Did it rain on St Swithun's Day? Probably not!

The aphorism that ‘if it rains on St Swithun’s Day, it will rain for forty days’, or words to that effect is well known. It does not appear, however, to have started from legendarily torrential rain on the day when St Swithun's relics (bones) were moved into Winchester’s Old Minster on July 15, 971. The source may have been a prognostic couplet for the saints’ days of two Roman martyrs Saints Processus and Martinianus, which was on July 2 and the same day as the deposition of Swithun’s relics. 

The leading Anglo-Saxon historian Michael Lapidge suggests that there may have been a shift of dates from July 2 to 15 over time. In any case, it was not until the late medieval period that the ‘forty days of rain’ was ascribed to Winchester’s local patron saint and became fixed in folk memory and print. It is ironic that, just as the cult officially ended in 1539 when his shrine was broken up by Henry VIII’s commissioners, the one memorable popular reference to St Swithun arose. 

 

The claim of rain or a tempest on the day of Swithun’s translation to Winchester’s Old Minster probably came from a misinterpretation of the Latin phrase qua tempestate written by Wulfstan around the 990s. According to Lapidge, it means ‘at that time’ in this context and not a tempest.

 

Source: Michael Lapidge, The Cult of St Swithun, Oxford 2003, p. 48.

 

• There is a longer article on St Swithun’s cult in the Friends of Winchester Cathedral’s Record Extra online journal’s June 2024 edition. Go to www.wincathrecord.org, choose Browse and select Record Extra.