Our Parish Saints

Margaret - Catherine - Augustine - All Saints - Michael - Leonard

A commentary by Dr Graham Jones (click here for his work on saints and religious devotion)

Margaret

Feast day July 20 (July 15 in the Eastern churches)

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.

In this detail from wall paintings showing her story in St Margaret's Church, Charlwood, Surrey, Margaret sits on her tuffet, spinning, while a herald declares Olybrius' devotion. Margaret thus became a patron saint of those engaged in sheep farming, an occupation important on the bishop's manor which our church served. The bishop's flock alone numbered several hundred in the Middle Ages, when Leicester was an important centre of wool production and trade with the Continent. In the nineteenth century, St Margaret as shepherdess supplied the brand image for a famous line of knitwear - for which see the History page.

Before the rebuilding of our chancel in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, it is highly likely that a similar cycle of paintings to those at Charlwood embellished its walls. You can see the Charlwood cycle at the Painted Church web-site. And on the Patronal Feast-day, the congregation would have sung a hymn in her honour. In the so-called Burnett Psalter, now in Aberdeen, such a hymn is found:

Gaude virgo Margareta que nutricis
gregem leta minabas ad pascua.

Gaude pompa mundi spreta
fide fortis ut adletha [athleta] vernans

('Rejoice! The virgin Margaret who drove her nurse's sheep to pasture; Rejoice! She disdained the pomp of the world, remaining strong in her faith and chastity.')

Joan of Arc claimed Margaret spoke to her and encouraged her to take arms. Asked during her trial if Margaret spoke to her in English, she replied: 'Why should she, since she is not on the side of the English?' In fact Margaret had been a popular saint in England since before the Conquest; her legend was translated into Old English.

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.

All Saints

All Saints was the dedication of the church just inside Leicester's Roman and medieval wall, where Margery Kempe was famously put on trial in 1417 for heresy - an accusation she successfully defended. All Saints parish became absorbed in our parish and today its church is under the care of the Redundant Churches Trust.

Michael

Michael was the patron of another of Leicester's medieval intramural churches. Its churchyard backed on to that of All Saints and some of the surviving foundations of the church were revealed during archaeological excavations on the site in 2005.

Leonard

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.

Augustine

Augustine, the monk sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 597 to convert the English to Christianity in the face of the failure of the British church to do so, was the patron saint of a church built in Leicester's northern suburbs around the year 1900. It became linked with St Margaret's when they were both incorporated in the Parish of the Abbey, so called because the site of Leicester's abbey was included within its boundaries.

St Augustine's closed only recently and was burnt down during the process of selling the building and its site for new uses. In memory of the people and mission of St Augustine's, an aumbry lamp has been installed in what was the Lady Chapel of St Margaret's, and which will now be known as St Augustine's Chapel.

In fact the dedication is quadruply significant, for there was also a chapel of St Augustine in the abbey, and a priory of Augustinian hermits (following the rule of the other Augustine, bishop of Hippo and author of the City of God) dedicated in honour of Augustine of Canterbury on the island in the Soar at Leicester's western gate. Furthermore, according to a fifteenth-century monk of Leicester, William Charity, there stood to the east of St Nicholas's church 'two chapels under a single roof', dedicated in honour of saints Augustine and Columba.

This church, now lost, must have been built on  the site of the basilica in Leicester's Roman forum - dating it to the earliest centuries of Christian witness in Leicester.