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A Fragment of a Reliquary Casket from Gwytherin, North Wales

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2011

Extract

A Drawing By The Antiquarian Edward Lhuyd or one of his assistants, which was made some time before the completion of his Parochialia c. 1699, was recently located in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (fig. 1). It shows a triangular-section wooden box decorated with metal mounts and is captioned Arch Gwenfrewi yn eglwys Gwytherin yn swydh Ddimbech (‘the shrine of Gwenfrewi [i.e. Winefride] in the church of Gwytherin Denbighshire’). This drawing, together with other illustrations of the shrine, and a discussion of its ornament, affinities and dating were subsequently published in an article in this journal. The shrine was thought to have been finally destroyed in the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps when the old church at Gwytherin was demolished in 1867. But in June 1991, while the above article was in press, a piece of wood was discovered by Tristan Gray Hulse in the presbytery attached to St Winefride's Catholic Church in Holywell (Flintshire), which includes the site of the famous holy well bearing her name. The fragment was wrapped in brown paper and labelled in faded black ink ‘From the wooden chest at Gwytherin supposed to have contained body of St Winifrede’. Enough survives for the piece to be identified securely as a fragment of one of the gable ends from the shrine of Gwenfrewi as illustrated in the Bodleian manuscript.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1992

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