Lives of the Saints
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Lives of the Saints’
Grand Duke Dmitri of Moscow loosened the grip of the Tartar Horde on the people of Russia, but treachery robbed him of triumph.
The tale of St Dmitri of the Don is a tale of the quest to free a people from foreign domination, of hard-fought victory and of wholly avoidable defeat. In 1380, Grand Duke Dmitri I of Moscow, aged just twenty-nine, freed the city from generations of vassalage to the Tartar Golden Horde, only for treachery to bring all that he had achieved to nothing in the very hour of triumph.
As he sat in his guest room at Durham Abbey, Ranulf de Capella could think of nothing but finding someone to rid him of his painful toothache.
Reginald of Durham was a monk at the Benedictine Abbey in Durham from about 1153 until his death some forty years later. The Abbey church housed the coffin and body (untouched by time, despite being regularly opened to view) of seventh-century miracle-working bishop St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, and from the steady stream of pilgrims who came to visit the shrine Reginald collected a fund of amazing tales.
Inspired by an avid interest in English warrior heroes, the fifteen-year-old Guthlac recruited a band of freebooting militiamen.
As a boy, so his biographer Felix tells us, St Guthlac (673-714) had been a mild-mannered child, a credit to his pious and well-to-do parents Penwald and Tette. But when he was fifteen, Guthlac began to be fascinated by stories of warriors and heroes and deeds of arms, and soon it became apparent that they were having a very negative effect on the blithe and innocent boy.
St Pega welcomed a royal servant with a serious eye condition to the monastery founded by her brother, St Guthlac.
After the death of St Guthlac in 714, his sister St Pega was left in charge of his hermitage at Crowland in modern-day Lincolnshire. For many years, exiled Mercian prince Æthelbald had been a frequent guest, so when one of his servants developed an eye problem which had all the doctors baffled, Crowland was their first thought.
On Easter night, monk Reginald woke from a doze to find the aged hermit Godric singing lustily.
St Godric of Finchale (?1065-1170) was a bed-ridden invalid near the end of a long and eventful life when Reginald, a monk from the nearby Durham Abbey, went to see him in his hermitage in a bend of the River Wear. It was a Saturday, the night before Easter Day. Back in the Abbey church, the monks were eagerly awaiting the sunrise, but Reginald had dozed off.
The monks of the monastery on Iona are all keeping the same secret from one another.
Columba brought twelve monks to Iona in 563. His little community supported itself by farming a fertile plain on the western side of the island, but the monastery stood on the eastern side, and to get home the monks had to trudge across a mile of tumbled upland moors. By half way, the loads they bore at harvest time felt decidedly heavy.