Saint Werburgh

She was born in Staffordshire early in the seventh century. ¹ Her father was Wulfhere, king of Mercia and son of Penda, whom the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia calls "the fiercest of the Mercian kings." ¹ Her mother was Saint Ermenilda, daughter of Ercombert, king of Kent, and of Saint Sexburga. ¹² The encyclopedia puts it in a sentence: she "united in her veins the blood of two very different races: one fiercely cruel and pagan; the other a type of gentle valour and Christian sanctity." ¹

Whether Wulfhere was a pagan who kept putting off his promised conversion or a Christian who had lapsed, the encyclopedia says, is disputed. ¹ Butler says he was a Christian when he married and promised to root out idolatry, but delayed for worldly reasons. ² Both sources credit Ermenilda with softening him. ¹²

The encyclopedia says that it was her privilege "to be trained by saints": at home by Saint Chad and her mother, and in the cloister by her great-aunt and her grandmother. ¹ Butler describes a girl who went with her mother to the whole of the daily office and spent many hours in prayer. ²

She was sought in marriage, and both sources name one suitor in particular: Werebode, or Werbode, a warrior of her father's court to whom the king was much indebted. ¹² Butler adds a prince of the West Saxons who came with rich presents and was refused. ²

Butler, following Henry Bradshaw's verse Life of 1521, tells a darker story. ² In it Werburgh's brothers Wulfade and Rufin were baptized in secret by Saint Chad, and Werbode, seeing them as an obstacle, moved their father in a fit of rage to have them killed; Wulfhere then repented, did penance and founded churches. ²

The encyclopedia will not have it. "The legend of the terrible and unnatural crime which has been imputed to him by some writers must here be dismissed on the authority of all earlier and contemporary chroniclers, as the Bollandists have pointed out." ¹ It adds: "The martyrs, Sts. Wulfald and Ruffin, were not sons of Wulfhere and St. Ermenilda, nor victims of that king's tyranny." ¹

In the end, the encyclopedia says, her constancy "overcame all obstacles," and her father let her enter the abbey of Ely, founded by her great-aunt Saint Etheldreda. ¹ Butler describes the king himself taking her there with his court, and the abbess meeting her at the gate with her nuns singing hymns; Werburgh knelt and asked to be received as a penitent. ² She exchanged, Butler writes, her "rich coronet, purple, silks, and gold, for a poor veil and a coarse habit." ²

Wulfhere died soon afterward; Butler gives the year as 675. ¹² Ermenilda then took the veil at Ely herself, and in time succeeded her own mother, Sexburga, as abbess. ¹² The encyclopedia's article on Ely counts Werburgh among the four sainted abbesses the house gave the Church before the Danes destroyed it in 870, with Etheldreda, Sexburga and Ermenilda. ³

Her brother Kenred was a child when their father died, and the crown passed to Wulfhere's brother Ethelred. ¹² Ethelred asked Werburgh to take charge of all the monasteries of nuns in his kingdom and bring them to the discipline he had admired at Ely. ¹² The encyclopedia says she agreed "with some difficulty," since it meant giving up the seclusion she valued. ¹

With the king's endowments she reformed the existing houses and founded new ones at Trentham and Hanbury in Staffordshire and at Weedon in Northamptonshire. ¹² The encyclopedia says that "in devotedness to all committed to her care she seemed rather the servant than the mistress." ¹ Butler says she recited the whole psalter on her knees every day besides the office, stayed on in church in prayer after Matins until daylight, and ate once a day. ²

The best known of her miracles, in the encyclopedia's words the one that "appealed most to the popular imagination," was at Weedon, where she sent away a flock of wild geese that was ruining the cornfields, and none, the story goes, was seen there again. ¹ It became her emblem. ¹ The encyclopedia also credits her with prophecy and with reading the secrets of hearts. ¹

Butler says she foretold her death and went round all the houses in her care to give her last instructions. ² She died at Trentham on February 3, in 699 or 700 by the encyclopedia's reckoning, "about the end of the seventh century" by Butler's. ¹²

She had chosen Hanbury for her burial, the encyclopedia says, to keep her communities from competing for her body. ¹ The nuns of Trentham kept it anyway, locking the coffin in a crypt under guard, and the people of Hanbury came at midnight and carried it off while the guards slept. ¹ Butler says only that she was buried at Hanbury, as she had wished. ²

In 708 the body was moved to a more prominent place in the church and found intact after nine years. ¹² The encyclopedia says her brother Kenred, by then king, was present, and was so moved that he resolved to give up his crown. ¹ Butler puts the ceremony on June 21 in the presence of King Coelred, and has Kenred already gone to Rome to become a monk that year. ²

In 875, for fear of the Danes, her body was taken to Chester. ¹² The church there, on the site of the present cathedral, was rededicated to Saint Werburgh and Saint Oswald, the encyclopedia says, probably in the reign of Athelstan. ¹ Leofric, earl of Mercia, and his wife Godiva rebuilt it, and in 1093 Hugh Lupus, earl of Chester, made it a Benedictine abbey with monks from Bec, a change with which the name of Saint Anselm is associated. ¹² Butler, from Bradshaw, tells of the city saved from a great fire in 1180 when the monks carried her shrine in procession. ²

Under Henry VIII the shrine was broken up and her relics scattered. ¹² Fragments of it were used as the base of a bishop's throne. ¹² When the encyclopedia was written, they had been moved to the south choir aisle, close to the shrine's original position, and thirty of the original figures remained, some restored with female heads on male shoulders and the reverse. ¹

Saint Werburgh is the patroness of Chester, where her relics were kept from 875 until the Reformation. ¹² The encyclopedia and Butler both give her that title, and no other patronage is named by the sources used for this page. ¹²⁴

Saint Werburgh's feast is February 3, the day of her death. ¹² The encyclopedia says "St. Werburgh's feast is celebrated 3 February." ¹ The Roman Martyrology enters her that day at Chester and, in its Italian text, translated here, calls her abbess of Ely and founder of several monasteries. ⁴

She was a king's daughter who asked to be received at Ely as a penitent, and was later sent out to run every convent in the kingdom. ¹² By the encyclopedia's account she went reluctantly, because she loved the quiet she was giving up. ¹

The work was reform: going from house to house, founding new ones, and living in them as the servant of the women she governed. ¹ Her prayer, as Butler describes it, was the psalter on her knees and the hours before dawn in church. ²

Some of what is told of her family is legend, and the encyclopedia says so. ¹ What is left is a woman trained by saints who spent her life training others, and whose communities loved her enough to fight over her body. ¹