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| Winchester Cathedral Photo by Gary Ullah, UK, via Creative Commons |
by Peggy Robin
Last week in this space I bid you all a happy Quatorze Juillet. I figured, better to get that greeting out six days early and leave my
July 15 column free for its purpose - St. Swithin’s Day! Never heard of it?
Neither have a lot of English people, even though it’s a quintessentially
English thing. It’s less about the saint, and more about the weather….meaning,
will it rain?
Here’s the little poem you recite on St. Swithin’s Day:
St. Swithin’s Day, if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain
St. Swithin’s Day, if it be fair
For forty days ‘twill rain nae mair
You might suppose, given the spelling of “no more” as “nae
mair,” that the origin of the holiday is Scottish, but all googling roads point
to Winchester, England, and a story about its archbishop, who died in 862 A.D.
At his request he was buried in a sunny spot in the churchyard at
Winchester. Nine years later, on July
15, 971, his remains were disinterred and moved into a magnificent new shrine
built for him within Winchester Cathedral.
Legend has it that it began to pour during the ceremony and the
torrential rains kept up for forty days. It’s not known who first wrote down
the rhyme but it has appeared in Mother Goose collections dating as far back as
1599.
It seems St. Swithin lives on as a kind of a groundhog-like
prognosticator of the weather for the English summer (but without a movie to
his name or a good PR machine). And, unlike the groundhog, who has really does
have a pretty good shot at being right about the coming of spring (see http://www.pennlive.com/life/2017/01/how_often_punxsutawney_phil_right.html),
St. Swithin’s batting average is a big fat goose egg. According to Britain’s
Royal Meteorological Society, St. Swithin’s Day has NEVER been followed by
forty straight days of rain OR forty days of drought (see: https://www.rmets.org/weather-and-climate/weather/st-swithins-day).
Maybe the problem with St. Swithin is that he’s not actually
there in the Cathedral to do the job. Sometime during the reign of Henry VIII,
as England broke away from the Catholic Church, the great cathedrals were
looted, their treasures expropriated, and the relics destroyed. St. Swithin’s
crypt was among the casualties. No one knows what happened to his bones. You
know how people say they can “feel the weather in their bones”? Poor St.
Swithin can hardly be expected to “feel the weather” for us if he no longer has
his bones!
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Still Life with Robin is published on the Cleveland Park Listserv and on All Life Is Local on Saturdays.
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