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Saint Swithin’s Day

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st. swithin's day

St. Swithin, Winchester Cathedral

Today is Saint Swithin’s Day, a Roman Catholic feast day dedicated to the ninth-century Saxon Bishop of Winchester. (Spellings of his surname have varied. Swithin is correct in modern English, while Swithun was the spelling of choice in Old English. In the original Saxon language, according to Butler’s The Lives of the Saints, it was spelled Swithum.) He was, in fact, never sainted.

Swithin’s name has been associated with the weather for several centuries. The following Elizabethan rhyme, still well-known in the British Isles, explains:

St. Swithin’s day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain
St. Swithin’s day if thou be fair
For forty days ’twill rain nae mair.

Before the bishop died on July 2, 862, he asked to be buried outside so he would be trodden upon and the rain could fall on his grave. While the particulars of this story cannot be confirmed, his body was buried outside in front of the west door of the Saxon Old Minster. Visitors can see its outlines, now traced in brick.

Being left out in the elements was considered a terrible indignity by the Church. According to folklore, nine years after his death, workers attempted to dig up his grave but were met with a torrential downpour that swamped the proceedings. The heavy rains lasted for forty days, signaling Swithin’s disapproval.

On July 14, 971, it appeared that Swithin had changed his mind. The weather remained fine as his body was exhumed and “translated” to a shrine within the cathedral. On October 30, 974, his bones, called relics, were moved once again, this time to a jewel-encrusted gold and silver feretory platform behind the altar, a gift from Edgar, King of Wessex.

His head was moved to a separate locked compartment on the altar, where it remained until 1006, when Alphege was elevated from Bishop of Winchester to Archbishop of Canterbury and took it with him to his new post. Other parts of his skeleton were probably divided among several shrines over the following years. (The Second Council of Nicaea had decreed in 787 that every altar should contain a relic, so bones were often split up to make sure every church had at least one.)

Norman invaders razed the church and built a larger cathedral on the grounds. On July 14, 1093, Swithin’s bones—his relics—were translated to a shrine behind the new altar. A tunnel called the Holy Hole was dug so pilgrims could crawl directly under his bones, the better to receive their rumored miraculous healing powers.

saint swithin's day

Winchester Cathedral

In the early 16th century, King Henry VIII seized control of the Roman Catholic Church, stood in judgment of “clerical abuses” such as excommunication, forbade appeals to the Pope, and declared himself head of the Church of England. In the predawn hours of September 21, 1538, the king’s men entered Winchester Cathedral, destroyed the shrine, and stole the platform. It was melted down a couple of years later. A builder filled in the Holy Hole.

In spite of his moniker, Saint Swithin was never officially canonized by the pope. (That practice wasn’t introduced until two centuries later.) The Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park, London, measured rainfall between 1841 through 1860 and found that the highest number of rainy days occurred when July 15th had been dry. In other words, his feast day is no more predictive than Groundhog Day.

Although nothing remains of the shrine today, those who make the pilgrimage to Winchester Cathedral will see the modern-day memorial and have the chance to walk in the footsteps of more than a millennium of history. We think Saint Swithin would approve.

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July 8 is the Soapy Smith Wake

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Today is the 43rd annual Soapy Smith Wake. Since 1974, descendants of con man Jefferson “Soapy” Smith have held an annual wake for him on the anniversary of his murder in Skagway, Alaska, on July 8, 1898.

soapy smith's wake

Soapy Smith, image at legendsofamerica

Jefferson Smith lived to prove the axiom, “A fool and his money are soon parted.” He gained his nickname due to his prize soap scam, in which he’d set up a display of soaps, make a show of placing bills from one to one hundred dollars around several bars, wrap them to resemble the other bars, then appear to hide them in the stack.

A shill he’d plant in the crowd would pay a dollar, unwrap a seemingly random soap, pull out a bill, and start shouting about his winnings. This convinced others to clamor to buy the other bars. There were no more winners. Smith had used sleight of hand of hand to conceal the fact that he had not put the money-wrapped bars in the pile. Halfway through, he announced the hundred-dollar bill hadn’t yet been found and auctioned off the remainder.

At some point in Smith’s mostly successful twenty-year career, Smith was arrested for running the prize soap racket. The police officer forgot Smith’s first name and wrote “Soapy Smith” in his logbook. The name stuck.

Smith’s luck came to an end on July 8, 1898, after his crew bilked a miner out of a sack of gold in a crooked game of three-card monte. Four men, including vigilante Frank H. Reid, confronted Smith, who refused to return the gold or turn over his associates. In the ensuing gunfight, Smith and Reid exchanged fire. Smith was shot through the heart and died instantly; Reid, shot in the groin, died twelve days later of his injuries.

Soapy Smith, dead, image at legendsofamerica

Soapy Smith was buried several yards outside the Skagway city cemetery. Over the years, his reputation grew to that of a Klondike-style Robin Hood, fleecing the rich to give to the poor. There’s no evidence he did anything but line his own pockets and those of the public servants and businessmen he bribed.

