OXFORD & CAMBRIDGE ARMS: Martlets

L to R: Your blogger (Trinity, Oxon.) and Cheryl-Lisa Hearne-
McGuiness, Hon. Sec. of the Oxford University Society's London
Branch. Photo by branding expert Paul C. Walton (BNC, Oxon.).

Oxford, U.K., Wednesday, April 18, 2018 – Yesterday, and the day before, Alice and I stayed at the fine Oxford and Cambridge Club in London.

On Monday I spoke there to 70 members of the Oxford University Society, London Branch, about the 38 coats of arms of the Oxford colleges and the six coats of the Permanent Private Halls.

On Tuesday I was speaker at a "Discussion Supper" of the Oxford and Cambridge Club and I added in most of the 31 Cambridge colleges.

My objective was to make the college coats of arms more accessible to students, alumni, tourists and anyone else curious about Oxford and Cambridge.

Dropping the usual baggage of lists of tinctures, furs, metals, ordinaries, subordinaries and so forth, I also skipped past explanation of the history of coats of arms, how they were brought over by the Normans with William the Conqueror and became widespread through the growth of tournaments among the knights in the 12th century, etc.

Instead, I dove right in to the Oxford (and Cambridge) coats of arms by selecting two or more college shields at a time that have a device in common, such as a form of cross or a species of bird (big or small), and focusing on the meaning of the device and of significant differences.

I used each set of shields as a prompt to tell stories about how the devices relate to the history of the colleges, and inevitably the history of England. Along the way I slipped in a few comments about relevant heraldic conventions.

To illustrate my approach, consider a little footless bird on the arms of three colleges and one permanent private hall – three of them at Oxford and one at Cambridge.

The bird is the MARTLET, which is important in heraldry because it is a brisure, a mark of cadency on a coat of arms indicating that it is being carried by a fourth son of the owner of the arms. The discussion below is amplified, and a few references added, from my remarks yesterday.

The perfect venue was the Oxford and Cambridge 

Club room named after Queen Victoria's grand-

daughter, Princess Marie Louise of Schleswig-

Holstein, Germany's northernmost state.

University College's shield shows four (on its website) or often five golden martlets around a cross on a blue (azure) field. The St Benet's shield includes an almost identical coat of arms on its top right (the sinister side in chief). The difference between the two crosses (Univ's is a cross patonce, while St Benet's is a cross fleury) is not significant, as both crosses have been used interchangeably in the posthumously attributed arms of Edward the Confessor. Edward was of course the last of the great Anglo-Saxon kings, whose death in 1066 precipitated a nine-month succession battle that culminated in the death of Harold Godwinson and victory of William, Duke of Normandy at Hastings. With the accession of William I, Norman nobles arrived with their knights and heraldry. Univ has claimed the arms attributed to Edward the Confessor, although the founding in 1249 was by William of Durham, long after Edward the Confessor. As the Univ website explains, "a legend grew up in the 1380s that we were actually founded even earlier, by King Alfred in 872, and, understandably enough, this became widely accepted as the truth." (The Univ martlets are a possible origin of the four martlets in the St Peter's College coat of arms.)

St Benet’s Hall seems to have more claim to the arms of Edward the Confessor than Univ because the Hall is a foundation of Ampleforth College [full disclosure: I was a pupil there in 1952-55], which was created by the same English Benedictines who occupied Westminster Abbey at its inception. When Edward the Confessor built the original Benedictine Abbey and Church, he decided that English monarchs should be crowned there [all but two subsequent monarchs have been]. The other half of the top of the shield (the chief) shows the imputed coat of arms of St Peter, to whom Westminster Abbey is dedicated; the bottom of the shield is from the original Abbey. Henry III built the Gothic Abbey Church in honor of Edward, who by then had been canonized.

Pembroke College, Cambridge is the owner of the third shield. The five red (gules) martlets look dissimilar from the martlets in the previous two shields, but they are meant to be the same bird, in that they have no feet. Pembroke was founded by Aylmer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, a man of importance in the reigns of Edwards I and II. The left side (dexter to the bearer) of the shield is half of his arms, which are split (impaled or dimidiated) with his wife Mary de St Pol, who came from Brittany.

