Juthwara

Saint Juthwara (also Jutwara, Juthware or, in Brittany, Aud Wyry, "Aud the Virgin") was a virgin and martyr from Dorset in England. According to the legend she was an eighth-⁠century Saxon, sister of Saint Sidwell; some historians think she was a Briton of the sixth century, and the Orthodox calendar places her in the seventh century, in Devon. Her relics were translated to Sherborne in the reign of Æthelred. Nothing further is known with certainty of her life.

The legend is known from John Capgrave's Nova Legenda Angliae. It says that she was a pious girl, the victim of a jealous stepmother, who prayed, fasted often and gave alms. After her father's death she began to suffer pain in her chest, which was ascribed to her sorrow and austerities, and the stepmother told her son Bana a malicious story about her. He struck off her head, and a spring of water appeared at the spot. Juthwara is then said to have picked up her head and carried it back to the church. According to the Breton tradition, Bana repented, became a monk and founded the monastery of Gerber (later Le Relecq).

Her death is said to have taken place at Halyngstoka, generally accepted as Halstock in Dorset, where local tradition points to a field still called by her name. Her feast day is 28 November, though a Devon and Cornwall calendar gives 13 July, the date of the translation of her body to Sherborne in the early eleventh century. Her shrine remained a place of pilgrimage at Sherborne until the Dissolution. The Orthodox calendar commemorates her on 1 July, as a saint of the West before the Great Schism (a saint of the undivided Church), by the New Calendar.