One Christmas, some years before the Battle of Hastings, Gilbert of Gent held his traditional festivities at his Northumbrian household. He held thrice-yearly contests, ‘testing the strength and spirit of those young men who were hoping for the belt and arms of knighthood by letting wild beasts out from cages’. This season's beast was a particularly ferocious bear: the ‘offspring of a famous Norwegian bear which had the head and feet of a man and human intelligence, which understood the speech of men and was cunning in battle’. Its father had allegedly raped a girl in the woods and fathered Beorn, king of Norway.

Gilbert's eighteen-year-old godson, Hereward, was visiting, having been banished from his homeland for being troublesome. Hereward was eager to have his strength and spirit tested, but Gilbert refused, ‘because although … [he] perceived the bravery of the young man, he feared for his youthfulness’. The bear escaped, and went on a killing spree. Hereward leapt into action, heading the bear off as he was about to attack Gilbert's wife and her women. He drove ‘his sword through its head as far as the shoulder-blades. Leaving the blade there, he lifted up the animal in his arms and held it out to those who followed, at which sight they were much amazed’.

In the early hours of 31 May 1076, Waltheof, earl of Northumbria, was about to be decapitated. He was one of the few native nobles who had retained his title under the new Norman regime, but had been found guilty of treason for his part in a rebellion against William the Conqueror. For a year in the king's prison at Winchester he had been the model of good behaviour, a heros,

Alas for Waltheof, this was not to be. He was taken by Normans to St Giles's Hill, just outside the town. He divided his rich garments amongst the clergy and the poor who happened to be there, and prayed. The Normans were worried ‘that the citizens would wake and … show sympathy for their noble fellow countryman by murdering the royal guards’, and told him to get a move on. Waltheof asked that he might at least say the Lord's Prayer, for the sake of his soul and theirs. On reaching ‘And lead us not into temptation’, he faltered, breaking down into tears and general lamentation. Becoming impatient, the executioner decided to proceed, and cut off the prisoner's head with his sword. Bystanders were somewhat surprised to hear the severed head continue, ‘But deliver us from evil. Amen.’ Presumably discomfited by this, the executioners unceremoniously dumped the corpse in a ditch, but this did not prevent rumours spreading of Waltheof's miraculous determination to finish his prayer despite being so rudely interrupted. Two weeks later, Waltheof's wife obtained the king's permission for Ulfketel, abbot of Crowland in Lincolnshire, to retrieve the corpse and take it back to Crowland. Remarkably, his body was ‘incorrupt, with the blood as fresh as if he had just died’.

Famously, James I of Scotland allegedly said that David I's extreme generosity towards the church had rendered him ‘ane sair sanct for the Croune’. David was also explicitly a saint for Walter Bower, who was reliant for material on John of Fordun, who in turn borrowed heavily from a eulogy written shortly after David's death by Aelred of Rievaulx. David's sanctity in these later sources does not, however, simply reproduce the twelfth-century depiction; it is instead adapted to suit the mores and requirements of the later authors. Aelred's David is virtuous and explicitly to be emulated, but he is not a saint. The later medieval reworkings of Aelred's David suggest, however, that he was, as it were, an embryonic saint – that is, that there was sufficient hagiographical ‘raw material’ for him to be subsequently seen as saintly. It is now widely accepted that saints’ vitae can provide valuable insights into the concerns of the cultural and political landscape from which they emanate, and were often written with didactic intent. The eulogy was presented as an exemplar to Henry of Anjou, shortly before he was to become Henry II of England. What kingship was Aelred recommending to the king-in-waiting? What were the pitfalls of which he believed Henry needed to beware? By examining Aelred's virtuous, but – crucially – flawed David, this study points to the wider application of quasi-hagiographical ideas in relation to non-saintly subjects, and suggests that subjects who were not saintly could be equally (and perhaps still more) valuable tools in attempts to shape the behaviour of others.

David I of Scotland (1124–53), youngest son of Malcolm III and Margaret of Scotland, had been reared in the English court, and knighted by Henry I. Shortly after Henry's death in 1135, David embarked on a campaign (ostensibly at least) in support of his niece Matilda's claim to the throne, and to claim Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland on his son's behalf. In January 1138, David again invaded Northumberland, in what was generally seen as an unnecessarily brutal campaign, which culminated in the Battle of the Standard. Thereafter, David's reign was relatively peaceful, and he furthered the institutionalisation of government, law and church reform on which much of his subsequent good reputation centred. He died at Carlisle, having designated his grandson heir to the throne.

The origins of this volume lie in a series of papers delivered during two sessions of the Leeds International Medieval Congress in July 2006, supplemented by further invited contributions. The two sessions were organised under the auspices of the Survey of Dedications to Saints in Medieval Scotland, a project funded by a Major Research Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project is designed to record and collate acts of dedication to saints (loosely defined to include all forms of commemoration and veneration) within the boundaries of the Scottish realm from the early medieval period to 1560.

The aim of the Leeds papers was collectively to address the way in which devotion to particular saints might transcend or cross linguistic, cultural and political boundaries. The emphasis of the papers collected here is therefore on the issue of transmission, that is, why certain saints’ cults spread beyond their original points or communities of origin to achieve a wider and more diverse following and the mechanisms by which this occurred. Many of the chapters have an Insular, and particularly north-British, focus. For this reason the volume was originally to have been entitled Saints’ Cults in the Insular World, but the wider scope of some of the essays, particularly the inclusion of material on Brittany and Breton cults, persuaded the publishers and editors to opt for the current title. The editors acknowledge that the implication that the cults examined in the volume grew and developed in a cultural, linguistic, devotional or political environment that could be described as distinctively or significantly ‘Celtic’ is potentially unhelpful.Most obviously, a number of contributions deal with societies, such as late medieval lowland Scotland and northern England, which were most assuredly not part of any wider ‘Celtic World’, if such could be said to have existed. Here, then, ‘Celtic’ is being used solely as a geographical shorthand to indicate that the studies that make up the volume concentrate on saints’ cults in a northern British context where interaction between Irish, Welsh and Scottish devotional traditions was extensive (particularly in the early medieval period).

Aside from the principal concern with tracing and explaining the spread of cults into new areas or social contexts, the collected essays have thrown up a variety of interesting sub themes.