ST MARGARET'S CHURCH, LEICESTER

ST CATHERINE: In this painting by Memling, 'The Marriage of St Catherine to Christ', dated around 1470, Margaret is seen between St Lucy (left) and St Barbara (right). Catherine is kneeling before the Christ child and receiving a marriage ring.

After Mary, Catherine was the most popular saint for women in the later Middle Ages, particular for younger women - as Nicholas was for men. She represented wisdom, as well as female piety - reflecting women's literacy and their widespread role as domestic and business managers.

Catherine was co-patron, with Margaret, of the principal medieval gild in our church.

ST LEONARD was the dedicatee of a small church and parish just outside Leicester on the northern bank of the Soar. In legend, Leonard was a forest saint, having helped the wife of the Merovingian king Clovis after she went into labour during a hunt near Limoges.

Leonard's patronage is found often on forest fringes, and so it is here at Leicester, for his church was by the roadside on the way to Leicester Frith, where the townspeople gathered their firewood by ancient right in the king's Forest of Leicester.

This French nineteenth-century painting, showing Leonard outside his hermitage chapel at Noblat, is happily appropriate, showing a church in a forest across a river from a walled town. By the saint's figure is a pair of manacles: he was a patron saint of prisoners.