Who Was St. Brigid of Kildare? The Untameable Mary of the Gael

Brigid’s father was trying to sell her to the king. She could not stop giving things away—his food, his livestock, anything she could reach—and he had had enough.

While he was inside negotiating, a leper approached the chariot where Brigid waited. She had nothing to give him except her father’s sword, the only object within reach. She handed it over.

When the king heard what she had done, he told her father to stop. “Her merit,” he said, “is higher before God than before men.” He would not buy her.

The Daughter of a Bondwoman

*The Hill of Faughart in County Louth (Source)*

Brigid was born around 451 AD in what is now County Louth, the daughter of two utterly different people. Her father Dubhthach was a pagan lord descended from a High King of Ireland. Her mother Brocca was a Christian bondwoman—in early Irish law, a cumal, a woman who was unfree, belonging to the household she served. The king her father tried to sell her to was Dunlang mac Enda, King of Leinster.

Brigid was born into bondage through her mother’s status, though her father’s noble blood complicated her legal position. She occupied an uncertain place from the start. According to the earliest accounts, she was born on the threshold of a house at sunrise—neither inside nor outside, neither fully day nor night.

Brocca raised her daughter Christian—tradition holds she was a convert from Patrick’s own mission. And from childhood, Brigid gave things away. Her father’s food. Her mother’s butter. Anything that passed through her hands went straight to someone who needed it more. This is what drove Dubhthach to try to sell her. She was making him poor.

After the king refused to buy her, Brigid entered the religious life. She was professed alongside seven other women who remained loyal to her for the rest of her life.

The Miracles of St. Brigid

As a young dairymaid, she gave away the household’s butter to the poor. When her mistress came to inspect the stores, the butter had been replenished—more than before. Asked why she could not simply keep what she churned like everyone else, Brigid’s answer, recorded in the Bethu Brigte, was simple: “It is difficult for me to deprive Christ of his own food.”

She saw Christ in every person who came to her hungry. This happens again and again in her stories. She gave everything away, and there was always more.

She supplied ale from a single barrel for Easter, enough for seventeen churches. On another occasion, lepers came seeking the basic hospitality of a drink, and she turned bathwater into beer for them. A medieval poem, sometimes attributed to her, imagines heaven the same way:

I should like a great lake of ale
For the King of Kings.
I should like the family of Heaven
To be drinking it through time eternal.

This is not an ascetic who despised the material world. This is a woman who saw heaven as a feast.

She hung her wet cloak on a sunbeam to dry. The sunbeam held.

And then there is the fox. A man had accidentally killed the king’s pet fox—a trained animal that performed tricks at court—and was sentenced to death. Brigid, moved by pity, called a wild fox out of the woods. The fox performed every trick the dead one had known. The king was satisfied. The prisoner was released. And Brigid let the fox go free.

The Fire That Never Went Out

*The ruins of the fire temple are located on the grounds of Kildare Cathedral in the Market Square, Kildare Town (Source)*

At Kildare—from the Irish Cill Dara, “Church of the Oak”—Brigid founded a monastery. And according to Gerald of Wales, who visited Kildare in the 1180s and left the earliest detailed account of what he found there, a sacred fire was kept burning by a community of nuns.

The ritual was precise. Nineteen nuns took turns tending the fire, each responsible for one night. On the twentieth night, the nineteenth nun would place her wood beside the fire and say: “Brigid, guard your fire. This is your night.” In the morning, the wood was consumed but the fire still burned. The ashes, Gerald noted, never accumulated—despite centuries of burning. The fire was surrounded by a hedge no man could cross. It was tended with bellows, never with human breath.

Gerald found the fire still burning six hundred years after Brigid’s death. In 1220, Archbishop Henry de Loundres of Dublin ordered it extinguished, calling it a pagan custom. It was relit. It was finally put out when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and seized Church property across England and Ireland in the 1530s and 1540s.

In 1993, the Brigidine Sisters relit it in Kildare’s Market Square. They tend it still, in their centre at Solas Bhride. For the Sisters, it represents the light of Christ, carried into Ireland in the fifth century and never fully extinguished.

The Most Powerful Abbess in Ireland

Kildare was a double monastery—men and women living separately but sharing a church. This arrangement was common in Celtic Christianity, where monasteries held more organizational power than dioceses.

Brigid’s authority, however, was extraordinary. Cogitosus, a monk of Kildare writing around 650 AD, describes her co-governing the church alongside Bishop Conleth and claims that Kildare held “supremacy over all the monasteries of the Irish.” Modern scholars characterize the authority she wielded as quasi-episcopal—jurisdictional power over a vast network of churches and communities. She entertained nobles of both state and church. She acted as peacemaker between rivals. According to tradition, she once told a king that if she had the power, she would steal all his royal wealth and give it to Christ’s brothers and sisters.

The woman who could not stop giving things away built the most powerful religious institution in Ireland.

