St. Bega and Her Holy Arm Ring

16 April 19 | Posted in Saints, Supernatural

St. Bega is an ancient Irish saint whose life is steeped in legend and mystery.  She lived between 700-900 A.D., probably closer to 850 AD and the time of Viking settlement in Ireland.  Bega was the daughter of an Irish king.  She is described as beautiful, virtuous and learned.  Her father had promised her to the son of the King of Norway, but Bega had no intention of marrying.  She consecrated her virginity to Christ.  According to one story, an angel presented Bega with an arm ring inscribed with the cross as a token of her sacred promise.  Arm rings were usually worn by men, not women.

On the night of her wedding Bega was desperate to escape.  All the doors in the palace were locked, and the strongest men of Ireland standing guard, “each with a dagger over his thigh, a double-edged axe over his shoulder and a spear in his hand.” (Very phallic symbols!) After a lengthy invocation by Bega, a holy voice directs her out of the palace while everyone else is drunk at a feast. All of the locks yield at the touch of the holy arm ring, and a boat is waiting for her at the shore.  In another account, Bega is transported across the Irish Sea by a clod of soil.  She arrives safely on the English coast at Cumbria. Settling there, Bega lived in strict seclusion in a hut she built in a grove of trees near the seashore.  She survived on food brought to her by seagulls and gannets.

After some years passed Viking pirates began to raid the coast.  Fearing rape and the loss of her virginity, Bega left her hermitage and traveled inland.  On the advice of King Oswald (later St. Oswald), she professed her religious vows, and established a monastery at St. Bees in Cumbria. 

What became of her magical arm ring?  In one story she leaves her arm ring behind as a future source of miracles. In another her arm ring was preserved as a holy relic at St. Bees.  St. Bega is credited with restoring the sight of a blind Irish boy; gifting a Galloway horse thief with an ass full of arrows, and killing by a disfiguring disease a detachment of soldiers who raped a nobleman’s virgin daughter.

The Registry of St. Bees’ Priory records the swearing of oaths on the “Bracelet of St. Bega” through 1279, and offerings to the arm ring were made as late as 1516.

The arm ring may have disappeared during King Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1540s; or, it may have been looted by the Scottish knight, Lord James Douglas during a raid in 1315.

Read more about St. Bega on these sites:

Esmeralda’s Cumbrian History and Folklore

St. Bees Village Website

St. Bega – Cumbria and Borders

Baldy Blog – St. Bees Priory

 

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