St Swithin's Day

There was a real St Swithin. He was Bishop of Winchester, consecrated on 30 October 852, and he died on 2 July, most likely in 863. What he did not do was control the weather. The four lines above promise that whatever falls from the sky on 15 July will keep falling, or keep not falling, for the next forty days.

It is a clean, testable claim, and that is unusual for weather lore. Most old sayings are vague enough to survive any outcome. This one names a date and a number, which means it can be checked. It has been checked, repeatedly, and it does not work.

Origins

Swithin, whose name is also spelled Swithun, asked to be buried outside the cathedral rather than inside it, in ground where rain could fall on his grave and ordinary people would walk past. He got his wish. Roughly a century later the monks decided that an outdoor grave was no place for a saint whose shrine was drawing pilgrims. On 15 July 971, Bishop Aethelwold had the remains dug up and moved into the Old Minster at Winchester with considerable ceremony.

The legend says heavy rain interrupted the procession, and that this was read as the saint objecting to being shifted indoors. That is the story the rhyme hangs on. It is worth being clear that it is a story: the forty-day weather tradition cannot be traced back anywhere near 971. It surfaces in print in the seventeenth century, some seven hundred years after the event it supposedly commemorates. Poor Robin's Almanack for 1697 carries a longer, clumsier version of the idea, promising that "full forty days after it will, or more or less some rain distil". The tight four-line couplet form most people know today came later.

One oddity in the standard text: "nae mair" is Scots for "no more", sitting at the end of an English rhyme about an English bishop. The line has clearly travelled and been reshaped by whoever was reciting it.

Meaning & Interpretation

The rhyme is a forecast rule, not a poem about a saint. Swithin himself never appears in it beyond his name and his day. What it offers is a symmetrical bet: wet means wet, fair means fair, and either way the answer is forty days.

Forty is doing familiar work here. It turns up all over biblical and English tradition as a round number meaning a long stretch, from the forty days of rain in Noah's flood to the forty days of Lent. Nobody counting the weather in a Winchester summer arrived at forty by measurement. It was already the standard word for "a long time".

Does the St Swithin's Day forty days of rain actually happen?

No. Since the start of UK weather records in 1861 there has never been a run of forty consecutive wet days, or forty consecutive dry days, following 15 July. The Met Office has said so directly. The rhyme has been tested against more than a century and a half of measurements and fails as a prediction, in both directions.

Is there any real weather behind the legend?

There is a partial reason the idea took hold. Mid-July is around the time the jet stream, the fast band of high-altitude wind that steers Atlantic weather systems, tends to settle into a position it holds reasonably steady into late August. If it sits north of Britain, high pressure and settled warm weather can dominate. If it sits south, Atlantic lows keep coming through. So mid-July weather can genuinely hint at the shape of the rest of the summer. That is a tendency, not a forty-day guarantee, and it has nothing to do with a ninth-century bishop.

When is St Swithin's Day?

15 July in England, the anniversary of the 971 translation of his remains rather than the date of his death. In Norway, where Stavanger Cathedral is dedicated to him, the feast is kept on 2 July, which is the day he actually died.

Who was St Swithin?

An Anglo-Saxon bishop of Winchester in the ninth century, active under the kings of Wessex and remembered mostly for the miracles reported at his shrine after 971. Very little detail about his life survives from his own century. Almost everything written about him dates from after the translation, when Winchester had reason to promote him.