When you step into the Lady Chapel in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, straight ahead of you there is a vivid stained-glass window full of busy little scenes showing kings and nuns, battles and rich interiors – as well as more homely ducks and pigs. In front of that is a monument. You might think, at first, that it is a tomb. And so it is. But it’s more than that. It was a shrine to the patron saint of Oxford, St Frideswide. Her bones are still housed in the church – although not in the shrine and not alone, as we shall discover. Christ Church is her church and was once dedicated to her. The stained glass window is by Edward Burne-Jones, made in 1860, the year before his great friend William Morris began the company that would become Morris & Co. Its scenes chart the story of the saint in and around the city.
Back in the seventh century Oxford was a small place, but it had a king nonetheless. This king, Didan, was a client king of the ruler of the Midlands – or Mercia, as it was then known. Mercia was a pagan kingdom, but Didan was a Christian and he married a good Christian wife, Safrida. Their daughter Frithuswith – or Frideswide – was an unusual child. She wasn’t interested in toys or sweets or play. By the time she was six she had read all the Psalms. As she grew up she became very learned, ate only vegetables and barley bread, and was clearly heading for life as a nun. This being the seventh century, her parents were bursting with pride at this and they had her installed as the abbess of a new religious house in Oxford, where like-minded women and men joined her. This much is probably true. Didan is mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the monastery is also mentioned in early histories, and ‘Frithu’ is the prefix of the names of various people connected with north Wessex and south Mercia.
Frideswide and her followers built their monastery where Christ Church sits today. But when her parents died, Frideswide was in danger. The new king was a Leicester man, Algar – possibly one and the same as Athelbald of Mercia. He wrote to Frideswide to demand that she give up being a bride of Christ and become his bride instead.
Algar may have been trying simply to legitimise his rule by marrying his predecessor’s heir, but Frideswide was not impressed and wrote back her refusal. Algar then showed his true colours. He sent messengers to bring her out by force if necessary and declared he would make her into a whore if she didn’t consent to marry him. Again Frideswide refused and God listened. The messengers were all struck blind. Only when they submitted to God’s will did their sight return.
Algar was furious. If you want a job doing, you have to do it yourself! He and his men set out to Oxford to carry Frideswide away. She didn’t stay to be taken. She and her maidens fled to the Thames, and there they found a boat waiting – a gift from God! Not a moment too soon. Algar and his men arrived at the monastery, swords bared – but as soon as Algar crossed the threshold he too was struck blind. It was said that from that day, no king dared enter Oxford lest he, too, should be struck down … although we do have records of William I, Henry I, and Stephen all staying in Oxford when the legend was current!
The boat sped Frideswide and her companions all the way to Bampton, about 20 miles away. They stayed there awhile, and cured a girl who had been blind for seven years, but Frideswide was drawn back to Oxford. Back in the boat, they travelled until they were in sight of the city. Frideswide’s instinct was to stay hidden. In a little wood not far from the river at what is now the little chapel of St Margaret, just outside Binsey, they found an abandoned swineherd’s hut. According to Burne-Jones’s image, the pigs were still there even if their herdsman wasn’t! There they settled into a simple life of praising the Lord and performing miracles of healing.
This bucolic life in a wood was not what the gently born girls who had travelled with Frideswide were used to. It was a hike down to the river to get water, and worse on the way back with full pails! Frideswide prayed for assistance, and a spring bubbled up right by her little sanctuary. Pilgrims came from all around to be cured by the water and the saint. She even cured a young man suffering from leprosy, though in one retelling she was human enough to find it a challenge to kiss the leper, despite the healing power of her kiss.
Eventually, Algar and his men found Frideswide’s sanctuary. Did she cower in the hut as Burne-Jones shows her doing? I don’t think so. In some versions of her legend she brought Algar to the well and cured him of his blindness. He begged her forgiveness and offered her a ride back to Oxford. Frideswide refused. An independent woman to the last, she walked back along the banks of the river that had saved her. Many years later, in her seventies, she died in her old monastery. She was surrounded by her maidens, as the last panel in Burne-Jones’s window shows, and was buried in St Mary’s Church, almost certainly where Christ Church is today.
St Margaret’s at Binsey became a place of pilgrimage during the Middle Ages. So popular was the well that the pilgrims had ‘worn the very pavement about it hollow’. The church was owned by St Frideswide’s Priory and shows its wealth in the fragments of medieval stained glass that remain. Henry VIII is said to have visited with Catherine of Aragon to seek help in conceiving a son – before he put an end to such beliefs and practices! Meanwhile, in the priory in town, Frideswide’s remains had stayed in the ground even after the burning of her church in 1002 during King Ethelred’s anti-Danish pogroms. In the 12th century a new priory of Augustinian canons was built on the site, and Frideswide’s bones were exhumed and a shrine built. That shrine, made more elaborate and en vogue in the 13th century, was broken up at the Reformation, but enough pieces remained for it to be reconstructed in the 19th and 21st centuries.
There are a couple of strange codas, one at Binsey and one in Christ Church, or St Frideswide’s as . At the Reformation, St Frideswide’s bones were set aside after the shrine was destroyed, and, bizarrely, in 1552, during the reign of Edward VI, another woman’s body was placed in the tomb – that of Catherine Martyr, apostate nun and wife of a Protestant reformer. Three years later under Queen Mary, up came the body of the reformer, to be chucked on a dung heap. Elizabeth I later ordered that Catherine be given a decent burial, and so her bones and Frideswide’s were mixed together and buried in the church – somewhere. The shrine was rebuilt in 1889 in front of Burne-Jones’s window, but there is no one home. At Binsey, the well got a reputation as a ‘treacle well’, as used by Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland. But what is a treacle well? A well where good sugary stuff is found, enough for three sisters to live on? Well, no. Some say it’s where flax was retted down into the fibres to make linen – a rather treacly mess. But not in this case. ‘Treacle’ comes from a word meaning a healing salve or potion – so a treacle well is simply a healing one.
Take a walk out from Christ Church in the heart of Oxford along the Thames Path to Binsey, past the Perch, to St Margaret’s Chapel. It’s an isolated place these days and, after the hustle and bustle of the city, still a place of sanctuary all these many centuries later.
COMPASS POINTS
Distance: 6.5 miles.
Duration: 4 hours.
Level: Level walking along sometimes damp paths.
Parking: Use one of the Park and Ride car parks, or come to Oxford by public transport.
Refreshments: The Perch, Binsey, and many other eateries in Oxford.
Further reading: Oxfordshire Folk Tales by Kevan Manwaring.
Route: https://gb.mapometer.com/walking/route_5524792.html
Kirsty Hartsiotis is based in Stroud and available for hire as a storyteller and speaker. She is an accredited Arts Society lecturer. Her books include Wiltshire Folk Tales and (with Anthony Nanson) Gloucestershire Ghost Tales and Gloucestershire Folk Tales for Children. She is also a curator at Swindon Museums.
