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COLLEGE 
 
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 COLLEGE HISTORIES 
 
 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN BUCHAN 
 
 LONDON 
 
 R E. ROBINSON 
 
 20 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, BLOOMSBURY 
 1898 
 
->«^.4i 
 
 B8 
 
 Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson &> Co. 
 At the Ballantyne Press 
 
TO 
 JOHN FOSTER CARR 
 
 Then said Christian to the Porter, Sir 
 What house is this? and may I lodge here 
 to-night i The Porter answered. This 
 house was built /or the relief and security 
 of pilgrims.— "Yh^ Pilgrim's Progress. 
 
 120059 
 
PREFACE 
 
 I HAVE attempted to make this little book serve a double 
 purpose — to present some sort of portrait of the vigorous 
 college life of the past and to give such historical detail as 
 may explain the place in guide-book fashion. The first 
 two chapters give the bare detail of its history ; the 
 others deal more fully with less arid matters. Facts of 
 purely antiquarian interest have been either omitted or 
 left to an appendix. The book is in no sense a minute 
 history ; rather it is an attempt to cast a rather bald 
 material into narrative form. Hence the author asks 
 pardon for much that may seem superficial and trifling to 
 graver eyes. The authorities used were the ordinary 
 works on the general history of the University, and such 
 manuscript sources of information as the Vice- Principals' 
 Register and documents in possession of the College. I 
 have to thank the Principal of Brasenose for kindly placing 
 at my disposal certain notes and extracts which he had 
 made on the subject, and I should also express my obliga- 
 tions to the best-informed sketch of the College history 
 which I have met with, Mr. Madan's article in Mr. Clark's 
 « Colleges of Oxford." To Mr. B. C. Boulter of Brasenose 
 I am much indebted for the drawing of a view from an 
 
 upper window in the Old Quadrangle. 
 
 J. B. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. THE king's hall AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE 
 
 COLLEGE 1 
 
 II. ITS LATER HISTORY l8 
 
 III. EARLY SOCIAL LIFE ...... 38 
 
 IV. THE COLLEGE IN MODERN TIMES • ... 55 
 V. THE COLLEGE BUILDINGS AND PROPERTIES . . 78 
 
 VI. THE COLLEGE AND ITS SPORTING HISTORY . . 96 
 
 VII. THE COLLEGE AND ITS FAMOUS MEN . . . II8 
 
 VIII. CONCLUSION 143 
 
 APPENDICES 
 
 APPENDIX A 155 
 
 APPENDIX B 158 
 
 APPENDIX C 162 
 
 APPENDIX D 165 
 
X CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 APPENDIX E 170 
 
 APPENDIX F 172 
 
 APPENDIX G 176 
 
 APPENDIX H 183 
 
 APPENDIX I 187 
 
 APPENDIX J i8g 
 
 APPENDIX K 192 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 VIEW BY LOGGAN (1674) Frontispiece 
 
 COLLEGE HALL, SHOWING FOUNDERS' 
 
 PORTRAITS Facingpage 14 
 
 LIBRARY AND CHAPEL FROM THE SMALL 
 
 QUADRANGLE „ 22 
 
 OLD QUADRANGLE FROM THE WEST . . „ 62 
 
 INTERIOR OF CHAPEL „ 84 
 
 NEW QUADRANGLE „ 1 10 
 
 OLD QUADRANGLE FROM THE EAST, SHOWING 
 
 SUNDIAL ON NORTH WALL ... „ I24 
 
 VIEW OF RADCLIFFE CAMERA FROM WINDOW 
 
 IN OLD QUADRANGLE .... „ 1 52- 
 
VNIVERS 
 
 CHAPTER 1 
 
 THE KING'S HALL AND THE FOUNDATION 
 OF THE COLLEGE 
 
 At the corner of Brasenose Lane, across from the site 
 of the great chestnut in Exeter Gardens, there stood in 
 days prior to the sixteenth century a building called 
 Little University Hall. The great Hall of that name, 
 where William of Durham's scholars dwelt, lay south of 
 the High Street, but this was a lesser place under the 
 same Master and fellows. Bordering it on the south, 
 and still flanking the narrow lane running from the 
 High (which was then called Schools) Street, was Brase- 
 nose Hall — almost on the site of the present old gate of 
 the college. South, again, stood two buildings belong- 
 ing to Oriel, called respectively Salisbury Hall and 
 St. Mary's Entry. Finally came two little halls. Little 
 Edmund's and Haberdashers', and then the High Street. 
 So much for the former occupants of the college site ; 
 but in early days the college property was not restricted 
 to one side of the street. Across Schools Street, on the 
 
 A 
 
2 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 site now occupied by the RadclifFe Library, lay Black 
 Hall and Glass Hall, the property of the Canons of 
 Oseney. Behind all the buildings on the western side 
 of the street, from the High to Brasenose Lane, there 
 seem to have stretched gardens of some magnitude. On 
 these patches of land — representing to-day the site of 
 the RadclifFe, the old and new quadrangles of Brase- 
 nose, and the small tenement to the west of St. Mary's 
 Church — grew up the future college. 
 
 The owners of the quaintly named halls were 
 generally larger academic or religious bodies. Little 
 University belonged, of course, to University College ; 
 Salisbury and St. Mary's Entry to Oriel ; the Abbey 
 of Oseney seems to have possessed Haberdashers', Black 
 Hall, Glass Hall, and St. Edmund's ; while a small and 
 obscure foundation, called Staple Hall, subsequently 
 merged in the college, was the property of the monks 
 of Eynsham. Brasenose Hall alone was an independent, 
 self-maintaining community with a Master of its own. 
 The ground thus occupied was in the very centre of the 
 city, close to the great church of St. Mary, next door 
 to the Schools, and abutting on the High Street. 
 Travellers by the main road from London would pass 
 by Haberdashers' Hall, and Schools Street was, in its 
 way, the main channel of the academic life. If a 
 position at the very centre of things be a virtue, it 
 was one to which this medley of little halls attained. 
 
THE KING'S HALL AND FOUNDATION 3 
 
 To trace the history of the life in the Halls* is to get 
 some insight into the dim days before colleges and 
 statutes, when the University was still a fluctuating 
 body, a centre of gathering for the learned or would-be 
 learned vagabondage of many countries. In those 
 times a college education was far from being a badge 
 of respectability. The eager student was only one 
 remove from the beggar, and both were often first 
 cousin to the knave. The Aula was a microcosm out 
 of which all the stately forms of our modem institutions 
 were developed. Vigorously democratic in nature, it 
 kept much of this quality in forms and customs to later 
 days. Its beginnings, so far as we can trace them, were 
 rude and simple. A band of scholars — gathered no 
 man knows where — would come to Oxford, hire a 
 lodging, choose one of their number Principal, and your 
 Hall was established. Its one connection with the 
 greater University power was the surety given by the 
 Principal to the Chancellor that the rent was not too 
 great for the thin pui'ses of his friends. In 1209 there 
 was an ugly crime done by a scholar in Oxford, and we 
 find him pursued and attacked " in his own hall, which 
 he had founded with three other clerks, as Fellows." 
 It might be that the place grew and prospered. Fresh- 
 men straggling up from the country, whether their own 
 
 * For such information as exists on the subject of the early halls 
 on the site of the College, see Appendix B 
 
4 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 masters or under the care of a " brynger,"'* would be 
 waited on by touts from the Halls and the favour of the 
 young gentleman's attendance requested. If the youth 
 were of a good name, probably the Master would come 
 in person and deprecatingly suggest that his lectures 
 might be given at least a three-days' trial. So bad 
 grew the habit in Paris that a statute was passed 
 expressly against it. But, indeed, the custom was not 
 inflexible. Our young man from the country might 
 hire his own lodging if he pleased and live at his ease, 
 if he found no Hall to his liking. 
 
 The authority in the Halls was light, for the Principal 
 owed his position to the consent of the whole com- 
 munity. He might, indeed, transfer the goodwill of 
 the thing to another Principal, but his successor had to 
 appear cap in hand and get the popular sanction. The 
 great man was not necessarily a Master or even a 
 Bachelor of Arts ; and it is not till late in the fifteenth 
 century that we find academic status made a require- 
 ment for the office. But by-and-by the institution 
 became more formal, as the authority of the University 
 body increased, and the flagrant individualism of the 
 little Halls disappeared. The Chancellor became able 
 to remove a Principal at his discretion. In the time of 
 Edward I. he acquired a right of veto over the Hall- 
 statutes, and gradually certain moral qualifications were 
 made indispensable in candidates for admission. All 
 
THE KING^S HALL AND FOUNDATION 5 
 
 this was the beginning of the end, and towards the close 
 of the Middle Ages the little democratic Halls were 
 beginning to be absorbed in the larger organisation of 
 the College. But while they existed they formed the 
 centre of a very vigorous, interesting, and turbulent 
 life. The Statuta Aularia, though belonging to a late 
 period, and though by their very existence marking a 
 degree of univereity authority in place of private regu- 
 lations, give us many interesting details which probably 
 date far back in the centuries. In the Statute of 1489, 
 passed in the Chancellorship of John Russell, Bishop of 
 Lincoln, we find little that seems oppressive and much 
 that is highly sensible. The Aularis of those days 
 might not swear, dice, or malign the neighbours. He 
 was compelled to attend Mass daily and all University 
 sermons. He might cut meals when he pleased, in 
 which case an allowance was made him for commons 
 which he had not used. But other rules were more 
 paternal. He might not walk abroad without a 
 respectable companion, nor be out of doors after eight 
 in winter and nine in summer. Above all things, he 
 must not be disputatious and given to exercise his wit 
 at the expense of his friends, making " odious compari- 
 sons of country to country, nobility to ignobility, 
 Faculty to Faculty.*" If at any time he forgets his 
 Latin and relapses into his native tongue, behold, he is 
 fined one farthing ; but if he breaks his neighbour's 
 
6 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 head he must contribute the serious sum of 6s. 8d. to 
 the Hall exchequer. 
 
 Of the several little halls which went to make the 
 College, Brasenose Hall may be chosen as the type, 
 the germ of the later foundation. The history of 
 the College is merely a continuation of the annals of 
 the little Aula Regia de Brasinnose, since it was built 
 around it, and had for its first Principal the last 
 Master of the Hall. In the forged charter of 1219 
 the name of Brasenose is found. In 1239 or there- 
 abouts, the building belonged to a certain JefFry Jussell, 
 whence it passed to one Simon de Balindon, and from 
 him again, in 1261, to the Chancellor of the University. 
 Thereafter it abruptly changed owners, and the son of 
 Andrew of Durham was ejected by one Adam Dilet 
 and his crew of turbulent scholars. In an Inquisition 
 of 1278, quoted by Wood, the name Brasenose occurs 
 as " domus cum quatuor Scholis."''' This is but one 
 step from the private house ; but in the next fifty years 
 the place acquired some corporate strength, which was 
 soon to be put to the test. 
 
 In the early half of the fourteenth century Oxford 
 was scarcely a cheerful abode for peaceful men. The 
 industrious scholar must often have been knocked up 
 at odd hours to go out with cudgel and quarter-staff 
 to defend his faction. Even in those early days 
 Brasenose Hall seems to have had a northern connec- 
 
THE KING^S HALL AND FOUNDATION 7 
 
 tion. At any rate, in 1334, Northerners fought against 
 Southerners with such violence that the Castle was as 
 full as it could hold of prisoners, and the sheriff was 
 at his wits' end to keep them safe. Certain studious 
 clerks from the Hall found the thing little to their 
 liking, so they migrated to the Lincolnshire town of 
 Stamford, leaving pandemonium behind them. The 
 inevitable Merlin had prophesied on the matter in bad 
 Latin : 
 
 Doctrinae studium quae nunc viget ad Vada Boum 
 Tempore venture celebrabitur ad Vada Saxi ; 
 
 so those loyal Northerners made haste to fulfil his 
 words. The King, Edward III., took the matter 
 seriously to heart, and sent down a commission to 
 inquire into the difficulty. He ordered the Sheriffs 
 of Lincoln and Oxford to forbid lectures in Stamford, 
 and summon the defaulting students to return; the 
 clerks replied that they preferred a quiet life and were 
 there for good. Then came a second warning which 
 drove some away; but many remained obstinate, 
 notably seventeen Masters and six Bachelors, who 
 were not dispersed till five months later. 
 
 The students of Brasenose Hall seem to have held 
 together and actually acquired an edifice in the town, 
 what we know afterwards as "Brasenose Hall in 
 Stamford.'' One archway of the place is still standing ; 
 
8 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 the refectory was in existence till 1688 ; and there is 
 extant a prehistoric knocker or door-handle of brass, 
 which must date from early in the twelfth century, and 
 probably was taken from the Oxford Hall to Lincoln- 
 shire as a token of continuity. The site of the building, 
 the archway, and the knocker were acquired by the 
 College in 1890, and the last mentioned now graces 
 the college-hall. It was a short-lived but vigorous and 
 flourishing little colony, and it was hard to uproot. 
 In the King's ultimatum of 1335, a certain Philip, 
 described as " obsonator Eneanasensis," is mentioned 
 as contumacious to the last. How serious was the 
 danger to Oxford is shown by the oath administered 
 to candidates for degrees as late as 1827 : " You shall 
 swear that you will not give or attend lectures at 
 Stamford, as in a university, seat of learning, or general 
 college.*" 
 
 With the year 1435, we come to authoritative 
 records, for then the lists of Principals begin. The 
 names are, as a rule, quite unknown, and the life of 
 the little Hall is a sealed book. The Munimenta 
 Academica print a list * of the articles of furniture in 
 the possession of Master Thomas Cooper of Brasenose 
 Hall in the early fifteenth century, but such stray notes 
 cast little light on the condition of the place. From 
 1480 to 1482 the Vice-Chancellor, William Sutton, was 
 * Cf. Appendix C. 
 
THE KING^S HALL AND FOUNDATION 9 
 
 also Principal of the Hall ; and the Proctors in 1458 
 and 1502 were John Molineux and Hugh Hawarden, 
 both of Brasenose. The latter, indeed, is the centre of 
 a tale. The Northern element in the Hall seems ^to 
 have continued, as it did in the University at large, 
 and in 1502 some jealous Southerners, law students of 
 Hinksey Hall and Peckwater^s Inn, made a riot in the 
 street on the night of Trinity Sunday, and, filled with 
 animosity to the unhappy Master Hawarden, the 
 Northern Proctor, battered down the doors and windows 
 of Brasenose Hall. It was but a forehint of that 
 serious fracas four years later, when the Principal of 
 Hart Hall and two others were killed, and the Principal 
 of St. Albans and certain Merton graduates shone 
 disgracefully among the combatants from their skill 
 with the sword and bow. 
 
 But soon we find traces of the movement which was 
 to change the hall into a college. The revolt against 
 mediaevalism had already begun. Grocyne and Linacre 
 had taught at Oxford. Colet and Erasmus had kindled 
 the torch of the new learning in the stronghold of the 
 schoolmen. But this great movement, which is nearly 
 associated with the foundation of Coi-pus Christi 
 College, has no bearing on the early history of Brasenose. 
 Indeed, the foundation is more in the nature of a 
 protest,* an adhering to old traditional usage, as 
 * This is clearly seen by the Statutes of the College issued in 
 
10 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 against the new anarchical ideas which were playing 
 havoc with sober sense. The Northern element in the 
 place was strong, and the North was the home of lost 
 causes. The first hint we have of the new project is 
 to be found in the will of a certain Edmund Croston 
 or Crofton, a Master of Arts, who in his dying 
 testament bequeathed £6 ISs. 4d., to " the building 
 of Brasynnose in Oxford, if such works as the Bishop 
 of Lyncoln and Master Sotton intended there went on 
 during their life or twelve years after.*" His books, 
 too, were to be placed in the library of Brasenose, 
 provided, he adds with fine caution, that that college 
 be not a myth. 
 
 It remains to notice who were the pious founders, 
 the "Bishop of Lyncoln"" and "Master Sotton.^' Of 
 the early life of both we have scanty records. William 
 Smyth was the fourth son of one Robert Smyth, of 
 Peel House, near Widnes in Lancashire — a family it 
 would seem of some pretensions to gentility. Ap- 
 parently he was a student in Oxford, but our one 
 record of his academic career is the fact that he was a 
 Bachelor of Law, when he became Rector of Cheshunt 
 in 1492. His promotion seems to have been rapid. 
 Margaret, Lady Richmond, and the great house of 
 Stanley used their influence in his favour, and in 1491 
 
 1521, four years— it is worth noting — after the publication of 
 Luther's Theses. 
 
THE KING^S HALL AND FOUNDATION 11 
 
 he was raised to the See of Coventry and Lichfield. 
 Before he had been Clerk of the Hanaper and Dean of 
 St. Stephen''s, Westminster. In civil life he presided 
 over the Prince's Council in the Marches of Wales, and 
 in the first years of the sixteenth century seems to have 
 been President of Wales. There is a benefaction to 
 his name prior to the foundation of Brasenose, for in 
 1495 he built at Lichfield a Hospital of St. John. 
 In this year he was translated to Lincoln, which made 
 him the official visitor of the two Colleges of Lincoln 
 and Oriel. To the first he gave ^£^300 for the 
 establishment of a scholarship ; to the second some 
 land in the shires of Stafford and Oxford. Indeed, it 
 is not unlikely that he had once intended to give 
 to Lincoln what he afterwards gave to Brasenose. 
 " Praeposuerat enim,""' wrote Robert Parkinson, the sub- 
 Rector of Lincoln, some fifty years later, "omnia 
 nostro collegio praestitisse quae postea in Brasinnos 
 egit, si voluissent Rector et Scholares qui tum fuerunt 
 ab eo propositas conditioncs recipere.^ What precisely 
 the conditions were does not appear ; but a scandalous 
 story elucidating the matter is still told in the college, 
 which, like Herodotus, knowing, we scruple to set 
 down. From 1500 to 1503 the Bishop was Chancellor 
 of the University. From this time till his death on the 
 2nd of January, 15|f , the steps in the founding of the 
 College are the only incidents of importance in his life. 
 
12 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 The other founder. Sir Richard Sutton, Knight, has the 
 distinction of being the first lay founder of any College. 
 He came of the Suttons of Sutton (" of that Ilk ") near 
 Macclesfield, a north countryman like the Bishop and 
 possibly connected by family traditions with the Hall, 
 since a William Sutton was Principal in 1469. The 
 recorded steps in his career are few. He was a Bamster 
 of the Inner Temple, and in 1497 became a member of 
 the King''s Privy Council. At Isleworth there was a 
 house of Brigittine nuns, called the Monastery of Sion, 
 of which he became Steward in 1513. He supplied 
 Pynson with funds to print the Orcharde of Syon in 
 1519, and died in 1524, having received knighthood 
 some years before his death. 
 
 Of the early relations between the two men and the 
 causes which led them to form the plan we have no 
 means of guessing ; but we can trace with some certainty 
 the actual steps in its fulfilment. On the 20th of 
 October, 1508, Richard Sutton, Esquire, and eight others 
 take Brazen Nose Hall and little University Hall from 
 University College on a lease of ninety -two years at £^ 
 a year, provided the lessees spend ^£^40 on the building 
 within a year''s time. No obstacles of any kind seem to 
 have been placed by owners of land or college authori- 
 ties to the incipient scheme. More, University agreed 
 to renew the lease and surrender all claims as soon as 
 property with a rental of £2 should be given them — a 
 
THE KING'S HALL AND FOUNDATION 13 
 
 compact which after Sutton'*s death was carried out by 
 his trustees. Next year the founders and a certain 
 Roland Messenger hire Edward Moseley's quarry at 
 Headington, and the building proceeds. It began in 
 the south-west corner of what is now the old quadrangle, 
 on the site of No. I. staircase. The foundation stone 
 was laid on the 1st of June 1509 ; and to-day a copy of 
 the original inscription recording the event is placed 
 above that staircase. It runs thus : — 
 
 ''Anno Christi 1509 et Regis Henrici octavi primo | 
 Nomine diuino lincoln | presul quoque sutton. Hanc posu 
 I ere petram regis ad imperium | primo die lunii." 
 
