Devotional card
St. Walstan
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Saints and feasts
St. Walstan
Confessor
Walstan was a Norfolk layman remembered for farm work, prayer and generosity to poor neighbours. Butler records pilgrimages to seek his intercession in illness, including fevers, palsy, lameness and blindness.
The reading
ⓘ Butler source
Alban Butler, The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints, Volume V (May), Richardson and Son, Derby, for the Catholic Book Society, 1843; May 30, “St Walstan, Confessor,” pp. 470-471.
Walstan was honoured in Norfolk, especially around Bawburgh and nearby Costessey. Butler follows an older life in which he left a prosperous family to work as a farm labourer at Taverham. He shared his food and clothing with poor people and joined difficult daily work to prayer.
The account remembers a layman who sought holiness in ordinary service. He made a vow of celibacy but did not enter a monastery. His death is placed on May 30, 1016, while he was at work in a meadow. His body was taken to Bawburgh, where a shrine and wells bearing his name became places of pilgrimage.
Butler explicitly records people seeking Walstan's intercession for fevers, palsy, lameness and blindness. He also describes the yearly visits of mowers and farm workers. Those passages document the historical devotion, while the detailed childhood narrative comes through the later sources cited in the entry. Walstan's remembrance brings together prayer, manual work and generosity to neighbours in need.
Historical note
An original Novena Regina reading adapted and summarized from the cited pre-1962 source. This is not a transcription of Butler’s words.
Butler cites Capgrave and an older manuscript life. The birth, childhood and death details are presented as that received tradition. The documented illness-related invocation is kept separate from any inference based only on his occupation.
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