The cult and legends of St. Michael were widespread in the British Isles during the Middle Ages. Veronica Ortenberg has suggested that the archangel “was probably the most popular of the great saints in England after St. Peter,” while Owen Chadwick has remarked that in Wales St. Michael was second in popularity only to the Virgin Mary. There is abundant textual and physical evidence that the cult of the archangel flourished in Ireland and Scotland as well. Although the evidence of pre-Conquest church dedications is scant, by the Reformation churches dedicated to the archangel in England alone numbered 611. Thus, it is clear that by the end of the Middle Ages there was a well-developed insular cult of St. Michael. Despite this wealth of evidence, there has never been a detailed examination of the establishment of the cult of and the proliferation of the legends of St. Michael in medieval England.

There have, however, been numerous book-length studies of the archangel and various aspects of the development of his cult, and Part I of this book is indebted to that body of work. In the late nineteenth century, E. Gothein argued in his ethnographic study of the archangel in German-speaking territories that St. Michael replaced the war-god Thor in the religious pantheon of the primitive Germans. A few years later, the British Egyptologist E. A. W. Budge made available for the first time valuable information on the cult of the archangel in northern Africa in an edition and translation of several Coptic homilies on St. Michael.