Blog for week ending 19th September
There is an oral tradition that the du Patural family stems from an illegitimate offspring of a Seigneur de la Roue and a shepherdess from the village of Eyvant. ( Perhaps Patural is derived from Pâturage which is french for pasture or grazing.)
The de la Roue's already had a coat of arms, so I presume that the bastard, for thus he was, chose to make his ancestry clear by taking the wheel as his armorial bearing.
The top left hand segment is easy to explain for the wavy blue line denotes the river from which the village name is derived. The name has appeared in various forms with Grandis Rious (C11th), Grandirivo (C13th) and Grandrife on a 1909 postcard, with Grand Ruisseau in between.
A straight translation of Grand ruisseau would be big stream
In
the top right hand segment is a dog carrying a
loaf of bread in his mouth. This relates to the
story of St. Roch, one of the two patron saints
of our village church.
St Roch was born in Montpellier in about 1295
where his father was governor. St. Roch had a red
birthmark on his chest in the shape of a cross.
When only twenty he became an orphan. His father
had bequeathed the governorship of the city to
him. Instead he gave the post to his uncle and,
having bestowed his wealth on the poor, set out
on a pilgrimage to Rome.
But this was a time when the plague raged
throughout Europe and St. Roch only got as far as
Aquapendente where he started his work amongst
those stricken by the plague. He had great
success in administering to the sick and went on
to have similar success in Cesana, Mantua, Modena
and Palma amongst many other places in and around
Rome. Finally at Piacenza he was himself laid low
by the plague. He was expelled from the village
and took refuge in a small hut in the nearby
forest. He would probably have perished had not a
dog found him and brought him bread each day.
The statue in the church in Grandrif portrays
him, as is the tradition, displaying wounds on
his leg, with the dog offering him a loaf of
bread.
On his eventual return to Montpellier, still
disguised as a pilgrim, he was arrested as a spy
by his own uncle and thrown into prison. He
languished there for five years, dying 16 August
1327, without revealing his name, to avoid
worldly glory. Upon his death the red cross on
his chest was discovered; he was soon canonized,
and a great church erected in veneration.
He is
commemorated throughout Europe not least by the
Scuola Grande di San Rocco and the adjacent
church in Venice. The Scuola Grande is famous for
paintings by Tintoretto, who painted St Roch in
glory on a ceiling canvas
(1564).
