Gratien d'Amiens

Who they were

A 9th-century manuscript of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, used at the abbey of Corbie in the diocese of Amiens, records under 23 October: "In Gaul, the burial of the martyr Gratian." His veneration, well attested in the diocese of Amiens from the 11th century, suggests a local saint who may have suffered at the village now called Saint-Gratien, eleven kilometres from Amiens; it is impossible to say for certain when he lived, though an 18th-century Amiens breviary places his death "under Rictius Varus," which, if accepted, would put it between 285 and 287.

His relics passed at the end of the 11th century to the monastery of Coulombs, in the diocese of Chartres, and were moved to safety in the archbishop's palace in Paris during the French Revolution, from where they disappeared in 1830. A curious episode was linked to his veneration: at the site of his martyrdom stood a walnut tree said to have grown from his old travelling staff, which every year on the night of 23 October, his feast, miraculously covered itself with leaves and fully ripe fruit; crowds of pilgrims came to witness the wonder, first stripping the tree of its earlier growth to be sure of the miracle, then devoutly eating the fruit. No trace of the tree remains today.

The miracles

There was never a formal cause: he has been honoured as a saint since before the Church's formal processes began.

Why that counted as sanctity

Martyr venerated at Amiens from the 11th century, whose feast on 23 October was marked by the legendary yearly blossoming of a walnut tree said to have grown from his staff.