St Catherine in Dorset: Holy Wells and Wishing Chapels

Of course, I have every interest in seeing wells of St Catherine everywhere, but when I finally get going with The Holy Wells of Dorset (which curiously I’ve never done, apart from a brief gazetteer for a learned journal many years ago) I’ll have to grapple as honestly as I can with the conundrum of whether she does or doesn’t have a well dedication in the county. Once upon a time the first stop for any holy well enthusiast was RC Hope’s The Legendary Lore of the Holy Wells of England, an 1893 compendium of all sorts of bits and pieces gleaned from local histories, journals, and magazines. In his Dorset section we find:

"ABBOTSBURY: WISHING WELL

On a certain day every year the young women of Abbotsbury used to go up to the Norman chapel of St. Catharine, Melton Abbey, where, after drinking the water of the Saint's well, they made use of the following invocation:

A husband, St. Catharine.

A handsome one, St. Catharine.

A rich one, St. Catharine.

A nice one, St. Catharine.

And soon, St. Catharine."

Of course the oddity that springs immediately to the attention of anyone who knows Dorset is the confusion between Abbotsbury and Milton Abbas, places which both have chapels of St Catherine, though only the Milton one is Norman in origin. It’s only at Milton, too, that one finds a well – or rather one finds a 1950s street called Catherine’s Well, rather than any actual watery site. On the old OS maps there’s what looks like a pond at the end of the lane that will one day become Catherine’s Well, but it doesn’t have a name.

Where did RC Hope get his information? He knew very little about the wells of the southern counties, especially, and often relied on bits and pieces of information sent to him. A few years ago the estimable Jeremy Harte (author of English Holy Wells: a Sourcebook) spotted where the Abbotsbury reference had come from (although in that book even he doesn’t include the whole citation). In September 1873 ‘C.W.’ wrote to the literary journal Notes & Queries as follows:

"WISHING WELLS. Can any of your readers help me to the words of the formula or charm used at the Wishing Wells of the West of England? I have heard it repeated, but can only recall the last two lines, when the young lady sums up the qualifications she wishes to find in her future husband thus:

“And rich, St Catherine,

And soon, St Catherine!” "

C.W. had to wait a fortnight for a reply. Mr Gulson of Teignmouth offered in October:

"At a recent meeting of the Archaeological Institute in Dorset, a party visited the little Norman chapel of St Catherine at Milton Abbey, where the Rev CW Bingham told us of the legend to which CW refers. On a certain day in the year the young women of Abbotsbury used to go up to St Catherine’s Chapel, where they made use of the following prayer … Mr Beresford Hope, who at these gatherings is always equal to any emergency, modestly proposed that all gentlemen and married ladies should retire from the chapel, so as to afford the young ladies present the opportunity of using so desirable a prayer."

Ho ho. You can see how this has become garbled into Hope’s account, either directly by him or by some other correspondent with no clear idea of the distinction between Abbotsbury and Milton Abbas. However, it’s peculiar that a well appears in Hope's version at all: although CW’s original query was made in the context of wishing wells, there is no mention of a well directly in Mr Gulson’s reply, still less a Saint’s well. Who added that?

The plot thickens further when we turn, as we should on such occasions, to JS Udal’s authoritative Dorsetshire Folklore of 1922. Here the author quotes The Bridport News of February 1886 itself quoting The Family Herald of September 1865, and an account therein of the Archaeological Institute’s visit to Dorset that year, to which Mr Gulson referred. This time the trip is reported as having been to Abbotsbury, not to Milton Abbas at all, although the wording is so precisely similar to the Gulson account that both he and Udal must have had the same printed words in front of them – which is most strange, given that Mr Gulson implies that he was there but clearly can’t give the correct venue. ‘A very similar custom seems to have prevailed at Milton Abbas’, Mr Udal goes on, and later on cites Rev H Pentin’s Memorials of Old Dorset (1907) in support, with a couple of rhymes which differ rather in form from the Abbotsbury one, suggesting an independent origin.

What’s going on here? Jeremy Harte suggests that Hope’s record in Legendary Lore gave rise to the well-name at Milton Abbas. Certainly neither Udal nor Pentin seem to show any awareness of Hope’s book, and neither of them mention a well, so the Catherine’s Well name hasn’t come via them or any Dorset source we know about.

In the merry world of folklore study we rather blithely refer to the idea of the transfer of motifs, but that somewhat obscures the necessity of having someone to transfer them. This can happen by accident when people misremember a story they’ve heard from somewhere else; when they overinterpret some evidence before them in the light of evidence from elsewhere; or when they tell fibs. In the case of the Dorset St Catherine traditions, my guess is that there were genuine, independent wishing traditions associated with both chapels, and if they are linked, it’s a linkage which goes back beyond our records of them. As for the well, it would make sense if it had arisen from the combined misunderstandings or misrepresentations of RC Hope and whoever his Dorset informant was; but anyone actually based in Dorset would have known that Abbotsbury and Milton Abbas aren’t the same, and that the former’s spinsters are highly unlikely to have toiled all the way to the latter to wish for a husband.

There are several points about this tangled story which are hard to believe. Although RC Hope wasn’t the most careful compiler of folklore, it stretches credulity to imagine that he can have been so credulous or so careless as to make the well up by mistake. Did someone else concoct it? Looking at the root accounts in Notes & Queries, again, it seems to require something more than just error: something close to a deliberate untruth. Would a Blandford Rural District Council apparatchik in the early 1950s really have known or cared enough about Hope’s book to name a street after a well that isn’t even explicitly named in its pages? But could it be even conceivable that a holy well concocted by a mistake or an actual fib coincidentally did exist?