A law unto itself

One could meet any day in Society
Harold Acton, Tom Driberg or Rowse:
May there always, to add their variety,
Be some rather Odd Fish at The House.

Thus W. H. Auden (something of an odd fish himself) reminiscing at a Christ Church gaudy half a century ago. There have certainly been quite a lot of such fish in living memory, not least in the Senior Common Room. In my time there was Robin Dundas, with his prurient interest in undergraduates’ sex lives; there was a law don who gave his tutorials in the small hours because he was too busy teaching elsewhere during the day; a sad philosopher whose cosmic misery led him to kill himself; Lord Cherwell, a gloomy figure whose peculiar dietary requirements had cast a blight over even Winston Churchill’s dinner table; and of course that oddest fish of all, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who gave undergraduates such time as he could spare from the hunting field and fashionable drawing rooms.. I hope that there have been many such since.     

But Christ Church itself has always been an odd fish in the Oxford pond: large, rich, something of a law unto itself. For one thing, it is not one institution but two: a cathedral with its own Dean and Chapter, and a distinct but not separate college. They are collectively known as Aedis Christi, the House of Christ, hence ‘The House’; and never, but never, Christ Church College.

The original college, founded and laid out with renaissance magnificence in 1525 by Cardinal Wolsey, was still-born when its founder was disgraced. It was resuscitated by Henry VIII in 1547 to provide a home for a cathedral in the newly established Oxford diocese: two for the price of one, enabling that dissolute monarch to save money for his wars.