Christ Church Cathedral

Five pilgrim routes and the Thames Pilgrims Way visit Oxford’s Christ Church Cathedral

Highlights

• Grave and shrine of St Frideswide

Christ Church Cathedral is an anomaly: an Anglican cathedral that happens to be part of a private college. You have to buy tickets to enter the complex, but the atmosphere inside is no different from any other great English cathedral. Indeed with the grave of St Frideswide it ranks among the holiest, a space for devotion and contemplation with a magnetic peace.

St Frideswide was an 8th-century princess who founded an abbey in Oxford, later moving to Binsey to escape the advances of King Ethelbald. When she died, her body was moved into a shrine in the abbey, which ultimately became Oxford’s cathedral in 1546. A new pilgrimage to her shrine was launched in October 2019, and details of future walk programmes were given on the cathedral website.

The shrine was venerated in the Middle Ages as a place of healing. The shrine structure was smashed at the Dissolution and the holy body of St Frideswide was removed. A bizarre attempt was then made to neutralize her veneration. St Frideswide’s bones were reburied with those of a woman called Catherine Dammartin, the wife of a famous Protestant theologian. The idea was dreamt up by a Calvinist theologian called James Calfhill as a crafty way of suppressing devotion to the saint’s relics. It doesn’t work on any level: St Frideswide still lies in her grave at the heart of Oxford’s cathedral.

The grave lies under a square slab marked with her name, on the floor of the Bell Chapel in the north aisle. Her medieval shrine structure was rediscovered in 1889 at the bottom of a well and reassembled in the adjacent side chapel in 2002. The shrine and grave are only a few steps apart, and there is a place to light candles by the shrine structure. She is remembered on 19 October, her saint’s day, and on 12 February, the day when her relics were translated into the shrine in 1289. She is the patron saint of Oxford University.

There was no painted image of the saint when I visited, although a colourful window behind the shrine depicts 16 scenes from the saint’s life. It was designed by Edward Burne-Jones in 1858 and contains what must be the world’s oldest, and perhaps only, stained-glass representation of a toilet, in the bottom right-hand corner. An icon of the saint would do the job rather more eloquently, one might sniff.

Elsewhere in the cathedral, the Bell Chapel itself is a relatively modern addition in honour of George Bell, Bishop of Chichester during the Second World War who bravely protested against the bombing of German cities. On the opposite side of the building, in the south transept, is a rare surviving stained-glass image of St Thomas Becket. When told to destroy it at the Reformation, the college simply removed his face. John and Charles Wesley, the founders of the Methodist Church, were ordained in this cathedral in the 1720s.

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Directions

Christ Church Cathedral, St Aldate’s, Oxford OX1 1DP

www.chch.ox.ac.uk

W3W: pools.lush.input

GPS: 51.7491N 1.2566W

The college entrance is on St Aldate’s, with a new visitor reception for ticket sales. The complex, including the cathedral, is open Mon–Sat 10am–4:15pm, 2pm–4:15pm Sun. Entrance costs £15 adults, £14 children and concessions, under 5s free.