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St. Begnet (7th century?),[1] alsoBegneta,Begnete,Begnait orBecnait is apatron saint ofDalkey,Ireland.[2] She is noted as a "virgin, not amartyr."[3] Herfeast day is November 12.[4] Tworuined churches in Dalkey are named for Begnet, one onDalkey Island, and the other near the 14th-century stonetownhouse now serving asDalkey Castle and Heritage Centre, in the area known asKilbegnet. Aholy well located near themartello tower on the island is also associated with her;[5] as theIrish playwrightHugh Leonard observed:
A few yards away are theruins of achurch supposedly built by the town's patron saint, St. Begnet. LikeSt. Patrick himself, St. Begnet may never have existed: There is even uncertainty as to whether he or she wasmale orfemale.[6] No one bothers to argue about this: In Dalkey, when it is a question ofsainthood,sex is hardly likely to have much relevance.[7]
The name has been incorrectly understood as a corruption ofSt. Benedict.[4] The stories associated with her suggest that she has also been identified withSaint Bega or othervirgin saints named as Begha or Becga in Irishcalendars.[8]
Begnet is named in the calendars of twomanuscriptbreviaries which in the 19th century were held by theLibrary of Trinity College, Dublin. One had belonged to thechurch of Clondalkin, and the other to theparish church ofSt. John the Evangelist,Dublin, but she is not mentioned in theMartyrology of Oengus.[9]
According to one source on the history of the church in Dalkey, Begnet's father was Colman, the son of Aedh in the parish of Kilbegnatan (Kilbegnet or Cill Becnait).[10] Like many other female virgin saints, she is described as beautiful and desirable, but she refused her numerous suitors in favour of religious devotion. Her social status is sometimes given as "Irish princess", and thus she would have been a valuable bride. She is said variously to have lived as ananchorite or to have served as the firstabbess ofnuns on a small island off the coast ofEngland.[11]
Begnet may not have come from Dalkey, despite the genealogical note on her origin.Missionaries may have founded the two churches in her name there.[11]
Alegend pertaining to this relatively obscure saint is propagated byhistoric preservationists andpromoters oftourism.[12] As a child, Begnet was visited by anangel who gave her abracelet inscribed with across as a mark of hervocation. To avoid marriage, Begnet left home and took nothing with her but the bracelet. In this version of the story, Begnet flees toNorthumbria, where she was received into theChurch byBishop Aidan. After years of enduring continual raids bypirates, she moved toCumberland. Her bracelet became an object ofveneration after her death. By the 12th century, the veracity oflegal testimony could be asserted by swearing on the bracelet, and the penalty forperjury was death.[11]
This story, or a version of it, is told also aboutSaint Bega, who is said to have been of Irish origin. One source for Bega's legend is a 15th-centuryBook of Hours held by theBodleian Library,Oxford.[13]
In 1795, the entry on Dalkey Island in W.W. Seward'sTopographia Hibernica (Topography of Ireland) claimed thatDalki was so-called "on account of thePaganaltar there".[14] Seward described the island as having "plenty ofherbage and somemedicinal plants", and said at that time the only building on it was the ruin of the church. The author also professed to find "some remarkable ruins ofDruidicantiquities" in nearbyKilliney.[15] The possibility cannot be excluded that the legendary Begnet is aChristianized survival of adeity from earlier Irish religious practice.
As is the case with many other early Celtic saints, aspects of Begnet's narratives and archaeology indicate that the traditional religions of ancient Ireland had been appropriated, rather than stamped out, by evangelizing Christianity. The existence of several similarly named saints in the region may also suggest cross-identification among local Christian religious figures, perhaps in association with one or more deities fromCeltic or other traditional religions, though this is no longer a fashionable view in the early 21st century.[16] The epithetsanctus, "holy," from which English "saint" derives etymologically and which is the word for "saint" inecclesiastical Latin, can appear inepitaphs of those who had notconverted to Christianity.[17] The interaction or sometimes reconciliation between Christian missionaries and representatives of traditional religiousauthority is expressed in Ireland by, for instance, narratives ofSt. Patrick and thedruids, many of whom are oppositional but some of whom eitherconvert or assume a welcoming,ecumenical attitude.[18] The 7th-century dating of the earliest surviving sources for these Irish stories coincides with the life of Begnet. Healing, one of her attributes, was an area in which local practitioners and Christian missionaries often competed for authority. At the same time, competition might mean incorporating local religious beliefs and traditions into the Christian message: "the local ecclesiastic, who weaves the cadences and mythology of orthodoxliturgy andcosmology with the exigencies and spirits of the localcosmos, has been well documented inByzantine andmedieval Christian cultures."[19]
Violent martyrdom would have been rare among Irish saints until theNorse invasions of the 8th century. A7th-century Irish homily describes three kinds of martyrdom: white (bloodless), a separation from all that one loves; blue (or green), the mortification of one's will throughfasting and penitential labour; and red (bloody), undergoing physical torture or death.[20] Early Christian theologians such asBasil of Ancyra regarded the forms of martyrdom as external to true virtue.[21] By these criteria, Begnet's description asvirgo, non martyr may not be a self-evident rejection of the status of martyrdom for her. The story of how she left behind her former life, carrying with her only the bracelet that marked her service to the cross, suggests a form of "white" martyrdom. The homily's colortriad of martyrdom appears with a fragment of aLatin triad on ethical martyrdom requiring "self-control in abundance, generosity in poverty, chastity in youth."[22] The rejection of marriage by the beautiful young Begnet would be categorized ascastitas in iuventute, a form of martyrdom acquired by "chastity in youth" and in early Ireland not considered inferior to that brought about through violence.[23]
During the 7th century in Ireland, saints' bodies were sometimes deliberately dismembered and distributed as relics, and this dispersal offers another explanation for the spread of similarly named saints.[24] In 1837, a topographical dictionary recorded mysterious "stone coffins" on Dalkey Island said to contain disarticulated human remains.[25] This practice may again preserve an earlier feature of ancient Celtic religious cosmology, in which the articulated human body corresponds in numerical proportion to the universe, as preserved in myths of ritual dismemberment by sword.[26] In the 19th century, it was speculated that the builders of the stone tombs on Dalkey Island, sometimes calledkistvaens, were "Celtic, orBelgic, tribes of a very remote æra."[27]
