The Parish Magazine July and August 2021

feature — 1
Even though there are more than
10,000 officially named saints there
are few that are not shared, for
example, there are more than 600
churches in England named after St
Andrew. It is rare for any church or
parish to claim a unique saint, but we
can for our ecclesiastical parish that
serves Charvil, Sonning and Sonning
Eye. Our unique saint is St Sarik!
St Who? is a common response to
strangers hearing his name, assuming,
of course, that he was male, after all,
there are 2,368 churches dedicated to
St Mary in the Church of England.
The Parish Magazine archives only
give a little background as to who
Sarik may have been and why he was
associated with our parish church, but
then the archives only go back to 1869!
However, Canon Chris Clark,
vicar of Sonning from 1999 - 2008,
announced in the December 1999 issue
of The Parish Magazine why the PCC
had decided to dedicate a new meeting
room to St Sarik.
Quoting from the 16th Century
historian John Leland's Itinerary,
Canon Clark wrote: 'Thens a mile and
half to Sonning, an uplandish Toune, but
set on a fair and commodius Grounde ...
there is an old Chapelle at the Est ende of
the Chirche of S. Sarik, whither of late tyme
resorted in Pilgrimage many folkes for the
Disease of Madness.'
The new St Sarik meeting room was
created by rebuilding part of what was
in Victorian times a morgue — the
nearby Sonning lock was a natural
stopping place for the unfortunate
bodies that entered the River Thames
upstream at Reading.
Canon Pearson, founder of this
magazine in 1869 also researched the
subject of St Sarik and concluded that
a chapel dedicated to him certainly
existed. The biggest uncertainty seems
to have been the saint's name which
could be Sarik, Sarac, Siric or Cyricus.
SIGERIC THE SERIOUS
Cyricus, with his mother Julitta,
were two of the earliest martyrs
venerated by the Catholic Church.
They were put to death in 304 AD and
in the Eastern Orthodox Church and
Oriental Orthodox Church their feast
day is this month on 15 July.
Another character in the St Sarik
mystery is Sigeric the Serious who
from 985-992 was in residence here as
the Bishop of Ramsbury and Sonning.
He went on to become, Archbishop of
Canterbury and died in 994.
The Parish Magazine - July/August 2021 15
Saint who? St Sarik, our unique parish saint!
A statue of Sigeric the Serious in Glastonbury
The St Andrew's choir emerge from the St Sarik Room
Alexirina27000, dreamstime.com
Tom Farncombe
Sigeric's name is engraved in a
bronze plaque in St Andrew's which
lists the 'Bishops of Sunning' and it has
been suggested that he buried some
of St Cyricus's relics in the church.
Burying a saint's relics in a holy place
was a common thing to do in those
days because it would encourage
pilgrims from distant places to visit
the burial site which, in turn, became a
lucrative tourist attraction!
Often the pilgrims were attracted
because they believed that they would
receive some kind of spiritual or
physical healing from being close to
the relics.
Any evidence of the relics being
buried has long been lost in time but
one of the interesting aspects of John
Leland's quotation above is this hope
that pilgrims had of a cure for 'the
Disease of Madness'.
While there is no documented
evidence of pilgrims being cured of
mental health illnesses, there has
been a suggestion from the work of
archaeologists in the church grounds
in 2001 that some of the Saxon
remains buried there could have been
from people suffering from physical
ailments and that they may have come
to Sonning for healing by St Sarik.
The remains were found in
the garden of The Bull during a
construction project and were clearly
the result of an ancient Christian
burial alongside what is believed to
have been the original site of the first
wooden Saxon church.
The Saxon remains found by The
Bull are now buried in a 'mass' grave in
the churchyard and the St Sarik Room
is used as a choir vestry.