 The various steps in the building for the next few 
 years have little interest. In or about the year 1510 
 the founders acquired Salisbury Hall and St. Mary''s 
 Entry from Oriel College at a yearly rent of thirteen 
 shillings and fourpence. Apparently the old Brase- 
 nose Hall was left till the college should have reached a 
 sufficient size, for we find caution given to the Uni- 
 versity for the Hall's dues in 1511 and 1512; we have 
 the name of the Principal of the year before ; and a 
 certain over-zealous and reactionary scholar of the place 
 found himself put in durance in the August of 1512, for 
 setting himself to interfere with the building of Corpus.* 
 
 * Dr. Fowler has told the story in full in his history of Corpus 
 Christi in this Series, pp. 37, 38. 
 
14 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 But already by this year the College was practically 
 formed, and in September of 1514 we find Matthew 
 Smyth spoken of as " Principal of the College and Hall 
 of Brasen Nose." In 1523 Sutton formally made over the 
 property he had bought from University College to the 
 Principal and Fellows of the new establishment. In 
 1530 the several halls called by the names of Haber- 
 dasher, Glass, Black and St. Edmund are granted to the 
 college on a long lease by the Abbey of Oseney ; and in 
 the process of the next century become genuine college 
 property. Lastly in 1556 Lincoln College let Staple 
 Hall (which had once belonged to the monks of Eyn- 
 sham) to Brasenose at a nominal rent of twenty 
 shillings. At first the building must have been of very 
 modest splendour. Till the time of James I., when an 
 extra story was added, the quadrangle must have con- 
 sisted of but one story and garrets. The chapel was a very 
 little oratory on No. I. staircase, a place now desecrated 
 into a Senior Common Room. The tower which stands 
 over the old gateway was the most commanding feature 
 of the place. It formed, as was usual, the Principal's 
 lodgings, and being a work of more elaboration, was not 
 completed till 1520. Standing high over the low quad- 
 rangle it must have had a distinction in its altitude very 
 different from its present squat and undignified air. 
 
 Such architectural details are dreary reading, and it is 
 pleasant to turn to the first charter of this new corpo- 
 
From a photograph by the] {Oxford Camera Club 
 
 COLLEGE HALL 
 
 SHOWING FOUNDERS' PORTRAITS 
 
THE KING'S HALL AND FOUNDATION 15 
 
 rate life, the statutes of the College. The formal charter 
 of foundation is dated 15]^ and shortly after the 
 statutes must have been put into shape. They seem to 
 have been completed in 1514, but a revised code after 
 Bishop Smyth's death was issued by Sutton in 15|4. 
 The preface is in the conventional style of the pious 
 founder : — 
 
 " In the name of the Holy and undivided Trinity, Father, 
 Son, and Holy Spirit, and of the most blessed Mother of 
 God, Mary the glorious Virgin, and of Saints Hugh and 
 Chad confessors, and also of St. Michael the archangel ; 
 We, William Smyth, Bishop of Lincoln, and Richard 
 Sutton, Esquire, confiding in the aid of the Supreme Creator, 
 who knows, directs, and disposes the wills of all that trust 
 in him, do out of the goods which in this life, not by our 
 merits, but of the grace of His fulness, we have received 
 abundantly, by royal authority and charter found, institute 
 and establish in the University of Oxford, a perpetual 
 College of poor and indigent scholars, who shall study and 
 make progress in philosophy and sacred theology; com- 
 monly called The King's Haule and College of Brasennose in 
 Oxford; to the praise, glory, and honour of Almighty God, 
 of the glorious Virgin Mary, Saints Hugh and Chad con- 
 fessors, St. Michael the archangel and All Saints ; for the 
 support and exaltation of the Christian Faith, for the 
 advancement of holy church, and for the furtherance of 
 divine worship." 
 
 The Colleoce to begin with was to consist of a Princi- 
 
16 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 pal and twelve Scholars or Fellows. The ecclesiastical 
 element was strong. The Principal must be over thirty 
 years, a graduate and a priest, and elected with the 
 sanction of the Visitor, the Bishop of Lincoln. His 
 income was the extravagant sum of five pounds, but he 
 might accept such clerical preferment as did not seri- 
 ously interfere with his college duties. A Fellow was 
 required to be in residence at least ten months 
 of every year, and he must enter holy orders within 
 seven yeai-s of taking his Master's degree. His income 
 was merely free board and lodging and service ; but he 
 too might receive ecclesiastical patronage up to the 
 annual value of ten marks. 
 
 The place of the mere scholar and the commoner is a 
 little obscure in the early days of the College. Provision 
 was made for the admission of certain scholars, who 
 were not to be accounted Fellows, whose annual income 
 was below twelve marks, and who were to receive free 
 board and lodging. But side by side with this provision 
 we find a clause to admit six young men of noble birth, 
 who had incomes of forty pounds or more in possession 
 or in expectancy. Such was the origin of that fair 
 flower, the gentleman-commoner. His existence at so 
 early a date in this " perpetuum Collegium pauperum et 
 indigentium scholarium '"' is a sign of a change which was 
 beginning to come over the whole of University life. 
 In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries your 
 
THE KING^S HALL AND FOUNDATION 17 
 
 Coui-tenay and De Vere, when it pleased him to study 
 at Oxford, had always the Church or Bar before him. 
 But now Oxford is becoming a school for the man of 
 fashion and the soldier as well as the lawyer and the 
 priest. 
 
 So much for the first rude beginnings of the little 
 College. Its later characteristics are already found 
 in embryo in the manner of its foundation. The whole 
 tale is pedestrian and typical ; an old and flourishing 
 Hall ; two well meaning and beneficent gentlemen ; 
 and then the wider corporation of the College. The 
 history is in no way spoiled with new movements and 
 great intellectual or religious convulsions. If anything 
 its foundation is a piece of reaction ; at any rate it is 
 highly respectable, conservative and normal. It is in 
 its way a relic of medisevalism in the midst of a swift 
 changing world. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 ITS LATER HISTORY 
 
 The century which followed the foundation was all but 
 unmarked by any event worthy of record. The character 
 of the place was fixed from the first, and we find the 
 twin characteristics of a northern connection and a 
 conservative temper grow stronger as the years pass. 
 The students are in the main drawn from good old 
 northern houses, the gentry of Cheshire, and York, and 
 Lancashire. The early benefactions have generally a 
 local condition among the terms of bequest. In 152S, 
 John Port, serjeant-at-law, founded two fellowships for 
 natives of the county of Chester ; William Clyfton the 
 sub-dean of York gave preference in his foundation of 
 1538 to natives of York, Lincoln and Nottingham ; so 
 also the Dean of York, Brian Higden, who in 1549 
 founded a fellowship for natives of the counties of York 
 and Lincoln. Such early benefactions were remarkable 
 for their frequency as well as their terms. Seven new 
 fellowships are founded in the first fifty years, and in 
 1538 we find John Claymond the first President of 
 
ITS LATER HISTORY 19 
 
 Corpus Christi College, giving funds to maintain six 
 scholars at Brasenose, provided they should attend lec- 
 tures on humanity and Greek at his own college. This is 
 in truth coals of fire, when an eminent scholar of the old 
 Hall had forfeited his liberty in his zealous interference 
 with the erection of the new Corpus. The scholars who 
 enjoyed this bounty were called Claymondines, which in 
 Antony Wood's time had become Clemmondines. In 
 1586, Joyce Frankland, the widow of Robert Trapps, 
 citizen and goldsmith of London, left considerable 
 property in lands and money for the " encrease of the 
 Principals'' diet. Fellowships, and for the addition of 
 one Fellow more." " She was so liberal a benefactor," 
 says Wood, "that her name hath been and is still 
 repeated in the common grace after meat in Hall, and 
 the society also have, in gratitude to her memory, 
 erected a monument over her grave in St. Leonard''s 
 Church, in Foster Lane, London ; which monument was 
 demolished (as I conceive) by the great fire that 
 happened in London in Sept. 1666." 
 
 In 1521, there matriculated Alexander No well, a boy 
 of thirteen years or so, who was afterwards to be 
 Principal of the College and a chief benefactor. There 
 is extreme doubt about the year of his bii-th, which is 
 given by Churton as 1507, and by Wood as 1511. In 
 any case he seems to have had serious trouble with his 
 degrees. We know that he was admitted Master in 
 
20 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 1540. The year of his Bachelor's degree is variously 
 given as 1526 and 1536; which would seem to show 
 that he was either fifteen years an undergraduate (which 
 is a long time of probation) or fourteen years a mere 
 Bachelor. In 1542 he gave public lectures in the 
 University on logic, and in the next year was made 
 master of Westminster School. Then comes his busy 
 public life, and it is not till near the end, in 1595, six 
 years before his death, that he returns to his old college 
 as Principal. He held the office for only one year, and 
 on his retirement was made a Doctor of Divinity with 
 seniority over all other doctors of the University. 
 
 His official period was too short for his influence to 
 have much effect on the College, but he w as remarkably 
 loyal in the matter of endowments. Six scholarships 
 were founded by Queen Elizabeth at his intercession, 
 the scholars to be called Queen Elizabeth's * scholars ; 
 and he himself was enabled by the same gracious hand 
 to found seven more. The curious Wood finds that all 
 his acts run to the tune of the number thirteen. " He 
 was thirteen years when he came to the college, he 
 gave thirteen places, and he died on 13 Feb., on which 
 day he is commemorated by the Society.'"* So also says 
 his epitaph. "Coll. Aenei Nasi Oxonii, ubi ab anno 
 aetatis 13, annos 13 studvit." 
 
 The mere list of benefactions and successive Principals 
 * See Appendix D. 
 
ITS LATER HISTORY 21 
 
 is unprofitable reading, and it is with real refreshment 
 that one passes from the quiet Oxford of the late 
 sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to the times 
 when the sleepy city played some part in the nation's 
 history. To be sure there is abundant interest in 
 Elizabethan and Jacobean Oxford, but the interest lies 
 in the quaint society of the place and the brilliance of 
 individuals, not in any part played by the corporate 
 body. In a later chapter we shall consider this early 
 social life, but at present our concern is with the dry- 
 bones of college annals, the constitutional and political 
 history, so to speak, before the chronicle of gossip. 
 And it is not till the Parliament wars that Brasenose 
 rises from its obscure prosperity. 
 
 The golden days of Oxford under the early Laudian 
 rule, when the University ruled in a masterful fashion 
 over the town, when the King and Queen came to 
 Oxford and were entertained with stage-plays in Christ 
 Church and St. John's, came to an end with the Parlia- 
 mentarian occupation in 1642. Thereafter comes a 
 period of storm and stress, when Charles takes up his 
 quarters in the ancient city, and the place is in a state 
 of siege. Even in these days gaiety did not wholly 
 languish, for when the Queen came from the north to 
 join the King, and took up her lodgings in the warden's 
 house at Merton, there was a court of a kind, at which 
 poor Royalists cut what figure they could. The plague 
 
22 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 came in 1643, and a fire in 1644, which arose from a 
 soldier roasting a stolen pig. In 1645, the city saw the 
 execution of the unfortunate Colonel Windebank for 
 his surrender of Bletchingdon Manor House, and at last 
 on June 24, 1646 — the King being now in the hands 
 of the Scots — the place surrendered. Fairfax and the 
 Parliament army were singularly considerate, and did 
 their best to preserve all libraries and ancient buildings. 
 A Parliamentary commission was appointed to inquire 
 into the abuses of the University, which, if we may 
 judge from the plain-spoken narrative of Wood, were 
 considerable. It is fortunate for us that this good man 
 spent most of these troubled years in Oxford, for his 
 narrative is always beside us as an acrid and forcible 
 commentary on his day and generation. 
 
 The Register of the Parliamentary Visitors of the 
 University from 1647 to 1658 gives us a clear account of 
 the state of affairs in Brasenose. Naturally from its 
 northern connection and conservative traditions, it was 
 vehemently loyalist. In the May of 1648, two-thirds 
 of the College signified their willingness to be driven 
 out sooner than acknowledge the right of this visitation. 
 Dr. Samuel Radcliff, the Principal, was deposed, and a 
 certain Daniel Greenwood set up in his stead. Then 
 came troubles. The College would have none of the 
 unhappy Mr. Greenwood, and, seeing that their 
 Principalship might be regarded as vacant, put up a 
 
From a t^wto^raph by the] 
 
 LIBRARY AND CHAPEL 
 FROM THE SMALL QUADRANGLE 
 
 [O.vford Camera Club 
 
ITS LATER HISTORY 23 
 
 notice on the Chapel door to summon the Fellows to 
 elect. Mr. Thomas Sixsmith and two others were 
 promptly called before the visitors and commanded to 
 acknowledge their new Head, but these wily gentlemen 
 answered with fair words and anarchical deeds. Meeting: 
 in the West end of the old library, they made an 
 election on their own account, Mr. Thomas Yate, one 
 of their own number. . He was immediately deprived of 
 his new honour and sent packing. After this, the 
 Fellows seem to have given way to sober reflection ; at 
 any rate they made no further resistance, but acknow- 
 ledged the powers that were as ordained of Heaven. 
 One excellent result of the Visitors'* reign is recorded, 
 for they made Sir William Petty, the economist, a 
 fellow of the College, and deputy to the professor of 
 anatomy. Dr. Clayton, whom he succeeded in 1651. In 
 the ruin of the Cromwellian pai-ty in 1658, he was 
 deprived of the office and ejected from Brasenose. He 
 removed to London and became a member of the Rota 
 Club, " that place of ingenious and smart discourse," a 
 frequenter of Will's coffee-house, and a close friend of 
 Pepys. 
 
 The Restoration in Oxford was the beginning of a 
 period of new laxity and merriment. The ejected Dr. 
 Thomas Yate was made Principal on August 10, 1660. 
 From this time till near the close of last century, the 
 College does not figure prominently in the life of the 
 
U BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 University. But it is a season of much interest for one 
 who would study the social life of the place, for then, 
 more than at any other period in its history, was 
 Brasenose a riotous and well-living abode of learning. 
 Discipline in the city generally seems to have been at a 
 discount. In 1673, Wood notes the occurrence of an 
 epoch-making riot. " Proctors took their places, great 
 rudeness at Trinity College, the undergraduates and 
 freshmen came into the hall, scrambled for biscuits, 
 took away bottles and glasses ; at Wadham the like. 
 September 15, the election of Oxford Mayor ; Anthony 
 Hall, vintner, chosen, at which some young scholars 
 and servitors being present, heard his speech of thanks 
 out of the balcony."" Master Hall seems to have 
 adopted a plain, downright, beef-and-beer style of 
 eloquence, which gave offence to the cultured gentlemen 
 of the College. Accordingly says Wood, " the scholars 
 hissed, but the townsmen, brooking it not, turned them 
 out ; then the scholars made some resistance by flipping 
 them on the cheek ; after that, in the evening, they 
 fought, and so they did on Sunday and Wednesday in St. 
 Peter's in the Bailey ; a scholar of Brasen Nose his arm 
 broke, another his head ; began by servitors, and carried 
 on by them and commoners and townsmen of the 
 meaner sort. This continued above a week, and would 
 have lasted longer, had not the vice-chancellors and 
 proctors bestirred themselves for the appeasing of it." 
 
ITS LATER HISTORY 25 
 
 We do not wonder that R. Pauling, draper, who was 
 Mayor for 1681 and Puritan-bred, dissuaded such 
 gentlemen as he knew from sending their children to the 
 University, because, as he said " it was a debauched 
 place, a rude place of no discipline.'" 
 
 Several distinguished visitors came to Brasenose in 
 those years, among them the French physician Sorbiere,* 
 who was told by some Brasenose wag that the nose of 
 bi'ass represented the nose of the famous Duns Scotus, 
 a former student of the college. More important was 
 Samuel Pepys, who came up in 1668, and inspected the 
 whole place in a few hours. The entry in his diary is 
 as follows : — " 9th June we came to Oxford, a very 
 sweet place ; paid our guide 1/. 2*. 6(1. ; barber, 2s. 6d. ; 
 book, Stonehenge, 4s. ; boy that shewed us the colleges 
 before dinner, 1*. To dinner, and then out with my 
 wife and people and landlord, and to him that showed 
 us the schools and library, 10^. ; to him that showed us 
 All Souls' College and Chichly's. picture, 5^. ; so to see 
 Christchurch with my wife, I seeing several others very 
 fine alone before dinner, and did give the boy that went 
 
 * " I shall not take upon me to describe all the Colledges to you. 
 There is one, at whose gate I saw a great brazen nose, like Punchi- 
 nello's vizard. I was told they also call it Brazen-Nose Colledge, 
 and that John Dunscotus taught here, in remembrance of which 
 they set up the sign of his nose at the gate." — Voyage to England ; 
 containing Many Things Relating to the State of Learning, Religion, and 
 other Curiosities of that Kingdom, 
 
26 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 with me 1^. ; strawberries, 1^. ^d. ; dinner and servants, 
 1/. Os. 6d. After coming home from the schools I 
 went with the landlord to Brazen-nose College, to the 
 butteries, and in the cellar find the hand of the Child 
 of Hales, butler, ^s. Thence with coach and people to 
 Physic-garden, 1*. So to Friar Bacon's Study, I up and 
 saw it and gave the man 1^. ; bottle of sack for land- 
 lord, 2s. Oxford mighty fine place and well seated, and 
 cheap entertainment. At night came to Abingdon, 
 where had been a fair of custard, and met many people 
 and scholars going home ; and there did get some pretty 
 good musick, and sang and danced till supper, 5^."' One 
 may still meet many people and scholars coming home 
 from Abingdon, but Oxford as a place of cheap enter- 
 tainment is, we fear, a vanished ideal. 
 
 In the year 1679 the College received perhaps its 
 most famous benefaction from Sarah, the Dowager 
 Duchess of Somerset, who gave messuages and lands in 
 Buckingham for the benefit of four scholars, to be called 
 Somerset scholars, chosen from the free school of 
 Manchester. They were to receive each 5s. sl week for 
 seven full years from their admission (" except they be 
 promoted to a fellowship in this or any other college, or 
 be expelled"), and were to have one chamber found 
 them by the College, with four studies, or else four 
 distinct chambers. They were required to wear cloth 
 gowns with open sleeves, like the students of Christ 
 
ITS LATER HISTORY 27 
 
 Church, and square caps, but without tassels while they 
 were undergraduates. At their admission they were to 
 receive from the College a new gown and cap, and a new 
 gown and cap at the beginning of the third year, and 
 again at the beginning of the fifth year, and were to 
 deposit no caution, but if they did not pay their battels 
 within a fortnight after they were due, their names were 
 to be crossed and their allowance stopped till all arrears 
 were paid. The Duchess appointed a commemoration 
 on the day of the foundation, and a Latin speech on 
 that day to be made by one of the Somei-set scholars to 
 commemorate their benefactress. On such an auspicious 
 day 40<y. was to be distributed to the Principal, Fellows 
 and Scholars present at prayers ; of which the Principal 
 was to have a double share. In her will in 1686 she also 
 provided for the maintenance of a certain number of 
 additional scholars to be chosen alternately from the 
 schools of Manchester, Marlborough, and Hereford. 
 
