should keep the body (Epistula 3; trans. Roberts, NPNF 2nd ser. 11; on the chronology generally, [Disputed: birth c. 316 on the traditional reckoning vs. c. 336 per Stancliffe 1983, pp. 111–133], which correspondingly shifts the reckoning of his age at death). The grave lay in the Christian cemetery outside the walls of Tours, on the road west of the city, and it is there — not in the cathedral — that the cult took root.

What turned the grave into a shrine was not a translation of relics but the steady accumulation of veneration at the burial place itself. Martin’s successors at Tours built over the tomb, and the resulting church became the spiritual center of the city in a way the cathedral never quite matched (Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul, 1985, on the topography of the Tours cult; Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 1981, on the late-antique grave-shrine as the focus of the holy). The relics of Martin, in other words, were from the first relics in situ — the tomb was the relic — and the long history of the cult is in large part the history of the buildings raised over that one spot.

Gregory of Tours and the Great Basilica

Our fullest early witness to the shrine and its wonders is Gregory, bishop of Tours (d. 594), who devoted four books to The Miracles of Saint Martin (De virtutibus sancti Martini) and treated the cult repeatedly in his Histories (Historia Francorum). Gregory describes a large basilica over the tomb — the work attributed to Bishop Perpetuus in the later fifth century — to which pilgrims came from across Gaul and beyond, and he records, in the manner of his age, a continuous stream of cures and signs at the grave (Gregory of Tours, De virtutibus sancti Martini, esp. Books 1–2; Historia Francorum 2.14, 10.31; trans. and discussion in Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul, 1993). These miracle-reports must be received as what they are — Gregory’s testimony to what the sixth-century church at Tours believed and claimed of its patron, not facts the present account asserts (METHODOLOGY §3.5); their value here is as evidence for the scale and character of the cult, which by Gregory’s day was the premier shrine of Merovingian Gaul.

The basilica of Perpetuus and its successors made Tours a place of asylum, royal patronage, and political weight: Frankish kings sought Martin’s favor, the cappa — the relic of the famous half-cloak — was carried into battle, and the shrine’s clergy guarded both the tomb and the saint’s standing (Van Dam 1985 and 1993; on the cloak as the founding relic, see The Cloak of Amiens). It is from the custody of that cloak-relic, the cappella, and its keepers, the cappellani, that European languages drew the words “chapel” and “chaplain” — a linguistic fossil of how central the Martinian relic-cult was to the medieval West.

Sack, Rebuilding, and the Medieval Shrine

The shrine’s prosperity made it a target. In the ninth and tenth centuries the basilica suffered in the Viking (Norman) raids that ravaged the Loire valley, and the relics were more than once removed for safety before being returned; the church was sacked and had to be rebuilt, and the community of canons reconstituted around the tomb (the Norman depredations on the Loire and the displacement of the Tours relics are reported in the medieval chronicles and digested in the standard accounts of the shrine; the specific details of each removal are unevenly attested, and the precise itinerary of the relics in this period should be held as [Disputed: the medieval chronicle traditions of the ninth–tenth-century removals and returns of Martin's relics are late and partly divergent, and no single contemporary source secures the full sequence]). A great Romanesque collegiate basilica eventually rose on the site, one of the major pilgrimage churches on the roads toward Compostela, and the cult of Martin remained among the most important in France throughout the Middle Ages.

By the high medieval period Martin was among the most popular saints of the whole of Western Europe. Thousands of churches, chapels, and place-names across France, the Low Countries, the German lands, the British Isles, and beyond bore his name; he was reckoned a patron of soldiers (from the cloak and his own military origin), of beggars and the poor (from the same act of charity), of vintners and the wine-harvest (from the November feast falling at the close of the vintage), and, in a special sense, a patron of France and of the Frankish and later French monarchy (Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 2003, on Martin’s standing as a patron of the Frankish realm; the sheer number of dedications is a commonplace of the topographical and hagiographical literature). The basilica at Tours was the heart of this devotion, and its tomb the destination of countless pilgrims.

The French Revolution and the Loss of the Relics

The medieval basilica did not survive the French Revolution. In the anticlerical campaigns of the 1790s the great Basilica of St-Martin at Tours was suppressed, despoiled, and — over the years 1797 to 1802 — demolished, its site cleared and partly built over with streets, so that the location of the tomb itself was effectively lost (the demolition of the Tours basilica in this period is the standard account in the histories of the shrine and of the Revolution’s treatment of French churches; here the present file follows the consensus narrative of those histories rather than a single primary text). The relics of Martin were in this upheaval largely destroyed or scattered: whatever the medieval shrine had held was dispersed, and the continuity of the relic-tradition was broken — the single most important fact in the modern history of the cult.

