Breage

Breage or Breaca (with many variant spellings) is a saint venerated in Cornwall and South West England. According to her late hagiography, she was an Irish nun of the 5th or 6th century who founded a church in Cornwall. The village and civil parish of Breage in Cornwall are named after her, and the local Breage Parish Church is dedicated to her. She is a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church and Catholic Church.

Traditions

Breage Church was established by 1170, giving its name to the village and parish of Breage, Cornwall. However, little else is known of Saint Breage or her early cultus. She was the subject of a medieval hagiography, probably written in the 14th or 15th century. The work is lost, but the English antiquarian John Leland recorded some extracts in his Itinerary around 1540. The surviving text suggests an initial composition at or for Breage Church, as it contains a number of references to local places and gives Breage precedence over other saints of the region. Undeterred, Breage travelled through Cornwall, visiting the hill of Pencaire and establishing a church at Trenewith or Chynoweth. After her death the church was moved to its present location, and many miracles occurred at her tomb. A Breage Fair is held on the third Monday in June.

It was whilst visiting Breage, on the 8th. of January 1982, that the international film actor Grégoire Aslan died.

Identity Since the traditions about Breage that have come down are late, the veracity of the details are doubted. The hagiography is replete with stock elements: her association with other locally venerated saints as companions, her conflict with a heathen tyrant, and her establishment as a hermit in a remote part of the parish that was later named for her. Her Irish origin is suspect, as in this period in Cornwall it was common to attribute a fabricated Irish connection to obscure saints. In Breage's case it may have been suggested by the similarity between her name and the Campus Breace in the Life of Brigid.

As such, the traditions surrounding Breage appear to be later legend attached to a figure whose true history had been lost. There was a saint with a similar name active in the area during the Early Middle Ages, Brioc, whose feast day was 1 May, the same day that William Worcester gave for Breage. Brioc was male, but it is not uncommon for the gender of poorly remembered saints to have been switched over the years. In Brittany there was also a Saint Briac, who gave his name to a number of places in the region. However, all medieval mentions of Breage regard her as female, complicating an identification with similarly named male saints.

Later brief accounts of Breage, mostly adapted from Leland, appear in the works of Alban Butler and Sabine Baring-Gould.