| St Margaret's church may not have bats in its belfry, but it does have pelicans on its font cover. Actually, I'm not quite sure what they're doing there. They enact a scene from medieval literature in which an adult bird revives its young by piercing its own breast and feeding them with its blood. In religious art, this story serves as an allegory of self-sacrifice; that's whv we find other pelicans on our All Souls altar, which is a war memorial. Why have them on the font cover, though? I've been exploring such issues for some while now. St Margaret's contains a wealth of symbolism, most of it decipherable. Basic identification, however, can be merely the first step in working out why a certain image has been utilized, and this is very much a "work in progress" report with as many questions as conclusions. |
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| Another strand which has
emerged
through the identification process is a little more surprising.
If
this is a "medieval" church, then it's also a decidedly British
one.
At least sixteen of the saints depicted here are either British, or
associated
with the Church here. To name but a few, we have St Alban, St
Augustine
of Canterbury (along with St Gregory the Great who sent him) and St
Margaret
of Scotland, besides more borderline figures such as St Helen and St
George.
At least some of this emphasis is intentional. The greatest
concentration
of these saints is in the clerestory windows, which are all of
near-identical
design, and must, I think, have been planned as a group. On one
side
we have bishops such as Saints Hugh and Chad, whose authority embraced
the Oxford area; on the other side are a rather mixed bag including St
Edward the Confessor, whose common factor seems to be royal
status.
Monarchs and bishops: how very Anglican. To this group we should
probably also add the window in the chancel to St John the Baptist and
St Bernard, patrons of our secular patron, St John's College.
Beyond this, though, there is little obvious sense of schemes of symbolism. There is, admittedly, a curious consistence to the Biblical images in the church. The main examples are the three southerly windows in the Lady Chapel, which were designed as a group to present the story of our redemption. The incidents included run from the Annunciation to Pentecost, and in fact there's scarcely another image in St Margaret's which adds to this sequence. The Old Testament is represented only by the Flood, and by the kings, priests and prophets who appear in the main east window as Christ's forefathers and foretellers. There are no scenes from the Early Church, and just few fleeting references to the glory of God as portrayed in Revelation. No Fall, then, and no Judgement, except by implication. In this at least, the medieval church is left behind. |
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| The rest is an odd mixture. Our St Catherine window can be accounted for as a memorial to Catherine Fordyce Birch. No such clues are forthcoming, however, about the origins of the nearby St Nicholas window. Nevertheless, the greatest mystery is generated by one of our most prominent fixtures, the high altar reredos. The central panel here includes the Epiphany, the Crown of Thorns, the four great Doctors of the Western Church (Augustine, Gregory, Ambrose and Jerome), Saints Frideswide and Margaret of Antioch (our patron), and a frieze of the True Vine. I have my own ideas about possible interpretations, but I'd be interested to hear what other people think.* Similarly, if anyone can identify the flanking saints on the All Souls and Lady Chapel reredoses, or the soldier-saint on the Edgar Hester memorial, please do let me know. |
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Vicar: Andrew Bunch
