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By F. C. Conybeare, M.A., sometime Fellow of University College.

The popular mind concerning the origin of University College is well exampled in the form of prayer which after the reform of religion was used in chapel on the day of the yearly College Festival, and which begins in these words—

“Merciful God and loving Father, we give Thee humble and hearty thanks for Thy great Bounty bestow’d upon us of this place by Alfred the Great, the first Founder of this House; William of Durham, the Restorer of it; Walter Skirlow, Henry Percy, Sir Simon Benet, Charles Greenwood, especial Benefactors, with others, exhibitors to the same.”[1]

However, Mr. William Smith, Rector of Melsonby, and above twelve years Senior Fellow of our Society, who in the year 1728 published his learned Annals of the College, sets it down that King Alfred was not mentioned in the College prayers as chief founder until the reign of Charles I., and he relates how “that Dr. Clayton, after he was chosen Master (in 1665), when he first heard King Alfred named in the collect before William of Durham, openly and aloud cried out in the chapel, ‘There is no King Alfred there.’ ”

For at an earlier date it had been of custom to pray indeed for the soul of King Alfred, but only in the following order—

“I commend also unto your devout Prayers, the souls departed out of this world, especially The Soul of William of Durham, our chief Founder. The Soul of Mr. Walter Skirlaw, especial Benefactor. The Soul of King Alfred, Founder of the University. The Soul of King Henry the 5th. The Souls of Henry Percy, first Earl of Northumberland; Henry the 2nd Earl, and my Ladies their Wives, with all their Issue out of the World departed. … The Souls of all them that have been Fellows, and all good Doers. And for the Souls of all them that God would have be prayed for.”

The date of this form of prayer is concurrent with Philip and Mary; between whose reign and that of Charles I. it is therefore certain that King Alfred was lifted in our prayers from being Founder only of the University to the being Founder of our College. And in so much as during many generations the belief that this college was founded by King Alfred has, by all who are competent to judge, been condemned for false and erroneous, I will follow the example of the learned antiquarian already mentioned, and recount its true foundation by William of Durham; eschewing the scruples of those brave interpreters of the law, who in the year 1727 said in Westminster Hall, “that King Alfred must be confirmed our Founder, for the sake of Religion itself, which would receive a greater scandal by a determination on the other Side, than it had by all the Atheists, Deists, and Apostates, from Julian down to Collins; that a succession of Clergymen for so many years should return thanks for an Idol, or mere Nothing, in Ridicule and Banter of God and Religion, must not be suffered in a court of Justice.”[2]

The historical origin of University College dates from the thirteenth century, and was in this wise. There was in the year 1229, so Matthew Paris relates, a great falling out between the students and citizens of Paris, and, as was usual for Academicians then to do, all the scholars removed to other places, where they could have civiller usage, and greater privileges allowed them, as the Oxonians had done in King John’s time, when three thousand removed to Reading and Maidstone (and as some say to Cambridge also). It appears that the English king, Henry III., was not blind to the advantages which would accrue to his country from an influx of scholars, and therefore published Letters Patent on the 14th July, of that very year, to invite the masters and scholars of the University to England; and foreseeing they would prefer Oxford before any other place, the said king sent several Writs to the Burgers of Oxon, to provide all conveniences, as lodgings, and all other good Entertainment, and good usage to welcome them thither.[3] Among other Englishmen who left Paris in consequence of these dissensions, was Master William of Durham, who repaired at first to Anjou only. But we may well suppose that his attention was drawn by the fostering edicts of the English king to Oxford as a centre of schools. It is certain that when he died, at Rouen, on his way home from Rome, twenty years later, in 1249, “abounding in great Revenues, eminently learned, and Rector of that noble Church of Weremouth, not far from the sea,” he bequeathed to the University of Oxford the sum of three hundred and ten marks, for purchase of annual rents, unto the use of ten or eleven or twelve, or more Masters, who should be maintained withal.

