Baring-Gould’s sources: Venerated in Tyrol. Authority: — A Life by Hippolytus Guarinoniusin 1646. The first to give an account of her is Rader in his Bavaria Sancta; Rader was a native of Inichen in Tyrol, and therefore took pains to collect such information as was accessible relating to the saints venerated in Tyrol. Rader's book was published in 1627; he drew his information from the collections of Francis Gezner. Gezner wrote about A.D. 1510, perhaps somewhat earlier. Guarinonius used his writings; he was born A.D. 1607. The account of Gezner has not been preserved intact, so that how much is original, and how much the accretion of late tradition, cannot be decided.] S. Nothburga was born at Rottenburg, in the Inn valley, near Schwatz, in Tyrol, in 1265, and at the age of eighteen entered the service of Henry Count of Rottenburg, Grand Chamberlain of Meinhardt Count of Tyrol and Duke of Carinthia, and became the cook of Rottenburg Castle. With the consent of her master and mistress, Nothburga gave the remains of every day’s dinner to the poor, who assembled in hungry swarms to receive the scraps. Henry of Rottenburg was succeeded by his son Henry, whose countess, Odilia, was a woman of a thrifty nature, and looked with an evil eye on the ways of Nothburga. She forbade the cook giving the scraps to the poor, and ordered them to go into the pig-pails to fatten the porkers for Christmas bacon.

Nothburga stinted herself to give to the needy, and on Fridays would eat only bread and drink water, that the food and wine apportioned to her might go to those who needed it more than herself.

If we may trust her biographer, she manifested a sublime indifference to the commands of her mistress, and continued distributing the contents of the castle larder and cellar among the beggars. But we will hope that Nothburga’s 6". Nothburga.

conscience was more sensitive to the first principles of right and wrong than that of her biographer. He relates that one day Nothburga was surreptitiously carrying away food and wine to give to the poor, when she was met by the Count, who angrily asked what she had in her apron. When she exposed what she carried, the bread and meat were transformed into chips of wood, and the wine into vinegar. Fortunately we need not believe this story, which is a poor nnpoetical version of a tale common enough in the legends of saints.1 In spite of the miracle, the Count was highly incensed, and Nothburga was requested to relieve the kitchen of her presence.

That Nothburga was unable to accommodate herself to the more careful manners of a new mistress is, perhaps, the reason why she was obliged to leave. Servants do not always like a change from an old mistress, who let them have their own way, and did not look too closely after the larder, to a new, active, and thrifty one, who wants to know where all the broken meat and half-emptied wine bottles have gone to.

Nothburga was not dishonest, but she was profusely generous with her master’s food, and the circumstances of the Rottenburgers were becoming somewhat straitened. Not long after this Odilia died. The poor people who had suffered from the cutting off of the supply that had once flowed so copiously from the castle larder into their wallets, and who had had much to say about Odilia’s order that the “ scraps were to go to the pigs,” speedily got up a tale, which circulated far and wide, that the ghost of the beth of Portugal, S. Germaine Cousin, S. Zita, S. Castilda, S. Rosaline, S. Rosa of Viterbo, S. Mathia, S. Louis of Toulouse, B. Theresa de Ourcm, &c. &c. It is originally a mythological legend of Nature bearing in her lap the seed through winter, till the lap is opened and looked into by the Sun, when it fills with flowers. dead Countess was to be seen nightly by those who cared to look into the pigsty, standing in the midst of the squealing porkers, who crouched panic-struck against the walls, bewailing her ill-fated order about the scraps. It was also popularly said and believed that a Benedictine [monks following the Rule of St. Benedict] monk of S. Georgien had been sent for to lay the ghost in the pigsty.

In the meantime, Nothburgahad entered the service of a farmer at Eben, a little village above Jenbach, at the mouth of the elevated trough or lateral valley, opening into the great Inn-thal, in which lies the large and beautiful Aachen-see.

A spur of hill runs out from the Heiler Stelkopf, and bears on its back and shoulders rich meadows, whence the name of the village. There Nothburga lived some while, with the green sheet of the Aachen-see to the north, and the glorious panorama of the Zillerthal Alps to the south, beyond the populous Inn valley, studded with villages^ spires, and castles.

