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                               THE
                       Lives of the Saints

                       REV. S. BARING-GOULD

                         _SIXTEEN VOLUMES_

                         VOLUME THE FIRST




  [Illustration: SILVER-GILT MONSTRANCE,
                 In the Treasury of the Cathedral, Aix-la-Chapelle.]




                               THE
                       Lives of the Saints


                             BY THE
                   REV. S. BARING-GOULD, M.A.


                   New Edition in 16 Volumes


       Revised with Introduction and Additional Lives of
           English Martyrs, Cornish and Welsh Saints,
              and a full Index to the Entire Work


             _ILLUSTRATED BY OVER 400 ENGRAVINGS_


                        VOLUME THE FIRST

                            January


                            LONDON
                        JOHN C. NIMMO
                14 KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND
                          MDCCCXCVII




           _Printed by_ BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
                _At the Ballantyne Press_




AUTHOR'S PREFACE
TO FIRST EDITION
(1872)


The Lives of the Saints, which I have begun, is an undertaking, of
whose difficulty few can have any idea. Let it be remembered, that
there were Saints in every century, for eighteen hundred years; that
their Acts are interwoven with the profane history of their times,
and that the history, not of one nation only, but of almost every
nation under the sun; that the records of these lives are sometimes
fragmentary, sometimes mere hints to be culled out of secular history;
that authentic records have sometimes suffered interpolation, and that
some records are forgeries; that the profane history with which the
lives of the Saints is mixed up is often dark and hard to be read; and
then some idea may be formed of the difficulty of this undertaking.

After having had to free the Acts of a martyr from a late accretion of
fable, and to decide whether the passion took place under--say Decius
or Diocletian, Claudius the Elder, or Claudius the younger,--the writer
of a hagiology is hurried into Byzantine politics, and has to collect
the thread of a saintly confessor's life from the tangle of political
and ecclesiastical intrigue, in that chaotic period when emperors
rose and fell, and patriarchs succeeded each other with bewildering
rapidity. And thence he is, by a step, landed in the romance world of
Irish hagiology, where the footing is as insecure as on the dark bogs
of the Emerald Isle. Thence he strides into the midst of the wreck
of Charlemagne's empire, to gather among the splinters of history a
few poor mean notices of those holy ones living then, whose names
have survived, but whose acts are all but lost. And then the scene
changes, and he treads the cool cloister of a mediaeval abbey, to glean
materials for a memoir of some peaceful recluse, which may reflect
the crystalline purity of the life without being wholly colourless of
incident.

And then, maybe, he has to stand in the glare of the great
conflagration of the sixteenth century, and mark some pure soul passing
unscathed through the fire, like the lamp in Abraham's vision.

That one man can do justice to this task is not to be expected. When
Bellarmine heard of the undertaking of Rosweydus, he asked "What is
this man's age? does he expect to live two hundred years?" But for the
work of the Bollandists, it would have been an impossibility for me to
undertake this task. But even with this great storehouse open, the work
to be got through is enormous. Bollandus began January with two folios
in double columns, close print, of 1200 pages each. As he and his
coadjutors proceeded, fresh materials came in, and February occupies
three volumes. May swelled into seven folios, September into eight,
and October into ten. It was begun in 1643, and the fifty-seventh
volume appeared in 1861.

The labour of reading, digesting, and selecting from this library is
enormous. With so much material it is hard to decide what to omit, but
such a decision must be made, for the two volumes of January have to
be crushed into one, not a tenth of the size of one of Bollandus, and
the ten volumes for October must suffer compression to an hundredth
degree, so as to occupy the same dimensions. I had two courses open to
me. One to give a brief outline, bare of incident, of the life of every
Saint; the other to diminish the number of lives, and present them to
the reader in greater fulness, and with