Saint Adrian of Canterbury

Saint Adrian of Canterbury, also known as Hadrian, was an African-born monk and abbot who came from Italy to England in the seventh century. Together with Saint Theodore of Tarsus he made Canterbury a center of learning and of Church life. The Church commemorates him on January 9.

Almost everything that is known about him was recorded by Saint Bede the Venerable in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede calls him an African by birth but gives neither the place nor the year of his birth. Adrian was abbot of a monastery not far from Naples. Bede presents him as a man well versed in Holy Scripture, experienced in monastic and Church life, and with an excellent command of Greek and Latin.

When Wighard, the candidate sent to Rome to become archbishop of Canterbury, died there during an epidemic, Pope Vitalian himself began to look for a shepherd for the Church in England and summoned Adrian. Adrian declined, considering himself unworthy of so great a dignity. In his place he proposed Theodore, a learned monk from Tarsus in Cilicia who was living in Rome at the time. The pope agreed on condition that Adrian himself would lead Theodore to Britain and support him in his teaching.

They set out from Rome on May 27, 668. Winter held them up in Gaul, and afterward Adrian was detained by Ebroin, mayor of the palace of the king of the Franks, who suspected that he was carrying a message from the emperor to the kings of Britain. When the suspicion proved groundless, Adrian was allowed to continue, and around 670 he reached Canterbury. Theodore entrusted to him the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul there, later called Saint Augustine’s Abbey.

The two of them traveled throughout the island, teaching the principles of Christian life and the canonical way of celebrating Easter. In Canterbury they gathered a large group of disciples. Besides Holy Scripture they taught them the art of composing verse, astronomy, and the reckoning of the Church calendar, as well as Greek and Latin. Bede testifies that in his day some of their pupils were still alive who knew both these languages as well as their own. Adrian’s disciples included Saint Aldhelm, later bishop of Sherborne, Tobias, bishop of Rochester, and Albinus, his successor at the monastery, who helped Bede gather information for his work.

Adrian outlived Theodore, who died in 690, by nearly twenty years. He died in Canterbury in the thirty-ninth year of his stay in England and was buried in the church of the Mother of God in his monastery. January 9 is taken as the day of his death. The year is not certain: Bede’s indications allow for either 709 or 710.

Adrian is one of the saints venerated since early times, before the process of canonization took shape in the Church. According to later accounts from the abbey, when the relics were being moved in 1091 during the rebuilding of the church, his body was found incorrupt, and his tomb became known for miracles. The Roman Martyrology remembers him as an abbot who, learned in both sacred and secular letters, passed on saving knowledge to many disciples.