 In 1691 a certain William Hulme of the county of 
 Lancaster, gave lands in trust to certain persons to 
 maintain "four exhibitioners of the poorest sort of 
 Bachelors for the space of four years.*" They were to 
 be nominated by the Warden of Manchester, the Rector 
 of Prestwich, and the Rector of Bury for the time 
 being. One other important bequest of this period 
 demands mention. In 1701 Sir Fi-ancis Bridgeman, 
 Knight, bequeathed among other things £500 for a 
 
28 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 panegyric yearly on King James the Second. Appa- 
 rently the searching analysis to which the monarch's 
 character must have been submitted came in time to be 
 a source of trouble even to this loyal College. They 
 felt that they had said all of good that could be said 
 about him, and that it would be a pity to spoil an 
 honest work by excursions in satire ; so by a decree in 
 Chancery, dated 1734, the money was ordered to be 
 applied to the pay of one Fellow, to be appointed yearly 
 by the College, for making and pronouncing an oration 
 on some of the arts and sciences taught in the University. 
 It is pleasing to think that the unfortunate King was 
 eulogised conscientiously for thirty years before the 
 College discovered an interest in the arts and sciences. 
 
 In the 18th century, as we have said, Brasenose 
 figured little in history, aud contributed merely a few 
 notes to the records of Oxford. " It is not specially 
 distinguished,'*'' says Mr. Madan, " except by an undue 
 prominence in the Vice-Chancellor's Court.'''' In the 
 beginning of the period it was strongly Jacobite. 
 Among the list of the " clergy. Fellows of Colleges, and 
 schoolmasters who have not taken y® Oaths to y® 
 Government'''' in 1699 we find the names of "Mr. 
 Wm. Pinock, senior fellow of br. Nose,'" and " Mr. 
 Stephen Seagar, fellow of the same Colledge.'' Later, 
 in the time of the first Jacobite rising, the place got 
 into a ferment. On the 28th of May, which was King 
 
ITS LATER HISTORY 29 
 
 George'*s birthday, some bells were "jambled""* by the 
 Whigs, but the mob rose and in its disgust at such 
 whiggery " pulled down the greater part of a presby- 
 terian meeting-house." On the 29th, which was a 
 Sunday, the riot became more serious. A collection of 
 Whigs, who called themselves the Constitution Club, used 
 to meet at the King's Head Tavern in the High Street. 
 Being for the most part young gentlemen-commoners 
 they gi'ew wanton and ordered the tavern windows to be 
 illuminated and faggots got i*eady for a bonfire. But 
 the crowd would have none of this, and tore the faggots 
 in pieces and bombarded the club-room with stones, in 
 which labour of love they were seconded by the " dis- 
 affected scholars,*''' who flung their caps in the air and 
 scattered money amongst the rabble, crying "Down 
 with the constitutioners I Down with the Whigs ! Long 
 live King James the Third ! the true King ! No usurper ! 
 the Duke of Ormond ! etc."" " Healths were everywhere 
 drank," says Hearne, "suitable to the occasion, and 
 every one at the same time drank to a new restauration, 
 which I heartily wish may speedily happen."" This was 
 on the Saturday, but on the Sunday the Constitutioners 
 met again, this time at Oriel, and again were attacked 
 by a mob of scholars. A Brasenose man was wounded 
 by a gun-shot fired by a Constitutioner, after which the 
 crowd dispersed to its old and welcome task of pulling 
 down the conventicles. 
 
m BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 On June 10th came the birthday of the " true king,'' 
 he " being now compleat 27 years of age.'' It seems 
 worth while to give Hearne's own account of the affair, 
 for it shows that University discipline, if in the hands 
 of a member of an honest college, might fall lightly on 
 the Tory delinquent. " 'Tis possible," he says, " that 
 there had been very great publick rejoicings here 
 amongst some people, had not Dr. Charlett, who is pro- 
 vice-chancellor, been very industrious to hinder them. 
 So that all honest men were obliged to drink King 
 James's health, and to show other tokens of loyalty, very 
 privately in their own houses, or else in their own 
 chamber, or else out of town. For my own part I 
 walked out of town to Foxcomb, with honest Will. 
 Fullerton, and Mr. Sterling, and Mr. Eccles, all three 
 non-juring civilians of Balliol College, and with honest 
 Mr. John Leake, formerly of Hart Hall, and Rich. 
 Clements (son to old Harry Clements, the bookseller), 
 he being a cavalier. We were very merry at Foxcombe, 
 and came home between nine and ten. Honest Will. 
 Fullerton and myself (it being very near ten o'clock) 
 were taken to by the proctor '(Dod of Braz-nose) just 
 on this side Christ Church, as we were coming to Carfax. 
 The proctor was very civil to Will., and did not pretend 
 to say anything to me. There was illuminating at 
 Wadham, tho' 'twas soon stopped by Charlett's order 
 and contrivance, The Bishop of Bristol (Smalridge) 
 
ITS LATER HISTORY 31, 
 
 invited all the noblemen and gent.-commoners of his 
 house to a supper, and kept them in his own lodgings, 
 he being one of the sneakers, and terribly afraid of dis- 
 obliging the debauched Court of King George.'" 
 
 John Meare succeeded Yate as Principal in 1681, 
 and he in turn was succeeded by Robert Shippen, 
 who subsequently became a Professor of Music in 
 Gresham College, London. Then comes an undis- 
 tinguished list of names — Francis Yarborough, William 
 Gwyn, Ralph Cawley, and Thomas Barker. But in 
 1785 the College entered on a new period of prosperity 
 with the election to the office of William Cleaver. He 
 was made successively Bishop of Chester in 1788, of 
 Bangor in 1800, and finally of St. Asaph in 1806. At 
 the same time the Phoenix Common-room, perhaps the 
 most famous of all college clubs, was founded, but its 
 history belongs to a later chapter. So, too, does the 
 account of the headship of Frodsham Hodson, when the 
 College attained the height of its prosperity. The main 
 facts in the life of this remarkable man may be noted 
 here. He came to Brasenose from Manchester in 1787, 
 was elected Fellow apparently about 1792, and after a 
 year as rector of St. Mary^s, Stratford-by-Bow, was 
 made Principal in 1809. He was Vice-Chancellor in 
 1818, and Regius Professor of Divinity in 1820. Lord 
 Liverpool had marked him out for a bishopric, but he 
 died in 1822 in his fifty-first year. He is buried in the 
 
82 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 ante-chapel of the College, and a good portrait by 
 Phillips in the College hall preserves his memory. It 
 shows a keen, active face, with something tart and 
 humorous in the eyes and the lines of the mouth — the 
 face of a great administrator. To him succeeded in 
 1822 Ashurst Gilbert, who was raised to the See of 
 Chichester in 1842. In all this period the College was 
 distinguished in the schools as in other things, and we 
 find that in the two years between 1808 and 1810 
 Brasenose had seven out of thirty-seven first classes and 
 twelve out of seventy-five seconds. 
 
 In the time of Ashurst Gilbert the College was 
 engaged in a great lawsuit, about which a pleasing 
 story is told. In 1827 an information was filed in 
 Chancery at the relation of Lord Suffield to compel 
 Brasenose College, as Governors of the Middleton 
 Grammar School, to apply the surplus income to 
 certain charity estates for the benefit of the school. 
 Letters patent had been granted to thie College by 
 Queen Elizabeth on the application of Dean Nowell, by 
 which lands of the annual value of about £28 were 
 appropriated for the purpose of founding the free 
 school. The rents were to be applied in payment of 
 fixed stipends to the masters and students of the school 
 and allowances to the Fellows and scholars of the 
 College. These payments left a small surplus, in fact, 
 which was not noticed in the letters patent. The 
 
ITS LATER HISTORY 33 
 
 College were also incorporated as Governors of the 
 school, and licensed to take other grants in perpetuity 
 for the support not only of the school, but also of the 
 poor scholars of the College. Subsequently other 
 property became vested in the College for the same 
 purposes. Under the Principalship of Nowell the 
 surplus incomes had been applied to the general benefit 
 of the College. In 1827 the surplus had grown to 
 more than =£^700 a year, and it was claimed that 
 this was " wholly applicable for the maintenance of 
 the school."" 
 
 The case was, of course, a sort of test one, and of 
 extreme importance for all the older Oxford colleges. 
 Dr. Gilbert, who was then Principal, to the surprise of 
 his colleagues insisted that the case should be entrusted 
 to Bethell, a young and comparatively unknown bar- 
 rister. Bethell was accordingly retained, and in spite 
 of the opinion of certain eminent counsel that a com- 
 promise should be sought, the College resolved to fight 
 it out. The case came on in 1831 before Sir John 
 Leach. Bethell appeared with Pemberton Leigh and 
 stated his case so ingeniously and convincingly that it 
 was given in favour of Brasenose. An appeal was made 
 to the House of Lords, but the decision was not 
 reversed. The future Lord Westbury used to say that 
 this success at once trebled his practice. The grateful 
 College invited him to visit them, and, when he found 
 
34 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 this impossible, sent him " a piece of plate with a suit- 
 able inscription.'' 
 
 The reason for Dr. Gilbert's preference for a young 
 and inexperienced barrister is found in a curious tale. 
 The young Bethell was being examined viva-voce in the 
 Classical Schools in 1818, and was put on to construe a 
 hard passage from Pindar. After finishing the passage 
 set him he was so carried away with the beauty of the 
 poet that he went on through nearly the whole of the 
 ode, turning it into the most felicitous English. One 
 of the examiners. Dr. Gilbert, was struck with the boy's 
 skill in catching the connection between the sentences 
 and his ingenuity in phrasing. Ten years afterwards, 
 when the great College lawsuit came on, he remembered 
 the boy he had examined, remembered, too, that he 
 was now a barrister and reputed a rising one ; it was 
 just such a type of mind that the case required ; so 
 Bethell was briefed and his first great opportunity 
 given to the future Lord Chancellor. 
 
 The headship! of Richard Harington brings us well 
 into the present century. The scholastic and sporting 
 history of recent years will be dealt with elsewhere ; 
 so, too, the very considerable architectural changes. 
 Edward Hartopp Cradock became Principal in 1853, 
 and in the year 1856 the new University Commission 
 revised the statutes and ordinances. The previous 
 proposal for a commission had been violently resisted 
 
ITS LATER HISTORY 35 
 
 by the College, as is shown by the lengthy narrative 
 printed in the Oxford University, City, and County 
 Herald for Saturday, May 10, 1851. The Principal 
 and scholars took counsels"* opinion on the matter of 
 the legality of such a Commission, maintaining that the 
 Crown had no right to interfere in any way with the 
 rights, property, and regulations of the College, and 
 that such visitations as history recorded on the part of 
 others than the proper visitor, the Bishop of Lincoln, 
 were made at the request or with the consent of the 
 governing body. The opinion of counsel — Bethell and 
 three others — went to confirm the College in this view : 
 " We are of opinion that the Commission of the 31st 
 August 1850, is not, as respects Brasenose College, 
 constitutional or legal " ; but they added advice with 
 the cautious proviso — " if the College shall deem it 
 incumbent on them in the discharge of their duty, and 
 in the protection of the rights entrusted to them, not 
 to submit to the Commission until its legality shall 
 have been duly established."" The Commission, when 
 subsequently established with proper powers, worked 
 certain beneficial changes. It abolished the condition 
 of birthplace in election to Fellowships,* provided for 
 the conversion of four Fellowships into Scholarships, 
 
 * The senior Fellowships, owing to the appropriations of fines to 
 the seniors, were very valuable, about ;^5oo per annum ; while the 
 junior Fellowships were about ;^8o. Five out of the twenty 
 
m BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 and the possibility of electing a Principal who had not 
 formerly been a Fellow of the College; it made the 
 conditions of election to a Fellowship more stringent 
 and at the same time more secular ; it abolished certain 
 small scholarships on the foundation of Joyce Frank- 
 land, John Claymond, Humphrey Ogle, James Stoddard, 
 Hugh Henley, Thomas Church, and Thomas Yate, the 
 emoluments being now treated as part of the corporate 
 revenues of the College ; it did away with the former 
 multiplicity of oaths which were baffling to a modest 
 man ; and in general it removed some of the more 
 absurd anachronisms which clogged the statutes. 
 
 It was during Dr. Cradock's * period of office that the 
 scheme of amalgamation with Lincoln was proposed. 
 
 Fellowships were suppressed, one being elevated to the endowment 
 of a Professorship, the remaining four to the establishment of 
 additional Scholarships, The senior Fellowships were limited to 
 /300 per annum, the juniors raised to /150. 
 
 * A pleasant article in Blackwood (Sept. 1895), after lamenting the 
 engulfing of Standen's shop in the new buildings of B. N. C, gives a 
 kindly sketch of Dr. Cradock : — " Best known, and in the under- 
 graduate world, most popular, were two of the married Heads, — 
 Cradock of B.N.C.and Evans of Pembroke. For if time had 
 sprinkled their hair with grey and lined their features, we felt that 
 their hearts were young and that their sympathies were with the 
 young. There was little of the dry bone about either man. Both 
 took a vivid interest in their colleges, on the river, or in the cricket- 
 field as well as in the schools. Neither at B. N. C nor at Pembroke 
 was there needed any tutor posing as the undergraduate's friend to 
 stand between the wrath of Jove and the peccant mortal. Straight 
 to Caesar's judgment-seat the defendant was ready to go, in certain 
 hope that, if impartial justice was administered, all due allowances 
 
ITS LATER HISTORY 37 
 
 On the 22nd of March 1878, there was a meeting of 
 the two governing bodies in Brasenose Common-room, 
 but by the end of the year the plan had fallen through. 
 In 1886 Mr. Watson succeeded to the office, and on his 
 resignation in 1889 Mr. Heberden, the present Principal, 
 was elected. 
 
 would be made for young blood and young heads on young shoulders. 
 We do not pretend to understand the secrets of the Senate-house, 
 nor were we ever curious to inquire whether, in the circle of Dons, 
 Cradock and Evans were regarded as model Heads, but we make 
 bold to assert that no two men ever exercised a healthier influence 
 or were more revered in the undergraduate world, and that the 
 feeling that the 'dear old chief would not like it was in their 
 respective colleges an effectual stopper on many an incipient or 
 contemplated act of insubordination. They are gone from among 
 us now, dying like David at a good old age, if not full of riches, full 
 at any rate of years and of honour, and their like we may hardly 
 hope to see again." 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 EARLY SOCIAL LIFE 
 
 Properly we have no concern with the early student 
 who honoured Brasenose Hall or Little University with 
 his presence. He was in no way a collegian, for his 
 hostel was not a college. He was, as a mle, a cinide 
 utilitarian, desperately poor, bent on learning, and 
 coming up to Oxford for its letters and not for its life. 
 When he came down from the North he would beg by 
 the way, and it might even be that he was sustained by 
 the contributions of the charitable towards a. sort of 
 chest provided for his benefit. He shared a dormitory 
 with several others, sleeping under a ragged coverlet, 
 with no fire on the hearth, and the winds of heaven 
 blowing through the glassless window. His food was 
 execrable, and his academical gown was then literally 
 his chief garment. He was up at five, reading in the 
 University schools, and his study of a night was done 
 by the light of a sputtering lamp. Pestilence, too, was 
 always in the air, in the food he ate, and the water he 
 drank, so that he was liable at any time to be cut off in 
 
EARLY SOCIAL LIFE 39 
 
 his hardships. The result was that he was generally a 
 heroic being, and if he fought his way to some measui-e 
 of learning he made good use of it. Oxford was then a 
 nursery of character if scarcely of culture. 
 
 But the old student of the Hall was not a pale, 
 abstracted bookworm. He was a robustious and 
 aggressive pei-son, as rough a type as the land could 
 furnish. He came often from the ends of the earth, 
 and he brought with him local prejudices and provincial 
 habits. He wore arms continually, for the towns' folk 
 would fall upon him as he went about the streets, and 
 if he walked in the country there were always the foot- 
 pad gentry waiting to slit his throat. Often the 
 hoarse roar of the town horns and the jangling of the 
 University bells warned him that a street-row was on 
 the boards, and he hastened thither, rejoicing. The 
 cook of the Papal legate empties a pot of broth on him, 
 and he retaliates by sticking the said cook in the leg. 
 He hates the Jews who have settled in the town, 
 because he owes them money at 43 per cent. ; so he 
 now and again starts an anti-Semite agitation, in which 
 he suffers severely. He has also his own local pride, 
 and his local quarrels to fight. K he come from the 
 North or from Ireland, and have Celtic blood in his veins, 
 he will have a profound scorn for the Saxon, and fight 
 to the best of his power on the side of the Northern 
 nation in their bow-and-arrow battles. He is a sports- 
 
40 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 man in his way, and now and then goes poaching for 
 the day in the preserves of Woodstock, Bagley or 
 Shotover ; for which little escapade, if the Crown get 
 wind of it, he may pay severely. He plays football, 
 after a fashion, in a place in the north of the town near 
 Balliol College called the Beaumont, but one would like 
 to know the rules he played under, for the result seems 
 to have been carnage. 
 
 But for our purpose it is necessary to pick up the 
 thread of undergraduate life only when it has been 
 straitened into the discipline of a college. When 
 Master Lawless (shall we say ?) comes down from the 
 wilds of Cheshire to the College of Brasenose, then not 
 fifty years old, he goes through certain formalities of 
 admission. No questions are asked about his income, 
 for he is the " filius aut consanguineus nobilium et 
 magnatum."" But he is compelled to have a tutor, and 
 to wear a surplice in chapel under penalty of a fine. 
 Also he swears before his admission to observe all the 
 statutes of the College in so far as they concern his own 
 person. Attendance at chapels is severely exacted, and 
 if he lies abed and fails to appear he may be corrected 
 with the rod. He has to go through an elaborate 
 formula of daily prayers and masses and " exequies " 
 for the souls of the Founders. Dreary disputations 
 are conducted by the Bachelors and Masters twice a 
 week on logic, and once a week on theology, with 
 
EARLY SOCIAL LIFE 41 
 
 a break in Lent filled by weekly lectures on moral 
 philosophy. The Fellows in those days had a com- 
 plicated life. They were bound to recite the Lord's 
 Prayer five times a day, " in honour of the five wounds 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ,'' the Angelic Salutation five 
 times "in honour of the five joys of the Blessed Virgin 
 Mary," the Apostles' Creed once, and some prayers for 
 the benefit of William Smyth and Richard Sutton. 
 
 The servants were the Bible-reader, who was clerk of 
 the chapel, the manciple or sponsor, the butler,* cook, 
 scullions, and one solitary porter, who filled likewise the 
 onerous post of barber to the College. The one woman 
 about the place was the laundress, (" mapparum et 
 aliorum usualium vestimentorum lotrix "), who was not 
 admitted within College, but might receive the washing 
 at the gates. " Quam," adds the Statutes^ "setatis 
 talis talisque conditionis esse volumus in qua omnis 
 suspitio sinistra evitetur." 
 
 At dinner in Hall the Bible was read or some other 
 " useful book " which the Principal might recommend. 
 It cannot have been the liveliest of meals, for all had to 
 talk in Latin under pain of a fine. When dinner was 
 over and grace had been said no one might remain, nor 
 
 * A note in Hearne, iv. p. 335 (Oxf. Hist. Soc), seems of interest 
 in this connection. " Which Place hath been sometimes before, I 
 think, enjoyed by Scholars, tho' not by Masters of Arts, as there is 
 a Scholar now (an Under-Graduate, who wears no Gown & never 
 intends it more) that is chief Butler of Brasen-nose College." 
 
42 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 were knots of scholars allowed to gather in any public 
 place in College. Indeed, a most curious and minute 
 system of fines prevailed. Anything from a farthing 
 to twopence was the penalty for coming late to a 
 lecture, omitting to wear a surplice in chapel, entering 
 the buttery, pantry or kitchen without leave, attempting 
 to linger in Hall after dinner, or speaking in English 
 in any public place within the walls. If Master Lawless 
 in a sudden studious fit went to the library, opened the 
 windows for air, took down a book and left without 
 closing it or the windows, he contributed a shilling to 
 the common purse. If he lost his temper and swore — 
 eight-pence. If in a gentle discussion with some 
 gentleman of another county he emphasised his argu- 
 ments with a blow on the face, he was poorer by three- 
 and-fourpence ; if he returned to the attack with a 
 stick or a stone, by six-and-eightpence ; but if he 
 eventually succeeded in wounding his antagonist to the 
 effusion of blood, by thirteen-and-fourpence. If at last, 
 " in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,*" and violently 
 out of temper, he summed up all his grievances in a 
 comprehensive assault and battery on the Principal 
 or the Vice-Principal, he forthwith bade farewell to 
 learning and retired incontinently to his native wilds. 
 
