October 7 is the festival of the Saxon Abbess and Saint, S Osyth. I grew up with her, in a sense, because the Catholic Church in Clacton on Sea is dedicated to Our Lady of Light (a devotion of Breton origin about which I wrote a few months ago) and S Osyth.
Because: only five or six miles away, there was a village called St Osyth (although its original name had been Chich). Osyth was one of those Saxon royal females and foundresses who so enliven the early ecclesiastical history of this island. As a boy, I used to go walking there; in those Essex marshes, one can get a sense of being miles from anywhere amid the wind and the water. And so, a little while ago, before writing this piece, I brought up on the computer a decade-or-so old episode of a TV Archaeology programme called Time Team, because I recalled that they made a major archaeological onslaught on the area and I thought I had better familiarise myself ... er ...
Oh dear.
They found pretty well nothing from the first millennium.
The area concerned is not a small one. And, in our Essex marshes, centres of population can move around. And I think the diggers were not encouraged to excavate within the precincts of what was was once a second millennium major religious House.
So I resisted the 'enlightenment' temptation to wonder if those monks had invented S Osyth so as to have a profitable shrine.
In Britain and Ireland, monastic sites were often within easy reach of the sea. There are several Roman villas near St Osyth marked on the map; the site was within easy reach of the Colonia Claudia Victricensis (my ancestral town).
Indeed, in S Osyth's day, a skilled waterman had only to get less than ten miles across the estuaries of the Colne and the Blackwater from her settlement to reach the neighbouring monastery founded by S Chad in the ruins of the old 'Saxon Shore' fort of Othona.
Presumably, such coastal religious communities waited avidly, as spring approached, for the Navigation Season to open, so as to replenish their supplies ... not least ... of wine and oil. I think it was Professor Charles Thomas who once reconstructed from shards the entire itinerary of a 'dark age' cargo boat from the East Mediterranean round the South West coasts of this archipelago.
During the winter months, just as First Millennium Irish middens reveal that the religious there binged on limpets, perhaps S Osyth and her sisters luxuriated on Mersea oysters without even needing to order them from Fortnum's.
Perhaps they ate those oysters off samphire ...
... off samphire richly doused in melted Essex butter ...
Yum Yum ... happy shuckers ....
... simple autochthonous food ... ...
1 comment:
Yes, and oysters were considered "poor food" back then, so they would have seemed highly suitable for a simple religious house's diet.
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