(d. 862)
Swithin (or, more properly, Swithun) was Bishop of Winchester. As a mark of humility, when he was dying he asked to be buried out of doors, where he would be trodden on and rained on; in the following century he was regarded as a saint, and the then Bishop had his bones reburied in a shrine inside the cathedral on 15 July 971. According to legend there was a heavy rain-storm, either during this ceremony or on its anniversary; one 14th-century chronicler says it caused massive flooding, several drownings, and a famine. Hence the popular saying, known since Elizabethan times, that if it rains on St Swithin's Day (15 July) it will go on raining for forty days (Opie and Tatem, 1989: 337-8).
