Who knows the fate of his bones?

 At the risk of turning this blog into a calendar of saints' days, I must, as a Mercian and now a Lichfieldian, note that today is St Chad's Day, marking the death in 672 of Chad, Bishop of the Mercians and Lindsey People, and founder of the church that is now that tri-spired wonder Lichfield Cathedral. Chad's death was heralded by the beautiful sound of angels singing joyfully and telling the saint (he was already regarded as a saint) that they would return in seven days to take him to his heavenly reward. They flew back, punctual to the day, and, still singing, took his soul to its rest. Egbert, a friend of Bede's, related that someone in Ireland (perhaps Egbert himself) had seen the heavenly host coming for Chad's soul and later returning with it to heaven.   
   Chad's body was buried in the nave of his church, but his head was preserved in a specially built Head Chapel beside the south choir aisle, where it became a revered object of pilgrimage. 'But,' as Sir Thomas Browne asked, 'who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried?' Sadly, the chapel was destroyed at the Reformation, and Chad's relics were passed, as it were, from hand to hand, turning up in the mid-17th century under a farmer's bed, then being divided, with some bones sent to St Omer in France, before the relics returned to Staffordshire, and were finally given to the new Roman Catholic cathedral of St Chad in Birmingham, where they still reside in an ark designed by Pugin. Happily, one bone was returned to Lichfield cathedral in 2022 and is housed in a new shrine in the retrochoir. 
   It is thought the famous, and beautiful, Lichfield Angel might have been the end piece of a shrine containing the bones of St Chad.

And this year St Chad's Day also turned out to be the day I saw my first butterfly of the year – a Brimstone (unusually a female) flying vigorously over the garden. It begins again – hurrah!

Llanddewi-Brefi

 The first day of Meteorological Spring, and the sun has been sighted here in Lichfield, though it seems to have disappeared again now. It is also Chopin's birthday (born 1810) – and St David's Day. To mark the last of these, here is a poem by R.S. Thomas – one that requires a word of explanation. First, the title: Llanddewi-Brefi, long before it found fame as the home of Little Britain's 'only gay in the village', was the scene of a sixth-century synod, at which the Welsh saints and bishops (pretty much the same thing in those days) gathered, and various miracles were performed, some of them by St David (Dewi). While he was preaching at the synod, the ground mysteriously rose under him, elevating him to a position from which he could be heard and seen by the large crowd that had gathered. It is this miracle that Thomas is recalling in his poem, which begins with a surprising echo of 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' – 

Llanddewi-Brefi

One day this summer I will go to Llanddewi,
And buy a cottage and stand at the door
In the long evenings, watching the moor
Where the sheep pasture and the shadows fall
Thick as swathes under the sun's blade.
And there I will see somewhere beyond the wall
Of the old church the moles lifting the ground,
And think of the saint's cunning and how he stood
Preaching to the people from his secret mound,
A head's breadth above them, and they silent around.