Worcester College, represented by the fourth shield, has two chevrons and six martlets, which are blazoned as black (sable) or sometimes red (gules). The coat of arms is that of Sir Thomas Cookes [someone at the meeting at the Oxford and Cambridge Club said it should be Crookes, but he was being funny, I think], a Worcestershire baronet, whose bequest of £10,000 back in 1698, when a pound sterling was really worth something, founded the college. The Worcester College shield is almost always shown, as here, with black (sable) martlets, but the blazon often calls for red (gules) as in the Pembroke arms. [Sir Thomas also founded Bromsgrove School, which uses the arms with red (gules) martlets, corresponding to its blazon.] 

MEANING: So what does the martlet signify? All sources I have consulted agree that the lack of feet means that they can't land, so they are always aloft. This suggests that the martlets are always searching and is a good symbol for the search for knowledge. A lovely idea – although when you think about it, it makes the intellectual life sound tiring. (Tiring, but surely not as discouraging as the fates of Sisyphus or Tantalus.)

Another interpretation is that the martlet is a symbol of the self-made man, someone without foundation. But to impute such arms to a King like Edward the Confessor would hardly be appropriate with that interpretation, unless one was imputing modesty.

Links to Further Reading: Use of Star-Like Devices in the Oxford Colleges . Creation of Arms in the Newer Colleges at Oxford (Oxford Today, Michaelmas 2015)

Set of 46 Newly Design Coats of Arms: Oxford City and Oxford University coats of arms, 38 colleges, and six Permanent Private Halls. Below is a low-resolution version of an original set of shields drawn for me by heraldic artist Lee Lumbley. I plan to be at the 2018 BookExpo America at the Javits Center in New York City, May 31-June 2 and will be looking for appointments to talk with publishers at this event. My email address is teppermarlin at aol dot com.

LIBRARIES: World's Greatest

Duke Humfrey's Library, the oldest Reading Room
 at the Bodleian, in Oxford.

What are the greatest libraries in the world?

The head of the Bodleian at Oxford once said in a speech I attended that the five greatest libraries are in New York City (the New York Public Library), Washington, D.C. (the Library of Congress), London (the British Library), Oxford (the Bodleian), and Paris (the Bibliothèque Nationale). I have library cards for all five of these libraries.👍

Size. Wikipedia says, and I dispute, that the NY Public Library's 53 million books rank it the third-largest cataloged collection in the world after the Library of Congress (more than 160 million items) and the British Library (more than 150 million items). 

If Archives Canada in Ottawa is correctly listed as having 54 million volumes or items, then Ottawa ranks third and NYPL only fourth in the world in collection size – still not shabby for the NYPL. Russia (Moscow Library) is at 44 million items and France (Bibliothèque National) has 40 million items and therefore ranks 6th.

A spokesperson at the Library of Congress told me when I visited in 2016 that libraries disagree on how to count items other than book volumes. The British Library allegedly counts some individual stamps as items equivalent to a book, whereas the Library of Congress combines stamps into albums.

Usability. I would rank the Weston Library, the main reading room of the Bodleian, as the most accessible, followed by the NY Public Library main building, behind the two lions (http://bit.ly/2v75Ru4). The NY Public Library is surely the most used, with annual visitors of 10-18 million (depending on how you count). In second place, at 1.7 million people per year, are the British Library and Library of Congress.

To my mind there is no question that the Bibliothèque Nationale is the most difficult of the five greatest libraries to use, certainly for someone pressed for time. The first day at this library is consumed by paperwork and walking from place to place through fortress-like gates and passageways. It may have just been my bad luck, but I don't think so. have commented on this (http://bit.ly/2vsGFiW.)

Most Beautiful. Two sites seem to focus on the sheer beauty of the libraries. One list is at booking.com, which posts a list of great libraries of the world (https://booki.ng/2vsb8gV) in the hope that you will book a tour of them! Two of the libraries on their list are among the great libraries of the world I have listed above, the Bodleian and the New York Public Library. The three World-Class Libraries that are missing from their list are the Library of Congress (oversight!), the British Library (oversight!) and the Bibliothèque Nationale.

