Hotspot 30. Berrymead
Berrymead was not part of the old township; it lay in Berkshire until 1974 and was anciently the property of Abingdon Abbey. It is nevertheless part of the Iffley landscape as an open space, a grazing ground and, latterly, a nature reserve famous for snakeshead fritilliaries.
Fritillaries
Until the middle of the 10th century the main channel of the Isis was the now minor branch running to the West of Berrymead and today’s main channel probably only flowed during floods. The monks of Abingdon owned land with an eastern boundary defined by the main channel of the river. In the reign of King Edmund I (939-946) the monks claimed that the river had moved its main channel to the east and so “the meadow called Beri” should be theirs. In order to prove their claim they conducted an extraordinary ritual of probable pagan origin. Early one morning a group of monks got into a boat below what is now Folly Bridge and floated a round wooden shield bearing a sheaf of corn and a lighted candle on the water and followed it downstream. Where the stream divided (by today’s University boathouse) the shield “miraculously” followed the left channel between Beri and “Gifteleia” so indicating that it was God’s will that Beri should belong to Abingdon monastery.

This strange story can be found (in Latin) in a 13th century copy of the Chronicle of the Monastery of Abingdon. Mediaeval monasteries were adept at forgery in support of their territorial claims, but the reference to a round shield (long obsolete by the 1200s) suggests that the entry is a truthful account of a 10th century event.