The Oxford Degree Ceremony

by J. Wells

But the Sheldonian has more harmonious associations. Music was from the first a regular feature of the Encaenia, and compositions were written for it. The most famous occasion of this kind was in July, 1733, when Handel came to Oxford, at the invitation of the Vice-Chancellor, to conduct the performance of some of his works; among these was the Oratorio Athaliah, especially written for the occasion. Handel was offered the degree of Doctor of Music, but (unlike Haydn) declined it, because he disliked 'throwing away his money for dat de blockhead wish'.

Convocation House.

Till quite recently the degree ceremony was usually held in the Convocation House, which lies just in front of the Sheldonian, under the northern end of the Bodleian Library (the so-called Selden Wing). This plain and unpretentious building, which was largely due to the munificence of Archbishop Laud, was begun in 1635 and finished two years later. It cost, with the buildings above, about £4,200. Its dreary late-Gothic windows and heavy tracery, and the Spartan severity of its unbacked benches, are characteristic of the time of transition, alike architectural and religious, to which it belongs. It has been from that time to this the Parliament House of the University, where all matters are first discussed by the Congregation of resident Doctors and Masters; it is only on the rare occasions when some great principle is at stake, and when the country is roused, that matters, whether legislative or administrative, are discussed anywhere else; a Sheldonian debate is fortunately very rare.

Its History.

The building is well suited for the purpose for which it was erected, and so has not unnaturally been used as the meeting-place of the nation's legislators, when, as has several times happened, Parliament has been gathered in Oxford. Charles I's House of Commons met here in 1643, when Oxford was the royalist capital of England; and in 1665, when Parliament fled from the Great Plague, and in 1681, when Charles II fought and defeated the last Exclusion Parliament, the House of Commons again occupied this House. It was on the latter occasion just preparing to move across to the Sheldonian, and the printers there were already packing up their presses to make room for the legislators, when Charles suddenly dissolved it, and so completed his victory over Shaftesbury and Monmouth.

A less suitable use for the Convocation House was its employment for Charles I's Court of Chancery in 1643-4.

For the reasons given above, degree days are now much more important functions than they used to be, and the Convocation House, never very suitable for the ceremony, is now seldom used.

Divinity School.

But the Divinity School, which lies at a right angle to the Convocation House, under the Bodleian Library proper, is a room which by its beauty is worthy to be the scene of any University ceremony, for which it is large enough, and degrees are still often conferred there as well as in the Sheldonian.

The architecture of the School makes it the finest room which the University possesses. It was building through the greater part of the fifteenth century, which Professor Freeman thought the most characteristic period of English architecture; and certainly the strength and the weakness of the Perpendicular style could hardly be better illustrated elsewhere. The story of its erection can be largely traced in the Epistolae Academicae, published by the Oxford Historical Society; they cover the whole of the fifteenth century, and though they are wearisome in their constant harping on the same subject—the University's need of money—they show a fertility of resource in petition-framing and in the returning of thanks, which would make the fortune of a modern begging-letter writer, whether private or public. The earliest reference to the building of the proposed new School of Divinity is in 1423, when the University picturesquely says it was intended 'ad amplianda matris nostrae ubera' (so many things could be said in Latin which would be shocking in English). In 1426 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Chichele, is approached and asked 'to open the torrents of his brotherly kindness'. Parliament is appealed to, the Monastic Orders, the citizens of London, in fact anybody and everybody who was likely to help. Cardinal Beaufort gave 500 marks, William of Waynflete lent his architectural engines which he had got for building Magdalen—at least he was requested to do so—(1478), the Bishop of London, by a refinement of compliment, is asked to show himself 'in this respect also a second Solomon'. [The touch of adding 'also' is delightful.] The agreement to begin building was signed in 1429, when the superintendent builder was to have a retaining fee of 40s. a year, and 4s. for every week that he was at work in Oxford; the work was finally completed in 1489. And the building was worthy of this long travail; its elaborate stone roof, with the arms of benefactors carved in it, is a model at once of real beauty and of structural skill.