Celtic Cross

© Godric Godricson

Superstition

Ecclesiastical  Curiosities
Edited William Andrews (1899) Project Gutenburg
© Godric Godricson

In country districts, more than in towns, superstition is rife with regard to our Churchyards. The variety and form of this superstition is well nigh ‘Legion,’ and though many of my readers may enjoy an Ingoldsby experience when read in a well-lighted room, surrounded by smiling companions, few of them, after such an experience would care to pay a visit alone to some neighbouring churchyard, renowned for its tale of ghostly appearances. This will, I think enable me to show that by far the larger number of churchyard superstitions are purely chimerous fancies of the brain, and do not owe their origin, or existence, to any other source, be that source a wilful fraud, or imposition, designed to produce fear, or merely the imaginative delusion of some overstrained, or weak brain, which called first it into existence.

Blue Gravel and pine needles



© Godric Godricson



Lady Elizabeth Cole

Lady Elizabeth Cole
© Godric Godricson

Saint Pega and the relics of a saint

 

Book of The Lives of the Fathers,
Martyrs, and Principal Saints
Alban Butler (1895)
Project Gutenburg
© Godric Godricson

She was sister to St. Guthlack, the famous hermit of Croyland, and though of the royal blood of the Mercian kings, forsook the world, and led an austere retired life in the country which afterwards bore her name, in Northamptonshire, at a distance from her holy brother. Some time after his death she went to Rome, and there slept in the Lord, about the year 719. Ordericus Vitalis says, her relics were honored with miracles, and kept in a church which bore her name at Rome, but this church is not now known. From one in Northamptonshire, a village still retains the name of Peagkirk, vulgarly Pequirk; she was also titular saint of a church and monastery in Pegeland, which St. Edward the Confessor united to Croyland