I love Oxford. Whenever I return there I am enchanted by the medieval origins of the university (and the achievements of men like Roger Bacon); the Cavaliers (Charles I’s Civil War HQ was at Christ Church College); the Jacobites; the Oxford Movement; the Inklings (and their friend Dorothy Sayers); Inspector Morse and a host of other associations.
I leapt at the chance recently to give a couple of lectures on Tolkien. But the guest house in which I was quartered lay near the Anglican church of St John the Evangelist and the attached St Stephen’s House. Until 1980, this Anglo-Catholic ensemble was the centre of what was once a minor world-wide ecclesiastical empire: the Society of St John the Evangelist, better known as the Cowley Fathers.
