Alban of Britain
The Holy Martyr Alban, Protomartyr of Britain
Protomartyr · Martyr · d. 3rd century (c. 209, or 251–259; Bede gives c. 304)
Commemorated 22 June — Martyrdom at Verulamium
Alban is the protomartyr of Britain: a citizen of the Romano-British town of Verulamium who sheltered a Christian priest fleeing persecution, was converted by him, and when the soldiers came exchanged cloaks with him and gave himself up in his place. Refusing to sacrifice, he was led out of the town and beheaded on the hill above the river Ver, where a church stood over his grave by the fifth century and where St Albans Abbey stands today. He is the earliest named Christian of the British Isles, attested by Gildas in the sixth century and told at length by Bede; the year of his death is disputed among the Severan, Decian and Diocletianic persecutions. He is commemorated on June 22 in Orthodox usage.
Verulamium and the hidden priest
Verulamium, on Watling Street some twenty miles north-west of Londinium, was one of the few towns of Roman Britain to hold the rank of municipium, and Alban is presented by the sources as one of its citizens — in the later recensions, a Roman soldier or a man of standing, though the earliest strand says only that he was a pagan townsman.
In a persecution whose date the sources do not agree upon, a Christian priest was fleeing the authorities and Alban gave him lodging. The tradition first names this priest, in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Amphibalus — a name almost certainly born of a misreading, since amphibalus is the Latin word for the very cloak that is the hinge of the story. Watching his guest keep vigil and pray through the nights, Alban was instructed by him and baptised.
The exchange of cloaks
Word reached the magistrate that a Christian teacher was hidden in Alban's house, and soldiers were sent to search it. Alban put on the priest's cloak and presented himself in his place, and was taken bound before the judge. The judge, who was at that moment sacrificing at the altars, saw the substitution and was enraged; he ordered that Alban should suffer whatever punishment had been prepared for the priest, if he would not sacrifice to the gods.
Asked his family and lineage, Alban answered with the sentence that Bede preserves as the core of the whole passion — that his kindred was no concern of the judge, but that if he wished to know the truth, he was called Alban, and worshipped and adored the true and living God who made all things. He was scourged and, remaining unmoved, sentenced to be beheaded.
The martyrdom
The execution was to take place outside the town, on the hill across the river. The account gives two wonders. The crowd following was so great that the bridge could not carry it, and the water of the river parted or ran dry before Alban so that he and his guards crossed on the dry bed. And on the hill — a gentle slope carpeted with wild flowers, in a description Bede plainly relished — the appointed executioner threw down his sword and refused to strike, confessing that he too was a Christian; he was beheaded with Alban, a martyr baptised in his own blood. The soldier who did strike the blow did not go unpunished: as Alban's head fell, the man's eyes fell out of their sockets.
A third figure appears in the fuller recensions — a spring that broke out on the hilltop for the martyr's thirst — and later medieval English hagiography multiplied the details considerably. The core, common to every version, is the exchange of cloaks, the confession of the true and living God, and the beheading on the hill.
The shrine
A church was built over the place of the martyrdom "when peaceable Christian times were restored," in Bede's phrase, and Bede reports that healings continued there in his own day. The earliest independent confirmation of the cult is that Germanus of Auxerre, in Britain in 429 to combat Pelagianism, visited the martyr's tomb, opened it, laid in it relics of the apostles, and took away some of the dust of the place — a notice from the near-contemporary Life of Germanus by Constantius of Lyon, and the strongest evidence that the cult is genuinely late-Roman and not a later invention.
The Anglo-Saxon and Norman abbey of St Albans grew on the site, and the town took the martyr's name. The relics were dispersed at the Reformation; a shoulder-blade long kept at the church of St Pantaleon in Cologne, which claimed a translation of Alban's relics, was given to St Albans Cathedral in 2002 and placed in the restored shrine.
Feast and commemoration
June 22 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 5). The Orthodox commemoration on this day is kept by the Orthodox Church in America and by the Russian calendars, which give him as "Martyr Alban of Britain, III–early IV century," and by the Orthodox parishes of the British Isles, for whom he is the national protomartyr; the Antiochian Archdiocese's own British-Isles usage and the Western-rite communities keep him likewise. In the Roman and Anglican calendars of England the day is generally June 20, and June 22 is the older and more widely attested date; the divergence is one of the reasons Alban appears twice in composite Western lists. He is among the pre-schism saints of the West whose veneration the Orthodox Church has received without qualification, his cult being both pre-schism and continuously attested from the fifth century.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Alban, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Alban is shown as a young or middle-aged layman-martyr, beardless or lightly bearded, in the tunic and mantle of a Romano-British citizen, holding the cross of the martyrs; English medieval art gives him instead the attributes of the passion narrative — a sword, and very often the cloak by which he took the priest's place, or a saltire cross. The narrative cycles, of which the most elaborate is the thirteenth-century illustrated Life by Matthew Paris of St Albans, show in sequence the sheltering of the priest, the exchange of cloaks, the river drying before him, the executioner's refusal, and the beheading with the eyes of the second executioner falling to the ground. Modern Orthodox icons written for the British parishes give him a red martyr's mantle and a model of the abbey church.
No storable pre-1900 image has been located for this collection. The one Wikimedia Commons file offered as an icon of Alban (File:St alban.jpg) carries no date and no named artist, shows internal evidence of having been produced in 2009, and is tagged public domain by an uploader rather than licensed by the painter: on the rule that a photographer's or uploader's licence does nothing to the underlying painter's rights, it was rejected. The medieval English manuscript cycles are not on Commons in any form retrievable by search.
Disputed questions
- The date. This is the substantial problem of the entry, and it is unresolved. Bede places the martyrdom in the persecution of Diocletian, about 304 — but Britain in those years lay under Constantius Chlorus, who is agreed to have enforced the edicts feebly if at all, which makes the Bedan date hard to sustain. The earliest recension of the Passio (the Turin manuscript) names a "Severus Caesar," and on that basis many now place the death about 209, in the years when Septimius Severus and his sons were campaigning from York. A third proposal puts it in the persecutions of Decius or Valerian, about 251–259. The century field here follows the third-century consensus of the modern discussion, while recording Bede's date; no source available to this entry settles it.
- Verulamium or Londinium? Gildas, the earliest witness, has Alban cross the Thames; Bede and the whole later tradition, together with the archaeology of the shrine, put the martyrdom at Verulamium on the Ver. Gildas is generally taken to have erred, or to have used a name loosely.
- Whether Alban existed. Ian Wood proposed in 2008 that the cult may have been promoted, or even created, by Germanus of Auxerre on his visit of 429. The proposal has not carried the field: the notice of the visit is itself the evidence that a tomb and a cult were already there to be visited, and Gildas writing in the sixth century knows the story independently of Bede.
- The priest's name. Amphibalus is not attested before Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century and is, in all probability, the cloak. The priest is nonetheless venerated under that name in later English usage; this collection does not treat him as a separate entry.
- The companions. Gildas names, immediately after Alban, Aaron and Julius, citizens of Caerleon, as martyrs of the same persecution. They are commemorated on this day in some British lists and are deferred here (see the June 22 calendar file).