OXFORD TO ABINGDON.
Oxford, from the Upper River; the New Town--The Courses of the
River, from Medley Weir to Folly Bridge--The Houses of the
Regulars and Friars--The University and Parish Churches--The
Halls and Colleges of the Seculars, from the Thirteenth Century
to the Reformation--Jacobean Oxford--Classic Oxford--Convenient
Oxford--The Architectural Revival--The Undergraduate
Revival--The River below Folly Bridge, and the Invention
of Rowing--The Navigation Shape of the River--Floods--The
Barges--Iffley--Littlemore--Kennington--Radley--Sandford--Nuneham.
The traveller down stream, who looks for Oxford across the flats of
Port Meadow, is aware of a large town, dusky red in colour, skirted by
a canal and a railway, and dominated by the slim brick bell-tower of
a church, one of the pangs of the architectural renaissance. There,
beyond the dingy quarter called Jericho, one may stray through many
streets of villas in the Middle Victorian taste, by flower-beds gay
with the geranium and calceolaria. Little is wanting that would be
found in St. John's Wood or West Kensington. For this is, in late
after-growth, that town of Oxford that meant to be like London, and was
like London, before the University came to interfere. It had its Norman
castle, its Gild Merchant, its charter, as good as those of London. It
was a place where Parliaments met. It had a palace of the kings, and a
rich Jewry, and a great mind to trade. But the University sprang up
and choked these things. London never had a real University, but only
colleges for students of Common Law, and so flourished. In Oxford the
town went under, and the University was everything. The "nations" came,
and after long war reduced the natives to servitude. But the wheel has
turned. The down-trodden race is quickly hiding the University with its
new towns of houses and churches, and the very University has lost the
monastic rule that allowed its members to camp as an alien garrison in
the place. Now they are surely being wrought into the fabric of the
town.
For the University there exist two rivers; one, The River, below Folly
Bridge, the other, The Upper River, above Medley Weir. Between the two
there is not one stream, but many. The river goes out of itself and
returns into itself again. And in this division it suffers various
fortunes. It goes far afield and grows forget-me-nots. It turns
mill-wheels, and is a servant of breweries. It is locked and sluiced
for the passage of barges. It is constrained and laid away in low and
discouraged quarters, where it keeps company with people out of repair,
with philanthropic enterprises, with aimless smells, with exhausted
dust, with retired hansom cabs. It is beguiled into obscure cuts for
bathing. It is imprisoned under streets. And when it comes to itself
again it is not allowed to have its name, but is called by the vain
sound of Isis.
The two main branches of the stream enclose a space rather over a mile
in length, and roughly of the shape of a slim ewer, with a handle
broken off near the top, that is at Medley Weir. There is a minor
junction of the streams by a cut across the narrowed neck of the ewer
opposite Worcester Garden. The upper of the two islands thus formed
is given up to meadows and the two railway lines. The lower island,
Osney, holds the two railway stations, and the continuation southwards
of the Great Western. South of the stations, and at right angles to the
railway, the Seven Bridges Road runs out towards Botley. South of this
again St. Thomas's Church lies east, and St. Mary's Cemetery and Osney
Mill west of the railway havoc. The rest is meadow and garden land,
scored with the streets of old and new settlements, and cracked by
lesser dykes and courses of the stream.
The eastern branch, after defining the upper rim of the ewer, turns
sharp southwards, and, keeping company with the canal, skirts red
Oxford and Worcester Gardens. It is here that its interest begins. A
little way above the first, or Hythe Bridge, a fresh division takes
place, and a narrow irregular strip of low island is formed, running
under three bridges to the Castle Mill, and below that occupied by
breweries for some hundred yards. Now it is only on the upper stretch
of this island down to the Castle Mill that any attempt is made by
the town to come to public and pleasant terms with its river. The
attempt is a shy one. The treatment is on a humbler scale than that
of the River Witham at Lincoln. The Fishers Row of low houses--some
new, some old, and one or two remarkable--straggles along a narrow
quay, arched over by the bridges. In the doubled stream, where it
fronts the houses, fleets of old punts lie moored to their poles among
the choking weeds; not the varnished toys of the Cherwell, but the
craft native to these shallow standing waters, as the gondola to the
lagoons of Venice. At the back of the houses, their gardens abutting
upon it in all variety of confusion and decay, moves a furtive and
even feebler stream. There is a wealth of matter here for the artist
to rescue from its odours; grey walls that have seen better days and
other uses, bricks rough-cast and timber, willow leaves and fluttering
clothes, the most old and various dirt. All this is only to be won by
glimpses from the bridges, or from the hospitality of back pigsties
and the like; and it is only just to add that the tenants of this
picturesque quarter--people, pigs, and ducks--show to the curious
visitor an unvarying courtesy. The best bit was till lately to be
seen from Pacey's Bridge, the second in order down stream. Just there
a house is bracketed out over the water, with windows disposed in
graceful bays. But the jealousy that keeps the stream secret has shut
away that last easy view, on the one side with a shop astride the
water, on the other with a mere wilful screen. Hythe Bridge is a poor
new thing; Pacey's Bridge is defaced with a new top. The next bridge
brings us to the Castle and the Castle Mill, the very heart of the
old town; the Castle older than the University, the Mill of older
foundation than the Castle. Then follow breweries, not without charm,
but reticent about the river. Just below the Swan Brewery the streams
come together again at a point marked by a summer-house; but it is only
for a fresh separation. From a garden in Chapel Place may be seen the
point of division; but one branch is now built over. Its name is the
Trill Mill Stream, and it runs behind Paradise Square, and round by
way of Rose Place, across St. Aldate's. Then it comes to light again
behind the houses, and skirts Christ Church Meadows, to join the river
near Folly Bridge. The other branch takes a stealthy course round the
low quarter between Paradise Square and the gasworks. They are least
ashamed of it in Abbey Place. From that point onward it shows at the
end of poor little streets, with meadows and willows beyond. From one
of these--Blackfriars Road--a bridge crosses to the bathing-cut, which
rounds the base of our ewer, and leads into the navigation stream. At
the tail of an island formed by the cut the navigation stream itself
comes in, and the united water bends round the gasworks, and so to
Folly Bridge, past some broken little gardens and backs of houses in
Thames Street. Folly Bridge is as poor as the other Thames bridges in
Oxford. It replaces the old Norman _Grand Pont_ with its forty arches,
and Friar Bacon's Study over the further end. A top storey added to the
"Study" was the "Folly." There is another now almost in the same spot,
built by a money-lender.
Of the navigation stream in its course from Medley Weir there is less
to say. At the neck of the ewer, at the point called Four Streams, it
goes so far as to form a regular cross. One of the arms is the cut
already mentioned running towards Worcester. The opposite arm is known
as the Old Navigation Stream, and runs out in a great loop under the
Binsey Road and the Seven Bridges Road at New Botley, and back to the
present navigation stream at the base of the ewer. A smaller concentric
loop leaves the stream at the first bridge beyond the station, throws
off a branch to join the outer loop at the Binsey Road bridge, and
returns at Osney Mill. Here, just by the mill, there is a lock on the
navigation stream. The island formed by the mill-stream and the lock
runs down a hundred yards or so, and on the face of the island, made
by the loop above, there is a meaner repetition of the Fishers Row. It
may clear the maze a little to think of the two mills and islands, and
quays balancing on opposite sides of the ewer.