The above information is derived from a report drawn up in 1280, by certain persons delegated by the University of Oxford to enquire into the Testament of Master William of Durham; which report is still kept among the muniments of the College, and constitutes our earliest statutes.

In the thirteenth century there was not the same choice of investments as to-day. The best one could do was to lend out one’s money to the nobles and king of the Realm, or to purchase houses therewith. The former security corresponded to, but was not so secure as, the consolidated funds of a later age. Nor was house property entirely safe. For in an age when communication between different parts of the country was slow and insecure, it was not of choice, but of necessity, that one bought house property in one’s own city; since farther afield and in places wide apart one lacked trusty agents to collect one’s rents; but in a single city a plague might in one year lay empty half the houses, and so forfeit to the owners their yearly monies.

In laying out William of Durham’s bequest, the University had recourse to both these kinds of security. As early as the year 1253, a house was bought for thirty-six marks from the priors and brethren of the hospital of Brackle; perhaps for the reception of William of Durham’s earliest scholars. This house stood in the angle between School Street and St. Mildred’s Lane (which to-day is Brazenose Lane), and corresponded therefore with the north-east corner of the present Brazenose College. Two years later, in 1255, was purchased from the priors of Sherburn, a house in the High Street, standing opposite the lodge of the present college, where now is Mr. Thornton’s book-shop. For this piece of property the University paid, out of William of Durham’s money, forty-eight marks down.

This house, the second purchase made out of the founder’s bequest, after belonging to the College for upwards of six hundred years, was lately sold to Magdalen College instead of being exchanged as it should have been, if it was to be alienated at all, with a house belonging to Queen’s College, numbered 85 on the opposite side of the street. And at the same time, all properties and tenements, not already belonging to us, except the aforesaid No. 85, intervening between Logic Lane and the New Examination Schools, were purchased, to give our College the faculty of some day, if need be, extending itself on that side.

The third house bought out of the same bequest adjoined (to the south) the former of the two already mentioned, and fronting on School Street, was called as early as A.D. 1279, Brazen-Nose Hall. It cost £55 6s. 8d. sterling, and on its site stands to-day Brazen-nose College gate and chapel. The purchase was completed in 1262. The last of the early purchases made by the University for the College consisted of two houses east of Logic Lane on the south side of the High Street. (The old Saracen’s Head Inn on the same side of Logic Lane only came to the College in the last century by the bequest of Dr. John Browne, who became master in 1744.) These two houses paid a Quit Rent of fifteen shillings, for which the University gave, A.D. 1270, seven pounds of William of Durham’s money, proving, as Mr. Smith notes, that in the thirteenth century houses were purchased in Oxford at ten years’ purchase, so that you received eleven per cent. interest on your money.

The rents of all these houses, so we learn from the Inquisition of the year 1280 already mentioned, amounted to eighteen marks. As to the rest of the money bequeathed, the Masters of Arts appointed by the University in 1280 to enquire found, “That the University needing it for itself, and other great men of the Land that had recourse to the University; the rest of the money, to wit, one hundred Pounds and ten Marks, had been made use of, partly for its own necessary occasions, and partly lent to other persons, of which money nothing at all is yet restored.”

The barons to whom the University thus lent money had long been at strife with King Henry for his extortions, and in May of 1264 won the Battle of Lewes against him. With them the University took side against the king, so far at least as to advance them money out of William of Durham’s chest. It is not certain—though it seems probable—that some few scholars were as early as 1253 invited by the University to live together, as beneficiaries of William of Durham, in the Hall which was in that year purchased out of his bequest. If it be asked how were they supported, it may be answered: with the interest paid by the nobles upon the hundred pounds lent to them; for, since the capital sum was afterwards repaid, it is fair to suppose that the interest was also got in year by year from the first. Although the University drew up no statutes for William of Durham’s scholars till the year 1280, yet his very will—which is now lost—may have served as a prescription ruling their way of life, even as it was made the basis of those statutes of 1280. Perhaps, however, his scholars were scattered over the different halls until 1280, when, after the pattern of the nephews and scholars of Walter de Merton, they were gathered under a single roof for the advancement of their learning and improvement of their discipline. Even if they lived apart, the title of college can hardly be denied to them, for—to quote Mr. William Smith—“taking it for granted and beyond dispute, that William of Durham dyed A.D. 1249, and that several purchases were bought with his money shortly after his death, as the deeds themselves testifie; all the doubt that can afterwards follow is, whether William of Durham’s Donation to ten, eleven, or twelve masters or scholars, were sufficient to erect them into a society? and whether that society could properly be called a college?” And the same writer adds that a college “signifies not a building made of brick or stone, adorned with gates, towers, and quadrangles; but a company, or society admitted into a body, and enjoying the same or like privileges one with another.” Such was a college in the old Roman sense.

