"Where a stolen saint left healing waters as consolation for those she could not stay to bless"
St. Withburga’s Well
Breckland District, England, United Kingdom
In the churchyard of St Nicholas Church in East Dereham, a spring has flowed for over a thousand years from the empty tomb of an Anglo-Saxon abbess. When monks stole St Withburga's body in 974 CE, tradition holds that water miraculously appeared where her remains had lain. The well has never run dry, and pilgrims still come seeking what the saint left behind.
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Quick Facts
Location
Breckland District, England, United Kingdom
Tradition
Site Type
Coordinates
52.6810, 0.9373
Last Updated
Jan 30, 2026
Learn More
St Withburga was a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon abbess who founded a convent at Dereham and was renowned for miracles during her lifetime. Her incorrupt body attracted pilgrims for two centuries until monks from Ely stole it in 974 CE. The spring that appeared in her empty tomb became a major pilgrimage destination until the Reformation, and has been rediscovered as a sacred site in the 21st century.
Origin Story
The story begins with a king's daughter choosing a different path. After the death of her father, King Anna of East Anglia, around 654 CE, Withburga gathered a community of women at Dereham and began building a church. Resources were scarce. According to the hagiographical accounts, she could only provide dry bread for the workers.
Withburga prayed to the Virgin Mary for help. In a vision, Mary instructed her to send maids to a certain woodland spring at dawn. There they found two wild does who allowed themselves to be milked, providing abundant nourishment for the construction. When a jealous local reeve tried to hunt down the deer, he was thrown from his horse and broke his neck. The monastery was completed, the deer continued to appear, and Withburga lived in holiness until her death in 743 CE.
She was buried at Dereham, and there her body remained for fifty-five years, until someone opened the tomb and found her incorrupt. Word spread. Pilgrims began to arrive. For nearly two more centuries, she lay undisturbed in the growing town that had formed around her monastery.
But Ely wanted her. The great abbey was accumulating a collection of royal Anglo-Saxon saints, building an ideology of holy kinship that would strengthen its prestige. Withburga, reportedly a sister of Etheldreda who had founded Ely itself, belonged to this family of sanctity. In 974 CE, Abbot Brithnoth devised a scheme: invite the people of Dereham to a feast, wait until they were drunk, and steal the saint's body in the night.
The plan worked. The monks loaded Withburga's incorrupt body onto a cart, transferred it to a boat on the River Brandon, and fled toward Ely. The men of Dereham pursued them, hurling clods of earth at the boat in rage, but could not stop them. They returned home to an empty grave, and there they found the spring that has never stopped flowing since.
Key Figures
St Withburga
Wihtburh
saint
Anglo-Saxon abbess and founder of the convent at Dereham. Daughter of King Anna of East Anglia, sister or half-sister of several other saintly women including Etheldreda of Ely. Famous for the miracle of the does who provided milk for her monastery workers, and for the incorruption of her body discovered fifty-five years after death. The well bears her name and is understood as her ongoing gift to Dereham after her relics were stolen.
King Anna of East Anglia
historical
Father of Withburga and several other saints, killed in battle around 654 CE. His death occasioned Withburga's founding of the convent at Dereham. Historians debate whether Withburga was actually his daughter, as her death date of 743 CE seems late for a child of a man who died in the 650s.
The Virgin Mary
deity
Appeared to Withburga in a vision and instructed her about the miraculous does who would provide milk for her monastery workers. Her intervention enabled the completion of the Dereham monastery.
Abbot Brithnoth of Ely
historical
The abbot who orchestrated the theft of Withburga's relics in 974 CE. His action, though understood as pious by Ely, was experienced as sacrilege by Dereham and led to the miraculous appearance of the well.
Spiritual Lineage
For seven centuries after the theft, Withburga's body remained at Ely, joining her sisters Etheldreda, Sexburga, and Ermenilda in a quartet of royal Anglo-Saxon saints. When the tomb was opened again in 1106 during translation to a new location, her body was found still incorrupt. But the Reformation ended this. In 1541, the shrines at Ely were destroyed, and what happened to the relics of the four holy women remains unknown. Dereham kept the well. Through medieval pilgrimage, through Reformation suppression, through Enlightenment reframing as a bathhouse, through Victorian restoration, and into the 21st century, the spring has continued to flow. What the body once provided, the water now offers: a point of connection to a woman who lived in holiness thirteen centuries ago and who left something of herself in this ground.
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