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St Giles' Oxford
Yesterday and Today
by Leslie Wood June 1974
The Story of the Parish of St Giles'
Our Patron Saint
Many churches dedicated to St Giles, the gentle saint, stand outside the
walls of busy medieval cities, as though seeking the silence that he found in
his own cave in the 7th century, but all too often, as in the case of Oxford,
the rapid growth of our towns has engulfed these silent places, and our St
Giles' today is poised between the suburbs and the city itself. Little is
known of St Giles, called Aegidius in the Latin records, except that he may have
been a Greek who came to France and established himself as a hermit in about 683
AD in the impenetrable forests at the mouth of the Rhône, where his reputation
for sanctity led Benedictines later to build the great monastery of St Gilles du Gard on the pilgrimage route from Arles to St James of Compostella in Spain at
the end of the 12th century. In representations of the saint, he is
accompanied by a hind which had fled to him for protection from a Royal
huntsman. By a strange turn of circumstances he then became the patron saint of
beggars and lepers, the flotsam and jetsam of humanity that haunt the market
square and the town gate.
The Site of the Church
The earliest 12th century church that was raised on this site may well have
received its dedication from the revival of interest in the saint from those who
returned with their palmers' shells from the pilgrimages to those shrines. But
there is the interesting question of why there should be two 12th century
churches, St Giles' and St Mary Magdalen, so close together in the territory
north of the city wall, for there was no secular building beyond the wall,
except for Beaumont Palace away to the west, until the City Council in the time
of Elizabeth I bought up the manorial rights from Walton Manor and let out the
land on lease for private building. All that can be surmised is that there may
have been an ancient track leading out of the city at the North gate and going
to join the Roman roads in the Midland shires. Be that as it may, it is
known from the Domesday Survey of 1086 that Alwyn Godgoose owned the land to the
north and beyond the city on which shortly after the Norman Conquest he had
proposed to build a church in the Romanesque style. It was, however, not
finished and a secular vicar installed until 1120 AD. As to its consecration,
that was not achieved until the last year of St Hugh of Lincoln's life in
1200 AD.
St Hugh of Lincoln
That Saint, who was so closely connected with our church, was born in France
near Grenoble, one of three children of the Lord Avalon, and trained for twenty
years as a Carthusian monk of the Abbey of the Grand Chartreuse. It was he who
was sent to England when, in about the year 1174, Henry II wished to introduce
the Carthusians into this land. His rugged character and austerity of life
commended themselves to the English king and led to his eventual enthronement in
the Bishop's chair in Lincoln. There are many stories of Hugh at the court of
the king at Woodstock and at the great abbey at Eynsham. His interest in our
slowly growing church in the fields led him to undertake the consecration, and a
cross of interlaced circles, like a child's exercise with a pair of compasses,
incised on the western column of the tower is said to commemorate this act. This
same saint, bishop and builder, in 1194 caused north and south aisles to be
added to the pre-conquest church of St Mary Magdalen a little down the road.
The Twelfth Century
As the visitor looks down from St Giles' to the Saxon tower of St Michael at
the North gate, he has to imagine that in the twelfth century there was nothing
but these two churches between him and the city wall, but beyond and to the
south of the Saxon tower there lay the town with a population of about 1000
people, crowded into the narrow streets, sanctified by fourteen churches, alive
with market stalls, and the whole surrounded by the great wall, often repaired
and in many parts rebuilt. One change of ownership was, however, to affect
St Giles' and to last until the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In 1138 the
Empress Matilda, or Maud, and her son, Henry Plantagenet, soon to be king, then
at war with Stephen, confirmed a grant of the church and all its lands and
appurtenances to the newly created Godstow Priory - a convent of women which was
a few years later to give shelter and a last resting place to Rosamund Clifford,
the Rosa Mundi of Henry II.
St Giles' Fair
It was in commemoration of this consecration that the St Giles' Fair was
founded to take place on the Monday and Tuesday after the Sunday following the
Saint's Day which is the first of September. The wide avenue in which the Fair
is held seems always to have been there. It may have had a stream running down
one side to join the town or Canditch. One of the earliest maps of Oxford, by
Ralf Agas, in 1578 shows a pond at about the place where the war memorial is
now, and the "Fender" outside St John's College is probably the only
remaining piece of roadside verge now remaining. The College purchased this
piece and planted trees on it in 1577 and built the existing wall in the
following year. Engravings in the 18th and 19th centuries show flocks of sheep
and cattle making their way leisurely along it; the loyalist students paraded
their in the occupation of Oxford in the Civil War; the territorial regiments
billeted in the City in the Great War put it to the same use, and the engravings
portray groups of University men in full academical dress and caps slowly
perambulating or gathering in knots to talk.
