According to Catholic and Orthodox tradition this James( nr 2 or 3), is called‘ the Less’, sometimes‘ St James the Just’. He was, as a relative of Jesus, such an important figure in the early Christian community in Jerusalem, that the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus mentions his execution in the year 62. Legend has it that he was thrown off the temple walls and then beaten to death with a fullers’ club, Josephus reports stoning, which was a judicial murder about which the Community complained to the Roman Procurator, where upon the High Priest Annas lost his job. The great esteem which James enjoyed with his contemporaries justifies that he is today the Patron Saint of pastry-and cake makers, a trade which has produced the goods, at least before the cake mixture or deep freeze was invented.
14 May St Matthias( First Century) He was chosen to replace Judas to make up the number of the apostles to twelve once more. Acts 1: 21-2, describes the vote taken by the apostles to choose from 2 candidates. With this brief appearance in the New Testament definite information about him ends. Tradition places him preaching in Judea, also in Cappadocia( Southern Turkey). There is a fictitious‘ Acts of Andrew and Matthias’ which links him to Ethiopia. Clement of Alexandria makes him one of the 72 disciples sent out to preach throughout the world. His emblem is an axe, he is said to have been beheaded, his claimed relics were taken to Jerusalem and later sent to Rome by the empress Helen.
26 May Saint Augustine of Canterbury( died 604)-( and not of Hippo!) He was a Benedictine monk who became the first Archbishop of Canterbury in 597. He is considered to be the‘ Apostle of the English Church’. He had been Prior of a monastery in Rome when Pope Gregor the Great chose him in 596 to lead a mission to Britain to Christianize the Anglo-Saxons and King Ethelberth of Kent. Ethelberth had married a Christian princess from Gaul( Bertha) Augustine is said to have landed on the island of Thanet where a stone marks the place. The King gave the missionaries land to build an Abbey outside Canterbury, where St Augustine was buried.
He is said to have baptised thousands on Christmas day 597, He founded
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