For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Confused Ape]

Well,l they don't call it "The Passion" for nothing (rile up their passions)

Many British saints had boring lives but the story of Saint Mildred was obviously inspired by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego surviving the fiery furnace.

A young nobleman, related to the Abbess of Chelles, entreated her to arrange that he might marry this English princess. The abbess tried to persuade her, but Mildred said her mother had sent her there to be taught, not to be married, and all the abbess's advice, threats and blows failed to persuade her to accept the alliance offered to her. At last the abbess shut her up in an oven in which she had made a great fire; but after three hours, when she expected to find not only her flesh but her very bones burnt to ashes, the young saint came out unhurt and radiant with joy and beauty.

She eventually returned home.

With her mother's consent, Mildred joined her at her foundation of Minster-in-Thanet.

She continued to be an extremely popular saint, eclipsing the fame of St. Augustine, in the immediate neighbourhood of her monastery, where the place that used to be proudly pointed out as that of his landing came to be better known as "St Mildred's Rock."

A good tourist attraction until she became too popular.

In 1033, St. Mildred was translated to St. Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury and minor relics also passed from here to Deventer in Holland

There was, however, a rival set of relics which were said to have been hidden at Lyming, with those of her sister, Milgitha, during the Viking devastation. These were given to the Religious Hospital of St. Gregory in Canterbury, by Archbishop Lanfranc in 1085.

I love the idea of a rival set of relics.

I know this has wandered off the original point of the topic but it does relate to the funding of churches and abbeys. The stories of Mildred and Winifred suggest that competition for pilgrims resulted in some places trying to outdo everyone else with their saints - "You've only got a martyr who stayed dead. We've got a saint who miraculously survived."