The first church on this site was that built by St. Frideswide, "The Lady," as she was afterwards called in Oxford, and her father Didan, about the year 727. The story of this saint, which no visitor to her church should omit to read, will be found in our chapter on the History of the Foundation.
A contemporary of the Venerable Bede, she was one of those noble and devoted souls who (as Dr. Jessopp reminds us) made Anglo-Saxon monasticism the brightest spot in the history of English community-life. The monks and nuns of that period were in fact missionaries, who spread the Christian faith among the half-civilised pagani, or country-folk; and, by the wise method of planting themselves in remote districts, and quietly living the gospel they preached, touched the hearts, and won the souls, of their rough neighbours. Thus, without the use of force, without even the exercise of royal authority, says Professor Freeman, the whole of England had, by the time of the birth of St. Frideswide (c. 700), accepted the Christian faith. But the religion of the country districts must have still been of a very untutored description; and St. Frideswide was one of those who spread in the South, just at the time when Mercia was the paramount power in England, the finer civilisation which had already established itself in the North, and produced kings like Edwin, saints like Aidan, and poets like Caedmon. Whatever may be the authority of the legends which gathered about her name, it is certain that she gave up her high estate, "devoted herself and all her worldly goods to the service of Christ and her poor brethren," refused the offer of a royal marriage, escaped the persecutions of her suitor, "and finally died in the odour of sanctity, blessed by the poor and ignorant people to whom she had devoted her troubled life."
Of the place where she established the little church, part of which can still be seen in the walls of the cathedral, Dr. Liddell, the late Dean, thus writes:—
"Meadows unbroken by human habitations or human cultivation, a river wandering through them as it listed, unbarred by locks, or weirs, or mills, the hills down to their margin clothed in primeval forest. The bank of gravel which still slopes down to what we call Christ Church Meadow, offered a dry and pleasant site; the river supplied fish for the inmates of the new convent; the Trill-mill stream bears testimony by its name to the fact that its water was in early times, perhaps the earliest, used to turn the wheel which ground their corn; the neighbouring forests supplied abundant wood for fuel, as well as game for food, and acorns for the swine; the rich meadows of the valley furnished pasture to the flocks and herds. In those days, no doubt, the existence of such a peaceful community exercised a humanising and softening influence over the rude thanes and their clansmen and serfs, who had as yet perhaps hardly heard the name of Christ."
Our next glimpse of the church is a terrible one. Despairing of beating back the Danes, Ethelred the Unready gave the mad and treacherous order for the Massacre of St. Brice's Day, 1002. "Urged by secret orders from the king," says Mr. J.R. Green, "the West Saxons rose on St. Brice's Day, and pitilessly massacred the Danes scattered defencelessly among them. The tower of St. Frideswide, in which those of Oxford had taken refuge, was burnt with them to the ground." This account is touched up by Mr. Andrew Lang with a little local colour:—"We are tempted to think of a low grey twilight above that wet land suddenly lit up with fire; of the tall towers of St. Frideswyde's Minster flaring like a torch across the night; of poplars waving in the same wind that drives the vapour and smoke of the holy place down on the Danes who have taken refuge there, and there stand at bay against the English and the people of the town." A finishing touch comes from the old chronicler, William of Malmesbury:—"Into the tower of St. Frideswyde they were driven, and as men could not drive them thence, the tower was fired, and they perished in the burning."
This closes the first era in the history of the church: the old ecclesiola of Didan and his daughter was gutted by the fire, and its roofs and furniture destroyed. Indeed, until lately it was held that the whole building was of wood, and perished therefore with the tower and roof, no vestige of it remaining for later times. But the recent investigations of Mr. J. Park Harrison, an archaeologist of remarkable devotion and insight, have proved that the east wall of the eighth century church, with two of its primitive arches, still remains, a venerable relic of times past, as part of the wall of the cathedral; while the foundations of the three apses, into which the three low arches once led, have been discovered in the garden to the north-east of the church (see pp. 33, 34). So did Anthony à Wood, when in the seventeenth century he wrote of "the antientist buildings" as "on the east and north side of the church," speak more truth than even he himself was aware.
After the slaughter of St. Brice's Day, King Ethelred made a vow that he would rebuild St. Frideswide's church. And well did he keep it; if in 1004 he built the splendid church which forms the main part of the cathedral as we know it to-day, sparing the more sacred part of the rude old building, it may be, because of the veneration in which everything connected with St. Frideswide was held. His charter contains the following sentence:—
"In the year of our Lord 1004, in the 2nd indiction, and in the 25th year of my reign, according to the disposal of God's providence, I Ethelred ruling over the whole of Albion, have with liberty of charters by royal authority and for the love of the Almighty, established a certain monastery situated in the city which is called Oxoneford, where the body of St. Frideswide reposes."
And here another question of the deepest architectural interest occurs. This church of Ethelred's was of a size and magnificence until lately considered not to have been attainable in England till many years after the Conquest. It was therefore taken for granted that the church was wholly rebuilt in the years 1160–1180, and that Ethelred's work was as entirely lost as Didan's was supposed to be. Dr. James Ingram, President of Trinity, had, it is true, written in the thirties to prove that the cathedral was Saxon, but, great authority as he was, he wrote at a time when architectural history was in its infancy; and at the restoration of 1869, Sir Gilbert Scott was content to write—"Dr. Ingram evinces great anxiety to prove that traces of his (Ethelred's) work still exist, but I need hardly say there is not a shadow of foundation for such a supposition." However, a greater authority than either of the preceding showed that the tide of knowledge was turning against the accepted view. Professor Freeman in his "History of Architecture" wrote that the cathedral might be "in the main portions of the fabric a monument of the later days of Saxon architecture," and that "the evidence between the conflicting statements which would assign it, some to the days of Æthelred II., others to those of Henry I., seems very evenly balanced;" in the former case, he said, "we have a complete minster of comparatively small size, but of the fullest cathedral type, belonging to the early part of the eleventh century." Mr. J.H. Parker, himself, who had been the chief authority for the theory that the Saxon architects built almost entirely in wood, at length changed his mind; and even went so far as to say, in the fourth edition of his "A.B.C. of Gothic Architecture," that "the Saxons, at the date of the conquest, appear to have been more advanced in the fine arts, such as sculpture, than the Normans," that "their work was more highly finished, had more ornament," and that their masonry was more finely jointed than that of the Normans.
Following up these admissions, Mr. Park Harrison carried on the most thorough investigations, examining almost every stone in the building, investigating Saxon MSS., and travelling over England and Normandy for the purposes of comparison. As a result he succeeded in convincing Professor Freeman, Professor Westwood, and other experts in Anglo-Saxon archæology, that Ethelred's church was still in the main extant; and at this moment his theory has a good many supporters. Without