<strong>College</strong> Oak 8 THE RADLEY NEWSLETTER
Every Wednesday evening Radleians congregate in their boarding houses for ‘Social Prayers’. Talks are given by dons which may have a moral or spiritual element, often they relate to events in the news, but sometimes they simply inform the boys about interesting ideas and facts which might not otherwise find their way into a curriculum. This is an address given by the Acting Warden, Andrew Reekes: Standing at the bottom of a broad track, alongside Capability Brown’s picturesque lake, is a gnarled and twisted oak tree of considerable girth and obvious antiquity. Since <strong>Radley</strong>’s early days it has been known as <strong>College</strong> Oak, but <strong>Radley</strong> <strong>College</strong> is a Johnny-come-lately when set alongside this noble tree, which dendrochronologists from the EU have recently dated as being c.1060 years old. In truth, it is one of the oldest extant trees anywhere in Europe. Pigs foraging for pannage through the forests attached to Abingdon Abbey evidently missed a stray nut. It took root at a time when Edgar the Peacable, from Wessex, was King of England and St Aethelwold the Bishop of Winchester held the Abbacy at Abingdon and so owned the woods. The tree was already a century old when William of Normandy conquered England; he came to Abingdon in 1084 to celebrate Easter, hunted boar across <strong>Radley</strong> land and left his son, later to be Henry 1st, to board at the Abbey. <strong>College</strong> Oak grew and flourished through the Angevin and Plantagent centuries, one of scores of such trees in these parts. A layman here would have been trespassing and it is likely that only boar and deer sheltered under its boughs; perhaps the occasional courting couple romped in its leafy shelter. At some stage, centuries ago, a lightening strike or a natural deformity led to a strange perversion which makes <strong>College</strong> Oak unique; its 60 foot long sideshoot, as thick as a child is high, lying parallel to the ground and rooting in the soil in its own right. It probably explains why the tree is here today. With Henry VIII came a passionate, competitive, dynastic desire to make a mark in Europe and war inevitably meant the need to defend these shores with a strong navy. Henry ordered the building of huge oak men-of-war of which the Mary Rose was one example. Because of its size, and height, and the design of is gunports it shipped water and turned turtle one benign summer’s day on the Solent. Surveyors then, as in the time of his daughter Elizabeth, scoured the south of England for thick, tall, straight oak timber. <strong>Radley</strong>’s was even then too old, too bent, to pass muster. As in the late 18th century when the Admiralty looked for English oak to construct a navy against Bourbon, then Revolutionary, finally Napoleonic, France, <strong>College</strong> Oak survived the cull. By then, too, something else had happened to it. It had been incorporated into the leisure industry of its era. Capability Brown, the greatest garden designer of his era, architect of over 140 such schemes, was employed here to landscape the grounds surrounding newish <strong>Radley</strong> Hall on lands freed, after Henry VIII’s dissolution, from ecclesiastical ownership. Capability Brown’s style was one of smooth, undulating grass accompanied by artistically devised clumps and softening of trees, with serpentine lakes, all with the aim of creating the gardenless garden. <strong>College</strong> Oak was a picturesque prop in an 18th century stage set, part of a contrived landscape in the style of Claude Lorraine. Its final incarnation, now 900 years old, was to act as bit part player in the new <strong>Radley</strong> <strong>College</strong>, founded in 1847. So hungry were early Radleians that they foraged like those Anglo-Saxon wild boar of old, for acorns from <strong>College</strong> Oak; they hid tuck from prying authorities in its hollow interior. At some stage – not, of course, now – it was also the secret repository of illicit cigarettes and the occasional bottles of hooch. By the 21st century it was, indeed, a hollowed-out oak, a hoary old growth, but it still had life, and survived the attentions of tree surgeons round the grounds in the last decade. So, it is rather humbling to review what it has outlived. It was 100 years old when the Normans came, 400 years old when England’s population was halved by Black Death, 600 years old when Shakespeare was born, 700 years old when Royalists and Parliamentarians surged to and fro across <strong>Radley</strong>’s lands as they contested the Thames Valley and Royalist Oxford; 850 years old when beacons were lit across Southern England to warn of impending invasion by Napoleon in 1805; the tree celebrated its millennium as Radleians and Eastbournians (evacuated here for the war’s duration) gazed skywards at German bombers passing north overhead to seek out Birmingham and Coventry. It is quite extraordinary that a living thing could have survived so much – over 1000 years – of our island history. That survival perfectly illustrates why we revere the oak tree – its resilience, strength and durability has long symbolised those enduring rugged, yeoman qualities of the idealised Englishman. THE RADLEY NEWSLETTER 9 THE RADLEY NEWSLETTER 9
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