Frideswide, patroness of Oxford, lived from about 650 to 735.
October 19
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Virgin
Frideswide, patroness of Oxford, lived from about 650 to 735. According to her legend, the daughter of King Didan refused the hand of King Algar and fled to Oxford. When he pursued her, he was struck blind and left her in peace. Her cell grew into a monastery, where she died on 19 October. The written life is four hundred years later, but the source thinks its substance plausible. Her church later became Oxford Cathedral.
With her parents’ consent she renounced the world, and founded a monastery for nuns at Oxford, in which she lived and devoted herself to prayer. A neighbouring prince, named Alfgar, more powerful than her father, sought her hand in marriage; and when she refused to leave her cloister, the chief, carried away by passion, resolved to seize on her by force. To escape from his pursuit she threw herself into a boat along with two of her nuns, and a young man robed in white, an angel of God, rowed them down the Isis to Abingdon.
Pray a little every day. Prayer runs all through this account.
Build up the community you belong to. This life was lived with and for a community.
Look after people who are sick or suffering. The sick come up again and again in this story.
Virgin, patroness of Oxford, lived from about 650 to 735. According to her legend, in its latest form, she was the child of King Didan and Safrida, and was brought up to holiness by Algiva. She refused the proffered hand of King Algar, a Mercian, and fled from him to Oxford. It was in vain that he pursued her; a mysterious blindness fell on him, and he left her in her cell. From this eventually developed the monastery, in which she died in 19 October (her principal feast), and was buried. The earliest written life now extant was not composed until four hundred years after her death, but it is generally admitted that the substance of the tradition has every appearance of verisimilitude. From the time of her translation in 1180 (commemorated 12 Feb.) from her original tomb to the great shrine of her church, her fame spread far and wide; for the university was now visited by students from all parts, who went twice a year in solemn procession to her shrine and kept her feasts with great solemnity. Cardinal Wolsey transformed her monastery into Christ Church College, King Henry made her church into Oxford cathedral, but her shrine was dismantled, and her relics [the bodily remains of a saint, or objects they used, kept with honor], which seem to have been preserved, were relegated to some out-of-the-way corner. In the reign of Edward VI, Catherine Cathie was buried near the site of her shrine. She was a runaway nun, who had been through the form of marriage with Peter Martyr, the ex-friar. The Catholics, as was but natural, ejected her bones in the reign of Queen Mary. But after Elizabeth had reinstated Protestantism, James Calfhill, appointed Canon of Christ Church in 1561, dug up Cathie's bones once more, mixed them up (in derision of the Catholics) with the alleged remaining relics of the saint, and buried them both together amid the plaudits of his Zwinglian friends in England and Germany, where two relations of his exploit, one in Latin and one in German, were published in 1562. The Latin relation, which is conveniently reprinted in the Bollandists [Jesuit scholars who since the 1600s have critically studied the lives of the saints], is followed in the original by a number of epitaphs on the theme Hic jacet religio cum superstitione, but it does not seem that these words were incised on the tomb, though it is often said that they were. The episode strikingly illustrates the character of the continuity between the ancient faith and the reformed religion of England.
Acta SS., Oct., VIII, 533-564; MABILLON, Acta SS. Ben. (1672), III, I, 561; HOLE in Dict. Christ. Biog., s. v.; HUBERT, Historia Bucerii, Fagii, item C. Vermiliæ (1562); PARKER, Early Oxford, 727-1100 (1885); PLUMMER, Elizabethan Oxford (1887).
