Jordan College was the gra and richest of all the colleges in Oxford. It robably the largest, too, though no one knew for certain. The buildings, which were grouped around three irregular quadrangles, dated from every period from the early Middle Ages to the mid-eighteenth tury. It had never been planned; it had grown piecemeal, with past and present overlapping at every spot, and the final effect was one of jumbled and squalid grandeur. Some part was always about to fall down, and for five geions the same family, the Parslows, had been employed full time by the College as masons and scaffolders.
The present Mr. Parslow was teag his son the craft; the two of them and their three workmen would scramble like industrious termites over the scaffolding theyd erected at the er of the library, or over the roof of the chapel, and haul up bright new blocks of stone or rolls of shiny lead or balks of timber.
The College owned farms aes all land. It was said that you could walk from Oxford to Bristol in one dire and London iher, and never leave Jordan land. In every part of the kingdom there were dye works and brick kilns, forests and atomcraft works that paid rent to Jordan, and every quarter-day the bursar and his clerks would tot it all up, annouhe total to cilium, and order a pair of swans for the feast. Some of the money ut by for reiment—cilium had just approved the purchase of an office blo Maer—and the rest was used to pay the Scholars modest stipends and the wages of the servants (and the Parslows, and the other dozen or so families of craftsmen and traders who served the College), to keep the wine cellar richly filled, to buy books and anbarographs for the immense library that filled one side of the Melrose Quadrangle aended, burrow-like, for several floors beh the ground, and, not least, to buy the latest philosophical apparatus to equip the chapel.
It was important to keep the chapel up to date, because Jordan College had no rival, either in Europe or in New France, as a ter of experimental theology.
Lyra khat much, at least. She roud of her Colleges eminence, and liked to boast of it to the various urs and ragamuffins she played with by the al or the claybeds; and she regarded visiting Scholars and emi professors from elsewhere with pitying s, because they didnt belong to Jordan and so must know less, poor things, than the humblest of Jordans under-Scholars.
As for what experimental theology was, Lyra had no more idea than the urs.
She had formed the notion that it was ed with magic, with the movements of the stars and plas, with tiny particles of matter, but that was guesswork, really. Probably the stars had daemons just as humans did, and experimental theology involved talking to them. Lyra imagihe Chaplain speaking loftily, listening to the star daemons remarks, and then nodding judiciously or shaking his head i. But what might be passiween them, she couldnt ceive.
Nor was she particularly ied. In many ways Lyra was a barbarian. What she liked best was clambering over the College roofs with Roger, the kit boy who was her particular friend, to spit plum stones on the heads of passing Scholars or to hoot like owls outside a window where a tutorial was going on, or rag through the narrow streets, or stealing apples from the market, ing war.
Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would h