Trade Secrets

[TisILeclerc]

All saints are forged.

Legend says that Sidwell was a Saxon Christian girl living in Exeter in the 8th century. Her stepmother wanted her killed, and hired a reaper to do the job. He cut off her head with a scythe, and where it fell, water sprang up. This became the well of St Sidwell, revered for the miracle and a place of pilgrimage in Anglo-Saxon and Norman England.

http://www.tellingourstoriesexeter.org. ... eturnid=80

Some sources say she was Romano-British, others that she was Saxon. Whatever the truth about the girl, and about her origin, she lived in Exeter at a time of change. The period from the departure of the Romans (around 410) until the time of King Alfred (9th century) was a period of great upheaval in the South West, and throughout Britain, and written records are few.

The Saxons probably reached Exeter some time towards the end of the 7th century. So if the date for Sidwell of 740 is right, and if she was in fact Anglo-Saxon (ie English) then Sidwell was one of the earliest English settlers in Exeter, and one of the earliest speakers of a language that sounds like our modern English. If she was Romano-British, as others claim, then she spoke something more like Welsh or Latin, and was part of a retreating and shrinking culture of the Dumnonii, which would soon be confined to Cornwall, west of the river Tamar.

A rather convoluted story. There would appear to be little difference between the time the Romans left and the Saxons arrived. Except for a few hundred years of course. She could have been this and she could have been that. But strangely they don't question the fact that a well sprang up when her head was chopped off.

But then this is a site dedicated to the modern saintly fabrication of multi culturalism and diversity. It's to tell the world that we have always been immigrants and all that sort of thing.

What they ignore is the history of well finding or water divining. Moses strikes a rock and water gushes forth. The whole of Europe is full of holy wells, usually found by saints of one sort or another. And there we go again, divine, sort, holywell. Sort being fate of course as we all know.

But the person who was responsible for finding the water source was a sourcier or sorcerer. But to men in dresses sorcerers were evil because they came before so best thing to do is call them saints and tell us how they were Christians who had their heads chopped off for no apparent reason. And why a scythe? Mind you death carries a scythe.

Which all goes to tell us that this lady existed or didn't exist long before curry houses, Saxons, Romans, Celtic poseurs and so on. She is a remnant of the old religion which was not a religion at all. It was called survival skills and if you didn't have them you didn't survive.

For some reason wells are associated with women. Which perhaps suggests a time when women had an important position in society or perhaps a specialised position. Mary well, Bridie's well and so on. Perhaps Sid was a bit of a tomboy in her day? Isn't there a place called Sidmouth somewhere down there? Perhaps it was a tribal designation?

Clean drinking water was vital for the well being of society. Oh dear there we go again, well. Just can't escape from words that always seem to hark back to the source of the idea.

Celui qui prétend découvrir des sources et des nappes d'eau souterraines, voire des métaux à l'état naturel et des trésors, le plus souvent en maniant une baguette de bois ou un pendule, selon les principes de la radiesthésie.

Fortunately for those who don't know any French this quote is from a French dictionary. So it should be easy enough to divine the meaning.

http://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/fr ... cier#72901

Of course the Church went on to persecute and destroy the original sourciers and sourcieres in order to preserve their monopoly on sainthood.

Rather like some people who gain chest loads of medals for all sorts of things.



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... l#comments

They did the same in south and central America as we know. The Church is a very viscious organisation. It smiles then smites in the name of a god it hijacked from the middle east.

And all our water sources have been sold off to France, China, Germany and other ne'er do wells. What saint will get them back for us? That's the question.

I'm setting a shrine up to Sid at this very moment.

[hvered]

Take a couple of dozen Welsh saints -- Beuno, Cadoc, Carannog, David, Melangell, Winifrede, etc. -- and try to find if they existed.

a)Traditionally llans and/or holy wells have been named after them.
b) They lived without exception in the 5th/6th century

However all the saints' Lives date from the 11th or 12th century (Melangell's is fifteenth-century!) some five or six hundred years 'too late', so these saints' names were presumably grafted onto place-names in the 11th or 12th century when records were first written down.

Historians claim there was a 7th century Saxon minster at Exeter though after extensive archaeology they haven't located it. The explanation is provided in Devon's local government Fact Sheet

Devon as an area had not produced the same wealth of archaeological finds for the Anglo-Saxon era as other parts of the country. This makes building a picture of ‘everyday life’ for Devon quite difficult and assumptions have to be made based on sources available elsewhere.