One Saturday afternoon, when reaping — so runs the story — the church bell tinkled for sunset and the beginning of the Sunday. Nothburga laid down her sickle. The farmer urged her to continue her work, but she refused, and, catching up her sickle, she flung it up into the air; and there it hung suspended, shining like silver, in the darkening evening sky, opposite the setting sun. And when the Tyrolese child looks up at dusk, and sees the silver sickle of the new moon shining over the mountain tops, he thinks it is Nothburga’s sickle, just as he thinks the. spots in the full moon are the Sabbath-breaker and his faggot. It is curious that both legends concerning the moon should have to do with Sabbath-breaking. Whilst Nothburga was at Eben, war was raging in the Inn valley between the Count of Tyrol and Otto Duke of sept,,4j. S. Nothburga. 243 Bavaria and the t Archbishop of Salzburg. Henry of Rottenburg and his brother Sigfried embraced opposite sides, and this led to fratricidal strife and great misery throughout the valley. The daughter of Meinhardt, Count of Tyrol and Duke of Carinthia, was married to Albert of Austria. The quarrel had originally broken out between Albert and the Archbishop, who had formed a league with Andrew, King of Hungary, and Otto of Bavaria against the Duke of Austria. Wenceslaus of Bohemia joined the confederacy, and Albert saw himself threatened on all sides. Otto of Bavaria and the Archbishop burst into Styria, and were joined by the natives, who revolted against the Austrian sceptre. Albert made a hasty peace with Wenceslaus, betrothed his daughter Agnes to King Andrew, and then, though it was in the depth of winter, at the head of his army, he cut his way through the snow of the mountain passes, and rushed unexpectedly down on the confederates at Briick, on the Mura, and compelled them to desert their camp and baggage, and retreat in confusion and dismay. The successes of Albert of Austria were the signal for the revival of the fortunes of Henry of Rottenburg, whose estates had been seized or devastated by his brother, Sigfried, fighting for the Archbishop. All his troubles and losses, all the disasters of the war, were due, the wise biographer of S. Nothburga would have us believe, to the fact that the departed Odilia had ordered the scraps from dinner to be given to the pigs instead of the poor. The German historians seem to have been unaware of this, for they attribute the war to the several, ambitions of the King of Hungary, to recover some cities that had been wrested from him by the House of Austria; of the Archbishop, who hoped to acquire Upper Austria as. a possession for the Church; and of Otto of Bavaria, who thought to annex part of Tyrol.

Count Henry of Rottenburg was about to marry Margaret of Hoheneck, sister or niece of the late Archbishop of Salzburg, and it was very necessary that the cuisine of Rottenburg should be improved. Henry's experience of cooks after losing Nothburga had not been satisfactory, and so he thought that he would condone the profusion of Nothburga, especially now that his affairs were flourishing, for the sake of her skill in cookery.

Henry had a son of the same name by Odilia, and he was a great favourite with the cook, who not only gave him nice things out of the oven, but also good advice; and when the new wife had a little son, the second boy grew up with the same attachment to the cook — an attachment not unfrequent in families, for cooks know very well the way to the hearts of children.

At last Nothburga died, aged forty-eight, at Rottenburg, in the house of her master. Before her death she implored the Count to allow her body to rest at Eben, on that glorious slope, strewn with heart's-ease in spring, overlooking the snows of the Zillerthal.

The coffin was placed on a cart, to which two oxen were yoked, followed on horseback by the Count and his sons, and the rest of the household, in true patriarchal fashion, united in the mourning procession, accompanying with honour to her grave their dear, good cook. The story goes, that when they came to the Inn the water parted, and let the oxen and coffin pass through on dry land. The convoy halted for refreshments at Jenbach. A little chapel marks the spot. Then came the long steep scramble by the old road across the Kiisebach, and up the hill to the church of S. Rupert at Eben; and there at last the worthy cook was laid.

The body was dug up again in 1718, a new church was erected with an elaborate rococo altar. Immediately over the tabernacle of the high altar is a large glass case, occupying the centre of the marble reredos. In this stands the skeleton, dressed up sumptuously in red velvet, and spangles, and blue satin bows. The skull is crowned with a wreath of artificial flowers; the right skeleton hand upholds a silver sickle.

The field in which Nothburga worked, and where it is pretended she flung her sickle up into the sky, is that to the south of the parsonage.

S. Nothburga is represented in a Tyrolese peasantess; costume, with a bunch of keys at her girdle and her sickle in her hand. Representations of her are common in Tyrol. tt BarthoJum.w, Ap. See Au£. 24.