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.