'Sources elsewhere' means using written sources instead. Actually it's not clear whether any archaeology has been carried out at St Sidwell's church (the give-away bits are underlined)

St Sidwell’s church is thought to have been in existence by the Anglo Saxon period. Nothing is known of its appearance or structure, but it may have been a large and important building, since it was an established pilgrimage site before the Norman Conquest of 1066. Perhaps the earliest part of the church to survive was its font, described in 1806 as ‘very ancient, and, by its ornaments, appears to be of Saxon construction.’ The font was lost in the 19th Century.

but various artefacts have been found and are now in Exeter Museum so there must have been some excavations, or lucky finds, such as a horseshoe, though admittedly of uncertain date

Badly rusted horseshoe found at Lion’s Holt. It is allegedly Saxon or Danish, but probably 1800s.

St Sidwell's just about survived the Civil War of 1642-9 but was bombed in the Second World War and no-one knows the whereabouts of the remains of the medieval stonework.

From looking at some of the best known Anglo-Saxon foundations it becomes obvious that despite lots of digging no Anglo-Saxon churches were found (if you can come up with one, I'd like to hear about it). More to the point, there are no contemporaneous records, historians have to rely on annals/chronicles of the 13th and 14th century. These note various places that were, of course, burnt down, plundered by Danes, whatever. In some cases Georgian or Victorian builders are blamed for the absence of archaeology, presumably in those areas the Danes didn't reach.

[TisILeclerc]

The Anglo Saxons were a funny bunch. They invade a country in three boats and driven everyone west into Wales, Cornwall, and Cumbria. Then they stop and form distinct kingdoms based on the old pre Saxon kingdoms.

An episode of Time Team, I forget which, shows a continuity of farms and farming and village life in east Yorkshire somewhere. The Britons were farming and expanding. The Saxons came and the Britons disappear. The Saxons stop being warriors and take over all the farms, houses etc and carry on as if nothing had happened.

The Danes are slightly different. We know about their expansion and the battles they had. They must have had better scribes writing it all down for the memoirs.

[Mick Harper]

Don't forget the tens of thousands of 'places' that the Anglo-Saxons founded (cos they're in English) whereas the Danes only founded a few 'thorpes'. Though I did just finish a paper on this note

The nature of Viking settlement in Wales remains one of the mysteries of early medieval archaeology, none more so than on Anglesey. Physical evidence of the Vikings in Wales is even less definite. Certainly, we know that the Vikings were familiar with Anglesey because of the place-names of Scandinavian origin which have been given to prominent coastal features as navigational aids

The good folk of Anglesey decided to name places courtesy of sailors passing by: "Hello, sailor! What? Didn't catch that ... oh right ... thanks."

[hvered]

The Danes are really useful, essential perhaps, for explaining away the invisibility of 'Dark Age' ecclesiastical archaeology.

One of the most unusual cases is the story of the minster of St Frideswide, the patroness of Oxford, because here the Danes were presented as the victims. The rest of Frideswide's life is remarkable only for its blandness.

A leading authority on Anglo-Saxon England called Stenton wrote a paper on St Frideswide of Oxford in which he says that "St. Frideswide is little more than a name"

It has been associated for more than nine hundred years with the site of Oxford, but it is unaccompanied by any genuine tradition of incident or personal relationships. The only pre-Conquest manuscript in which it is mentioned is a list of saints honoured in England, which was written early in the eleventh century, and simply states that ‘St. Frideswide rests at Oxford.’* No materials for her life were available to the first generation of Anglo-Norman hagiographers, and the earliest writer to sketch the outline of her legend is the historian William of Malmesbury, writing shortly before the year 1125

* This cannot be taken as read since the MS comes from Hyde Abbey, founded in the (late) 12th century.

Stenton is obliged to describe the Frideswide story as "one of the most nebulous of English monastic legends" but he immediately claims she must have existed because there's a charter to prove it

This does not mean that St. Frideswide herself should be regarded as a legendary figure. The fact that she was honoured as a saint at the beginning of the eleventh century raises at least a case for her historical existence. This case would become much stronger if it were possible to accept the evidence of a remarkable charter which king Æthelred II is supposed to have granted in 1004 to the church where her body lay. According to this document, when the king and his council had decreed that all the Danes in England should be killed—¬a reference to the massacre of St. Brice’s Day, l002—the Danes of Oxford took refuge in St. Frideswide’s minster. Their pursuers thereupon burned the church and all the ancient writings inside it, and the king therefore thought fit to make a new charter confirming the minster in the possession of its lands, and re-asserting its privileges.

