St Swithin Christening the Apples

Besides the forty days of rain, Brand records an old saying that when it rains on St Swithin’s Day the saint is christening the apples. The 1849 edition adds a group of local proverbs for the day and the season. If St Swithin greets, or weeps, the weather will be foul for forty days, but a shower in July when the corn begins to fill is worth a plough of oxen and all that belongs to it. Frosty nights and hot sunny days, another rhyme says, set the cornfields in a blaze, meaning they hurry the ripening of the white crops.