Thank you for your very thoughtful email, Jeremy.

 

I can’t claim to have any research knowledge except a deep love of wells and a delight in their company. One thing I have been wondering about has been the links between holy wells and Neolithic smallholdings. I was visiting Alsia well in Cornwall one year, wondering why it was so isolated from any community. When the landowner started to tell us about the recent discovery of an ancient settlement on the nearby field, it all began to make more sense. The well was in the perfect spot for that settlement.

 

I have also wondered why bowsenning has only been mentioned amongst Cornish wells and no others in any other part of the country. Indeed, the only other trace of similar practice I could find came from Ethiopia, which retained a spiritual interest in living waters for many centuries.

 

The recurring story of standing stones going down to the local holy well or stream to drink also make me think there is link between marker stones for roundbarrows or dolmens/quoits and the local sacred water site, which predates the medieval veneration of holy wells.

 

Best wishes

 

Sarah

 

 

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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