Martyrs and Local Saints in Late Antique Britain

Abstract

Abstract St Alban of Verulamium is the only Romano-British martyr whose cult certainly continued after the Roman period in an enclave of British Christians. His basilica was later adopted by Anglo-Saxons, who preserved the cult in what became one of the major monasteries of medieval England. The Roman town of Verulamium has produced archaeological evidence from the last decades of the fifth century that has been seen as ‘a remarkable testimony to the survival of craftsmanship, engineering practice, and Roman habits of life’. As the decayed Roman town was finally abandoned, a new town started to grow up near the martyrial church across the valley, a pattern of development with noteworthy Continental parallels. And eventually the place took its name from the saint. Continuity of this kind is nowhere else so well attested in Britain. One response to that may be to regard St Albans as a site whose unique history should be attributed to the rare phenomenon of a martyr cult. Another is to suppose that such sites might have been recognized elsewhere, if the traces of post-Roman activity in lowland Britain had not been masked or even removed during the Anglo-Saxon period. A martyr Sixtus, for example, was still venerated at a now unknown location in southern Britain until Augustine of Canterbury suppressed the cult.

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