Cathedral Close

The Cathedral Close is the greatest of Oxford's closes, gathered about the Twelve Angels, Oxford's cathedral, on its low hill at the heart of the city. The cloisters lie to the south, and about them are ranged the canons' homes, the treasury and the house where chapter sits. Dean Aldous Frere governs it, the longest-serving of all the city's great officers still at work, with twenty-four canons under him, and together they run the cathedral, its courts and lands spread over three counties. To the east rises the Archiepiscopal Hall, where Archbishop Oswin Halden's household settles a great deal and commits almost none of it to paper.

Inside the close, precedence is everything. The canons sit, speak and propose by an order written nowhere and known to each of them by heart, running by office, then by seniority, then by the worth of a man's prebend, and a new canon needs two years merely to learn it. Chapter meets weekly in term, and since the dean sets the order of business, many of Oxford's sharpest quarrels have been fought over when a matter would be heard rather than what it was. The house, the chapter and the schools each have their interest here and contend with perfect courtesy, and a quarrel over a roof is seldom about the roof. With the archbishop old and his succession whispered about, the close porters have seldom been so well tipped.

Under a roofed arch along the cloister's northern walk wait reeves, incumbents, stewards, widows, litigants and the professional petitioners who know every clerk by name, sometimes for an hour and sometimes for days. An afternoon there tells a stranger the state of the province, and the chapter, knowing the archway leaks, prefers a leak it can watch. Just outside the precinct wall the Archway Cook-Shop feeds the waiting for fivepence, and Robert Bunce will keep a man's place for him. About the cathedral steps the chapter stalls sell devotional sheets, engraved saints, choir copies and travelling marks, and Elspeth Mere's illuminations are the finest there and the most copied.

Within the cathedral the sacrist has the burial ground, which is in truth four grounds at as many prices, running from inside the walls out to beyond them, and his promises about graves are never set down in writing. The chapter's provisioning office keeps its accounts in the close, where oil sent out to Causey End turns up year after year and nobody queries it. West of the cloister, Sexton's Walk brings in fuel, laundry and night soil by day; after dusk it belongs to the sextons and vergers, and anyone else found on it had better have a reason ready.