Confessor Brictius

Brictius of Tours, also known as Brice, Britius, or Bricius, was a bishop and confessor of the late fourth and early fifth centuries in Roman Gaul. The principal narrative of his life comes from Gregory of Tours, writing in the sixth century, who presents Brictius as a native of Tours taken in as a child by Saint Martin of Tours and formed among Martin’s clergy and the monastic community associated with Marmoutier. Ordained priest in due course, he was regarded as gifted but, in his younger years, proud and inclined to worldly manners. Gregory relates that Brictius once mocked Martin as a senile wonder-worker; Martin is said to have answered with a prophecy that Brictius himself would become bishop of Tours and would suffer many adversities in that office. When Martin died in 397, Brictius succeeded him as the fourth bishop of the see.

As bishop, Brictius held the diocese of Tours for an exceptionally long tenure and promoted the memory of his predecessor. Tradition credits him with building a church or chapel over Martin’s tomb, a structure that stood at the origin of the later basilica of Saint Martin. After more than three decades of episcopal rule, a grave public accusation was brought against him. A woman employed in washing clothes for the church community gave birth, and the people of Tours alleged that Brictius was the child’s father. According to the hagiographical account, Brictius had the infant, then only about a month old, brought into the congregation and adjured it to say whether he was the father; the child is reported to have denied it. The crowd was unconvinced. Brictius was expelled from Tours. During his absence the see was occupied first by a bishop named Justinian and then by Armentius.

Brictius travelled to Rome and spent seven years in exile, seeking the judgment of the pope. The surviving sources do not furnish a year-by-year record of this Roman sojourn, but Gallic tradition holds that he was received as a penitent and that the Apostolic See ultimately supported his restoration. After the death of Armentius he returned to Tours, around the later 430s, and resumed his office. Gregory of Tours states that he died in the forty-seventh year of his episcopate, a calculation that places his death in 444. He died at Tours and was buried there, in close association with the shrine of Saint Martin which he had helped to establish.

The Church venerated Brictius as a saint and confessor notwithstanding the scandals of his middle years, interpreting his long exile and peaceful restoration as the fulfillment of Martin’s prophecy and as evidence of patience under trial. His cult is already taken for granted by Gregory of Tours. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 13 November, a date later known in medieval England as St. Brice’s Day. Precise details of his birth are not independently documented beyond the tradition that he was a native of Tours raised in Martin’s household; no contemporary chronicle supplies a birth year. What can be affirmed with reasonable confidence is his succession to Martin in 397, his long and troubled episcopate, his exile and return, and his death at Tours in the mid-fifth century.