History
Before being renamed to commemorate Saint Osyth, the village was called Chich (alternative spellings include Chiche and Chick).
St Osyth was the subject of an episode of Channel 4's Time Team programme, "Lost Centuries of St Osyth", (series 12 episode 9, first broadcast in February 2005). This programme sought to uncover the early origins of the village, which was presumed to have grown up at around the same time as the Priory, in the twelfth century. Many of the investigations around the current village centre found little evidence of settlement earlier than the fourteenth century; it appeared that the early village centre lay some way off, between the Priory and the river.
The village was a focus for the St Osyth Witches witch persecutions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with a total of ten local women being hanged as a result. In 1921 the skeletons of two women were discovered in the garden of a house in the village. One was claimed to be the witch Ursley Kempe who was the first to be prosecuted. The skeletons became a local tourist attraction.
In 2012, alleged sightings of a lion near the village sparked an armed hunt for the animal. The search was ended within 24 hours after no trace of the animal was found, nor had any animals escaped from a nearby circus or Colchester Zoo.
Read more about this topic: St Osyth
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“The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
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“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)