 Some minor points in the petty economy of the 
 College demand a passing notice. The Principal could 
 regulate the dress of the Fellows, and there is an 
 
EARLY SOCIAL LIFE 43 
 
 excellent statute, copied apparently from Magdalen, 
 which forbids long hair (" Quod nullus sociorum inordi- 
 natos crines nutriaf'' in the quaint Latin), and the 
 wearing of costly furs, " cloth of velvet or of Damascus, 
 sattin or chamblet." The scholar might not bear arms, 
 except when coming up or returning home, nor might 
 he play at dice, cards or ball except at Christmastide, 
 when games of cards might be played in Hall. There 
 were to be no dogs, birds, or any other animals kept in 
 College or out of it which should disturb the studies 
 and slumbers of collegians. Nor was instrumental 
 music to be played in chambers if it produced a like 
 effect. If Master Dugald from across the Tweed, having 
 strayed so far, brought down with him his native pipes, 
 and essayed to play them, Master Dugald's melody was 
 promptly put a stop to. Finally, there was the curious 
 rule that no one should walk out of College alone 
 except to the Schools or a lecture, but should choose 
 a suitable companion. Doubtless it was a wise precau- 
 tion, for two men are better than one in a street-row. 
 Strange practice though it was, it survived till com- 
 paratively recent days. I have heard old members of 
 the College say that in their time it was a stringent 
 piece of etiquette that undergraduates should walk out of 
 College in pairs and arm-in-arm. Once out of the gates, 
 apparently the couples might scatter wherever they 
 pleased. 
 
44 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 The furnishing of the scholar's room cannot have 
 been magnificent. In his dormitory he had often to 
 share his bed with another. There seems to have been 
 no chance of a morning bath, and it is doubtful if the 
 College rules allowed early pilgi'images to the Isis or 
 Cherwell. Probably he had few books, possibly none 
 at all ; he read his Aristotle in the huge vellum folios 
 in the library, chiefly in the morning hours when the 
 light was good. His study at its best can only have 
 been a very humble affair. When the great Earl of 
 Essex went to Cambridge, he had a deal table covered 
 with green baize, a truckle-bed, six chairs and a wash- 
 hand basin, valued altogether at five pounds. It is 
 unlikely that the poor gentleman of Brasenose had so 
 much. It is difficult to tell what his studies amounted 
 to. He had of course his logic, and, if he were a north- 
 countryman he probably used as his text-book the 
 Institutiones logicoe of 1589, the work of one John 
 Saunderson, a Lancashire Roman Catholic. He had, 
 too, his lectures on Rhetoric to attend, and the works 
 of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian to study. He had a 
 certain smattering of grammar and philology to acquire 
 from the works of Priscian or Linacre or some such 
 approved authority. A little geometry, the rudiments 
 of the Greek language, and a certain course in moral 
 philosophy based on the Ethics and Politics of Aris- 
 totle, made up the whole of his possible studies. 
 
EARLY SOCIAL LIFE 45 
 
 Of the later sixteenth century, the days when the 
 bishops were burned opposite Balliol College, when the 
 young Ralegh was at Oriel, when No well became 
 Principal, the social life is scarcely known to us. 
 Doubtless several of the tavern poets and playwrights 
 in London, " the young gentlemen from the university," 
 came from Brasenose, and compared its ale with the 
 brew sold at the Mermaid. Richard Bamfield, to take 
 one instance, was at Brasenose from November 27, 1589, 
 to February 5, 1592. He was apparently rusticated 
 for a season, but according to a register of the College, 
 he was allowed to return on condition of delivering a 
 declamation publicly in the hall within six weeks, or 
 paying in default 6s. 8d. He may have been a nervous 
 man on whom the College took this mode of inflicting 
 punishment. Then he went to London in his period of 
 Sturm und drang\ and finally died a quiet country 
 gentleman in Staffordshire. He was a poet with a 
 peculiarly sweet and true lyrical gift, and some of his 
 pieces had the rare honour of being for long attributed 
 to Shakespeare. About the same period the College 
 made efforts after luxury. Dean Nowell — famous in 
 story as the discoverer of the art of bottling beer* — about 
 
 * " And here, having mentioned his attachment to the honest and 
 quiet art and recreation of angUng, with which Augustus used to 
 relieve the cares of empire, one circumstance connected with it 
 must not be omitted. Having either accidentally or by design (for 
 the accounts vary) left in the grass, or buried in the ground, a bottle 
 
4e BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 the year 1572, put board floors in the lower rooms of 
 the College, which previously had been unboarded.* 
 
 In the Cavalier and Puritan occupations of the city, 
 Brasenose seems, as far as records show, to have kept 
 within her gates. But towards the end of the century, 
 we catch glimpses of the hilarious doings of the gentle- 
 men of the College. Then comes the eighteenth century 
 at Oxford, which is pre-eminently social. It is a dull 
 backwater of learning, the home of lost and stupid 
 causes, of vegetating dons and the idiot and modish 
 undergi-aduate. When Berkeley came to Holywell, 
 looking upon Oxford as a sort of Ideal City, he must 
 have found himself sadly at a loss. At the very end of 
 the period, when new influences were beginning to work, 
 and life was stirring, a Highland girl. Miss Grant of 
 Rothiemurchus, came to stay with the Master of 
 University, and left it as her opinion that the only two 
 things for which the place seemed remarkable were 
 obstinate Toryism and idle frivolity. Scarcely a single 
 Fellow or Master, she adds, in any way approached 
 gentility; and they married vulgar low-born women 
 like themselves. All this is true enough of the whole 
 
 of ale, he found it again after some time, • not a bottle but a gun, 
 such the sound of it when it opened.' And this (as casualty, says 
 Fuller, is the mother of more inventions than industry) is believed 
 the original of bottled ale in England." — Churton's L«/i? of Nowell, 
 p. 80 ; cf. Fuller's Worthies, p. 115. 
 * See Appendix D. 
 
EARLY SOCIAL LIFE 47 
 
 century, but the very laxity of discipline, the low 
 standard of learning and conduct, give the period a 
 fascination for the student of undergraduate manners. 
 It was a home of festivity, a rakish, modish place, full 
 of foppery, and drunkenness, and vile language. It is 
 a pity that Hogarth did not begin his "Rake''s 
 Progress "" before the hero had left the University ; for 
 we might have had a panorama of the transformation 
 of the gawky boy into the clumsy man of fashion. 
 
 Study, apparently, was little in favour, and small 
 wonder. A Brasenose scholar writes in 1742 : " We 
 are here quite taken up with logic, which is, indeed, a 
 very dry study .'"' It was indeed a very dry study as 
 pursued in that place, where the tutor read his bare 
 notes on Ferii and Darapti to a few yawning boys while 
 he waited on his breakfast. Hence the two main 
 interests in the undergraduate's life came to be politics 
 and festivities, and he had abundance of both to his 
 hand. Oxford in the early years of the eighteenth 
 century was torn with poHtical strife. The High Tory 
 party were in the ascendency, for though the arrival of 
 William had at first been welcomed gladly, a reaction 
 soon set in, and, apart from the actual non-juroi-s, there 
 were hundreds of disaffected Jacobites, graduate and 
 undergraduate. The Whigs were mostly young men of 
 good standing, scions of good Whig families ; the Tories 
 were the democracy of the colleges. Riots were 
 
48 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 incessant, heads were broken, and property damaged, 
 and the streets were full of ribald Jacobite ballads. So 
 we find Burnet writing in desperation : " The univer- 
 sities, Oxford especially, have been very unhappily 
 successful in corrupting the principles of those who 
 were sent to be bred among them ; so that few of them 
 escaped the taint of it, and the generality of the clergy 
 were not only ill-principled, but ill-tempered/' The 
 popularity of the Stuarts continued long after their 
 power had become a thing of the past. William, so 
 they said, was irreligious, a boor and a Dutchman ; so 
 their hearts went a wandering after exiled kings. The 
 result was " abominable riots at All Souls " (to quote 
 Hearne) ; Sacheverell, in his tour through the provinces, 
 was feted extravagantly, and when the Chancellor, the 
 Duke of Ormond, definitely entered the service of the 
 Pretender, Oxford showed her admiration by promptly 
 electing his brother, the Earl of Arran, in his stead. 
 Party bands of mohocks paraded the streets ; Hearne 
 says they were all "of the whiggish gang,"*' with a 
 certain Burnet of Merton, a son of the Bishop, at their 
 head. The Jacobites drank health to the Stuarts on 
 their knees and publicly, and the University winked at 
 it. Oxford, as has been said, was the real Jacobite 
 capital of England, the place to which the eyes of 
 honest Squire Westerns turned as the true glory 
 of the nation. " Golgotha," as the Hebdomadal was 
 
EARLY SOCIAL LIFE 49 
 
 affectionately called, was of a piece with the rest. It 
 is hard to sympathise with it all, for while the Tory 
 Fellows were drinking in their common-rooms to the 
 king over the water, and doing nothing more, and the 
 noisy undergraduate contenting himself with breaking 
 windows, the poor gentlemen of the North were facing 
 the real danger in the fire of King George's soldiery. 
 It was a very easy loyalty which came in with the port 
 and fled at the sight of arms, and, except for the 
 few who rose with Derwentwater, and one " Leonard 
 Walden, a very worthy young gentleman just fresh 
 from Christ Church,'*'* who was taken at Preston, the 
 service of Oxford to the forlorn cause was a thing only 
 of the lips. 
 
 The young man from the country who came of good 
 Tory stock found himself in a place after his own heart. 
 He found the Whigs laughed at, kept out of office, 
 punished on the most trivial grounds. He could shirk 
 the oath of allegiance by kissing his thumb instead of 
 the book, while his tutor looked on approvingly. 
 Merton was the Whig college, and happily it had 
 windows to smash and men to persecute. There were 
 taverns for him to sit in accompanied by " honest '*'' 
 folk from All Souls or Brasenose, where all day long he 
 might pass his wine over the water, and toast " Betty 
 of Hearts,'*'* or drink " King James, Ormond and Mar,'" 
 and "Confusion to the Usurper,'"* and "Damn the 
 
so BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 Constitutioners,^"* and "Good fortune to the Good 
 Cause." The one man of the lot with a sense of humour, 
 Dr. King, the Principal of St. Mary's Hall, the " tall, 
 lean, well-looking man," must have now and then 
 laughed silently at this pot-house ardour, for he had 
 been secretary to Ormond and to Arran, and had 
 known some of the true loyalists in the North, who 
 risked their all on a desperate chance and were not 
 afraid. 
 
 The life of the poor scholar or the sizar at Brasenose 
 was not in those dajs a pleasant one, for the cult of the 
 desei-ving poor had not been discovered. In one of 
 Baker's comedies, published in 1704, a "gentleman- 
 servitor at Brazen-Nose College" is introduced. His 
 name is Chum, and his father is " a qhimney-sweeper, 
 and his mother a poor ginger-bread Woman at Cow- 
 cross.'''' He waits upon the Gentlemen-Commoners, 
 cleans their shoes and does their compositions. His 
 place in the play is like that of the faithful slave Syrus 
 in Terence ; he personates the rich lover, and wins the 
 maiden Berynthia for his master Smart, receiving for 
 his perquisite a present of 500 guineas. His previous 
 fortune, we are told in the play, was no more than 
 " the reversion of old shoes which Gentlemen-Com- 
 moners leave off, two Raggs called shirts, a dog's card 
 Grammar^ and a piece of an Ovid de Tristihusy This 
 was the condition of such an one as George Whitefield, 
 
EARLY SOCIAL LIFE 51 
 
 who in 1728 was a sei-vitor at Pembroke, winning 
 favour there by reason of the experience he had once 
 gained as drawer at his home, the Bell Inn in 
 Gloucester. 
 
 But the Smarts of those days were very different per- 
 sonages. Master Gresham of Brasenose would sneer at 
 the antiquated garb of that good man his father a 
 fortnight after he had been deposited from the Ban- 
 bury coach, a raw country boy. The clean fresh old 
 English life, which was everywhere to be found in the 
 shires, the life of Sir Roger and Lady Prue, and the 
 Sues and Dorothies of many lyrics, somehow became 
 clownish and silly when it came near the fringe of 
 letters. The statesmen and scholars of the better sort 
 lived in a society as nicely polished as could be desired ; 
 but its fringes, both in the literary tavern-life and in 
 the modish Universities, were less agreeable. It would 
 be hard to produce a more foolish creature than the 
 average Oxford Smart. The young gentleman, caned 
 not a month before by the Busby of his time, " in a 
 new suit of drugget, a pair of prim ruffles, a new 
 bobwig and a brazen-hilted sword," now swaggers on 
 the Oxford pavements, and affronts the astonished sun 
 with his finery. He is pulled up at six of a morning by 
 his servitor, and wanders into chapel with a head still 
 misty from much port. Amherst has drawn his portrait 
 without mercy, and it is worth reproduction. Finding 
 
52 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 a letter from his father awaiting him in which he is 
 bidden to have a care of his purse, he damns that good 
 person for an " old country putt,"" and sulks for an 
 hour. By ten his breakfast is over ; he practises an air 
 on the flute, and then strolls round to the eighteenth- 
 century Gridiron, Lyne^s coffee-house, to see his friends 
 and write a note to his Sylvia. Thereafter he goes for 
 a walk in the Park or the Merton Fields, feeling a 
 monstrous fine fellow, a man o' the world, and at peace 
 with his own soul and all humanity. He dines in his 
 room at one, and then dresses himself out in a silk-lined 
 coat with laced ruffles at breast and wrist, Spanish 
 leather shoes, white stockings, a long flaxen tie-wig, 
 and a laced hat. Mayhap a poor man from Pembroke, 
 Johnson by name, rubs against him in the street, and our 
 exquisite scarcely deigns to glance at so vulgar a being. 
 He has a glass at Hamilton''s, and then struts before 
 Sylvia's windows that the girl may see his finery. If he 
 be inclined to sport he may ride on the fine stretch 
 between Oxford and Woodstock, though there is always 
 the chance that some clod-pate highwayman may 
 relieve him of his purse. After he has sauntered into 
 evening chapel, he remembers that the fair Sylvia has 
 asked him to drink a dish of tea with her, and after- 
 wards attend her to Paradise Garden. Thither he goes, 
 and as they walk he tells her some new verses he has 
 made in her honour, which, he flatters himself, run as 
 
EARLY SOCIAL LIFE 53 
 
 equably as Mr. Gay's. He goes home with her to 
 supper, and then on to the Mitre, where he fuddles his 
 head drinking spiced wine in her honour, loses much 
 money at ombre, and retires eventually to rest guided 
 by the firm and tender hands of his more sober friends. 
 If our gentleman have some gi'ains of sense, he soon 
 begins to lament, like young Edward Gibbon of 
 Magdalen, that " his time was lost and his expenses 
 multiplied." If he be a mere scatter-brain he varies 
 his Oxford career with sundry visits to London, where 
 he spends his days in a fashion more varied than 
 reputable, till the Nemesis of it all gets hold of him, and 
 he goes back to his country home to an irate father and 
 a dull future. 
 
 Of such a life Brasenose seems to have been a favourite 
 centre. Its High-Toryism and its moderate wealth 
 combined to make it a festive college in an era of 
 festivities. For one thing it seems to have possessed a 
 certain amount of histrionic talent. In 1655 one John 
 Glendall, of Brasenose, terras filius and a great mimic, 
 had acted in several plays " which the scholars before 
 acted by stealth, either in the stone-house behind and 
 southward from Pembroke College, or in Kettle- 
 hall, or at Halywell-mill, or in the refectory at 
 Gloucester-hall" (Antony Wood). Moreover, the 
 College is frequently mentioned in contemporary plays. 
 One instance has been quoted from Baker ; another is 
 
54 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 to be found in Mrs. Cowley's " Who's the Dupe ? '' 
 (1779), where the Brasenose scholar called Gradus comes 
 to town wearing " a grizzle wig curled as stiffly as Sir 
 Cloudesley ShoveTs in the Abbey — a dingy brown coat 
 with vellum button-holes — and cambric enough in his 
 ruffles to make his grandson's shirt." Good cheer seems 
 to have been a characteristic of the place. Amherst in 
 his vitriolic sketch of the colleges declares that " Brase- 
 nose engrosses good livings, and brews ale which flies to 
 the seasoned head of an Essex squire ; in a play, a man 
 who wishes to be taken for a Fellow of that college 
 has to use a large pillow for a stomach." This agi-ees 
 with the testimony of Lord Eldon, who tells in his 
 anecdote book how he once saw a Doctor of Divinity 
 trying to make his way to Brasenose through the 
 Radcliffe Square ; " he had reached the Library, a 
 rotunda then without railings, and unable to support 
 himself save by keeping one hand on the building, he 
 continued walking round and round till rescued by a 
 friend." 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE COLLEGE IN MODERN TIMES 
 
 Oxford in the early years of the present century was 
 fortunate in her chroniclers. An astonishing number 
 of memoirs give us some insight into the social life of 
 the place, and the many celebrities who at the time 
 gathered there raise the former provincially modish 
 town into a centre of a more interesting life. She still, 
 to be sure, retained much of her eighteenth-century 
 character. Her learning was not significant, and her 
 manners were much to seek; degrees were still to be 
 had for an old song ; and with a few shining exceptions 
 the academic dignitaries were pedantic reactionaries. 
 Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, who was at Christ Church 
 in 1798, fills his coiTespondence with abuse of his 
 tutors. Cyril Jackson, his Dean, is pilloried as " an 
 inspired swine, who preached exceeding dry sermons 
 with a prodigious degree of snuffling.*" Dr. Parr is 
 " composed of insolence and tobacco." In his " New 
 Oxford Guide,"*"* which was modelled on the then famous 
 " New Bath Guide " he has small etchings of the various 
 
56 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 types which thronged the colleges. There is Master 
 Growler, 
 
 " The gentleman commoner gay. 
 Whom I met at my tutor's, at breakfast to-day, — 
 Master Growler, a person of high reputation. 
 Who dresses and struts in the pink of the fashion, — 
 And ask'd me to wine in that elegant tone. 
 As if he had rather have let it alone." 
 
 There is the Welsh baronet, Sir Griffith ap Shenken ap 
 Tudor ap Leek, and the bibliophile Margin, and 
 Bamboozle the humourist, and Dicky Cosmetic the 
 dandy, and " my Lord Rubbish — the son of an earl," 
 whose portrait is unfortunately unfit for reproduction. 
 Lastly there come 
 
 " Tommy Drivel, whose noddle's a thick one. 
 And a gentle tuft-worshipper, meek Master Pick-bone, 
 Who with pleasure will suffer his ears to be cufft 
 By any Scotch cousin of any Scotch tuft." 
 
 The little society had still much of this stuff in it, but 
 the colleges were awakening, freshmen were coming up 
 distinguished for more than mere capacity for hard 
 drinking, and the way was being prepared for the 
 advent of the athletic spirit, which has been the making 
 of modern Oxford. 
 