The other list of the most beautiful libraries is by a Huffington Post writer (http://bit.ly/1ejQixl). It includes only one of the five great world-class libraries, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, which is (yes) a great collection, but, as I have noted, can be a nightmare to try to use. So I take it that this list is for looking at the architecture and not the contents.

BOAT RACE: History

Memorial to Dr. Charles Merivale (1808-1893)
 in Ely Cathedral. "Caustic in wit".

The Original Challenge.  The BNY Mellon website on the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race pins the origin of the Boat Race on a very personal story.

The founders of the boat race are two friends from Harrow named Charles:

• Charles Wordsworth, who had gone on to Oxford  (Christ Church) and
• Charles Merivale [sic, only one "r"], who went on to Cambridge (St John's College).

Charles Wordsworth was the nephew of the poet William Wordsworth (St. John's College, Cambridge, 1787-1791) and the son of Christopher Wordsworth (1774-1846), Master of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1820-1841.

Charles Merivale deserves most of the credit for the challenge. He actually rowed in the Cambridge boat at #4. The two Charleses met during the vacation in Cambridge and are said to have gone "rowing" on the Cam (they may have been punting).  The two Harrovians decided to organize an intercollegiate challenge.

Punting on the Cam. View looking south from the Garret Hostel
Bridge. Photo by JT Marlin, June 2014.

On February 10, 1829, according to the BNY Mellon site, a meeting of the Cambridge University Boat Club requested Mr. Snow of St John’s to write immediately to Mr. Staniforth of Christ Church with the message

The University of Cambridge hereby challenge the University of Oxford to row a match at or near London, each in an eight-oared boat during the ensuing Easter vacation.

Staniforth and Snow had been contemporary oarsmen at Eton.

However, a guide to Cambridge Colleges published by Pitkin Press, printed in 2014, says the boat race was started by Cambridge as a challenge from the Lady Margaret Boat Club at St. John's College. The Lady Margaret Boat Club is the oldest college boat club on the River Cam and is famed for the scarlet jackets worn by its rowers. This jacket is said to have been the origin of the word "Blazer" as applied to boat club jackets and later to any jackets of a formal nature.

The two stories can be reconciled if we speculate that Merivale took the matter of the challenge up with the Lady Margaret Boat Club and they in turn approached the CUBC.

What is broadly agreed is that the first race eventually took place on June 10, 1829 at Henley-on- Thames. Oxford won this first race easily. The fact that the next race was not until 1836 suggests both how much the initiative had come from Cambridge and how much the eagerness of the Cambridge oarsmen to test themselves may have been dampened by their initial defeat.

Their winning boat from the first race is on display at the River & Rowing Museum in Henley.

Since 1856 the annual event has been uninterrupted except during the two World Wars, although the actual race was interrupted in 2012 by an Australian protester who was subsequently convicted of a crime.

The Course. The 4.2 mile course on the Thames starts in Putney and ends in Mortlake, which also happen to be stations on the SouthWest Trains line, which originates in Waterloo Station. The train trip from Putney to Mortlake takes five minutes, about one-fourth the time it takes to travel on an Oxford or Cambridge boat–although only the cox is able to travel without doing any rowing. The cost of the train each way by is £1.90 or about $3.

The two boats are called "Blue Boats", although they are not in fact painted blue. Cambridge rowers wear shirts that are light blue or have light-blue highlights. Oxford wears dark blue or shirts with dark-blue highlights.

Each year approximately 250,000 people watch the race live from the banks of the Thames while millions watch on television. Cambridge has won 81 races and Oxford 78 races, with one tie.

Writer in 2012 at marker of the start
of the boat race, with Putney Bridge
in the background. UBR stands for
 "University Boat Race."

Boat Race training starts immediately with the beginning of the academic year in September.

The Wikipedia Boat Race entry has an exhaustive history of the boat race, including full coverage of two interesting disputes among the Oxford crew members that involved American rowers who found the Boat Race culture of the time more than they could take.

Several books have been written on the history of the boat race and the various disputes that occurred.

