Ursula, ST, a celebrated saint and martyr of the Roman calendar (October 21), especially honoured at Cologne, the reputed place of her martyrdom. The legend in its present form is found as far back as the 12th-century Chronicle of Sigebert of Gemblours, and fills 230 folio pages in the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum. Here Ursula is the daughter of a British king, and is sought in marriage by the son of a heathen prince. She made it a condition that her suitor should become a Christian, and that she should be allowed a space of three years to make a voyage of pious pilgrimage with her maidens, 11,000 in number. She sailed up the Rhine to Cologne, thence to Basel, travelling thence to Rome. Returning to Cologne, the pious virgins fell into the hands of a horde of Huns, who put them all to the sword save Ursula herself, reserved as a prize for the chief. But she demanded to join her companions in martyrdom, and thus the full tale of victims was made up. The centuriators of Magdeburg exposed this ridiculous story; the Jesuit Crombach devoted an entire folio volume to its defence (1647). One explanation offered is that this belief arose from the name of a virgin who was really the companion of Ursula's martyrdom—Undecimilla. The record of the martyrdom in the calendar thus being 'Ursula et Undecimilla VV.,' 'Ursula and Undecimilla Virgins,' was easily mistaken for 'Ursula et undecim millia VV.,' 'Ursula and eleven thousand virgins.' Or again the entry might have been 'Ursula et XI.M.V.,' where M. being misread for millia not martyres gave 'Ursula and 11,000 virgins,' instead of 'Ursula and 11 martyr virgins.' Early in the 12th century the citizens of Cologne in digging foundations for their new walls across the cemetery of the old Roman settlement of Colonia Agrippina naturally enough found a large number of bones. These were declared by an ecstatic nun of Schönau, Elizabeth by name, to be the relics of the virgins. Unhappily many of these were soon discovered to be the bones of males, but the nun redeemed the reputation of the virgins by discovering in a series of fresh visions that a pope of the name of Cyriacus, an archbishop, several cardinals, bishops, and priests had been so charmed by the holiness of the lovely virgins as to follow them to Cologne, only to gain for themselves also the martyr's crown. But still worse, a number of young children's bones were found, and unhappily the ecstatic nun was now dead. This compromising fact, however, was explained by a vision vouchsafed to a patriotic English monk of Arnsberg to the effect that many of their married relations had accompanied the virgins on the voyage from England. But, as Schade first pointed out (Die Sage von der heiligen Ursula, Han. 1854), Ursula is none other than a Christianised survival of old German paganism still remembered under the names of Berchta, Hulda; in Swabia, Ursel or Hörsel; and in Sweden, 'Old Urschel.'
See, besides the work by Schade mentioned above, Kessel, St Ursula und ihre Gesellschaft (Col. 1863); Stein, Die heilige Ursula (ib. 1879); and S. Baring-Gould's Popular Myths of the Middle Ages.