by Ann Swinfen
I have taken one liberty with time. The attack by Prior de Hungerford, accompanied by a group of secular thugs from the town, on the sub-prior and canons, during Matins (the midnight service), actually took place about eight months later – I hope I’ll be forgiven for bringing it forward. Prior de Hungerford was an out-and-out scoundrel!
The priory grange, mentioned in the story, appears to have stood on part of the ground now occupied by the university Botanic Garden, at some distance from the main enclave.
When I wrote The Bookseller’s Tale, I made a brief mention of St Frideswide’s Fair, assuming that it was held on the obvious open area of St Giles, where later fairs were located, and where St Giles Fair still takes place every autumn, although it is a very different kind of fair nowadays. Further research revealed that St Frideswide’s Fair was held close to the priory, which was natural enough, making it easier to control. The fairground seems to have been the northwest portion of what is now Christ Church Meadow, just outside the town wall which formed the southern boundary of the priory enclave, and just past the South Gate for those coming from the town.
Time passed. The monastic institutions were dissolved and their property seized by Henry VIII, St Frideswide’s being suppressed even earlier (by Cardinal Wolsey) in April 1524. The fair was handed over to the town and held around the Guildhall, but the town never made a success of it, so that it eventually died. The priory buildings, income, and property were ‘acquired’ by Wolsey, who planned to create on the site his huge Cardinal College. The wonderful church had the three bays at the west end of the nave demolished to make way for what is now Tom Quad, but mercifully the plan to destroy the rest of the medieval church was never carried out and it later became Christ Church Cathedral, with its own bishop. I was confirmed there when I was a student – and long before I knew anything about St Frideswide’s Fair.
Wolsey too fell, in 1530, to the capricious jealousy of Henry VIII, who took over the college project in 1532, completing it as Christ Church College, familiarly known now as The House. If Nicholas were to stand in the church today, with his back to the truncated west end of the nave, he would recognise it, though it would probably look a little bare to him.
Thanks to the efforts of many concerned members of the university and citizens of Oxford, the wonderful meadows stretching south, down from the town wall to the rivers, still remain beautiful and unsullied, a large piece of the country in the middle of the town. These meadows used to be rougher, with several streams wandering across them, streams which are now culverted, but walking there it is not difficult to imagine Nicholas and Emma sitting by the river, with the merchants’ barges coming upstream and the busy hum of the fair at their backs.
A final thought. Many people do not realise how far back in the past the use of spectacles occurs, but in fact they appear in portraits of the fourteenth century. When they were first developed, they would have been expensive. However, by early in the following century they were so common that hawkers were selling them in the streets of London, alongside the pedlars of hot pies and other delights. Read the fifteenth century poem London Lickpenny and you will see them mentioned:
‘Master, what will you copen or buy?
Fine felt hats, or spectacles to read?’
The poem is worth reading in any case for its ironic refrain ‘For lack of money I might not speed’. Nothing ever changes!
The Author
Ann Swinfen spent her childhood partly in England and partly on the east coast of America. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Classics and Mathematics and married a fellow undergraduate, the historian David Swinfen. While bringing up their five children and studying for a postgraduate MSc in Mathematics and a BA and PhD in English Literature, she had a variety of jobs, including university lecturer, translator, freelance journalist and software designer. She served for nine years on the governing council of the Open University and for five years worked as a manager and editor in the technical author division of an international computer company, but gave up her full-time job to concentrate on her writing, while continuing part-time university teaching in English Literature. In 1995 she founded Dundee Book Events, a voluntary organisation promoting books and authors to the general public.
She is the author of the highly acclaimed series, The Chronicles of Christoval Alvarez. Set in the late sixteenth century, it features a young Marrano physician recruited as a code-breaker and spy in Walsingham’s secret service. In order, the books are: The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez, The Enterprise of England, The Portuguese Affair, Bartholomew Fair, Suffer the Little Children, Voyage to Muscovy, The Play’s the Thing, and That Time May Cease.
Her Fenland Series takes place in East Anglia during the seventeenth century. In the first book, Flood, both men and women fight desperately to save their land from greedy and unscrupulous speculators. The second, Betrayal, continues the story of the dangerous search for legal redress and security for the embattled villagers, at a time when few could be trusted.
Her latest series, the bestselling Oxford Medieval Mysteries, is set in the fourteenth century and features bookseller Nicholas Elyot, a young widower with two small children, and his university friend Jordain Brinkylsworth, who are faced with crime in the troubled world following the Black Death. In order, the books are: The Bookseller’s Tale, The Novice’s Tale, The Huntsman’s Tale. And The Merchant’s Tale. Both series are being recorded as unabridged audiobooks.
She has also written two standalone historical novels. The Testament of Mariam, set in the first century, recounts, from an unusual perspective, one of the most famous and yet ambiguous stories in human history, while exploring life under a foreign occupying force, in lands still torn by conflict to this day. This Rough Ocean is based on the real-life experiences of the Swinfen family during the 1640s, at the time of the English Civil War, when John Swynfen was imprisoned for opposing the killing of the king, and his wife Anne had to fight for the survival of her children and dependents.
Ann Swinfen now lives on the northeast coast of Scotland, with her husband, formerly vice-principal of the University of Dundee, a rescue cat called Maxi, and a cocker spaniel called Suki.
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Learn more at her website www.annswinfen.com
