agreement, however, they were closely pursued by the Worcester party. Exhausted from their rapid march, they stopped just within sight of Winchcombe Abbey. As they struck their staffs into the ground, a spring burst forth, and this refreshed them so that they were able to press on to the Royal Mercian Abbey at Winchcombe, where the bells sounded and rang without the hand of man. Then Quendryda asked what all this ringing meant and was told how her brother's body was brought in procession into the abbey. 'If that be true,' said she, 'may both my eyes fall upon this book', and then both her eyes fell out of her head upon the Psalter she was reading. Soon after, both she and her lover died wretchedly, and their bodies were cast out into a ditch. The remains of Saint Kenelm were buried with all honour and he has since been revered as a martyr. His feast day is celebrated on 17 July, the date of his translation to Winchcombe. South English Legendary The legend of Saint Kenelm is included in a medieval collection of saints' lives in Middle English known as the South English Legendary, compiled during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It tells a similar story to the one in the twelfth-century manuscript at Winchcombe Abbey, with the following addition: after the murder and secret burial of Saint Kenelm in the Clent Hills, a cow came and miraculously sat at Kenelm's grave, eating nothing all day and returning each night with her udders full. Quendryda had forbidden her murdered brother's name ever to be spoken, and as the memory of him faded, God caused this cow to sit there so that his memory would not disappear entirely. Everybody in the district grew to learn of this cow's strange behaviour. The animal was closely observed, seen to sit by a thorn tree and eat nothing all day but to be miraculously full of milk in the evening and again in the morning, and this went on for many years. The valley came to be known as Cowbach. Then one day, a white dove flew down into the Pope's chapel in Rome carrying a message that Saint Kenelm's body lay in a place called Cowbach, in the Clent Hills. Word was dispatched to Archbishop Wulfred of Canterbury, and a party was sent into Worcestershire, where the local population were able to