Maybe 11th-century Oxford was mindful of its status as the main (first?) university town and wanted to be seen as putting up a fight (unlike the pusillanimous citizens of Cambridge and other places in East Anglia)? Either way, Stenton doesn't think the Aethelred charter is a forgery so he has to somehow present the bogus saint's cult and non-existent (because burnt) records as 'proof'

It may be added that the very barrenness of the Frideswide legend is really evidence of her importance in the religious life of her time. The absence of any pre-Conquest record of her miracles goes far to prove that her cult was not merely a popular response to wonders associated with her tomb.

[Mick Harper]

Let's hope old Frank's dictum never takes hold. The less evidence there is the more certain someone existed. Come to think of it ....

[TisILeclerc]

It's all a bit like 'Carry on up the Nunnery' with these saintly ladies.

This one gets chased about, hides with pigs in a forest and then when she comes back all the lazy nuns can think of is that it's too far to go and get water. So she prays and lo and behold ...

In the longer version, the nuns in Binsey complain of having to fetch water from the distant River Thames, so Frideswide prays to God and a well springs up. The well water has healing properties and many people come to seek it out. This well can still be found today at the Church of St Margaret in Binsey, a few miles up river from Oxford.

Frithuswith was her name so why she changed it to Frideswide is anyone's guess. And why call the well St Margaret's well. Although of course Margaret is a variant of Mary so all is well as they say.

And when trouble started she was restored by Queen Mary. And then a Catherine appears. Catherines do seem to hang around Marys.

Her shrine was reinstated by Queen Mary in 1558, but was later desecrated by James Calfhill, the Calvinist canon of the church, who was intent on suppressing her cult. As a result, Frithuswith's remains were mixed with those of Catherine Dammartin, wife of Peter Martyr Vermigli, and they remain so to this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frithuswith

So, perhaps it's another ancient well water diving memory given legs?

[Mick Harper]

Before we run away with this water divining theory let's not forget that anywhere in England you can twitch the hazel, dig a hole and you will have made ... a water well.

[TisILeclerc]

Perhaps people in ancient times didn't know that. And let's face it if you are a water diviner you're not going to say something like 'why don't you do it yourself it's easy. I don't want your money honest.'

What we do know about this good lady is that she attracted lots of very important people once she was dead. For the daughter of a minor king of Mercia, or sub king, that's not bad. She also existed in France. As for water divining I'm sure a twitch might work but why make it a twitching head or body all the time?

The identity of Bentona is the most controversial part of St. Frideswide's story. The traditionalists from Oxford claim it is Binsey, where our story says the saint retired. This lies just outside the city, not quite in Berkshire, where the county boundary departs from the Thames and follows, instead, the Seacourt Stream. St. Margaret's Church was St. Frideswide's pig-sty-cum-oratory, and her well, St. Margaret's Well. It was a great place of pilgrimage in the middle ages. Tradition says the deserted medieval village of Seacourt had twenty-two inns to house the vast numbers of pilgrims visiting Binsey (excavation has shown there was only actually one). But if St. Frideswide had prayed to Saints Cecilia and Catherine for deliverance, then why the dedication to St. Margaret? Though it seems unlikely that Bentona is related to Yattendon (Etingedene 1086, Gettendon 1195, etc.), Frilsham's parish church is dedicated to St. Frideswide and not far away is her holy well. This was still visited by loved one's, early last century, to see if the male partner was approved of by the well's spitting toad. If the man's intentions were not honourable he would be violently spat at! Also nearby is Kings Wood (King Aelfgar's wood perhaps), and Reading Abbey held some of Frideswide's relics. Place-name experts tell us that Frilsham means Frithel's Homestead. However, such a personal name is unrecorded elsewhere, and a diminutive form of Frithuswith seems at least possible. There are, of course, other claimants: Bampton and Benson, also in Oxfordshire, and Bomy in Artois across the Channel in France. This latter also has the obligatory chapel and well of St. Frideswide (Frevisse) and displays her bones. However, the legend never mentions the saint crossing the Channel, and, indeed, only the site at Frilsham is consistent with her journey down the Thames to Abingdon. The first rendering of the story in c.1125 by William of Malmesbury does not mention the place by name, and the slightly later life of St. Frideswide confusingly says she hid at Bampton, in a wood called Binsey. Unfortunately the two are nowhere near each other, and the writer was clearly confused. Later writers dropped Bampton, claiming the place was Binsey, in a wood called Thornbury. Recent excavations at Binsey have revealed an Iron-Age/Early Saxon enclosure surrounding St. Margaret's Church which is consistent with the name Thorn-bury, the Thorny Fort. Recent analysis, however, also indicates that Bampton was originally understood to be Bentona. There is a church and well here too, but any Frideswide association has long since been lost. Thus the later Binsey connection, as put forward by the Berkshire tale, is perhaps given some credence.

