Patrick Comerford
During my walkabout in Oxford last week, by the river, through Iffley in East Oxford, and in the city centre, I had opportunities to see from the outside four religious houses that have interesting places in the story of religious communities and community life in Oxford.
Greyfriars has one of the most distinctive buildings in Oxford; it is the only flint-stone Norman-style building in the city, and its green spire is prominent along the Iffley Road in East Oxford. Greyfriars is a Catholic parish and a Franciscan friary, and until 2008 it was also a permanent private hall of the University of Oxford.
The original Greyfriars church and friary in Oxford was founded by the Franciscans in the marshy St Ebbe’s area of the city in 1224. The mediaeval friars in Oxford included the theologian Robert Grosseteste, also Bishop of Lincoln and the first Chancellor of the University of Oxford. Other early Franciscans in mediaeval Greyfriars in Oxford included Roger Bacon, John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and the Antipope Alexander V, who was from Neapolis in Crete.
The mediaeval friary was in the south-west corner of the city walls. Its footprint was extensive, running between the present-day Paradise Street and the Westgate Oxford Shopping Centre. The Franciscan order divided into two branches in 1517: the friars who had been living in city-convents and teaching in universities became known as Conventuals, while the friars who lived a more eremitical life became known as Observants; the Capuchins developed in 1528.
The original Greyfriars in Oxford continued as an educational and religious centre in the Middle Ages before being dissolved at the Tudor Reformations in 1538, and the Capuchins did not return to Oxford until 1905.
Greyfriars Church or the Church of Saint Edmund and Saint Frideswide on Iffley Road was built in 1910-1911 as a chapel of ease to the Jesuits of the Church of Saint Aloysius, Woodstock Road. The dedication recalls Saint Edmund of Abingdon, Archbishop of Canterbury, who gives his name to St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and Saint Frideswide, the patron of Oxford. It succeeded Saint Ignatius chapel in St Clement’s (1793) as the principal site of Roman Catholic worship in east Oxford.
The church was designed by the priest-architect William Edward (Father Benedict) Williamson (1868-1948). The builders were Hunt & Sons of High Wycombe. Williamson’s other works include the Jesuit church of Saint Ignatius in Stamford Hill, north London, and a range of monastic buildings at Farnborough Abbey in Hampshire – both, like his church in Oxford, in a neo-Romanesque style.
The church is listed Grade II for its architectural interest as an austerely dignified neo-Romanesque church by an accomplished architect, with a particularly serene and well-proportioned interior. The church is at the north end of the long range of buildings at Greyfriars on the west side of Iffley Road and is aligned north-south. The church is built in a plain neo-Norman style. The main entrance is through the tower, with an organ gallery above.
Meanwhile, the Capuchin Franciscans had returned to Oxford in 1905 when they founded Saint Anselm’s Friary, and it was recognised by the university as a house of studies in 1910. The Jesuits transferred responsibility for the Church of Saint Edmund and Saint Frideswide on Iffley Road in 1928 to the Capuchins who already ran a student hostel at Grosseteste House in a pair of nearby houses on Iffley Road. The present friary buildings, designed by the Oxford architect Gilbert Gardner under the supervision of Father Cuthbert Hess, were built in 1930-1931 to the south of the church.
The Capuchins first named the house Grosseteste House after the first head of the original Greyfriars. When the present building was completed in 1930, the name of Greyfriars was adopted once more.
Greyfriars became a private hall in the university in 1957. Greyfriars had an unusual position in Oxford, and the university hall and Franciscan friary were part of the same institution and coexisted on the same site. The friars and the students mingled on the site and shared mealtimes. The hall had a tradition of noted theology academics, but students were in a range of disciplines, including English, history, theology, geography and law. Greyfriars was closely linked with Balliol College, with a long-standing tradition of sporting links.
In October 2007, the Capuchins announced they planned to close Greyfriars as a permanent private hall, for financial and personnel reasons. All students and prospective applicants were transferred to Regent’s Park College, and the hall closed in June 2008, despite a last-minute attempt by the Holy See to save the hall. At the time Greyfriars closed, the fellows included Aidan Nichols and honorary fellows included Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham. There was surprise in some circles that the Greyfriars students did not migrate to Saint Benet’s Hall, the Benedictine PPH, or Blackfriars Hall, the Dominican PPH; Saint Benet’s Hall closed in 2022. The buildings continue to house the friary.
As I was walking back from the River and Donnington Bridge towards Iffley Road, I found myself at the back gate of the Convent of the Incarnation on Fairacres Road, although the main convent entrance is at Daubeny Road. The Convent of the Incarnation – known as Fairacres – is home to around 15 sisters, and their work includes prayer, hospitality, study. And publishing.
