Arrowsmith October 2024
This month the first Cirencester History Festival begins on October 26th with a talk in St John’s Parish Church about mystical mediaeval women by Dr Janina Ramirez. To find out more visit cirencesterhistoryfestival.org
It’s not an easy matter getting your name down in history, especially if you aren’t wealthy, and particularly if you’re a woman. Women in general get a little celebration at the end of October, when Halloween gives children and party-going adults a chance to dress up as whatever they imagine witches to have been.
We in Cirencester have our own rich woman, from near Lechlade, who lived in the sixth century. Her grave was found in 1985. It was clear from her burial, and the objects with which she was buried, that she was a very important member of Anglo Saxon society between the time of the Roman occupation and the development of Christianity. Her grave has been reconstructed in the Corinium Museum.
She’s been nicknamed ‘Mrs Getty’ which almost seems to suggest that her wealth and status was the result of her having married a wealthy and powerful man, however – as Dr Ramirez will make clear – some mediaeval women were extremely powerful, such as Aethelflaed, daughter of Alfred the Great. (She probably made better cakes than him too!) So, the princess of Lechlade had every chance of being rich and powerful in her own right.
Witches too would have been well respected in pagan days, before Christianity began to oppose women gaining power outside the confines of service as nuns. Certainly many ‘wise women’ were knowledgeable concerning ‘folk remedies’ and what could be termed pastoral wisdom in settling interpersonal problems. There are explanations of why ‘witches’ were said to fly on broomsticks, but most superstitions of that type are simply early examples of fake news.
Nowadays the Cotswold equivalents of coven members drive top of the range electric four-wheel-drive vehicles and are just as likely to have gundogs as cats to act as their familiars. Their spells and potions are now pleasantly scented ‘aesthetic wellbeing products’ used in a variety of ‘alternative holistic therapies’ and every ceremony and ritual is now available to members of the public to benefit their spiritual and emotional health. Cake and coffee are optional.
Now that men appear to have given up burning women as witches, the new fashion seems to be casting out people we wish to forget, whom we once used to think we should celebrate as people of whom we should be proud. Thus, we pull down statues and try to cancel the history of any of our past attitudes we’d rather forget.
But we probably don’t need to bother. We are fickle when it comes to remembering past heroes. Shelley wrote a poem called ‘Ozymandias’ which tells of a statue erected by a boastful king, instructing people to envy the work he’d done, but of which no evidence remains. Our Lechlade princess’s remains are with us 1,500 years since her death, but we don’t know her true name, nor any personal details of her story.
Graves are often thought to be a worthy way to memorialise our ancestors, but it doesn’t take long before – like Ozymandias’ – their lives are forgotten. The earliest headstone in the graveyard of St John the Baptist in Cirencester dates back to 1628; just less than 500 years ago, but the inscription has worn away.
A few hundred yards away is a sculpture representing the Abbott who founded the now dissolved Abbey in 1117, standing with an Augustinian Canon.
Not knowing their names, we call them ‘Russ Abbott and Tommy Canon’.
Arrowsmith
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