Saint Sioned

"Sioned! You're a Saint and were a nun. You can't mean?"

Sioned laughed.

"I can and do, Mary. If it hadn't happened you wouldn't have a village now."

Mary Jones, rector of this small border village church of St James, was very proud that they had their own Welsh Saint.

Saint Sioned was buried under a plain slab before the altar. Her slab and her remains had remained untouched because her inscription was so plain. It just said 'Sioned'.

Saint Sioned had been the younger daughter of a Welsh Prince but she wanted to be a nun and eventually became the leader of her convent of nursing nuns just the other side of the Welsh border.

She had inherited her father's fiery temper and was annoyed that she and the nuns spent so much of their efforts treating men injured in border raids between the Welsh and English.

She asked her father to summon the local Welsh leaders and the Barons from the English side to a meeting at the convent. There she tore into all of them and promised not only to have them excommunicated by the Welsh priests and English bishops but to be cursed by her as well -- unless they agreed to live in peace.

She was successful, mainly because she was respected by both sides as a holy woman. Saint Sioned's peace lasted for one hundred years before a few minor forays but then it was renewed again because by that time Sioned had been recognised as a saint and no one wanted to offend a saint with such a temper.

She asked to be buried in the church of Saint James to recognise that the Welsh and English were at peace. The Welsh would have to make pilgrimages into England to visit her resting place and the English would be reminded that they had a fiery saint on their land.

+++

It was early in the year 2014, one hundred years since the First World War had started. The Reverend Mary was kneeling before Sioned's grave asking for guidance about what the now much larger village should do to mark the event. Of course, like every year, there would be a service and parade to the War Memorial but 100 years was special. What else should they do?

The Reverend Mary stood up with a sigh. She hadn't had any ideas yet. The village had suffered during the First World War. It had still been very small and only ten men had gone to war, of whom only two had returned. But those ten had been all nine men of the appropriate age and one more, Ewan Owens, a grandfather, who had died his white hair black to rejoin the Royal Nany he had left a decade before. Ewan survived, having fought at Jutland. Jonas, who had been in the Royal Signals, was the only other survivor.

That night Reverend Mary dreamt that Saint Sioned visited her in a dream. Although Mary knew Welsh, Saint Sioned spoke ancient Welsh and sometimes struggled to get her meaning across. The Saint's frustration demonstrated that even though dead for hundreds of years, she still had a fiery temper. But eventually Mary got the meaning of what Saint Sioned was trying to convey.

In 1914 the local squire's son had been an amateur photographer. He had taken portraits of the village at that time, and every man who had gone to war, in their uniforms. He had used a full plate camera with glass negatives and those negatives were still in the squire's family possession.

What Saint Sioned had been trying to say, but struggling because in her day there was no word for photograph, was that life-size prints could be made of the eight who had died and they could be carried in procession into the Church and remain on display.

The Reverend Mary liked the idea. On Remembrance Day 2014, life-sized pictures of the eight men who had died were carried into the church by young women from their families.

But it was Saint Sioned's other suggestion that worried the Reverend Mary. Each one of the servicemen had left a pregnant woman behind. Sioned suggested that eight men, dressed in 1914 uniforms, should accompany the women, and each should spend the night in that woman's bed. Sioned, in dreams, had visited all eight women and told then to choose partners they would have sex with.

They did and in 2015 eight more villagers were born.