The Charm of Oxford Part 5

Brasenose (or B.N.C., as it is universally called) has produced a prime minister of England in Henry Addington, whom the college record kindly describes as "not the most distinguished" statesman who has held that position: but a much better known worthy is John Foxe, the Martyrologist, whose chained works used to add a grim charm of horror to so many parish churches in England; the experiences of the young Macaulay, at Cheddar, are an example which could be paralleled by those of countless young readers of Foxe, who, however, did not become great historians and are forgotten. Somewhat junior to Foxe, at B.N.C., was Robert Burton, the author of the /Anatomy of Melancholy/, who found both his lifework as a parish vicar, and his burial-place in Oxford.

But these names, and the names of many other B.N.C. worthies, hardly attain to the first rank in the annals of England's life. The distinguishing features of the College have long been its special connection with the Palatine counties, Lancashire and Cheshire, and its prominence in the athletic life which is so large a part of Oxford's attraction. To the connection with Lancashire, B.N.C. owes the name of its college boat, "The Child of Hale"; for John Middleton, the famous, giant, who is said to have been 9 ft. 3 in.

high (perhaps measurements were loose when James I was king), was invited by the members of his county to visit the College, where he is said to have left a picture of his hand; this the ever curious Pepys paid 2s. to see. A more profitable connection between Lancashire and B.N.C. is the famous Hulmeian endowment, which is almost a record instance of the value of the unearned increment of land to a learned foundation.

The rowing men of Brasenose are as famous as the scholars of Balliol.

The poet parodist, half a century ago, described her as:

"Queen of the Isis wave, Who trains her crews on beef and beer, Compet.i.tors to brave,"

and the lines written in jest were a true compliment. The young manhood of England had maintained its vigour by its love of athletics, and has learned, in the discipline of the athletic club, how to obey and also how to command. Hence it was fitting that to B.N.C. should fall the honour of giving to Britain her greatest soldier in the Great War; Lord Haig of Bemerside was an undergraduate member of the College in the 'eighties of the last century, and the College has honoured him and itself by making him an Honorary Fellow.

Most Oxford colleges have their quaint and distinctive customs; that of Brasenose was certainly not inappropriate to the character that has just been sketched. Every Shrove Tuesday some junior member of the College presented verses to the butler in honour of Brasenose ale, and received a draught in return. The custom is recorded by Hearne more than two hundred years ago, and may well be older, though, as the poet of the Quatercentenary sadly confessed, its attribution to King Alfred--

"Our woven fantasy of Alfred's ale, By conclusive cut of critic dry, Is shredded clean away."

The most distinguished poet who thus commemorated the special drink of England and of B.N.C. was Reginald Heber, bishop and hymn-writer, who composed the verses in 1806; the compositions have been collected and published at least three times. When the old brew-house was pulled down to make room for the New Quad, the College gave up brewing its own beer, and its poets ceased to celebrate it; but the custom was revived, as has been said, in 1909. It may be permitted to a non-Brasenose man to quote and echo the patriotic expressions of the versifier of 1886:

"Shall Brasenose, therefore, fail to hold her own?

She nerves herself, anew, for coming strife, Her vigorous pulses beat with strength and life.

Courage, my brothers! Troubles past forget!

On to fresh deeds! the G.o.ds love Brasenose yet."

CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE

"But still the old quadrangle keeps the same, The pelican is here; Ancestral genius of the place, whose name All Corpus men revere."

J. J. C., in "/The Pelican Record/," 1700.

[Plate XVI. Corpus Christi College : The First Quadrangle]

Corpus is emphatically, before all other colleges in Oxford, the college of the Revival of Learning; its very foundation marked the change from the old order of things to the new. Its Founder, Bishop Foxe, of Winchester, was one of the great statesman-prelates to whom mediaeval England owed so much, and he had a leading share in arranging the two royal marriages which so profoundly affected the history of our country, that of Henry VII's daughter, Margaret, with the King of Scotland, and that of his son, afterwards Henry VIII, with Catharine of Aragon.

After a life spent "in the service of G.o.d" "in the State," rather than "in the Church," Foxe resolved to devote some of his great wealth to a foundation for the strengthening of the Church. His first intention was to found a college for monks, but, fortunately for his memory and for Oxford, he followed the advice of his friend, Bishop Oldham, of Exeter, who told him, in words truly prophetic, that the days of monasteries were past: "What, my lord, shall we build housed for a company of buzzing monks, whose end and fall we ourselves may live to see? No, no, it is more meet a great deal that we should have care to provide for the increase of learning." In the next generation the monasteries were all swept away, while Foxe's College remains a monument of the Founder's pious liberality and of his friend's wise prescience.

