Excerpt from Shrines of British Saints

No wonder that England and Ireland alike were called the Island of Saints, and that the small Isle of Bardsey, near Cardigan Bay, received the same honourable dis tinction independently of the mother isle, for, although but two miles and a half in length by one. And a half in breadth, it is said that the bodies of twenty thousand saints were there laid in peace.

Glastonbury Abbey was called the Second Rome on account of the number of saints who were buried within its precincts. At St. Augustine's, Canterbury, it was said that every footstep trod upon the grave of a saint; and William of Malmesbury declares that every corner of that monastery was filled with the bodies of saints of great name and merit, any one of which would be of itself sufficient to irradiate all England.

The numerous Holy Isles - such as Iona, which being Anglicised means the Blessed Isle; Holyhead, and nearly all the parishes with the same prefix in the British Isles, in its Latin, Celtic, or English form - commemorate the presence of the grave or shrine of a saint.

Although nearly the whole of the visible shrines in Britain have been totally destroyed, the entire land is a shrine, its soil is permeated with the dust of her saints; but, alas! The sins of her children arrest the continued application of the name The Isle of Saints.

Saturated as the land is with saintly remains, it had, until the sixteenth century, special centres of devotion associated with those more specially honoured, such as St. Edward at Westminster, St. Cuthbert at Durham, and St. Thomas at Canterbury, and others who gave their names to the towns that rose around their shrines, as St. Alban, St. Edmund, and St. David.

The present work is an attempt to picture the various classes of shrines which were raised in Great Britain to honour the memory and the relics of her saints, to describe the construction of the greater shrines, to comprehend the riches of art bestowed upon them, and to expose the dominating reason for their destruction. These former structures Should be better known, some for the sake of the saint, others for the sake of the Shrine others, again, reveal to us some of the customs of our forefathers, or how they became the means of swaying human passions. Raised to stimulate devotion, they occasionally stirred envy and covetousness, and tended to provoke even more grievous Sins.

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