[Illustration: OXFORD, FROM HEADINGTON HILL.]
But this is not all. We have still to account for a stream that left
the Thames at Hagley Pool, above Godstow. From that point it describes
a yet wider loop, passing first by Witham, then under the Seven Bridges
Road at Botley, and on by the two Hinkseys. At Clasper's Boathouse
under the Long Bridges it is reinforced by a fresh offset from the
main stream, and does not return again till just above Rose Island by
Kennington. The old men on the river have been heard to say that this
branch from Clasper's to Kennington used to be the main stream for
barges, and it is quite possible, for the Long Bridges and new towpath
only date from the end of last century. The Hinksey Stream is not
navigable throughout, because of two mills on its lower reaches. The
low Cumnor Heights behind make a limit to the wandering and division
of the water; but the whole flat between this boundary on the west and
that of the Oxford Canal on the east is an amphibious country, now
lake, now labyrinth.
It will have been observed how little the obscure region of the river
we have traversed has to do with the University of our time. One is
invited to think how the river of Oxford has come to be treated so; why
the colleges shun it and give it over to railways and slums. And again,
if one regards the college quarter with any attention, one is forced
to ask by what steps the plan of building and habit of life we know as
a college came to be as it is out of the old Benedictine conventual
schools. What were the links of building between St. Frideswide's and
Merton, and what has become of them?
The answer to the first question, and partly to the second, is that
a more magnificent and more richly significant Oxford than the
present once occupied the isle of Osney and the river quarter now so
degraded;[1] but all that proper fortune of the river, all that beauty
and history, has been incredibly blotted out, leaving only its first
and last links in St. Frideswide's and Worcester, together with a few
names and inconsiderable fragments. The buildings of Oxford are a story
whose mutilated preface is followed by a great gap where the opening
chapters should be. A line here and there marks the interval, and when
the tale is taken up again it is abruptly and in a changed temper.
Quickly it runs to a fluent mannerism that makes a great bulk of the
text. Then it proceeds in a classical version till the time when our
own century began to spell and imitate the archaic forms.
The town before the University is better represented than the following
period by its castle and parish churches. The ancient St. Frideswide's
remains as Christ Church. But greater churches than St. Frideswide's,
one of them, that of the Franciscans, twice as long, have been taken
clean away, and not a stone remains to stand for the Dominican and
Franciscan houses that moulded the early University. We must give a
little space to this, and to another missing chapter, and then briefly
read the rest of the story.
When the two great mendicant orders arrived early in the thirteenth
century, there was already, besides the old foundation of St.
Frideswide, at that time a house of Austin canons, the great monastic
foundation of Osney, dating from early Norman times. In its church,
over the tomb of the foundress Edith, English wife of the second lord
of the Castle, was painted a tree full of chattering pies, whose
voice assailed her in her walks. Her confessor knew them for souls
in Purgatory, and the canons were installed to pray for them. By the
time the friars came to Oxford the chattering souls were perhaps as
much thought of as are the souls of those killed in the French wars of
the fifteenth century by the Fellows of All Souls College now. At the
Dissolution the great Abbey Church had a chance of safety. For a short
time it was the cathedral church of the new diocese of Oxford. But that
fortune passed to St. Frideswide's, and no one translated Osney Abbey
into a college. All that is left of it now is an archway and part of a
barn among the buildings of the Mill.
The two great orders of friars settled finally near one another on
opposite sides of the Trill Mill Stream. The Dominicans were first in
the field, and for a time encamped near the schools and the Jewry,
with designs on both. They built a hospital for converted Jews, which
afterwards was used as the Town Hall, and it is on record that at
one time they had two Jews in the _Domus Conversorum_, but one of
them, an acolyte, afterwards suffered a relapse. Soon, however, the
friars migrated to the damp riverside, as a place more favourable
to rheumatism and ague, just as in London they went from Holborn
to Blackfriars. It was the happiest fact that the mendicant orders
coming to towns in their young and ascetic days settled in outcast
and uninviting quarters, and covered them, as they grew in riches,
with pleasant gardens and splendid buildings. But the Black Friars
of Oxford, like those of London, are only remembered now by names of
streets, and of that bend of the river by the gasworks still known as
Preachers' Pool.
The Grey Friars are even more completely gone. The Paradise given them
by a pious lady has given its name to a square, but the groves and
buildings of the Minorites have not even left a name to the streets
that have replaced them. There must be many of the friars still below
ground in their coffins; in the courtyards behind the dismal streets
there are glimpses of provoking walls, but with no speaking stones;
and in the wall that divides the garden of Trinity from Parks Street
lie many old stones incognito, brought from the quarry of the Friars
Preachers and the Friars Minor.
The White Friars, or Carmelites, had no better fate. Edward II., flying
from Bannockburn with his Carmelite confessor, vowed a house to Our
Lady of the White Friars if he should cross the Border in safety. To
redeem the vow he gave over his palace of Beaumont to the Carmelites.
Beaumont Street runs through the site. Some of the stones are in Laud's
new quad at St. John's.
Of another great house a small witness remains. Above Hythe Bridge,
the way by Fishers Row is continued from the tip of the eyot across a
little bridge, and thence runs for a space alongside an ancient wall.
This was a boundary wall of Rewley Abbey, the great house of the order
of Citeaux. Almost covered by the wood stores of a wheelwright is a
doorway with carved spandrils, and a label ending in sculptured heads.
The wheelwrights, whose sheds lean against the old wall, show a wooden
peak, the last vestige of a "summer-house" lately pulled down. Only the
other day they came upon a well in the garden behind. The London and
North-Western Station occupies the site of the chief buildings. Before
it was put up the remains were considerable. Rewley and Osney Abbeys
between them accounted for most of the Osney island.
But the most speaking memorial of this lost University is that side
of Worcester that still remains of old Gloucester Hall. Benedictine
novices, from the many houses of the order scattered over England, were
numerous among the early students of Oxford. The Benedictines were
rich, and there were few University endowments. Gloucester Hall was the
house founded in 1283 for those of the novices who came from Gloucester
Abbey. Then other Benedictine abbeys had houses built alongside the
first for their own students, till twenty-five abbeys were represented.
Others in the same way sent their men to Buckingham College, Cambridge.
Over the doorways of the halls still standing at Worcester may be seen
the escutcheons of their several abbeys; the griffin of Malmesbury, the
cross of Norwich.
The house of the fourth great mendicant order, the Austin Friars, has
disappeared as completely as the other three. On its site, in the reign
of James I., Wadham College was built, but the phrase "doing Austins"
long survived as a memory of the University exercises that took place
in the Austin Schools.
The friars of the Order of the Redemption of Captives have left as
little sign. Their property is part of the garden of New College.
