530 ST MELAINE, BISHOP OF RENNES;  the author of his life tells us that he performed many miracles; played a leading part in drawing up Council of Orleans canons 511; King Clovis after his conversion held him in great esteem
6^th v. ST ILLTUD, OR ILLTYD, ABBOT; a disciple of St Germanus (of Auxerre), who ordained him priest, and that he presided over the monastic school at Llantwit in Glamorgan much stress is laid on his learning and wisdom “This Illtud was the most learned of all the Britons both in the Old Testament and the New, and in all kinds of philosophy—poetry and rhetoric, grammar and arithmetic…were I to begin to relate all his wondrous works I should be led to excess”.

530 ST MELAINE, BISHOP OF RENNES;  the author of his life tells us that he performed many miracles; played a leading part in drawing up the canons of the Council of Orleans in 511; King Clovis after his conversion held him in great esteem

MELAINE (Melanius) was a native of Placet in the parish of Brain, in Brittany. He had served God with great fervour in a monastery for some years when, upon the death of St Amand, Bishop of Rennes, he was constrained by the clergy and people to fill that see. As a bishop he played a leading part in drawing up the canons of the Council of Orleans in 511 (see Neues Archiv, xiv, 50), and with others wrote a letter of rebuke to two Breton priests who were wandering from place to place and behaving very irregularly. A sincere humility, and a spirit of continual prayer chiefly enhanced his virtue, and the author of his life tells us that he performed many miracles. King Clovis after his conversion held him in great esteem. St Melaine died in a monastery, which he had built at Placet, some time before 549. He was buried at Rennes, where his feast is kept to-day, as it was formerly at Mullion in Cornwall, where he had come to be regarded as the local patron, supplanting an earlier St Mollien or Moellien. He must not be confused with the St Mellon venerated in Normandy, who gave his name to Saint Mellons between Newport and Cardiff.

See his life in the Acta Sanctorum, January 6, of which other, and probably older, re­dactions may be found in the Catalogus Cod. Hagiog. Lot. Paris, i, 7x and ii, 531. Cf. also MGH., Scriptores Merov., vol. iii; Duchesne, Fastes Épiscopaux, vol. ii, pp. 340—341; and G. H. Doble, St Melaine (1935).  

6^th v. ST ILLTUD, OR ILLTYD, ABBOT; a disciple of St Germanus (of Auxerre), who ordained him priest, and that he presided over the monastic school at Llantwit in Glamorgan much stress is laid on his learning and wisdom “This Illtud was the most learned of all the Britons both in the Old Testament and the New, and in all kinds of philosophy—poetry and rhetoric, grammar and arithmetic…were I to begin to relate all his wondrous works I should be led to excess”.

THE first information we have about IlItud, one of the most celebrated of the Welsh saints, is in the perhaps early seventh-century Life of St Samson. Here it is said that he was a disciple of St Germanus (of Auxerre), who ordained him priest, and that he presided over the monastic school at Llantwit in Glamorgan much stress is laid on his learning and wisdom “This Illtud was the most learned of all the Britons both in the Old Testament and the New, and in all kinds of philosophy—poetry and rhetoric, grammar and arithmetic…were I to begin to relate all his wondrous works I should be led to excess”. There are further references in the ninth-century Life of St Paul Aurelian there it is stated that the saint’s monastery was established on a certain island “within the borders of Dyfed, called Pyr”, which is usually identified with Caldey, off Tenby. This statement has given rise to the baseless conjecture that there was an original Llanilltud on Caldey, and that a later and bigger foundation in Glamorgan was distinguished from it as Llanilltud Fawr, that is “the Great”. Illtud is said to have increased the size of this “very limited area hemmed in by the sea”, at the suggestion of his pupils Paul, David, Samson, and Gildas.*{*Little credence can be attached to the statement that St David was a pupil of St IlItud: cf. A. W. Wade-Evans, Life of St David, p. 73. The same scholar sought to identify the insula with Manorbier on the mainland of Pembrokeshire (Notes and Queries, 1950).}

