It was raining this morning, so I stayed back at the boat while Paula took the laundry to a launderette. This afternoon it cleared up a little and we had two appointments, one at one of the oldest colleges and one at one of the newest. It’s not just the colleges that have a long history in Oxford, though. Some of the pubs do, too.

The Bear Inn can trace it’s history back to 1242 though the current building only dates back to the 1600s, and the Bear did not move there until 1801. Back in the 1500s the owner really did have a pet bear.

First stop was Merton College, which goes back to the late 1200s, so it’s almost as old as The Bear.

This is one corner of Mob Quad, finished in the 1370s, and one of the oldest college quads in Oxford. Nobody can remember why it is called Mob Quad any more, unless it was a reference to the scruffy students who lived there. The Old Library runs along the upper story on two sides of the quad, and this was the reason I wanted to visit Merton. It’s the oldest continuously operating academic library in the world. Here’s one wing.

You’ll notice there were benches and desks between the shelves. That’s because the books used to be chained to the shelves to prevent them escaping, so if you wanted to read one you had to do it right there. They still keep one especially dangerous book chained up in case it makes a break for freedom.

The other books are now free to leave, but most of them seem quite happy there.

They also have an astrolabe dating back to 1350.

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a book on how to use an astrolabe of exactly this type, and he had friends at Merton, so he may well have worked with this very instrument. Of course, people who bought The Astrolabe thinking it was a sequel to Canterbury Tales and thumbed through it looking for the dirty bits were bitterly disappointed. Still, critics never change. If you do something the same they say you’re repeating yourself, and if you do something different they complain that it’s not the same.

Speaking of critics, here is Swinburne Warning Dante Gabriel Rossetti Not To Tamper With The “Blessed Damozel”.

Yes, that really is the name of the fresco. The artist is Max Beerbohm, who had a not particularly successful academic career as a student at Merton, but became famous enough as a caricaturist, author, and socialite that the college took his old room and filled it with his artwork. At my college at Cambridge, we have the Wordsworth Room. Wordsworth had a room over the college kitchens – he complained about it in one of his poems. However, I happened to notice in a late 19th Century print of the college kitchen that it was two stories high, and after some research (before the Internet, when research was hard) I discovered that the college kitchens had been extended upwards for a few decades to make them cooler, and the the original ceiling was restored sometime after the invention of electric fans. So, while the Wordsworth room occupies some of the same space that Wordsworth did, the floor and internal walls are entirely different.

Our tour continued to the college chapel. The first thing you see is the brand new organ, which is like being punched in the eye by a stainless steel paint factory.

After a few minutes to recover, we were able to admire the stained glass…

and the painted wood roof.

This is Fellows’ Quad, and the ornate pillars represent four types of classical Greek architecture, Ionic, Doric, and I forget the others, but Nick can probably explain it all for us.

Then on to Nuffield College, for tea with Jonathan, who is just about to complete his PhD on the sociology of cybercrime. We had a nice chat, and he recommended a Lebanese restaurant that was on our way back to the boat, so we left him to his editing and headed over there for dinner, which was yummy.

As we were coming out of the restaurant we ran into Jonathan again. We’re starting to feel like locals here now, running into people we know.