Ivo

Holy Hierarch Ivo is the patron of the town of St Ives in Cambridgeshire (formerly Huntingdonshire) in England. His veneration is attested from the beginning of the 11th century at Ramsey abbey. He is commemorated on 24 April. According to tradition he was a Persian bishop who became a hermit in Huntingdonshire.

The main medieval source about him is the Vita sancti Ivonis, written by the monk Goscelin of Saint-⁠Bertin in the 11th century. According to Goscelin, Ivo was a Persian bishop who traveled to Britain to die with his companions in a village called Slepe. In the year 1001 a peasant ploughing his field came upon his coffin; the body appeared to be vested with the insignia of a bishop. According to Goscelin, the saint appeared to the ploughman in several visions and then to the abbot's reeve, who at first did not take it seriously. The monastic community rejoiced greatly at the discovery. The Abbot of Ramsey, Eadnoth the Younger, built a church in his honor, and the neighboring village was renamed St Ives. On 24 April 1002 Eadnoth translated the body, with those of two companions, to the mother house at Ramsey. In 1017 the church was turned into a Benedictine priory. In the 12th century his memorial was observed in the cathedral of Exeter. The parish of St Ive in Cornwall is also attributed to him.

The link with Persia came about after Abbot Withman of Ramsey heard in the Holy Land of a Persian bishop named Ivo; Goscelin then tied the story to the Ivo of the fen country. The Persian tradition is regarded as spurious. It is thought rather that he was a Cornish saint; one historian has even suggested that he is a male double of Saint Neot. He is honored as a saint of the undivided Church.