The life of St Winefride of Treffynnon
Beuno is said to have restored her to life, rejoining her head to her body and leaving only a faint scar as a mark of what she had suffered. She lived on afterward for years as a nun, and in time as abbess, at Gwytherin in Denbighshire, where she reposed in peace.
The earliest surviving accounts of Winefride's life were written some five centuries after she is said to have lived, and modern scholarship weighs her story as legend more than settled history. The Church has never required that kind of certainty to honor a saint, and Winefride's memory endured through the long medieval pilgrimage to her well at Holywell, still visited for healing today, and through the translation of her relics to Shrewsbury in the twelfth century. She is honored as virgin martyr for what she suffered at her attacker's hand, though by the Church's own account her earthly life continued long afterward. As with other saints of the pre schism West, her commemoration in the Orthodox Church today is kept chiefly among Western Rite parishes and communities honoring the saints of the British Isles, rather than observed universally across every jurisdiction.