 These years are in many ways the most interesting in 
 the history of Brasenose. The Principalship of Frod- 
 
THE COLLEGE IN MODERN TIMES 57 
 
 sham Hodson was a time full of intellectual and social 
 activity. Mark Pattison, coming up as a freshman 
 with his father to decide upon his college, found the 
 two in highest repute to be Oriel and Brasenose. He 
 chose the former, for the latter filled him with some 
 awe. It was said that men there looked down upon 
 the ordinary dull and industrious scholar, that a bril- 
 liant wit was in great demand, and that as a whole 
 the place was extravagant and drunken. Hodson in 
 especial seems to have oppressed his fancy. " Returning 
 to College,"''* he tells us in his Memoirs, " after one Long 
 Vacation, Hodson drove the last stage into Oxford with 
 post-horses. The reason he gave for this piece of 
 ostentation was, * that it should not be said that the 
 first tutor of the first College of the first University of 
 the world entered it with a pair.** " " The story,*" he 
 adds wickedly, " is symbolical of the high place B. N. C. 
 held in the University at the time, in which, however, 
 intellectual eminence entered far less than the fact that 
 it numbered among its members many gentlemen 
 commoners of wealthy and noble families." But indeed 
 there was no lack of intellectual eminence, and it is this 
 which makes these years so attractive. It is a period 
 of a rich social life, of college clubs, of wine parties 
 where wit was at least of as much importance as wine ; 
 and moreover a period when able men lived within the 
 College walls, when Brasenose men were commonly 
 
58 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 found in the University prize-lists, when excellent mots 
 were circulated everywhere, when a man like Richard 
 Heber would show his keen interest in politics by 
 posting up to town to hear the debates in the 
 House. 
 
 The intellectual side of the College life is centred 
 round such men as Heber and Barham, the social round 
 the new club, the Phoenix. Reginald Heber came to 
 Brasenose in 1800. He was sprung from a good old 
 Yorkshire family, the Hebers of Marton Hall, and 
 naturally he turned his eyes to the great Northern 
 college. His career was distinguished enough to satisfy 
 most men ; for in his first year he won the Latin Verse 
 Prize, with a " Carmen Seculare '*'' on the opening of 
 the new century. Two years later he won the Newdi- 
 gate with his " Palestine,^' a poem which Dr. Crotch 
 set to music in 1812, and which has been often reprinted. 
 It was probably the most successful prize poem ever 
 written, and to us of to-day who remember its facile 
 prettiness and the utter lack of interest in the recitation 
 of modern Newdigates, it seems strange to hear of the 
 Sheldonian crowded not only at the Encaenia but at 
 the rehearsal the night before, and the audience crazy 
 with delight. In 1805, Heber gained the English 
 Essay, and was elected to a Fellowship at All Souls — 
 the blue ribbon of an Oxford career. Thereafter he 
 leaves Oxford, and some twenty years later, he died at 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE COLLEGE IN MODERN TIMES 59 
 
 Trichinopoly while still in his prime, worn out with the 
 immense labours of the see of Calcutta. 
 
 The Newdigate Poem is associated with a story in 
 which Sir Walter Scott plays a pai-t. In that year 
 Scott had paid a visit to London, and accompanied by 
 his friend Richard Heber, the famous book-collector, 
 proceeded afterwards to Oxford. He breakfasted with 
 his friend's half-brother Reginald in his rooms in Brase- 
 nose, where the young man read to the now-famous 
 writer the verses which had gained the prize. His 
 rooms were one pair left on staircase No. 6, a square 
 high room with one window looking on the Lane and 
 one on the Radcliffe Square, and darkened by the great 
 chestnut in Exeter Gardens, which is still called Heber's 
 Tree. Lockhart tells the story : " Scott observed that, 
 in the vei-ses on Solomon's Temple, one striking circum- 
 stance had escaped him, namely, that no tools were 
 used in the erection. Reginald retired for a few minutes 
 to the corner of the room, and returned with the 
 beautiful lines ; — 
 
 " No hammer fell, no ponderous axes rung. 
 Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung. 
 Majestic silence ! " 
 
 This was not the only occasion on which Sir Walter 
 came to Brasenose. In the November of 1826 he came 
 to Oxford to visit his son. Tlie passage from Lockhart 
 
60 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 is worth setting down (1837, vi. 391), as a pathetic 
 commentary on the former visit. "Breakfasted with 
 Charles in his chambers at Brazen-nose, where he had 
 everything very neat. How pleasant it is for a father 
 to sit at his child''s board ! It is like the aged man 
 reclining under the shadow of the oak which he has 
 planted. My poor plant has some storms to undergo, 
 but were the expedition conducive to no more than his 
 entrance into life under suitable auspices, I should con- 
 sider the toil and the expense well-bestowed. We then 
 sallied out to see the lions. Remembering the ecstatic 
 feelings with which I visited Oxford more than twenty- 
 five years since, I was surprised at the comparative 
 indifference with which I revisited the same scenes. 
 Reginald Heber, then composing his Prize Poem, and 
 imping his wings for a long flight of honourable 
 distinction, is now dead in a foreign land — Hodgson 
 and other able men all entombed. The towers and 
 halls remain, but the voices which fill them are of 
 modern days. Besides, the eye becomes saturated with 
 sights, as the full soul loathes the honey-comb. I 
 admired indeed, but my admiration was void of 
 enthusiasm.'' Nor can we wonder. If the " sun upon 
 the Weird-law Hill" and Ettrickdale and Yan*ow had 
 lost their power to charm the wearied man, how should 
 the trim gardens and ivied walls of Oxford suc- 
 ceed ! Later Scott read Heber's " NaiTati ve of a Journey 
 
THE COLLEGE IN MODERN TIMES 61 
 
 through Upper India," and we find this entry in his 
 Journal (vol. ii. p. 250). " I read Reginald Heber^s 
 Journal after dinner. I spent some merry days with 
 him at Oxford while he was writing his prize poem. 
 He was then a gay young fellow, a wit, and a satirist, 
 and burning for literary fame. My laurels were begin- 
 ning to bloom, and we were both madcaps. Who 
 would have foretold our future lot ? 
 
 " 'Oh, little did my mother ken 
 The day she cradled me. 
 The land I was to travel in. 
 Or the death I was to die.' " 
 
 Of the other Brasenose men of the period who gave 
 to the College its reputation in letters, the most famous 
 were Richard Harris Barham, the author of the 
 Ingoldshy Legends, and Henry Hart Mil man, who after- 
 wards became Dean of St. Paul's. Barham entered 
 Brasenose at nineteen as a gentleman-commoner, and 
 was soon elected a member of the Phcenix Common 
 Room. His chief friends seem to have been Lord 
 George Grenville (afterwai'ds Lord Nugent), Cecil 
 Tattersall, the friend of Byron and Shelley, and 
 Theodore Hook. His intimacy with the last named 
 was cut short by that gentleman's retirement from the 
 University — an event which had nearly happened at the 
 beginning of his course owing to his generous offer to 
 
62 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 subscribe not only to thirty-nine but to forty articles 
 if he should be so requested. One story of Barham"*s 
 college days is still told, and seems worth repeating. 
 Frodsham Hodson on one occasion politely asked him 
 to account for his continued absence from morning 
 chapel. 
 
 " The fact is, sir,**' said Barham, " you are too late for 
 me.*" 
 
 " Too late ! " repeated the amazed tutor. 
 
 " Yes, sir. I cannot sit up till seven o'clock in the 
 morning. I am a man of regular habits ; and unless I 
 get to bed by four or five at latest, I am really fit for 
 nothing next day."" 
 
 Milman''s college career was graver and more dis- 
 tinguished. He won the Newdigate in 1812 with a 
 poem on "Apollo Belvidere," which Dean Stanley 
 considered with justice to be the most perfect of Oxford 
 prize poems. He afterwards won the English Essay, 
 and was elected in 1814 to a Fellowship at his own 
 college. As an intimate friend of Heber, he wrote 
 several of his best hymns for his Hymnal. 
 
 To turn to the other side of college life, we find 
 it exemplified in the beginning of the famous Phoenix 
 Common Room in 1781 or 1782. It is by far the 
 oldest social club in the University, and was founded 
 during the Principalship of Thomas Barker, just before 
 the dawn of the College prosperity. The founder was a 
 
^'^^ 
 
 Of ^ " >?- 
 
 
THE COLLEGE IN MODERN TIMES 63 
 
 certain Joseph Alderson, who subsequently migrated 
 to Cambridge, and became a Fellow of Trinity. The 
 membership was and always has been limited to twelve ; 
 they dine together nominally once a week — dinners of 
 which the fullest records are preserved ; and they wear 
 a club dress of brown and yellow. Of the members on 
 its roll, many were afterwards distinguished in different 
 walks of life. Five of the original twelve became 
 Fellows of colleges, and among later names we find 
 Frodsham Hodson, Lord Valentia, Lord Fortescue, 
 Reginald Heber, Lord George Grenville, Barham, 
 Richard Harington, who became Principal in 1842, the 
 famous "S. G. O.'*'' (Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne), 
 and the present Dean of Rochester. No dining-club 
 has so distinguished a history, and few have kept so 
 near to the traditions of their foundation. It was a 
 member of the Phcenix who played the chief part in 
 Heber^s humorous poem, the Whippiad, of which a 
 slightly inaccurate version was published in the fifty- 
 fourth volume of Blackwood's Magazine (1843). The 
 story is briefly given in the introductory note. " A 
 certain friend of Heber's, Bernard Poi*t, was found 
 cracking a four-horse whip in the quadrangle, to the 
 immense disgust of a certain doctor, a fellow and tutor 
 and at that time also dean of the College, commonly 
 called Dr. Toe from a defect in one of his feet. This 
 gentleman had made himself obnoxious to most of those 
 
64 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 of his own college by his absurd conduct and regulations. 
 On the following day Mr. Port again cracked the whip 
 in the quadrangle, whereupon the doctor issued from 
 his rooms in great wrath, and after remonstrating with 
 Mr. Port and endeavouring to take the whip from him, 
 a scuffle ensued in which the whip was broken, and the 
 doctor overpowered and thrown down by the victorious 
 Port, who had fortunately taken his degree of Master 
 of Arts." 
 
 The opening of the poem is in the true heroical 
 style : — 
 
 " Where whiten' d Cain the curse of Heaven defies, 
 And leaden slumber seals his brother's eyes, 
 Where o'er the porch in brazen splendour glows 
 The vast projection of the mystic nose, 
 Triumph erewhile of Bacon's fabled arts. 
 Now well-hung symbol of the student's parts ; 
 'Midst those unhallow'd walls and gloomy cells 
 Where everything but Contemplation dwells. 
 Dire was the feud our sculptur'd Alfred saw. 
 And thy grim-bearded bust, Erigena." 
 
 It seems that in Brasenose it had been the habit to set 
 impositions by linear measure, so the irate doctor cries 
 as he hastens to the culprit that " six ells of Virgil shall 
 the crime repair."" The end comes suddenly : — 
 
 " Till now the Dean, with throat extended wide. 
 And faltering shout, for speedy succour cried 
 
THE COLLEGE IN MODERN TIMES 65 
 
 To them who in yon grateful cell repose 
 
 Where Greenland odours feast the stranger's nose — 
 
 ' Scouts, porters, shoe-blacks, whatsoe'er your trade. 
 
 All, all, attend, your master's fist to aid! * 
 
 They heard his voice, and, trembling at the sound. 
 
 The half-breech'd legions swarm'd like moths around ; 
 
 But, ah ! the half-breech'd legions, call'd in vain, 
 
 Dismay'd and useless, fill'd the cumber'd plain ; 
 
 And while for servile aid the Doctor calls. 
 
 By Port subverted, prone to earth he sprawls.'* 
 
 The author adds a wicked note : " ' Procumbit humi 
 bos.' This is not the first time the Doctor has been 
 overcome by port.'*'* 
 
 This unfortunate " Doctor Toe "^ seems to have been 
 the butt of his generation. He is lampooned by Charles 
 Kirkpatrick Sharpe, and a letter in the same volume of 
 Mag a adds still another page to his fame. "As an 
 appendage to the Whippiad^'' says the writer, "the 
 following jeu d'esprit, attributed to the same pen, may 
 not be unacceptable. The young lady to whom Dr. 
 Toe's attentions were supposed to have been paid was a 
 
 certain Miss Bell H ,who eventually jilted the 
 
 Doctor and married her footman ; a circumstance which 
 gave rise to the following stanzas : — 
 
 " 'Twixt footman John and Doctor Toe 
 A rivalship befell. 
 Which of the two should be the Beau 
 To bear away the Belle ! 
 
66 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 The Footman won the lady's heart, 
 And who can blame her ? — No man. 
 
 The whole prevailed against the part : 
 *Twas ^oo^-man versus Toe-man.' " 
 
 But the club which rose to the greatest notoriety in 
 the College in the early century was undoubtedly the 
 Hell-fire Club, which ran a brief but glorious course 
 from 1828 to 1834. There was no connection, as some 
 have supposed, between this doubtful institution and 
 the eminently respectable Phoenix. At the time clubs 
 of this name were common in the country. Scotland 
 had several, from which Stevenson seems to have got 
 the idea of his Suicide Club, and all were weak imita- 
 tions of the famous Medmenham revels half a century 
 before. It met twice a week, and apparently some four 
 or five men from other Colleges were admitted as 
 members. It met in rooms on the left hand at the foot 
 of Staircase VI., a dark and melancholy place even in the 
 daytime, for the great chestnut in Exeter Gardens quite 
 overshadows it. The windows look out on Brasenose 
 Lane, which is still a dismal, lonely place, with its high 
 dead-wall on one side, and the iron-barred windows of 
 the College on the other. In those days it was, if 
 possible, more dreary, except on market-days, when the 
 country-folk would stack their empty carts along it, 
 forty in a row, close under the wall. Here the club 
 held its unholy revels till the death of the President 
 
THE COLLEGE IN MODERN TIMES 67 
 
 from delirium tremens in 1834 brought the thing to an 
 abrupt end. This, and the fact that a woman died in 
 the Lane on Dec. 5, 1827,* after having been given 
 brandy out of a Brasenose window, laid the foundation 
 of what has been perhaps the most remarkable and 
 enduring of College myths. It has been presented in 
 many forms (F. G. Lee^s Glimpses of the Supernatural^ 
 1872, vol. ii. p. 207 ; Blackwood's Mag., Feb. 1891), and 
 the tale is told at length in a curious book called Odds 
 and Ends, published in 1872 by W. Maskell, Vicar of 
 Mary church in Devon. 
 
 "Between eleven and twelve o'*clock one night in 
 December,'"* says Mr. Maskell, " nearly at the end of 
 
 term, Mr. (afterwards Archdeacon ), then 
 
 Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, was returning 
 home along the Lane. As he walked towards the 
 College, he saw a tall man, seemingly wrapt up in a 
 long cloak, standing before the window of one of the 
 ground-floor rooms. When he got nearer, the tutor 
 observed that they were the rooms of an undergraduate 
 of bad reputation and known to be one of the most 
 
 * A full account of both circumstances is to be found in the Vice- 
 Principal's Register. The name of the President was Edward Leigh 
 Trafford, who matriculated in 1832 and died March 3, 1834. We 
 find also this entry : "31 Jan. 1828. H. J. Radclifife, having admitted 
 that he gave to Ann Crutchley on the evening of the 5th of December 
 intoxicating liquors from one of the windows of this College, 
 Resolved, that being now absent he be not allowed to return till 
 after the Long Vacation." 
 
68 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 active members of the Hell-fire Club. He saw also that 
 the person outside was helping some one to get out of 
 College through the window. With the natural impulse 
 
 of a 'don' Mr. hurried forwards, hoping to 
 
 secure both in the act. But — as he himself afterwards 
 said — he was seized with a sudden terror, why or 
 wherefore at the moment he could scarcely tell, — and he 
 declared that before he could get quite close he knew 
 with a positive conviction that it was no man, no 
 human being, who stood upon the pavement. As he 
 rushed by, the occupant of the rooms, the notorious 
 member of the infamous club, was being slowly and 
 strugglingly drawn through the wire netting and 
 
 through the iron bars. Mr. recognised the young 
 
 man, notwithstanding the agony and amazement by 
 which his countenance was disturbed. It was but a few 
 steps to the College gate round the corner of the Lane ; 
 
 but Mr. , half fainting with horror, could scarcely 
 
 reach it and knock at the door for entrance before he 
 fell senseless on the ground. At the moment that the 
 porter opened the gate there came also a cry and a rush 
 of men from one of the rooms on the right hand of the 
 quadrangle. There had been a meeting of the Hell-fire 
 Club, and in the very middle of one of his own blasphe- 
 mous speeches, the owner of the rooms, who was the 
 president for the night, had broken a blood-vessel, and 
 fallen dead upon the floor."" 
 
THE COLLEGE IN MODERN TIMES 09 
 
 It is a spirited and well-found legend, but I have 
 heard a variant which made the meeting-place Heber*'s 
 old rooms on the first floor. There the Enemy of Man- 
 kind appeared in all his winged teiTors, and decamped 
 over the Bodleian, pulling the unfortunate gentleman 
 by the hair. But doubtless the version given above is 
 the correct one, for who could doubt the eye-witness of 
 Mr. (afterwards Archdeacon ) ? 
 
 With the close of Dr. Gilbert**s Principalship what 
 may very well be called the classical age of Brasenose 
 comes to an end. It is interesting to look back upon 
 it as enshrined — with much more that is quaint and 
 curious — in the Recollections of a former Esquire-Bedell, 
 Mr. Cox of New College, published in 1868. We have 
 glimpses of a meiTy life among the authorities, when it 
 was proposed that the gentlemen of the Brasenose Senior 
 Common Room should be called in to decide a fierce 
 dispute between New College and All Souls, as to which 
 produced the better hot negus, which they called bishov. 
 We hear of the fanciful taste in dress which characterised 
 the young Brasenose " smart *" of the day, one like Lord 
 George Grenville, as he appears in Deigh ton's caricature, 
 " A View from B. N. C. Gateway."" Portraits are given 
 us of the great Brasenose Principals, Cleaver and Hod- 
 son. Cleaver was " a tall man with good features and a 
 stately gait ; ' he looked ' (as the old Brasenose porter 
 used to say) * quite the Bishop.' The effect, too, was not 
 
70 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 a little increased by a habit of walking with both his 
 hands upon his chest, and those hands, as in the portrait, 
 made conspicuous by gloves of bright Bishop''s-purple." 
 Of his predecessor in the Principalship, Dr. Barker, our 
 diarist has little to say except that "he was the brother 
 of the butler of Brasenose, a respectable old man who 
 lived in a small house in what was then Cat Street/' 
 Frodsham Hodson had " the rare advantage of a good 
 figure, handsome countenance, and winning address/' 
 But the great man had moments of relaxation ; he had 
 a large family of children, "and,'"* says the solemn 
 Mr. Cox, " it was a pleasing sight to see them clinging 
 to him as he left home for Convocation, when he would 
 gently shake them off, with ' Away, ye dear little encum- 
 brances.' ■" He has one further personal recollection 
 to tell : — " On his going up to Court with an Address, 
 as Vice-Chancellor, I heard him remind Sir Robert Peel 
 (at St. James's) of his having examined him for his 
 Degi'ee, — adding, ' My fellow-examiners accused me of 
 flattering you, or, at least, putting a bad pun into your 
 mouth, — when I selected for your vivd-voce construing 
 the passage in Virgil, — 
 
 ' Referes ergo haec et nuntius ibis 
 Pelidoe genitori/ etc." 
 
 Of Mr. Tench of Brasenose, Proctor for the year 
 1800, we have a less flattering account. " He was at 
 
THE COLLEGE IN MODERN TIMES 71 
 
 once pronounced to be an odd fish, when he came up 
 after some years'* absence from Oxford, wearing a vulgar- 
 looking, powdered, one-curled wig, speaking with a 
 strong Lancashire dialect, and reading with a voice of 
 thunder: indeed his enunciation of the oaths and 
 exhortations on Degree-days was an awful infliction on 
 the drum of one"'s ear.^ 
 
 Full justice, too, is done to the very real intellectual 
 life in the College. " In the Easter Public Examination 
 of this year (1809), Brasenose College monopolised the 
 highest honours, the only three First-class men being 
 all of that college."" A Mr. Dunbar of Brasenose 
 became Curator of the Ashmolean Museum in 1815, "a 
 clever, amusing person, of good family, whose witticisms 
 (rather studied and elaborate) were occasionally circu- 
 lated." Finally the Esquire-Bedell records that on 
 November 11 of the year 1848 " my colleague, having 
 died, was succeeded in the office by Mr. Haiiison, B.A. 
 of Brasenose." 
 
