Osgyth (or Osyth; died c. 700 AD) was a Mercian noblewoman and prioress, venerated as an English saint since the 8th century, from soon after her death.

Raised in the care of her maternal aunts, St Edith of Aylesbury and Edburga of Bicester, her ambition was to become an abbess, but she was too important as a political pawn to be set aside.

[2] While her husband was off on a long hunt to run down a beautiful white stag, Osgyth persuaded two local bishops to accept her vows as a nun.

Upon his return some days later, he reluctantly agreed to her decision and granted her some land at Chich near Colchester, now named after her as St Osyth, where she established a convent,[3] and ruled as first abbess.

The holy spring at Quarrendon, mentioned in the time of Osgyth's aunts, now became associated with her legend, in which Osgyth stood up after her execution, picking up her head like Saint Denis in Paris, and other cephalophoric martyrs and walking with it in her hands, to the door of a local convent, before collapsing there.

[7] Around 1121, his successor, Richard de Belmeis I founded a priory for canons of Saint Augustine, on the site of a former nunnery at Chich.

[7] Benefactions, charters, and privileges granted by Henry II, made the Canons wealthy: at the Dissolution of the monasteries in 1536, priory revenues were valued at £758 5s.

In 1397 the abbot of St Osgyth was granted the right to wear a mitre and give the solemn benediction, and, more singularly, the right to ordain priests, conferred by Pope Boniface IX.

Undeterred, according to the curious 17th-century antiquary John Aubrey (author of the Brief Lives), "in those days, when they went to bed they did rake up the fire, and make a X on the ashes, and pray to God and Saint Sythe [Saint Osgyth] to deliver them from fire, and from water, and from all misadventure."