Suggest an Edit — William of Perth

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Biography

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William of Perth, known also as William of Rochester, was a Scottish baker whose cult developed at Rochester Cathedral in the early thirteenth century. He was born in Perth, in the Kingdom of Scotland, at an unknown date in the twelfth century; no contemporary record preserves the year of his birth. By occupation he was a baker. Medieval accounts of his life, which survive through the tradition of the Benedictine cathedral priory at Rochester rather than through independent Scottish sources, present him as a man of notable piety and charity. He is said to have given a tenth of his goods to the poor and, in particular, to have reserved every tenth loaf from his baking for those in need.

According to the same hagiographical tradition, William found an abandoned infant at the door of a church, adopted the child, named him David, and brought him up in his own household, teaching him the baker's trade. In later life William determined to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He set out from Scotland accompanied by his adopted son. Their route took them through England as far as Rochester in Kent, where they remained for a short time before continuing toward Canterbury and, ultimately, the Holy Land.

After they had left Rochester, David is said to have murdered William for the money the pilgrim carried, striking him on the head and cutting his throat, and then to have fled. The traditional date of the killing is 1201. The place of the murder was in the neighbourhood of Rochester, outside the city itself. A woman who had been suffering from madness later found the body. The legend relates that she fashioned a garland of honeysuckle, set it first upon the dead man's head and then upon her own, and was at once restored to her right mind; she then made the crime known.

The monks of Rochester Cathedral took up William's body and buried it in their church. Miracles were reported at the tomb, and a shrine was established. In the thirteenth century the cult attracted pilgrims and offerings on a scale that made it, locally, second only to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket as a source of devotion and of income for the cathedral fabric, which was then being rebuilt after fire. Bishop Lawrence of St Martin, who held the see of Rochester in the mid-thirteenth century, promoted the cult and obtained papal indulgences for pilgrims. William was popularly venerated as a martyr, though he was not the subject of a formal papal canonization of the kind that later became standard. His feast day is 23 May. He is invoked as a patron of adopted children. The historical core of the story—a Scottish pilgrim slain near Rochester about 1201 and buried in the cathedral—is consistent with the cathedral's own later medieval records; the more detailed episodes of the vita cannot be confirmed from independent evidence and belong to the conventions of medieval saint's legend.

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