 In the Tractarian Movement, and the whole theo- 
 logical war which convulsed Oxford for years, we find 
 scarcely any record of interest shown by the College and 
 its members. The fact is stranger when we remember 
 that, though partially a lay-foundation, the whole 
 tone and temper of the place had always been reactionary 
 and mediaeval in matters of faith. But the period of 
 prosperity in the early century seems to have laid the 
 
7^ BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 foundation of a healthy secular spirit which kept it 
 free from the ecstasy and bitterness of the time. The 
 one theological disputant whom the College succeeded 
 in producing during the troubled years was a Mr. 
 Garbett, who "preached a sermon at St. Mary's, in 
 which a busy member of Convocation (Mr. Knollys of 
 Magdalen) thought he detected something heretical.**' 
 So the case was brought before the Vice-Chancellor, 
 but he, like an honest man, " having had enough of 
 such inquiries, dismissed the delator with the remark 
 that he had observed nothing objectionable in the 
 sermon unless it were its great length." The same 
 Mr. Garbett turns up again as the author of a " lengthy 
 pamphlet" (length seems to have been his forte) 
 against Wai'd's famous book. The Ideal of a Christian 
 Church. 
 
 The actual social life of the time — which is the 
 proper subject of the chapter — is difficult to write of 
 from its very closeness to the present. Stories have 
 lost the reality of gossip and have not yet been 
 dignified into traditions. One can gather something 
 from the two little volumes of Ale Verses, which are to 
 us of to-day the sole reminder of a vanished custom. 
 Every Shrove Tuesday, the Butler of the College 
 presented a copy of English verse on Brasenose ale to 
 the Principal, and received a sum of money. The 
 poems were composed by some undergraduate or other, 
 
THE COLLEGE IN MODERN TIMES 73 
 
 and the collection * is fairly continuous from the years 
 1826 to 1889, when a Latin requiem was also published 
 by a Fellow of the College over the death of the old 
 rite. Till 1886 Brasenose brewed its own beer, but in 
 that year the old brew-house was removed to make room 
 for the new buildings. The verses are crowded with 
 contemporary allusions, political, literary, spoi-ting and 
 academical. Many of them are entirely execrable, such 
 as that in which Heber is saluted as " Bishop of 
 Calcutta,*" and informed in the next line that his name 
 without reverence the author dare not " utter."" But 
 some even now amuse us when the allusions have been 
 forgotten, and the forgotten allusions themselves have 
 a certain quaint and pathetic charm. Dons are chaffed 
 for their convivial reputations; sconces — a custom no 
 longer obtaining — are referred to; bad puns, classical and 
 otherwise, are everywhere. We hear of a Fancy Dress and 
 Polka Ball given atBrasenose on January 30, 1845. There 
 is a bitter cry against the passing of the Tests Abolition 
 Act, and awful visions are conjured up of the College a 
 prey to " satanic Liberalism "" and the " rankling venom 
 of Dissent.""* A Brasenose speaker of the time at the 
 Union is thus pilloried. The poet is addressing Beer : — 
 
 " Inspu'ed by thee see issue forth in state 
 The mighty leader of the fierce debate ; 
 
 * Certain odd sets for the year 1709 are preserved in Hearne, ii. 
 p. 327 (Oxf. Hist. Soc). 
 
74 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 With studied attitude he takes his stand. 
 Serenely silly, and grotesquely grand. 
 With rapid gesture and with speed immense, 
 Heedless alike of grammar and of sense. 
 He fires away, and boobies round him sit 
 Who kindly laugh at all his borrowed wit." 
 
 The College successes on the river and in the cricket- 
 field are commemorated in flowing strains, and the 
 names of athlete and scholar are punned on with 
 commendable assiduity. Moore, Byron, Tennyson, and 
 Swinburne are parodied, according to the fashion of the 
 day. Here is the inevitable " Dolores '"* version ; 
 
 " O lips full of youth and of laughter. 
 
 Gay lips that shall sing and not grieve, 
 Drink hard lest glad others come after. 
 
 To drink what you languidly leave. 
 Not Trinity, Magdalen, nor Merton, 
 
 Thus, thus your soft souls can regale, 
 O better, more bitter, than Burton, 
 
 Our Brasenose Ale ! " 
 
 But the best in the collection are the three sets 
 written by Mr. Humphrey Ward. The last verses in 
 the copy for 1869 are in the true spirit of a ballad of 
 Thackeray''s 
 
 " With laughter loud and trickling tears 
 My memory brings before me 
 The frantic hopes, the foolish fears, 
 
THE COLLEGE IN MODERN TIMES 75 
 
 The odd adventures of the years 
 Which Time has wafted o'er me. 
 
 Oh ! Brasenose Ale, I shrewdly guess. 
 
 You, if you have a conscience. 
 To many blunders must confess. 
 To many hours of idleness. 
 
 And failures in Responsions. 
 
 But then again, no doubt, could you 
 
 Tell us a cheerful story 
 Of cricket triumphs won by few, 
 Of bumps achieved by gallant crew. 
 
 And gowns put on with glory. 
 
 What gleeful evenings you inspired ! 
 
 W^hat festive little dinners ! 
 How often was your aid required 
 To celebrate the speed untired 
 
 Of fleet-foot Brasenose winners ! 
 
 How oft you helped us at the boats. 
 
 For which we have to thank you ! 
 How many high and tuneful notes 
 Did you elicit from the throats 
 
 Of gentlemen who drank you ! 
 
 To make an old quotation new, — 
 
 ' Beer is than water thicker ' ; 
 Yet I must say good-bye to you. 
 Good-bye, my friend so tried and true. 
 
 Incomparable liquor ! " 
 
76 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 Of the later years of the College history we cannot 
 write at length. It is pre-eminently a sporting record, 
 and as such will be treated in another chapter. The 
 rise of athleticism was the dawn of a new era for the 
 College, and ever since in every sport — on the river and 
 on the track, in the cricket-field and in the football- 
 field — she has been worthily represented. The sturdy 
 north-country stock from which she drew her members, 
 and the vigorous corporate spirit which was always 
 present, made her name famous in outdoor sports, and, 
 when all has been said, it is likely that this is the 
 highest praise which a college can attain to, for it 
 means that the life within her walls is manly and 
 wholesome, and that, if the minor moralities get scant 
 respect, there is abundant reverence for the greater 
 virtues of pluck, endurance and good-temper. But 
 there is more than this, for though the College won 
 great academic success only in short and brilliant periods 
 with wide intervals between, there was yet always a 
 respectable sprinkling of Firsts. If she was not always 
 " foremost in the schools " as well as " first upon the 
 River,"' as the Ale-poet sang, she yet could show a credit- 
 able record. 
 
 If we turn to the other side of the undergraduate's 
 intellectual life, the College literary club and the College 
 debating society, we find a certain activity. The Brase- 
 nose Debating Society, after a glorious but chequered 
 
THE COLLEGE IN MODERN TIMES 77 
 
 career, came to an end a few years ago, and its place has 
 been taken by a Society, called the Sutton after one of 
 the Founders, which began in 1895. The pui'ely literary 
 Essay Club, called the Ingoldshy^ may fairly claim to 
 be one of the oldest of its kind in Oxford. The first 
 meeting was held on February 18, 1879, and the first 
 President was Mr. E. R. H. Tatham. Twenty years in 
 a place so full of evanescent societies is a hoary age for 
 an Essay Club. The Ingoldshy^ through wisely main- 
 taining the custom of having only one officer at a time 
 and electing him for a year, has been free from the 
 small rivalries which perplex kindred societies, and the 
 papers read before it have preserved a tradition of 
 liberal culture. In another field of undergraduate dis- 
 tinction, the debates at the Union, the College has been 
 prominent. Apart from minor offices, the President's 
 chair has been filled on nine occasions by Brasenose 
 men — by D. C. Wrangham (afterwards Serjeant-at-law 
 and M.P. for Sudbury) in 1826, by W. E. Buckley 
 (afterwards Professor of Anglo-Saxon) in 1839, by 
 J. G. Cazenove, the late Provost of Cumbrae College, 
 in 1845, by D. C. Lathbury in 1855, by J. Oakley in 
 1856, by T. R. Halcombe in 1857, by R. A. Germaine 
 in 1878, by G. O. Bellewes in 1885, and by P. J. 
 Macdonell in 1895. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE COLLEGE BUILDINGS AND 
 PROPERTIES 
 
 I. — The Quadrangles. 
 
 The old Quadrangle of Brasenose remains to-day very 
 much as it was in the beginning, save that a second 
 story was added in the reign of James L, an addition 
 which did not, as at New College, spoil the proportions 
 of the old buildings. The Hall and the tower remained 
 the same as before. In some places unfortunately the 
 beautiful old muUioned windows have been removed, and 
 flat modern ones set in their place. The Principal's 
 lodgings, as was common in all colleges, were at first 
 above the gateway, but in 1770 a separate house was 
 assigned for his use. Above the entrance to Staircase I. 
 is the copy of the original inscription on the foundation- 
 stone already referred to. Above the entrance to the 
 Hall are two worn and grotesque busts of King Alfred, 
 the reputed founder of the ancient Hall, and Duns 
 Scotus, who was once believed to have been a student ; 
 but now unfortunately it is impossible to decide which 
 
BUILDINGS AND PROPERTIES 79 
 
 is the King and which is "thy grim-bearded bust, 
 Erigena."" 
 
 At present the centre of the quadrangle is filled with 
 a square grass-plot, but in early days its place was 
 occupied by a fantastic maze, which is engraved in 
 Loggan''s view of the College in 1675. It seems to have 
 been surrounded with some sort of wall, otherwise it is 
 hard to see what would prevent the happy undergraduate 
 from losing himself irrevocably in its recesses of an 
 evening when he was making merry. The maze was 
 removed in October 1727 and its place taken by a 
 statue of Cain and Abel which Dr. George Clarke 
 bought in London. Heame loses all patience when 
 he thinks of the " silly statue " which displaced the 
 greenery. It was at one time believed to be an original 
 by Giovanni da Bologna, but, says Mr. Madan, " external 
 evidence points to its being only a copy of the valuable 
 original presented to Charles I. at Madrid, and by 
 George III. to the great-grandfather of the present 
 possessor. Sir William Worsley, of Hovingham Hall, 
 Yorkshire."" The statue seems to have been a straiiffe 
 perversion of the Scriptui*al fact, for Cain, as we learn 
 from many a jeu d'esprit^ was painted a shining white. 
 Occasionally, too, so runs the story, both figures would 
 be habited in odd raiment and coloured red by sportive 
 gentlemen of the College. It was removed in 1881 and 
 afterwards destroyed. 
 
80 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 The old quadrangle has always seemed to me one of 
 the most perfect in Oxford. It has no magnificent 
 proportions like Tom Quad in Christ Chm'ch, nor has 
 it the wealth of greenery which beautifies the Garden 
 Quadrangles at New College or Magdalen. The buildings 
 are simple and unadorned and with no pretensions to 
 great architectural beauty. On the northern side there 
 is a huge sun-dial painted on the wall which is by no 
 means a thing for the eye to delight in. But the place 
 has a simplicity and freshness and a perfect form which 
 are all its own. The great chestnut which rises over 
 its north walls, the dome of the Radcliffe and the many 
 towers of All Souls charm by contrast with its austerity. 
 When the sun is shining of a morning or a late after- 
 noon it is a pleasant place to dwell in, pleasant with a 
 comfort quite apart from ivied walls and shady garden 
 places. There is a cleanness and a freshness in the 
 whole air of the little quadrangle which are somewhat 
 rare qualities in the lushness of Oxford. In the month 
 of March and in the clear spring sunlight it is at its 
 best ; in summer, if one must speak the truth, there is 
 apt to be a glare from the entire absence of shadow. 
 But the finest view here, as at Melrose, is by moonlight, 
 and he who has once seen from the north-western corner 
 the silvery gleam on the RadclifFe and the spire of 
 St. Mary"'s and the green shadows on the turf is not 
 likely to forget it. 
 
BUILDINGS AND PROPERTIES 81 
 
 Through the archway on the left as one enters the 
 College is the way to the second quadrangle, which dates 
 from the building of the new chapel and library in the 
 middle of the seventeenth century. It is a little old- 
 fashioned place, with the kitchen to the west, the chapel 
 to the ^ south, and the Hall to the north; part is in 
 grass and part is planted with shrubs. For some reason 
 or other it is always known as the Deer-Park, though 
 the most ascetic of deer could not pick up a living from 
 its narrow confines. Up till 1807 the eastern side was 
 a cloister beneath the Library, where many old membei*s 
 of the College were buried ; but now the cloisters have 
 disappeared except in name, and are occupied by sets of 
 rooms. The change dates back to Uhe passing of a 
 Statute of Convocation forbidding residence out of 
 College. Only two courses were open : either to reduce 
 the number of members, or increase the accommodation ; 
 so the College chose the latter, and turned the cloisters 
 into rooms. It appeai-s, from the entry in the Vice- 
 PrincipaPs register* which records the change, that at 
 that time the Deer-Park was known as the Fellows 
 Garden. 
 
 To the south-west of the Deer-Park lies the New 
 
 Quadrangle with a gateway on the south which opens on 
 
 the High Street. When in the beginning of last 
 
 century the College bought the houses between St. 
 
 * See Appendix F. 
 
 F 
 
82 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 Mary's Entry and All Saints' Church it immediately 
 began to plan a frontage to the High Street. Nicholas 
 Hawksmoor, who built the High Street front of Queen's, 
 made some hideous designs for the buildings in a 
 similar style, which were engraved in Williams's Oxonia 
 and the Oxford Almanojck of 1723, and were fortunately 
 not accepted. One can very well imagine how ill the 
 florid classical style would harmonise with the simple 
 Hall and the old buildings. Sir John Soane, in 1807, 
 and Philip Hardwick, in 1810, also prepared designs, 
 but it was not till recent years that a pure Gothic 
 design was accepted from Mr. T. G. Jackson. By the 
 end of 1887 a new quadrangle was practically formed, 
 consisting of a gateway and tower, a Principal's house, 
 and a considerable number of rooms, one of which is 
 now used as Junior Common Room. This is practically 
 what the author of the Brasenose chapter in the 
 Memorials of Oxford had suggested — " an embattled 
 tower-gateway, with chambers on one side and the 
 Principal's lodgings on the other." At the south-west 
 corner there is still a small gap left, and it is to be 
 hoped that the College will soon see its way to com- 
 plete the quadrangle by continuing the buildings on 
 this vacant space. 
 
 The New Quadrangle is filled with flower-beds and 
 small grass-plots, the walls are covered with creepei*s, 
 and, generally, it is a bright and attractive place. 
 
BUILDINGS AND PROPERTIES 83 
 
 though far enough from the quaint distinction of the 
 older quads. It is the scene of bonfires on red-letter 
 days, for there is space enough free from grass for a 
 huge fire; and aesthetic souls rejoice at the beautiful 
 illumination of St. Mary's spire; while festive bodies 
 now and then come near cremation. 
 
 II. — The Chapel. 
 
 The old Chapel was in what is probably the oldest part 
 of the College buildings — the south-west corner of the 
 old quadrangle ; it was on the first floor of Staircase I., 
 the room now used as a Senior Common Room. The 
 curious may still see from the kitchen yard traces on 
 the walls of the old Chapel windows. The foundation- 
 stone of the new Chapel was laid on the 26th of June 
 in the year 1656, and the site chosen was to the south 
 of the Deer-Park. Dr. Samuel Radchffe, who was 
 ejected by the Parliamentarians from the Principalship, 
 contributed the large sum of =^1850 to the new edifice. 
 It took ten years to build, and it was consecrated to 
 St. Hugh and St. Chad by Bishop Blandford on the 
 17th of November 1666 ; the same bishop having 
 consecrated the new Chapel of University College the 
 year before. The name of the architect is unknown, 
 but tradition ascribes it to Sir Christopher Wren, and 
 certainly it resembles his work. The roof, which is a 
 remarkably fine piece of fan-tracery, is said to have 
 
84 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 come originally from the chapel of St. Mary''s College ; 
 and supporters of this view urge in its defence the two 
 facts, that the roof does not quite fit, and that the 
 chief beams, as well as the rafters of the western part of 
 the Hall, are numbered consecutively as if they had all 
 been brought from one building. The architecture is a 
 curious mixture of Greek and Gothic, but not unpleas- 
 ing. The large West window was gifted by Principal 
 Cawley in 1776, and on the north side there is a 
 memorial window to F. W. Robertson of Brighton. In 
 the ante-chapel a mural tablet with medallions has 
 lately been inserted in memory of Walter Pater. There 
 is no special value or interest in the Chapel furniture. 
 There are two pictures, one an old copy of Spagnoletto''s 
 Entombment of Christ, and the other a copy of 
 Poussin''s Assumption of St. Paul. The handsome 
 brass eagle at the lectern was given by a T. L. Dummer 
 in 1731. The two candelabra have only recently been 
 restored to their present place, having in past time been 
 presented by the College to Coleshill Church in Buck- 
 inghamshire. The most precious possession is a pair of 
 chalices with pattens, which date from before the 
 Reformation. 
 
 The place is a good example of an average College 
 chapel, but in no way specially remarkable, and most 
 unlike the magnificent buildings of New College, 
 Magdalen, or All Souls. The East window looks on the 
 
yrom a photograph by the] [Oxford Camera Club 
 
 INTERIOR OF CHAPEL 
 
BUILDINGS AND PROPERTIES 85 
 
 Radcliffe Square, and there is said to be a beautiful 
 effect obtainable on summer evenings from the square, 
 when the sun shines through both West and East 
 windows. But this is a sight which the present writer 
 has not had the good fortune to witness. 
 
 III.— The Hall. 
 
 The Hall remains much as it was at the foundation. 
 It is a high, well-proportioned building, with many of 
 its windows decorated with the arms of the founders 
 and benefactors. In the North window at the east end 
 are portraits of Smyth and Sutton, and a face with a 
 grotesque nose, of which the ornament above the 
 College gateway may be a copy. The South window 
 over the dais has a history connected with it. In the 
 early years of the century Louis XVIII. of France 
 visited Oxford and lunched in Brasenose Hall. So " to 
 record that event so honourable to the Society by the 
 erection of some appropriate monument,""* on April 26, 
 1821, this window was inserted. It shows in the two 
 central compartments the arms of England and France 
 surmounted by their proper crowns, and flanked by the 
 Orders of the Garter and the Holy Ghost. Elsewhere 
 are emblazoned the arms of the Principal then in office, 
 and of the Founders of the College.* Till the middle of 
 last century the old open fireplace in the centre was 
 * See Appendix F. 
 
86 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 retained, and the louvre or lantern above is still in 
 existence, though hidden by the ceiling. In 1760 the 
 Hon. Ashton Curzon (afterwards Lord Curzon) of 
 Clitherow in Lancashire, a former member of the 
 College, gave the present chimney-piece. It contains 
 his coat-of-arms* and " A. C." the initials of his name. 
 At the far end the famous Brazen Nose hangs in a 
 frame; it was brought from Stamford in 1890, after 
 the site of the Hall there with the gateway and 
 knocker had been purchased by the College. 
 
