St. Frideswide

Here are a few more images from my ride up to Wytham Wood (see previous post) and a story along the way.














Some English blackberries. These line the roads, hedgerows and fields everywhere and, as you can see, are very much in season.


















Here is the interior of Saint Margaret's Church, Binsey. Founded in the 12th century (and rebuilt from the waist up in the 13th), it's at the end of a winding lane a few miles out into the fields northwest of town, beyond the Thames, surrounded by a family farm. Just west of the present church is St Margaret's Well (apparently still there, though I did not find it). With water from that well, the story goes (in the main - versions vary), the 7th century Saxon noblewoman Frideswide cured the blindness of Algar, a Mercian King. Algar had been blinded by a flash of lightning during a raid on Oxford, where he had come to take Frideswide away by force, she having refused his advances after taking vows of chastity on founding a priory there while still quite young. She had fled from Algar up the Thames a few miles to Binsey, where she tended sheep for some local nuns, and prayed for deliverance. It came in part in the form of the treacle well (cf. Alice in Wonderland, a delightful children's book by a former Christ Church, Oxford mathematics teacher) that appeared there on her striking the ground with her staff. She took pity on the blinded Algar and healed him with its waters, and for it gained his repentance. She named the well for St. Margaret, who herself was martyred in part for refusing a pagan suitor during a persecutory rage in Rome.









Here's the view of the door (the remaining bit of the original structure) from the yard (where the well is). Apparently, Henry VIII visited the church, a characteristically brazen gesture, I think. No English King before Henry III would even visit Oxford for fear of being struck blind like Algar, and one might think someone with a record like VIII (though I am not sure when his visit occurred) might have considered having at least some similar scruples. At any rate, Frideswide became Oxford's patron saint (Christ Church, the city's Cathedral at the center of one of the university's older colleges, was founded originally in her name by the Augustines in the 12th century) and the places of her story are scattered throughout the area.


















A resident of Binsey - looking thus askance I think because I had nothing to offer in the way of delectables.