St Giles’ Church, Oxford

St Giles’ church in north Oxford was founded in 1120. The pointed windows suggest a date later than Norman, which would have been all the rage in the foundation year, so the current building, or its externals at least, must be later. It is recorded to have been built by one ‘Edwin, son of Godegose’. These sound like fine, Anglo-Saxon names to me. Sadly, people with names like that had lost much land and power since the Norman conquest fifty years previous; although the two ethnic groups eventually intermarried and became largely indistinct, the loss at Hastings would have still have been raw for older folk (like Godegose, perhaps).

Edwin must not have become too impoverished in the new England, because he could afford to found a church, but he was certainly constructing it in a climate rather more alien and hostile than his grandfather would have known. As Britain descends into further moral chaos, as false religions prosper and secularism and materialism apparently suck the life out of the English soul, let us still go about our Christian business, reaching the lost, founding churches and building up the faithful. Such work outlives those who labour.

And herein is that saying true, one soweth, and another reapeth. John 4:37

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