Dear All,
Perhaps a bit late to
respond to this thread, but I've been mulling over James' suggestion that there
used to be more saints' wells in England than there are now, and I wonder if
that's right. If anything, there may have been fewer saints' wells in
England at any given time in the Middle Ages than there are now, given that
nobody then was doing the kind of archival searches for which we are
now grateful to James.
This thought was
triggered by a long day spent in in the Edwardian gravitas of Bristol
Central Library - marvellous building, helpful people - where I was following up
some references in Phil Quinn's book. Bristol has a lcreditable tradition of
topography, going back to William Worcestre, who would climb down a
vertical cliff face to inspect St. Vincent's Cave and was clearly not the
sort of chap to neglect a holy well if he saw one. It has also had repeated
modern studies of its mediaeval layout. But for that, we have only three holy
wells: St. Edith's (the one which is at Stourhead now), St. Mary's, and a single
reference to Pithay Pump being called Hollywell.
Bristol is England's
second city, unless you come from York... there's a useful league ranking in Bob
Hoskins' Local History in England p176, based on two sets of C14 tax
quotas. If you combine these, the top six cities in England come out as Bristol/
York, Lincoln, Norwich, Newcastle, and Salisbury. As far as I can see, the
others were all much like Bristol, with three or so holy wells in the city. The
next six in ranking include Shrewsbury with three, Oxford with two (well, three
if you count Holywell in the suburbs) and Coventry with one (assuming that St.
Catherine's is mediaeval) but also Kings Lynn, Boston and Great Yarmouth which,
to the best of my knowledge, didn't have any holy wells at all.
Stamford, as it happens,
comes in fortieth in the ranking, being rather less than a quarter the size of
Bristol. I would guess that where other religious provision is concerned -
churches, chapels, guilds etc. - Bristol did have slightly over four times as
many as Stamford. But I find it hard to believe that it had 24 holy
wells, and that 21 of them have just vanished from the record without
trace.
Another thing: several of
the holy wells in these old cities are known from one reference only. There
seems to be just the one record of the St. Mary's Well in Bristol, or St.
Mary's in Southampton, or St. Martin's in Winchester, or All Saints' Well
in Colchester, and significantly these are mentioned as reference points in
abuttals of property, not as sources of baptismal water or recipients of
bequests. It looks very much as if 'St. Martin's Well' means, not 'the well
where we may be in touch with the power of St. Martin', but 'that well in the
ditch, you know, the one near St. Martin's Church'. Pulchre Well in Leicester is
clearly the well near St. Sepulchre's; the Holy Sepulchre didn't, as it were,
have any personal interest in its waters.
Just because a well has a
saint's name doesn't mean it had a saint's cult (Tristan has made the same point
in the past). It may be that the number of culted wells has always been
very small, perhaps one or two in each county, but that in the nature of things
there cults come and go, and then we gather together all the evidence of the
centuries and say 'Ah, the Age of Faith! What a lot of holy wells there
must have been in those days'.
Well, it's a theory. What
does anyone think?
Jeremy Harte
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