 The walls, after the fashion of college halls, are hung 
 with portraits. There are none of any great artistic 
 value, like the few choice pictures which redeem Balliol 
 Hall, nor are there any of extraordinary historic interest. 
 In the middle of the East wall there is a glaring modern 
 presentment of King Alfred, who seems to be common 
 property among Oxford colleges. He was the reputed 
 founder of Little University Hall, and some good folk 
 have supposed that the " King's Hall '' in the proper 
 designation of the College contains a reference to him.f 
 Tlie picture is flanked by portraits of Smyth and Sutton, 
 
 * Argent, on a bend sable three Popinjays or, collared gules ; a 
 crescent for difference. Crest ; a Popinjay rising, or, collared gules. 
 Cypher A. C. 
 
 t " There is a spot in the centre of the city where Alfred is said to 
 have lived, and which may be called the native place or river-head 
 of three separate societies still existing, University, Oriel, and 
 Brasenose, Brasenose claims his palace, Oriel his church, and 
 
BUILDINGS AND PROPERTIES 87 
 
 and next the Bishop hangs Joyce Frankland, the 
 eminent benefactress,* a quaint and solemn lady with 
 an antique watch in her hand. The other portraits are 
 of Cleaver, Frodsham Hodson, Thomas Baron Ellesmere, 
 Dr. John Latham, John Lord Mordaunt, Samuel Rad- 
 cliffe, Sarah Duchess of Somerset, Robert Burton, 
 Thomas Yate, Francis Yarborough, Ashurst Turner 
 Gilbert, and Edward Hartopp Cradock. The portrait 
 of the first Marquis of Buckingham, which once hung 
 here, is now restored to the family. Of the more 
 modern portraits, the best are those of Hodson and 
 Cradock ; many of the others have that flat and photo- 
 graphic air which is fatal to a picture. But our 
 favourite among them all is the little one of Alexander 
 No well, which hangs on the far right of the East wall. 
 Izaak Walton himself has written of NowelPs portrait 
 in words which demand quotation : — 
 
 " The good old man (though he was very learned, yet 
 knowing that God leads us not to heaven by many nor by 
 hard questions), like an honest angler made that good. 
 
 University his school or academy. Of these, Brasenose College is 
 still called in its formal style ' The King's Hall,' which is the name 
 by which Alfred himself in his laws calls his palace ; and it has its 
 present singular name from a corruption of brasinium or brasin-huse, 
 as having been originally located in that part of the royal mansion which was 
 devoted to the then important accommodation of a brew-house." — From a 
 Review of Ingram's Memorials of Oxford in the British Critic, vol. 
 xxiv. p. 139. This seems the high-water mark of absurdity. 
 * See Appendix E. 
 
88 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 plain, and unperplexed catechism, which is printed with 
 our good old service books. I say, this good old man was 
 a dear lover and constant practiser of angling as any age 
 can produce ; and his custom was to spend, besides his 
 fixed hours of prayer (those hours, which by command of 
 the Church were ordained the clergy, and voluntarily 
 dedicated to devotion by many primitive Christians), I say, 
 beside those hours, this good man was observed to spend 
 a tenth part of his time in angling, and also (for I have 
 conversed with those who have conversed with him) to 
 bestow a tenth part of his revenue, and usually all his fish, 
 amongst the poor that inhabited near to those rivers in 
 which it was caught, saying often ' that charity gave life to 
 religion ' ; and, at his return to his house, would praise God 
 he had spent that day free from worldly trouble ; both 
 harmlessly, and in recreation that became a Churchman. 
 And this good man was well content, if not desirous, that 
 posterity should know he was an angler, as may appear by 
 his picture now to be seen and carefully kept, in Brasen- 
 nose College (to which he was a liberal benefactor). In 
 which picture he was drawn, leaning on a desk, with his 
 Bible before him, and on one hand of him his lines, hooks, 
 and other tackling lying in a round; and on his other 
 hand are his angle rods of several sorts, and by them this 
 is written, 'That he died 13 Feb. 16OI, being aged 95 
 years, 44 of which he had been Dean of St. Paul's Church ; 
 and that his age had neither impaired his hearing nor 
 dimmed his eyes, nor weakened his memory, nor made any 
 of the faculties of his mind weak or useless.' 'Tis said that 
 angling and temperance were great causes of these bless- 
 
BUILDINGS AND PROPERTIES 89 
 
 ings, and I wish the like to all that imitate him, and love 
 the memory of so good a man." 
 
 IV. — The Library. 
 The original Library of the College was on Stair- 
 case IV., one pair to the right, with its windows facing the 
 old Chapel. In early Spartan days, when men rose with 
 the sun and read through the morning houi*s, it was well 
 that library windows should look east and west to catch 
 the light. But with the sixteenth century idler habits 
 came in, and the windows faced north and south as in 
 the first Brasenose Library. After the Restoration east 
 and west came into favour again, and so we find in the 
 present Library a return to the first mode. The old 
 Library is now used as a lecture-room, and still retains 
 a handsome ceiling panelled in red and gold. The new 
 building owes its existence to the architectural activity 
 which possessed the College in Restoration times : the 
 date of its completion is 1663, and it is, of course, 
 attributed to Sir Christopher Wren. It forms the 
 eastern side of the Deer-Park, adjoining the Chapel, 
 and with an outlook on the Radcliffe Square. When 
 Principal Yarborough, who died in 1770, bequeathed 
 his large collection of books to his College, it became 
 necessary to re-arrange the Library. The chains, which 
 up to that time had bound the volumes, were removed, 
 and in 1780 the interior was fitted up under the direc- 
 
90 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 tion of a Mr. Wyat at the same time and in the same 
 style as the Libraries of New College, Oriel, and Balliol. 
 A year ago a further reform was effected, and by the 
 introduction of tables and desks it was made to serve as 
 an undergraduates' reading-room. 
 
 The Library has received many donations since the 
 founder. Bishop Smith, increased the small collection of 
 Edmund Croston by adding his own library. John 
 Longland, Bishop of Lincoln, contributed his share, and 
 down to the middle of the seventeenth century a large 
 number of theological* and controversial works were 
 added. In the reign of James I., Dr. Henry Mason, 
 who died in 1647, gave so valuable a collection that it 
 was then estimated at <^1000. The Library was further 
 increased by Principal Yarborough's bequest, which con- 
 tained not only an unique collection of the theological 
 literature of the eighteenth century, but also the 
 classical library and the manuscript notes of Christopher 
 Wasse of Queens'* College, Cambridge, the would-be 
 rival of Bentley. Dr. Thomas Barker, rector of West 
 ShefFord, who was Principal in 1777, contributed c£*300 
 to assist in refitting the Library ; and, in 1725, Dr. 
 
 * Extract from the Will of Alexander Nowell, Dean of St. Paul's ; 
 •' I do give to the library of Brasen-tiose College in Oxford, the thirteen 
 centuries of the Ecclesiastical History begun at Magdeburge, and 
 the great Greek Lexicon of Henry Stephanus in three volumes 
 strongly bound and armed, and all the History of Martyrs written 
 by Mr. John Foxe in ten volumes of the best paper and fair bound." 
 
BUILDINGS AND PROPERTIES 91 
 
 Grimbaldson left c^^lOOO as endowment " to buy books 
 at the choice of the Principal and Senior Fellows, 
 annually on the twenty-fourth day of June."*** 
 
 The Library is not rich in treasures, but it is a good 
 specimen of an average college collection, and it affords 
 an interesting commentary on the temper and fashions of 
 Brasenose in past times. It is specially rich in theo- 
 logical literature and pamphlets ; and its store of county 
 histories and works on local antiquities is respectable. 
 There is a collection of Brasenose authors, more than 
 four hundred in number, made by Mr. Buckley. Of 
 late years the historical side has been well developed, 
 and under its new regime it is likely that it will be kept 
 well up to date. In all it possesses something over 
 fifteen thousand volumes. Its few rarities I transcribe 
 from Mr. Madan's list. Among MSS. there is a tenth- 
 century Terence, which once belonged to Cardinal 
 Bembo, and the only MS. of Bishop Pearson's minor 
 works. There is an illuminated folio missal of 1520, 
 with a miniature of Sir Richard Sutton. Finally, there 
 is a vellum copy of Aristotle's De Animd (Oxford 1481), 
 a Cranmer's Litany of 1544, and a Day's Psalter of 
 1563. There are no pictures, but two busts, one of 
 Lord Grenville by NoUekens, and one of Bishop 
 Kaye. 
 
92 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 V. — The Kitchen and Buttery.* 
 
 The Kitchen is not a famous curiosity as at Christ 
 Church, but it is pi-obably as old as any part of the 
 College. It forms the west side of the Deer-Park, and 
 in former times was a sacrosanct place of mystery which 
 the scholar entered at the peril of fines. The Buttery, 
 which is beside the Hall, contains several portraits, 
 notably one of the famous Child of Hale, the hero after 
 whom the Brasenose boat is always named. The Child 
 was a Lancashire man, one John Middleton, who was 
 nine feet three inches high, and whose hand was seven- 
 teen inches long. In 1617 he went to the Court of King 
 James, where he wrestled with the King's wrestler and 
 put out his thumb ; a feat for which he received a royal 
 present of £20. He returned by way of Oxford, and 
 "there being many Lancashire students in Brasenose 
 College at the time, his likeness was taken, and still 
 
 * The College possesses no specially remarkable plate, but it 
 seems that at one time a valuable part was stolen. "In her own 
 name and in that of her son William Saxye, she (Joyce Frankland) 
 bequeathed some curious and very valuable articles of plate to the 
 Society of Brazen-Nose ; the great part of which was stolen not 
 many years afterwards, 'by breaking up of our treasure-house,' as 
 the register notes, without further specification of the circumstances 
 of the robbery " (Churton, p. 345). 
 
 The Plate Book (pp. 20 and 21) specifies some of the stolen 
 articles. "■Imprimis a nest of gilt gobletts with one cover to the 
 same weighing 73 oz. 3 q'e"^* at 5s. 2d. the oz. //., one Basen with 
 a rose in the bottome and gilt chasen about the edges weighing 
 51 oz. at 5s, id. the oz. The whole amounted to 247 oz. 3 q'^rs." 
 
BUILDINGS AND PROPERTIES 93 
 
 adorns the College buttery." By way of leaving a 
 memory behind him in that place he is said to have left 
 the mark of his hand on the Buttery walls far above an 
 ordinary man''s reach. At the end of last century, when 
 the Resurrectionists were abroad, it was feared that his 
 grave in Hale Churchyard might be disturbed, so his 
 remains were taken up and kept for some time in Hale 
 Hall. The thigh-bone was found to reach from the hip 
 of an ordinary-sized man to his foot. There is, of 
 course, a fairy tale about his height which seems worth 
 repeating. When a boy, his size was nothing extra- 
 ordinary ; but one day an idea struck him, and he drew 
 on the sand the outline of an enormous man. On this 
 he lay down to sleep, wishing that meanwhile he might 
 expand to the dimensions of the outline ; and lo and 
 behold ! when he awoke his wish was fulfilled. 
 
 VI. — Title, Arms, &c. 
 
 The full designation of the College is Aula Reg^ia et 
 Collegium de Braseiwse in Oxonia; the "King^s Hall 
 and College of Brasenose in Oxford." The name 
 actually in use has varied with every century ; King'*s 
 College, Collegium Regale, Brasinnose, Brazen Nose 
 and Brasenose* being the chief variations. But it is 
 
 * The absurd derivation which would connect the name with 
 Brasinium or Brewing-house seems now to be generally abandoned. 
 Antony Wood saw the matter more correctly: "The College was 
 
94 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 probable that the word, in spite of strange spelling, 
 was always pronounced as a dissyllable. The College 
 seal consists of three Gothic compartments, with the 
 Trinity in the centre, and St. Hugh and St. Chad on 
 either side. Bishop Smyth's arms are underneath on a 
 little shield, and the lettering is "Sigillum commune 
 colegii regalis de brasinnose in oxonia." 
 
 The arms are : The shield divided into three parts 
 paleways ; the centre or, thereon an escutcheon charged 
 with the arms of the See of Lincoln (gules, two lions 
 passant gardant in pale or, on a chief azure Our Lady 
 crowned, sitting on a tombstone issuant from the chief, 
 in her dexter arm the Infant Jesus, in her sinister a 
 sceptre, all or) ensigned with a mitre, all proper ; the 
 dexter side argent, a chevron sable between three roses 
 gules seeded or barbed vert, being the arms of the 
 founder, William Smyth : on the sinister side the arms 
 of Sir Richard Sutton of Prestbury, Knight, viz., 
 quarterly first and fourth, argent a chevron between 
 three bugle-horns stringed sable, for Sutton; second 
 and third, a chevron between three crosses crosslet sable, 
 for Southworth. 
 
 A coat tripartite paleways is of course very un- 
 common, but two other Oxford colleges, Lincoln and 
 
 near finished out of the ruins of several hostels, the chief of which 
 was Brasenose Hall, so-called, without doubt, from such a sign, which was 
 in ancient time over its door, as other Halls also had, viz. , Hawk or 
 Hieron Hall, Elephant, Swan, or Bull Hall." 
 
BUILDINGS AND PROPERTIES 95 
 
 Corpus, exhibit it. Certain variations are to be found 
 in diiFerent examples; for instance, in one the crosses 
 are crosslet fitchy and in another patonce. The arms 
 were officially recorded by Richard Lee the poursuivant 
 in 1574, and may be found in MS. H 6 of the Heralds'* 
 College. 
 
 It is not quite cei-tain whether the coats displayed for 
 Sutton were ever actually borne by Sir Richard Sutton, 
 but their use to commemorate that founder dates back to 
 1574. The arms of Colleges seem merely to have been 
 assumed from those borne by their founders; at least 
 they were never authoritatively gi'anted by the College 
 of Arms, from whose jurisdiction the University was 
 exempted by a special charter of Henry IV. Dean 
 Burgon maintained that the arms of Brasenose were 
 already in use before 1574, and in that year were merely 
 confirmed by Lee {Portcullis), But it has been pointed 
 out by a writer in Notes and Queries^ that Lee, in 
 getting ai-ms from the stained glass of the chapels, 
 attached to the shield the name of the founder and not 
 that of the College, and that the peculiar mode of 
 blazon " Tierced hi Pale "*"* was not used in England at 
 the time.* 
 
 * Cf. Dean Burgon's Arms of the Colleges at Oxford (1855), Wood- 
 ward's Ecclesiastical Heraldry, pp. 427, 431, and Notes and Queries, 
 6th Series, xii. p. 446. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE COLLEGE AND ITS SPORTING 
 HISTORY 
 
 From the early years of the century the College has 
 been identified with Oxford sport. In rowing the 
 Brasenose record is pre-eminent, and it is the Brasenose 
 Club Book which is our earliest trustworthy authority 
 on boating history. But that does not begin till 1837, 
 and the chronicles of the years previous are few and 
 cryptic. The first inter-University contest was in 
 1829, but the first race between college crews seems to 
 date back to 1815. Then, apparently, Brasenose was 
 head of the river, but on the next seven years history is 
 silent. In 1822 there were bumping races, and a dis- 
 puted bump between B. N. C. and Jesus, which ended 
 in a free fight. In 1823 there was no race, because 
 Stephen Davis, the boat-builder, was rowing in the 
 B. N. C. eight, and Christ Church would have none of 
 it. When the B. N. C. boat appeared on the river the 
 Christ Church men ran alongside of it shouting, " No 
 hired watermen." In 1824, B. N. C. started second, was 
 
COLLEGE AND SPORTING HISTORY 97 
 
 bumped by Exeter under the Willows on the first night, 
 but caught Christ Church on the third day and finished 
 second. In those days the way of the thing was 
 primitive. The boat lay in Iffley Lock, while the 
 stroke stood on the bow thwart and ran down towards 
 the stem, pushing with his shoulder against the lock 
 gates. The boat would be clear of the lock by the 
 time he reached his own seat, so dropping on to his 
 thwart he began to row, the oars having been mean- 
 while " tossed " to their owners. Bulteel, who stroked 
 B. N. C. in 1822, seems to have been famous for his 
 skill in this perplexing manoeuvre. In 1825, the 
 custom was given up and the boats started in line along 
 the bank. In 1827, B. N. C. bumped Balliol and Christ 
 Church and left off head, but the next year she fell to 
 second place. In 1829 there were no races on account 
 of the new inter- Univei*sity contest, and in 1830, when 
 the races were renewed, B. N. C. was bumped by Balliol 
 and finished third. From this year to 1837, available 
 records seem to be utterly wanting. The rules for such 
 early contests were much like those in force to-day, save 
 for one curious point of difference ; for it was ordained 
 by a committee of umpires in 1826, that "the boats 
 below the one that bumps stop racing, those above 
 continue it.""* 
 
 But with 1837 we enter upon surer ground. It 
 would be difficult to conceive of more racy and inspirit- 
 
98 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 ing records than the minutes of Brasenose Boat Club. 
 More, they form the only authentic history of the 
 early years of University rowing, as Mr. Woodgate 
 has acknowledged in the Badminton volume. On the 
 first page is inscribed a set of verses as a fitting 
 preface : 
 
 " Whoe'er thou art who readest o'er 
 These records of brave deeds of yore 
 By which the name of B. N. C. 
 Has been ennobled and shall be. 
 Of all their lessons learn this one, 
 ' What has been, may again be done.' " 
 
 The records begin humbly, for in 1837 it was found 
 that the club was some £1'2, in debt, and that its 
 balance in the bank was only £d. A subscription of 
 <£85 was raised in College and the financial difficulties 
 settled, but, says the narrative, "having an indifferent 
 crew who were by no means backward in throwing the 
 blame upon the boat, we allowed their excuse and 
 decided it prudent not to put on." That year Queen's 
 left off head. The next year B. N. C. ordered a new 
 boat from Searle which cost £S0 16*. They left off 
 sixth, and it is mentioned that the steering of W. B. 
 Garnett, the cox (who is called the "steerer""), was 
 universally admired. In 1839 they had a new boat 
 built for them by Isaac King, and the crew seems to 
 have been a strong one. No. 5, R. G. Walls, rowed 5 
 
COLLEGE AND SPORTING HISTORY 99 
 
 in the University boat the same year, when Oxford lost 
 to Cambridge. The result was a brilliant victory for 
 B. N. C, which bumped Trinity, St. John's, Exeter, 
 Balliol, and Meiton ("The Balliol men, dissatisfied 
 with their own, borrowed the Queen's boat, but,'"* says 
 the dramatic chronicler, "nothing could save them.'"), 
 and finished head of the river. In the Torpids, which 
 were then rowed in May, B. N. C. became head the 
 first night but afterwards fell to Oriel. On June 10, 
 1839, " Mr. Empson presented a handsome flag to the 
 College in honour of the ' Childe of Hale ' being head 
 of the river." On June 14, the crew entered for the 
 Grand Challenge Cup at Henley, but were beaten in 
 the first heat by the Etonian Club boat, " which may 
 be accounted for by B. N. C. having pulled down from 
 Oxford to the scene of action only the day before." 
 Spartan times and Spartan manners ! 
 
 In 1840, B. N. C. remained head though hard pressed 
 by both Wadham and University. In the Oxford boat 
 of that year no less than five of the crew had places, 
 Nos. 5, 6, 7, stroke and cox. It was the most exciting 
 contest which had yet been seen, and ended in 
 Cambridge winning by three-quarters of a length. In 
 the same year the University Fours were started, and 
 B. N. C. entered with a crew of four Blues. It seems 
 to have been a tremendous race, and the account in the 
 minutes is Homeric. In the semi-final, B. N. C. 
 
100 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 struggled home only half a length ahead of Trinity, 
 and in the final they beat University by two lengths 
 after a foul in the Gut. In 1841 there were four 
 B. N. C. men in the Oxford boat, but in the College 
 races the boat fell to third place. 
 