The Oxford version of the story also tells how during a lull in Aelfgar's searches, St. Frideswide returned home to Oxford. It was at this point that the Mercian prince descended, besieged the city, and eventually forced his way in to carry her off. Just as he entered through the city gates, he was struck blind! Ever since the superstition grew up that the same would happen to any monarch who entered the City of Oxford. Accordingly, the Kings of England stayed away until the reign of Henry III. Some say that all the ills of his reign were due to this presumption. Perhaps, if the kings had known the Berkshire version: that the people of Oxford were St. Frideswide's betrayers, not her defenders, then perhaps they would have visited the place sooner.

St. Frideswide's nunnery was destroyed by the Danes in 1002. The monastery was re-established for Austin Canons in 1122. The church was rebuilt in 1180 and St. Frideswide's body translated to a beautiful shrine. Many pilgrims visited her there, including Henry III, Edward I and Henry VIII's queen, Catherine of Aragon. In 1525, Cardinal Wolsey gained permission from Pope Clement VII to dissolve the monastery and transform it into Cardinal College, with the Abbey Church as the college chapel. In 1546, Henry VIII changed this to Christ Church College and the church became the Cathedral of the new Diocese of Oxford. St. Frideswide still lies buried there beneath part of her reconstructed shrine. However, she is not alone. In 1561, a religious fanatic named Caldiff, a canon of Christ Church and a commissioner of Elizabeth I, mixed her bones with those of one Catherine Cathie Dammartin, a former nun and latter wife of the Zwinglian Regius Professor of Divinity, Canon Peter Martyr Vermigli.

http://www.britannia.com/history/legend ... ide02.html

It's a long read but it's worth it. It involves lady being chases by suitors, hiding with pigs, travelling down rivers, foreign connections and lots of kings and clever people coming to see her chapel. Which, as the article points out, is not named after her or her favourite saints but St Margaret.

I would suggest it's all a garbled memory from a very long time ago.

All men who lust after her go blind and she has two wells not one.

Down by the Thames, the three found a small boat tended by a white robed youth. Unbeknown to them, the young man was an angel in disguise who readily agreed to take them down the river to Abingdon. From here the ladies sought refuge in the deep oak forest which covered much of Berkshire at that time. They travelled many miles on foot to a place then called Bentona, now Yattendon. Here they discovered a small ivy-covered pig-sty where the swineherds brought their animals in autumn to feet on the acorns of the forest. Frideswide made the sty into a small oratory for the three companions and here they lived off the land for some three years, drinking from a well which appeared when Frideswide had prayed for water.

http://www.britannia.com/history/legend ... ide01.html

She also cured a leper. All good saintly stuff but about five thousand years too late I would say.

[TisILeclerc]

Another strange thing about this lady is that her name appears to have not been used very much in England except in a Germanic form among the Norman nobility.

Intriguingly, during the 12th and 13th century, Frideswide was not in use in Britain, yet the Latinised Germanic Fredesendis was. It may be that, in some cases, the Latinised Fredesendis was also applied to the Old English Frithuswith -- in 1450 Godstow says 'Fryswyde the English for Frediswitha' which does show a later connection between the two -- or it may be that Fredesendis only survived among Norman nobility. Henry III's Fine Rolls for the years 1216-1242 list two Frethesentas: Lady Frethesancia de la Haye of Hertfordshire and Lady Frethesenta de Scotney.

The Germanic form of the name seems to have died out in Britain by the 15th century. Frideswide was revived (or continued) thanks to the growing cult of the saint.

http://www.britishbabynames.com/blog/20 ... swide.html

So we now have a name in search of a legend. Sounds like something out of a Smiley novel.