Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Missionary to Strathclyde
January 14 · d. 603
Kentigern, called Mungo, was the first bishop of the Britons of Strathclyde and is the patron of Glasgow, where his church stands on the site he is said to have chosen at the meeting of the Clyde and the Molendinar. He was driven out by a hostile king, sheltered in Wales, and was called home by King Rhydderch to rebuild a Christian people. He died on 13 January, and Glasgow has carried his emblems ever since.
Before Kentigern was born, his mother had already survived more than most people survive in a lifetime. Teneu was the daughter of Leudonus, a half-pagan king whose name still sits inside the word Lothian. She wanted no husband; what she wanted, the older Life says, was to be made like the Virgin Mary both in her virginity and in her bringing forth. Her father gave her a choice that was not a choice: marry the man he had picked, or go and drudge for a swineherd. She went to the swine. There a man named Owain came to her in disguise and forced her, and mocked her afterward for weeping over what he called sport. When her father learned she was pregnant, he had her thrown from the height of Dunpelder. She lived. Because she lived, he decided she was a witch, and put her out on the open water in a boat with no oar and no rudder.
The boat came ashore at Culross, and there she bore her son.
The community of Servanus took them in, and it is Servanus who gives the boy both his names. At the font he called him Kyentyern, which the Life glosses as "the Capital Lord." Later, marking him out from the other boys, he gave him a second name, Munghu, and the Latin sets down what it means: "Karissimus Amicus," dearest friend. That is where Mungo comes from. It was a pet-name from an old man to a child he loved.
The other boys did not love him. They killed a robin that used to feed from Servanus's hand, tearing off its head as they snatched it from one another, and then agreed to say Kentigern had done it. He took the bird, set the head back on the body, signed it with the cross, and prayed: "Lord Jesus Christ, in Whose hands is the breath of every rational and irrational creature, give back to this bird the breath of life, that Thy blessed name may be glorified for ever." The robin flew, and went to meet the old man coming back from church. Glasgow has put that bird on its arms ever since.
He did not stay. When the time came to go, Servanus followed him to the water's edge, leaning on a staff, and called across: "Alas, my dearest son! light of mine eyes! staff of mine old age! wherefore dost thou desert me?" He offered, if the young man would only make the water solid again, to change places with him entirely, to be son instead of father and pupil instead of teacher, so as to spend his last days at his side. Kentigern wept and would not turn back. "But I," he said, "destined to the work of the ministry, will go forth to that which He sent me, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by His grace." They blessed each other, and never saw each other's face again in this world.
What he went out to was a bishopric among the Britons of the Clyde, at a place called Cathures that would become Glasgow. It did not go smoothly. A tyrant named Morken mocked him for having nothing, wagered his own grain stores that the poor bishop could not move them, and lost when the river rose and carried the barns intact to Kentigern's door. Morken's soldier kicked the bishop; Morken died; Morken's kinsmen came to kill him. So Kentigern fled south to David in Wales, and founded a house at Llanelwy, and stayed years.
Then King Rhydderch, seeing that the Christian religion was almost entirely destroyed in his kingdom, sent messengers with letters, and an angel confirmed it in the night, and Kentigern went home. He did not go alone: of the nine hundred and sixty-five brethren, six hundred and sixty-five walked north with him and three hundred stayed under Asaph. To the ones he was leaving he said, "Do you, therefore, most beloved ones, stand firm in the faith. Quit you like men and be comforted, and seek always that everything be done in charity." To God, when the angel told him to go, he said only what the psalm says: "My heart is ready, O God! my heart is ready for whatsoever may please Thee."
Two things from the long years afterward are remembered above the rest. Columba came from Iona with a great company to meet him, having seen on the road a fiery pillar in fashion as of a golden crown coming down out of heaven onto Kentigern's head; the two processions met singing psalms to each other, and the two men embraced and kissed, and Columba gave him his own pastoral staff. And Queen Languoreth, whom Kentigern had already prayed out of barrenness into motherhood, betrayed her husband with one of his soldiers, and the king took the ring from the sleeping man's hand and threw it in the Clyde and gave her three days to produce it or die. Kentigern had a salmon caught and cut open, and the ring was in it. That is the fish on Glasgow's arms, and it is there because a man used what God gave him to keep a guilty woman alive.
At the end his disciples threw themselves down and begged not to be left behind. He had barely breath to answer them, and what he said was of a piece with everything else he had said since he was a boy at the water's edge: "The will of the Lord be done in us all: and do with us as He best knoweth, and as is well-pleasing unto Him." They carried him into a vessel of warm water he had blessed, and he lifted his hands and his eyes to heaven and bowed his head as if sinking into a calm sleep, and gave up his spirit. His disciples got into the same water, one after another, before it could cool, and went with him.
Whatever else is uncertain about him, this much is not: a woman who was thrown off a cliff and set adrift to die came ashore at Culross, and out of that came a bishop, a city, and a robin that flew.
You may be tempted, reading Kentigern, to sort what is verifiable from what is only remembered, and to keep the first and set the second aside. Notice what happens if you do. The bare, documented Kentigern is a name in an annal beside a date nobody can fix. Everything else that has shaped a city for eight hundred years, the robin, the ring, the mother in the rudderless boat, comes to you as memory the church chose to keep, in a book written by a man who never met him. That is how you have received almost everything you believe, including the parts you would not part with. So the question is not whether you can prove it. Where have you been quietly discounting what was handed to you, simply because it came to you through someone else's hands?
