Hernin of Locarn

The record of Hernin is a hermitage place-name, a lost Vita surviving at second hand, and a living Breton cultus; it is given here as it stands.

The lost Vita and what it told. The sole authority for Hernin's Life is Albert le Grand, the seventeenth-century Breton hagiographer, who drew his account from a manuscript Vita preserved in the church of Locarn; that manuscript perished at the Revolution, so everything narrative rests on his summary, as transmitted by Baring-Gould and Fisher. According to it, Hernin was a native of Britain in the sixth century who crossed over into Armorica and settled as a hermit in the parish of Duault, near Carhaix, on land given him by a British chief established at Quelen. The Vita told the grant in a wonder: promised as much land as he could enclose in a single day, Hernin walked his bounds trailing his staff behind him, and the staff drew not a furrow only but a deep trench and threw up a bank — a legend told also of Goueznou and Brioc, and, as Baring-Gould and Fisher observe, a legendary way of accounting for the minihi, the marked-off sanctuary land of his hermitage. There he lived until his death, which the Vita placed on the first Monday in May, and he was buried in his oratory under a great lech or stone.

The tomb, the stag, and the church. The same tradition continues that the place was later ravaged in the war between Conmore and Judicael and lay desolate, until a Count of Poher named Conmore, hunting in the neighbourhood, saw the stag he pursued take refuge at the saint's tomb, where the hounds would not touch it; struck by the marvel, he made inquiry and ordered a church built over the grave. When the workmen assembled their materials, the birds were found to have gathered twigs and leaves and built a little green dome over the tomb. Albert le Grand speaks of two Counts of Poher named Conmore, but there was only one — the Conmore who became regent of Domnonia — and from this Baring-Gould and Fisher argue that the church over the tomb must have been built before about 550, in the years before Conmore fell to quarrelling with the saints; the saint's death falls correspondingly early in the sixth century. Stanton's chronological index sets it at about 540, and this entry's frontmatter follows him.

Relics and cultus. The high altar of the church of Locarn is held to stand over Hernin's grave. His relics were taken up: the head is preserved in a silver bust and an arm is likewise enshrined, and Stanton records that many relics of the saint are kept there in due reverence. He is patron of Locarn, near Maël-Carhaix, and of the parish of Saint-Hernin near Carhaix in Finistère, and has a chapel at Ploumagoar; his holy well at Locarn is surmounted by a mediaeval granite statue of the saint as a hermit in monastic habit holding a closed book (thirteenth-century by one volume of Baring-Gould and Fisher, fourteenth by the other), and there is another statue of him at Saint-Hernin. He is invoked for the cure of headaches.

The name. The philologist Joseph Loth derived the name from the old Celtic Isarninos/Iserninos ("iron"), which yielded the Breton forms Hoiernin and Houernin found in the Cartulary of Redon (860–866) and Huernin (833), surviving in the place-names Pluherlin in Morbihan and Saint-Hernin in Cornouaille. Under the form Hoiernin the saint is invoked in the Celtic litany preserved in the Dean and Chapter Library at Salisbury — an early liturgical witness to his cult. Baring-Gould and Fisher reject the identification of Hernin with Iserninus the companion of Patrick, since Albert le Grand's Vita made him a Briton and knew nothing of the apostle of Ireland. A Welsh trace may survive in "Llanyhernyn," a chapel under Llanegwad in Carmarthenshire recorded in the church-goods inventories of 1552–3.