Withburga of Dereham

Venerable Withburga of Dereham was an East Anglian abbess, renowned for founding and governing a convent at Dereham in Norfolk. She died in 743 and is remembered on 8 July (in the Russian sources, on 17 March). She is also honoured in the Orthodox Church, in the Synaxis of the saints of Britain and Ireland.

According to folk tradition she was the youngest daughter of King Anna of East Anglia, but some scholars, such as Virginia Blanton and Barbara Yorke, think this unlikely: Bede, who writes of her elder sisters, Seaxburh of Ely, Æthelthryth, Æthelburh of Faremoutiers and Sæthryth, mentions no Withburga, and her name first appears in sources of the tenth and eleventh centuries, so that the connection with Anna's family may be a fabrication, invented to enhance the status of Ely Abbey. After her father's death (about 653) Withburga built a convent at East Dereham in Norfolk.

It is told that, while the convent was being built, Withburga had nothing to feed the workers but dry bread. She prayed to the Mother of God and was told to send her maidservants every morning to the local spring. There they found two wild but gentle does, which let themselves be milked. Their nourishing milk gave the workmen strength to continue the building. A local official who disliked Withburga or her miracles wanted to hunt the does with dogs and kill them, but his horse threw him from the saddle and he broke his neck. The story is kept on a large sign in the centre of Dereham.

Withburga died in 743 and was buried at Dereham. After fifty-⁠five years, when her tomb was opened, her body was found untouched by age and decay, and the church and tomb became a place of pilgrimage. In 974 Brithnoth, the abbot of Ely, decided to steal her body, so as to collect the pilgrims' money himself. He went to Dereham with some armed men and held a feast, and when the locals were drunk he stole the body. The people of Dereham soon learned of it and pursued the culprits, and in the scuffle both sides even used spears. Nevertheless the thieves reached Ely first, because they knew the short way through the marshes. From that time Withburga's relics were again at Ely, next to her sisters Æthelthryth and Seaxburh. When the people of Dereham returned home they found that a spring had burst forth in Withburga's despoiled tomb, which they took as consolation for the loss of their saint; pilgrims continued to come and drink from it. The spring has not run dry in more than a thousand years and can still be seen at the place of her tomb.

In 1106 her body was examined again and found intact. Her cult in eastern England, which was never large, was closely linked with that of Æthelthryth. It was suppressed during the Reformation in the 1540s, and her relics were destroyed.