In art St Pol is most generally represented with a dragon, and sometimes with a bell, or a cruse of water and a loaf of bread, symbolical of his frugal habits.
St Ronan
Of St Ronan there is told a tale of solemn warning to wives addicted to neglecting their children and “seeking their pleasure elsewhere,” as it is succinctly expressed. St Ronan was an Irish bishop who came to Léon, where he retired into a hermitage in the forest of Névet. Grallo, the King of Brittany, was in the habit of visiting him in his cell, listening to his discourses, and putting theological questions to him. The domestic question 368 must have been a problem even in those days, since we find Grallo’s Queen, Queban, in charge of her five-year-old daughter. Family cares proving rather irksome, Queban solved the difficulty of her daughter by putting the child into a box, with bread and milk to keep her quiet, while she amused herself with frivolous matters. Unfortunately, this ingeniously improvized crêche proved singularly unsuccessful, for the poor little girl choked on a piece of crust, and when the Queen next visited the child she found to her horror that she was dead. Terrified at the fatal result of her neglect, and not daring to confess what had happened, the Queen, being a woman of resource, closed the box and raised a hue and cry to find the girl, who she declared must have strayed.
She rushed in search of her husband to St Ronan’s cell, and upbraided the hermit for being the cause of the King’s absence. “But for you,” she declared, “my daughter would not have been lost!” But it was a fatal mistake to accuse the Saint, or to imagine that he could be deceived. Sternly rebuking her, he challenged her with the fact that the child lay dead in a box, with milk and bread beside her! Rising, he left his cell, and, followed by the agitated royal couple, he led the way to where the proof of the Queen’s neglect and deceit was found. Small mercy was shown in those days to erring womanhood, and the guilty Queen was instantly “stoned with stones till she died.” The Saint completed his share in the matter by casting himself on his knees beside the child, whereupon she was restored to life.
St Goezenou
St Goezenou (circ. A.D. 675) was a native of Britain whose parents crossed to Brittany and settled near Brest, where 369 the Saint built an oratory and cabin for himself. The legend runs that the prince of the neighbourhood having offered to give him as much land as he could surround with a ditch in one day, the Saint took a fork and dragged it along the ground after him as he walked, in this way enclosing a league and a half of land, the fork as it trailed behind him making a furrow and throwing up an embankment, on a small scale. This story is quite probably a popular tradition, which grew up to explain the origin of old military earthworks in that part of the country, which were afterward utilized by the monks of St Goezenou.
QUEEN QUEBAN STONED TO DEATH
It is also related of this worthy Saint that he had such a horror of women that he set up a huge menhir to mark the boundary beyond which no female was to pass under penalty of death. On one occasion a woman, either to test the extent of the Saint’s power or from motives of enmity, pushed another woman who was with her past this landmark; but the innocent trespasser was unhurt and her assailant fell dead.