We will then leave it to the reader to decide whether University College is or is not the earliest college in Europe, even though its foundation by King Alfred is mythical, and will pass on to view the statutes made in the year 1280. In that year at least the Masters delegated by the University “to enquire and order those things which had relation to the Testament of Master William of Durham,” ordained that “The Chancellor with some Masters in Divinity, by their advice, shall call other masters of other Faculties; and these masters with the Chancellor, bound by the Faith they owe to the University, shall chuse out of all who shall offer themselves to live of the said rents, four Masters, whom in their consciences they shall think most fit to advance, or profit in the Holy Church, who otherwise have not to live handsomely without it in the State of Masters of Arts. … The same manner of Election shall be for the future, except only that those four that shall be maintained out of that charity shall be called to the election, of which four one at least shall be a Priest.

“These four Masters shall each receive for his salary fifty shillings sterling[4] yearly, out of the Rents bought. …

“The aforesaid four masters, living together, shall study Divinity; and with this also may hear the Decretum and Decretalls, if they shall think fit; who, as to their manner of living and learning, shall behave themselves as by some fit and expert persons, deputed by the Chancellor, shall be ordered. But if it shall so happen, that any ought to be removed from the said allowance, or office, the Chancellor and Masters of Divinity shall have Power to do it.”

By the same Statutes a procurator or Bursar was appointed to take care of rents already bought and procure the buying of other rents. This Bursar was to receive fifty-five shillings instead of fifty. He was to have one key of William of Durham’s chest, the Chancellor another, and a person appointed by the University Proctors the third.

Three points are evident from these statutes: firstly, that in its inception the College of William of Durham was entirely the care of the University, which thus held the position of Visitor. Secondly, theology was to be the chief, if not sole study of the beneficiaries. Perhaps the founder viewed with jealousy the study of Roman law, which was beginning to engross some of the best minds of the age. Thirdly, only Masters were admissible as Fellows. It was the custom at the time to have graduated in Arts before proceeding to teach Divinity.

After a lapse of twelve years, A.D. 1292, at the Procurement of the Executors of the Venerable Mr. William of Durham, who were, it seems, still living, the University made new statutes for the College. In these new statutes we hear for the first time of a Master of the College, of commoners, and of a College library. The Senior Fellow was to govern the Juniors, and get half a mark yearly for his diligence therein. Thus the headship of the College went at first by succession, and not until 1332 by election; after which date the master was required to be cæteris paribus proxime Dunelmiam oriundus, or at least of northern extraction.

The first alien to the College who was elected Master was Ralph Hamsterley, in 1509. Previously he was a fellow of Merton College, where in the chapel he was buried. (Brodrick, Memorials of Merton College, p. 240.) He was “nunquam de gremio nostro neque de comitiva,” and was therefore chosen Master conditionally upon the visitors granting a dispensation to depart from the ordinary rule. (W. Smith’s MSS., xi. p. 2.)

