Baring-Gould’s sources: Canonized by Clement VI. in 1347. His elevation is celebrated in the diocese of Treguier on Oct. 29th. Authority: — The Acts of his canonization, begun in 1330, from which several condensations have been made; amongst others a life by Maurice Gaufred. The Acts contain the testimony of many who saw and knew S. Yvo.] In looking through the names and lives of saints, we see the deadening effect of prosperity and wealth on the religious susceptibilities of man. Rich and flourishing countries have produced few saints, whereas sad and poor ones have developed them in crowds. Brittany and Ireland have brought forth thousands; Normandy not one, at least of Norman race. Few have come of the shopkeeper class, and few from the ranks exercising legal professions. All are kings or beggars, prelates or monks, warriors or hermits. There are one or two physicians, but their legends are apocryphal. Brittany has had the privilege of adopting a saintly lawyer, S. Yvo; but the popular conscience protests to this day against the intrusion, by singing on his festival, “ Advocatus et non latro, Res miranda populo” (a lawyer and not a thief, a marvel to people). S. Yvo or Yves, called “ the advocate of the poor/' was born in the year 1253, at Kermartin, near Treguier. His father Heler was Lord of Kermartin. His mother’s name was Azon du Quenquis. To this day Kermartin is in the possession of a descendant.1 The house in which S. Yvo was bom was pulled down only in 1834, but the bed has been preserved, and is still shown.
…married Plesson de Quelin; their great grand -daughter married Maurice de Quelen. From this family it passed to that of La Riviere, which possessed it in 1790. The heiress of La Riviere was the wife of the famous Lafayette, who sold Kermartin to the Count of Quelen, and it belongs to the family of this name at the present day.
At the age of fourteen, Yvo was sent by his parents to the Paris schools, where he studied canon law. At the age of twenty-four he studied civil law at Orleans. On his return to Brittany he was appointed by the bishop of Rennes to be ecclesiastical judge in the diocese. At that time a great number of cases, which now come under the jurisdiction of the civil courts, were heard in the ecclesiastical courts. At Rennes he received minor orders [the lower ranks below deacon, such as reader and acolyte, abolished in 1972], as it was considered necessary for the bishop's judge to be a clerk, but it was not till 1579 that the judge was required to be in priest's orders [ordination; “orders” means the sacrament by which deacons, priests and bishops are ordained].
But Alain de Bruc, bishop of Tr^guier, having claimed Yvo for his diocese, he obeyed the appeal of his bishop and changed his tribunal, though not his office. In 1285 he was ordained priest and made incumbent of Tredrez. He held this cure eight years, and then received that of Lohanec, which he retained till his death. As judge and lawyer he proved himself to be strictly just, and what was a marvel in those days — inaccessible to bribes. When people were at variance, he sought by all means to reconcile them, and adjust their quarrels amicably, without bringing them into court. When a poor person was summoned before him by a richer for some wrong done, he endeavoured to dissuade the prosecutor from bringing the law to bear on the offender, and to persuade him to accept instead an apology and a promise of amendment. In countless instances, he saved the expenditure of large sums in lawsuits, and prevented quarrels from developing into estrangement and hostility. He was an umpire rather than a judge; or rather, he only assumed his judicial authority as a last resource, when ail means of reconciliation proved ineffectual. He also pleaded the cause of the poor when oppressed, before the civil tribunal, taking no payment, but acting solely from his love of justice and desire to see wrongs redressed. His living brought him in a good revenue, which he spent in charity. He turned his parsonage into an orphanage, and those orphans whom he could not receive he provided for in other houses, and when they were arrived at a proper age, he apprenticed them to different trades. His sympathy with the poor was unbounded. One morning he found a poor half-naked man lying on his door-step. He had spent the night there, shivering with cold. Yvo, shocked, made the beggar sleep in his bed the following night, and lay himself outside the house on his door-step, that he might learn by experience what the sufferings of the poor are, and knowing them, might be always ready to feel for them.
On another occasion, he was being fitted by a tailor with a new coat. As the tailor was walking round him, putting the coat about his person and admiring the fit, Yvo’s eyes were gazing through his window into the yard, and there he saw a miserable man with only a tattered coat on his back, through the rents of which his flesh was exposed. He plucked off his new coat, ran down stairs, and gave it to the beggar, saying to the astonished tailor, “ There is plenty of wear still in my old coats. I will content myself with them.”
Again, one day he visited a hospital, and when he saw how ill-clothed some of the sick persons were, he pulled off his own garments and gave them away, then wrapping a coverlet round him, sat on the side of a bed, till his servant had brought him another suit from home. As a priest he was full of zeal, and preached with unction. Wherever he went, he sought to instil the love of God, and a knowledge of their duties into the hearts of those with whom he was cast. In the fields he walked by the ploughman, and taught him prayers. He sat under a furze bush on the moor beside shepherd boys and instructed them in the use of the rosary, and he caught little children in the street, and told them Bible stories of God and Jesus Christ. His Bible was his constant companion, and when he slept, he laid his head on the Sacred Book as his pillow. One story of his advocacy of the poor must not be omitted. Two rogues brought a heavy chest to a widow lady, which they said contained twelve hundred pieces of gold, and requested her to take charge of it for them, till they reclaimed it. Some weeks after, one of the rogues returned, claimed the box and carried it off. A few days later the other rogue came and asked for the chest, and because the widow could not produce it, brought her before the court and sued her for twelve hundred pieces of gold. Yvo heard that the case was going against her, when he entered the court, offered to take her defence, and then said, “ My client is ready to restore the money to both of the men who committed it to her trust; therefore both must appear to claim it.”
At this the accuser turned uneasy, and attempted to escape, but he was restrained, and then confessed that this was a plot between him and his companion to extort money from the widow, and that the chest really contained nothing but bits of old iron.
On the Good Friday before his death, S. Yvo preached on the Passion in seven different parishes, one after another, for he was so earnest, eloquent, and his Breton sermons were listened to with such emotion by the peasants, that the clergy in his neighbourhood sought his aid in the pulpit, and he never denied it, when it was possible for him to give it. He said his last mass on the Yigil of the Ascension, and died on the 19th May, 1303, at the age of fifty.
At the French revolution his reliquary was destroyed, but the bones were preserved, and have been re- enshrined May ig*l S. Yvo.
at Tr^guier. S. Yvo is generally represented with the cat as his symbol; the cat being regarded as in some sort symbolizing a lawyer, who watches for his prey, darts on it at the proper moment with alacrity, and when he has got his victim, delights to play with him, but never lets him escape from his clutches.
