Aldrich, the versatile, followed in the Deanery, nothing being said of Massey in the letters patent which installed him as direct successor to John Fell. We have alluded to him more than once in this book, and his monument in the nave is mentioned in its place.
After Aldrich came Francis Atterbury in 1711, who in 1713 left Oxford to combine the rather dissimilar functions of Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster. He found his way into the Tower of London in 1722, being convicted of correspondence with the Pretender.
By the eighteenth century Oxford had sunk into a state of torpor, from which it began to recover in 1807, when the first honour schools were founded; though from 1783 Dean Cyril Jackson had been doing a great work in the restoration of order and efficiency at the House. Christ Church thus bore an honourable part in the revival of learning, and gradually developed from a rich man's plesaunce into a home of learning: the names of Ruskin, Gladstone, and Pusey are typical of the great men in different walks of life that have belonged to the cathedral college in our own era. Dean Gaisford more than half a century ago did much to help on the progress; and the long rule of his successor, Dean Liddell (1855-91), familiar to every schoolboy through his famous lexicon, covered a period of immense change both in the cathedral and in the college. Dr. Liddell died January 18th, 1898. His successor is Dr. Francis Paget, one of the writers in "Lux Mundi," and the author of some well-known volumes of addresses.
Fifty years ago it was said that Christ Church was the only cathedral in Christendom where there were neither services nor sermons for the people of the diocese. But the new life, which has since then wrought such great changes in university, cathedral, and diocese alike, has left Christ Church, if still the smallest, yet not the least important of the great centres of ecclesiastical activity.
CHAPTER V.
THE DIOCESE OF OXFORD.
Down to our own time, Oxford remained one of the new dioceses of the English Church, having been set up by Henry VIII. by way of compensation for his confiscation of the monastic properties. Before 1542 Oxford belonged to the enormous diocese of Lincoln; but in that year the new see was created, and Robert King, the last Abbot of Oseney, was made first Bishop of Oseney, and the Bishop's stool set up in his magnificent abbey church of St. Mary.
This Abbey of Oseney, which had been founded by Robert D'Oilgi in 1129, and rebuilt in 1247, was, like St. Frideswide's, a house of Augustinian Canons, but far larger. It was, indeed, one of the finest abbeys in England, its principal cloister being as large as Tom Quad, and its church no less than 352 feet by 100, with double aisles, and twenty-four altars. Gardens and courts, and comely outbuildings, ran along the side of the river; in every corner a busy life went on among the orieled windows and high-pitched roofs, within the fretted cloister, the schools and libraries, the refectory, and the kitchen, whither a conduit brought the water from the river side. A great gate looked on to the high road; and the abbot's lodgings were so spacious that six men could walk abreast up the steps which led into his hall. Yet others were not forgotten; besides the guest-house, there was a building reserved for poor clerks.
But Henry's mania for destruction could not let the Abbey stand. In 1546 he moved the see to St. Frideswide's, reconstituting the old Priory, which Wolsey had turned into a college, as both college and cathedral. The doom of Oseney was pronounced, and in that year the demolition began.