St Michael at the North Gate reredos

St Michael at the North Gate reredos

The Oxford Movement in a parish

The parish church of St Michael at the North Gate, with its Saxon tower, has been a familiar sight since the 11th century on what is now called Cornmarket Street. This reredos (an altarpiece or screen behind an altar) from the Lady Chapel at St Michael demonstrates the resistance to the Oxford Movement within some of Oxford's Anglican parishes. The Lady Chapel with its reredos had been set up in the fifteenth century, before the Reformation, but was partly defaced during the Reformation of Edward VI (1547-53). The chapel was restored in 1556, during the reign of the Catholic Mary I, but ceased to be used shortly thereafter.

At the height of the Oxford Movement, when Tractarian supporters across Oxford attempted to recover the physical remains of pre-Reformation churches for the Church of England, the vicar of St Michael at the North Gate, Frederick Metcalfe (1815-85), was unwilling to accept any such changes to the interior. But attitudes had begun to shift in Oxford, and attendance declined at St Michael at the North Gate. On Metcalfe's death, changes to the church's spiritual leadership resulted in alterations to its physical fabric in line with the religious revival taking place in other Oxford parishes. In 1897, a brass altar cross was used for the first time since the Reformation. In the Lady Chapel the altar was replaced with something more elaborate, and the empty niches of the reredos were filled with statues of the Virgin and Child, St Frideswide, and St Mildred.

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Museum of Oxford

Photo credit: © Rex Harris

Wooden altarpiece with gold gilding. A painted statue of the Virgin Mary and child with two angels.