The Growth of the Manor
At the time when the first church of St Giles' was built, it stood in the
open fields of Walton Manor until the conveyance to Godstow nunnery. At the
Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1535 the church and the lands passed into the
hands of Dr George Owen of Godstow, a physician of Henry VIII. His son conveyed
it in 1573 to Sir Thomas White, Lord Mayor of London, who in 1555 had refounded
the Cistercian House of St Bernard as the College of St John the Baptist. White
settled the church on his newly established College, which has presented vicars
to the church ever since. To go back to the 12th century. Slowly buildings
began to collect round the church. In 1219, an ancient Bedlam, or Bethlehem
Cottage, is recorded in a lease s standing just north of the church and between
the two roads. Its site is now unknown. In the King's Peace in the halcyon
summers that preceded the Civil War, the munificence of William Laud added the
renaissance glories of the Canterbury Quad to St John's College, but there is
little evidence of other development in the parish. When Charles I and Henrietta
Maria visited Oxford in 1635 to see Laud's new work, he may well have remarked
on what his generation had learned to call the barbarous gothic church hidden
away in the trees, for we know that he forestalled the tourist of today and
walked through Oxford to visit the Bodleian. Whether the church played any part
in the Civil War is not certain - there is a legend that Price Rupert was shot
in the foot as he passed St Giles' riding up the road to Banbury toward the
Parliamentary lines without his armour; and another legend that during the
Commonwealth a person hid behind the large table tomb n the churchyard to avoid
soldiers who were searching for him and so escaped with his life. After
the civil war, there was an increase of house building on the plots leased by
the City Council. By the end of the 17th century there were four inns to refresh
the passer-by - the Pheasant Inn, the Eagle and the Child, the Royal Oak and the
Lamb and Flag, the symbol of John the Baptist. The Judges Lodgings, now St
John's House, was built by Thomas Rowney in 1702 - four members of his family
have memorials in the church - and eleven other houses with smooth ashlar
fronts, parapets and pediments supported by pilasters with Greek capitals gave
an air of sophistication to the street. St Giles' Street, however, like
many a village street, was only one house thick. On the west, gardens and
cultivated plots stretched away to meet the walls of Beaumont Palace. In 1771,
following the Poor Law legislation of 1722-3. a House of Industry was built in
what is now known as Wellington Square, to house the poor of the eleven United
Oxford Parishes, but our parish escaped being rated because of the extent of its
own charities. The path leading westward from the church that had been known as
Black Boys Lane then became Workhouse Lane and it became Little Clarendon Street
under the influence of the University and Clarendon Press set up in Walton
Street in 1830. This development was followed by the Radcliffe Infimary and Wind
Tower designed by Henry Keen in 1772, and standing to the north and west of our
church.
People of the Parish
What kind of people came to live in this growing parish is difficult to say;
one piece of evidence may be found in the report on sanitary conditions in
Oxford in 1847. Although the terrible cholera epidemic of 1832 did not touch the
parish of St Giles', it was nevertheless continually wracked by the epidemic
diseases of typhus, diarrohea, scarlet fever, measles and small pox. The
particular places of greatest infection were the yards and courts in Observatory
Street, St Giles' Street, Adams Yard, Little Clarendon Street and Cook's Yard
Row. In these courts were observed heaps of manure and bones which were used in
manufacture, so that in addition to the grand houses and Infirmary with their
numerous servants there must have been a large population of low-grade workers,
probably connected with the land and with commerce of the canal which reached
Oxford by 1797.
The Nineteenth Century
When the common fields to the north of the town were enclosed by St John's
College in 1832 the gates were opened to the building of private houses. A Town
Clerk of the Corporation built himself a large house, which is now the core of
St Hugh's College, and used to take the city treasure home with him at night
accompanied by armed outriders. The infestation of the roads by footpads did
not, however, deter the expansion of the city. In 1853-5 the Park Town Estate
was designed and built by S. Lipscombe Seckham, the city architect and surveyor.
