Mags, Martyrs, and Memorials (2)

 When Oxford's Martyrs' Memorial, commemorating Archbishop Cranmer and bishops Ridley and Latimer, was planned and put up, the drawing-room tastes which animated the 1777 design had been dethroned by the Gothic Revival: this implied a far closer copying of actual medieval precedent than the late rococo gothick-as-superficial-decoration which preceded it. An up-and-coming architect still in his twenties secured the commission: Gilbert Scott. He produced (as his commission prescribed) a restored, enlarged version of the Eleanor Cross at Waltham. He opined that his own cross "was better than any one but Pugin would have produced".

It is one of the ironies of architectual history that, around this time, Pugin was fighting, unsuccessfully, for the big Balliol contract. To Pugin, of course, the project of commemorating publicly the three Protestant 'martyrs' who had been burned just outside the Master's door at nearby Balliol, was anathema. The reformers were "vile, blasphemous imposters pretending inspiration while setting forth false doctrine" and the subscribers were "foul revilers, tyrants, usurpers, extortioners and liars."

Since then, many millions of Japanese tourists, and thousands of Americans, have carefully ptotographed Scott's Memorial, in some cases probably unaware of who the three bearded old gentlemen were, why they died, and how ferocious the ecclesiastical politics of the 1830s were. Indeed, undergraduates in the 1920s and 1930 may have been a tadge sketchy on some of these questions. The Martys' Memorial must have inspired much more laughter than  prayerful recollection.

There is an Oxford tradition, too ben trovato to have any chance of being true, that tourists are informed ... and believe ... that the Memorial is the tip of the spire of an underground Cathedral. Much closer to truth is the ...

Oops; you need some background here.

Before modern plumbing reached Oxford (which was certainly later than 1960 when I went up), every male undergraduate had a 'scout' (servant) and ... a Chamber pot. One of the scouts' many duties  was to empty the Pots of the men on his staircase each morning (you will like to know that my scout was a Mr Hosier.

These universal and ubiquitous Pots were a source of some merriment. When Undergaduates drank and became drunk, one of their simple adolescent joys was to place a Pot on the highest pinacle of the Martyrs' Memorial. 

Frankly, it is one of Oxford's miracles that no undergraduate (to my knowledge) ever fell and killed himself. 

But the two Proctors, charged with maintaining discipline among the youff, knew that something had to be done. At a meeting between the Proctors and the Vicar of Mags, the latter gentleman suggested that a Gothick Revival Potty should be firmly and perrnanently affixed to the top of the Memorial.

Laymen ...

Let me generalise here ...

Simple laymen such as the Proctors never go for a down-to-earth practical solution. Things remained unchanged until, with the arrival of coeducation in the colleges, inebriation became an occupation which retreated from the public forum and became simply a prelude to private unchastity.

And the plumbing was improved. You can't expect girls to put up with ...