July 20.
St. Margaret.
This saint is in the church of England calendar and the almanacs.
Butler speaks of her merely as a virgin, who is “said” to have been instructed in the faith by a christian nurse, and persecuted by her father, who was a pagan priest; that after being tormented, she was martyred by the sword “in the last general persecution;” that “her name occurs in the litany inserted in the old Roman order,” and in ancient Greek calendars; that, from the east, her veneration was exceedingly propagated in England, France, and Germany during the holy wars; that “Vida, the glory of the christian muses,” honoured her as “one of the titular saints of Cremona, his native city, with two hymns, begging of God through her prayers” a happy death and a holy life; and that “her body is now kept at Monte Fiascone, in Tuscany.”
The Egyptians are not more famous for embalming, than the Romish church is celebrated for the keeping of saints’ bodies—with the additional reputation of a peculiar tact at discovering them. It was not at all uncommon to distinguish their bones, from other mortuary remains, a few centuries after death.
We are told that St. Margaret received the crown of martyrdom in the year 278,[263] therefore her body, “now kept at Monte Fiascone,” may be regarded to have been as well “kept” through one thousand five hundred years, as those of other saints; for it must be observed that none but saints’ bodies “keep.” There is not an instance of the body of any lay individual, however virtuous or illustrious, having remained to us through fifteen centuries.
The illustrious father of the order of the Jesuits, Peter Ribadeneira, rather confusedly relates that St. Margaret was devoured by the devil; and “in an other place it is sayd that he swalowed her into his bely,” and that while in his inside she made the sign of the cross, and she “yssued out all hole and sounde,” though it is added that this account “is apocrifum.” We are told that a devil appeared to her in the likeness of a man, but she caught him by the head, threw him down, set her right foot on his neck, and said, “Lye still thou fende, under the fote of a woman.” In that situation the devil admitted he was vanquished, and declared he would not have cared if a young man had conquered him, but he was very vexed to have been overcome by a young woman. St. Margaret asked him what he was, and he answered that his name was Veltis, that he was one of a multitude of devils who had been enclosed in a brass vessel by Solomon, and that after Solomon’s death this vessel was broken at Babylon by persons who supposed it contained a treasure, when all the devils flew out and took to the air, where they were incessantly espying how to “assayle ryghtfull men.” Then she took her foot from his neck, and said to him, “Flee hens thou wretched fende,” and behold “the earth opened and the fende sanke in.”[264]
However “right comfortable” this relation may be, there is more “delection” in that of St. Margaret being swallowed by the devil; it is a pity it is “apocrifum.”