Late Middle Ages (13th–14th century)
Feast: May 19
A Breton lawyer-priest who defended the poor for free, fed prisoners from his own kitchen, and astonished everyone by being an honest judge.
The old joke goes: 'St. Ivo was a lawyer and not a thief — a thing that astonished the people of Brittany.' It was carved on his memorial in Rome, and it tells you everything about how medieval people viewed lawyers. Ivo Helory studied law in Paris and Orleans, then came home to Brittany and worked as an ecclesiastical judge. He was famous for two things: he tried to reconcile parties before cases went to trial, and he represented the poor for free. He paid court costs out of his own pocket. He visited prisoners, brought them food, and once gave his own bed to a homeless man, sleeping on the floor himself. When he became a parish priest, he kept practicing law alongside his pastoral work, turning his rectory into something like a combination courthouse and soup kitchen. He built a hospital and personally nursed patients. He fasted so severely that his health suffered, and he died in 1303 at about fifty. His canonization investigation recorded testimony from hundreds of ordinary Bretons who described specific acts of kindness. He remains the patron saint of lawyers, and the bar associations of several countries still celebrate his feast day.