More on Steventon

The Directors of the Railway Company used to have their meeting in Steventon; it is roughly half-way between London and Bristol, and a train from each place brought the two groups of Directors for Board Meetings, held in a solid building (which still survives) beside the Railway Station (which does not; a "Kingdom Hall" is built on its site). If you go up Steventon High Street and then turn left down the ancient Causeway, half-timbered medieval houses beside you for all its length, you come to the Church. Its notice board caught my eye.

On it (I approve of the use of Heraldry) are the arms of the old Catholic Diocese of Oxford. These show a fess; above it, three female demi-Saints who were clearly princesses, since they are crowned. Tradition identifies them as S Frideswide, Advocata specialis almae Universitatis, and two other ladies who appear in her legends: S Margaret and S Etheldreda (the three appear again in the famous Eucharistic Window in S Thomas's, cause of the celebrated anti-Ritualist law-suit). In the base is an Ox walking across a ford. The old undergraduate joke was that the composition represents three lady dons viva-ing a cow.

However, the artist of the Steventon notice board had introduced a variation of his own. Each of the three ladies has her upper garment drawn open, revealing her breasts. They look for all the world like those rather noticeable 'priestesses' or 'mother goddesses' dug up by Sir Arthur Evans (whose home was not many miles away in Boars Hill) in Minoan Crete.

I wondered how one would blazon such a detail. The words "lactating, proper" passed through my mind, but that's not quite right.