Official feasts used to be an important part of the human community. People would gather together to remember something sacred, express their faith and hope for the future, and / or just be together formally, recognizing each other as being part of a shared community. Few things express a desire for shared companionship and social intimacy more than dining together. Sadly, the gathering together for feasting is increasingly a relic of the past – at least here in the West.
It need not be so! Today we will remember the ancient feasts.
The Feast Day of St. Wulfric
This is a Christian religious celebration of Wulfric, an 11th and 12th century English miracle-worker. Wulfric was one of the most famous Anchorite priests in Medieval Europe. He spent the last 29 years of his life living voluntarily in a cell adjacent to St Michael and All Angels Church.
Wulfric was born at Compton Martin, ten miles south of Bristol. After becoming a priest, he at first exercised his ministry at Deverill, near Warminster. At this stage he was apparently much addicted to hunting, with both hawks and hounds. A chance conversation with a beggar, however, converted him to more godly pursuits, and he moved back to Compton Martin as parish priest.
In the year 1125, Wulfric came to St Michael and All Angels Church in Haselbury Plucknett, Somerset. He wished to spend the rest of his life as an anchorite, withdrawn from the world, living in a cell adjacent to the church. This cell stood on the cold northern side of the chancel where the vestry is now. Although he apparently failed to obtain episcopal permission for this move, he was supported by the Cluniac monks at Montacute. Sir William FitzWalter had a great respect for his saintly neighbour; he sent provisions to him and visited him from time to time. Wulfric numbered among his intimate friends Osbern, the village priest; William, a lay brother of Forde Abbey; and Brichtric, who seems to have joined him as a disciple or attendant.
Soon, people came to him for guidance and blessing. During the reigns of kings Henry I and Stephen, Wulfric exercised a powerful influence, not only in his own neighbourhood but also at court. Henry I was informed, correctly, that he would shortly die, while King Stephen was chastised for the evils of his government. Wulfric is said to have received the gifts of prophecy and healing and was involved in many miraculous happenings. He became known as a healer of body, mind, and spirit for all those who sought him out.
One of his visitors was Matilda of Wareham who had been planning to work overseas. Wulfric persuaded her that she should become an anchorite. She was committed and agreed to go to Wareham to work for over two years while a cell was created for her. She returned with her servant Gertrude. She died in the cell after fifteen years and Gertrude agreed to take her place.
According to Abbot John of Forde Abbey, Wulfric lived alone in these simple quarters for 29 years, devoting much of his time to reading the Bible and praying. In keeping with the ideals of medieval spirituality, he adopted stern ascetic practices: he deprived himself of sleep, ate a frugal and meatless diet, spent hours reciting the psalms sitting in a bath of cold water, and wore a hair shirt and heavy chain-mail tunic.
One of the most influential anchorite priests of medieval England, he died in his cell on 20 February 1154. At his death, a scuffle occurred in and around St. Michael’s between black-robed Norman Cluniac monks from Montacute and common folk from Haselbury and Crewkerne who had been summoned by Osbern, the priest of Haselbury. The monks maintained that providing food for the anchorite, which they had done for many years, gave them a claim to the holy man’s mortal remains. But the locals forced them to withdraw and Wulfric was buried in his cell by the bishop of Bath who had visited him at his death-bed. For security reasons, Osbern moved Wulfric’s remains twice, until they came to rest somewhere near the west end of the church, “…in a place known only to himself and God”.
Legacy
In July 2009, The Wulfric Festival was held at the parish churches of St Michael and All Angels at Haselbury and St Martin’s at North Perrott, being three days of classical, folk, jazz, and West gallery music, all in aid of the restoration of the two churches.
St. Wulfric in Popular Culture
Let me describe Wulfric to you, to see if he sounds familiar. He was successful early in life, such that he could pursue fame or riches. However, personal shame drove him to conclude that he should spend the last few decades of his life, holed up in a castle. Nevertheless, from inside the walls of said castle, he remained influential to his country’s leaders. For good measure, this person was famous for working miracles.
