From Your Valentine! – The history behind the day

The history behind February the month of love is varied with religious, pagan and Roman legend all having  input to the origins.

It is said that Valentine was a Roman priest in the day of Emperor Claudius II who performed marriage ceremonies for young lovers against the will and rule of Claudius who thought young single men made better soldiers than married men. He was executed for his defiance. Another story suggests that Valentine helped Christians escape from torture and death and he ended up jailed whereby he fell in love with jailor’s daughter to which he sent a letter signed from From Your Valentine before his death. Both stories although having a tragic ending have links to love.  Valentine’s martyrdom has not gone unnoticed by the public as many people make the pilgrimage to honour St. Valentine’s courage at Whitefriars Street Church in Dublin where it is claimed his remains lay

The celebration of Valentine’s Day could be to commemorate Valentine’s death, or the alternative theory is that the Christian church decided to site the feast of St. Valentine in the middle of February as a way to Christanise the pagan celebration of Lupercalia, a pagan fertility festival dedicated to Fanus, the Roman god of agriculture and the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, the twins who were raised by wolves.  The ceremony was the sacrificial slaughter of a goat and its hide would be dipped in its blood and the crops and the women would be struck by the pelt to encourage fertility.

The pagan ceremony of Lupercalia was later banned and thought to have no connection with Christianity, but a 5^th century pope declared 14^th February as the day of St. Valentine. The oldest known Valentine greeting in existence was a poem written in 1415 by the Duke of Orleans, to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following capture at the battle of Agincourt.  By the middle of the 18th it was common for friends and lovers to exchange tokens of affection or handwritten notes.  In the 1900 it was hugely popular and printed cards began to replace written letters due to improvements in printing techniques and the cost of postage stamps.

So there we have it, St. Valentine’s Day a long-standing tradition based upon legends and love.

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