The east end of Oxford Cathedral, shown both in the frontispiece (Plate I) and Plate XVII, probably contains the oldest buildings, above ground, in Oxford.  Inside the cathedral can clearly be seen traces of three round arches, which may well be part of the church founded by St. Frideswyde in the eighth century.  That princess, according to the tradition, the details of which are all pictured by Burne-Jones in the east window of the Latin Chapel, having escaped by a miracle the advances of too ardent a suitor, founded a nunnery at Oxford.  The nunnery, which was later transferred to Canons, was undoubtedly the earliest institution in Oxford, and in its cloisters, in the second decade of the twelfth century, we hear of students gathering for instruction.  It was this old monastery, which Wolsey, with his reforming zeal, chose as the site of his great Cardinal College, and the chapel of the old foundation was to serve for his new one, until such time as a great new chapel, rivalling in splendour that of King’s College at Cambridge, had been built on the north side of Tom Quad.  This new chapel never got beyond the stage of foundations; and hence the old building has continued to serve the college till this day, having been made also the cathedral of the new diocese of Oxford, which was founded by King Henry VIII.  Wolsey may, perhaps, be credited with the fine fan tracery of the choir roof, but he certainly swept away three bays of the nave in order to carry out his ambitious building plans, and only one of these three bays has been restored in the nineteenth century.

Wolsey’s action at Christ Church was significant.  Men felt that the days of monasteries were past, and the Church was ready to welcome and to extend the New Learning.  But his changes were a dangerous precedent; as Fuller says with his usual quaintness:  “All the forest of religious foundations in England did shake, justly fearing the King would finish to fell the oaks, seeing the Cardinal began to cut the underwood.”  Henry, however, when he swept away the monasteries, spared his great minister’s work; modifying it, however, as has just been said, by associating the newly-founded college with the diocese of Oxford, now formed out of the unwieldy See of Lincoln.

The cathedral is the smallest in England, but contains many features of special interest; its most marked peculiarity is the great breadth of the choir, due to the addition of two aisles on the north side; these were built to gain more room for the worshippers at the shrine of St. Frideswyde.  Another feature of architectural interest is the spire, which is one of the earliest in England.  But perhaps even more interesting is the wonderful series of glass windows, which give good examples of almost every English style from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century.  And for once the moderns can hold their own; the Burne-Jones windows of the choir (not, however, the Frideswyde window, already mentioned) are particularly beautiful.