Holy Virgin-Martyr Ia of St Ives

Saint Ia of St Ives

Today in the Orthodox Church we venerate a particularly significant saint of the præ-Schismatic West, who indeed may not have been from the West at all – but might have been one of the Syriac saints. The third of February is the feast-day of the holy Irish virgin-martyr Saint Ia. Her legend is fascinating enough and indeed human enough to belong to a fully-historical personage. However, her veneration in Cornwall overlaps enough with trade in wares from the Eastern Roman Empire and Asian Christendom in those parts to suggest an identification with another holy virgin-martyr, Saint Ia of Persia. This name, shared by an Irishwoman and a Persian, also belongs to an ethnic-Manchu Chinese martyr of the Boxer Rebellion, Saint Ia the Teacher. The name of Ia thus links three cultures by the blood of holy martyrdom.

According to her hagiography, our Irish Saint Ia [also Hia, Hye, Eve, Ives, Íte or Yé] was born around the year 480. She was the sister of Saint Erc of Slane and Saint Euny of Lelant. She heard the preaching of Saint Padrig, and from him received baptism and became a Christian. Saint Padrig reposed in the Lord in the year 493, so if the date of her birth is correct, then she took baptism from him before her thirteenth year. She took fire for the faith, however, and yearned to become an anchoress and travel to Cornwall to preach the Gospel there.

She had made plans to travel to Cornwall together with Saints Fingar and Piala. However, the two of them got on the boat without her, and it sailed off. Saint Ia got to the shore only to see that the ship for Cornwall had already hauled anchor and was a long way out at sea. Stricken and tearful, she raised her hands to heaven and prayed for help from God. After she had finished praying on the shore, a tiny leaf floated by her on the waves. Idly she took up a stick and poked at the leaf to make it sink. But the leaf didn’t sink – instead it grew. Broader and firmer it became, and its edges curled up at the sides, such that soon it would make a serviceable coracle for the saint to ride in. She climbed atop her leaf, and it carried her across the Irish Sea to land at Hayle Beach on Penwith. As it turned out, she had made better time than her friends who had left without her, for Saints Fingar and Piala and their 777 shipmates arrived soon after she did.

She set up an anchorage not far away from where she landed, at what is now St Ives, after seeking the permission of a local prince named Dinan. Dinan sponsored a church on an island off St Ives, which was thereafter named for him – Pendinas. There she lived an austere and prayerful existence, struggling against the passions in solitude. She drew water from a holy well nearby that rose from her prayers to God. She was active in evangelising the countryside, as witnessed by the chapel erected by her in Troon some fourteen miles inland to the east. She may also have reached Brittany, as the town of Plouyé in Finistère is named for her. She was martyred under the persecutions of the wicked Breton Prince Tewdwr in the middle of the sixth century. Fingar and Piala were beheaded on the beach at Hayle by the same heathen Tewdwr; a vita of Fingar attests that Saint Ia shared in the same fate.

Mediævalist Caitlin Green has an intriguing and provocative theory about the Saint Ia of Cornwall. Though she does not dismiss the possibility of Saint Ia being an obscure local saint, she does not give much if any credit to the assertions of her later-mediæval hagiographers. She points out several commonplaces in the hagiographic tradition, including a noble and holy heritage – being the sister of two better-attested saints of Ireland – and the ‘clearly fantastical’ elements of her voyage. Dr Green goes on to make a case in a very different direction, however, asserting the possibility of Saint Ia’s identification with the Persian virgin-martyr under the persecutions of Šâpur II.

Cornwall, she points out correctly, had for a long time been a favoured trading destination of the eastern Mediterranean on account of its rich tin ore deposits. Though the method for smelting tin had been lost after the departure of the Romans from Britain, it was rediscovered in sub-Roman times in the waning years of the fifth century. It didn’t take long for the Eastern Roman Empire to ‘rediscover’ Cornwall as a valued source of the metal. As the hagiography of Saint Piran points out, trade in tin made Cornwall wealthy again quite quickly. Around this same time, she notes, Emperor Saint Justinian had just renovated in lavish style the main shrine to the martyr Ia, in the Golden Gate at Constantinople. Coincidence?

Dr Green points out the occurrence in Cornwall of astonishing amounts of North African and eastern Mediterranean earthenware dating to around this time – suggestive of where the goods being traded for Cornish tin were coming from. A significant amount, and that of a couple of very fine types, of this pottery has been unearthed on Hayle Bay around St Ives. Green also notes several textual references in Welsh and Cornish sources to events and personages that were current in the Eastern Roman Empire, which suggests that this particular corner of the West was not so cut off from happenings in the eastern Mediterranean as we might be liable to imagine. On top of this, she notes that Saint Ia might not have been alone in being a ‘transferred’ cultus from the Roman East. She gives the example of Saint Iestyn the Hermit, who shares the name (Justinian) with the sainted emperor in Constantinople.

Personally, I find Dr Green’s thesis quite attractive, and indeed plausible in certain ways. I do genuinely enjoy the idea of a Persian virgin-martyr venerated in Byzantium finding a welcome reception among Cornish miners and tradesmen! And I do share Dr Green’s scepticism of certain aspects of Saint Ia’s traditional hagiography, to be clear. But the very antiquity of the toponyms and certain aspects of the personality of the saint portrayed in the hagiography prevent me from writing off her historicity altogether. A poor girl, perhaps a bit of a romantic dreamer by temperament, seeming hopelessly late for her ship, despondently poking at the leaves in the water with a stick as they float by… it’s all too plausible a human type to be dismissed as fabrication. Even so, with a local Saint Ia and a Saint Ia venerated by Byzantine traders in Cornish ports, who is to say the two culti didn’t rub shoulders, didn’t enrich and support and strengthen each other? There are multiple Saint Constantines and Saint Helens venerated in Britain, who have been confused betimes with each other. One more Saint Ia isn’t beyond the scope of reason. Venerable anchoress Ia, athlete for Christ and bearer of the faith in Cornwall, pray unto Christ our God for our salvation!

Thy life and mission
Were pleasing to God, most pious Ia,
For seeing thee left behind in Ireland,
He miraculously transported thee across the sea to Cornwall on a leaf.
Wherefore O Saint, pray to God for us
That we may never give way to despair
But ever trust in His great mercy.

St Ia’s Church, St Ives, Cornwall