St Gregorys Avenue SP2

The Church of Saint Gregory and the English Marytrs was built, in what is now St Gregorys Avenue, in 1938 ¹. St Gregorys is to the North of Salisbury, adjoining Roman Road and Devizes Road.

There were many Saint Gregorys:

• St. Gregory of Nazianzus
• St. Gregory of Neocaesarea
• St. Gregory of Nyssa
• St. Gregory of Utrecht
• Gregory of Valencia
• Pope St. Gregory I (“the Great”)
• Pope St. Gregory II
• Pope St. Gregory III
• Gregory VI (Antipope)
• Pope St. Gregory VII

I don’t yet know which of the Gregories is the dedicatee for Saint Gregory’s Church.

Pope St Gregory I (‘the Great’) has some connection with the English, if not necessarily with the English martyrs, as far as I know. The story is that
“Gregory saw a group of Angle (English) children being sold as slaves in the market place. Gregory asked who they were. When he was tolds that they were Angles, he replied “And rightly so, for they have an angelic mien, and should be the co-heirs of angels in heaven”². He then decided to spread Christianity to England.

Gregories

I have heard the word ‘Gregories’ used as rhyming slang for ‘glasses’ or ‘spectacles’.

This is one of the bits of rhyming slang where the slang is actually ‘at one remove’ from the rhyme. Gregory is short for ‘Gregory Pecks’, which rhymes with ‘specs’

Footnotes

1. Salisbury – Roman Catholicism | British History Online [↩]
2. A History of England Under the Anglo Saxon Kings by Johann Martin Lappenberg, Benjamin Thorpe [↩]