“Few native saints enjoyed a greater reputation in Catholic England than St John of Beverley,” asserts Butler’s Lives of the Saints. His shrine was indeed one of the most popular places of pilgrimage before the Reformation and St John Fisher, who was born in Beverley, and Julian of Norwich both devoted to him.
They were not the only ones. The learned Alcuin had an extraordinary devotion to the Anglo-Saxon saint and celebrated miracles attributed to his intercession in verse. The Wessex King Athelstan ascribed to him his victory over joint Scottish and Viking forces at the Battle of Brunanburh (possibly Bromborough, Wirral) in 937 and in 1415 King Henry V credited the miraculous intervention of St John for the English defeat of superior French forces at Agincourt – because the battle was fought on the feast of the translation of his relics in 1037. Henry ordered his feast to be kept throughout England and named St John as a patron of the royal household. He and his queen visited his shrine in Beverley on pilgrimage in 1420. A little over a century later, however, the shrine was in ruins, destroyed by King Henry VIII in 1541 during the Reformation.
The saint was born in Harpham, a Yorkshire village, in the seventh century and was educated in Kent by the abbot Adrian at the school founded by St Theodore. He returned to Yorkshire and entered the double abbey of Whitby, then under the rule of the Abbess Hilda.
His abilities marked him out for preferment and he was appointed Bishop of Hexham after the death of St Eata. He spent whatever time he could spare from his episcopal ministry in solitude, often retiring for set periods to a cell beside the Church of St Michael beyond the River Tyne, near Hexham. He was also kind to the sick – including a dumb youth with a horrific skin disorder who both taught to speak and cured – and the poor, whom he would go out of his way to serve.
On the death of St Bosa, St John was appointed Bishop of York. St Bede the Venerable, who received holy orders from the saint when Bishop of Hexham, refers to him at some length in his Ecclesiastical History, providing testimony of his sanctity and of miracles he performed, attested to by eye-witness accounts of the abbots of Beverley and of Tynemouth.
As Bishop of York, St John desired to maintain his practice of contemplation in solitude and chose for his retreat the abbey he had built at Beverley, then a forest in the east of the county. In 717, tired by old age and the demands of his office, he relinquished his episcopal ministry to St Wilfrid the Younger and he retired to Beverley to spend the last four years of his life in prayer. He died on 7 May 721.