The Edict of Milan: Why does it Still Matter in St Albans?

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On this day, 13th June in CE 313, the Edict of Milan was issued. Most people who walk through St Albans today, past the Cathedral, or the Roman ruins of Verulamium, are unlikely to connect their surroundings to a piece of legislation issued by two Roman emperors in the city of Milan, over seventeen centuries ago. Yet the Edict of Milan, proclaimed in CE 313 by Constantine and Licinius, is one of the threads that ties St Albans' ancient past to its present identity, and without it, the city might not bear the name it does.

The Edict of Milan was not the first attempt at religious tolerance in the Roman Empire; that distinction belongs to an edict decreed by Emperor Galerius two years earlier, in 311. Nor did it make Christianity the empire's official religion, as that would not happen for another eighty years, under Theodosius I. What the Edict of Milan did was something more immediate and more practical: it ended, almost overnight, nearly three centuries of state-sanctioned persecution of Christians.

The text of the Edict granted what was, for its time, a revolutionary principle, the freedom for Christians and "all others" to follow whatever religion they chose. In a world where the worship of the traditional gods had always been bound up with the stability and legitimacy of the state itself, this was a profound break with the past. For the first time, a person's faith became a matter of individual conscience rather than political obligation.

For Christians specifically, the consequences were immediate and tangible. The systematic imprisonment, torture and execution that had intermittently defined the Christian experience for generations came to an end. Confiscated places of worship, cemeteries and properties were ordered to be restored, giving the Christian community not just legal recognition but a financial and institutional foundation. Congregations could now meet openly, build places of worship, and organise themselves into the kind of formal hierarchy that had previously been impossible under threat of persecution.

This newfound stability had consequences that rippled forward through history. With persecution lifted, the Church was finally able to turn its attention to resolving internal theological disagreements through great ecumenical councils. The most famous was the Council of Nicaea in 325, which produced the Nicene Creed, which is still recited in churches across the world today. In this sense, the Edict of Milan was not simply an endpoint but a beginning: it set Christianity on the path from a persecuted underground movement to the dominant institutional force that would shape European civilisation for the next thousand years and beyond.

What does any of this have to do with a market town in Hertfordshire?

The answer lies in the story of St Alban himself, traditionally regarded as Britain's first Christian martyr. According to tradition, Alban was a citizen of the Roman municipium of Verulamium who sheltered a Christian priest, was converted, and was executed for his faith. Though there is not enough evidence to pinpoint an exact date, his death would have taken place during one of the periods of persecution that the Edict of Milan would ultimately bring to an end.

It is precisely because the Edict of Milan changed the legal status of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire, including Roman Britain, that the veneration of figures like Alban became possible. Before 313, honouring a Christian martyr openly, building a shrine, holding a public cult of veneration, marking the site of a martyrdom, could have been interpreted by the authorities as an act of defiance against the state. After the Edict, it became not only permissible but, within a few generations, an accepted and even encouraged part of civic and religious life. The shrine that grew up on the hill above Verulamium, on the site where Alban was said to have been executed, eventually gave its name to the mediaeval abbey, and in time to the city itself: St Albans.

In other words, without the Edict of Milan, there may have been no legal or social space in which the cult of St Alban could develop into the foundation of a city's identity. The Edict did not create St Alban's story, but it allowed the conditions under which that story could be told, commemorated, and built upon: first in stone and brick, in the form of the abbey and eventually in the very name of the place.

This is the kind of connection that elucidates St Albans' heritage: the city's Roman past and its mediaeval history, showing that the city's present identity is not arbitrary, but is the visible end of a chain of historical cause and effect stretching back to the Roman world.

The Edict of Milan is one of the critical links in that chain.

It is easy to think of such decrees as abstract milestones in "world history," disconnected from any particular place. However, in St Albans, the Edict's significance is not abstract at all. It is written into the topography of the city, into the dedication of its Abbey/Cathedral, and into its very name. Every time someone refers to "St Albans," they are, in a small way, invoking the consequences of a decree issued in Milan in CE 313. This is a reminder that the local and the global, the present and the ancient, are very often closer together than they appear. This is why a knowledge of history is so important to every living person!