But some of the houses of the Regular Orders, besides Gloucester Hall,
remain in a translation. The College of the Novices from the Convent of
Durham is the old part of Trinity. St. Mary's College of the Regular
Canons has left a gateway opposite New Inn Hall, and the latest-founded
of the religious houses, that of St. Bernard for the Cistercians, still
shows in the street with some changes as the front of St. John's.
[Illustration: NEW COLLEGE, FROM THE GARDENS.]
We have to think, then, of the Oxford of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries as chiefly made up of the schools of the Regular and
Mendicant Orders, afterwards suppressed. The Colleges of the third
class, the Secular Clergy, were only beginning; the prevailing
influence was that of the Dominican and Franciscan teachers,
particularly the latter, with their Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus and
Occam, to set off against the Aquinas and Albertus of the Parisian
Dominicans. At the time of the Dissolution the numbers and spirit of
the various religious houses had run very low. However, they made
a push to extend their buildings, hoping so to ensure their wealth
against the Royal Commission, just as the Colleges did in our own time.
But Henry VIII. seems, in most cases, to have made for the lead from
the roofs of the buildings as his own share of the spoil, and the later
additions with their flat lead roofing would just meet his taste. The
walls he sold or gave to others, who used them chiefly as quarries. A
letter quoted by Mr. Fletcher, written to Thomas Cromwell by one of his
agents, gives a good notion of the look of things at the time, and of
the spirit of the reformers:-"The Black Fryers bathe in ther backsyde
lykwise dyvers Ilonds well woddyd and conteyneth in lengith a great
ground. There quere wasse lately new byldede and covered with ledde.
It ys lykewisse a bigge Howse, and all coveryd with slatt, saving the
queere. They have prety store of plate and juellys, and specially there
ys a gudd chales of golde sett with stonys, and ys better than a C
marks: and there ys also a gudd crosse with other things conteynyd in
the bill. Ther ornaments be olde and of small valor. They have a very
fayer Cundytt and ronnyth fresshelye. Ther be butt X. Fryers, being
Prests besid the Anker, which is a well-disposyd man, and have 1. marks
yerly of the King's cofers."
Now we turn to the reaction against all this; to the quarter of the
University that remains, the quarter of the old town parishes in which
the Halls and Colleges of the secular clergy grew.
And first we feel the Gothic pattern of the streets. We have left the
water behind, but the streams had to do in determining the flow of the
"stream-like" streets. They kept the forms they were pressed into by
the castle and city walls; St. Giles's bursting out wide from the point
where the old north gate cramped it by St. Michael's; Broad Street
broad because just outside the circuit; the rest winding and twisting
with the happiest effects for the jostling buildings.
[Illustration: ST. MARY'S, FROM THE HIGH STREET.]
Then when we look closer at this large mass of Gothic work, of great
establishments squeezed into the old shapes, and elbowing scanty strips
and corners of the displaced houses, the notable point about most of
the work is, not how old, but how new it is. The Gothic is late, even
belated. Little of it is earlier than the Perpendicular Period; much
of it is more recent still, and of a kind to which purists grudge even
the name of Gothic. It is true that in Oxford buildings, when made of
local stone not cunningly laid, become shabby and theatrically aged in
the shortest time. They look not venerable, but battered and burned,
the stone hanging in rags, and leaving where it falls raw yellow
patches. Mouldings and carvings drop away; pinnacles, battlements, and
gables, and all outstanding features, thaw like blackened snow; walls
are suddenly found wasted and thin, the rooms and towers depending on
the merest crust of stone. The heads about the Sheldonian Theatre shed
their beards of a rainy night. But all this is a very sham antiquity.
Some of the later buildings suffer from it most, and some of the oldest
look, and are, newest because of sedulous restoration. One has to
search diligently for hints of the older work, and to entrap it as it
looks out of its new body in some favourable light.
It is the churches, the parish churches and the towers of St.
Frideswide's and St. Mary's, that seem most to promise age in a
distant prospect, and to strike a recurrent note of antiquity as one
goes about the town. The old Town Church of St. Martin at Carfax,
with its picturesque altered gables and clock and "penniless bench,"
is much wanted; but it was pulled down inconsiderately and rebuilt
in haste. But St. Peter's, St. Michael's, St. Mary Magdalen's, and
St. Giles's, are rich in beauty and interest. The lovely spire of St.
Mary's, panelled with pomegranates for Queen Eleanor, stands almost
alone of the old University Church. There is, indeed, on the north of
the chancel, and set at a divergent angle, a yet older building--the
two-storeyed Ancient House of Congregation. Its two storeys simulate on
the outer side the appearance of one to conform with the new church,
but the groined roof remains of the lower room, now half-buried and
given to lumber. This and the old church were the real centre of the
University. In the five chapels the regents of the five faculties
assembled for the Act at which disputations were held and degrees
given. Not only the Schools and Theatre and Convocation House, but the
University Library, too, hived off from these buildings. The first
books were kept in chests in the "soler," or upper room, and there,
too, those other chests were stored that were the earliest form of
University endowment. In them the money left by benefactors was kept,
and lent out to poor students, who in return pawned books and daggers
and other articles of value.
The colleges began as a counterpoise to the schools of the regular and
mendicant orders, more particularly the latter. The friars, learned and
powerful, naturally drew to them great numbers of the poor unattached
scholars. Statutes ineffectually made eighteen years the lowest age of
consent. The University had a hard fight to keep even its degrees in
its own hands. This third great body of scholars, unattached to monks
or friars, consisted of the ordinary or secular clergy, men qualifying
not merely for the work of parish priests, but for what are now the lay
professions of lawyer and doctor. They had a bad time of it while the
friars were still popular. They had few endowments, and were forced
to labour for a living, or to beg their way. It was common for poor
scholars to serve as scouts. They lived either in private lodgings or
in the numerous private Halls, Inns, or Hostels that covered the sites
of the present colleges. Those are the second obliterated chapter among
university buildings. They were simply lodging-houses, rented from
the owner by a Master of Arts, who was styled Principal. By an early
statute, that marks the encroachment of the University on the town,
the owner of the hall was bound to let it to the first applicant who
deposited the needful caution with the Vice-Chancellor. The Principal
was paid by the inmates for board and tuition. The first colleges were
such halls, furnished with an endowment for poor scholars, and with a
set of statutes to regulate its administration. At first the scholars
went to service at the nearest parish church; but gradually, as funds
allowed, chapel and hall and library were built, and the familiar front
with its gate-tower screened the old and new buildings. The full-grown
College, as it had taken shape before the times of the Reformation and
rich lay undergraduates, was a society incorporated for the benefit
of poor scholars of the secular order. Its buildings replaced the
single Hall or group of Halls that had been converted from private to
corporate use, or else the old tenements were recast in the new mould.
That new mould followed with modifications the plan of the monastic
houses.
