Suggest an Edit — Machutus

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Biography

Short Description

Saint Machutus, known in French as Saint Malo and in Latin also as Maclovius or Maclou, was a British monk and missionary of the sixth century who became bishop of Aleth in Brittany and one of the seven traditional founding saints of Brittany. The walled port city of Saint-Malo on the north Breton coast takes its name from him. Almost nothing about his life can be established from contemporary documents. The principal narrative sources are later medieval vitae, especially a Life composed in the ninth century by Bili, a deacon of Aleth, which already combines local memory with miracle stories and legendary voyages. Later recensions added still more folkloric material, including an association with Saint Brendan the Navigator that historians treat as literary rather than historical. He belongs to the wider movement of British monastic emigration into Armorica in the fifth and sixth centuries, which shaped the church of Brittany.

Tradition places his birth in Wales in the earlier sixth century, sometimes at or near the monastery of Llancarfan in Glamorgan, sometimes in Gwent. No verified year of birth survives, and precise dates sometimes offered in later lists should not be treated as historical. He is described as having received a monastic education and as having crossed the Channel to Armorica. There he settled on a tidal island off Aleth (the later Saint-Servan, now part of Saint-Malo), where a hermit named Aaron was already established. Machutus lived as a monk, attracted disciples, and in time was made bishop of Aleth. In that office the vitae present him as an austere preacher and organizer of Christian life among the Bretons. A well-known episode in the legend, in which he restores a dead pig to life, later encouraged popular devotion among swineherds, though such tales belong to hagiographical convention rather than to recoverable biography.

Relations with the people of Aleth deteriorated. The medieval lives attribute his expulsion to the harshness of his discipline or to disputes over customary dues. He is said to have withdrawn to Saintonge in Aquitaine and to have been received by Bishop Leontius of Saintes. Accounts of his last years diverge: one strand has him die in exile in the south-west; another has him recalled to Brittany and dying at Archambiac, a place often identified with Saint-Malo-de-Beignon in Morbihan. Reference works commonly give the year of his death as 621 and assign his feast to 15 November, the date under which he appears in the Roman Martyrology and in Breton and Welsh calendars. Because the vitae are late and internally inconsistent, the precise place of death cannot be regarded as certain, even though 621 and 15 November are the dates conventionally cited.

After his death a strong local cult developed. Relics associated with him were translated to Aleth and subsequently to the growing settlement on Aaron's island, which took the name Saint-Malo. In the twelfth century the bishopric itself was transferred from Aleth to Saint-Malo. He was numbered among the seven saints - Samson, Brieuc, Tugdual, Paul Aurelian, Patern, Corentin, and Malo - who in Breton tradition founded the chief bishoprics of the peninsula. Churches dedicated to Machutus or Malo are found in Brittany, Normandy, and other parts of France, and related or homonymous dedications appear in Wales and Cornwall, where Saint Mawes is sometimes, though not always, distinguished from him. His relics at Saint-Malo suffered in the French Revolution. He remains the patron of the city of Saint-Malo. A careful historical account must distinguish the missionary-bishop of Aleth, whose existence and cult are early and well attested, from the richly embroidered saint of later legend.

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