The legend of the Lilac Sorceress
The legend as the town tells it, and as the museum, the church guide and the Lilac Fair have told it since the statue was raised in 1898.
The story
In the hard winter before the great flood, a woman came to Vengerberg over the hill by the Old Road, alone, in a dark cloak, with a spray of lilac in her hand although it was January. Nobody knew where she came from, and she did not give her name. She took a room at the Bell, on the west side of the Market Square, and paid for it in silver.
She was a healer. The miller’s child, sick with a fever no one could break, was well within three days of her visiting the mill. She set the leg of a carter crushed under his wheel on the bridge. Wherever she had slept, it is said, the room smelled of lilac until the spring, and so the town called her the Lilac Sorceress. She wore at her throat a star of black and white stone.
In February the snow on the hills melted under rain, and the Pontar began to rise. The woman told the quay master that it would rise higher than anyone living had seen, and that the bell should be rung for the people of Bridge Street and Water Lane to leave their houses. On the night the water came, she was seen standing on the bridge in the dark, with her hand raised over the river.
The water rose to the line that is still cut on the third pier of the bridge, and stopped there, and went no higher. In the morning she was gone. On the parapet where she had stood lay the star of black and white stone, which the borough took into its seal. That spring lilacs came up along the path to the church, where none had grown before.
Where the story is told
- The statue in the Market Square shows her with her hand raised towards the bridge, holding the lilac. See The statue.
- The crest of the town carries the star, and three wavy lines for the river. See The town crest.
- The church guide connects her with the window of violet glass in the north aisle of St Laurence’s. See St Laurence’s Church.
- The Lilac Fair each May lays a wreath of lilac at the statue, and its cordial is made from the lilacs of Church Walk. See The Lilac Fair.
- The Lilac Room at the museum has the 1897 pamphlet that first printed the story, and the plaster model for the statue.
What the records say
The flood is real. The chamberlain’s accounts of the borough record payments for mending the bridge “after the great water” in the spring of 1648, and the flood mark for that year is the highest on the bridge, 2.64 metres above the summer level of the river.
The earliest written version of the legend is the pamphlet The Lilac Lady of Vengerberg, printed in 1897 for the statue subscription, which says it records the story “as related by the old people of the town”. The star appears on the borough seal by 1694, the earliest impression that survives, but there is no record of when it was first used or why. The violet glass in the church window is of about 1660. The lilacs on Church Walk were planted, or replanted, many times; the oldest there now are about a hundred years old.
The museum has found no record that names the woman, and the town has never given her a name. As the panel in the Lilac Room puts it, the legend is the town’s own, and it has been told in Vengerberg for at least a hundred and thirty years.
The museum is always interested in versions of the legend told in families in the town, and in any early references to it. Please write to the Curator, or email curator@vengerberg.org.