Turned Out Nice Again
St Swithin and talking about the weather
15th July should be a happy day in Winchester. I’ve not been there to see if the town celebrates St Swithin, after whom the Cathedral is named. For most of us, however, St Swithin’s Day is connected with predicting the weather. You may have heard a rhyme that goes like this:
St. Swithin's day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain.
St. Swithin's day if thou be fair
For forty days 'twill rain nae mair.
St Swithin’s Day is literally a bell weather for the next few weeks, critical for the harvest as the wheat ripens in the field, especially when you can’t import tonnes of it from Canada. Some meteorologists can justify this date as an important one, saying that this date is around the time that the jet stream settles down into a pattern which tends to hold for the next six weeks or so. But it was clearly a rule of thumb which held some merit in an agrarian society for centuries.
Who was St Swithin?
Swithin was made bishop of Winchester in 852, known for his personal piety, making journeys around the diocese on foot and inviting the poor to his banquets. He was zealous in building new churches and restoring old ones. It’s hard to imagine that there were old churches in need of restoration in 852 but Christianity had been gaining ground all over England for centuries, well before the mission from Rome in 597.
According to William of Malmsbury, Swithin advised King Ethelwulf on spiritual matters. Swithin is also said to have accompanied the young Alfred to Rome in the 850s. Most of the surviving sources on Swithin’s life and ministry are from centuries later so it’s hard to be sure – if it matters.
Swithin died in 862. It would have been traditional to bury him in the cathedral, but he was insistent on being buried outside:
ubi et pedibus praetereuntium et stillicidiis ex alto rorantibus esset obnoxious
translation: where it might be subject to the feet of passers-by and to the raindrops pouring from on high.
And so begins Swithin’s connection with the weather. For reasons I’ve been unable to fathom, he wanted raindrops to fall upon his dead body. The moving of his body into the Cathedral in 971, then, was very much not what he would have wanted. On 15th July, when the bones of St Swithin were moved inside, he showed his displeasure from beyond the grave by sending a mighty rainstorm. Saints can do that, apparently. (I’m pretty sure they can’t).
Saints and Weather
If you read almanacs and books about Saints’ Days, there are, in fact, many associations with the weather. Over at The Field, you can read all about rhymes like the one for All Saints Day:
On first November if weather is clear
’Tis the end of the sowing you’ll do for the year.
Ten days later, on Martinmas, there are more meteorological rhymes:
If ducks do slide at Martinmas
At Christmas they will swim;
If ducks do swim at Martinmas
At Christmas they will slide.
Most of these have been long forgotten, but traditional farming communities have remembered them until comparatively recently. They have remained until radio and then television gave us weather forecasts which have become more and more accurate. Now it’s all on an app.
What We Have Lost?
The Puritan in me struggles with linking the weather to saints’ days. The canonisation of Christians is already a bridge too far to me. But we are now living in a society in thrall to the Enlightenment. We don’t just believe the science. We believe in Science, the great god of our age.
The slenderest connection between the spiritual realm and the weather has been snipped. If you link flash floods or storms to any kind of sin, you will not just be laughed at, you will be scorned, or worse. I reflected on this last Sunday as I attended York Minster, famously struck by lightning almost exactly forty years ago on 9thJuly 1984. What, if anything, did it mean? While it is not possible to draw a straight line between any particular weather event or climate catastrophe and specific sins of our society or church, there is still some connection.
It is not hard to find places in scripture where the weather has spiritual significance. The plague of locusts inflicted on Egypt is clearly linked to their enslavement of God’s people. The drought in the days of Ahab pronounced by Elijah is unambiguously related to the Baal worship introduced by Jezebel. The annihilation of all but eight people saved through the flood in the days of Noah was the direct result of dire and prevalent sin.
When Christ comes, he controls and commands the weather. By extension, he must also control the climate. Some of the Net Zero agenda is full of technocratic Enlightenment solutions. But the most vocal and destructive component, the Climate Extinction rebellion, is shot through with religious fervour, demanding an end to all capitalism, deemed to be inherently immoral. By what spiritual standard this judgment is made remains unclear.
St Swithin’s Day, then, can be a reminder that the ripening harvest is God’s grace and mercy to us, in spite of our sins, individual and corporate. Let us remember what Jesus says:
You [are] children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. (Matthew 5:45)
But God’s indiscriminate common grace to all will not last indefinitely. As Paul said to the elites of Athens:
In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead. (Acts 17:30-31)
Happy St Swithin’s Day. I hope it stays fine for you.