Feast Day
2 saints in our library are celebrated on June 22.
February 7, 1478 — July 6, 1535
Thomas More — lawyer, scholar, author of Utopia, and Lord Chancellor of England — was praised by Erasmus as a man of exceptional wit and learning, yet chose beheading over endorsing Henry VIII's break with Rome. He endured fourteen months in the Tower of London before his execution on July 6, 1535, declaring at the scaffold: 'I die the king's good servant, but God's first.' Canonized four hundred years after his death.
Unknown, c. AD 300 — c. 305 AD
Saint Alban was a pagan Roman citizen of Verulamium who sheltered a fugitive Christian priest, converted to his faith within days, then dressed in the priest's robes to face arrest in his place. He was beheaded on Holywell Hill around 305 AD — Britain's first recorded Christian martyr, whose cult gave rise to St Albans Abbey and inspired Bede's most vivid account of Christian heroism.