ST MARGARET'S CHURCH, LEICESTER

ABOUT OUR PATRON SAINT: Feast Day - 20th July

Our patron saint (not to be confused with the twelfth-century St Margaret, Queen of Scotland) is said to have been born at Antioch in Pisidia, in modern-day west-central Turkey. Antioch was made a Roman colony by the emperor Augustus in 25 B.C. and by the middle of the first century A.D. it seems that several members of the imperial household had served as magistrates there. Its synagogue attracted Jews and others who, though not full converts, worshipped the God of Israel (Acts 13:16). Paul gave a sermon there, with mixed success, in which he presented Jesus in the light of Israel's history (Acts 13:13-52).

The fourteenth-century book illustration (in the Royal Dutch Library at The Hague, KB76, F7 33v), shows Margaret emerging unscathed from the dragon which in legend devoured and then disgorged her, during her trial and tortures. From this episode she became a saint whose help was sought both by pregnant women and those with kidney ailments.

Her legend (perhaps from the fifth century but perhaps not translated into Latin till the ninth) also described her working as a shepherdess for her nurse after her father, a priest of another religion, expelled her for becoming a Christian. It was as a shepherdess of his Spanish homeland that Francisco de Zurbarán painted Margaret around 1631 (a picture now in the National Gallery, London) - with a rather small dragon to her left. While keeping her sheep, said the legend, Margaret was seen by a governor called Olybrius, who had her tortured and then killed after she refused his courtship.