Saint Regulus
Legendary Greek saint in Scotland
Saint Regulus or Saint Rule (Old Irish: Ríagal) was a legendary 4th century monk or bishop of Patras, Greece who in AD 345 is said to have fled to Scotland with the bones of Saint Andrew, and deposited them at St Andrews. His feast day in the Aberdeen Breviary is 17 October.
Biography
The details of Saint Regulus' life are unclear and differ in the several extant accounts. Saint Regulus was a monk or bishop of the city of Patras, in present-day Greece, then part of the Roman Empire. In AD 345 Regulus was told by an angel in a visionary dream that the Emperor Constantine had decided to remove Saint Andrew's relics from Patras to Constantinople, and in some retellings that Constantine was about to invade Patras. For safekeeping Regulus was to move as many bones as far away as he could to the western ends of the earth, where he should found a church dedicated to St Andrew. He was accompanied on his voyage by a number of consecrated virgins, among these Saint Triduana.
According to the various accounts Regulus was either shipwrecked or told by an angel to stop intentionally on the shores of Fife at the spot called Kilrymont, a Pictish settlement which is now St. Andrews. Here he was welcomed by a Pictish king, Óengus I (who was actually of the eighth century).
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This entry incorporates text from “Saint Regulus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.