...There were so many beautiful and

...There were so many beautiful and interesting things to see that I hardly know what to pick out as the most beautiful. Perhaps it is Magdalen Tower-I'm sending you a photograph of it. Don't you think it is lovely? Someone described it as "Sight music that is frozen". Every year at sunrise on May morning (so John told me, and he got up to see it) the choir of Magdalen gather on the top of the tower to sing a Latin hymn. The custom goes back to the first days of the tower, at the end of the 15th century, and has gone on ever since. Oxford is full of curious old customs like that. For example, Queen's College was founded in 1341 by Robert de Eglesfield. He must have been a man with a lively imagination for he ORDERED the college to be governed by a head of the college and twelve Fellows (in memory of Christ and the Twelve Disciples), and he said that on New Year's Day each year, the bursar (the man who is in charge of the money matters of the college) should present each Fellow with a needle and thread of coloured silk saying, "Take this and be thrifty". The needle and thread was a pun on his name, Eglesfield. (The French aiguille = needle; fil = thread.) With the same idea the shield of the college shows three golden eagles on a red field ("eagles-field"). That was 600 years ago. And still, though Eglesfield's buildings were replaced in the 17th century by the present college, every New Year's Day the bursar presents each Fellow with a needle and thread and says, "Take this and be thrifty." In that same college, too, evesy Christmas Day a roast boar's head is carried, with great ceremony, to the high table where the dons sit. The story of this custom goes back to the early years of the 16th century and celebrates the fight between a student of the college and a wild boar on the hills near the college. The student killed the boar by thrusting down its throat a copy of Aristotle that he happened to be reading at the time, saying as he did so, "That's Greek!" As John said, "You can believe the story if you like."
As you walk through Oxford you seem to be living in history, so many things call up events and figures of the past. Here Queen Elizabeth I listened to Shakespeare's plays in a college hall, and made jokes with the professors-in Latin and Greek! In Oxford, Charles I held his Court at Christ Church while the colleges melted down all their silver dishes to help his cause during the Civil War, and his Queen Henrietta and her ladies walked in the gardens of St. John's. Here, Roger Bacon laid the foundations of experimental science, not in the 18th but in the 13th century; here, every night you can hear the sound of "Great Tom", the big bell in Tom Tower, the tower that Wren designed for Christ Church. Every night at five minutes past nine the bell is rung 101 times in memory of the 101 students in Christ Church in Henry VIII's time. In the medieval library of Merton College you can see all the chained BOOKS and the old benches just as they were in the 13th century. These reminders of the past are everywhere.
John and I walked along St. Giles, one of the most beautiful streets in Oxford. It is not, like most of the Oxford streets, narrow and winding between colleges, but very wide with magnificent trees all the way along it. And there, outside Balliol College, is a monument very like the "Cross" at Charing Cross in London. I asked John what it was. He said, "It's the Martyrs' Memorial. Bishop Latimer and Ridley and Cranmer were condemned to death at Oxford in 15552 for their religious beliefs and were burned at the stake in this place. As the fire was being lighted Latimer said, 'Be of good comfort Master Ridley and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God's Grace, in England as I trust shall never be put out."'