The only life we have of St IlItud himself is a Latin composition dating from about 1140. This tells us that his father was a Briton who lived in Letavia with his wife; it has been suggested that Letavia here really means a district in central Brecknock rather than Brittany. When he grew up Illtud went by water to visit “his cousin King Arthur”, and married a lady called Trynihid. Leaving Arthur, he entered the military service of a chieftain in Glamorgan, whence he is sometimes called IlItud the Knight. The story goes that he was startled into taking up the monastic life by a hunting accident in which some of his friends lost their lives, and that he was recommended to leave the world by St Cadoc (who was hardly born at this time). Illtud went to live with Trynihid in a reed hut by the river Nadafan, but was warned by an angel, in peculiar circumstances, to leave his wife. This he did, very roughly, early in the morning, and went to St Dubricius to receive the tonsure of a monk. Then he made his abode by a stream called the Hodnant, and lived austerely there as a solitary until disciples began to flock around. They flourished materially and spiritually, their land was good and they worked hard, and St Illtud’s monastery became the first great monastic school of Wales, known as Llanilltud Fawr (now Llantwit Major in Glamorgan).

Once Trynihid came to see her husband, whom she found working in the fields, but he was offended and would not speak to her (The narrator here attributes a similar discourtesy to Almighty God). When Illtud was driven from his monastery by the oppression of a local chieftain he had to take refuge for a time in a cave by the river Ewenny, where he was fed from Heaven their lands were threatened by the collapse of the sea-wall, which the monks built up again, but finally it had to be made good miraculously by the saint. He is said to have gone with corn-ships to relieve a famine in Brittany, and places and churches bearing his name are found there as well as many in Wales. Illtud was honoured as having introduced to his monks, and so to the people, an improved method of ploughing. The life is largely taken up with anecdotes of wonders, which provoked Dom Serenus Cressy in the seventeenth century to complain of “fables and unsavoury miracles”, when he met them in Capgrave’s Nova legenda Angliae. It states that in his old age Illtud again crossed the sea, and died at Dol; but the Life of Samson gives a moving account of his last days at Llantwit.

When it was judged proper to found a new monastery in a remoter part of the country of the Morini, for the instruction and example of the inhabitants of that part, Heremar, a man who had lately embraced the faith, bestowed on St Bertin some land at Wormhout, near Dunkirk, very convenient for that purpose. Bertin sent thither his four British monks to found the new monastery. St Winnoc and his brethren worked tirelessly in building their church and cells, together with a hospital for the sick, and the place soon became an important missionary centre. Many miracles were attributed to Winnoc, who was always foremost in the service of his monastic brethren and his heathen neighbours. Even in his old age he ground corn for the poor of his community, turning the hand-mill himself without any assistance. When others were astonished that he should have strength enough to do constantly such hard labour, they looked through a chink into the barn and saw the quern turning without being touched, which they ascribed to a miracle.

St Winnoc died on November 6, the year, according to the fourteenth-century tradition, being 717. Count Baldwin IV built and founded at Bergues an abbey, which he peopled with a colony from Sithiu and enriched with the relics of St Winnoc. The lands of the monastery of Wormhout were settled upon this house, and the town bears the name of Bergues-Saint-Winnoc.

In curious contrast to St Illtud, St Winnoc, though his direct connection with Great Britain is very slight, is commemorated in nearly all the English calendars of the tenth and eleventh centuries (see those edited for the Henry Bradshaw Society by F. Wormald in 1934). What is more, his name is mentioned and the miracle of the corn grinding described in detail in the Old-English martyrology of c. 850. Three Latin lives of St Winnoc have been printed in the Acta Sanctorum, November, vol. iii, but only the first, which may have been written as early as the eighth century, is of much account, the other two being obviously based upon this. This first life has also been edited by Levison in MGH., Scriptores Merov., vol. v. See also Van der Essen, Étude critique sur les Saints méroving., pp. 402 seq. Flahault, Le culte de St Winnoc a Wormhout (1903) and Duine, Memento, p. 64. St Winnoc is apparently the titular of Saint Winnow in Cornwall, and in an excellent monograph (1940) Canon Doble gives reasons for thinking he was a Welshman who founded this Cornish church, and subsequently came to Sithiu, no doubt via Brittany. 

912 ST DEMETRIAN, BISHOP OP Khytri

The mitre of dark-green velvet is originated from the Khutyn monastery. It has got its modern shape in the late 18-th century when it was altered, but all details the mitre made in 1643 had, were kept and have been transfered to the new one. These are the silver gilt plaques adorned with the engraved compositions of “The Holy Virgin of the Sign”, “Deisis with Barlaam from Khutyn, the Reverend of Novgorod”, the cherubim. Against the velvet background on a base which is worked of round thin small plaques made of plated wire in spectacular manner are laid threaded pearls. Of great interest is a narrow stripe adorned with incased donative inscription that reads, “year 7151 (1643) March, 1 this hat was made to the house of his Gracious Reverend Barlaam at Khutyn”.

