 Present day scholarship tends to treat St Bega not as a historical personage but a cult.As one scholar states; "The discovery of inconsistencies between these medieval texts, coupled with the significance attached to her jewellery (said to have been left in Cumbria on her departure for the north-east), now indicate that the abbess never existed.... More plausible is the suggestion that St Bega was the personification of a Cumbrian cult centred on 'her' bracelet (Old English