Gerald of Mayo

Gerald of Mayo, known in Irish as Garalt of Mag nEo, was an English monk of Northumbrian origin who became abbot of the monastery of Mayo in Connacht, in the west of Ireland. He belongs to the generation that followed the Synod of Whitby of 664. Contemporary written evidence for him personally is slight. Bede of Wearmouth-Jarrow, in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed about 731, gives a careful account of how an English monastery came to be founded at Mayo, but he does not mention Gerald by name. The identification of Gerald as abbot of that house, and most of the personal detail attached to him, rest on later Irish tradition, including a Latin Life of Saint Gerald which mixes plausible institutional memory with legendary episodes. No reliable year of birth survives, and nothing more precise than a Northumbrian English origin can be said about his birthplace.

After King Oswiu of Northumbria ruled at Whitby in favour of the Roman Easter and tonsure, Colman, bishop of Lindisfarne and a monk of the Columban family, left Lindisfarne with those who would not conform. He went first to Iona and then, about 668, established a monastery on Inishbofin, off the coast of what is now County Galway. Bede reports that strife broke out between the Irish and English monks. The Irish were in the habit of leaving the island in the summer to travel among their own people, leaving the English to do the work of the house, and of returning in winter to live on the fruits of that labour. Colman therefore obtained a site on the mainland and founded a separate monastery for the English at Mag nEo, the plain of the yews, thereafter often called Mayo of the Saxons (Mag nEo na Sacsan). Later tradition names Gerald as the superior set over this English community, either as its first abbot or as Colman's successor in that role.

Mayo became one of the more notable English monastic foundations in Ireland. Bede, writing while the community still flourished, described it as a distinguished monastery containing a large number of English monks living under a rule and observing the canonical Easter. The house later acquired a reputation for learning and in time became the seat of a bishopric. How far Gerald himself shaped its observance or its later fame cannot be measured from sources written in his own lifetime. Hagiographical accounts credit him with a long abbacy, with the foundation of a convent associated with a Saxon woman named Segretia, and with contact with Saint Adomnán of Iona. These stories cannot be confirmed independently and should be treated as legend rather than as established biography.

Martyrologies and later calendars give 13 March 732 as the date of Gerald's death and place that death at Mayo. He is commemorated as an abbot-saint of the early Irish Church. His feast day is 13 March. Like most saints of his period and region, he was not the object of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval type; cult grew from the memory of the monastery he governed. The later medieval and early modern diocese of Mayo looked back to the Saxon monastery as its origin, and Gerald remained the principal saint associated with that foundation. Claims that he lived more than a century, that he was a bishop, or that he performed particular miracles belong to the later Life and to popular devotion, not to independently attested history.