Simon Stock

Simon Stock was an English Carmelite of the thirteenth century who served as prior general of his order during its transformation from a community of hermits into a mendicant order of friars. Virtually nothing about his origins can be verified from contemporary records. Later Carmelite hagiography, written a century or more after his death, asserted that he had been born in Kent and had lived for years as a solitary in the hollow trunk of a tree, a story that supplied the surname Stock. The round figure of a hundred-year lifespan, which yields the traditional birth year sometimes printed in older works, belongs to the same legendary layer and is not corroborated by independent evidence.

What can be said with greater confidence is that Simon Stock belonged to the generation that adapted the Carmelite vocation to Western Europe after the hermits left Mount Carmel. He is listed as prior general, an office tradition assigns to him from about 1247. During those years the order obtained from Pope Innocent IV a modified rule that permitted the Carmelites to settle in cities, to preach, and to study, following the pattern of the Franciscans and Dominicans. Foundations were made at Cambridge, Oxford, Paris and other university towns. Simon Stock’s name is therefore bound up with the juridical and institutional consolidation of the Carmelites in the Latin West.

Catholic devotion remembers him above all for a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary, said to have occurred at Cambridge on 16 July 1251. In that account Mary gave him the Brown Scapular and promised that anyone who died wearing it would not suffer eternal fire. The story is absent from thirteenth-century sources and first appears in Carmelite writings of the late fourteenth century. Historians therefore regard the scapular vision as a later expression of Marian and order-identity piety rather than as a documented incident of Simon Stock’s lifetime. The devotion itself, however, became one of the most widespread sacramentals of the Catholic Church.

According to the tradition of the order he died at Bordeaux on 16 May 1265 and was buried in the cathedral there. His tomb attracted pilgrims, and his liturgical cult grew within the Carmelite family from the later Middle Ages. He was never the object of a formal papal canonization of the post-Tridentine type; his feast on 16 May was granted to the Carmelites and he is commemorated in the Roman Martyrology. Relics remain at Bordeaux; others were translated to the restored Carmelite priory at Aylesford in Kent in the twentieth century. He is invoked as a patron of the Carmelite order and of the city of Bordeaux.