Herald AV Publications

HAVPCD297 – Evensong for St Swithun’s Day

Swithun?s recognition as a saint dates from well before the period of official, papal canonizations. His body was elevated on 15 July 971. The event was later recorded by Wulfstan the Cantor, a Winchester monk who as a boy had been present at Swithun?s elevation: he recalled how he and his fellow novices had been terrified by a violent storm. (Such storms were a commonplace in the medieval biographies of saints.) This was the event which gave rise to the legend that if it rains on St Swithun?s day it will rain for forty days thereafter.