Almost everything told above comes from one hand. Jocelin of Furness, a Cistercian, wrote the Life of Kentigern for Bishop Jocelin of Glasgow between about 1175 and 1199, finishing in time for the cathedral's consecration on 6 July 1197, roughly five hundred and eighty years after his subject died. An earlier Life, commissioned by Bishop Herbert of Glasgow between about 1147 and 1164, survives only as a fragment, and it breaks off long before the adult ministry, so it checks Jocelin on the birth story and nothing else. Jocelin himself says in his prologue that he reworked the Glasgow legend together with an old volume written in the Irish style whose language he found intolerable. The coracle, Servanus, the robin, the wolf at the plough, the Welsh exile, the ring in the salmon, the meeting with Columba, the pilgrimages to Rome, the death in the warm bath: all of it reaches us through that one commissioned book.
Outside it, four things stand. The Annales Cambriae record, under a year editorially reconstructed as 612, the death of Kentigern and bishop Dyfrig; that is the only notice of him anywhere that is not a saint's life, and the edition's own note warns that the A-text carried no years at all and that the dates now printed are disputed within about five years. Adomnán of Iona, writing about 697 to 700, knows King Roderc son of Tothal, who reigned at the Rock of Clyde, and records Columba's prophecy that he would die at home on his own pillow; scholarship takes him to be Jocelin's Rhydderch. The battle of Arfderydd in 573, which Jocelin's chronology leans on, is independently recorded. And Alexander Penrose Forbes printed the Latin and English of both Lives in 1874, which is why we can read them at all; no later critical edition has superseded it.
The death year is genuinely open. Tradition and most reference works, including our own calendar, give 603; the annal gives 612; 614 also circulates. The argument usually made for 603 is that 13 January fell on a Sunday that year, which is true, but 13 January 614 was also a Sunday, so the test does not discriminate. Jocelin's own chronology tells against 603 rather than for it: he states that Kentigern died at one hundred and eighty-five years old, and it is only William Forbes Skene's emendation of that figure to eighty-five that lets a birth around 518 meet a death in 603. The honest position is that a bishop of that name and region died on a 13 January in the early seventh century, and that the year cannot be settled from what survives.
Two further things the tradition's own literature concedes. The fostering by Servanus cannot stand as told, because Servanus belongs to a later period than Kentigern's childhood requires; Skene showed it in the nineteenth century, and the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 prints the caution itself. And modern work, by John Reuben Davies in 2009 and Dauvit Broun in 2007, has found little evidence of widespread interest in Kentigern before the twelfth century, which means the veneration we can document is largely the veneration the reformed diocese of Glasgow deliberately built. The Welsh connection at St Asaph is likewise regarded now as a probable later graft, and St Asaph's own historical materials say frankly that there is no archaeological evidence or written record there before the twelfth century. None of this touches the bare fact of the man. It does mean that with Kentigern, more than with most, "the tradition holds this" and "this is documented" are frequently the same sentence, and the difference is worth keeping in view.
Glasgow's arms carry four emblems, and every one of them is an episode from Jocelin: the robin restored to life, the frozen hazel branches that rekindled the monastery fire, the bell said to have been a papal gift, and the salmon with the queen's ring in its mouth. Glasgow schoolchildren still learn them by rhyme: Here is the bird that never flew / Here is the tree that never grew / Here is the bell that never rang / Here is the fish that never swam. His mother is venerated in her own right as St Thenew, or St Enoch, co-patron of Glasgow with her son, with a feast on 18 July and her name still on St Enoch Square. His relics were translated to a new tomb in the cathedral on 6 July 1197, a summer date chosen to sit with the burgh's fair rather than with the hard January feast, and offerings followed for a century: Alexander III founded an altar to him in 1284 after three of his children died. The Reformation stripped the shrine, and almost nothing portable survives; a carved thirteenth-century fragment of the tomb is still on display in the cathedral, and where his body went is now folklore rather than record.
Every quotation above is taken from A. P. Forbes, ed., Lives of S. Ninian and S. Kentigern, Historians of Scotland vol. V (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1874), which prints Jocelin of Furness's Life and the earlier fragment in Latin with a facing English rendering; no translator is credited within the volume for the Kentigern material, and it is cited here as the translation printed in that edition. The prayer over the robin is at Chapter V (p. 43); the parting from Servanus, including "Alas, my dearest son" and "But I, destined to the work of the ministry," at Chapter VIII (pp. 49-50); the naming as Kyentyern and Munghu at Chapter IV (p. 41); the farewell to Asaph's community and "My heart is ready, O God" (the saint reciting Psalm 108:1) at Chapters XXX-XXXI (pp. 90-91); Rhydderch's recall at Chapter XXX; Columba's vision of the fiery pillar and the meeting at Chapter XXXIX (p. 107); the queen and the salmon at Chapter XXXVI; the deathbed reply, "The will of the Lord be done in us all," at Chapter XLIII (p. 113); and the death itself, with the vessel of warm water, at Chapter XLIV (pp. 114-116). The volume is public domain and readable in full at https://archive.org/stream/livesofsniniansk05forbuoft/livesofsniniansk05forbuoft_djvu.txt; a 1998 English translation of Jocelin by Cynthia Whiddon Green is hosted at Fordham's Medieval Sourcebook, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/Jocelyn-LifeofKentigern.asp. For the external anchors see the Annales Cambriae A-text at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Annals_of_Wales_A and Adomnán's Vita Columbae I.15 at https://celt.ucc.ie/published/T201040/. On the making of the veneration, see Tom Turpie, "A Casualty of War? The cult of Kentigern of Glasgow, Scottish patron saints and the Bruce/Comyn conflict," in Historic Bute: Land and People (2012), pp. 61-74, https://www.ssns.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/05_Turpie_Bute_2012_pp_61-74.pdf; the Skene caution on Servanus and the 603 death date are in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08620a.htm.
British (Received Pronunciation): Kentigern /ˈkɛntɪɡɜːn/
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Kentigern to preach the Gospel to the people of Strathclyde: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.