Baring-Gould’s sources: Some ancient martyrologies, others on July 8th. Authority:—The Ely Chronicle, and a Life supposed to be by Goscelin, the historian of S. Werburga.
The royal race of the Uffings of East Anglia was remarkable for the crowd of saints which it produced. King Anna, who married the sister of Hilda, the celebrated abbess of Whitby, became father of three daughters and a son. The son became in his turn the father of three daughters, two of whom were in succession abbesses of Hackness in Northumbria [the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of northern England and south-east Scotland], founded by their grand-aunt S. Hilda, and the last, Eadburga, became abbess of Repton.
The three daughters of Anna,—Etheldreda, Sexburga, and Withburga—are all counted among the saints. Withburga was sent into the country to be nursed, and remained there till she heard, while still quite young, of her father's death on the battle-field. She resolved immediately to seek a refuge for the rest of her life in claustral virginity. She chose as her asylum a modest remnant of her father's lands at East Dereham, in Norfolk, and there built a little monastery. But she was so poor that she, her companions, and the masons who built her future dwelling, had to live on dry bread alone. One day, after she had prayed long to the blessed Virgin, she saw two does come out of the neighbouring forest to drink at a stream whose pure current watered the secluded spot. Their udders were heavy with milk, and they permitted themselves to be milked by the virginal hands of Withburga's companions, returning every day to the same place, and thus furnishing a sufficient supply for the nourishment of the little community and its workmen. This lasted till the ranger of the royal domains, a savage and wicked man, who regarded with an evil eye the rising house of God, undertook to hunt down the two helpful animals. He pursued them with his dogs across the country, but, in attempting to leap a high hedge, his horse was impaled on a post, and the hunter broke his neck.
Withburga ended her life in this poor and humble solitude; but the fragrance of her gentle virtues spread far and wide. The fame of her holiness went through all the surrounding country. The veneration given to her by the people of Norfolk was maintained with the pertinacity common to the Anglo-Saxon race, and went so far that, two centuries after her death, they armed themselves to defend her relics [the bodily remains of a saint, or objects they used, kept with honor] from the monks of Ely, who came, by the king's command, to unite them to those of her sisters at Ely.
There still exists at East Dereham a well bearing the name of S. Withburga. It is fed by a spring rising in the very place where the saint's body was laid before its translation to Ely.