Some of these Halls still remain. But the form of university life they
represented, and to a great extent the buildings themselves, have gone
as completely as the Oxford of the Religious. The colleges swallowed
most of them. New College accounts for ten, Merton for eight. From
old prints one can gain a notion of the splendid jumble of gables
and chimneys of all degrees of dignity that enriched the streets;
and one is tempted to regret that some of the colleges gave up the
picturesque grouping and domestic style of the clustered halls for the
more monotonous and pretentious manner of their latter shape. As Henry
suppressed the religious houses, so Laud suppressed the private halls,
leaving five only as academic halls. Of these, one--Magdalen Hall--has
left its beautiful bell-tower to Magdalen College, and its second site
to Hertford. Of the rest, three are now absorbed in colleges.
The great date in college history is 1264, when Walter de Merton gave
statutes to the college he had founded. University Hall, afterwards
University College, had already been founded from a legacy administered
by the University. But in Merton the idea of a great college was
first clearly struck out, and its statutes were an exemplar for all
succeeding societies both at Oxford and Cambridge. Merton, however was
not built in one heat. The old quad and parts of the chapel are early
work, but the tower and other parts are later. The chapel is so large,
because it is not only chapel to the college, but church to the parish
of St. John, a great part of which the college absorbs. The library is
one of the most beautiful as well as one of the most ancient rooms in
Oxford.
Balliol and Exeter, Oriel and Queen's, are also early colleges, but
they do not stand for so much historically. They group with Merton,
and have all changed their first bodily shape. The next great moment
in the college history, the beginning of a new group, comes about a
hundred years after Merton. This was the foundation of the College
of St. Mary Winton--called New from a sense of the importance of the
event--by William Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester. Several things are
important about this great creation. To begin with, the foundation
was of a new magnificence. It provided for seventy scholars, a term
at that time synonymous with fellows. There was a stronger accent
about it of opposition to the regular clergy. Its lands were bought
from impoverished monastic bodies. It was made self-sufficient by its
nursery and counterpart in architecture, the College of St. Mary at
Winchester. It was saved from the jurisdiction of the University by the
power granted it of giving degrees, and from the jurisdiction of the
Bishop of Lincoln, in whose diocese Oxford then lay, by the appointment
of the Bishop of Winchester as its Visitor. But above all, not only was
the plan of its institution a great educational achievement, but the
building itself was by the same author, the work of a man of genius,
coherent and complete. The quadrangle has been altered out of all
knowledge by the addition of the third storey with battlements, and
the re-shaping of the windows, but even so it shares with the added
wings of the garden front a wonderful dignity and purity. The original
towers are so dominant everywhere that one reads their spirit into the
encumbered translation.
[Illustration: MAGDALEN TOWER, FROM THE CHERWELL.]
The stroke told. Henry VI. echoed the idea in Eton and King's College,
Cambridge. In Oxford, the chapel and cloisters of Chichele's All Souls'
were imitated from New College. But a richer reverberation followed.
Waynflete's Magdalen is another New more magnificent, and later by
a hundred years. It is not more beautiful. Feature by feature is
reproduced, with just that luxury of virtue and grace that one would
expect from Mary the Magdalen walking in the footsteps of Mary the
Virgin. The chapels are planned alike, and in either college set back
to back with the hall. Magdalen has a cloister quad, a more spacious
one; a higher and richer tower, wider and more lordly grounds. But
one can turn from the baffling and haunting charm of Magdalen Tower
to be satisfied with the simple fighting tower of New College; and
it is dangerous to go from the blackened walls and gaunt arches, the
austerely divided daylight of the cloistered walk at New College, to
the coarser forms and less single purpose of the other. The older
cloister is still the walk of a recluse, overlooked only by the tower
and gable of the chapel, and interrupted by rare and funeral writing
on the walls. The other is built in an easier temper. Staircases open
upon it below, and many windows occupy it above. It is the covered
thoroughfare of the College.
[Illustration: STONE PULPIT, MAGDALEN.]
It should be remembered, however, that Magdalen cloisters have suffered
much. They have been pulled down almost throughout and rebuilt. An
upper storey has gone from the north side, ugly Westmorland slate
has replaced the grey Stonesfield kind, and windows have been made
bigger and more regular. Historically it is to be noted that Magdalen
superseded a collegiate building of another kind, the old hospital or
almshouse of St. John the Baptist. The stone pulpit in St. John's Quad
marks this. On the saint's day a sermon used to be preached from the
pulpit, and the quad was strewn with rushes and hung with boughs to
represent a wilderness. At last a Principal caught his death of cold by
going out into the wilderness, so they gave it up, and had the sermon
in chapel instead. There was some grudging show made of keeping up the
almshouse. A low vault under a chapel was given over to the poor. A
report was drawn up for the year 1596 giving the following cheerful
particulars:--"In sommer the resort is greater, in winter very smale,
bycause of the coldnes and onwholesomenes of the vault; which is in
verie deed so moyst and dampish that we have the last yeare removed the
beddes into another house not far of, for that everie winter they are
subject to rottennes." However, they were going to repair the floor "as
well for the safetie of our beddes as for the health and ease of the
poore."[2]
The building of the old quad of Lincoln went on by stages during this
same fifteenth century, and Corpus followed early in the next. Neither
of these has been rebuilt, but both have been defaced so as to lose
almost all interest; but they stand for points in history. Lincoln was
a college of priests, to make head against Lollardry; Corpus stood for
Greek.
[Illustration: "TOM" GATEWAY.]
Then follows the notable foundation of Wolsey's Cardinal College,
afterwards Christchurch. All Souls' had been founded with the spoil of
"alien" priories--cells, that is, of foreign monasteries in England.
Magdalen had taken the place of a religious society; but the final step
was taken when English religious houses were suppressed to form one
great educational foundation. St. Frideswide's was preserved to be its
chapel. The huge ungainly quad was planned out and partly built. After
the suppression of religious houses stone was cheap, so the building
went on even after Wolsey's fall. The Tom Tower was added much later.
It is one of Wren's essays in Gothic, masterful and striking in general
design, but unfeeling in detail. The fan-vaulted roof of the hall
staircase is a lovely piece of later work, but the staircase itself is
badly managed. The cathedral is a rather disconcerted building; but
there is plenty in it to study and enjoy. The story of the saint may
be read in a window by Mr. Burne Jones. Other four windows by the same
artist were executed by Mr. Morris, with the result that in colour as
well as in design they rank with the best of old workmanship, and can
be compared with nothing new, except those from the same hands in other
places.
If New and Magdalen stand for the enriching sunset of Gothic in Oxford,
the great group of buildings that follows the Reformation stands for
a strange and prolonged after-glow of the art. It is this period that
more than any other belongs to Oxford, gives it a peculiar character.
Nowhere else is it so largely represented. The Renaissance, coming all
this way, was too weak and distressed to create forms of architecture
quite its own; but it passed as a principle of change into the veins of
the old style, and broke out here and there in the strangest features.
