As I type this I’m sitting on a train to Glasgow, the last stop on my trip with my friend Jarred to Inverness, in northern Scotland. We’ll be bumming around for 10 days, seeing all kinds of historical sites, great landscape, and hopefully some pagan monuments for the winter solstice.
But first, I need to cover some of the visits I paid to two of Oxford’s oldest colleges, Christ Church and Balliol.
Back in September, in “0th week” – the week before classes start and when students typically receive their first paper assignments for the term – my housemate Corey and I paid a visit to Christ Church College to meet our tutor for our course on the crusades. Our tutor met us at the gate and took us through the quad to the chapel in the back. Christ Church is extremely old, and the chapel itself holds the remains of St. Frideswide, the patron saint of Oxford (both the city and the university). Frideswide is a relatively unremarkable saint from the eighth century, who is said to have performed miraculous healings and later founded a priory in the region, of which she served as abbess until her death. It’s a pretty standard story, but it was still neat to see her actual tomb.
The stained glass window showing Frideswide’s life was made in the nineteenth century, and it’s appropriately straightforward, save for a neat little anachronism in the last panel which shows her death. In the background of the image, behind the bed of the dying Frideswide and in another room can be seen a flush toilet. Our tutor told us that it was put there because of a Victorian obsession with cleanliness at the time of the window’s creation. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the saint herself – the British just liked toilets.
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After we left the chapel, we stepped back out into the college’s main quad, which is incredibly huge and impressive. Normally visitors have to pay to get in, and we didn’t realize that as students of the university, we weren’t considered visitors, even though we didn’t belong to that particular college, so we wanted desperately to get all the photos we could since we hadn’t had to pay to get in this time. We took some photos of the quad, and really liked the fountain in the middle, so we decided to walk up and take some close-ups of it.
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After just about a minute or so, an old porter of the college (sort of like a guard, but with a bowler hat! It’s adorable) came up and asked us if we were visiting the college. We thought we were, so we didn’t think to show him our student IDs. He asked us what we were doing at the fountain, and we confusedly answered that we were just taking some photos of it. He pointed out signs that said “No visitors beyond this point” which were all over the outside path of the quad, and asked us why we thought we could ignore those signs. If you look at the high-resolution versions of my photos of the quad, you can clearly see and read the signs, but in our defense we genuinely didn’t see them. We tried explaining to him that it was just an honest mistake, and that we didn’t see the signs but would go back to the outside path right away, but the old guy wasn’t having any of it. “Do you take me for some kind of fool?” he asked, furious that we had “lied to his face”. We really didn’t want to argue, and we weren’t about to break the rules when we hadn’t even had to pay for a ticket in, so we just said we were going to leave and apologized again. “Don’t think I’m an idiot,” he said as we walked away. It was probably rude of us to turn our backs on him and just walk out of the college, but we weren’t about to argue with him or apologize any more, since his hat and gut made looking at him an exercise in containing our laughter. So we ended up only seeing about half the college’s grounds, and we left unnecessarily, since if we had shown him our Oxford IDs he would’ve just walked away in the first place.
The moral of the story: Porters are silly, old, surly, petty little men. Or at least that one is. I like to think all of them are, though. Check out my full Christ Church set here, including more shots of the quad and lots more stuff within the chapel.
My tutorials for my crusades course met in Balliol College, which is another very old, relatively large campus within the city centre, and by the point we had our first tutorial I realized I was free to walk into any campus since I was an Oxford student and my ID didn’t even say that I went to Regent’s Park, since I’m a visiting student.
Balliol’s main quad is much smaller than Christ Church, but it’s still quite nice. It’s very green and has lots of flowers planted about as well. I took a few photos of the quad (including one of a man with pink pants who just needed to be documented) and then moved into the chapel. Again, the chapel is much smaller than that of Christ Church, and there are no saints on display or mentioned, but it’s nonetheless in great shape and very photogenic.
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After taking lots of pictures of the chapel, I went to the main campus behind the quad, which is much bigger and resembles an American campus like Macalester with its paths, fields (which students are actually allowed to walk on!), trees, and disconnected buildings. It was really busy, but it’s nothing remarkable if not for the age and history of the college itself.
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The college was founded by the Balliol family, a noble Scottish house from the late Middle Ages that died out long ago (though the college, of course, has stayed open). The school dates back to the thirteenth century, and the message to visitors near the entrance says it goes back to 1263 and “has a claim to be the oldest college at Oxford”. Notable alumni and professors include Adam Smith, Aldous Huxley, and Richard Dawkins.
Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get kicked out of Balliol, although that would have presented serious problems as I had to return there each week to meet for my tutorial, so it’s a good thing there were no problems. Check out the full set here.
Jarred and I will be doing all kinds of great stuff in Scotland, starting with a few nights in Inverness, which is on the north tip of Loch Ness, so expect multiple blog updates in the next couple weeks. It’s just a matter of finding a place where I can use the internet that doesn’t make me pay by the hour, at this point!
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