Saint Gerald of Mayo

Gerald of Mayo (died 13 March 732 AD) is a saint of the Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church. Gerald was born in Northumbria. Little reliable information is known of his early life, and his date of birth is unknown. Gerald is said to be the son of an Anglo-Saxon king, Cusperius, and the queen Benitia. According to the stories of the Life of Saint Gerald, the king sent Gerald and his brothers Balanus, Berikertus, and Hubritanus to be educated by the Irish bishop Colmán of Lindisfarne. Gerald later became one of the English monks at Lindisfarne who accompanied Colmán to Iona and then to Ireland. This occurred after the Synod of Whitby in 664 AD. The Northumbrian King Oswy ruled in favour of the Easter date then current in the rest of the Catholic Church, which meant he ruled against the Irish method of calculating the date for Easter. Though Colmán was an ardent supporter of the Irish traditions, he decided after the synod to go along with the Alexandrian computus, which by that time had become essentially universal in 9th century western christianity. Gerald was among thirty Northumbrian monks who left Lindisfarne with Colmán and eventually settled in 668 on Inishbofin [island of the white cow] in what is now Galway, 8 km off the coast of Connemara in Connacht. Angles of Northumbria would have originally been influenced by teachers of Irish descent. The newcomers would have therefore experienced at first hand Irish teachings and a monastic life to which they had been formed in Lindisfarne. Dissensions arose, almost immediately, between the Irish and the Northumbrian monks. The Northumbrian contingent were disgruntled by the others leaving Inishbofin for the summer to preach around the mainland, while they were left to tend to the island. This falling-out, it has been suggested, might simply have arisen from a difference between Northumbrian and Irish agricultural traditions, the latter incorporating Transhumance.