There are still known in England thirteen dedications of churches or chapels in the name of St. Werburgh, although, perhaps, not more than half of them are any longer above ground.[9] Seven, however, out of the thirteen are within the counties of Stafford, Chester, Shropshire, and Derbyshire: that is, they are within the original kingdom of Mercia, wherein, as the posthumous renown of the saint never extended beyond a nation, or rather a dynasty, that long since has been extinct and forgotten, we might have expected to have found them all. But the other six are extraneous, and three of them great stragglers. These must have owed their origin to political and military extensions of the influence of that kingdom, and these, it is intended to show, are found in places where Æthelbald, one of the three Mercian aspirants for English empire, has made good a conquest. This dedication may, therefore, be believed to have been his usual method of making his mark of possession. St. Werburgh was the daughter of Wulfhere, the second Christian King of Mercia, who was the son of Penda, the last pagan King. Æthelbald was the grandson of Eawa, a brother of Penda, probably the Eoba, who, in the Annales Cambriæ, A.D. 644, is himself called “rex Merciorum;” so that Æthelbald and Werburgh were what we should call second cousins.[10] Wulfhere, A.D. 675, was succeeded by his brother Æthelred, who placed his niece Werburgh at the head of three great convents of women, with a sort of general spiritual charge of the female portion of the newly christianised kingdom. She is said to have died about A.D. 700, for it is noted that on opening her coffin in the year 708, her body, after eight years, was found unaltered, and her vestments undefiled; and from this time, sealed by this reputed miracle, the renown of her sanctity soon grew to beatification; and when, eight years afterwards, her kinsman Æthelbald began his reign, she had achieved the reputation and precedence of the latest national saint. She was, however, one of a family of whom many of the women have transmitted their names, from immediately after their deaths to our own times, attached to religious foundations. Among these, that of her aunt, St. Audry, still lives in Ely Cathedral: and this example may serve as a crutch to those who find it hard to realise the unbroken duration of churches, with these names, direct from the very ages in which the persons who bore them lived; for the continuity of this name at Ely is a matter of open and undisputed history, unaided by mere inference, such as our less conspicuous case requires. There are some, also, who stumble at finding all the female saints of particular provinces to have been members of one royal family. But of this we have an analogy pervading the entire area of our own every-day life, in the active assistance in all benevolent purposes, received by the clergyman of nearly every parish, from the leisured daughters of the more wealthy families.