pp. 95–101). There is a fourteenth-century life in Lansdowne MS. 436. It is not improbable that St. Frideswide, a member of the royal house of Mercia, should have founded a monastery at Oxford in the eighth century (Boase, Oxford, p. 5). The belief that English kings feared to enter the city is curious, for Oxford was a favourite place for holding meetings of the witan in the eleventh century, and King Harold died there in 1040. It lingered late, for it is noted that Henry III ‘defied the old superstition which was commonly repeated’ by worshipping at the saint's shrine in 1264 (Wykes, iv. 143), and it was said that Edward I refrained from entering Oxford in 1275 from fear of the legend (ib. p. 264). The relics of St. Frideswide were translated on 12 Feb. 1180 (ib. p. 39). Wood says that Henry II was present at the ceremony (Annals, i. 166, comp. Hardy, Descript. Cat. i. 460); the church was within the walls. A second translation was performed on 10 Sept. 1289 to a new and splendid shrine erected near the old shrine (Ann. Osen. iv. 318). Probably at a later date the shrine was removed to the north aisle. The shrine was destroyed in 1538. Some bones, said to be those of St. Frideswide, were in the church in the reign of Mary, for in 1557 Pole considered that wrong had been done to the saint by burying Catherine Cathie, once a nun, the wife of Peter Martyr, near the virgin's sepulchre. Catherine's bones were accordingly cast out. In Elizabeth's reign Catherine's bones were reburied and were mixed with the relics of the saint, both being laid in the same receptacle, with the epitaph, ‘Hic jacet religio cum superstitione’ (Monasticon, ii. 141; Froude, vi. 36–8). St. Fridewide's monastery came into the hands of secular priests or canons probably during the Danish wars of the ninth century, and was held by them when the Domesday survey was made (Domesday, f. 157 a). The condition of the house was in bad repute, and in 1111 or 1121 Roger, bishop of Salisbury, established there a convent of regular canons of St. Augustine under Guimund as the first prior (Gesta Pontificum, p. 316). The convent was suppressed in virtue of a bull obtained by Wolsey from Clement VII, and bearing date 15 Sept. 1524, which was confirmed by the king 5 Jan. 1525. In July Henry granted the site and lands to Wolsey for the foundation of ‘Cardinal's College.’ The society was refounded by the king in 1532 under the name of ‘King Henry VIII's College in Oxford.’ Lastly, in 1545, the collegiate church was made cathedral, and called the church of ‘Christ and the B. Virgin Mary,’ and was again founded in the November of the next year as the ‘Cathedral church of Christ,’ the old college becoming the house of Christ Church. St. Frideswide's day is 19 Oct., on which she is supposed to have died (Leland, Collectanea, i. 342), and for which there is an office in the Sarum Breviary. Under the year 1268 Wood observes that after the translation of the saint it was the custom for the chancellor and scholars in the middle of Lent and on the festival of the Ascension to go in procession to the church of St. Frideswide as the mother-church of the university and town, and there worship (Annals, i. 272).
[Parker's Early Hist. of Oxford, pp. 86–104 (Oxf. Hist. Soc.); Acta SS. Oct. viii. 533 sq.; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum, p. 315 (Rolls Ser.), and Gesta Regum, i. 297 (Engl. Hist. Soc.); Ann. de Osen., Chron. T. Wykes, Ann. Monast. iv. 39, 143, 264, 318; Robert of Gloucester, ii. 545 (Hearne); Dugdale's Monasticon, ii. 134–75; Leland's Collectanea, i. 342 (Hearne); Wood's Annals, Hist. and Antiq. of Oxford, i. 166, 272 (Gutch); Hardy's Descript. Cat. i. 460 (Rolls Ser.); Leonard Hutten's Antiq. of Oxford, Elizabethan Oxford, pp. 51–61 (Oxf. Hist. Soc.); Boase's Oxford, pp. 4, 9, 38 (Historic Towns Ser.); Froude's Hist. of England, vi. 36–8 (ed. cr. 8vo); Dict. of Christian Biog. ii. 563.]
FRIEND, Sir JOHN (d. 1696), conspirator, was the eldest son of John Friend, a brewer, who resided in the precinct of St. Katharine's, near the Tower of London (Le Neve, Pedigrees of the Knights, Harl. Soc. pp. 398–9; will of John Friend, the elder, P. C. C. 141, Mico). He followed his father's business. He built the ‘stately brewhouse’ called the Phœnix in the Minories, and amassed considerable wealth. For a while he maintained a fine country residence at Hackney. In 1683 he was appointed a commissioner of excise (Haydn, Book of Dignities, p. 502). As colonel of the Artillery Company Friend, on occasion of their feast, 26 June 1684, had the honour of entertaining the Duke of York and Prince George of Denmark ‘at a banquett in a fair large tent’ in the Artillery Ground (Luttrell, Relation of State Affairs, 1857, i. 312). Though avowedly a protestant he remained a faithful adherent of James II, by whom he was knighted 3 Aug. 1685. After the revolution he was expelled from the artillery company at a meeting held in February 1689–90 (ib. ii. 13), and lost his seat at the board of excise. However, by a treasury order dated 18 Dec. 1690, he was relieved from the payment of excise duties (Cal. State Papers, Treas. 1556–1696, p. 148). James sent him a colonel's commission to raise a regiment of horse against the day when the French
