Saint Jordan of Bristol

Veneration Although antiquarians such as John Leland have traditionally wanted to date the origin of Jordan's cult to a time long before the building of Bristol's Norman-era cathedral, the earliest evidence for its existence can actually be found in the will of widow Agnes Spelly, who left a donation to the chapel of Saint Jordan on College Green in 1393. Later references to Jordan's cult can be found in financial record-keeping of St. Augustine's Abbey, Bristol: in the year 1491–92, funds were described as being taken "from the pyx within St. Jordan's chapel on the green" .

Based on the content of this hymn and its accompanying collect, David H. Higgins concluded:

While the name Jordan had been popularized in England by pilgrims returning from the Holy Land with bottles of water from the Jordan River,

Samuel Seyer, the early-19th-century historian of Bristol, also supported the view that Jordan, brother of Robert Fitzharding, had been named after an earlier saint, but he firmly believed this saint had been a member of the Gregorian mission, writing, "Nothing is more probable than that the pious founder of the abbey [Robert Fitzharding] gave it its name in memory of St. Augustine; and that Harding, his father, named one of his sons Jordan, in memory of the preacher, Augustine's companion."

Despite these indications of the cult's presence in the city, Fleming concluded that the extent of Bristolians' veneration of Jordan remained unclear, partly because "his name is not known to have been attached to any other location in Bristol," and "there is no reference to him in Ricart's Kalendar." The icon was painted by Helen McIldowie-Jenkins. However, maps of Bristol from the 17th century by cartographers John Speed and James Millerd appear to show the location of St. Jordan's former chapel before it was destroyed. John Speed's map of 1610, in particular, corresponds to William Camden's description of the former chapel's location as a "green plain, shaded all along the middle with a double row of trees; among which is a pulpit of stone, and a Chapel, wherein they say, that Jordan, Companion to St. Austin the English Apostle, was bury’d."

Due to an absence of references to Jordan in important texts such as Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Michael Hare dismissed as fiction the description of Jordan as a companion of Augustine of Canterbury; instead, he claims he was probably a local saint of the late Middle Ages.