Some Famous Rowers. Investment bankers are said to favor Oxford and Cambridge rowers because they are presumed to be smart, fit and tall–except for the cox. )

The most famous cox may be Jim Rogers, the investment biker, who coxed the Oxford boat and recently donated a new shell to Balliol. Some famous rowers (lists of crews for most years may be found here):

1922-23 (Oxford) Andrew Irvine
1950 (Cambridge) Lord Snowdon
1977 (Oxford) Colin Moynihan
1978-83 (Oxford) Boris Rankov (whose long stint led to the Rankov Rule)
1980 (Cambridge) Hugh Laurie ("Dr. House")
1990-91, 1993 (Oxford) Olympic gold medalist Matthew Pinsent (his sharp comments on the 2012 race are famous)
1997 (Oxford) Olympic gold medalist Tim Foster
1997 (Oxford) Luka Grubber
1997-99 (Oxford) Andrew Lindsay
1998 (Oxford) Ed Coode
1999, 2001, 2006-07 (Cambridge) Kieran West
2010 (Oxford) The Winklevoss twins (who spoke at the 2012 NYC Boat Race Dinner)

Racing Rules. The race is governed by a Joint Understanding between the Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Clubs. Since 1983, no rower may row more than four times as an undergraduate and four times as a graduate.

To protect the status of the race as a student event, the Boat Race committee in July 2007 refused to award a blue to 2006-2007 Cambridge oarsman Thorsten Engelmann because he did not finish his year, returning to the German rowing team to prepare for the Beijing Olympics. One proposal is that only students in courses lasting two or more years should be allowed to row.

Organization. Like the British Constitution, the organization of the boat race is not written down in any one place because the agreements are private and have been changing. Oxford's official site includes a useful summary of the culture of the boat race and some information on the costs. The race costs "hundreds of thousands of pounds" for the rights to use the Thames for the race and an equal amount to prepare the two crews for the race.

So title sponsorships can be taken to be of this order of magnitude. The rules of the boat race are set by the Oxford and Cambridge rowing clubs, and they also appear to be in charge of hiring the management company, the Boat Race Company Limited (BRCL), that handles the details of the race. BRCL in turn obtains sponsorships and hires staff and contractors. One of its contractors is Professional Sports, based in Weybridge, which deals with media and addresses details relating to sponsorships. The boat race website also lists contractors who do web site design and updating.

Writer at Putney Pier, next to the start of the Boat Race.

Sponsors. Boat Race sponsors over the years have included Ladbrokes, Beefeater Gin, Aberdeen Asset Management, and until May 2012, as a "Title Partner", the business outsourcing company Xchanging, which has an office in Chicago but was not widely known in the United States.

The new "Title Partner" sponsor with a strong U.S. base has a five-year contract from 2013 to 2017, BNY Mellon. The boat race is called the BNY Mellon Boat Race. Sponsorships are governed by private agreements with BRCL.

BNY Mellon's Newton Asset Management group has already sponsored the women's boat race and starting in 2015 women's race will be given equal billing with the traditional men's race (for which women have been allowed to race in the coxswain spot). This is a long way from 1963, when Murray Edwards College's women's boat beat Oxford’s in what appears to be the first intercollegiate women's boat race.

Besides the title sponsor, the BRCL obtains other partners such as Hackett, Sharp's Doom Bar, Bollinger Champagne, and BBC Sport. It also lists "suppliers" including London Voyagers, Fattorini, Crew Room, Hunter and BT. The BRCL also lists an official charity, London Youth Rowing, which teaches rowing to young people who might never otherwise have a chance to learn to row and get a chance to compete.

Boat Race Dinners. More than 70 Oxford-Cambridge committees worldwide are dedicated to running boat race events - 15 in the United States, five in Canada, and more than 50 in the rest of the world. In addition, many university-specific Oxford and Cambridge alumni associations sponsor dinners at the time of the boat race, i.e., in the March-May period.

The largest Oxford-Cambridge dinner is usually held in New York City, attracting more than 200  people in years 2012-14, although in the first year of President Clinton's occupancy of the White House, more than 300 people signed up for the Washington Boat Race Dinner. (President Clinton did not appear, although many of his appointees did. I was at the dinner. After 1993, Washington BRD attendance fell.)

