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.


Thursday, 2 March 2023

St Chad


Today is the Feast of St Chad, onetime Bishop of York during the absence of St Wilfrid, but better known as the missionary of Mercia who founded the See of Lichfield.

I have posted about him and about churches under his patronage in the past in articles such as Churches of St Chad from 2013, St Chad's Day from 2015, and St Chad, his relics and churches from 2021.

Last November one of his relics from his shrine in St Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham was taken by the Archbishop and Chapter to its ancient home in Lichfield Cathedral where it was enshrined in a new altar on the site of the medieval shrine in the retrochoir and designed to be a focus of devotion to the saint.

There is a report about the ecumenical service, including the text of the homilies of the Archbishop and of the Bishop of Lichfield, from the Lichfield Cathedral website at The Reinstatement of the Shrine of St Chad, andfrom the Church Times at Relic of St Chad finds new home

May St Chad pray for his cathedrals and churches, his dioceses and all of us.


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