J.K. Rowling named her character Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore after this real life English saint and there are hard-to-miss similarities between them. The following is probably way more information than anyone looking for the real-life saint might want, but I am giving it to you anyway because I am fan of lengthy side tangents. (via mugglenet.com)
by Dr. Beatrice Groves
Today is Wulfric of Haselbury’s day – the saint after whom Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore is (in part) named. Harry Potter is full of saints’ names, and these names always carry some kind of hint about the character who bears them (This kind of naming is called cratylic naming, and it is perhaps Rowling’s favorite literary device.) Hedwig, for example, is probably the most important saints’ name in the series, and the Sisters of St. Hedwig were established to educate orphan children. Harry’s owl’s name touchingly conveys the way in which Hedwig cares for her owner, not just (as might be expected) the other way around. Percy Weasley’s middle name (Ignatius) suggests that like Ignatius Loyola – a saint who underwent a famous conversion – he might switch sides. Then there is Binns’ Christian name: Cuthbert (a name Rowling gave him when planning the series, although it was not included in the final text). St. Cuthbert, a historically significant (and deeply uncongenial) saint, is a perfect namesake for an unsociable history teacher. Rowling has noted how Binns was based on a university professor whose “disconnect with his students was total,” and St. Cuthbert, too, was famously unenamored of those who came to him in the hopes of imbibing some of his wisdom.
The Clerk of Oxford’s superlative blog on Anglo Saxon England and the liturgical year tells us that Wulfric of Haselbury (who died on this day in 1154/5) was “an anchorite who lived in a cell attached to the church in the Somerset village of Haselbury Plucknett. He was noted for his miracles of healing and prophecy, and though he was never canonized, pilgrims were still traveling to his shrine at the time of the Reformation; tales about Wulfric were collected in oral tradition in Somerset as late as 1900.” Wulfric’s gifts of healing and prophecy align with Dumbledore, as do his linguistic abilities. Dumbledore is a gifted linguist (able even to speak Mermish), and when Wulfric heals a mute man, the newly vocal man is rather surprisingly bilingual (adept at French as well as English).
Handwritten Black Family Tree
Rowling has used another little-known saint from South West England as a name source (Walburga, an 8th century Devonshire Saint who turns up on the Black family tree), and it seems likely that she knew of both Wulfric and Walburga because they were relatively local to her growing up in Tutshill (or when at Exeter University). Wulfric’s fabulously named home village of Haselbury Plucknett is in Somerset, and many South West placenames – such as Porlock, Dursley, Chudleigh, and Ottery St. Mary – appear in Harry Potter transformed into animals, cousins, Quidditch teams & the Weasley’s home village of Ottery St. Catchpole. Rowling is likely to have known of Wulfric because he was a relatively local saint, but it remains a very unusual choice for a name. And it seems to be possible that she chose it for him because Dumbledore was born on, or near, Wulfric of Haselbury’s day on February 20. And this is a tempting possibility for another reason.
I must admit, I always wondered why nobody ever asked me what Dumbledore’s wand was made of!” (J.K. Rowling)
The answer to this question, of course, turned out to be crucial for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – but Dumbledore only owned the Elder Wand after winning it from Grindelwald in 1945. Which has led me to wonder if this question will once again turn out to be important in Fantastic Beasts?
Enter Robert Graves – a celebrated poet, novelist, classicist, and author of an influential “Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth” called The White Goddess (1948), which has never been out of print. Graves’s father, incidentally, was Alfred Perceval Graves; and his nephew was Richard Perceval Graves – a family naming trait that is certainly the source for Percival Graves’s name (as well as, possibly, another of Dumbledore’s middle names). In The White Goddess, Robert Graves states that each month of the year is governed by a particular wood and a particular rune, and out of this idea, he created the so-called Ogham Tree Calendar (also known as the Celtic Tree Calendar). Graves based this calendar on the arboreal sources of some rune names, but he extended this, as well as inventing the link with months to create a more satisfying and complete schema. The Tree Calendar he thus devised has proved immensely popular, and among its other influences, it is the basis of some aspects of wandlore.
