Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford
Christ Church College in Oxford is unique in having the only college chapel that is also a cathedral. It is said to have been founded as a convent by St Frideswide in the 8th century, but the oldest parts of the present church date from the 12th century, when it was an Augustinian priory and place of pilgrimage. In 1525 Thomas Wolsey suppressed the priory and began work creating a college on the site, named Cardinal's College in his own honour, and when Wolsey from grace Henry VIII refounded the college as Christ Church.
Christ Church Cathedral boasts one of the earliest windows by Edward Burne-Jones: the east window in the 'Latin Chapel' was designed by Burne-Jones in 1859, two years before the foundation of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., for the firm of James Powell and Co. (also known as Whitefriars Glass). Burne-Jones was recommended by Benjamin Woodward, architect of the Oxford Museum of Natural History, who was a friend of John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites. The window depicts St Frideswide and is different in style to his later windows, evoking the spirit of medieval glass with crammed scenes bustling with colour (pictured: photograph by Akoliasnikoff, used under Creative Commons licence ). Note the incongruous flushing loo behind the red curtain to the right!
The later windows by Burne-Jones in the Cathedral, designed for Morris and Co., are more familiarly Pre-Raphaelite in character. They were installed as part of the restoration of the cathedral by Sir George Gilbert Scott in the 1870s and include the Vyner Memorial Window in the Lady Chapel (unusually bearing Burne-Jones's initials) and the St Cecilia window in the north aisle. There are also other good Victorian windows in the Cathedal by William Wailes, John Hardman, and Clayton & Bell, whose large St Michael window dominates the north transept.
Christ Church College has a connection to Alice in Wonderland : Lewis Carroll taught at Christ Church, and Henry Liddell, father of the 'real' Alice, was Dean of the college. The figure of St Catherine in Burne-Jones's window in the Cathedral's Chapel of Remembrance bears the likeness of Alice Liddell's younger sister Edith, and stained glass windows in the College Hall depict characters from the Alice books. Strangely, St Michael's church at Lyndhurst, below, also has an Alice connection...
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