St Wærburh: The Multiple Identities of a Regional Saint

The saint’s cult discussed in this chapter originated in Mercia but was promoted over a wide area, including Chester and, eventually, a monastery which as been described as “to all intents and purposes a West Saxon institution.”¹ As such it forms a particularly fitting subject for a volume in honour of Barbara Yorke who has written so extensively and influentially about Anglo-Saxon Wessex in particular and the royal women of Anglo-Saxon England as a whole. This chapter has had an extremely long gestation—I first wrote about St Wærburh in the early 1980s—and it is with great pleasure that