Khutyn Monastery of Saviour's Transfiguration and of St. Varlaam used to be the holiest monastery of the medieval Novgorod Republic. The monastery is situated on the right bank of the Volkhov River 10 km away from Novgorod, in the area known as Khutyn, whose name is derived from the Old Russian word for “devilry”.

A Serbian monk named Pachomius wrote the life of St Barlaam of Khutyn; in the Russian use of the Byzantine Mass he is commemorated at the preparation of the holy things.

See Martynov’s Annus ecclesiasticus Graeco-Slavicus in Acta Sanctorum, October, vol. xi; and cf. note under St Sergius on September 25 herein.  

1312 BD CHRISTINA. OF STOMMELN, VIRGIN; dying at the age of seventy, in 1312, with a great reputation of sanctity. Thirty years after her relics were translated to Niedeggen  in the Eifel, and again in 1569 to Jülich, where they still repose and receive the veneration of the people. Nor does anything which has been said above reflect on the credit of Bd Christina or suggest that that veneration is misplaced; for heroic virtue, which is the condition of holiness, is entirely independent of abnormal physical phenomena or extraordinary divine favours, and the first of these are not inconsistent with a life far from holy. The Holy See has recognized that the evidence touching the personal virtue of Bd Christina justifies the continuation of her age-long local cultus.

DURING her life and from the time of her death until to-day Christina Bruso was venerated as a saint in her native village of Stommeln, near Cologne, and at Jülich, where she was eventually buried; and on account of this uninterrupted local veneration Pope Pius X confirmed the cultus in 1908, just on 600 years after her death. Were it not for the large amount of contemporary, eyewitnesses’, and personal testimony to the phenomena which make her one of the most extraordinary cases in all hagiology, she would have to be dismissed as a devout but mentally diseased young woman who suffered from hallucinations on a very large scale indeed or whose biographers were either hopelessly deceived or unscrupulous liars.
   Even as it is, some of the Catholic scholars who have studied the documents are of the opinion that many statements of experiences were made by her when she was not mistress of herself; and, as one of them has put it, “it is easier to believe that the whole story was a romance concocted, letters and all, by Peter of Dacia and that no such person as Christina ever existed” than to believe the extravagances recorded in her letters written by the hand of the village schoolmaster.

   After Father Peter left Cologne in 1269 Christina corresponded with him through the parish priest, John, who sometimes added to her dictation comments of his own. From these letters it appears that the visitations, which Christina attributes to the malice of the Evil One, continued unabated, though in ever-varying forms. These violent happenings were not confined to Christina herself. Her father was hit with stones on the head and arms, her friend the Benedictine prior of Brauweiler was badly bitten by invisible teeth, and a skull, after moving about in the air, tied itself about the neck of the Brusos’ servant.

Father Peter of Dacia died about 1288 and Christina’s known history ends at that time, but she lived for another twenty-four years, dying at the age of seventy, in 1312, with a great reputation of sanctity. Thirty years after her relics were translated to Niedeggen in the Eifel, and again in 1569 to Jülich, where they still repose and receive the veneration of the people. Nor does anything which has been said above reflect on the credit of Bd Christina or suggest that that veneration is misplaced; for heroic virtue, which is the condition of holiness, is entirely independent of abnormal physical phenomena or extraordinary divine favours, and the first of these are not inconsistent with a life far from holy. The Holy See has recognized that the evidence touching the personal virtue of Bd Christina justifies the continuation of her age-long local cultus.

In the Acta Sanctorum (November, vol. i, pp. 418—459) Bd Margaret is mentioned among the praetermissi, and the writer describes the evidences of a still fervent cultus that he witnessed on a visit to Argentan in 1878. He also refers to a catalogue of miracles at the shrine, drawn up by Fr Mann de Proverre, but at that date unprinted. Several lives of this servant of God were published in the seventeenth century for example, one by P. de Hameau in 1628. In more modern times we have biographies by E. Laurent (1854) and R. Guérin (1926). The decree confirming the cultus is printed in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, vol. xiii (1921), pp. 231—233.