The Master had until lately as much or as little right to marry as any of the Fellows, and in 1692 the Fellows, before electing Dr. Charlet, exacted from him a promise that he would not marry, or, if he did, would resign within a year. It seems that in old days Fellows of Colleges who were obliged to be in Holy Orders were free to marry after King James the I.’s parliament had sanctioned the marriage of clergymen. Already in 1422 the Master is called the custos, but he was till 1736, when new statutes made a change, called “the Master or Senior Fellow, Magister vel senior socius.” He had the key of the College, but in time delegated the function of letting people in and out to a statutory porter. The introduction of commoners or scholars not on the foundation is thus referred to in these statutes of 1292: “Since the aforesaid scholars have not sufficient to live handsomely alone by themselves, but that it is expedient that other honest persons dwell with them; it is ordained that every Fellow shall secretly enquire concerning the manners of every one that desires to sojourn with them; and then, if they please, by common consent, let him be received under this condition, That before them he shall promise whilst he lives with them, that he will honestly observe the customs of the Fellows of the House, pay his Dues, not hurt any of the Things belonging to the House, either by himself, or those that belong to him.”

In the year 1381 we find from the Bursar’s roll that the students not on the foundation paid £4 18s. as rents for their chambers, a considerable sum in those days.

As to the books of the College, it was ordained that there be put one book of every sort that the House has, in some common and secure place; that the Fellows, and others with the consent of a Fellow, may for the future have the benefit of it.

For the rest it was ordained that the Fellows should speak Latin often, and at every Act have one Disputation in Philosophy or Theology, and have one Disputation at least in the principal Question of both Faculties in the Vespers, and another in the Inception in their private College. In these disputations it is clear that rival disputants sometimes lost their tempers from the following ordinance—

“No Fellow shall under-value another Fellow, but shall correct his Fault privately, under the Penalty of Twelve-pence to be paid to the common-Purse; nor before one that is no Fellow, under the Penalty of two shillings; nor publickly in the Highway, or Church, or Fields, under the penalty of half a mark; and in all these cases, he that begins first shall double what the other is to pay, and this in Disputations especially.”

In those days a lesson was read during dinner. In these degenerate days all the above salutary rules are inverted, and it is customary for the senior scholar to sconce in a pot of beer any junior member who quotes Latin during the Hall-dinner.

In the year 1311 fresh statutes were ordained by convocation for the College, which, however, add little to the former ones. Of candidates for a Fellowship, otherwise duly qualified, he was to be preferred who comes from near Durham. After seven years a Fellow was to oppose in the Divinity Schools, which was equivalent to nowadays taking the degree of Doctor of Divinity. Each Fellow or past-Fellow was to put up a mass once a year for the Repose of the soul of William of Durham; and all alike were to cause themselves to be called, so far as lay in their power, the scholars of William of Durham. Lastly, the Senior Fellow was to be in Holy Orders. This, however, must not be taken to mean that the other Fellows were not to be so likewise. They were till recently expected to be ordained within four years of their degree, and the Statutes of 1311 A.D. were reaffirmed in that sense by the visitors under the chancellorship of Dr. Fell, 1666 A.D., when it was sought to remove Mr. Berty, a Bennet Fellow, because he had not taken orders.

In or about the year 1343 the scholars of William of Durham removed to the present site of the College, where a house called Spicer’s Hall, occupying the ground now included in the large quadrangle, had been bought for them. At the same time White Hall and Rose Hall, two houses facing Kybald Street—which joined the present Logic Lane and Grove Street half-way down each—were bought, and made part of the College. Ludlow Hall, on the site of the present east quadrangle, was bought at the same time, and a tenement, called in 1379 Little University Hall, and occupying the site of the Lodgings of the Master (which in 1880, on the completion of the Master’s new house, were turned into men’s rooms), was bought in 1404. But Ludlow Hall and Little University Hall were not at once added to the College premises.