He followed that with a design, also in the 1850's, for what he called the
Norham Manor Estate, showing some detached Italianate houses grouped round a new
gothic church. In June 1860, the college sold some land in lots for
building along the west side of the Woodstock Road, but in the next month the
first real step was taken to establish what came to be known -and admired- as
Victorian North Oxford.
The Builders of North Oxford
A Witney-born architect and builder, William Wilkinson, 1819-1901, at the
invitation of St John's College, took over from Seckham the planning and
development of the College property for houses for the expanding population of
the city and produced a master plan for the layout of the Norham Manor Estate,
which then consisted of what became Norhan Gardens, Norham Road and Fifield
Road. Having made the plan, he built a number of the houses himself. By the end
of the 1870's most of the land between the River Thames on the west of the city
and the River Cherwell was either built upon or subject to plans and proposals. In
this work he was associated with two nephews, Harry Wilkinson Moore, 1850-1915,
and Clapton Crabb Rolfe, 1845-1907, who shared with him a native skill in design
and a highly individual taste in architecture. Their plans for the layout of the
streets of the Norham Manor and Walton Manor Estates showed a delicate feeling
for space, so that many vistas led to a gap purposely left between the houses
and filled with trees, with the result that the eye rested upon an
apparently limitless horizon. Their designs for houses, some of which are left
to us, have certain recognizable characteristics. The elevation is often off-centre;
that is, a gable or tower is so placed as to throw away the regularity we
associate with the buildings of the 18th Century; they used stone dressings
framing red brick walls, and the divisions in the windows are stone columns with
slender shafts and over-large carved capitals, and many niches are filled with
stone carved decorations in a gothic style that contrasts oddly with the modern
purpose of the house. It is often said that this suburban growth was
occasioned by the demand of the married fellows of the colleges for houses of
their own, but the dates show that much of this building was provided earlier
for those who were engaged in the professions and in commerce in the city. By
1869 Kingston Road was pegged out, by 1881 the builders had begun on St
Margaret's Road then called Rackham's Lane, building from the east on the south
side and turning back along the north to the west side. The interesting work
done on the records of St John's College by Dr Andrew Saint shows the successive
dates of building as the houses run down one side of the road and up the other.
Hayfield Road, named after a local innkeeper, was laid out by Wilkinson and
Moore in 886 with houses for artisans and administered by the Oxford Industrial
and Provident Land and Building Society. Our own parish buildings of St Giles'
were erected during 1887-1891. The University Statute, however, that
permitted Fellows of Colleges to marry and live out of College was passed in
1877 and had subsequently to be ratified by each college. Victorian North Oxford
began, then, as a suburban expansion of the city along the healthy gravel
terraces between the Thanes and Cherwell.
New Parishes
Because of the growth of the population, the ancient parish of St Giles'
suffered an amputation. Summertown had already become a parish on its own with a
chapel of ease in 1833; the new parish of SS. Philip and James was carved out in
1863 and the first vicarage was built at the same time. Then followed St
Margaret's and finally St Andrew's in 1906-7.
Wellington Square
A word must be said about the two most characteristic parts of the parish -
Wellington Square and Little Clarendon Street. The origin of the Square
was that in 1772 a House of Industry was built in the fields between the church
and Walton Lane. This institution was to contain the poor of the United Parishes
of Oxford. It took the place of the west side of the present Square, backing
onto Walton Lane, which was a few yards west of the present Walton Street, and
running 230 feet north to south. It was separated from Little Clarendon Street
by a wall and the present Square garden seems to have been a garth within the
open square formed by the three arms of the House. The legend that the garden
was the burial place for cholera victims is not bourne out by the records. Although
the institution was put in the parish, the parish itself was not rated for the
purpose, as were the remaining ten. The charitable bequests especially for the
relief of the poor administered by St Giles' were so numerous that they counted
as relief of rates. Even in 1849, according to the guide book of the
period, the inmates of the House were becoming so numerous that its extension
was being discussed. This did not happen, however, until William Wilkinson won
an architectural competition for the new Oxford Workhouse in 1862 which was then
built in Cowley Road. This was then followed by the demolition of the House of
Industry and the erection of the north range of the Square, named after the Iron
Duke, who had been the Chancellor of the University from 1844 to 1853. When
the Square was completed it was entirely residential except for Rewley House in
the south east corner. This house was put up to accommodate St Anne's, Rewley, a
Church of England High School for girls, founded in the parish of St Thomas by
the Rev. T. Chamberlaine, Canon of Christ Church and Tractarian Vicar of St
Thomas, and also the founder of St Edward's School, which also migrated from the
parish of St Thomas via New Inn Hall Street to the William Wilkinson buildings
in the Woodstock Road in 1873. Rewley House was then taken over by the County
Library Department of the City Council and then became the headquarters of the
Department of External Studies of the University. Up to the end of the
second world war, all the remaining houses in the Square were either privately
occupied or were lodgings for students or other people employed in the city.