The Sisters of the Love of God began in 1906, and their first convent was a small house in East Oxford. They moved a little further from the centre of Oxford in 1911, the present chapel was built in 1923.
As the community numbers grew from 1928 into the 1970s, new houses opened in Hemel Hampstead, at Burwash in Sussex and near Staplehurst in Kent, and a house opened in New Zealand in 1995. By 2005, falling numbers and increasing age led to closing the other houses, and community life since then has been centred in Oxford, where their story began.
Later this week, on the Feast of the Birth of Saint John the Baptist (Wednesday 24 June 2026), Sister Christine (South) will be blessed and installed as the new Reverend Mother of the Fairacres Convent.
The community established a small publishing house, SLG Press, in 1967 and produces a journal with short theological papers twice a year, the Fairacres Chronicle. The main publishing activity is a list of over 200 short books on prayer and the spiritual life, including a significant collection of Syriac patristics works and a series of contemplative poetry. The authors include AM Allchin, Professor Sebastian Brock, Father John Chryssavgis, Professor Andrew Louth, Professor John McGuckin, Archbishop Michael Ramsey, Sister Benedicta Ward, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware and Archbishop Rowan Williams.
At the corner of Holywell Street, St Cross Road and Longwall Street, a plaque to four Catholic Martyrs was erected at 100 Holywell Street in October 2008 and reads: ‘Near this spot George Nichols, Richard Yaxley, Thomas Belson, Humphrey Pritchard, were executed for their Catholic Faith, 5 July 1589.
The plaque was organised by Dr Joseph Shaw of Saint Benet's Hall, with permission from Merton College, the owner of the house. The four men are also remembered on the plaque commemorating all the martyrs of the Reformation, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, erected in the University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin on 19 June 2008.
All four men were hanged at Holywell Gallows in Oxford in 1589 were Roman Catholics living in Oxford. The first two were priests, and the second two were laymen.
Father George Nichols was born in Oxford in 1550 and studied at Brasenose College. He was ordained in Reims in France in 1583, before being sent back to Oxford. Father Richard Yaxley (alias Tankard) Yaxley was born in Boston, Lincolnshire. He was ordained in Reims In 1585 and returned to England in 1586.
Thomas Belson was born at Brill in Buckinghamshire and studied at Saint Mary Hall, Oxford, and at the English College in Reims in 1584. He was a prisoner in the Tower of London for a while, before returning to Oxford, where George Nichols was his confessor.
Humphrey Pritchard, or Prichard or ap Richard, or ap Richard ap Gruffydd or Griffin or Griffith, was a Welsh servant at the Catherine Wheel Inn in Oxford, and a tailor. He was said to have served the Catholics who came to the inn in every way possible during the 12 or 14 years before his execution. Some Catholic priests in Oxford were hunted down at the Catherine Wheel Inn in Magdalen Street, which was owned by a Catholic widow.
All four men named on the plaque were arrested at the Catherine Wheel Inn. The priests were held in Bocardo in Cornmarket Street, then the city gaol, and the two laymen in Oxford Castle, then the county gaol, before being sent to London, where they were questioned and tortured in the Bridewell and in the Tower of London.
The four were returned to Oxford on 30 June 1589. The two priests were convicted of high treason and hanged, drawn, and quartered at Holywell Gallows, and their parts parboiled in a cauldron before being fixed to the wall of Oxford Castle, where they were mutilated by Protestants. Two days later the heads and quarters were removed by the authorities and placed on high poles over the four town gates of Oxford. The two laymen who had been convicted of felony were simply hanged. All four martyrs were beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1987.
Grandpont House, near Folly Bridge, takes its name from a long causeway on the River Thmas known as Grandpont that once stretched along almost the full length of Abingdon Road.
Grandpont House sits on stone arches over a water channel off the River Thames. It was built in 1785 for Sir William Elias Taunton (1744-1825), the City Solicitor and Town Clerk of Oxford. The Taunton family owned Grandpont House until 1847, when it was acquired by Brasenose College. It was the home in the 1850s and 1860s of Thomas Randall (1805-1887), a tailor who may have been the inspiration for the Hatter in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Prince Hassan, son of the Khedive of Egypt, lived in the house in 1869-1872 while he was studying law at Brasenose. The chaplain of Brasenose, the Revd HC Wace, was living at Grandpont House In the early 20th century. Another Brasenose Fellow, William Holdsworth, Vinerian Professor of Law, was living there From 1922 to 1944.
Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei, who spent five summers in England, was keen to open an Opus Dei in Oxford. He visited Grandpont House in 1958 and the house and grounds were bought in April 1959. Grandpont House is one of several properties which is owned and operated by Netherhall Educational Association, which is linked with Opus Dei.
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