Merton College Chapel

The ‘chapel’ of Merton College in Oxford in much larger and grander than its name would suggest. I am sure that I have seen cathedrals which are smaller. An event seems to have taken place here in the late 1550s which lasted three weeks. It would seem that Bloody Mary’s reversion to Romanism was well received at Merton, and when Elizabeth acceded the throne, three weeks’ worth of stout resistance was offered to Archbishop Matthew Parker’s officers who were enforcing the Church of England’s return to Protestantism. The records describe it as a siege, though whether this was literal, the doors being locked and noses thumbed, or metaphorical, I cannot yet say.

Although education today loves to ally itself with anything novel, revisionist and cutting edge, hence its obsession with weird understandings of gender, the academia of the past was often conservative and traditionalist. Today, schools and colleges are besieged by all manner of godless views and stupid narratives, not the moderate reformed Christianity of Matthew Parker against which the fools of Merton offered resistance.