Great Fern. _Osmunda regalis._
Dedicated to _St. Ethelbert_.
~February 25.~
_St. Tarasius_, A. D. 806. _St. Victorinus_, A. D. 284. _St. Walburg_,
Abbess. _St. Cæsarius_, A. D. 369.
_St. Walburg._
This saint, daughter of Richard, king of the West Saxons, also a saint,
became a nun at Winburn in Dorsetshire, from whence, twenty-seven years
after she had taken the veil, she went to Germany, and became abbess of
a nunnery at Heidenheim in Suabia, where her brother governed an abbey
of monks, which at his death, in 760, she also governed, and died in
779. His relics were distributed in the principal cities of the Low
Countries, and the cathedral of Canterbury. The catalogue of relics in
the electoral palace of Hanover, published there in 1713, mentions some
of them there in a rich shrine. Butler calls them “rich particles.” Part
of her jawbone, at Antwerp, was visited and kissed by the archduke
Albert and Isabella in 1615. An oily liquor flowed from her tomb, and
was a sovereign remedy, till the chemists and apothecaries somehow or
other got their simples and substances into superior reputation. Strange
to say, these victors over relics have never been canonized, yet their
names would not sound badly in the calendar: for instance, St. William
Allen, of Plough-court; St. Anderson, of Fleet-street; St. Cribb, of
High Holborn; St. Hardy, of Walworth; St. Fidler, of Peckham; St.
Perfect, of Hammersmith; &c.