13th July
St Mildred’s Day
St Mildred Icon by Pete Murphy. Source: artweb.com
Today is St Mildred’s Day. Mildred was a mystical seventh century saint, and Abbess of the Abbey at Minster-in-Thanet in Kent, who spent large periods of time in a state of euphoric meditation. On emerging from one particularly deep trance, she was alleged to have stamped the ground hard and created a permanent imprint on a stone near the river at Ebbsfleet, north of Sandwich. The stone became a place of worship and it was said if the stone was ever moved, it would simply return to its original place. After she died, Mildred took on some similar characteristics to the stone: in 1035 monks tried to move her bones from her former abbey to Canterbury, but they proved impossible to lift. It took the Abbot of Canterbury himself to pray for divine intervention before the saint’s corpse could become portable enough to be moved from Ebbsfleet. Mildred eventually resided at Canterbury, although two sets of rival bones were on display.
Some of this story smacks of Christianisation of a tradition of a sacred river and its goddess.