Follow up on Saint Frideswide

I highlighted this saint and her shrine at the Anglican Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford last Sunday. At that time, I mentioned that the Once I Was a Clever Boy blog featured news of celebration of her feast on Wednesday, October 19. John Whitehead has followed up on that announcement on his blog with this hymn to St. Frideswide:

It is sung to Handel's March from Judas Maccabeus - Hail the conquering hero comes - and also used for Thine be the Glory.

Frideswide our patron, clear our clouded sight;
Help dissolve our darkness, bring us God's own light.
Child of royal parents, courted by a king,
Sought a crown of glory, spurned a wedding ring.

Frideswide our patron, clear our clouded sight;
Help dissolve our darkness, bring us God's own light.

Powerful and peaceful, vowed to God alone,
Frideswide chose a heavenly, not an earthly throne.
Prayer and meditation raised her soul above
All this world's attraction; Jesus held herlove.

Frideswide our patron, clear our clouded sight;
Help dissolve our darkness, bring us God's own light.

Algar of Leicester planned to do her wrong,
Sent his men to seize her, Frideswide's faith was strong -
In an instant blinded then his sight restored,
They knew both the wrath and mercy of the Lord.

Frideswide our patron, clear our clouded sight;
Help dissolve our darkness, bring us God's own light.

Wonders of healing Frideswide's prayers obtained -
Crooked limbs were straightened, speech the dumb regained.
Through her intercession may the grace be ours
For God's use to offer all our gifts and powers

Frideswide our patron, clear our clouded sight;
Help dissolve our darkness, bring us God's own light.

Light filled the city as she passed away
Journeyed through death's shadow into endless day,
There we hope to join her, by the truth set free,
Where we have our treasure, there our hearts shall be.

Frideswide our patron, clear our clouded sight;
Help dissolve our darkness, bring us God's own light.

I am reading a volume on the Elizabethan era by Lacey Baldwin Smith. He commented on how the remains of St. Frideswide were discovered when the remains of Peter Martyr Vermigli's first wife Catherine were returned to their resting place inside Christ Church, having been tossed out during Mary I's reign. Elizabeth told the canons of the cathedral to mix the bones together. Thus one of the canons wrote a much less reverent verse:

Papists and Protestants should now
In peace abide,
As here religion true and false
Lie side by side.

St. Frideswide and Christ Church

St. Frideswidge is the patron saint of Oxford, but her relics at Christ Church Cathedral, where an earlier monastery stood before Thomas Wolsey founded his own college (Cardinal College, taken over by Henry VIII and renamed Christ Church), have not always been treated with the greatest respect, according to the changing religious fashions of the monarchy (according to the BBC):

The original monastery is thought to have been where Christ Church now stands, and in the 1980's archaeologists found evidence of a graveyard there dating back to the late 7th century.

Tradition has it that this is where St. Frideswide was buried, and in 1180 the prior of the (by then Augustinian) monastery had her bones disinterred, and laid with great ceremony in a reliquary which was displayed in a shrine to which pilgrims flocked, hoping for miracles. They were not disappointed.

A later shrine (1289) was broken up during the Reformation in the 1530's, but many pieces from it have been found over the past hundred years or so, and it has been reconstructed in Christ Church Cathedral. It stands in the Latin Chapel, in front of a wonderfully detailed stained glass window telling the story of her life, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite artist, in the 1850's.

As for her bones, they were dug up in the reign of Mary Tudor, and kept in two silk bags.

A few years later, when the Protestants were again in the ascendant, and the veneration of saints severely discouraged, St. Frideswide's relics were deliberately mixed up with the bones of another woman who had been buried only recently in the Cathedral, and they were re-interred together in "the upper part of the church towards the east".

This is where the shrine is now, but a little to the south of it, in the Lady Chapel, there is also a dark paving stone in the floor carved simply with the name Frideswide, and it is here that the anniversary of her death is commemorated on October 19th each year.

Here is some history of Christ Church, from the Cathedral website. According to Once I Was a Clever Boy, St. Frideswide will be honored this week on her feast day.