Arilda of Oldbury

Saint Arilda
Virgin martyr
Born	unknown possibly Gloucestershire or Wales
Died	5th or 6th-century Oldbury-on-Severn, Gloucestershire
Venerated in	Roman Catholic Church; Anglican Communion
Major shrine	St Peter's Abbey, Gloucester (destroyed)
Feast	20 July
Patronage	Oldbury-on-Severn and Oldbury-on-the-Hill, Gloucestershire

Arilda, or Arild, was a female saint from Oldbury-on-Severn in the English county of Gloucestershire. She probably lived in the 5th- or 6th-century and may have been of either Anglo-Saxon or Welsh origin.

Arilda was a virgin martyr who, according to John Leland, was slain by a youth named Municus when she refused to have sex with him.

Two churches in Gloucestershire are dedicated to Arilda, one at Oldbury-on-Severn near her traditional home, a second (St Arild's Church) at Oldbury-on-the-Hill. Both places were called "Aldberie" at the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, suggesting that their names may be derived from the saint.

Leland claims that Arilda lived in Kington, a hamlet in the parish of Oldbury-on-Severn, where there is a holy well bearing Arilda's name. The waters from the well are said to run red with her blood, though a more prosaic explanation is the presence of a red alga of the genus Hildenbrandia.^[1]

There was a shrine to Arilda at St Peter's Abbey, Gloucester, which is now Gloucester Cathedral, but it was destroyed after the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

• G. Jones, "Authority, Challenge and Identity in three Gloucestershire Saints' Cults", Authority and Community in the Middle Ages (ed. Donald Mowbray, Ian P. Wei, Rhiannon Purdie), 1999, ISBN 0-7509-1867-5, pp. 124–127
• Julian M. Luxford, "The art and architecture of English Benedictine monasteries, 1300–1540: a patronage history", Boydell Press, 2005, ISBN 1-84383-153-8, p. 134
• Alan Thacker, Richard Sharpe, "Local saints and local churches in the early medieval West", Oxford University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-19-820394-2, p. 509
• David Verey, Gloucestershire: the Vale and the Forest of Dean, The Buildings of England edited by Nikolaus Pevsner, 2nd ed. (1976) ISBN 0-14-071041-8, p. 314
• David Verey, Gloucestershire: the Cotswolds, The Buildings of England edited by Nikolaus Pevsner, 2nd ed. (1979) ISBN 0-14-071040-X, p. 351