Nectan of Hartland

The children of Brychan

Nectan is placed by his Life among the family of Brychan, the semi-legendary king of Brycheiniog in south Wales — the Brecon country — whose numerous children, traditionally twenty-four, are the founding saints of a large part of Cornwall, Devon and Wales. Nectan is called the eldest. The family tradition is not history in a strict sense: the "children of Brychan" are better understood as a school or missionary company that the genealogists of a later age organised into a single household. But it records something true — that the evangelisation of the south-western peninsula came across the water from Wales, in a body, in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Moved, the Life says, by the example of Anthony of Egypt, Nectan left Wales to live alone. He crossed to the north Devon coast and went inland from the cliffs into a steep wooded valley at Stoke, near what is now Hartland, where there was a spring; and there he built his cell. The tradition adds that his brothers and sisters, scattered along the same coast, came to him once a year, on the last day of December, and that he was the head of the company.

The swineherd's gift, and the martyrdom

A swineherd of the district lost his pigs; Nectan found them and brought them back, and the man in gratitude gave him two cows. Two robbers drove the cows off. Nectan followed them, found them, and — this is the point of the story, and it is entirely in character for the sixth-century Celtic ascetic — did not demand his property back but preached the Gospel to them. Enraged, they struck off his head.

The Life then gives the motif for which he is best remembered: the saint took up his own head and carried it the half mile back to the spring beside his cell, and there laid it down and died. Where his blood fell, the local tradition says, foxgloves sprang up — the tall crimson spires that still fill the Devon lanes in June, when his feast falls.

The cephalophore — the beheaded saint who carries his own head to the place of his burial — is one of the standard forms of Western martyr-legend, told of Denis of Paris and of many others, and its function is to explain why the shrine stands where it stands rather than at the place of execution. It is recorded here as the Life records it, and read for what it means: the martyr, not his killers, chose the ground of his burial.

Athelstan, and the shrine at Hartland

The cult at Hartland was already old when it received royal patronage. During King Athelstan's campaign of 937 — the year of Brunanburh — a young soldier of the king's household was struck with sickness and called on St Nectan, and recovered. Athelstan, so the Hartland tradition runs, took the healing as a debt: he honoured the saint thereafter, gave lands and privileges to his church, and established a college of secular canons at the place, which in the twelfth century became Hartland Abbey.

The shrine drew pilgrims to the twelfth century and beyond. The relics — with, it was said, the saint's bell and staff — were kept in the church; the holy well below it, and St Nectan's spring in the valley, remained places of resort. Hartland church, the tallest tower in Devon and a seamark for the whole of the Bristol Channel approach, is dedicated to him, as are churches at Welcombe and elsewhere along that coast, and St Nectan's Glen near Tintagel in Cornwall carries his name by later association.