13th of November - St Brices Day
13th of November is the 317th day of the year
St Brices Day:
Strangely the observance of the feast day for the Gallic St Brice, Bishop of Tours from 397 to 444, declined after the Conquest, though Norman was of course then rather different from French. Brice had a chequered history, exiled to Rome by the people of his bishopric when a nun there gave birth to a child presumed his. On his return after seven years he behaved in a more saintly manner. One of the most savage days in our history took place on this day in 1002 when Danish settlers were massacred on the orders of Aethelred the Unready. An equally unsavoury (to modern minds) custom was observed for many centuries in Stamford on St Brice’s Day – a bull running, marking an accidental run in the reign of King John: when driven onto a bridge over the Welland it would be heaved in to the river, then killed when reaching shore. The last of these cruel events was held in 1839.
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