Talk:Begga

Content from "Saint Bega"

The following content is from the article Saint Bega, which is now a redirect to here. Pastordavid 17:01, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

St. Bega was a Dark Ages' saint of what is now north-west England, the area at the time being part of the celtic kingdom of Rheged.

She was supposedly an Irish king's daughter who valued virginity. She was said to be promised in marriage to a Viking prince who, according to a medieval manuscript, was "son of the king of Norway". Bega "fled across the Irish sea to land at what in now called St. Bees, a remote spot on the Cumbrian coast. There she settled for a time, leading a life of exemplary piety. Then, fearing the raids of pirates which were starting along the coast, she moved over to Northumbria."

If she existed, the most likely date for her coming to St. Bees is about 850 AD.

She was associated in legend with a number of miracles, the most famous being the "Snow miracle":

Ranulf le Meschin (sic) had endowed the monastery with its lands, but a lawsuit later developed about their extent. The monks feared a miscarriage of justice. The day appointed for a perambulation of the boundaries arrived - and, lo and behold, there was a thick snowfall on all the surrounding lands but not a flake upon the lands of the priory. Melvyn Bragg wrote the novel Credo based on her life.

I'm proposing to move this content back to a separate article on Saint Bega - most lists of saints show St Bega = St Bees as a separate individual from St Begga, and there appears to be no overlap between the traditional Irish-Northumbrian biography of St Bega and the French woman described in the main article on Begga.--Lang rabbie 11:06, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Whose feast day?

I have now moved all of the text above back to a separate article on (the probably mythical?)Saint Bega. However, I note that User:Warlordjohncarter has now added a feast day and a reference to the Penguin Dictionary of Saints. Does this relate to St. Bega or St. Begga? Newman's lives of the English Saints gives this as a feast day for St. Bega, but that is not conclusive.

The Beguine movement

According to tour guides at Groot_Begijnhof_(Leuven), Begga did not start the Beguine movement, and was only chosen as the patron saint in the 1600s. Prior to that time, the patron saint was a St. Catherine (though there are two, and I am not sure which he meant.) There are numerous books on the history of the Groot Begijnhof, and I intend to clean up several of these articles with references from those books, unless someone beats me to it. Another claim to the origin of the name Beguine is that it etymologically derives from a word for the color of the traditional beige habits they wore.

Each of the houses in the Groot Begijnhof in Leuven are named either for saints or for events in the Bible; there is a house named for Begga that bears a statue of her on its corner. —Preceding unsigned comment added by NoDepositNoReturn (talk • contribs) 15:58, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

External links modified

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Birthyear

Although it may be fashionable to cite various online family trees, in reality, we have *no clue at all* what year Begga was born. So I've removed 615. As it has no reliable source for that specific a year.Wjhonson (talk) 01:01, 19 June 2019 (UTC)