> * Walstan (1016) - born and lived near Norwich as a servant; took vow of
> chastity, but never became a religious
> Last year Graham Jones added this important bit of information concerning
> Walstan:
>
> May I add (since my friend Miriam has just published on Walstan):
>
> One of England's more obscure and exotic saints. Tradition made him a
> king's son who renounced his right to succession and became a farm
> labourer. Like St Sitha in Devon, Walstan is supposed to have been
> murdered with a scythe, the implement with which he is shown in
> Norfolk wall- and screen-paintings. His mother, Blida, was also culted in
> Norfolk.
>
> Miriam's article is in the journal of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology
> and History, XXXVIII (Part 3), 1995, pp. 245-254: Miriam Gill, _The saint
> with a scythe: a previously unidentified wall painting in the church of St
> Andrew, Cavenham_. Essentially a Norfolk saint, Walstan is very
> occasionally found culted and/or depicted in Suffolk and Essex.
Had I read Miriam's article properly before 'rushing into print', I would not
have committed the howler of attributing Walstan's death to assassination. I
now know better. The saint may be shown carrying a scythe, but both the
legends explain his death, foretold by an angel, as from 'natural causes'.
Walstan was a patron of mowers and scythe-followers who gathered at Bawburgh on
his feast day. He is also occasionally shown with the two young unbroken
cattle which transported his body from Taverham, where he laboured, to Bawburgh
where he was buried. Miraculous springs appeared in the course of this
journey. Thus a late fifteenth century account formerly displayed above his
tomb, and a Latin version found in the NLA, supported by John Bale's account of
the cult, c. 1560. Given the late medieval dates and character of these
accounts, and the rarity of the natural death topos in the lives of AS local
saints, I am tempted to speculate that the scythe might conceivably be a
survival from an earlier story. (This is a bit of kite-flying, I should add,
for which Miriam is in no way to blame! - Though I am indebted to her for
pointing the similarity of the fifteenth-century version of W's legend to that
of St Theobald, patron saint at Great Hautbois, a village just the other side
of Norwich? St T appears to have been an historical figure of the eleventh
century (W, NB, is given a suspiciously precise death date in that century),
who like W renounces aristocratic life for that of a country labourer - and
dies a professed monk, not a martyr. Like W, too, his mother plays a part in
his story. I could go on... as you may be fearing.
Sufficient to say that my faux-pas (grovel, grovel) provides an opportunity to
focus on the multi-layering evident in many of the lives summarised in our
List's daily roll-call.
Graham Jones
Leicester
e-Mail: [log in to unmask]
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