Inscriptions: Rhodes Building
This inscription is on the front of Oriel College's Rhodes Building, facing the High Street. It acknowledges Cecil Rhodes' munificence, and the enlarged letters are a chronogram giving the date of construction, 1911, in roman numerals.
E : L A R G A : M V N n I FI C E N T I A
C A E C I L I I : R H O D E S
This chronogram is not immediately obvious, because:
- the roman numerals LMVIICICILIID have to be reshuffled into the correct order MDCCCLLVIIIIII
- the normal way to write 1911 in roman numerals is MCMXI
Here, MD is used for 1500, CCC for 300, then LL for another hundred added on to that, and VIIIIII for the final eleven.
The Rhodes Building fills the whole stretch of the High between Magpie Lane and Oriel Street, and seven houses had to be demolished to make room for it.
The new college building was not universally regarded as an enhancement to the street; in his memoirs of 1927, W. E. Sherwood wrote that Oriel had "broken out into the High, ... destroying a most picturesque group of old houses in so doing, and, to put it gently, hardly compensating us for their removal". And James Morris in Oxford (1965) wrote: "If you are very old indeed, you are probably still fuming about the façade built in the High Street by Oriel College in 1909, which most of us scarcely notice nowadays, but used to be thought an absolute outrage."