The main ideas of the Gothic structure held their own--the sloping
roof, the traceried window; but a languor and a fever seized upon the
mouldings and details of the old work. At any moment the sedate lines
of the Perpendicular tracery might run wild into twirls of trivial
scroll-work, or one whole side of a building speak a sleepy Gothic
and another stammer the queerest Greek. But the whole seldom fails to
please, because it is ordered throughout by the most sure and delicate
sense of proportion. It is the work of men whose hand is well in, whose
ideas are running few and thin, but are dealt out and recombined with
the utmost freedom and familiarity. One is often blankly disappointed
by the flatness, the poverty, the childishness of the decoration; but
however meagre and thoughtless and alien the elements of the design may
be, there never fails an artistic sense in the way they are set out,
so that the most incongruous lendings of various styles meet and are
subdued to perfect comfort in one another's company. Perhaps the salt
that saves the whole is the sense of humour that pervades it, just as
it does the rich enjoyed sentences of the contemporary literature. The
buildings do not expect to be taken quite seriously; the figures on the
tombs are very much at play with death. Sometimes, indeed, the windows
of grave buildings like the chapel of Wadham stiffen out into the older
and more decorous manner; but it would be hard to match for rollicking
irresponsibility the porch that Laud added to St. Mary's Church.
Colour, too, was near the heart of the builders. They revelled in
gilding, in paint, in marbles and alabaster. And in the weighty matters
of architecture that go beyond the mere building, in the recognition
of its neighbourhood, of its place as a mass in the streets or a
kindly growth among fields and trees, they were very much at home.
The presence of such buildings is one of comfort, of fun, of flexible
tradition and generous possibilities. The style begins at Oxford under
Elizabeth, and continues under Charles; but it centres under James, and
hence is conveniently called Jacobean. Not only university and college
buildings belong to it, but most of the beautiful domestic work of the
streets, like Archbishop King's house off St. Aldate's, and the house
off the High, used as a police-office.
It was in a building of the Jacobean time that the University idea
first found adequate expression, gathered out of the scattered lodgings
in which it had been housed. Already, by 1480, a noble room had been
built for the Divinity school, with the library of Duke Humphrey above
it. Sir Thomas Bodley's first act was to give this library a new roof
and fittings, and to add to it at right angles the building that forms
above an extension of the library, below the Proscholium or ambulatory
of the schools. It was the day after his funeral, in the year 1613,
that the first stone was laid of his magnificent plan for completing
the quadrangle, of which the Proscholium forms one side. This
quadrangle is a plan or map of the University's theory of knowledge.
As one enters under the gateway tower the scholastic sciences announce
themselves in gold letters above the various doors. The faculties--the
faculty of Arts with its subdivision into the Trivium and Quadrivium,
the faculties of Canon and Civil Law and of Medicine lead up to the
fifth and crowning faculty, the science of sciences, Divinity, lodged
behind the richly-panelled front of the Proscholium. Before this,
the faculty of Arts had been housed in the thirty-two schools that
gave their name to Schools Street. In these the Regents, that is the
young M.A.'s, the ruling and teaching body of the University, gave
lectures and sat, at stated times, to determine in the disputations
that preceded, as examinations do now, the B.A. degree. The public
viva voce in the schools is the remnant of this formal exhibition of
logical skill. The disputant went round to solicit the presence of his
friends, and statutes were passed to restrain the system of touting
for an audience as well as to limit the regular supper that followed.
At Cambridge it was the duty of the Bedells to go round to the various
colleges and halls where the questionists were, and "call or give
warninge in the middest of the courte with thees words: 'Alons, alons,
goe, Mrs., goe, goe,'" and any tendency to a real viva voce was rudely
checked by the same officer. "If the Father shall uppon his Chyldren's
aunswer replie and make an Argument, then the Bedel shall knocke him
out"--which seems to have meant that he hammered loudly on the door.[3]
The Act, or public contest of degrees, still took place in St. Mary's,
till the Sheldonian Theatre completed the new group of the schools in
1669. The new Convocation House, with the Selden Library above, had
already been added in 1640 at the further end of the Divinity school.
About the same time as the new schools Wadham College had been built.
Complete at the outset, it is remarkable among Oxford buildings for its
singleness and symmetry of design, and its skill of building or fortune
of stone; it is one of the most ancient of the colleges in the sense
that it is authentic.
The rebuilt University College and Oriel and the new Jesus may be
grouped together. They have in common the beautiful treatment of the
upper windows as a series of little gables in place of the tiresome
screen of battlements. The front of Jesus is a modern disguise, the
clever but unsympathetic work of Mr. Buckler. It replaces the old
Elizabethan front with its gateway in the fashion of the beautiful one
of St. Alban's Hall. The Jesus gate, however, had been obscured by a
heavy rusticated screen. Brasenose gained in the Jacobean Period its
exquisite dormer windows; Lincoln its homely second quad and lovely
chapel. Another fine example is the hall and chapel of St. Mary Hall.
In Merton four of the five orders of the Schools Tower were reproduced.
The chief author of all this work was a Thomas Holt of York. Among
his followers were the brothers Bentley, and Acroide, Oxford builders.
A greater name is associated with the new quad of St. John's. In this
Inigo Jones was mastered by the genius of the place, and constrained to
build the wonderful garden front. Inside the quad he had his own way
in the colonnades, but he was more in character still when he designed
the Danvers Gateway of the new Physic Garden, and plotted its wall and
walks. Here, at last, in a quiet corner of the place, where science
was beginning in a gentle way to stir, the English Gothic tradition of
building was fairly broken, and the key struck of the manner that in
the end of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century
gave Oxford its sturdy and picturesque English Classic. Soon after, the
troubled times of the Civil War, the rather farcical, but disastrous
siege of Oxford, "leaving no face of a University," and the subsequent
spoiling of the colleges by the Puritans, must have served very
effectually to snap the chain of building tradition, and make a blank
for the new ideas.
[Illustration: THE DOME OF THE RADCLIFFE, FROM BRASENOSE.]
When the strange holiday time was over, and the University was in a
frame for building again, the period of Wren and of his school began.
The Chapel of Brasenose, built under the Commonwealth, marks the point
when the relations of the mixed styles were becoming too strained. The
Sheldonian Theatre announces the rupture. It is in Wren's happiest
manner. There is no building where the audience is more artfully
disposed so as itself to be a great part of the architecture. This
was followed by various buildings of the school of Wren. He revised
Bathurst's design for Trinity Chapel, though he clearly thought it a
bad job, and he is said to have had a hand in Hawksmoor's work at
Queen's and All Souls. Certainly the robust screen and gateway of the
Queen's front are not unworthy of him. Aldrich's All Saints' Church and
Peckwater Quad at Christ Church belong to the early eighteenth century.
The last great building in this manner is Gibbs's Radcliffe Library.
It gives the University a comfortable centre as only a dome can, and
counts for quite half in any distant view of Oxford buildings.
The rest of the eighteenth century has nothing very notable to show.
Hawksmoor, in his nightmare buildings at All Souls', had proved
how dead Gothic was. A good deal of Classic went up, the work of
academic amateurs, dabbling in Vitruvius and Palladio. But one holds
one's breath till the period is well over. Dilettanti among the dons
travelled to Italy and came back terribly ashamed of their barbarous
Oxford. It is a matter for thankful wonder that all the old buildings
were not replaced by Palladian colleges. The clean sweep of old Queen's
and of the mass of buildings that made way for the Radcliffe, must have
tempted many a common room. Hawksmoor actually prepared a design for a
brand-new Classic Brasenose, with four domes and a High Street front.
