A saint with a false beard
Many monastic foundations in Oxford were adapted and transformed into the colleges where students and staff live and work today. The front quad of St John’s College was largely built between 1437 and 1540 to house the Cistercian monks of St Bernard’s College, which was closed at the Reformation. When the cloth merchant Thomas White established St John’s College in 1555, during a brief Catholic revival under Mary I, these former monastic buildings were bought and repurposed.
Above the front gate is a statue of St John the Baptist, patron of both the college and the Merchant Taylors. During building work in 1915, it was discovered that the stone figure’s hair and beard were of a different material and had been added later. It seems that an older statue depicting St Bernard, a clean-shaven monk, was remodelled as the unshorn St John when these pre-Reformation buildings acquired a new patron.
Like the stones of Osney Abbey, medieval buildings and art were taken and transformed throughout the City, producing the distinctive mixture of the medieval and the modern in contemporary Oxford.