Dear Commons Community,

After our visit to Stonehenge, Elaine and I had a light lunch in Oxford in The Eagle and Child, a pub that has been serving patrons since the mid-1600s.   The pub is well-known as the meeting place of The Inklings, an Oxford writers’ group which included C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Hugo Dyson. From late 1933, they met on Thursday evenings at Lewis’s college rooms at Magdalen College,  where they would read and discuss various material, including their unfinished manuscripts. These meetings were accompanied with more informal lunchtime gatherings at various Oxford pubs which coalesced into a regular meeting held on Mondays or Tuesday lunchtimes at the Eagle and Child, in a private lounge at the back of the pub known as the ‘Rabbit Room’.   

A Martyr’s Memorial, just outside Balliol College commemorates Anglican bishops Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who were burned at the stake for heresy during the persecutions of King Henry VIII’s daughter, Queen Mary.

As part of our bus trip, we also stopped at Windsor Castle, one of the royal family’s homes.  Lots of history, finery, and the burial place of England’s Kings Henry VIII and Charles I.

Tony

Martyr’s Memorial in Oxford

Windsor Castle