Magdalen had the narrowest escape. A Mr. Holdsworth, a Fellow of the
College, "an amiable man and a good scholar," returned from a sojourn
in Rome full of enlightenment. His first scheme was to pull down the
whole building, tower and all; but he had to give up the tower chapel
and hall, and content himself with the destruction of the cloister
quad. However, he began his scheme with the New Buildings on unoccupied
ground, and somehow it was not carried further; so the great new quad,
with its three colonnades, remained on paper.
But in 1771 the University set itself to a wider change. The rough
unpaved streets in which the buildings were rooted like trees, the
island markets that blocked the traffic, the narrow rambling bridges,
and above all, the North Gate or Bocardo by St. Michael's, and the
East Gate above Magdalen, hurt the best feelings of dons dreaming
of vistas and piazzas. The place, besides, was no doubt very dark
and dirty. An Act of Parliament was obtained for cleaning, lighting,
and paving the town, removing gates and other obstructions, building
markets, and repairing or rebuilding Magdalen Bridge. So Oxford became
convenient and lost half its pictorial effect. The old bridge over the
Cherwell at Magdalen was everything that a good bridge can be without
being convenient. It had a chequered course of six hundred feet over
land and water, leaping the water in a series of arches of different
height and width just as was necessary; occupied by houses and shops
where it crossed the land; and throwing out, at irregular intervals,
angular bays of varying width and projection. But in some places it
was as narrow as thirteen feet, some of the arches were ruinous, and
the city and county were responsible for the repair of different
parts, which they both appear to have left alone. So it had to come
down. The new bridge, as well as the market and other changes, was the
work of an engineer named Gwyn. His bridge kept something of the old
picturesqueness, though in a formal way. It had the same places to go
over; a circular bay in the centre stood for the old angles; and the
lines at either end swept out in graceful curves. But people were very
angry because it was so narrow and high. The roadway was afterwards
heightened to reduce the pitch of the bridge, the parapet was lowered,
and in our own time the width has been doubled for the convenience of
trams. Old St. Clement's Church, too, has gone from the road on the
further side, and has been rebuilt in another place and manner in full
view of every one who crosses the bridge.
Many of the old houses had been shorn away in the process of widening
the streets; but some people were not satisfied. The old Gothic
buildings had begun to command a certain zeal without knowledge; but
people disliked the Gothic pattern of the streets, and the irregular
patches of domestic buildings. They wanted to have things cleaned
up, and made regular; to have "views;" to see the great buildings in
solitary distance with no interference from house-roofs or trees, a
thing that very few buildings in the world can stand. An interesting
evidence of this state of mind is a little book by a certain rector
of Lincoln, Dr. Tatham. It was he who defaced the old quad of his
college with stupid battlements and other changes. He is remembered
by Mr. Cox as an old gentleman, who lived out of Oxford, but might be
seen landing his pigs in the market-place on Saturdays, and who, in
defence of the faith and the Three Witnesses, in the University pulpit,
wished all the "Jarmans" at the bottom of the "Jarman" Ocean. The
book is called "Oxonia Explicata et Ornata: Proposals for Disengaging
and Beautifying the University and City of Oxford." The buildings of
Oxford, he thought, were "too crowded and engaged. Our forefathers seem
to have consulted petty convenience and monastic reclusiveness, while
they neglected that uniformity of Design which is indispensable to
elegance, and that grandeur of Approach which adds half the delight. If
the Colleges and Public Edifices of this place were drawn apart from
each other, and dispersed through the extent of a thousand acres, so
that each might enjoy the situation a man of genius would approve, we
might boast," &c. He prefixes to the book a little design of his own
for a martyr's memorial, "a triumphant monument to be placed across
Broad Street, the whole so airy as very little to obstruct the view of
the buildings." Of this design one may say that it would have been much
more interesting than the Eleanor Cross of Sir Gilbert Scott.
This cross of Scott's was one of the first new works at Oxford of
the Gothic revival. Wyatt and others had already worked at what they
called restoration, and Pugin's gateway, lately removed, had been set
up at Magdalen the year before. Oxford has suffered its full share of
buildings that were the costly grammatical exercises of men learning
a dead tongue. In architecture such exercises are more expensive
and obtrusive than in any other art, and it will be long perhaps
before people will have the courage and sacrifice to pull them down
again. Some are merely learned and lifeless, like Buckler's Magdalen
School and Jesus, and Scott's Chapel of Exeter. Others are hopeless,
sullen blocks, like Scott's extensions of Exeter and New College, and
Butterfield's new buildings at Merton. Others are fancifully bad, like
the conscientious ugliness of the Museum, and the _recherché_ ugliness
of Balliol, and the mixture of both in the Meadow Buildings of Christ
Church. Butterfield in Balliol Chapel and Keble College shows a great
power of geometrical invention in form and colour, an invention for
the most part greatly astray. It is refreshing among all this to come
upon the strong, though wayward artistic temperament of Burges in the
decoration of the hall and chapel of Worcester, or even the respectable
classic Taylorian buildings of Cockerell, unpleasant in colour and
jarring on the spirit of the place as they are.
[Illustration: THE 'VARSITY BARGE.]
Very different work has been done of late years. There is less about it
of defiant expression of undesirable artistic personality, or pedantic
exhibition of a style--more recognition of the power of the place, more
actual artistic instinct. Even the much abused Indian Institute of
Champneys, in spite of the heavy frivolity of its details and interior,
is, in the disposition of the wall and window space, the invention
of its tower, and the way the whole building takes its place in the
picture, a piece of architecture, which such things as Balliol are
not. The space of blank wall on its corner tower is worth more than
all the geometrical troubles that fret the face of Keble. At Magdalen,
again, the genius of the old buildings has been lovingly reproduced
by Mr. Bodley in the new. His tower is not good, and it was carrying
faithfulness too far to reproduce the stupid gargoyles and grotesques
of the original; but much of the rich decoration in wood and stone is
refined in design and workmanship. One can praise, too, the extension
of St. John's. It may be said of all the new Oxford buildings that they
are apt to be heavy within, owing a good deal to the fear of fire that
makes all the staircases of stone.
But there is an architect who has taken up the tale where Thomas Holt
dropped it, and who has carried it farther, with results almost as
important for the appearance of Oxford. A like moment in the history
of the place seemed to have come round again. The new ways of the
University needed new schools--for examination this time instead of
disputation--and a great extension of college building coincided.
Never, perhaps, since Wren had the churches of London to rebuild has
one architect had such a fling in so important a place as Mr. T. G.
Jackson in the Oxford of our time. And there can be no question that,
whatever the faults of restlessness and overcrowding that sometimes mar
his designs, Mr. Jackson has been worthy of his opportunity.
