Saint Brigid

Of the fifteen Irish saints bearing this name, the most important is St Brigid of Kildare (d. 525), one of the three patron saints of Ireland, along with St Patrick and St Colum Cille. Often referred to in popular tradition as ‘Mary of the Gael’, her feast-day is 1 February. Verifiable details of her life are scant, although her serious hagiographers elaborated the outline with many fabulous stories. She is thought to have been born in the middle of the 5th century at Faughart, near Dundalk, Co. Louth, and to have founded a religious house at Kildare, where she died. The name Dubthach is traditionally ascribed to her father. Perhaps the most enduring legend attached to her is that she converted a pagan on his deathbed while holding a cross plaited from rushes on the floor; crosses of St Brigid, made of four stalks of rushes extending from a square, are still commonplace in Ireland. A second association is with fire. Giraldus Cambrensis reported (1184) that a company of nuns attended an ‘inextinguishable’ fire at Kildare in St Brigid's honour. Although it had been kept burning for 500 years, it had produced no ash; men were not allowed near the fire. Brigid was thought of as the ‘mother’ and exemplar of virgins. She was also a patroness of Leinstermen and was thought to favour them in times of war.

As her fame spread through the British Isles she was venerated in Scotland, Wales, on the Isle of Man, and in England, where there were nineteen churches dedicated to her before the Reformation. In the Hebrides she was thought to be the midwife of the Virgin Mary, and a special votive figure was made in her honour. A straw figure dressed in women's clothes was placed in a large basket and called ‘Brigid's bed’. Commentators have long asserted that her persona is based on the cult of the pre-Christian goddess Brigit. None the less, St Brigid remains on the Church calendar with the caution that most stories portraying her life are inauthentic. See also BARBE, SAINT.

Bibliography

• Dorothy A. Bray, “‘The Image of St. Brigit in the Early Irish Church’”, Études celtiques, 24 (1987), 209–15