Rowling used this calendar to choose some of her character’s wands by aligning these wand woods with their birthday tree according to the calendar. On March 16, 2006, in the lead up the publication of Deathly Hallows (in which we were to learn about the importance of the Elder Wand for the first time), Rowling posted extensive information about how she had used this calendar for assigning wand woods. If Dumbledore’s birthday were to fall on February 20, according to this calendar, he would have an ash wand. But, as Rowling has said, she does not stick to this tree calendar so much as take inspiration from it – and I am particularly interested in the tree that falls just before (February 17): the rowan.
In traditional folklore, the rowan is one of the most explicitly magical trees. It is said that its old Celtic name fid na ndruad means “Wizards’ tree,” and it was regularly used for defensive magic. Cradles were made of rowan to protect against changelings and the famous exclamation in Macbeth“Aroynt thee witch” may derive from the idea that rowan trees (“rauntree”/“aroynt thee”) had virtue in deterring witches. Rowan’s power meant that it was also used for fashioning protective crosses (such as those on display in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford). In one of the most atmospheric Oxford fantasy novels – Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising (which certainly influenced Harry Potter) – the wooden Sign which will repel the forces of the Dark must be made from rowan: “our wood is one which the Dark does not love. Rowan, Will, that’s our tree. Mountain ash. There are qualities in rowan, as in no other wood on earth, that we need.”
The Christian iconography of rowan crosses – both historically and in Cooper’s novel (her Signs are crosses within a circle) – is peculiarly suitable. For, until the nineteenth century, rowan was known in English as the “quicken tree” or “quickbeam.”“Quickbeam” is a strikingly evocative name – bringing together the words for being alive (“quick”) and tree (“beam” is Old English for tree, and remains in some modern tree names, such as hornbeam and whitebeam). “Beam” was likewise Old English for the cross, which was so often understood as a tree (“beam-lights,” for example, were lighted candles placed before the rood, or cross, in a church). The connection between these two types of “beam” – the cross and a tree (Acts 5.30) – is part of the typological connection between the Fall (caused by eating an apple from a tree) and Christ’s redemption. This makes rowan’s name of “quickbeam” a peculiarly evocative one – a name that is probably a sign of the belief in the tree’s efficacious qualities. (Tolkien, unsurprisingly, was drawn to the Old English significance of the name “quickbeam” and gave it as a nickname to one of the Ents in Lord of the Rings).
Rowan, or “quickbeam,” therefore, has a uniquely magical and even sacred reputation which makes it all the more surprising that it never appears as a wand wood in Harry Potter. The more so given the fulsome entry on rowan given by Ollivander in the notes concerning wand woods published on WizardingWorld.com. These extensive comments explain how “Mr. Ollivander believes that wand wood has almost human powers of perception and preferences;” and Ollivander has this to say about rowan:
Rowan wood has always been much-favored for wands because it is reputed to be more protective than any other and, in my experience renders all manner of defensive charms especially strong and difficult to break. It is commonly stated that no dark witch or wizard ever owned a rowan wand, and I cannot recall a single instance where one of my own rowan wands has gone on to do evil in the world. Rowan is most happily placed with the clear-headed and the pure-hearted, but this reputation for virtue ought not to fool anyone – these wands are the equal of any, often the better, and frequently out-perform others in duels.”
Ollivander’s lore here, connecting rowan with defensive charms and hence protective magic, responds closely to the historical use of the wood. Both the virtue of rowan wood and its superiority in dueling would make it a suitable choice for Dumbledore, who defeats the two darkest wizards of all time – Grindelwald in 1945 and Voldemort (at the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) – in duels. Ollivander’s underlying point here (that goodness is not weakness but strength) moreover recapitulates what Dumbledore is constantly trying to teach Harry about the power of love: the force that is at once more wonderful and more terrible than death.
