These singular results achieved at Oxford are all the more surprising
when one considers the distressing conditions under which the
students work. The lack of an adequate building fund compels them to
go on working in the same old buildings which they have had for
centuries. The buildings at Brasenose College have not been renewed
since the year 1525. In New College and Magdalen the students are
still housed in the old buildings erected in the sixteenth century.
At Christ Church I was shown a kitchen which had been built at the
expense of Cardinal Wolsey in 1527. Incredible though it may seem,
they have no other place to cook in than this and are compelled to
use it to-day. On the day when I saw this kitchen, four cooks were
busy roasting an ox whole for the students' lunch: this at least is
what I presumed they were doing from the size of the fire-place used,
but it may not have been an ox; perhaps it was a cow. On a huge
table, twelve feet by six and made of slabs of wood five inches
thick, two other cooks were rolling out a game pie. I estimated it as
measuring three feet across. In this rude way, unchanged since the
time of Henry VIII, the unhappy Oxford students are fed. I could not
help contrasting it with the cosy little boarding houses on Cottage
Grove Avenue where I used to eat when I was a student at Chicago, or
the charming little basement dining-rooms of the students' boarding
houses in Toronto.
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