Meadow Beef at the Rent Audit

Each year just before Christmas (usually the Friday before), we traditionally hold a lunch to entertain our tenant farmers.  It is believed that over hundreds of years this was the occasion at which our tenants arrived from distant properties to hand over their rents to our Treasurer, who in turn provided a Feast, or at least a festive lunch.  Another custom is that, on this occasion, we serve as the centrepiece, roast beef from cattle raised in our Meadows.  That is what you see in our photograph, and this is the description in the menu reproduced here. ("Roast Christ Church Longhorn / Aberdeen Angus X Meadow Beef"):  you can read it if you enlarge it!

Normally, we would hold this lunch in our magnificent Tudor Hall, the largest in Oxford, with its notable stained glass, hammerbeam roof and portrait collection.  However, it was recently discovered that the (load bearing) beams are under serious attack by death-watch beetle.  That is going to be exceptionally expensive and time-consuming to put right.  The immediate impact is that we cannot mount Feasts in Hall, and the Rent-Audit function had to be displaced elsewhere, and a knock-on consequence was that the pre-lunch drinks had to be served in the "Lee Undercroft", a place ordinarily used as an undergraduate bar.  It is the associated decor that accounts for the blue cast in the first photographs in this gallery that records the lunch.  Others suggested, but it is not true, that the colour derives from residues of radioactive substances left behind from the times when this place was a Chemical Laboratory where ground-breaking studies of isotopes were carried out!