During the first hundred years of the life of the College its members were called simply University Scholars, and the ordinance of A.D. 1311, that they should call themselves the Scholars of William of Durham, proves that that was not the name in common vogue. Their old house at the corner of what is to-day Brazen-nose College was called the Aula Universitatis in Vico Scholarum (the Hall of the University in School Street). After 1343, the probable year of their migration, until at least 1361, the College was called as before Aula Universitatis, only in Alto Vico, i.e. in High Street. After 1361 they assumed the official title of Master and Fellows of the Hall of William of Durham, commonly called Aula Universitatis. It was not till 1381 that the present title Magna Aula Universitatis, or Mickle University Hall, was used, in distinction from the Little University Hall, which was only separated from it by Ludlow Hall. But the nomenclature was not uniform, and in Elizabeth’s reign, as in Richard II.’s, it was called the College of William of Durham.

The legend of the foundation of the College by King Alfred has been mentioned, and here is a convenient place to conjecture how and when it arose. The first mention of it we meet with in a petition addressed in French to King Richard II., A.D. 1381, by his “poor Orators, the Master and Scholars of your College, called Mickil University Hall in Oxendford, which College was first founded by your noble Progenitor, King Alfred (whom God assoyle), for the maintenance of twenty-four Divines for ever.” Twenty years before, in 1360, Laurence Radeford, a Fellow, had bought for the College various messuages, shops, lands and meadows yielding rents of the yearly value of £15. This purchase was made out of the residuum of William of Durham’s money, now all called in. But it turned out that the title to the new property was bad, and, after forging various deeds without success, the College appealed in the above petition to the king, Richard II., to exercise his prerogative, and take the case out of the common courts, in which—so runs the petition—the plaintiff, Edmond Frauncis, citizen of London, “has procured all the Pannel of the Inquest to be taken by Gifts and Treats.”

The petition prays the king to see that the College be not “tortiously disinherited,” and appeals to the memory of the “noble Saints John of Beverley, Bede, and Richard of Armagh, formerly scholars of the College.” A petition so full of fictions hardly deserved to lead to success, and the College was eventually compelled to redeem its right to the estate by payment of a large sum of money to the heirs of Frauncis. The interest of this petition, however, lies in the fact that in 1728, on the occasion of a dispute arising for the mastership between Mr. Denison and Mr. Cockman, it formed the ground upon which, in the King’s Bench at Westminster, it was held that the College is a Royal foundation, and the Crown the rightful visitor; the truth being that the whole body of Regents and non-Regents of the University were and always had been the true and rightful visitor.

But the French Petition to Richard II. was not the only fabrication to which William of Durham’s unworthy beneficiaries had recourse in order to establish a fictitious antiquity and deny their real founder. About the same time they stole the chancellor’s seal and affixed its impress to a forged deed purporting to have been executed in A.D. 1220, the 4th of Henry III., May 10th, by Lewis de Chapyrnay, Chancellor. This false deed records the receipt of four hundred marks bequeathed by William, Archdeacon of Durham, for the maintenance of six Masters of Arts, and the conveyance of certain tenements to Master Roger Caldwell, Warden and senior Fellow of the great hall of the University. The reader will the more agree that this forgery was worthier of Shapira than of “honest and holy clerks,” when he reads in Antony à Wood (City of Oxford, ed. Andrew Clark, vol. i. p. 561)—who was not deceived by it—that it was written “on membrane cours, thick, greasy, whereas, in the reign of Henry III. parchment was not so, but fine and clear.” There never were such persons as Chapyrnay and Caldwell, and William of Durham did not die till 1249, and then left only three hundred and ten marks. Mr. Twine, the author of the Apology for the Antiquity of Oxford, said of this deed, “mentiri nescit, it cannot lie.” “But,” says quaintly Mr. William Smith, “if ever there was a lie in the world, that which we find in that Charter is as great a one as ever the Devil told since he deceived our first Parents in Paradise.”

It would oppress the reader to detail all the other fictions which followed on this early one. One lie makes many, and as time went on outward embellishments were added to the College commemorative of its mythical founder. Thus a picture of King Alfred was bought in the year 1662 for £3—perhaps the same which one now sees in the College library. There was—so Mr. Smith relates—an older picture of him in the Masters’ lodgings.