Corpus was the first inst.i.tution in England where definite provision was made for a teacher of the Greek Language, and Erasmus hailed it with enthusiasm; in a letter to the first President of the new college, he definitely contrasts the conciliatory methods of Reformers in England with the more violent methods of those in Germany, and counts Foxe's foundation, which he compares to the Pyramids of Egypt or the Colossus of Rhodes, among "the chief glories of Britain."

Foxe, however, did not confine his benefactions to cla.s.sical studies, important as these were. He imported a German to teach his scholars mathematics, and the scientific tastes of his students are well ill.u.s.trated by the picturesque and curious dial, still in the centre of his College Quad, which was constructed by one of them in the reign of Elizabeth. It is well shown in our picture, as are also Foxe's charming low buildings, almost unaltered since the time of their Founder.

But it has been on the humanistic, rather than on the scientific, side that Corpus men have specially distinguished themselves. The first century of the College existence produced the two great Elizabethan champions of Anglicanism. Bishop Jewel, whose "Apology"

was for a long period the great bulwark of the English Church against Jesuit attacks, had laid the foundations of his great learning in the Corpus Library, still--after that of Merton--the most picturesque in Oxford; he often spent whole days there, beginning an hour before Early Ma.s.s, i.e. at 4 a.m., and continuing his reading till 10 p.m.

"There were giants on the earth in those days." Even more famous is the "judicious Hooker," who resided in the college for sixteen years, and only left it when, by the wiles of a woman, he, "like a true Nathanael who feared no guile" (as his biographer, Isaac Walton, writes), was entrapped into a marriage which "brought him neither beauty nor fortune." The first editor of his great work, /The Ecclesiastical Polity/, was a Corpus man, and it was only fitting that the Anglican Revival of the nineteenth century should receive its first impulse from the famous a.s.size Sermon (in 1833) of another Corpus scholar, John Keble.

Corpus has been singularly fortunate in its history, no doubt because its Presidents have been so frequently men of mark for learning and for character. Even in the dark period of the eighteenth century it recovered sooner than the rest of the University, and one of its sons records complacently that "scarcely a day pa.s.sed without my having added to my stock of knowledge some new fact or idea." A charming picture of the life of the scholars of Corpus at the beginning of the last century is given in Stanley's /Life of Arnold/; for the famous reformer of the English public-school system was at the College immediately after John Keble, whom he followed as fellow to Oriel, on the other side of the road. It need hardly be added that in those days an Oriel Fellowship was the crown of intellectual distinction in Oxford.

Bishop Foxe had set up his college as a "ladder" by which, "with one side of it virtue and the other knowledge," men might, while they "are strangers and pilgrims in this unhappy and dying world," "mount more easily to heaven." Changing his metaphor he goes on, "We have founded and raised up in the University of Oxford a hive wherein scholars, like intelligent bees, may, night and day, build up wax to the glory of G.o.d, and gather honeyed sweets for their own profit and that of all Christian men." So far as it is given to human inst.i.tutions to succeed, his college has fulfilled his aims.

CHRIST CHURCH (1) THE CATHEDRAL

[Plate XVII. Christ Church : The Cathedral from the Meadows]

"Those voiceless towers so tranquil seem, And yet so solemn in their might, A loving heart could almost deem That they themselves might conscious be That they were filled with immortality."

F. W. FABER.

The east end of Oxford Cathedral, shown both in the frontispiece (Plate I) and Plate XVII, probably contains the oldest buildings, above ground, in Oxford. Inside the cathedral can clearly be seen traces of three round arches, which may well be part of the church founded by St. Frideswyde in the eighth century. That princess, according to the tradition, the details of which are all pictured by Burne-Jones in the east window of the Latin Chapel, having escaped by a miracle the advances of too ardent a suitor, founded a nunnery at Oxford. The nunnery, which was later transferred to Canons, was undoubtedly the earliest inst.i.tution in Oxford, and in its cloisters, in the second decade of the twelfth century, we hear of students gathering for instruction. It was this old monastery, which Wolsey, with his reforming zeal, chose as the site of his great Cardinal College, and the chapel of the old foundation was to serve for his new one, until such time as a great new chapel, rivalling in splendour that of King's College at Cambridge, had been built on the north side of Tom Quad. This new chapel never got beyond the stage of foundations; and hence the old building has continued to serve the college till this day, having been made also the cathedral of the new diocese of Oxford, which was founded by King Henry VIII. Wolsey may, perhaps, be credited with the fine fan tracery of the choir roof, but he certainly swept away three bays of the nave in order to carry out his ambitious building plans, and only one of these three bays has been restored in the nineteenth century.

