Christ Church (and) College

     On Friday, January 9, we walked through much of central Oxford. The highlight was a tour of Christ Church College and Cathedral, one of the—maybe the—most famous, prestigious, and wealthiest of colleges of Oxford. It is the school of British Prime Ministers (thirteen of them) and the location for stories and movies from Alice in Wonderland to Harry Potter as well as the inspiration for many verses. Christ Church has about 550 undergrad and grad students, large by Oxford standards. It has wonderful buildings (the Tom Tower, below, designed by Christopher Wren, is one of Oxford’s landmarks); they are surrounded by beautiful gardens, lush sporting grounds (from croquet to soccer/football) and an expansive meadow notable for its herd of cows.

 

 

     It also has a rich history. It was created in 1525 by Cardinal Wolsey as Cardinal College. However, Wolsey fell out of favor a few years later with King Henry VIII, when he couldn’t get Henry’s first marriage annulled (tangent: you can always remember the fate of Henry VIII’s wives with the rhyme, “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived). Henry took over the College and called it (you guessed it) Henry VIII College. A few years later, he renamed it Christ Church as part of his creation of the Church of England.

     From the start, the College and Cathedral were created and developed by funds garnered by the English reformation and the dissolution of Catholic monasteries. About 100 years after Henry VIII, the royal and religious disputes continued to shape Christ Church  when it became the home of Charles I during the English Civil War—Charles lost his head over his war with Parliament.  Speaking of lost heads, one of the acts of Henry VIII as head of his new church (sorry, I know I’m jumping back a century) was to deface or cut off the heads of all images of Catholic saints—he was purifying a church that had become idolatrous. Even the images of the children of a saint honored in the Cathedral lost their heads:

Even a beautiful stained glass window portraying the murder of Thomas Beckett wasn't spared--the head was replaced with a plain piece of glass (one could argue that at least the window was spared). 

     The Cathedral is central to the College, though students no longer have mandatory attendance. I don’t think I’d ever known that the dean of the College must be from the clergy. Is Christ Church a religious college—in a way that even Notre Dame U or Brigham Young U aren’t? In a week that has been dominated by news of murder and mayhem in Paris caused in the name of religion, there was a certain disquieting feeling when listening to the violent history of the Cathedral at the center of the College.  

 

     We didn’t get to see the Great Hall, which has been the inspiration for a number of other college great halls, including Hogwarts. So maybe my experience would have been different if that secular (if maybe magical) site had been included. The Great Hall is closed until March—maybe I’ll update this post then. We didn’t even get to climb the great stairs where students are greeted by the Dean—or at least that’s how it goes in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (ok, this part of the blog entry is for my grandchildren). This is what we saw of the stairs:

 

     After the tour, we went to a lovely nearby café for scones, clotted cream, coffee, and tea. We are getting acclimated.