Once I was a clever boy learning the arts of Oxford... is a quotation from the verses written by Bishop Richard Fleming (c.1385-1431) for his tomb in Lincoln Cathedral. Fleming, the founder of Lincoln College in Oxford, is the subject of my research for a D. Phil., and, like me, a son of the West Riding. I have remarked in the past that I have a deeply meaningful on-going relationship with a dead fifteenth century bishop... it was Fleming who, in effect, enabled me to come to Oxford and to learn its arts, and for that I am immensely grateful.


Monday, 19 October 2020

Feast of St Frideswide


Today is the Feast of St Frideswide, the founder of Oxford and the patron saint of both the city and the University.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2588/4025405104_229a632fa1.jpg

                     St Frideswide
Fourteenth century glass in Christ Church Cathedral

Image: Lawrence Lew OP on Flickriver

There is a life of the saint from David Nash Ford’s Royal Berkshire History website at .RBH Biography: St. Frideswide (c. AD 665-735)

There is another account by a member of the Orthodox Church at the Pilgrim website which can be seen at St Frideswide of Oxford
I reproduced this, slightly adapted, in 2016 at 

The author of A Clerk of Oxford posted a Middle English poem in her honour together with a translation and a series of pictures of St Frideswide at The Feast of St Frideswide
in 2013. His first illustration is one I knew well in my time at the church of St Thomas the Martyr.

St Frideswide in a twentieth century chancel window in the church of St Thomas the Martyr, Oxford
with Christ Church cathedral behind her

image: A Clerk of Oxford

I posted about her relics in 2010 in St Frideswide and also about one example of contemporary expressions of devotion to her at Hymn to St Frideswide in 2011.

St Frideswide Pray for us


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