Who was St. Wite? Nobody knows. She is a mystery, and that is part of her power. There are no written historical records of her life. But there is a strong and consistent oral tradition that she was a Saxon woman who lived as a hermit on the cliffs near her sacred well. She offered a light to ships at sea and was killed defending the local people against a Viking raid. Soon after her martyrdom, King Alfred the Great built a church at Whitchurch Canonicorum to honour her remains.
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The church was among Alfred’s valued possessions. When he died in 899, he bequeathed the building and surrounding village to his youngest son, Ethelwald. In his will, Alfred called the place ‘Hwitancircian’, showing that from the earliest times, the place and the church were linked to St. Wite. (The ‘canonicorum’ bit came later.).
After the Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror gave the church to Benedictine monks. They renamed St. Wite after another saint, ‘St Candida’, whose name means ‘white’. Local people still called her St. Wite.
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Over the next 400 years, St. Wite’s Shrine became one of England’s greatest pilgrimage sites. People inserted the sick parts of their bodies into one of three oval holes beneath her limestone coffin and prayed for intercession. Lepers had separate openings in the outside wall so they didn’t have to enter the church to pray.
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All this ended when Henry VIII banned pilgrimages and the veneration of saints. Across England, hundreds of shrines were destroyed. But for some reason – no one knows why – St Wite’s survived. Her church was stripped of all its treasures; even the font was taken away and used as a cattle trough. But the shrine remained.
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Today it is once again a place of quiet pilgrimage, as is St. Wite’s Well on the cliffs nearby, overlooking the sea.
Sara Hudston
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