WADHAM COLLEGE (1) THE BUILDINGS

“Here did Wren make himself a student home,
Or e’er he made a name that England loves;
I wonder if this straying shadow moves,
Adown the wall, as then he saw it roam.” 
A. UPSON.

[Plate XXII.  Wadham College :  The Chapel from the Garden]

The buildings of Wadham College have been pronounced by some good judges to be the most beautiful in Oxford.  This is not, however, the usual opinion, nor is it my own, though, perhaps, it might be accepted if modified into the statement that Wadham is the most complete and perfect example of the ordinary type of college.  However that may be, there are three points as to these buildings which are indisputable, and which are also most interesting to any lover of English architecture.  They are: 
    (1) Wadham is less altered than any other college in Oxford.
    (2) It is the finest illustration of the fact that the Gothic
        style survived in Oxford when it was being rapidly superseded
        elsewhere.
    (3) No building in Oxford (very few buildings anywhere) owe their
        effect so completely to their simplicity and their absence of
        adornment.

These three points must be illustrated in detail.

Wadham is the youngest college in Oxford, for all those that have been founded since are refoundations of older institutions (but, as its first stone was laid in 1610, it has a respectable antiquity); yet the Front Quad is completely unaltered in design, and of the actual stonework, hardly any has had to be renewed.  Could the Foundress return to life, she would find the college, which was to her as a son, completely familiar.

The second point is a more important one.  In the reign of Elizabeth, classical architecture was being rapidly introduced; Gothic was giving way before the style of Palladio, even as the New Learning was banishing the schoolmen from the schools.  This change is markedly seen in the Elizabethan buildings at Cambridge, especially in Dr. Caius’ work, so far as it has been allowed to survive in the college that bears his name.  But in Oxford the old style went on for half the following century; in the great building period of the first two Stuarts the old models were still faithfully copied.  It was the genius of Wren, which, by its magnificent success in the Sheldonian, ultimately caused the new style to prevail over the late Gothic, of which his own college, Wadham, is so striking an example.

In Wadham the conservative Oxford workmen were inspired by the presence of Somerset masons, whom the Foundress brought up from her own county, so rich in the splendid Gothic of the fifteenth century.  Hence the chapel of Wadham (shown in Plate XXII) is to all intents and purposes the choir of a great Somerset church.  So marked is the old style in its windows that some of the best authorities on architecture have maintained