The Shrine of St. Frideswide appears in the middle of the picture, standing in one of the eastern bays of the north wall of the choir. The north side of the Shrine is seen, together with the ancient wooden watching-chamber above.
A tomb shows between the column and the seventeenth-century reading-desk at the right of the picture, also a glimpse of the choir.
The carved oak stall front immediately under the Shrine is probably of the time of Wolsey, and part of the furniture of his choir.
To the left is the east window of the Chapel—filled with stained glass representing scenes in the life of St. Frideswide, designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart., and executed by Mr. William Morris.
The two figures represent a visitor to the shrine of the saint and a verger.
of St. Martin, St. George, St. Mary Magdalen, St. Mary the Virgin, St. Ebbe, St. Michael, and St. Peter in the East; and the last two, to one who had stood at Carfax in 1100, would still be recognised, if he visited the shadowed doorway and stern crypt of the one, and the tower of the other, though he might look in vain for what he knew in “The Seven Deadly Sins lane” and elsewhere.
Whatever learning then flourished in the city is now to be found in its architecture, in Prior Philip’s book on the miracles of St. Frideswide, and in the inestimable atmosphere of the place. We can guess that there was much that is worthy to be known, from the eloquent monkish figures of the corbels in Christ Church chapter-house; and can wistfully think of the wisdom that was uttered in Beaumont, the royal palace and learned resort, whose gardens lay at Broken Hays and near Worcester College; and in Osney Abbey, whose bells—Hautclere, Douce, Clement, Austin, Marie, Gabriel et John—made music that was known to the Eynsham abbot on May evenings, when it was a rich, calm retreat, and not as now, a shadowy outline and a sorrowful heap of stones beyond the railway station. More than the ghost of the abbey survives in the sketch of its ruined but still noble walls, in the background of that picture of its last abbot, in a window of the south choir aisle at Christ Church.
Before the Conquest Oxford had been visited by parliaments and kings; it now began to be honoured by learning and art. Olim truncus eram....[Pg 78] maluit esse deum. It had often been violated or burned; in Doomsday Book it appears as a half desolate city, despite the churches; but it had already begun, though again checked by fire that flew among the wooden houses with such ghastly ease, to assume the proportions and the grace which were fostered by William of Wykeham and a hundred of the great unknown, and in the last few years by Aldrich and Wren and Jones,—crowned by the munificence of Radcliffe,—illuminated with green and white and gold and purple by the unremembered and by Reynolds, Morris, and Burne-Jones. The Saxon work at St. Frideswide’s was superseded or veiled by the Norman architects; the fine old pillars were in part altered or replaced; and the relics of the Saint herself were transferred ceremoniously and “with all the sweet odours and spices imaginable,” to a more imposing place of rest. Upon the base of the old fortifications probably now rose the bastions of the mediæval city wall, once so formidable but now defensive only against time, and unable any longer to make history, but only poetry, as they stand peacefully and muffled with herbage in New College Gardens, or at Merton or Pembroke, or by the churchyard of St. Peter’s in the East.
The history of that age in Oxford is indistinct, and recorded events therein have a suddenness, for modern readers, which is vivid and fascinating, but to the historian at least, painful and false. And so the birth of the University, in the midst of darkness and noise, is to us to-day a melodious sudden cry. It is as if a voice,[Pg 80][Pg 79]