Saint
Saint in the Furrow
Don't call a dead bishop a cobbler.
Stand where it happened
- What's there
- Priory Road area by the river; scant priory remains
- Legend from
- c.1001, written 11th century
- Tone
- Curious
St Ives got its name from a ploughman's discovery: a stone coffin, and a saint who would not stop appearing in people's dreams.
Around the year 1001 a ploughman working for Ramsey Abbey at Slepe turned up a stone coffin holding a body dressed like a bishop. Ramsey's monks later wrote that the dead man, St Ivo, said to be a Persian bishop who had wandered to England, appeared to the ploughman in repeated visions. When the abbot's bailiff mocked the find as the bones of some low cobbler, the angry saint appeared to him too, promising him boots that would last a long time; he woke crippled with gout. The relics went to Ramsey, a priory rose at the spot, and Slepe became St Ives.