Many of the houses "took in" students, some of whom would sit on their
window sills in the summer weather and dangle their legs into the abyss below;
at one corner was the famous college servant and landlord who looked so like
Winston Churchill that he got his portrait in a national magazine; on a first
floor nearby was the tutor who, as the advertisements in the Gazettte said, read
Greek and Latin with candidates for Responsions; the vocal arts were represented
by a teacher of singing who found the resonance of the Square rewarding. During
the war the W.A.A.F.S. moved into one house and brought great gaiety and the
banging of car doors late into the night - this was still a time when students
had to be in betimes. The army was followed at the end of the hostilities by
Barnett House, moving up the road from 35 Beaumont Street then came the W.E.A.
and the Department of External Studies and various teaching rooms for academic
studies. Steadily the University infiltrated the Square and many members
of our congregation moved away. Administrative Departments took temporary refuge
there while their concrete palace was being prepared in Little Clarendon Street.
The remaining inhabitants then saw a change in the car parking pattern, in that
the Square once was empty in the day but full of homecoming cars in the evening,
then it changed so that cars filled the Square in the daytime and left it empty
at night. The ranges on the east and north then fell to the bulldozer. Those who
had lived there saw their old wall papers briefly exposed to view like bombed
houses in wartime, before, in a cloud of dust, the hundred-year old terraces
evaporated. But the Square as it had been for that hundred years must have left
memories of their Oxford days in men all over the world.
Little Clarendon Street
In the years when this street was untouched by development it was a village
street; too narrow for wheeled traffic, it invited the pedestrian to loiter and
stray over the road. In the middle of the north side, where Somerville College
now dominates the skyline, was a row of two-storey cottages with tiny front
gardens and fences and white painted gates that children used to swing on,
talking the while to their friends. On the south side the long blank wall,
probably dating form 1832, never the canvass for painted slogans, hid the back
gardens and dustbins of the houses in the Square. There were shopkeepers
who had been there man and boy for generations. Life was very simple behind
those windows and counters. The tobacco shop was warmed -not heated- by an oil
stove perilously near the front door, yet the only fire that
struck the street in the last war was in the timber yard surrounded by the stone
walls of an ancient court. This event was so unusual that fireman ran up and
down the street looking for the hydrant. When a coffee shop, perhaps the
first sign of impending change, opened its doors the conversations within ranged
from the runners in the 2.30 to the philosophy of Wittgenstein, subjects which
had been equally aired in the Duke of Cambridge before its improvement, but made
more exciting by the flight of darts to the board on the other side of the bar. It
was said that the street provided all the necessities of life from
greengroceries and milk to footware and gentlemens' bespoke tailoring, and it
lacked only books, banks and burials. Its present elevation to elegant fashion
houses and boutiques for gear and the University offices has changed its
character, but it is still a place for leisure, for dodging bicycles going up
the one-way street and for the gossip and trade of the village.