A statue of Alfred also stood over the chapel door, and was removed by Mr. Obadiah Walker, Master in 1676, to a niche over the hall door to make place for a statue of St. Cuthbert, the patron saint of Durham, on whose day the gaudy used to be celebrated until 1662, at which date it was changed to the day of Saints Simon and Jude, out of respect to the memory of Sir Simon Benet, who had lately bequeathed four Fellowships, four scholarships, and various other benefits. This was the real cause of the 28th of October being chosen for the gaudy, although afterwards the Aluredians absurdly pretended that it was the day of King Alfred’s obit. The statue of Alfred above-mentioned was given by Dr. Robert Plot, the well-known author of The Natural History of Oxfordshire, who was a Fellow-commoner of the College, and it cost £3 1s. 5d. to remove it, as related, in the year 1686. A hundred years later a marble image of Alfred was given to the College by Viscount Folkestone, which is now set up over the fireplace in the oak common-room. A relief of him is also set over the fireplace in the college-hall, and was given by Sir Roger Newdigate, a member of the College, and founder of the University annual prize for an English poem.

A picture of St. John of Beverley, mentioned in the French petition to Richard II., was, we learn from Gutch’s edition of Antony Wood’s Colleges and Halls (ed. 1786, p. 57), set in the east window of the old chapel in the beginning of the seventeenth century. The same authority assures us that until Dr. Clayton’s time (Master, 1605) there were in a window on the west side of the little old quadrangle pictures of King Alfred kneeling and St. Cuthbert sitting, … the king thus bespeaking the saint in a pentameter, holding the picture of the College in his hand, “Hic in honore tui collegium statui,” to whom the saint made answer, in a scroll coming from his mouth—“Quæ statuisti in eo pervertentes maledico.”

In a window of the outer chapel were also the arms of William of Durham, which were, “Or, a Fleur de lis azure, each leaf charged with a mullet gules.” Round these arms was written on a scroll: “Magistri Willielmi de Dunelm … huius collegii”; the missing word, so Wood had been informed, was “Fundatoris,” erased, no doubt, by an Aluredian. The arms of the College to-day are those of Edward the Confessor, to wit—“Azure, a cross patonce between five martlets Or.” We would do well to resign our sham royalty, and return to the arms of William of Durham, our true founder.

The crowning fiction was the celebration in the year 1872 of the millennium of the College, during the mastership of the Rev. G. G. Bradley, afterwards Dean of Westminster. It is said that a distinguished modern historian ironically sent him a number of burned cakes, purporting to have been dug up at Athelney, to entertain King Alfred’s scholars withal. It is not recorded if they were served up or no to the guests, among whom were Dean Stanley and Mr. Robert Lowe, both past tutors of the College. At the dinner which graced this festal occasion, the late Dean of Westminster is said to have ridiculed the idea of King Alfred having bestowed lands and tenements on scholars in Oxford, which place was in A.D. 872 in possession of Alfred’s enemies the Danes; whereupon Mr. Lowe made the happy answer, that this latter fact was itself a confirmation of the legend, for King Alfred was a man much before his time, who in the spirit of some modern leaders of the democracy took care to bestow on his followers, not his own lands, but those of his political opponents.

