Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 8.djvu/189

ST. MAllY THE VIRGIN, OXFuHD. I;i7 which he has justly acquired by the splendid inciiiorials ot" his taste and skill, to be seen at Great Malvern and at Windsor.9 But whoever the architect of the new buildings may have been, the Church has not come down to our times in the state in which he left it. A few years after its completion in 1492, it sufiered severely from a storm, the elTects of which have never yet been fully repaired. All the allusions to this event that I liave been able to discover, are httle more than repetitions of a note by Leland, who in his Itinerary remarks, that " The University Church in Oxford, alias St. Mary's, was begun to be re-edified in the time of Dr. Fitz James, after Byshope of London. He procuryd much mony tow^ards the buyldinge of it. The embatylments of it were full of Pinnacles ; but in a tempestious w^ethar most part of them wx're thrown down in one night." ^ Leland began his Itinerary about the year 1538, and continued it for five or six years, n As he does not say anything to indicate that the injuries which he describes were of recent occurrence, it may be presumed that they had taken place some time before he noted them. In the collections under the name of Holingshed, the last edition of whose Chronicles, during the author's life, was published in 1586, the same account is repeated almost word for word, wutli the additional circumstance, that the occurrence happened soon after the restoration of the edifice. " That of Oxford " he says, (meaning the University Church,) " also was repared in the time of Edward the Fourth and Henry the Seventh, when Dr. Fitzjames, a great helper in that work, was Warden of Merton College,'^ but yer long after it was finished, one tempest in a night so defaced the same that it left but few Pinnacles standing about the Church and Steeple, wdiicli since that time have never been repared." -^ The time at which the reparation of these injuries was I attempted, may be fixed with greater certainty. Dr. Plot, in his " Natural History of Oxfordshire," first published in 1677, observes that "there are many lofty spires about the I country as w^ell as city, built all of freestone, and of exquisite 1 workmanship, such as those of Bampton, AVitney, Burford, ' Memorials, 3. ' Itinerary, v. viii., fo. 11.3 h. i' Dr. Fitzjames was Warden of Mertou from 148'2 to 1507. ^ Holingshed, cap. v., p. 149.