In William Shakespeare’s “King Henry V” he makes great play of
the fact that the Battle of Agincourt was fought on “Saint Crispin’s Day” – “Gentlemen
in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and
hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks that fought with us upon Saint
Crispin’s day”.
So who was Saint Crispin?
There were actually two saints, namely Crispin (often
spelled Crispian) and his twin brother Crispinian, who lived in the late 3rd
century. They were nobly-born Christians who lived in Rome but who escaped the then
current round of persecutions and went to live in Gaul instead, settling in the
town of Noviodunum (modern day Soissons in north-east France).
They embarked on missionary work and made shoes in the
evenings to earn a living, although they took care never to charge a customer
more than they could afford to pay.
When Emperor Maximian visited Noviodunum some of the locals
complained to him about the brothers’ missionary activities. Maximian handed
them over a man called Rictius Varus, who had some novel and painful ways of
getting Christians to recant their faith. However, he failed completely, which
played such havoc with Varus’s mental state that he promptly drowned himself
(or possibly jumped into a fire that he had lined up for the brothers – there
are several versions of this story).
Maximian decided that a more reliable method of ridding
Noviodunum of two troublemakers would be to behead them, and this was what was
done.
Because of their nightly work as shoemakers, Crispin and
Crispinian have traditionally been regarded as the patron saints of workers in
leather.
There is another version of the legend in which the brothers
were British and their shoemaking took place in Faversham, Kent. As with so
many stories about early saints, the faithful can believe which version they
want to!
© John Welford
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