Relying on Swithin for a late salvation

Country Living with Francis Farragher

You can always know that the prospects for the summer are a bit dodgy when an old codger in the corner of the bar, starts mentioning St. Swithin’s Day as a kind of last gasp hope for an improvement in conditions.

Tradition has it that if St. Swithin smiles kindly on us during the daylight hours of July 15, then we’re pretty much ‘guaranteed’ 40 good days of weather that would take us fairly benignly towards the end of August.

The old rhyme goes something like this: “St. Swithin’s Day, if it does rain, for 40 days it will remain; St. Swithin’s Day if it be fair, for 40 days in will rain no more.”

Even though the old saint passed away well over 1,100 years ago, his legend still lives on and such is our love of weather lore and Piseogs that yesterday’s weather conditions will still have been noted by many people around the country.

It’s something akin to the ‘Ould Cow Days’ yarn for the beginning of spring when March in a fit of pique borrowed a few days from April to kill off the old brindled cow, who had ill-advisedly boasted about the inability of the year’s third month to kill her off.

As church leaders go, St. Swithin – or Swithun as he was sometimes written – was apparently one of ‘the better ones’ in his role as Bishop of Winchester in the old Anglo Saxon kingdom of Wessex in the south of England.

A kind of modern day Pope Francis, he had built up something of a reputation for himself as a man who looked after the poor back in the mid-800s, whilst also building up a network of churches across Wessex to look after the spiritual needs of his flock.

Before he shed his mortal coil in 862AD he made one humble enough request regarding his burial place, namely that he be laid to rest in the great outdoors where the rain would fall upon him and where the feet of ordinary people could trod upon the soil that covered him.

A reasonable enough request from a departing Bishop, one might have thought, but of course one of his successors just couldn’t leave well enough alone, deciding to move him indoors to a far more pretentious tomb location.

That transfer of the remains under the direction of a Bishop Ethelwood occurred in 971, and tradition has it that the new shrine became a place of special worship with a number of miracles attributed to it. All the while, the old spirit of St. Swithin was none too pleased about being shifted from his outdoor residency to more salubrious surroundings.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.