Chapter V - Late Medieval Saints' Legendarie

Summary

DESPITE THE INTEREST in Helena in the Brut tradition, she was never a popular subject of religious literature in England, yet her role in the Inventio legend continued to be recounted widely textually and iconographically. Helena is not often found in English saints' calendars before the fifteenth century, and features in only one genuine vita, by Jocelin of Furness (see below), in England prior to the sixteenth century. The Middle English verse St Elyn, discussed below, can hardly count as a vita, since, despite its manuscript title, it deals with the cure and conversion of Constantine by St Silvester rather than with Helena's life.

Even though her cult was evidently not one of the most vibrant during the early Middle Ages and the Church did not promote the alleged British connection, Helena's presence was maintained in a secondary capacity. She was a reasonably popular dedicatory saint in post-Conquest England, the subject of about 135 church dedications dating from the eleventh century onwards, most of which are in the north of England. At least one of these, St Helen's Worcester, appears to have been a British church and a parochially powerful establishment which was probably dedicated to Helena before the earliest extant record of this name in the eleventh century. It is likely too that St Helena was chosen as the dedicatee of other Anglo-Saxon churches as part of a programme of establishing some continuity with the Roman Church in Britain, including the deliberate situation of churches on the sites of former Roman buildings.