Beya of Copeland

Beya, also rendered Bega or Bee, is a saint associated with the Cumbrian coast of north-western England, where she is traditionally remembered as an Irish virgin who lived as an anchoress and founded a religious community at the place that bears her name, St Bees in Copeland. She is commemorated on September 6, and her cult observes additional dates in the late autumn. By tradition she belongs to the seventh century, with her repose conventionally placed around the year 660.

The account of her life is preserved chiefly in a medieval Life of St Bega, which survives as part of a collection of English saints' lives that belonged to Holmcultram Abbey in Cumbria and is dated to the mid-thirteenth century. Because no contemporary record of her survives, the narrative is hagiographic rather than documentary, and modern scholarship has questioned how much of it reflects a historical person. One line of interpretation, reflected in the Dictionary of National Biography, regards Bega as a largely legendary figure whose cult grew up around a venerated bracelet; the Old English word 'beag', meaning ring or bracelet, has been proposed as the origin of her name.

Whatever the historical kernel, the place-name St Bees and the long-standing priory there preserve her memory. The site she is said to have established later became a Benedictine house: the Life relates that the monastery was attached as a cell to the abbey of St Mary at York, and the priory was refounded in the twelfth century. Through these institutions her veneration persisted in the region for centuries.