Reid was painted as a villain who murdered Smith. If we assume the two men shot each other—and there are those who question that—then Smith must have shot Reid first, since he couldn’t have fired after being shot through the heart. Unless the gun went off as he was falling, but then we’re getting into grassy knoll territory.

On July 8, 1974, members of Smith’s family and their friends began the tradition of holding a wake at his gravesite, toasting him with several bottles of champagne. When the group felt nature calling, they started another tradition by entering the cemetery proper and relieving themselves on Frank H. Reid’s grave.

A reporter present at the wake dubbed it the “sprinkling of Frank.” The Smiths and many residents found it humorous at the time. The family continued to furnish champagne for years until the wake was finally banned from the cemetery and moved to the Eagles Hall in downtown Skagway.

If you can’t make it to Skagway to celebrate, The Magic Castle in Hollywood, California, has held a Soapy Smith Party every year since 2004. No matter where you are, raise a glass, if you like, and toast the cantankerous, thieving criminal known as Soapy Smith. And if you have to pee, please use a restroom.

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April 9 is Jenkins’ Ear Day

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Today is Jenkins’ Ear Day, also known as Jenkins’s Ear Day. It commemorates an event that took place on April 9, 1731, and remains one of the strangest rationalizations for war in human history.

jenkins' ear dayIt’s difficult to find any time in the early 18th century when England and Spain weren’t at odds or war. At various points, diplomats were given the miserable task of trying to impose order. The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 was one such attempt, signed as the War of Spanish Succession begun in 1700 wound down.

The agreement awarded England an exclusive 30-year contract to supply an unlimited number of slaves to the Spanish colonies. Although it allowed only 500 tons of goods per year, many traders, now able to weigh anchor for “legitimate” business purposes, used the opportunity to smuggle goods into and out of the Spanish colonies.

Skirmishes over trade and ongoing disputes about the contested land between the British colony of Georgia and Spanish-ruled Florida culminated in one of many Anglo-Spanish wars. Most historians agree it ran from 1727 to 1729; some say it began in 1726. With the level of hostility between the two nations, it was hard to tell when the war started.

In 1729, the Treaty of Seville was signed. One of its provisos gave the Spanish the right to board and search English vessels and to seize any contraband they found. It’s not surprising that mutual distrust and enmity resulted in the detainment and delay of many ships, regardless of suspicious activity. Captains began to report harrowing tales of abuse and theft of legal cargo.

One such incident occurred on April 9, 1731, when the crew of a Spanish sloop from Havana, Cuba, boarded the British ship Rebecca and claimed to have found contraband. Not much is known about Captain Robert Jenkins. In some accounts, he is described as a master mariner; in others, he is called a notorious smuggler.

Jenkins may or may not have been lashed to his ship’s mast and tortured by Spanish captain Juan de Leon Fandino. Someone drew his cutlass and sliced off Jenkins’ left ear. According to Jenkins’ account, the blade was not entirely successful in removing the ear. Another Spanish sailor then grabbed it, tore it off and handed it to Jenkins, who was told to present it to his king with the message that Fandino would do the same to him.

We can’t be sure of the details as we don’t know if anyone on the Rebecca spoke Spanish or Fandino’s crew, English. We assume it would have been hard for Jenkins to hear, what with only having the one ear and that most likely being filled with the sounds of his own screaming.

In any case, his traumatic auriculectomy didn’t garner much concern in Parliament, possibly because it was in no hurry to start a fresh war. Perhaps it wasn’t considered too upsetting because the cropping of ears (and noses) was a common punishment dating back to the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi in 1754 BC.

One case worth mentioning took place in 1538 when Englishman Thomas Barrie was pilloried in the Newbury town square. To intensify his humiliation, his ears were nailed to the pillory on either side of the head hole. At the end of the day, he was released by having his ears cut off. He later died of shock.

What was Barrie’s crime? He spread rumors that Henry VIII had died. This displeased the king, who was very much alive and not amused. Barrie was the proto-Twitter troll. Imagine if this punishment were still in use today. There would be a lot of people cupping their hands to their heads, saying, “What? What?”

Back to our story. In 1738, politicians sought to gain support for a new war. Victory was expected to provide new business opportunities in Spanish America in part by forcing Spain to honor (and renew) the slave trade treaty which would expire in a few years. They needed to drum up outrage to generate nationalistic fervor.

Jenkins was called to testify before the House of Commons. Apparently, he was still attached to his ear, although it was no longer attached to his body. Afterward, some stories claimed he took it from his pocket where it was wrapped in cotton wool. Others insisted he had pickled and stored it in a jar, which he held aloft so that every member of the august assemblage might be afforded an unimpeded view.

A flaw in this version of events is that parliamentary records, normally exhaustive, show only that he was called to appear on two separate occasions. Surely a man brandishing an ear would have been noticed. Even without the visual aid, his visit would almost certainly have been documented, especially when it was to be used for political purposes.

It’s more likely that he was at sea. He was a ship’s captain, after all. If he returned after the war began in 1739, he wouldn’t have been amazed, as some histories suggest, to find the conflict was named after his ear. It didn’t become known as the War of Jenkins’s Ear until Thomas Carlyle coined the term in 1858, 110 years after it concluded.

Have a happy Jenkins’ Ear Day!

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