United States or Cyprus ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
These and a host of lesser songsters, each with his several songs, joining with the glorious harmonies that have for so long been sent up from Magdalen, New College, and from that ancient fane where once St. Frideswide rested, make good the claim of Oxford as a city of sweet song.
Frideswide's shrine on the ground that such recoveries of life and limb were quite as real as any that Frideswide ever wrought. Sickness and death in the prior's story avenge the saint on her blasphemer, but no earthly power, ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have ventured to deal with him. A more daring act of fanaticism showed the temper of the Jews even at the close of Henry the Third's reign.
The town church of Saint Martin rose from a thickly-built group of houses, at a spot called Quatre Voies, where the principal streets crossed, which name we corrupt into Carfax. He counted the towers of thirteen churches, including the historic shrine of Saint Frideswide, which afterwards developed into the College of Christchurch, and later still furnished the Cathedral of the diocese.
Prior Philip of St. Frideswide complains bitterly of a certain Hebrew who stood at his door as the procession of the saint passed by, mocking at the miracles which were said to be wrought at her shrine. Halting and then walking firmly on his feet, showing his hands clenched as if with palsy and then flinging open his fingers, the Jew claimed gifts and oblations from the crowd that flocked to St.
"Having set up my things handsomely," he continues, "the same day, before noon, I determined to spend that whole afternoon, until evensong time, at Frideswide College, at my book in mine own study; and so shut my chamber door unto me, and my study door also, and took into my head to read Francis Lambert upon the Gospel of St. Luke, which book only I had then within there.
Frideswide' preserves for us, we trace the traditional surgery which is still common in the East. But it is perhaps in a more purely material way that the Jewry at Oxford most directly influenced our academical history. There as elsewhere the Jew brought with him something more than the art or science which he had gathered at Cordova or Bagdad; he brought with him the new power of wealth.
Halting and then walking firmly on his feet, showing his hands clenched as if with palsy and then flinging open his fingers, the mocking Jew claimed gifts and oblations from the crowd who flocked to St. Frideswide's on the ground that such recoveries of limb and strength were quite as real as any Frideswide had wrought.
The early history of Oxford is more or less connected with that of the obscure and insignificant monastery of St. Frideswide, though even at Oxford it is observable that the town and the University grew up in almost entire independence of any influence exercised by any of the older religious houses. At Cambridge this was much more the case.
Frideswide, they were horror-struck by beholding a Jew rush forth, seize the cross which was borne before them, dash it to the ground, and trample upon it with the most furious contempt. The offender seems to have made his escape in the tumult, but his people suffered for his crime.
It is possible to imagine a low-lying cluster of wooden houses forming narrow streets, and occupying the land between the Cherwell and the Isis, nearly a thousand years ago. In those days no doubt it was reckoned a town of some importance, but, with the possible exception of the minster of St. Frideswide, there was nothing to relieve its squalid appearance.
Word Of The Day