This legend of King Alfred sprang up in the fourteenth century, when people had forgotten the Norman Conquest and time had long healed all the scars of an alien invasion. Then historians began to feel back to a more remote period for the origin of institutions really subsequent. In so doing they fed patriotic pride by establishing an unbroken continuity of the nation’s life. So to-day we see asserting itself, and with better historical warranty, a belief in the antiquity of English ecclesiastical institutions. The best minds are no longer content with that idol of the Evangelicals, a parliamentary church dating back no more than three centuries. It may be even that a good deal of the Aluredian legend was earlier in its origin than the fourteenth century, and shaped itself at the first out of anti-Norman feeling. In the reign of King Richard, anyhow, all sections of the now united nation accepted it, and not only have we the writ of King Richard II., dated May 4th, 1381 (in answer to the French petition), setting down the College to be “the Foundation of the Progenitors of our Lord the King, and of his Patronage,”[5] but in that very reign, if not later, a passage was interpolated in MSS. of Asser’s Life of Alfred, identifying the schools—which Alfred undoubtedly maintained—with the schools of Oxford. The Fellows of University only took advantage of a feeling which was abroad, and by which they were also duped, when they declared themselves in the French petition to be a royal foundation. Antony Wood was not deceived by the legend, though he credits it in regard to the University. It is strange to find Hearne the antiquary, and Dr. Charlet, Master, 1692–1722, both acquaintances of Mr. W. Smith, adhering to the belief. Mr. Smith declares that Dr. Charlet did so from vanity, because he thought that to be head of a royal foundation added to his dignity. Obadiah Walker had sided with the Aluredians, because he was a papist, and because Alfred had been a good Catholic king and faithful to the Pope. What is most strange of all is that, although the king’s attorney and solicitor-general, being duly commissioned to inquire, had, in October 1724 pronounced that the College was not a royal foundation, nor the sovereign its legitimate visitor, yet the Court of King’s Bench three years after decided both points in just the opposite sense. It is an ill wind that blows no one any good. We then lost the University as our visitor, but have since obtained gratis on all disputed points the opinion of the highest law officer of the realm, the Lord Chancellor.

Between the years 1307 and 1360 as many as sixteen halls in the parishes of St. Mary, St. Peter, St. Mildred, and All Hallows were bought for the College. They were no doubt let out as lodgings to University students, and were in those days, as now, a remunerative form of investment; some of them standing on sites which have since come to be occupied by colleges.

It was not till the fifteenth century that the College acquired property outside Oxford, and then not by purchase, but by bequest. In those days locomotion was too difficult for a small group of scholars to venture on far-off purchases. But in 1403 Walter Skirlaw, Bishop of Durham, left to our College the Manor of Mark’s Hall, or Margaret Ruthing, in Essex. The proceeds were to sustain three Fellows “chosen out of students at Oxford or Cambridge, and if possible born in the dioceses of York and Durham.” It has already been remarked how closely connected was the College with the North of England. No other conditions were attached to the benefaction save this, that “all the Fellows shall every year, for ever, celebrate solemn obsequies in their chapel upon the day of the Bishop’s death, with a Placebo and Dirige, and a Mass for the dead the day after.” Is it altogether for good that we have outgrown those customs of pious gratitude to the past? Bishop Skirlaw’s Fellowships, it may be added, figure in the Calendar as of the foundation of Henry IV., because the lands were passed as a matter of legal form through the sovereign’s lands in order to avoid certain difficulties connected with mortmains.

The next great benefactor of the College after Bishop Skirlaw was Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, who in 1442 left property and the advowson of Arncliffe in Craven in Yorkshire. Three Fellows drawn from the dioceses of Durham, Carlisle, and York were to be sustained out of his benefaction. The next chief benefaction was that of John Freyston or Frieston, who in 1592 bequeathed property in Pontefract for the support of a Fellow or Exhibitioner, who should be a Yorkshire man, and also by his will made the College trustee to pay certain yearly sums to the grammar schools of Wakefield, Normanton, Pontefract, and Swillington.

Coming to the seventeenth century, we find a Mr. Charles Greenwood, a past-Fellow, leaving a handsome bequest to the College, out of which, however, only £1500 was secured from his executors, which money paid for the present fabric to be partially raised; the north side of the quadrangle, the chapel, and hall and old library being first begun A.D. 1634. The present library was partly built out of money given by the executors and trustees of the second Lord Eldon, past-Fellow of the College. It shelters the colossal twin-image of his kinsmen, and was designed by Sir G. G. Scott, and is better suited to be a chapel than a library. Then in 1631, Sir Simon Bennet, a relative and college pupil of Mr. Greenwood’s, left lands in Northampton to maintain eight Fellows and eight scholars; though they turned out sufficient to maintain but four of each sort. The last great benefactor of this century was the famous Dr. Radcliffe, formerly senior scholar, of whom the eastern quadrangle, built by his munificence, remains as a monument. Beside completing the fabrics he founded two medical Fellowships, and, dying in 1734, bequeathed in trust to the College for its uses his estate of Linton in Yorkshire.