S. FRIDESWIDE. S. Frideswide. his wife Sefrid. With her parents’ consent she renounced the world, and founded a monastery for nuns at Oxford, in which she lived and devoted herself to prayer. A neighbouring prince, named Alfgar, more powerful than her father, sought her hand in marriage; and when she refused to leave her cloister, the chief, carried away by passion, resolved to seize on her by force. To escape from his pursuit she threw herself into a boat along with two of her nuns, and a young man robed in white, an angel of God, rowed them down the Isis to Abingdon. There she left the boat on the borders of a forest, and she hid herself in a hut covered with ivy, intended for the swine, which, then as later, went to eat the acorns in the woods, and were one of the principal riches of the Anglo-Saxon proprietors. It was not a secure refuge for her. Alfgar, growing more and more in earnest, tracked her everywhere, but at the moment when, exhausted with weariness, she was about to fall into his hands, she bethought herself of the great saints who, from the earliest days of the Church, had defended agd saved their virginity at the price of their lives. She invoked Catharine, the most illustrious martyr of the Eastern Church, and Cecilia, the sweet and heroic Roman, whose name, inserted in the Canon of the Mass, was already familiar to all the new Christians. Her prayer was granted. God struck the savage Anglo-Saxon with sudden blindness, which put an end to his furious pursuit From this incident sprang a fantastic superstition, according to which the kings of England for several centuries carefully avoided living in, or even passing by Oxford, for fear of losing their eyesight.1 Frideswide, thus miraculously saved, obtained by her prayers the restoration of sight to her persecutor, and then returned to spend the rest of her days in peace in the monastery she had founded. In her last sickness she was conVOL. XII. 9 soled by the apparition of the two virgin martyrs, S. Catharine and S. Cecilia, to whom she had once so successfully appealed.
The tomb of Frideswide, the chapel she had erected in the depth of the wood of Thombury, her own estate, the fountain which sprang up at her prayer, at Bisney, were objects of attraction in the thirteenth century to crowds of pilgrims, who were led thither by the fame of the miraculous cures there performed. But of all the miracles collected after her death, none is so touching as that which is told of her and the leper. It happened on her return to Oxford after her flight to Abingdon, that an unfortunate young man, struck with leprosy, met her on the road, and prayed her, “ I conjure you, Virgin Frideswide, by the Almighty God, to kiss me, in the name of Jesus Christ His only Son.” The maiden, overcoming the horror felt by all towards this loathsome disease, approached him, and after having made the sign of the cross, she touched his lips with a sisterly kiss. Soon after the scales of his leprosy fell off, and his body became fresh and wholesome like that of a little child.
The monastery of S. Frideswide, transformed into a college by Cardinal Wolsey, is now Christ Church. Her church, rebuilt in the twelfth century, is the cathedral of that city. Her body still rests there, and her shrine is shown; but it must be added that a commissioner of Queen Elizabeth, in brutal disrespect for the sacred relics [the bodily remains of a saint, or objects they used, kept with honor], placed beside them, and mixed with them the bones of a disveiled nun married to a renegade priest, Peter Martyr. The commissioner having mingled the bones so that it was impossible to distinguish the one from the other, placed them in a stone coffin, on which he engraved the words, now happily effaced, Hie requiescit religio cum superstitions. S. Frideswide, under the name of Saint Frewisse, is venerated also at Bomy, near S. Peter of Alcantara.
TWrouaune, in Artois, whither, according to Flemish tradition, she fled from the pursuit of Alfgar. A little chapel on a hill is dedicated to her, supposed to occupy the site of her cell, and a miraculous fountain near at hand is sought by the sick, and is believed to have been elicited by her prayers. Relics of the saint are shown in this chapel, but as the Bollandist observes, there is not any authentic document which can justify any one in regarding them as genuine. S. Frideswide is represented in art with an ox at her feet, and a fountain; often with a pastoral staff as abbess.
Feast: October 19
One short email a day for nine days. The day's prayer, a line from St. Frideswide's story, and a nudge to keep going.
From Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, new edition in 16 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1897–98); text from the Internet Archive scan (OCR, lightly cleaned; errors possible). Public domain.
From “Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)/St. Frideswide,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907–1914), via Wikisource. Public domain. Matched by name and feast date; text unedited except for our bracketed notes in grey.
From Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, new edition in 16 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1897–98); text from the Internet Archive scan (OCR, lightly cleaned; errors possible). Public domain in the United States. Reproduced unedited, except for short bracketed notes in grey that we added to explain names and terms (“S.” is the old abbreviation for Saint). Some history and judgments reflect 19th-century scholarship.