The last great addition to Oxford is its undergraduates. It is not very
long since the colleges, in respect of undergraduates, were normally as
All Souls' is now, with its four Bible Clerks; but they were not as All
Souls' is in respect of its Fellows. The long deserts of theological
and political war had left them for the most part mere club-houses,
whose members existed to drink port together of an evening, and abuse
one another in little pamphlets during the day. The Common Room was the
great invention of the late seventeenth century, and the eighteenth was
spent in bringing it to perfection. Then came the Fellows of Oriel,
the Examination Statutes, the genius of the Masters of Balliol, the
Commission, the new Statutes, the Unattached. It is an exciting show
for the visitor, this incongruous surface of new and old, this great
bustle and pulse of the machine among the frail and crumbling walls.
Each morning dilatory tides of men in cap and gown set about the
streets under the jangling bells; each afternoon, in punctual haste,
a steady stream of the same men, in flannel, makes for the river, and
flows back for the monastic evensong and refectory dinner. There was a
time when the dinner-hour was ten o'clock in the morning, and it was
thought that so late an hour was a sign of the decay of learning.
[Illustration: A "BUMP" AT THE BARGES.]
Meanwhile the streets grow emptier, and the visitor, in the abstraction
of the growing darkness, will gather hints of the antiquity about him.
He will see the society grimace of the buildings relax. Their features
will relapse into startling meanings, and the presence of other
centuries will strike in upon his senses. If he is an American, like
Mr. James's _Passionate Pilgrim_, he will feel about it all the pang
of a forfeited possession. It is part of himself that was lost and is
found, a history forgotten long before he was born. Now he remembers it.
Nowhere is midnight so late as in Oxford. It is announced from so
many towers at so many moments by bells of the most various tone and
cadence; but by all, even to the most maundering and belated, with the
same precise conviction, as if one could hear all the lecturers saying
the same thing in their own words--_It is midnight here, now_. And
faint and loud another and another awakes and insists, _It is midnight
here, now_. Through the middle clamour the chime of St. Mary's drops
down three pathetic steps and climbs up through the same intervals. The
University is older by another hour.
[Illustration: IFFLEY MILL.]
The great deed of the new undergraduates was the discovery of the
river. In the early years of the century it was still only a place
for fishing in; occasionally a heavy tub was rowed down to Nuneham.
Bell-ringing had gone out as an exercise; cricket was the game of one
exclusive club; the nearest approach to a healthy rivalry between the
colleges was a competition between New College and All Souls' in making
negus. New College won by putting in no water. It was not till 1837
that the old boats had their sides cut down. About ten years later
outriggers came in, and after another ten, keelless boats. Another
ten brought sliding seats from America, and so the skiff and the four
and the eight reached their perfect economy of construction, and the
quality of beauty they share with their counterpart, the bicycle, on
land. Both bicycle and skiff are extensions of the human machine within
such limits that they remain as it were mere developed limbs working at
every moment as parts of one balancing frame, projections of the person.
[Illustration: IFFLEY CHURCH.]
In 1839 the University Boat Club was started, and the great Oxford
school of rowing shot up to overshadow the older faculties. Before this
time college racing had begun on the admirable bumping system, that not
only makes the race a prolonged spectacle for those who stand still to
see, but allows of so much spirit of body in those who run by their
college boat. At first the boats started out of Iffley Lock. The stroke
of each boat, as its turn came, ran down the thwarts pushing out, and
the next boat followed as soon as he cleared the lock.
[Illustration: LITTLEMORE CHURCH AND KENNINGTON ISLAND.]
The river between Oxford and Abingdon in its present shape is a sort
of free canal, locked at Iffley and Sandford, and again just above
Abingdon. There used to be a lock at Nuneham, but it was taken down.
More recently, too, the Folly Bridge Lock was carried away, and has
not been replaced. The history of the river as a work of art is a
long and interesting one. Obstructions to its natural course, and to
its navigation, began with mills and mill-weirs. In early charters
there are provisions for removing "gorees, mills, wears, stanks,
stakes, and kiddles." Commissions and Acts of Parliament tinkered
at the navigation, but till the end of the eighteenth century no
progress was made beyond the old mill-weir, with sluices in it to
let the boats through. This arrangement was called a "flash" lock.
The flashing emptied the reach of the river above the lock, but all
the water was needed to move the heavy barge sticking on the "gulls"
below. Navigation was of course terribly slow. A bargeman had sometimes
to send on ten miles ahead to get a flash when going up stream, and
sometimes lay for a month till enough water had accumulated. When he
got it there was none for any one else. Leonardo da Vinci, who thought
of everything, had invented the pound-lock long ago; and other people
before and after him had hit on what seems a very obvious contrivance.
But that ingenious people, the Chinese, are said still to hoist their
barges over weirs, and it was not till the time of the great period of
canal-making that began with the Bridgewater Canal in 1760 that the
pound-lock made any way in this country. The canal from Birmingham
reached Oxford in 1790, and shortly afterwards the locks and towpath
were put into their present shape. Then followed jealousies between
rivers and canals, till the railways came and made inland navigation of
less importance. Nowadays there is little barge traffic through Oxford
(Folly Bridge was always a difficult point), but another question, that
of floods, presses as much as ever. Quite recently the engineer to the
Thames Commission brought out a scheme for doing away with Iffley Lock
and Weir, and dredging a deep and narrow channel between Iffley and
Folly Bridge. The Vice-Chancellor and the Dean of Christchurch, both by
virtue of office Commissioners, were in favour of this scheme with a
view to Oxford health; but it has been proved to the satisfaction of
the Thames Conservancy Board, whose officers have examined the place,
that so sweeping a change is not needed. The effect of the change would
be to give the river banks instead of brims, and it has been argued
that it would kill the elms of Christ Church and the fritillaries in
the water meadows about Iffley. Most serious of all would be the loss
of Iffley Mill. We may hope that Oxford health need not be bought so
dearly.
[Illustration: OXFORD TO ABINGDON.]
Meantime Iffley Lock ends the shorter course for rowing practice,
Sandford the longer; while Nuneham and Abingdon, to keep to an Oxford
point of view, mark the longer picnic courses. It is all Frideswide
ground; the saint was rowed to the outhouse near Abingdon by an angel,
when she was warned in a dream and fled. The meadows of her convent
now are lined by the college barges. These are an interesting study
in development. The first of them were old procession barges of the
London City Companies. One of them, the Oriel barge, still remains,
with its delicate form, and long sharp prow, in which the rowers sat.
The bronze figures by the door of the saloon are untouched, the oval
windows, the tarnished gilding within. But the spirit of utility
rebelled and the model changed. The long prow was chopped off close,
the semblance of the high stern went, and there was left merely a
square floating dressing-room with railings round its roof, and seats
for the spectators of races. Then the sense of beauty mutinied, perhaps
alleging the use of the toy for picnic excursions, and the prow and
stern were restored. The University barge is a monument of the Gothic
revival. Several architects have tried their hand in designs for these
craft, and new ones are from time to time constructed. It is the oddest
little street, this row of motley Noah's Arks; and when the high poles
shake out their amazing flags, and the men come down in fearless
college colours, and a vast and diverse millinery decks every foot of
standing room the roofs can give, there would seem to be some touch
of an Arabian Night about a very English day, were it not that the
vigorous people wear many more colours than Arabia would allow.