St. Brigid’s Cross

*Boy with woven Staint Brigid Cross at Saint Brigid’s Shrine Faughart (Source)*

The cross woven from rushes—four arms radiating from a woven square center—is Brigid’s most recognizable symbol.

According to folk tradition, a dying pagan lord sent for Brigid. He was seriously ill, and the time for his instruction was short. She went to his bedside and, as she spoke of Christ, picked up rushes from the floor and began weaving. He watched her hands. He asked what she was making. She told him the story of the Cross—not as theology but as something her hands could show him. He was baptized before he died.

The people of Ireland have never forgotten. On St. Brigid’s feast day, crosses are still woven from rushes—pulled, not cut—and hung in homes and barns for protection, especially from fire. Each year, a new cross replaces the old, which is burned.

Brigid and Patrick

Brigid’s feast day falls on February 1. Patrick’s on March 17. Whether the two ever met is one of the great mysteries of early Irish history. If Patrick died around 461, as some annals record, Brigid would have been only about ten at his death—too young for the deep collaboration that later hagiographers imagined. But many scholars favor a later date of around 493 for Patrick’s death, which would place Brigid in her early forties and already established as abbess of Kildare. Under this chronology, their meeting is entirely plausible.

What is certain is that they belong together—not necessarily as historical companions, but as complementary figures in the story of Irish Christianity. Patrick is the apostle who arrived from outside and proclaimed the Gospel. Brigid is the native daughter who took that Gospel and built it into the landscape—into monasteries, hospitals, dairy farms, schools. He brought the faith. She made it last.

An early Irish hymn captures what Ireland saw in her:

Brigid, excellent woman, a flame golden, delightful;
May she, the sun dazzling, splendid, guide us to the eternal kingdom.

Celebrating St. Brigid’s Feast Day

February 1 marks the beginning of spring in the old Irish calendar—Imbolc, the season of first milk, when ewes begin to lactate before lambing. Brigid, saint of abundance and provision, presides over the turn from winter scarcity to spring.

The oldest traditions for her feast day are rooted in Irish folk custom, documented in collections like the 1937-38 Irish Schools’ Collection and Kevin Danaher’s The Year in Ireland:

Weave a St. Brigid’s cross from rushes or straw. The rushes should be pulled, not cut. In the old custom, they were laid outside the house on Brigid’s Eve. After the evening meal, a girl of the family went out to gather them, knocked at the door, and cried in Irish: “Go on your knees. Let the door be opened. Let Brigid in.” She was admitted, and the family wove the crosses together at the table. Hang yours in the kitchen or above a doorway. When next year’s cross replaces it, burn the old one.
Leave out a brat Bhríde—a piece of cloth, traditionally a silk ribbon, placed outside the house on Brigid’s Eve (January 31). According to custom, Brigid blesses the cloth as she passes, giving it curative properties. Bring it inside on the morning of her feast.
Light a candle and let it burn through the evening—a small echo of the fire that burned at Kildare for centuries, tended nightly by the nuns who kept Brigid’s flame alive.

St. Brigid’s Patronage

The Irish called her Muire na nGael—the Mary of the Gael. No other title better captures what Brigid meant to Ireland: she was to the Irish Church what the Blessed Virgin was to the universal Church, the first and greatest of its women.

Brigid is patron of farming and agriculture, of the Irish homestead and all domestic concerns, of schools, of students, of young women, and of religious vocations. She is traditionally represented with a cow at her side. The Book of Lismore explains her patronage of students: “Wherefore thence it came to pass that the comradeship in the world’s sons of reading is with Brigid; and the Lord gives them through Brigid’s prayer every perfect good they ask.”

A Novena Prayer to St. Brigid

Lord, have mercy on us.
Christ, have mercy on us.
Lord, have mercy on us.
Eternal Father, have mercy on us.
Divine Son, have mercy on us.
Holy Spirit, have mercy on us.
Holy Mary, Virgin of Virgins, pray for us.

St. Brigid, friend of the poor, pray for us.
St. Brigid, refuge of the outcast, pray for us.
St. Brigid, constant in prayer, pray for us.
St. Brigid, tireless in work, pray for us.
St. Brigid, worker of miracles, pray for us.
St. Brigid, disciple of St. Patrick, pray for us.
St. Brigid, revered by St. Colmcille, pray for us.
St. Brigid, model of Virgins, pray for us.
St. Brigid, mirror of Mary, pray for us.
St. Brigid, Mary of the Gael, pray for us.

Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world: Spare us, O Lord.
Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world: Graciously hear us, O Lord.
Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world: Have mercy on us.

Let us pray:
O God, the author of holiness, grant that we, who inhabit the island of Saints, may, through the intercession of St. Brigid, so walk in their footsteps on earth, that we may join them in your presence in Heaven. Through Jesus Christ, Our Lord. Amen.

Pour out on us, we beg you, O Lord, the spirit of Your wisdom and Love, with which you have filled your holy servant, St. Brigid. By sincerely obeying You in all things may we, by zealous imitation of her virtues, please You in faith and works. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.