institutions

Today we toured the Oxford Castle and peered inside the gates of All Souls College (it was closed today to visitors, but is open some other days). It wasn’t an intentional juxtaposition, but thinking about it afterward, we couldn’t have created a greater historical contrast.

Oxford Castle dates back to 1071 and the Norman invasion of Saxon England. They built an impressive fortress, but after the English Civil War of the 1640s, it became a prison and remained one until less than 20 years ago. It is as a prison that it is most famous. It was a barbarous place for almost three hundred years, with murderous conditions and treatment. I’m not going to recount either here, but the tour guides take a certain pleasure (an understandable defense) in describing these. It's a good tour: I learned some things and got the answer right to the one quiz question we were asked, but the history is really grim.

On the other side of downtown Oxford stands All Souls College, a monument to learning and to privilege. It is a gorgeous place, and while the treatment of students in the centuries past may also have been outrageous from our modern perspective (undergraduates were the servants of the "fellows"--professors and graduate students) , it wasn’t Oxford Prison by any standard. It has been a site of learning  since 1438.  It now admits a few gifted graduate students from around the world and has a very fine faculty. Hardly all souls--some souls are said to be over haunting the Castle.

 

That the prison is now an upscale hotel and the college is still a college may be a sign of human progress. I believe it is (though the commercialism of turning a prison into a hotel could be another entry). Let us aspire to the lofty spires rather than dark dungeons and battlements.