Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Corpus Christi College (formally, Corpus Christi College in the University of Oxford; informally abbreviated as Corpus or CCC) is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1517 by Richard Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, it is the 12th oldest college in Oxford.

The college, situated on Merton Street between Merton College and Christ Church, is one of the smallest in Oxford by student population, having around 250 undergraduates and 90 graduates. It is academic by Oxford standards, averaging in the top half of the university's informal ranking system, the Norrington Table, in recent years, and coming second in 2009–10.

The college's role in the translation of the King James Bible is historically significant. The college is also noted for the pillar sundial in the main quadrangle, known as the Pelican Sundial, which was erected in 1581. Corpus achieved notability in more recent years by winning University Challenge on 9 May 2005 and once again on 23 February 2009, although the latter win was later disqualified.

The Bishop of Winchester (currently Philip Mounstephen) is Visitor of the college ex officio.

History

Foundation

Corpus Christi College was founded by Richard Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, and an accomplished statesman. After entering the clergy, Foxe worked as a diplomat for Henry Tudor. He became a close confidant of his and, during Henry's reign as Henry VII, Foxe was appointed Keeper of the Privy Seal and promoted up the bishoprics, eventually becoming Bishop of Winchester. Throughout this time he was involved in Oxford and Cambridge Universities: he had been Visitor of Magdalen College and of Balliol College, had amended Balliol's statutes for a papal commission, was master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, for 12 years and had been involved in the foundation of St John's College, Cambridge, as one of Lady Margaret Beaufort's executors.

Foxe began to build from 1513. He bought a nunnery, two halls, two inns and the Bachelors' Garden of Merton College. Building was probably completed by 1520.

Foxe was assisted in his foundation by his friend Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, and Oldham's steward, William Frost. Oldham was a patron of education and donated £4,000 and land in Chelsea towards the foundation. For this, he was styled præcipuus benefactor (principal benefactor) by Foxe, remembered in daily prayers and a scholarship was established for students from Lancashire, where Oldham was born. Frost bequeathed his estate in Mapledurwell to the college, for which he and wife were remembered in a yearly prayer and a scholarship was founded for his descendants.

Foxe was granted letters patent for the foundation by Henry VIII in 1516. The college was officially founded in 1517, when Foxe established the college statutes. These specified that the college was to contain 20 fellows, 20 students, three lecturers, two priests, two clerks and two choristers.

Founding fellows of the College included Reginald Pole, who would become the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury.

Later developments

In its first hundred years, Corpus hosted leading divines who would lay the foundations of the Anglican Christian identity. John Jewel was Corpus' Reader of Latin, worked to defend a Protestant bent in the Church of England and the Elizabethan Religious Settlement. John Rainolds, elected president in 1598, suggested the idea of the King James Bible and contributed to its text. Richard Hooker, author of the influential Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, was deputy professor of Hebrew.

The Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives taught at Corpus during the 1520s while tutor to Mary Tudor, later Mary I of England. John Keble, a leader of the Oxford Movement, was an undergraduate at Corpus at the start of the 19th century, and went on to a fellowship at Oriel and to have a college named after him (Keble College, Oxford).

Having been founded nearly half a millennium earlier as a college for men only, Corpus Christi was among many of Oxford's men's colleges to admit its first female undergraduate students in 1979 (though women graduate students had been admitted five years earlier). Corpus Women's Boat Club was founded in 1978 and won their Blades rowing in the summer Eights that year. Between 2015 and 2017, 0.6% of UK undergraduates admitted to Corpus were black.

Buildings and gardens

Buildings

The main buildings on the main college site are the Front Quad, the West Building, the MBI Al Jaber Auditorium, the Fellows' Building, Gentleman-Commoners' Quad and Thomas Quad.

The Front Quad was built for the college's foundation and designed in an archetypal Oxford college style, with a tower over the main gate. The quad was constructed by distinguished builders associated with Henry VIII's Office of Work: master mason William Vertue, master mason William East and carpenter Humphrey Coke (Warden of the Carpenter's Company in London). The quad's architecture later inspired that of Oglethorpe University. Although by then considered heavily antiquated, in 1625 battlements were added to make the effect more complete and akin to other colleges.

The chapel adjoins the library and is just off the Front Quad. Its location is unusual: many colleges (even small ones) had their chapel in their main quad, with some colleges placing them on the first floor to fit them in (e.g. Lincoln and Brasenose). Its lectern is one of the first bronze eagle lecterns in Oxford; it is the only pre-Reformation one  and was a gift of the first president. The chapel's altarpiece is a copy of Ruben's Adoration of the Shepherds, a gift from the antiquarian Sir Richard Worsley.

Later buildings on the main site include the Fellows' Building of 1706–1716, the Gentlemen Commoners' Building of 1737 and the Emily Thomas Building, designed by T.H. Hughes, of 1928.

On the corner of Merton Street and Magpie Lane, lie the Jackson and Oldham buildings and Kybald Twychen, which all house students. In 1884–85, the architect T. G. Jackson had first installed a 'New Building and Annexe', replacing town houses on Magpie Lane. In 1969, this work was trimmed and modified to make space for a further new building created by Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya using a modernist beehive design, while leaving Jackson's Annexe substantially intact. Powell and Moya's building uses local limestone rubble and has the architects' characteristically large windows mounted within an exposed concrete frame. Particular attention was paid to placing the design within the existing architectural context, including the plain wall of Oriel College, Merton's Gothic chapel and Jackson's heavily ornamented Annexe. In 2017, the New Building and Annexe were substantially renovated and renamed the Oldham and Jackson Buildings, respectively.

Corpus also owns several buildings further afield: the Liddell Building on Iffley Road (built with Christ Church in 1991), and houses on Banbury Road.

Library

right|thumb|The aisle of the library as seen from the former President's Study in the far west end. The chapel is visible through a pane of glass at the end of the library.

The college library was "probably, when completed, the largest and best furnished library then in Europe". The scholar Erasmus noted in a letter of 1519 to the first President, John Claymond, that it was a library "inter praecipua decora Britanniae" ("among the chief beauties of Britain"), and praised it as a "biblioteca trilinguis" ("trilingual library") containing, as it did, books in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. The library windows in the front quad are framed by seven bamboo plants. Kratzer's Corpus dial stood in the garden until around 1706, when the gardens were remodelled for the construction of the Fellows' Building.

The dial has required regular maintenance throughout existence. The markings were replaced many times over the centuries and, despite restorations overseen by a professor of natural sciences and a historian of science, Robert Gunther, more and more errors crept into the pillar's tables. The dial also developed a lean. This was fixed in 1967 after it was discovered that the dial had no solid foundation and that its base was made of stone panels loosely packed with rubble. In 1976, the sundial was restored (and its tables corrected) to its state 1710 by Philip Pattenden. Since the 1710 tables were designed for the Julian calendar, they have no modern use. The sundial was most recently restored in 2016.

Two copies of the Pelican Sundial exist in America. The first, the Mather Sundial in Princeton University, was commissioned by William Mather as a goodwill gesture between the United Kingdom to the United States. The second is on the front lawn of Pomfret School in Connecticut and was donated in 1912 by the father of a graduating student.

Gardens

thumb|right|View from Small Garden towards Front Quad|upright

Aspects of the evolution of the college's ornamental gardens (Grade II listed) have been documented since the late 16th century.