The honest position is therefore that the Martinian relics as a continuous, securely identified deposit did not survive the Revolution intact. Claims that some fragment was rescued and preserved, and the later identification of remains at the tomb, belong to the nineteenth-century recovery and must be weighed as such: [Disputed: that a genuine relic of St. Martin survived the Revolutionary destruction and dispersal is asserted in the tradition of the restored cult, but the chain of custody across 1797–1802 cannot be securely documented, and the authentication of the remains recovered in 1860 rests on the topographical identification of the tomb rather than on an unbroken relic-tradition]. The methodology of this repository requires that such a claim be stated as a claim, with its weakness named, and not converted into a fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5; §4).

Rediscovery, the New Basilica, and the Surviving Relic

In 1860, excavations on the cleared site at Tours uncovered what was identified as the original tomb of Martin, beneath the streets that had replaced the demolished basilica. On the strength of this rediscovery a new church was built over the site, and a new Basilica of St-Martin — a smaller neo-Byzantine structure on the footprint of the ancient tomb — was raised, its construction completed in the early twentieth century and the basilica consecrated in 1925 (the 1860 rediscovery, the building of the present basilica, and its consecration in 1925 are the standard account of the modern shrine). In the crypt of this church the tomb is again venerated, and a relic of the saint is preserved and shown there.

That a relic is venerated today is not in dispute as a fact about present practice; what is rightly disputed, as above, is the unbroken physical descent of that relic from the saint’s body across the catastrophe of the Revolution. The Orthodox reader can hold both honestly: the cult at Tours is continuous in intention and in place, rooted in the very ground of the original grave, even where the material continuity of the relics is, by the historian’s standard, broken and partly conjectural.

Martinmas: The Feast of 11 November

Martin’s feast is kept on 11 November, the day of his burial at Tours, and in the West it acquired its own name — Martinmas (the Mass of St Martin) — and a dense cluster of seasonal customs. Falling at the close of the agricultural year, after the harvest and the vintage and at the slaughtering-time before winter, Martinmas became one of the great hinge-days of the old European calendar: rents and wages were paid, hiring-fairs held, livestock killed and salted, and the new wine first broached (the seasonal and customary character of Martinmas is the common testimony of the folklore and calendar literature; its position at the close of the vintage explains Martin’s patronage of vintners noted above).

Among its best-known customs is the Martinmas goose — the roast goose eaten on or about St Martin’s day across much of northern and central Europe, the bird being in season and the feast marking the last great eating before the fast to come. The day was widely felt as the true beginning of winter, and a spell of mild, bright weather around mid-November is still called, in English, “St Martin’s summer” (and by cognate names in other languages), a late warmth before the cold sets in (these usages — the goose, the onset of winter, and “St Martin’s summer” — are standard in the calendar and folklore literature on the feast).

“St Martin’s Lent” and the Pre-Christmas Fast

Martinmas also marked, in the older Western calendar, the beginning of the pre-Christmas fast. In the early medieval West a period of fasting before the Nativity ran from Martinmas onward, and the season was accordingly known as “St Martin’s Lent” (Quadragesima sancti Martini) — a forty-day, Lent-like preparation for Christmas beginning on or just after 11 November (the designation of the pre-Christmas fast as “St Martin’s Lent,” beginning at Martinmas, is the standard account of the early-medieval Western liturgical calendar; the practice was later regularized and shortened into the Advent of the Roman rite). For an Orthodox reader the parallel is striking: the East keeps a Nativity Fast of forty days beginning on 15 November, and the Western “St Martin’s Lent,” beginning four days earlier at Martinmas, is the cognate of that same ancient instinct — to fast in preparation for the Incarnation — in the undivided Church’s calendar.

That Martin’s feast should have given its name to the threshold of the Nativity Fast is itself a measure of his standing. The day of a Gallic bishop’s burial became, across the medieval West, the marker of winter, of the goose and the new wine, and of the turn toward the coming of Christ — a saint so woven into the year that the calendar itself remembered him. The historical reckoning of the man behind this feast, and the sources on which it depends, are taken up in the companion file (see legacy-and-sources.md).

References

Sulpicius Severus. Epistula 3 (To Bassula, on the death of Martin), Vita Martini, and Dialogi. Trans. Alexander Roberts, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 11. New York: Christian Literature Company, 1894. (Martin’s death, 8 Nov 397; the funeral and burial at Tours, 11 Nov; the contention of Poitiers and Tours.)
Gregory of Tours. De virtutibus sancti Martini (The Miracles of Saint Martin), Books 1–4, and Historia Francorum (Histories). Trans. and discussed in Raymond Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (The basilica of Perpetuus; the shrine and its reported wonders; the cult under the Merovingians.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (The topography of the Tours cult; the shrine as the city’s spiritual center; royal patronage and the cappa.)
Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. (The late-antique grave-shrine as the focus of the holy; Martin’s tomb as a paradigm.)
Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. (Martin as patron of the Frankish realm; the diffusion of his cult.)
Stancliffe, Clare. St. Martin and His Hagiographer: History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. (Chronology of Martin’s life and the birth-year question, pp. 111–133.)