Wolsey's action at Christ Church was significant. Men felt that the days of monasteries were past, and the Church was ready to welcome and to extend the New Learning. But his changes were a dangerous precedent; as Fuller says with his usual quaintness: "All the forest of religious foundations in England did shake, justly fearing the King would finish to fell the oaks, seeing the Cardinal began to cut the underwood." Henry, however, when he swept away the monasteries, spared his great minister's work; modifying it, however, as has just been said, by a.s.sociating the newly-founded college with the diocese of Oxford, now formed out of the unwieldy See of Lincoln.

The cathedral is the smallest in England, but contains many features of special interest; its most marked peculiarity is the great breadth of the choir, due to the addition of two aisles on the north side; these were built to gain more room for the worshippers at the shrine of St. Frideswyde. Another feature of architectural interest is the spire, which is one of the earliest in England. But perhaps even more interesting is the wonderful series of gla.s.s windows, which give good examples of almost every English style from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. And for once the moderns can hold their own; the Burne-Jones windows of the choir (not, however, the Frideswyde window, already mentioned) are particularly beautiful.

The hand of the "restorer" has been active at Christ Church, as elsewhere in Oxford; Gilbert Scott took on himself to remove a fine fourteenth-century window from the east end of the choir, and to subst.i.tute the Norman work shown in Plate I. The effect is admittedly good, but it may be questioned whether it be right to falsify architectural history in this way.

Oxford Cathedral has great a.s.sociations apart from the college to which it belongs. It was to it that Cranmer was brought to receive the Pope's sentence of condemnation, and in the cloisters the ceremony of his degradation from the archbishopric was carried out.

Almost a century later the Cathedral was the centre of the religious life of the Royalist party; when Charles I made his capital in Oxford and his home in Christ Church, and when the Cavaliers fought to the war-cry of "Church and King." It is not surprising that, when the Parliamentarians entered Oxford, the windows of the Cathedral were much "abused"; that so much old gla.s.s was spared was probably due to the local patriotism of old Oxford men.

In the next century it was to Christ Church that Bishop Berkeley, the greatest of British philosophers, retired to end his days, and to find a burial-place; and, during the long life of Dr. Pusey, the Cathedral of Oxford was a place of pilgrimage, as the living centre of the Oxford movement.

In the back of the picture (Plate XVII), behind the Cathedral, rises the square tower, put up by Mr. Bodley to contain the famous Christ Church peal of bells (now twelve in number), familiar through Dean Aldrich's famous round, "Hark, the bonny Christ Church bells." When the tower was erected, it was the subject of much criticism, especially from the witty pen of C. L. Dodgson, the world-famous creator of /Alice in Wonderland/. The opening paragraph is a fair specimen: "Of the etymological significance of the new belfry, Christ Church.

"The word 'belfry' is derived from the French '/bel/-- beautiful, meet,' and from the German '/frei/--free, unfettered, safe.' Thus the word is strictly equivalent to 'meat-safe,' to which the new belfry bears a resemblance so perfect as almost to amount to coincidence."

Others saw in the uncompromising squareness of the new tower a subtle compliment to the Greek lexicon of Liddell, who then was Dean. But in spite of the wits, who resented any innovation in so famous a group of buildings, Bodley's tower is a fine one, and really enhances the effect of Tom Quad.

CHRIST CHURCH (2) THE HALL STAIRCASE

"And love the high-embowed roof With antique pillars ma.s.sy proof."

MILTON

[Plate XVIII. Christ Church : The Hall Staircase]

When Wolsey began to build what he intended to be the most splendid college in the world, the first part to be finished was the dining- hall, with the kitchen. The wits of the time made very merry at this: their epigram /Egregium opus! Cardinalis iste inst.i.tuit collegium et absolvit popinam/ may be rendered:

"Here's a fine piece of work! Your Cardinal A college plans, completes a guzzling-hall."

Certainly the hall of Christ Church is the finest "popina" which has ever been abused by envious critics; its size and magnificence place it easily first among the halls of Oxford, and its great outline stands conspicuous in all views of Oxford from the south, whether by day, or when by night, to quote M. Arnold's "Thyrsis":

"The line of festal light in Christ Church Hall"