Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

A METRICAL LIFE OF ST. WULFSTAN OF WORCESTER In the thirteenth century St. Wulfstan of Worcester, canonized on 21 April, 1203, enjoyed great popularity as a healer in the Marches and in Wales. It has been suggested that the offerings at his shrine helped to provide the funds for the rebuilding of the church which had been damaged by fire in 1202. Bishop Silvester of Evesham trans- lated the body of the saint to a shrine on 7 June, 1218. The shrine became a great centre of pilgrimage and new accounts of the saint and his miracles were put into circulation. The Life had originally been written in Old English by Coleman of Worcester, who had been the bishop's chaplain. This Life is lost, but William of Malmesbury made it the basis of a Life in Latin in the first half of the twelfth century. An abridgement of Malmesbury's work was made, Professor Darlington has suggested, by Senatus prior of Worcester (d. 1207), at any rate in the first half of the thirteenth century. This is found in a manuscript from Worcester at Durham (B.iv), which has been dated about 1240, where it is accompanied by a work on the miracles of the saint, com- posed not earlier than 1235, and by an account of his translation and canonization. All these documents are edited by Professor R. R. Darlington, The Vita Wulfstani of William of Malmesbury, Roy. Hist. Soc., 1928. It is clear that, as might have been expected, there was considerable activity in the documentation of the saint's virtues and miracles at Worcester in the first half of the thirteenth century. The work on the miracles contains a number of evidences for pilgrimages to the shrine from Wales in the thirteenth century. We find bishops of St. Asaph, Bangor, and Llandaff as witnesses to miracles (i, capp. 4, 7), a leper from Wales cured (i, cap. 10), the son of a rich Welshman healed of epilepsy and blindness (i, cap. 20), a boy from Abergavenny cured of dumbness (i, cap. 27), a woman from Cantref Mawr (here Cantermaur "), co. Carmarthen, healed of dysentery (i, cap. 28), a Welshman of fistula (i, cap. 35), a Welsh youth of an internal complaint (ii, cap. 2), and a man from New Radnor of deafness (i, cap. 37). That these Welsh pilgrims journeyed to the shrine, not only as single individuals, but in troops, is shown by the story of a woman de ultimis partibus Wallie who came with a company from her own village (" contigit autem ut quidam convicanei sui ad sanctum properarent Wlstanum ") and was healed of blindness (i,cap.28). A curious light is thrown on conditions in Monmouthshire by the story of the private war between the castles of Abergavenny and Grosmont