A little hill at Iffley lifts up the rusty-grey rectory and church. The
church is, for its size, made in an absurd number of styles, beginning
with Late Norman. The heavy arches inside are carved round with
sunflowers, looking like an ancient imitation of modern work. Outside,
there is the strangest confusion of carvings; a centaur strayed from
Phigaleia, and other pagan images among the Christian symbols. The Gods
in Exile have visited Iffley too. On the south side a great yew has
been building all through the Transition and the Perpendicular and the
Tractarian times, and the people who Decorated, and the people who Late
Middle Pointed, and the rest make the ground quite uneven round its
roots. An undated villager, who styles himself Archdeacon of Iffley,
and has a venerable humour, comes among the graves for company.
Behind the hill, and a little beyond Iffley, lies Littlemore. Here
is the little church that Newman built, and came to from St. Mary's
for the last two years of the Via Media. Near it is the range of
low buildings that people called a monastery, where Mark Pattison
and others came to be with Newman, and where, on October 8th, 1845,
Newman was received into the "One Fold of Christ" by Father Dominic
the Passionist, the good father making holy puns upon the name of the
place. Now The College, as the building is called in the village, is
given as almshouses to the poor. The largest room is a public library.
In the kitchen lives an old woman who served the Newmans in her youth.
Her husband, an old toy peasant, with smock-frock and silver hair, and
a fine rheumatism that I am sure his country gladly supports, sits by.
She stands up and remembers Newman. He lived there with his pupils
"before he became a Pope. The Pope of Rome, that's the real Pope,
over-persuaded him, and he went away and never came back again. She did
hear that the Church of England gave him some punishment for leaving,
but didn't rightly know. And the clerk's wife had been to see him, and
found him in a bare room with no carpet on the bricks, like any poor
person, and had said that it was to be humble and like his Master that
he did it all."
Meanwhile on the river we have to pass some ornate sewage works, and
the wanton embankment of a railway, that here crosses to Littlemore.
Below lies the Rose Isle, with its "Swan Inn," and on the right the
heights come nearer with the little village of Kennington. A beautiful
tree-planted road runs along the top to Radley, with its school in the
old park of the Bowyers' house, and against the tall trees is a little
grey church and thatched cottages, where women come out and sit with
their sewing machines on the summer evenings. From this the road goes
on through a corn country to Abingdon.
Next on the river comes Sandford Mill, with a leaning chimney, that
has all the interest and all the beauty of the leaning tower of Pisa.
Sandford Church lies away from the river, nearer the Nuneham Road. The
porch proclaims, "Condidit me domina Eliz. Isham. Anno gratiæ 1652,"
and adds--
"Thanks to thy charitie, religiose dame,
Which found me old, and made me new againe."
It is proper, at the same time, to speak strongly of the taste which
found the church Norman, and made it something very new indeed. But it
is worth while going in to see the curious carving in the chancel of
the Assumption of the Virgin.
[Illustration: A PICNIC TO NUNEHAM.]
Another mile, and the heights of Nuneham close in on the left with
woods sweeping down to the very edge of the water. Presently one comes
upon a little island, connected with the Nuneham side by an intensely
rustic bridge. By the landing-place is a cottage with exaggerated
thatch. Here they make tea. They make most not for the University
picnics that the summer term brings to these hospitable woods, but when
the great revolt of the town sets in with the long vacation. The river
is as populous as ever then with dashing young fellows in flannel, and
enchanting young ladies dressed in the depth of fashion. Great and
many barges are towed down to Nuneham, and there merry people dance
round Carfax, and float up again to Salter's in the heavy purple dusk,
trolling snatches of songs. Carfax reminds us what a place of shifting
Nuneham is. To begin with, the family was removed hither from Stanton
Harcourt in the last century; then they moved the church and the
village to new places; then the river was moved into a new cut, and the
town of Oxford presented Lord Harcourt with Otho Nicholson's conduit.
It was a work that gave the town the final accent of the Jacobean
style; but it was in the way of cabs. May one hope that perhaps it came
to Nuneham, like other pilgrims from Oxford, only for a season, and
that it is waiting in that hospitable retreat till its home is worthy
of it again?
[Illustration: THE BRIDGE AND COTTAGE, NUNEHAM.]
The conduit did good service to Nuneham at the time. It took the place
of a projected "Gothic castle." Gothic castles and abbeys, well ruined,
were in vogue, to cap a rising ground or to conceal a dairy. It was
the time of "landscape gardening." People corrected their land as much
as possible after the ideas of Claude. It is for his pictures one must
look in grounds like those of Nuneham. The trim Elizabethan garden,
with its pleasaunce and mount, and bowling-green and wilderness,
its fountains and clipped trees, give place to a carefully-arranged
disorder. Foregrounds were picturesquely grouped, middle distances
were plotted, and sunk fences, palings painted green, grottoes with
stalactites and stalagmites and other devices went to make up what
was called Nature. The disciple of Rousseau felt that he had indeed
returned when he could sit upon a jag of extremely difficult geology
fresh from the contractor's hand, and drop the tear of sensibility
into the cascade that his own fingers had turned on. The man who had
the chief hand in the laying out of Nuneham was Lancelot Brown, called
"Capability;" but Lord Harcourt kept, besides, two tame poets, Mason,
the author of "The English Garden," and Whitehead, the Laureate, to
help him to be elaborately natural in his gardening, and to write
verses on the seats. The two had a genuine contempt for one another.
Mason had the last word. He wrote the verses on Whitehead's memorial
urn. He said--
"....let the sons of fire
The genius of that modest bard despise,
Who bade discretion regulate his lyre,
Studious to please, but scorning to surprise;
Enough for him, if those who shared his love
Through life, who virtue more than verse revere,
Here pensive pause, while circling round the grove,
And drop the heart-paid tribute of a tear."
Mason could do most things badly. His patron says of him:--"In the
church there is a barrel-organ, upon which is set Mr. Mason's music for
the responses to the Commandments, and his Sunday hymns. The adjoining
flower-garden was formed by him, and he suggested the alterations on
the north terrace. So that in a very small space we have specimens of
his genius in music, painting" (the altarpiece of the church was his
work), "and poetry; of his taste in improving the beauties of Nature;
and what is most soothing to those who loved him, a proof that he
applied his talents to the noblest purpose, that of celebrating the
praises of Him from whom he received them."
All this has only a little to do with the look of Nuneham Reach from
the river. One may discern upon it perhaps the seal of Claude, of this
and the other poet. It is so with all planted landscape. But apart from
that, Nuneham, in its architecture of hill and wood and water, has the
trick of the great places in Thames scenery. It is an early feat that
promises Richmond.
It is best to see Nuneham Reach from the railway bridge. From any
other point it is necessary to see the bridge itself. Soon after its
great achievement the river is claimed again by a distant spire. Above
Nuneham the towers of Oxford linger, holding the landscape; for the
rest of the way it belongs to St. Helen's at Abingdon.
/D. S. MacColl/.
[Illustration: DISTANT VIEW OF ABINGDON.]