St. Swithin’s Troubled Rest.
If one passes from secular history to the legends of the saints, the exhumations become innumerable. It is, tradition asserts, on account of an attempt to remove the body of St. Swithin that we owe the prediction:
St. Swithun’s day, if thou dost rain,
For forty days it will remain:
St. Swithun’s day, if thou be fair,
For forty days ’twill rain na mair.
St. Swithin, chiefly notable for his mildness and humility, ordered that he should not be buried in his cathedral of Winchester, but in a “vile and unworthy place” among the common people in the churchyard. This the monks could not bring themselves to consider right, and on one July 15, they attempted to move the body of the bishop into the cathedral. But on that day and for forty days thereafter it rained so hard that they finally recognized in the weather the anger of the saint and abandoned their idea.
Apparently, however, the good saint changed his mind half a century or so later, for his remains were then brought into the cathedral and, instead of manifesting any displeasure, two hundred miraculous cures were credited to him in ten days.