The 2014 and 2015 NYC BRDs are at the University Club. The NYC dinner is also the oldest continuous Oxford-Cambridge alumni event in the world, celebrating its 82nd uninterrupted annual dinner in 2015. The Vancouver BRD is the oldest, dating back at least to 1929, but it was not held in three of the next four years including 1933 and therefore loses by one year to NYC, which started in 1933 and had not missed a year.

Alumni Boat Races. Over the years a number of efforts to organize Oxford-Cambridge boat races have been made in the United States. Boston is continuing the tradition, with an alumni boat race before its Boat Race Dinner in May.

New York has had several successful launches, but none has endured as long as Boston's. Most recently races were held at the Saugatuck Rowing Club in Westport, Conn. Dr. Saman Majd was Race Director in  2006-2007. He spoke about the race at the 2007 NYC Oxford-Cambridge Alumni Boat Race. He has a degree in Physics from Oxford and a PhD in Finance from MIT. He rowed for St. Paul's School, London, and for Christ Church (Captain, 1977). He stroked the Isis crew that set a new course record in the race against Goldie. Since 2004, he has competed for the Saugatuck Rowing Club in the US and World Masters Championships and served as the Club's Commodore in 2006-7.

FEAST DAY: Oct. 9 - John Henry Newman

Blessed John Henry
Cardinal Newman

Today is the Feast Day of Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890). Newman's birthday was February 21 and he died in August. October 9 was the date, after two years of instruction, when Newman was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 by Dominic Barberi, an Italian Passionist, in Littlemore.

Oxonians brought many gifts to America, including independence, with Pitt the Elder kicking the French out of the colonies and Lord North trying to make the colonials pay for the cost of British troops, thereby precipitating the Revolution. Newman's gift was not just to Catholics in America, but to Christians everywhere, especially those speaking English.

He was born in London and at 16 years of age went up to Trinity College, Oxford. He then served as a tutor at Oriel College, which was a center of Oxford University's religious revival.

For 17 years from 1828, he was vicar of the Anglican St. Mary's (The University Church of St. Mary the Virgin) close to Oriel at the center of the University on High Street. Five years into Newman's vicarage, John Keble gave his famous sermon at St. Mary's that won over Newman to the Oxford Movement to regenerate Catholicism. The Movement went back to the early Church for inspiration.

In 1845,  based on his search for continuity in the history of Christianity and his belief in objective truth, Newman then became a Roman Catholic. He published eight volumes of Parochial and Plain Sermons as well as two novels. He is celebrated as both an Anglican and a Roman Catholic theologian. His poem, "Dream of Gerontius," was set to music by Sir Edward Elgar.

In 1847, Newman was ordained a Catholic priest in Rome and joined the Congregation of the Oratory, founded three centuries earlier by St. Philip Neri. Returning to England, Newman founded Oratory houses in Birmingham and London. In 1854 he went to Dublin to serve as rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, which he helped found. While in Dublin he wrote The Idea of a University, in which he sets out his ideas on the purpose of education. Newman promotes the idea that the lived experience of believers is a key part of formation of theology.

Newman accepted Vatican I's teaching on papal infallibility while noting its limits, which at that time few proponents of infallibility were eager to do.

Newman was named a cardinal in 1879, and he took as his cardinal's motto Cor ad cor loquitur ("Heart speaks to heart"), which he adapted from a 17th century dictum. His crest includes three hearts, which are interpreted as being the Trinity. Pope Benedict XVI used the Cor ad cor loquitur motto to headline Newman's long-awaited beatification.

Newman was buried near Birmingham but his grave was exhumed in 2008 and a new tomb was prepared at the Oratory church in Birmingham. Three years after Newman died, a Newman Club for Catholic students began at the University of Pittsburgh, and similar centers for students were set up in many universities. Newman Centers had been created earlier but until Newman himself was beatified they lacked ecclesiastical blessing.

Pope Benedict beatified Newman in September 2010, at a ceremony outside of Birmingham. The pope noted Newman's balanced emphasis on both his religious beliefs as part of civilized society and on his pastoral energy to attend to the needs of the sick, poor, bereaved or incarcerated.

Newman's views were a key reference point for Vatican II under Pope John XXIII. He was called the "absent Father" of this conference of bishops 70 years after his death, especially on issues of conscience and religious liberty, the vocation of lay people, and relations between Church and State.