St Michael's Church, Stanton Harcourt

A rare painting of one saintly Anglo-Saxon abbess and the remains of a shrine that housed another make this a fine pilgrim destination, visited by the Newman Pilgrimage

Highlights

• St Edburga’s shrine structure
• St Etheldreda’s medieval image
• Oldest wooden rood screen in England

We meet a few Edburgas on our journey through England’s holy places. This one is St Edburga of Bicester, a mid-7th century abbess who lived and worked in Oxfordshire. Her tomb was originally at Bicester Priory, 15 miles away, where the monastery church was destroyed and then built over following the Reformation.

Stanton Harcourt’s shrine is thought to be the best surviving relic connected to St Edburga, although archaeological work at the site of Bicester Priory in 2011 briefly challenged that (see below). If her bones are ever rediscovered, Stanton Harcourt’s stone shrine would certainly be an appropriate place to store them.

St Edburga’s relics once sat on top of this stone base, housed in a metal container. You can see examples of such reliquaries in the V&A Museum, London (page 73). The shrine was probably constructed in 1302 when Bicester Priory was rebuilt. It might have been moved to Stanton Harcourt around the time of the Reformation and reused as part of an Easter Sepulchre. The church now celebrates St Edburga on her festival day, 18 July.

St Edburga is not the only saint to grace Stanton Harcourt’s ancient church. A 13th-century wooden screen has an image of St Etheldreda, abbess of Ely (page 119). She was the most famous female saint in medieval England, a fitting companion to the more obscure St Edburga.

The painting is in reasonably good condition, but very dark even on a sunny day. It is on the right-hand end of the wooden paneling in front of the chancel, as you look at it from the nave. This paneling is part of a rood screen. ‘Rood’ is the old English word for ‘cross’, referring to the wooden crucifix that would sit on top. At various points in the liturgy, the screen would hide the mysteries of the Eucharistic sacrament from the congregation in the nave. Both Catholic and Protestant churches tended to remove such barriers after the Reformation. Stanton Harcourt has the oldest surviving wooden example in the country.

St Edburga was born around 620, possibly a daughter of Penda of Mercia – a pagan king who was tolerant of Christianity so long as converts were sincere (Bede’s History iii.21). She founded a small monastery at Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, working with her sister St Edith of Aylesbury and her niece St Osyth. She died in Aylesbury in 650 on 18 July.

Bicester Priory excavations

Archaeologists digging on the site of Bicester Priory in 2011 uncovered a simple lead casket containing human bones, buried beneath what had been the church’s north transept. This find sparked inevitable speculation in the media that St Edburga’s mortal remains had been unearthed. Radio carbon dating subsequently revealed that the person had lived in the 13th century.

St Edburga’s relics stand a better chance than most of being found, since her shrine was quietly suppressed a few decades before the Reformation. In the year 1500 the Pope ordered that St Edburga’s body be taken to Belgium, to stamp out an unofficial pilgrimage to her grave. Whether any of her bones were secretly left at Bicester, or indeed lie buried in an unmarked plot in Belgium, remains a question that devotees must be keener than ever to answer.

Directions

The church is down an unmarked lane, off Main Road, Stanton Harcourt OX29 5RJ

www.achurchnearyou.com/church/6006

W3W: fuse.dynamics.mailer

GPS: 51.7481N 1.3980W

The church is on the east side of the village at the end of a short gravel lane marked with a sign off the main village road, opposite the Harcourt Arms pub. It is open during the day.

The former site of Bicester Priory is on the south side of Bicester, partly under the modern St Edburg’s House care home on Old Place Yard, though there is nothing to see above ground. Bicester’s parish church is on Church Street 100m to the north; it was associated with the priory but did not house the shrine.