St Osyth's Birthplace and Holy Well

Quarrendon: somewhere in these empty fields, a Saxon princess-saint was said to be born, on ground where nothing would grow.

Hagiographic tradition says St Osyth, possibly a daughter of the Mercian sub-king Frithuwold, was born at a royal residence at Quarrendon in the mid-seventh century. The Tudor antiquary John Leland copied a twelfth-century account saying local peasants still pointed out the site of the royal hall as a patch of ground where nothing would grow and which was never used for ordinary purposes. Leland also recorded a holy well of St Osyth between Quarrendon and Aylesbury. Neither the hall nor the well has been securely located, and the archaeologists suggest the palace story may have become tangled with Aylesbury itself.