Adrian of May

Saint Adrian of May is an early medieval Christian martyr whose cult developed on the Isle of May, a small island in the Firth of Forth off the coast of Fife in eastern Scotland. Contemporary written evidence for his life is entirely lacking. What later generations believed about him is preserved chiefly in the Aberdeen Breviary, printed in 1510, which drew on older Scottish liturgical and legendary materials assembled under Bishop William Elphinstone of Aberdeen. In that account Adrian is described as a man of royal blood from Pannonia, that is, Hungary. He is said to have abandoned his homeland in order to preach the Gospel, taking with him a sister named Stobna and an enormous company of companions, numbered in the breviary at six thousand six hundred and six. After a voyage that brought them to the shores of Fife they were welcomed by a Pictish ruler, commonly identified as King Hungus or Óengus, and they established themselves on the Isle of May, living there in a monastic or eremitical community.

The same tradition records that Danish raiders, sometimes named as Hubba and Hinguar, fell upon the island in the year 875 and put Adrian and his companions to death. The precision of that year and the identification of the killers belong to the legendary rather than the documentary stratum of the story; no ninth-century annal independently confirms a massacre of that date on May. Nevertheless the island became a cemetery and a focus of devotion. By the twelfth century the site was important enough that King David I of Scotland founded a Benedictine priory there, placing it at first under the English abbey of Reading. The priory church was dedicated to Saint Adrian, and the island drew pilgrims who came to venerate the relics of the martyr and to seek healing. Archaeological remains, including stone coffins long associated in local tradition with Adrian and his followers, have been noted on the island by later observers.

Historians of the early Scottish church treat the Hungarian royal genealogy, the vast number of companions, and the date 875 as typical late-medieval elaborations, comparable to other inflated martyr-legends of the period. A widely discussed scholarly hypothesis identifies the saint of May with Saint Ethernan, also called Itharnan, an Irish or Pictish missionary whose death among the Picts is recorded in the Annals of Ulster for the year 669. On this view the name Adrian may have been substituted or popularized after the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when continental saints’ names and dedications became more common in Scotland under royal and monastic patronage. It is also possible that two originally distinct cults were fused. No early vita survives, and the historical figure behind the medieval legend—whether a ninth-century victim of Viking attack or a seventh-century missionary later re-named—cannot be reconstructed in any detail.

The liturgical feast of Saint Adrian was kept on 4 March in the Aberdeen Breviary and in other Scottish calendars, where he is sometimes styled bishop as well as martyr. Later Scottish writers, including Hector Boece in the sixteenth century and George Buchanan, repeated the story of the Hungarian missionary and the Danish massacre, thereby fixing the legend in national historiography. The priory on the Isle of May remained a pilgrimage centre through the later Middle Ages until the Reformation. In modern times Adrian of May is remembered as one of the early saints of Fife and of the medieval Scottish church. His legend, however unreliable in its particulars, preserves the memory of missionary Christianity and of martyrdom on the eastern coast of Pictland and early historic Scotland, and the island itself continues to be associated with his name.