When the saints march in The Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Albans, Hertfordshire, part II

In the second of two articles, John Goodall examines some of the recent changes made to highlight the saints associated with this ancient church

- John Goodall

ON June 25, 1178, a grand procession conveyed a collection of bones exhumed from a burial mound at Redbourn, Hertfordshire, to the great Benedictine Abbey of St Albans three miles away. Among them were supposedly the remains of a cleric who had been saved from persecution by the bravery of the abbey's eponymous saint in the late Roman period. As described in the previous issue, early accounts of Alban's execution outside the walls of Verulamium, possibly in 304BC, offer no record of the cleric's name or subsequent story. In 1135, he became Amphibalus—or ‘cloak’—the word borrowed from an item of his clothing mentioned in a 6th-century narrative of Alban’s martyrdom. An exemplary restoration project has now given Amphibalus physical presence within this church once again.

The procession of 1178 followed hard on the feast of Alban’s martyrdom on June 22. It was also connected to an account of the life of St Alban—masquerading as a Latin translation of an ancient British text—recently composed by a member of the monastic community called William. According to this, Amphibalus fled to Wales and was followed by 999 citizens of Verulamium who had been converted to Christianity by his preaching. The whole group was pursued and massacred, but Amphibalus was bound in chains and brought back to the city. There, he was executed by being forced to walk around a post to which his intestines had been nailed (Fig 1). A further butchery of Christians followed and, in the confusion, Amphibalus’s corpse was hidden, ‘to be brought to light at some time or other—by divine action as we may believe’.