There is little information about Ursula or the anonymous group of holy virgins who accompanied her and, on an uncertain date, were killed along with her at Colonia Agrippina.

[7] The tale depicts her as a princess who at the request of her father, the semi-legendary King Dionotus of Dumnonia in south-west Britain in the late-4th century, set sail along with 11,000 virginal handmaidens to join her and 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.

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1912) article on Ursula states that "this legend, with its countless variants and increasingly fabulous developments, would fill more than a hundred pages.

[9] The most important hagiographers (Bede, Ado, Usuard, Notker the Stammerer, Hrabanus Maurus) of the early Middle Ages also do not enter Ursula under 21 October, her feast day.

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.

Yet the cleric Wandelbert of the Abbey of Prüm 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.

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.

[14] It contains what has been described as a "veritable tsunami of ribs, shoulder blades, and femurs ... arranged in zigzags and swirls and even in the shapes of Latin words".

When skeletons of little children ranging in age from two months to seven years were found buried with one of the sacred virgins in 1183, Hermann Joseph, a Praemonstratensian canon at Steinfeld, explained that they were distant relatives of the eleven thousand.

[19] However, they are still mentioned in the Roman Martyrology, the official but professedly incomplete list of saints recognised by the Roman Catholic Church, which speaks of them as follows: "At Cologne in Germany, commemoration of virgin saints who ended their life in martyrdom for Christ in the place where afterwards the city's basilica was built, dedicated in honour of the innocent young girl Ursula who is looked on as their leader".

Both saints were considered to be Christian princesses who fled their homeland by ship in order to postpone or avert an undesired marriage with a pagan king.