Yesterday, I went on pilgrimage to the treacle well at Binsey.
It wasn’t a very long pilgrimage. The Perch isn’t the Tabard (it’s probably a lot nicer) and Binsey Lane isn’t the road to Canterbury.
There’s a longer version for the more dedicated pilgrim that goes from Christ Church Cathedral and past the site of Osney Abbey before turning west towards the Parish Church of Margaret and Antioch (an early saint of dubious provenance) and its legendary well. Even so, I fancy that the Camino de Santiago doesn’t have much to fear from the Botley Road.
The pilgrimage route links sites associated with the Saxon St Frideswide who, according to some accounts, founded her first small monastic community at Binsey before heading for the bright lights of Oxford.
It was a very nice pilgrimage. The sun was shining. There was a chicken, some nice cows, and some even nicer sheep; I gathered wool from the grass verge and ate blackberries from the hedgrow. And of course, visited the treacle well.
There really is a treacle well. It turns out that “treacle” is a medieval word for “healing water” rather than Lewis Carrol’s better know definition of, well, “treacle”.
To be fair, the well is a little underwhelming – well, very underwhelming – and I’m not sure that I’d want to either drink from it or douse myself in its waters.
But the real point of a pilgrimage is to travel, meditate, pray, grow and, eventually, to rest. The little church at journey’s end is open, welcoming, quiet, cool and unpretentious. It was a good pilgrimage – a buen camino.
After Work 
Thank you for that. As a huge fan of Lewis Carrol and all things “Alice” (I once led an Alice tour of Oxford) I’ve often wondered about the treacle wells.
Most of the saints are entirely imaginary. Eddy and I visited St Bees in Cumbria, home of St Beca from Ireland. She came to England to escape marriage with an Irish nobleman in order to preserve God’s greatest gift to woman, perpetual virginity. She even founded a monastery in Northumbria. Only she didn’t. She never even existed. The abbey never existed, she was no more than an idea, a cult, with no basis in history. Most of what was written about her is 17thC. There are literally hundreds of them, imaginary saints, noble ideas, venerated in churches all over Europe.
Of those who actually existed, my least favourite is St Thesesa of Calcutta, by contemporary accounts of her “sisters” a rather unpleasant woman who kept her charges in poverty as she believed poverty and humility to be a virtue. The hospitals and orphanages were not nice places, but when she became ill she went to a pukka one. As for her miracles, well who knows.
Actually, I think that the saint is kosher (as it were), but some of the more sensational actions ascribed to her were always deemed to be a bit apocryphal from the earliest days.
Before the advent of safe childbirth, reliable contraception, the Married Women’s Property Act and, I would argue, the welfare state, perpetual virginity was probably not such a dumb choice.
Single women could keep control of any money or property; didn’t die at a ridiculously early age through the complications of childbirth or the exhaustion of repeated pregnancies or live in the poverty caused by having too many mouths to feed; divorce violent or feckless husbands and even when they could, would, until very recently, would most likely lose custody of their children.
If you were a Saxon princess or otherwise endowed with money/ and or power pv might have been an attractive alternative to an arranged marriage.
Women who went into religious communities or other types of religious life could be educated, do intellectually challenging things, have interesting jobs, run businesses and be respected in their own right. The resurgence of religious communities in the 19th century was both spiritual and practical – part of a movement that enabled capable women to study, run schools and hospitals and carry out other important acts of social welfare as well as having an active spiritual life.