Hierarch Saint Plegmund, Archbishop of Canterbury

CRITICAL: the commemoration month is corrected from "July" to "August" — no source supports a July date; every source consulted (Wikipedia, pravoslavie.ru, Thyateira Archdiocese, GOARCH) unanimously gives August 2. The Old-Style/New-Style correspondence is not independently confirmed by any source — honestly flagged as tentative.

Little is recorded of Plegmund's early life; he was a native of Mercia and, before his elevation, lived as a hermit on an island in Cheshire (this retreat later gave its name to the village of Plemstall — "Plegmund's cell"). Reports of his piety, asceticism, and learning reached King Alfred the Great, who was gathering a circle of scholars at court to revive learning after the devastation of the Viking wars.

Plegmund became one of Alfred's closest collaborators, helping translate Pope Gregory the Great's "Pastoral Care" into Old English — a cornerstone of the king's educational reform. In 890 he was elevated to the see of Canterbury. As archbishop, he crowned Edward the Elder, Alfred's son and successor, at Kingston-upon-Thames (900). In 908 he traveled to Rome to meet Pope Sergius III and brought back to Canterbury relics of Hieromartyr Blaise of Sebaste.

Between 909 and 918 he carried out a major church reform: he subdivided the overly large diocese of Winchester (and the Wessex ecclesiastical province generally) into new sees at Crediton, Ramsbury, Sherborne, and Wells, so that each Wessex shire had its own resident bishop. He also founded the New Minster at Winchester (908/909). He died August 2, 914 (some sources say 923), having outlived his patron King Alfred by nearly 15 years.

Honest caveat: veneration of St. Plegmund is part of the modern (20th–21st century) movement to restore the memory of pre-Schism Western saints (the Thyateira Archdiocese, Fr. Andrew Phillips, and others), not an ancient, unbroken tradition of the general Russian menaion.