Following the revival of interest in Swithun, a number of miracles were attributed to him. Perhaps the most famous miracles are the miracle of the egg-woman and the ordeal of Queen Emma. In the first, Swithun is reported to have restored a woman’s basked of eggs that had been maliciously broken by some workmen. The story of Queen Emma’s ordeal is a little more complicated. Emma was wife to two kings, Æthelred the Unready, and Cnut the Great. (Cnut deposed Æthelred, and married Emma to solidify his claim to the throne.) Some time around 1044, the Archbishop of Canterbury accused Emma of having an affair with Ælfwine, the Bishop of Winchester. To prove her innocence, Emma was ordered to walk across nine red-hot ploughshares placed on the pavement of the nave of Winchester Cathedral. (Tellingly, there is no indication Æalfwine was subjected to any comparable ordeals.) Swithun appeared to Emma in a dream the night before the ordeal and told her she would survive the ordeal—and she did. Her son, King Edward, proclaimed her innocence and sent the Archbishop into exile.
Swithun is one of those weather saints, whose feast is said to be a harbinger of future meteorological conditions. Swithun had originally asked to be buried outside his church, “where it might be subject to the feet of passers-by and to the raindrops pouring from on high”, and so his feast day is a predictor of rain. In the usual proverb,
For forty days it will remain
St Swithun’s day if thou be fair
For forty days ’twill rain nae mare
Swithun died on 2 July, but his feast day is 15 July, the date of the translation of his relics.