‘To strengthen your faith’ was how Ælfric described the purpose of his collection of Lives of Saints to the patron for whom they were written, in about 990. Such ‘lives’ constituted one of the most extensive genres of literature in the Christian world from the second century AD onwards. The earliest saints were the Christian martyrs of the Roman Empire who had died, often horrifically, for their faith, as the apostles had done before them; but sainthood could be achieved also by people who died naturally but had lived exemplary, holy, lives. The term ‘confessor’ was used for these, to distinguish them from the true ‘martyr’ (a Greek word meaning ‘witness’). The recorded life of a confessor saint is called by the Latin word uita (‘life’), that of a martyr a passio (‘passion’, in the sense of suffering). Saints are important for a unique double reason: their holiness brings them close to God, but their human nature makes them also accessible to ordinary people. Thus a saint may be persuaded by prayer to intercede with God on behalf of a Christian seeking forgiveness for sins or a cure for illness. Such, at least, was the hope which stimulated the veneration of saints in so-called ‘cults’ during the medieval period and in turn gave rise to a veritable industry of pilgrimage to saints' shrines and the collecting of (and trade in) ‘relics’ – for it was believed that contact with anything connected with a saint (a piece of clothing or a fragment of bone, for instance) might expedite one's petition.