Didan’s or S. Frideswide’s Church was burnt on S. Brice’s Day, 1002, when the general massacre of Danes, which Æthelred the Unready, in a fit of misguided energy, had ordered to take place on that day throughout the country, was carried out at Oxford. The Danes in their extremity rushed to S. Frideswide’s Church, burst open the doors, and held the tower as a fortress against their assailants. The citizens failed to drive them out. As a last resource they set fire to the wooden roof and burned the church, “together with the ornaments and books thereof.” The Danes perished in the burning.
Nothing now remains, save the parts that I have mentioned, of the church which was then gutted. But after the massacre the King made a vow that he would rebuild S. Frideswide’s, and the church he then began to erect forms the main part of the Cathedral as we see it to-day.
Those arches, so plain and massive, over the western bays of the north choir aisle and Lady Chapel, were part of Æthelred’s transept aisle; the south transept aisle, now S. Lucy’s Chapel; the walls of the south choir aisle; the pillars of the choir and the open triforium of the south transept—these are the chief portions of the Cathedral which are thought to be unrestored parts of Æthelred’s work.
It is now generally admitted that the Saxons, at the date of the Conquest, were more advanced than the Normans in the fine arts. Their sculpture was more highly finished and their masonry more finely jointed. We need not therefore be surprised at the excellence and ornamentation of the work in Oxford Cathedral, which is attributed to this date, nor, when we remember that Æthelred was the brother-in-law of Richard-le-bon, the great church-builder of Normandy, need we wonder at the unwonted magnificence of Æthelred’s plans for this church.
The Danes soon took ample revenge for that treacherous massacre. They ravaged Berkshire and burned Oxford (1009). The climax came when Sweyn arrived. The town immediately submitted to him, and “he compelled the men of Oxford and Winchester to obey his laws” (Saxon Chronicle).
Æthelred’s work was interrupted by the coming of Sweyn, and the King’s flight to Richard’s court in Normandy. In the south-east pier of the Cathedral tower there is a noticeable break in the masonry, which marks, it is supposed, the cessation of building that coincided with the close of Anglo-Saxon rule.
When Sweyn died Æthelred returned, and for three years held Cnut in check. The work at S. Frideswide’s was probably resumed then. The richly carved, weather-beaten capitals of the choir, with their thick abaci and remarkable ornamentation, partly Saxon and partly Oriental in character, are eloquent of the exile of Æthelred and of the influence of the Eastern monks whom he met at the court of his brother in Normandy. And they speak not only of Byzantine influence, passing through Normandy into England, but also, through the existing traces of exposure to rain and wind, of the ruinous state into which the church had fallen when
“whether by the negligence of the Seculars or the continuall disturbance of the expelled Regulars, it was almost utterly forsaken and relinqueshed, and the more especially because of that troublesome warre betweene King Harold and William the Conqueror.”
For the nunnery which S. Frideswide founded had soon ceased to be a nunnery. By the irony of fate, soon after her death, the nuns were removed, and the priory was handed over to a chapter of married men, the Secular Canons, whom S. Dunstan, in his turn, succeeded in suppressing. But the nuns never came back, for, after many vicissitudes, the priory was finally restored, under Henry I. (1111), as a house of the Canons Regular of S. Augustine. Some have thought that Guimond, the first prior (1122), was responsible for the building of the whole church, but he more probably found enough to do in re-establishing order and restoring the monastic buildings. His successor, Robert of Cricklade, perhaps it was who restored Æthelred’s church on the old plan and inserted most of the later Norman work, especially the clerestory and presbytery.
The triforium and clerestory in the nave (roofed in with sixteenth-century wood-work) give us an interesting example of the latest Norman or Transitional style. The clerestory consists of a pointed arch enriched with shafts at the angles, and supported on either side by low circular arches which form the openings of a wall passage. The arrangement of the triforium is remarkable. The massive pillars of the nave are alternately circular and octagonal. From their capitals, which are large, with square abaci, spring circular arches with well-defined mouldings. These are, in fact, the arches of the triforium, which is here represented by a blind arcade of two arches set in the tympanum of the main arch. The true arches of the nave spring from half capitals, set against the pillars, and are plain, with a circular moulding towards the nave. The crown of these arches is considerably below the main capitals of the pillars, from which the upper or triforium arches spring. The half capitals assist in carrying the vaulting of the aisles.