Osburh of Coventry
From Butler's Lives of the Saints,[2] and the nineteenth century book by Stanton,[3] David Farmer[4] suggests that Osburh died around 1018 CE, having been, from its inception, abbess of a convent founded by King Cnut two years earlier.Around the Saxon nunnery, Coventry gradually developed as a town, though settlement in the area dates back to the Iron Age.[7] The 15th-century writer John Rous related that Cnut the Great destroyed the old Coventry minster, and referred to the "holy virgin Osburga now laid there in a noble shrine".[8] The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the devastation of neighbouring Warwickshire in 1016, so Cnut's having attacked a convent at Coventry is credible.Destroyed during the sixteenth-century Reformation, when the monastery was dissolved,[9] was a splendid shrine with relics, along with Osburh's head enclosed in copper and gold (description in 1539).