The spires of delights

Why are Oxford’s spires deemed to be dreaming?

THE famous epithet ‘dreaming spires’ was coined by the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold (1822-1888). The son of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School, he attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize with his poem Cromwell. He graduated with secondclass honours in 1844.

The term ‘dreaming spires’ comes from his poem Thyrsis, an elegy in 24 stanzas to his friend and fellow poet, Arthur Clough, who died aged 42 from malaria. Arnold describes Clough as Thyrsis, an archetype shepherd-poet of Ancient Greece.

The lines about the dreaming spires come at the end of the second stanza. Arnold writes of how, as students, he and Clough explored the countryside around Oxford and describes the view from Boars Hill, three miles south-west of the city: And that sweet city with her

dreaming spires She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.

The phrase is a reference to the timeless beauty of the harmonious architecture of the colleges, but it’s also an allusion to the intellects working within those buildings.

At the beginning of the following century, the phrase took on the negative connotation of the sheltered condition of unworldly academics.

An article in The Herald: The National Labour Weekly of Saturday, September 4, 1915, had: ‘A writer in the new number of the Church Socialist, which is up to the usual interesting standard, says there are always those who will picture university life as a matter of “dreaming spires” and cloistered seclusion.

‘Would it were true. Having looked at sundry pronouncements of university professors on the war, we could devoutly wish them unbroken dreaming and eternal seclusion.’

Keith Whitman, Eynsham, Oxon.

Is it true that donated blood can be stored for only 35 days?

BLOOD can be stored for 35 days, which is a vast improvement on the two-week storage time from when I started work in the Blood Transfusion Service 50 years Elegant: Part of the Oxford skyline ago. Red cells start to swell in storage and potassium leaks into the plasma, which is potentially dangerous. The cells also lose their oxygen-carrying ability.

Blood can be frozen, but this involves using a solvent to protect the red cells, which are filled with liquid and would therefore burst if they froze otherwise.

After freezing, complex washing procedures are needed to reconstitute the red cells so that they are suitable for transfusion. These take time and so are of no use for emergency situations.

Blood is frozen for patients with complex blood types and, if rumours are to be believed, the Royal Family.

Eleanor Williams, Shepperton, Surrey.

What was the purpose of the Court Of Chancery, which plays such an important part in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House?

THE Court Of Chancery had its origins in the Norman courts, but it became an important part of the justice system from the 15th century.

It was a court of equity or fairness, promising justice based on the merits of the case rather than being bound by the strictures of the common law courts.

The courts were presided over by the Lord Chancellor and his deputies on behalf of the monarch, and provided a more flexible and pragmatic approach to the resolution of disputes.

Cases that required arbitration rather than the rule of law included those regarding wills, land and property, trusts, debt, marriage settlements and bankruptcy.

The court procedure involved the gathering of written pleadings and evidence. By the 19th century, this had become so convoluted and provided such a good living for lawyers that a simple dispute could drag on for decades. It was not uncommon for all the equity to be spent on the legal wrangling.

The archetype for this process became Charles Dickens’s Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a black hole of a Chancery Court case that formed the centrepiece of 1852’s Bleak House.

In the novel, John Jarndyce explains that his case is nothing more than an issue ‘about a will, and the trusts under a will’, but that ‘. . . the lawyers have twisted it into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the case have long disappeared from the face of the earth’.

By the 19th century, the way in which the court functioned was so technical and its procedures so slow that ‘the length of time taken to decide even uncontested cases amounted to a denial of justice’.

From the mid- 1850s, a series of Parliamentary Bills sought to overhaul the system. The process was concluded with the Supreme Court of Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875, which brought together the courts of common law and Chancery into a new High Court of Justice, with a separate Court of Appeal. This added rigour into the system.

The names of some of the old courts — Chancery or Queen’s/King’s Bench — became divisions of the new court.

Louise Westwood, Birmingham.

Why do modern windmills turn clockwise and traditional windmills turn anti-clockwise?

THE earlier answer explained that the sails of most traditional windmills turn anti-clockwise, so a right-handed miller can adjust the rigging.

However, there are surviving exceptions, such as the five-sailed Dobson’s Mill at Burgh Le Marsh in Lincolnshire. Its sails rotate clockwise, giving the mill a distinctive appearance.

D. V. Page, West Bridgford, Notts.

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