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Biography

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Saint Armel (also known as Arthmael, Arthfael, or Armagilus) was a sixth-century monk and missionary associated with the British emigration to Armorica. Later medieval hagiography presents him as a native of South Wales, of aristocratic birth, and as a kinsman of Saint Samson of Dol. The principal Life of Armel is a twelfth-century composition and cannot be treated as a contemporary record; it does, however, preserve the outline of a cult that was already well established in Brittany. According to that tradition, Armel received a monastic formation in Britain before crossing the Channel with other British clerics during the period of migration that populated the Breton peninsula.

In Léon, in what is now the department of Finistère, he is credited with founding the parish and monastery of Plouarzel, whose name preserves his own. The same tradition then takes him to the Frankish royal court of Childebert I at Paris, where he is said to have been received with honour. From the king he obtained land in inland Brittany, in the forested country later associated with Brocéliande, and there he established a second monastic centre. That foundation became Ploërmel (from the Breton Plou-Armel, meaning parish of Armel), which remained the principal focus of his cult.

Hagiographical legend attributes to Armel the taming and destruction of a dragon that had been ravaging the neighbourhood of Ploërmel: he is said to have bound the creature with his stole and led it away to perish, a motif shared with several other Celtic and Breton saints. He is portrayed as an abbot and wonder-worker who spent his last years at the monastery he had founded. Tradition places his death and burial at Ploërmel, where his relics were afterwards venerated in the church that bears his name.

Armel's feast is kept on 16 August. His cult remained strongly local to Brittany, with dedications at Ploërmel, Plouarzel, and a number of other parishes including several communes named Saint-Armel. In the late fifteenth century the future Henry VII of England, who had spent years of exile in Brittany, developed a personal devotion to the saint and later promoted his image in England; a figure of Saint Armel appears among the decorations of Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster Abbey. In popular Breton devotion Armel has been invoked against headaches, fever, gout, rheumatism, and colic. He was never the subject of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval or modern type; his recognition as a saint belongs to the older, local, and pre-congregation pattern of cult.

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