Saint Ursula. Saint Ursula is a legendary Romano-British Christian saint, died on October 21, 383. Her feast day in the pre-1970 General Roman Calendar is October 21. There is little definite information about her and the anonymous group of holy virgins who accompanied her and on some uncertain date were killed at Cologne. They remain in the Roman Martyrology, although their commemoration does not appear in the simplified Calendarium Romanum Generale of the 1970 Missale Romanum. The earliest evidence of a cult of martyred virgins at Cologne is an inscription from c. 400 in the Church of St. Ursula, located on Ursulaplatz in Cologne which states that the ancient basilica had been restored on the site where some holy virgins were killed. The earliest source to name one of these virgins Ursula is from the 10th century. Her legendary status comes from a medieval story that she was a princess who, at the request of her father King Dionotus of Dumnonia in south-west Britain, set sail along with 11,000 virginal handmaidens to join her future husband, the pagan governor Conan Meriadoc of Armorica. After a miraculous storm brought them over the sea in a single day to a Gaulish port, Ursula declared that before her marriage she would undertake a pan-European pilgrimage. She headed for Rome with her followers and persuaded the Pope, Cyriacus, and Sulpicius, bishop of Ravenna, to join them. After setting out for Cologne, which was being besieged by Huns, all the virgins were beheaded in a massacre. The Huns' leader fatally shot Ursula with a bow and arrow in about 383 AD. There is only one church dedicated to Saint Ursula in the UK. It is located in Wales at Llangwryfon, Ceredigion. The Catholic Encyclopedia states that this legend, with its countless variants and increasingly fabulous developments, would fill more than a hundred pages. Various characteristics of it were already regarded with suspicion by certain medieval writers, and since [ Caesar ] Baronius have been universally rejected. Neither Jerome nor Gregory of Tours refers to Ursula in his writings. Gregory of Tours mentions the legend of the Theban Legion, to whom a church that once stood in Cologne was dedicated. The most important hagiographers of the early Middle Ages also do not enter Ursula under October 21, her feast day. A legend resembling Ursula's appeared in the first half of the tenth century; it does not mention the name Ursula, but rather gives the leader of the martyred group as Pinnosa or Vinnosa. Pinnosa's relics were transferred about 947 from Cologne to Essen, and from this point forward Ursula's role was emphasized. In 970, for example, the first Passio Ursulae was written, naming Ursula rather than Pinnosa as the group's leader. This change might also be due in part to the discovery at this time of an epitaph speaking of Ursula, the innocent virgin. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, a 12th-century British cleric and writer, Ursula was the daughter of Dionotus, ruler of Cornwall. However, this may have been based on his misreading of the words Deo notus in the second Passio Ursulae, written about 1105. The plot may have been influenced by a story told by the 6th-century writer Procopius about a British queen sailing with 100,000 soldiers to the mouth of the Rhine in order to compel her unwilling groom Radigis, king of the Varni, to marry her. While there was a tradition of virgin martyrs in Cologne by the fifth century, their number may have been limited to between two and eleven, according to different sources. Yet the cleric Wandelbert of the Abbey of Prum stated in his martyrology in 848 that the number of martyrs counted thousands of saints who were slaughtered on the boards of the River Rhine. The 11,000 were first mentioned in the late 9th century; suggestions as to where this number came from have included the reading of the name Undecimillia or Ximillia as a number, or reading the abbreviation XI. M. V. as eleven thousand virgins rather than eleven martyred virgins. One scholar has suggested that in the eighth or ninth century, when the relics of virgin martyrs were found, they included those of a girl named Ursula, who was eleven years old, in Latin, undecimilia. This was subsequently misread or misinterpreted as undicimila, thus producing the legend of the 11,000 virgins. In fact, however, the stone bearing the virgin Ursula's name states that she lived eight years and two months. Another theory is that there was only one virgin martyr, named Undecimilla, which by some blundering monk was changed into eleven thousand. It has also been suggested that cum militibus, with soldiers, was misread as cum millibus, with thousands. Most contemporary sources, however, cling to the number 11,000.