Today – as Wulfric of Haselbury’s day – is Dumbledore’s name day. If that marks February 20 as a day that falls near Dumbledore’s birthday, then both the Celtic Tree Calendar and rowan’s inherent capabilities of goodness and strength would make rowan a natural choice for Dumbledore’s original wand. But the main reason for this guess is the nugget of information given to us by Ollivander at the end of the entry for a wand wood of a very different character – elder:
The rarest wand wood of all, and reputed to be deeply unlucky, the elder wand is trickier to master than any other. It contains powerful magic, but scorns to remain with any owner who is not the superior of his or her company; it takes a remarkable wizard to keep the elder wand for any length of time. The old superstition, ‘wand of elder, never prosper,’ has its basis in this fear of the wand, but in fact, the superstition is baseless, and those foolish wandmakers who refuse to work with elder do so more because they doubt they will be able to sell their products than from fear of working with this wood. The truth is that only a highly unusual person will find their perfect match in elder, and on the rare occasion when such a pairing occurs, I take it as certain that the witch or wizard in question is marked out for a special destiny. An additional fact that I have unearthed during my long years of study is that the owners of elder wands almost always feel a powerful affinity with those chosen by rowan.
This seems to me a startingly odd detail given that elder is the most important wand wood of the Harry Potter series, and rowan is never even mentioned.
The only reason I can see for including this fact which Ollivander has so laboriously unearthed “during long years of study” is that it is a hint about a story that Rowling knows but has not yet told. It is a clue that Dumbledore and Grindelwald – two young men who were to feel such a powerful affinity for each other – were respectively those chosen by a rowan and an elder wand.
That is probably more than you wanted to know about St. Wulfric, trees, or JK Rowling, but as they say…
What do you eat for the Feast Day of St. Wulfric?
What do you eat to celebrate an English saint who underwent self-imposed poverty? You eat a traditional English recipe that said impoverished person might have enjoyed from time to time. I have just the thing.
Bubble and squeak is a fried British dish made with potatoes and cabbage. It’s quite similar to the Irish colcannon. Bubble and squeak, which often contains meat such as ham or bacon, is traditionally made on Monday with the leftovers from Sunday’s dinner or on Boxing Day with leftovers from the Christmas feast. It is sometimes topped with a fried egg.
Why Is It Called Bubble and Squeak?
The name “bubble and squeak” likely comes from the noises the ingredients make when they are fried together in a pan. Since cabbage contains a lot of water, it tends to make “bubbly” noises as it wilts and cooks.
Ingredients
½ medium head cabbage, sliced
3 slices bacon, diced
1 onion, thinly sliced
1 cup cubed cooked ham
1 tablespoon butter
3 cups potatoes – baked, cooled and thinly sliced
½ teaspoon paprika
salt and pepper to taste
Directions
Gather all ingredients.
Cook cabbage in a medium saucepan with a small amount of water until tender, about 3 to 5 minutes. Drain, and set aside.
Cook bacon and onion in a well-seasoned cast iron skillet until onion is soft and bacon is cooked, about 5 minutes.
Add ham, and cook until heated through. Add butter, then mix in cooked cabbage and potatoes; season with paprika, salt, and pepper. Cook until browned on the bottom, turn, and brown again.
What is a prayer to say for St. Wulfric’s Feast Day celebration?
Despite looking, I was unable to find a prayer tradition surrounding this saint. Nevertheless, this is easily remedied. After sharing the saint’s biography, you could simply say the following:
St. Wulfric, pray for us!
When is the Feast Day of St. Wulfric celebrated?
This celebration occurs annually on 20 February, the anniversary of his death.
I hope everyone who celebrates has a wonderful day!
Thanks! One of the things I’ve enjoyed about researching and writing this Feast Day series is picking up some history of which I was not aware. I also like (in this case, anyway) stumbling across the obscure history that Rowling used to write Harry Potter. It gives me an appreciation for the depth of detail that goes into writing a story like that.
I hadn’t heard of the celebration of Wulfric before or even St. Wulfric. A very interesting post.
Thanks! One of the things I’ve enjoyed about researching and writing this Feast Day series is picking up some history of which I was not aware. I also like (in this case, anyway) stumbling across the obscure history that Rowling used to write Harry Potter. It gives me an appreciation for the depth of detail that goes into writing a story like that.
Yeah, this is such a great way to learn more.