St. Frideswide’s College certainly existed from of old in Wolsey’s time. Her story has passed through the hands of Philip, her third Norman prior; through William of Malmesbury’s and John of Tynemouth’s; and is found in Leland’s Collectanea. It runs as follows.[248] About A.D. 727 an alderman, or subregulus, of the name of Didan is discovered ruling in all honour over the populous city of Mercian Oxford. He and his wife Saffrida have a daughter called Frideswide. She embraces the monastic life with twelve other maidens. Her father, at her mother’s death, builds a conventual church in honour of St. Mary and All Saints, and thereof makes her prioress. The munificent kings of Mercia also build inns or halls in the vicinity.[249] This seems to anticipate even Alfred’s imagined foundation of University College; and is therefore to be adhered to as dogma for the present by all members of the larger House. But Mr. Boase’s remarks on the probabilities of the story are strongly in its favour.
Many days and troubles passed over St. Frideswide’s Church, or its site. It was wholly or partially burnt in the massacre of Danes in 1002; also in 1015. It was rebuilt and made a “cell” or dependency of the great monastery of Abingdon. It became a house of Secular Canons, who were dispossessed after the Conquest; when a Norman church was constructed by restoration of the old Saxon one, whose foundations, however, exist and form part of the actual structure still. The present chapter-house, or rather its doorway, may have belonged to this period. It is justly celebrated as a fair specimen of Norman architecture, and is considered by several authorities to be more ancient, not only than the chapter-house itself (which, however, Sir Gilbert Scott places about the middle of the thirteenth century; see Report, p. 7), but than the old nave and transept walls, which are generally taken as twelfth century, if we must reject Dr. Ingram’s belief in them as Ethelred’s,[250] grateful as it must be to all members of the foundation. The doorway certainly bears marks of fire, which may be referred to the conflagration of 1190, when a great part of Oxford was destroyed.[251]
Ten years before, the body of St. Frideswide had been translated from its resting place to the north choir aisle, to be again (but not till one hundred and ten years after, on 10th September, 1289) removed to a new and more costly shrine in the Lady Chapel, which had been added to that aisle early in the thirteenth century, or between that and the north choir aisle.
Her first regular prior, Guimond, had been employed till his death in 1141, in the re-arrangements of monastic buildings which would be necessary on the change, at the Conquest, from Secular Canons to Regular Augustinians. Both he and his successor, Robert of Cricklade, seem to have been wise and well-meaning ecclesiastics; and a school was connected with the convent which really may be considered as the original germ of the historical University.
Robert of Cricklade spent much labour upon the present structure, tower, nave, transepts, and choir; and the works were far enough advanced in 1180, under prior Philip, for St. Frideswide’s first translation. Then, we presume, the fire of 1190 gave occasion to some re-constructions, and let in Transitional Architecture, of which something has to be said here. The term “transitional” seems to mean change or progress in a style (as from the round to the pointed arch in Gothic-Romanesque), where principles and rules are adhered to; not attempts to combine incongruous styles. England is full of transitions, through Norman to Early English, to Decorated, and so on; and they seem natural, and not lawless or contradictory. But the Roman way of encrusting their own great vaults and arches with Greek lintels and pediments, constructively useless, is a different and worse thing—just as bad as the Baroque or Fancy Renaissance. Still, a mixture of pure elements is at all events a pure mixture; and in Christ Church the Romanesque, Norman, and Decorated features are all of the best. The north-east walls and turrets might remind one of the Cathedral of Mainz or of Trier; while the Chapter-house door is fine Norman, and the Early-Decorated windows excellent in their way. It was just at this time of the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, when Northern builders were eliminating all traces of the Greek or trabeated structure, that the new or pointed arch began to present itself, and be welcomed here and there, just for its beauty’s sake. In Christ Church the arches of the nave, and other principal ones, are round, but two of the four which carry the tower are pointed; the greater supporting power of the latter form may have been already observed.
The ancient interior must have been one of considerable beauty from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, when Wolsey destroyed three bays of the west end of the nave, reducing it to one-half its original length; and probably his name must also be associated with the lowering of all the roofs. If he executed the beautiful choir-vaulting, that is no small merit to balance these destructions; but it is questioned. The curious treatment of the side arcades should be noticed; the solid pillars of the twelfth century have been ingeniously divided in their thickness; the halves facing the aisle have been left in their natural proportions, while those which face the central nave have been raised so as to embrace the triforium stage.[252]
The upper stage of the Cathedral tower with its spire, twice since rebuilt, belongs to the thirteenth century, like the chapter-house; and just within that century (1289) is a second northern aisle, built as a Lady Chapel, and containing a new shrine of St. Frideswide. The curious wooden structure at present existing is really the watching-chamber of the shrine erected in the next century, and is placed on the donor’s tomb in all probability, instead of the saint’s.
The large chapel, now called the Latin, and formerly the Divinity Chapel, was added in the next (fourteenth) century, to the north of the northern choir aisle, by building two more bays eastward to the north-east chapel of the thirteenth century just mentioned. This is called “the dormitory,” being the burial-place of several deans and canons; the word is a simple translation of the Greek cœmeterium, or sleeping-place, applied to the catacombs of Rome from the second century. Windows were now altered from Norman to Decorated; three of which at the East end of the choir are again restored to their original style. In 1340 the Lady Elizabeth de Montacute gave the convent the present Christ Church meadow in order to maintain a chantry in the Lady Chapel. Her tomb is between that chapel and the other on the north-east, near a prior’s (Robert de Ewelme’s or Alexander de Sutton’s), and near also to that of Sir George Nowers, a companion of the Black Prince.
Important alterations began towards the end of the fifteenth century: the choir clerestory was remodelled, the rich vaulting (probably) added, and various side windows altered to the Perpendicular style, which was then extending its rigid rule over England.
The great north transept window and the wooden roof of the transepts and tower (that of the nave is later) are early sixteenth-century. But at the end of the first quarter of that century (1524) came Wolsey’s great scheme for Cardinal College, with its good and evil. The latter may be soon disposed of; he certainly spoilt St. Frideswide’s Church by cutting off its three western bays for his great quadrangle. His intended Perpendicular Church on the north side of that quadrangle would hardly have atoned, with all its magnificence, for the destruction of the nave, which (even now, when partially restored) is an affliction to the spectator as he enters the double doors.