Tucked away in the Marshwood Vale in Dorset stands St. Candida’s church, in the village of Whitchurch Canonicorum, population around 700. The church is named after the obscure saint Wite, whose name is ‘Candida’ in Latin. Whitchurch simply means Wite’s church, and the ‘canonicorum’ part of the village name refers to the canons of Salisbury and Bath and Wells, both of whom received its tithes after a bit of good holy wrangling over the money in the thirteenth century.
St Candida’s is a very unusual church in one respect–it has one of the two remaining undamaged, unrestored medieval saint’s shrines left in England. Surviving the Reformation by means unknown, the shrine is complete, still in its original ‘foramina’ style, with holes in the sides into which pilgrims would place their hands or their heads while they prayed to the saint for healing. The saint herself also still lies at rest within the shrine; in 1900, her lead coffin was opened and found to contain the bones of a small woman. On the coffin was written in Latin “HIC-REQESCT-RELIQE-SCE-WITE,” confirming the woman’s identity.
And who was St Wite? No one knows for sure. Some say that she was an Anglo-Saxon holy woman slain by marauding Vikings (there is a crude carving on the church exterior that might represent a Viking longship.) Others think she might be an incarnation of the Breton Saint, Gwen Teirbron, whose name was translated to St Blanche in French, and St White in English. In the western and southwestern parts of England, dedications are occasionally found for Breton saints, not just in Cornwall but in places such as Milton Abbey, Dorset ( dedication to St Mary, St Samson and
St Branwallader) and Wiltshire (St Melor, St Samson).
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