It is beyond the limits of a short article to narrate all the vicissitudes which during the epochs of the Reformation and Commonwealth the College underwent. In the reign of Elizabeth it sided with the Roman Catholics, and the Master and several Fellows were ejected on that account. Later on, in 1642, the College lent its plate, consisting of a silver flagon, 8 potts, 9 tankards, 18 bowles, one candle-pott, and a salt-sellar to King Charles I., one flagon alone being kept for the use of the Communion. The gross weight as weighed at the mint was 738 oz. The Fellows and commoners also contributed on 30th July, 1636, the sum of 19li. 10s. for entertaining the king; and again on 17th Feb., 1636, 4li. 17s. 6d. Subsequently the College sustained for many months 28 soldiers at the rate of 22li. 8s. per month. After all this show of loyalty we expect to learn that Cromwell ejected the Master, Thomas Walker, and instituted a Roundhead, Joshua Hoyle, in his place.

Another member of the College of the same name, but who achieved more fame, was Obadiah Walker, who was already a Fellow under Thomas Walker’s mastership, and was ejected by the Long Parliament along with him, and also with his old tutor, Mr. Abraham Woodhead. Woodhead and O. Walker retired abroad and visited Rome and many other places. At the Restoration they both regained their Fellowships, but Woodhead never more conformed to the English Church. O. Walker, however, continued to take the Sacrament in the College chapel, and after that he was elected Master distributed it to the other Fellows, till, on the accession of James II., he “openly declared himself a Romanist, and got a dispensation from his Majesty for himself and two Fellows, his converts, who held their places till the king’s flight, notwithstanding the laws to the contrary.” William Smith, who was a resident Fellow at the time, has “many good things to say of Obadiah Walker, as that he was neither proud nor covetous, and framed his usual discourse against the Puritans on one side, and the Jesuits on the other, as the chief disturbers of the peace, and hinderers of all concessions and agreement amongst all true members of the Catholic Church.” He complains, however, that “as soon as he declared himself a Roman Catholic, he provided him and his party of Jesuits for their Priests; concerning the first of which (I think he went by the name of Mr. Edwards) there is this remarkable story, that having had mass said for some time in a garret, he afterwards procured a mandate from K. James to seize on the lower half of a side of the quadrangle, next adjoining to the College chapel, by which he deprived us of two low rooms, their studies and their bed-chambers; and after all the partitions were removed, it was someway or other consecrated, as we suppose, to Divine services; for they had mass there every day, and sermons at least in the afternoons on the Lord’s Day.”

Smith goes on to relate how the Jesuit chaplain was one day preaching from the text, “So run that you may obtain,” when one of many Protestants, who were harkening at the outside of the windows in the quadrangle, discovering that the Jesuit was preaching a sermon of Mr. Henry Smith, which he had at home by him, went and fetched the book, and read at the outside of the window what the Jesuit was preaching within. For this it seems the particular Jesuit got into trouble. Smith complains also that by mandate of the king, Walker sequestred a Fellowship towards the maintenance of his priest, and incurred the College much expense in putting up the statue of James II., presented by a Romanist,[6] over the inside of a gate-house. He adds that “Mr. Walker that had the king’s ear, and entertained him at vespers in their chapel, and shewed the king the painted windows in our own, so that the king could not but see his own statue in coming out of it, never had the Prudence nor kindness to the College, as to request the least favour to the society from him.”

That Mr. William Smith, who writes the above, could also make himself a persona grata to the great men of State who came to Oxford to attend on the king, we see from the following letter written by Lord Conyers, who in 1681 lodged with his son in University College, on the occasion of the Parliament meeting in Oxford. It is dated Easter Thursday, London, 1681, and is as follows (MSS. Smith):—