St Giles' Street
And now for the great artery of the parish -St Giles' Street itself. Wide
enough for King Charles' troops to drill in, for the brazen panoply of the Fair
and for civic processions on Remembrance Sunday and other great occasions, it is
one of the loveliest approaches to any city. Down this avenue or boulevard, as
it has been called, have come a motley collection; Henry I from Woodstock to his
palace at Beaumont Place; Cistercian monks to their academic house; Carmelite
friars; the great scholar, Robert Grossteste, fresh from lecturing in the
medieval schools; parliamentary men, driven from London by plagues or civil
strife. Cardinal Wolsey rode this way to take farewell of his king, Elizabeth I,
who had known Rycote as a girl prisoner, yet returned as Queen to Woodstock, and
from there visited Oxford several times. On her first visit in August
1566, she rode in form Woodstock and was met by the Chancellor of the University
and the Heads of Houses; she was waited on at Summertown by the Mayor and
Corporation, bearing suitable gifts, and then all united in a magnificent
procession down St Giles' and into the city where she prolonged her visit for
seven days. In a later year, 1830, traversing the crowded Fair the
captured men of Otmoor were set free after their riot against the enclosure of
their marshy kingdom. In addition to the passage of royalty and great
statesman the street became a route for the trade of the Midlands to the
southern ports, and, as the commercial prosperity of the city increased, more
17th and 18th century houses raised their elegant facades behind the fringe of
trees. But then the pattern familiar to us in the 20th century was set in
motion. As more modest houses were built beyond these stately environs, the
Street itself became a channel through which the suburban dwellers had to pass
to reach their destinations, and so in 1881 the first horse drawn tram was put
on the road. It set out from Carfax at eight minute intervals and traveled
through St Giles' and the Banbury Road to a terminus at St Margaret's Road, then
known as Rackham's Lane. It reached a further terminus in Summertown in 1898 - a
slow journey. There was a branch line that swung round into Beaumont Street and
then a further dizzy turn into Walton Street to a stopping place in Kingston
Road. Many stories are told of trams leaving the rails and crashing into houses
on the corners encountered in this
rapid progress. The dangers of speed indeed. Among their instructions the
drivers were warned to drive their horses slowly through a herd of cattle of a
crowd of people and to stop their cars at the approach of a flock of sheep. This
way of life came to an end when in 1913 the young Mr William Morris replaced the
horse tram by his motor buses. The changing character of St Giles' was
further demonstrated by the founding of the Oxford High School for Girls. This
school began life with 29 pupils in 1875 in the Judge's lodgings. These happy
pupils had to be given half a day's holiday every time the Assize Judge wanted
to come into residence. This proved so disruptive of the girl's studies that the
school, now growing rapidly, moved into No. 38 for two years and in 1880 into
No. 21 Banbury Road were it remained until 1957. The Banbury Road house was
built for the school by the celebrated Oxford Architect, Sir Thomas Jackson, who
at the request of the committee, added "the bell-cot and terracotta
enrichments to the architectural features - all of which could be left out if
the money for them could not be found". It was to the school in this
building that Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) came to lecture on philosophy to
the girls and stayed to play written games on the black-board. To the
educational resources of the street there were added the new Ruskin Hall, the
predecessor of Ruskin College for Working Men, founded in No. 21 St Giles' by
two American donors to provide working men with facilities for residence
and
study. The college was moved in 1906 to the "old building of a timber
merchant in Walton Street", according to Henry Taunt, and is now graced by
a handsome stone residence occupying nearly the length of Worcester Place. Black
Hall gave house to the first British Council Office in Oxford; it then formed
part of Queen Elizabeth House when established at No. 20 St Giles'. Across the
road the tall four-storeyed 19th century terrace building became occupied by the
Christian Science Reading-Room, the Army Information Office and the beauties of
the Secretarial College. To increase the diversification of this once
residential street there can now be found on the west side the Office of the
Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages, the Meeting House of the Society of
Friends the Cartographic Department of the University Press and the office of
the Diocesan Architect and Surveyor. Small wonder that the lights are on in the
working day, but off at night, and that the spaces between the trees are the
disc parking places for some thousand cars. It is estimated that some 5000
people pass through the south passage of St Giles' Church every week day. The
church no longer stands solitary in the empty fields, but it stands with one
foot in the city and one in the northern suburb, hoping no longer to be an
outpost, but a meeting point for all who call themselves the citizens of Oxford. First
Keble College and then the Women's Colleges had brought their academic influence
into the parish in the 1870's and set in motion the ideas that eventuated in the
concept of the Bradmore Triangle for the extension of University institutions.
This plan has not wholly been completed, but it has allowed the 12th century
tower of St Giles' Church to be overshadowed by the new Engineering Department
and the fan-shaped building. All is not lost, however, for the lights in the
lofty Engineering building on a foggy November evening bring a brilliance and
gaiety into the scene. With our bells and these lights many a traveler is guided
safely, as in the old days, through the parish of St Giles', into his haven in
the city.
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