 In 1842 the luck changed ; B. N. C. did not figure 
 in the Westminster to Putney race and the boat 
 finished fifth on the river. There is an account in 
 BelTs Life of a four-oared race got up by members of 
 the College in 1843, but the same ill-luck attended the 
 boat, which dropped to eighth place. But in the great 
 struggle in that year at Henley for the Grand Challenge, 
 one B. N. C. man, Royds, figured in the winning boat, 
 and another old B. N. C. oar, Meynell, rowed for the 
 London Oxford Club. The race is one of the most 
 famous in history. Menzies, the stroke, fainted just 
 before the start. Cambridge were forbidden by the 
 rules of the Regatta to allow another man to take his 
 place, and apparently they considered the law more 
 honoured in the observance than in the breach. It 
 seems worth while to quote the account given in the 
 Records : 
 
 " As things were in this stage, to the surprise of every- 
 body the Oxford University boat turned out with seven 
 working hands only in her, the bow oar being absent, four 
 necessarily rowing on one side and three only on the other. 
 Loud shouts of applause greeted this behaviour, and the 
 
COLLEGE AND SPORTING HISTORY 101 
 
 Oxonians, acknowledging it with a bow, came to the 
 starting-place, followed by the Umpire's boat. Immediately 
 after the departure of the Oxford boat the Cambridge 
 crew came facing the judge's stand, and were of opinion 
 they ought to claim, as the rival boat had not her number 
 in her. Their claim, however, was rejected, and the Cam- 
 bridge crew following the Umpire's boat, prepared for the 
 start. They took the Berks shore, and on the signal being 
 given both went off together. They remained oar and oar 
 for two or three minutes, the Oxonians keeping way with 
 their opponents in a wonderful manner. At length it 
 became a question whether the Oxford seven were not 
 better than the Cambridge eight, and so it turned out beyond 
 all question. On arriving at the first gate on the towing- 
 path from the island the Oxford boat drew ahead, and the 
 Cantabs made several powerful efforts to overtake her, but 
 in vain. Oxford continued to lead and won by more than 
 a length amongst the most deafening shouts of applause ! 
 Nothing could exceed the surprise produced by this result, 
 and the triumph of the Oxford Gentlemen at their well- 
 earned victory." 
 
 In 1844, B. N. C. came up to third place in the Eights, 
 and the year is also marked by Tuke'^s stroking the win- 
 ning Oxford boat, and by the presence for the first time 
 of a second B. N. C. boat on the river. Next year the 
 Oxford boat was again stroked by Tuke, and F. C. 
 Royds of B. N. C. rowed at 6. In the College races 
 the second day saw B. N. C. head, and they kept the 
 place for the rest of the week, and in the Torpid races 
 
102 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 (which were rowed after the Eights) the boat made a 
 steady progress from fifth place to first. On the second 
 last night they accomplished what the records call a 
 very unusual feat. " Having made a good start, B. N. C. 
 gained on Oriel every stroke, and bumped them easily at 
 the side of the Haystack ; they backed water in order to 
 free their boat from the Oriel one, which caused a delay 
 of some few seconds, and gave Wadham a considerable 
 chance of improving their distance. Notwithstanding 
 this, B. N. C. were very soon after Wadham, and after 
 a very hard pull caught them a little on this side the 
 Long Bridges, rowed a short distance by their side, and 
 passed them a little before the Cherwell, coming in a 
 considerable distance ahead.''*' In the contemporary 
 BelVs Life there is an exceedingly quaint account of 
 the bump-supper which followed, when " the members 
 of the spirited College entertained their aquatic friends 
 in a most sumptuous manner at supper, when a goodly 
 muster of the gallant sons of Isis enjoyed their 
 hospitality.'''' 
 
 In 1846, B. N. C. kept head of the river, but the next 
 year they fell to second place on the seventh night " by 
 a chance which no one can always prevent, one of the 
 crew catching a crab and falling quite out of the boat 
 just opposite the winning-post.'''' In the winning Oxford 
 boat of that year B. N. C. had three representatives, 
 Royds, Oldham, and Winter. In 1848 they had hard 
 
COLLEGE AND SPORTING HISTORY 103 
 
 luck in the Eights, falling to fifth, in spite of the fact 
 that the boat contained two University oars, Royds and 
 Winter, who in two successive years were Presidents of 
 the O. U. B. C. In 1849 B. N. C. fell another place 
 in the Eights, but in 1850 they won the Fours, and 
 ascended to third place in the Eights. Next year they 
 left off second, and competed unsuccessfully for the 
 Stewards' at Henley, but won the Ladies' with ease. 
 A B. N. C. Pair won the University Pairs, but the 
 Fours were lost to Christ Church. 
 
 In 1852 the Torpids were rowed in March, and 
 B. N. C. kept their head place. In the winning Oxford 
 boat, which was stroked by Chitty of Balliol, three 
 B. N. C. men, Prescot, Greenall, and Houghton, had 
 places. In the Eights, B. N. C. bumped Balliol at the 
 Willows the first night, and finished head. In the Tor- 
 pids and Eights of next year they remained head, and 
 P. H. Moore of B. N. C. rowed 2 in the Oxford boat 
 which won the Grand at Henley. In 1854, B. N. C. 
 left off head boat in the Eights, but the next year they 
 fell to Balliol after a desperate struggle. Every pos- 
 sible misfortune seems to have overtaken the unlucky 
 crew, for No. 3 was forbidden to row by his doctor on 
 the first day, a crab was caught on the fifth, No. 2 
 failed them on the sixth, and stroke cut his hand badly. 
 A worse fate overtook them in the year following, and 
 on the second last day the crew declined to row. Next 
 
104 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 year the rowing improved considerably, but it was not till 
 1859 that B. N. C. got as high as fourth place in the 
 Eights. In the same year, H. F. Baxter of B. N. C. 
 won the University Sculls, being the first member of 
 the College who had ever achieved that honour. He 
 had already rowed bow in the winning Oxford boat, and 
 so, after an interval of half a dozen years, a B. N. C. man 
 again appeared in the University Eight. In 1860 the 
 College ascended one place in the Eights; Woodgate 
 and Baxter won the Pairs ; and a B. N. C. crew won the 
 Fours. Next year — when Champneys, of B. N. C, was 
 bow in the University boat — they had serious misfortunes 
 from accident among the crew, and fell to fourth place 
 in the Eights. Woodgate won the University Sculls, 
 and the Pairs fell likewise to the College. At Henley, 
 in the same year, Champneys and Woodgate won the 
 Silver Goblets, and the B. N. C. crew beat London for 
 the Wyfold. In the Eights of 1862, B. N. C. rose to 
 third place : Woodgate again w on the Sculls ; and, 
 along with R. Shepherd, won the Pairs for the third 
 time in three years. A B. N. C. Four won the Stewards'* 
 at Henley, Woodgate and Champneys won the Silver 
 Goblets, and Woodgate only lost the Diamond Sculls 
 after a dead heat, thus clearly proving himself one of 
 the foremost amateurs of his time. On the 17th of July 
 in the same year he completed his record by beating 
 the w inner of the Diamonds for the Wingfield Sculls, 
 
COLLEGE AND SPORTING HISTORY 105 
 
 the first occasion on which the trophy had fallen to an 
 Oxford man. In 1863 the College had three men in 
 the University boat, and rose from third to second 
 place on the river. In all this period, in addition to 
 the rivalry with other Colleges, there was keen compe- 
 tition for various lesser trophies, the Armitstead Pairs, 
 the Phcenix Sculls, the Royds and Winter Pairs, and the 
 Brasenose and Trinity Sculls. 
 
 In 1864, D. Pocklington of B. N. C. stroked Oxford, 
 and in the Eights the College finished second. At 
 Henley, Woodgate won the Diamonds. Next year the 
 boat rowed head of the river, and Rickaby of B. N. C. 
 won the Sculls. In 1866, F. Crowder of B. N. C. rowed 
 2 in the University Boat, and the College kept its 
 headship in the Eights. The race was in the highest 
 degree exciting, for they fell to Coi-pus on the third 
 night, re-bumped them easily on the fourth, and rowed 
 over for the remaining days. In 1867 the Coxe Fours 
 were started to be rowed in Michaelmas Temi, the rule 
 being that no more than one member of the last Eight 
 and one of the last Torpid row in each crew, and that 
 each boat contain at least one fi*eshman. B. N. C. 
 kept its place in the Eights, Crowder and Crofts won 
 the Paii-s, and Crofts the Sculls. At Henley, Crofts 
 won the Diamonds. At the Henley Regatta of 1868 
 the B. N. C. Four, which was entered for the Stewards'* 
 Cup, made some sensation by refusing to row with a 
 
106 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 coxswain. The new tactics were inspired by Mr. 
 Woodgate, and were in imitation of the New Brunswick 
 Four which had appeared shortly before at the Inter- 
 national Regatta. Mr. Wood of University appealed 
 to the Stewards, and it was decided that the rules 
 demanded that the boat should start with a cox. The 
 crew accepted the ruling, rowed to the start without 
 any coxswain, there took on board Mr. F. E. Weatherly, 
 who (to quote the records), " on the word ' Off being 
 given jumped overboard so completely as to go down 
 among the water-lilies and not to appear for some 
 seconds.'^ The boat had lost the start while waiting on 
 him to get clear, since it was too small to allow of 
 rowing while burdened with his extra weight. But 
 when it was once on its way it quickly overhauled the 
 Kingston and Oscillators Fours and won by over a 
 hundred yards. The winners were naturally dis- 
 qualified, but the experiment had opened the eyes of 
 the rowing world, and thenceforth the coxless Four 
 became the custom. At the same regatta Woodgate 
 and Crofts won the Silver Goblets with some ease. 
 
 In 1868 the College had gone down to seventh place 
 in the Eights, but in 1869 she ascended to fourth.. 
 There is a queer note in the minutes to the effect that 
 "this year the traditional training was somewhat 
 modified, the men having the choice between port and 
 claret, and they were not forced to eat things which 
 
COLLEGE AND SPORTING HISTORY 107 
 
 disagreed with them/' In 1 870 the boat fell one place 
 in the Eights. In 1871, Mr. J. McC. Bunbury of 
 B. N. C. rowed at 7 in the Oxford boat, and in the 
 Eights B. N. C. bumped Exeter and St. John's, and were 
 bumped in turn by Christ Church and Pembroke. A 
 vote of thanks is recorded in the minutes to No. 4, 
 Mr. J. W. Goodwyn, " for resuming his place this year 
 in spite of the rival attractions of the cricket-field, in 
 which he is a man of no mean reputation."*' The same 
 year Mr. Bunbury won the Sculls, and rowed in the 
 winning Pair. At. Henley he rowed 4 in the Oxford 
 Etonian Eight, stroke in the Four, and started for the 
 Diamonds. 
 
 In 1872, B. N. C. rose to third place in the Eights 
 and pressed Balliol hotly for second. Next year the 
 Eight seems to have been very bad, for it fell to seventh, 
 but Farrer, who had rowed 3 that year against 
 Cambridge, was in the winning Pair. In the Fours of 
 that year the B. N. C. crew only lost by damaging their 
 steering gear and running into the bank. In the 
 Oxford boat of 1874 there were two men from the 
 College, stroke and bow, and in the Eights B. N. C. left 
 off second. The Eight entered for the Grand and the 
 Ladies'* at Henley and a College Four for the Visitors', 
 but both crews were unsuccessful. To console them 
 they won the University Fours with some ease in the 
 autumn. Three B. N. C. men were in the boat of 1875 
 
108 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 which broke the long list of Cambridge successes — Mr. 
 Way at stroke, Mr. T. C. Edwardes-Moss at 7, and 
 Mr. H. P. Marriott at 2. In the Eights the College 
 kept its second place, and Mr. Edwardes-Moss rowed in 
 the winning Pair. In 1876, B. N. C. rose on the first 
 night to the head of the river. At Henley, an 
 amalgamated B. N. C. and University Eight entered 
 for the Grand, and a College Four for the Visitors\ 
 The racing in both entries was of the closest kind, but 
 in neither case was the College successful. Later in 
 the year the Fours were won in the easiest way by 
 B. N. C. 
 
 The Putney to Moi*tlake race of 1877 resulted in the 
 famous dead heat, which has been one of the points of 
 controversy ever since in boating history. Mr. Marriott 
 of B. N. C. stroked and Mr. Edwardes-Moss rowed at 7. 
 Oxford was clear, rowing well together, when just above 
 the Limes bow''s oar broke, he caught a crab, and for 
 the rest of the race was virtually useless. From the 
 Field of March 24 I take the following : 
 
 " It took Oxford a second or two to get settled again, 
 and Cambridge came on them like a shot. By the time 
 that bow's oar was extricated the lead was reduced to a 
 short half-length, and the match was virtually seven oars 
 to eight for the last half-mile. It could be seen that bow 
 from that moment was unable to feather ; his blade was 
 always square for the rest of the race, and was generally up 
 
COLLEGE AND SPORTING HISTORY 109 
 
 in the air. So far as he could he swung and kept time, but 
 the oar being ' hinged ' as it were with a joint where the 
 leather held it together, wobbled about as it was moved, 
 and it was difficult work to keep it from again fouling the 
 water. The run in was the finest thing ever seen upon the 
 Thames. Cambridge, though they had been pretty well 
 pumped before they reached Barnes, were still capable of 
 a capital spurt, and as the water became smoother they 
 went steadier and splashed less. Oxford spurted in turn — 
 both boats were rowing 40 — Cambridge gaining inch by 
 inch, and the Oxford rudder throwing up fountains, as it 
 held the boat straight with the uneven work of four oars to 
 three. Oxford had still two or three feet of lead left at 
 the Ship, and the last efforts of both strokes were enough 
 to make their reputations for life as oarsmen, even if they 
 had never been heard of before. The boats passed thejlag- 
 boat level." 
 
 In the Eights of 1877, B. N. C. fell from head to 
 third place, partly from weakness and partly from 
 unlucky accidents which befell the stroke. Mr. 
 Edwardes-Moss won the Sculls, and at Henley in the 
 same year added the Diamond Sculls to his long list 
 of triumphs. The Fours fell to the College, and to the 
 hollow win for Oxford in the boat-race of 1878 Mr. 
 Edwardes-Moss and Mr. Marriott again contributed. 
 In the Eights, B. N. C. rose to second place; at 
 Henley, Mr. Edwardes-Moss won the Diamonds a 
 second time, and along with Mr. W. A. Ellison of 
 
110 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 University carried off the Silver Goblets. In 1879, 
 Mr. Man-iott again stroked Oxford, this being the 
 seventh time in succession a B. N. C. man had filled 
 that position. In the Eights the College fell three 
 places. In 1880, Mr. R. H. Poole of B. N. C. rowed 
 bow in the winning Oxford boat, and in the Eights — 
 thanks to the coaching of Mr. Farrer and Mr. Edwardes- 
 Moss — B. N. C. made three bumps and left off second. 
 5'or the next two years there is little of interest to 
 chronicle till the Henley of 1882, when a B. N. C. Four 
 won the Visitors'. In the 'Varsity race of 1883, when 
 Oxford won in a blinding snow-storm, Mr. Puxley of 
 B. N. C. rowed 4. Next year Mr. F. J. Pitman stroked 
 Cambridge, and broke the spell of her ill-luck as Goldie 
 had done in 1870. In the race of 1887, when Mr. 
 D. H. McLean broke his oar, there were two B. N. C. 
 men in the boat, Mr. W. F. Holland at bow and 
 Mr. H. R. Parker at 4. In the same year the Fours 
 fell to the College, and as bow in the winning crew 
 there comes the name of one of the most famous of all 
 B. N. C. oars, Mr. C. W^. Kent. 
 
 From 1888 begins the period of chief distinction in 
 the boating annals of the College. In the Oxford boat 
 of that year Mr. Holland of B. N. C. was bow, Mr. 
 Parker 6, and Mr. Frere stroke. In the Eights the 
 B. N. C. boat, which was coached by Mr. R. C. Lehmann, 
 rose to second place. Mr. Holland won the Sculls, and 
 
COLLEGE AND SPORTING HISTORY 111 
 
 a B. N. C. Four won the Visitors' at Henley by seven 
 lengths. In 1889, Mr. Holland stroked the 'Varsity, 
 and Mr. Parker rowed at 6. In the Eights, B. N. C. 
 under Mr. Kent's stroking rose to head of the river. 
 They were chased every night by New College and 
 generally finished only some few feet ahead. It was 
 altogether a wonderful effort of pluck, considering that 
 both Mr. Kent and Mr. Holland were very un\vell on 
 at least one night of the races. In the 'Varsity race 
 of 1890, when Oxford, with Mr. W. A. L. Fletcher as 
 stroke, won for the first time in four years, Mr. Holland 
 kept his place at bow. In the Eights the boat kept its 
 place at head in spite of its strange composition, for 
 Mr. Kent, who weighed only lOst. 10, was followed at 7 
 by Mr. F. Wilkinson, who rowed 13st. 8. At Henley 
 that year B. N. C. was very prominent. In the first 
 heat for the Stewards' a B. N. C. Four^-Mr. Holland, 
 Mr. Ford, Mr. Wilkinson, and Mr. Kent — beat Leander 
 by two feet. In the final the Thames crew were two 
 lengths ahead at Fawley Court boathouse, but B. N. C. 
 in a series of extraordinary spurts rushed up level 
 opposite the Grand Stand and won by three-quartei*s of 
 a length. The B. N. C. Eight were only beaten for the 
 Grand after a close struggle with London. The Four, 
 with Mr. C. H. Hodgson at bow instead of Mr. Holland, 
 won the Visitors' with ease. 
 
 The 'Varsity race of 1891 was a memorable one for 
 
112 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 Oxford men, both from the number of famous oars in 
 the Oxford crew and from the narrowness of the victory. 
 Mr. Kent stroked, Mr. Fletcher rowed at 7, Lord Ampthill 
 at 6, Mr. Wilkinson at 5, Mr. Guy Nickalls at 4, Mr. 
 Vivian Nickalls at 3, Mr. R. P. Rowe at 2, and Mr. Poole 
 bow. At Chiswick Church the boats were level, but 
 from Thorneycroffs Oxford began to draw away and 
 passed through Barnes Bridge three-quarters of a length 
 ahead. Cambridge spurted magnificently the whole 
 way to the finish, but Mr. Kent answered with his 
 famous "rushes," and took his crew past the winning- 
 post a bare half-length to the good. In the Eights 
 B. N. C. kept head without much difficulty. At 
 Henley the Leander crew which won the Grand was 
 stroked by Mr. Kent, coxed by Mr. Williams of 
 B. N. C, while Mr. Ford and Mr. Holland rowed 
 respectively at 2 and bow. The race for the Grand 
 was one of the most exciting on record, and Mr. Kent's 
 stroking will not soon be forgotten. In the final for 
 the Silver Goblets there was a tremendous race — 
 Lord Ampthill and Mr. Guy Nickalls against Mr. 
 Wilkinson and Mr. Fletcher, the former passing the 
 post only one foot to the good. Mr. Ford rowed in 
 the 'Varsity boat-race of 1892, when Mr. C. M. Pitman 
 continued the apostolic succession of great Oxford 
 strokes. In the Eights the glory of B. N. C. departed, 
 and she fell first to Magdalen and then to New College. 
 
COLLEGE AND SPORTING HISTORY 113 
 
 At Henley, Mr. Kent stroked the winning Leander 
 Eight with his usual success, and Mr. Ford rowed at 2. 
 In the Eights of 1893, B. N. C. bumped New College 
 and left off second. At Henley, Mr. Kent, Mr. Ford, 
 and Mr. Holland again rowed in the winning Leander 
 boat, and also a new B. N. C. oar at 5, Mr. W. B. 
 Stewart. Mr. Stewart rowed 3 in the Oxford boat of 
 1894. In the Eights B. N. C. fell to New College in 
 the very spot where they had made their bump the 
 year before. 
 
 At this point we may bring our history of the Boat 
 Club to a close. If we collect some of the results we 
 find that we have had close on forty 'Varsity oars in the 
 College, many of whom rowed for several years. The 
 first years of boating in Oxford found the College head 
 of the river, and, in 1891, which was the last year of 
 her headship, she had started head in the Eights on 
 110 days. The Eights records do not become complete 
 till 1837, but before that date she had left off head at 
 least in 1815, 1822, 1826, and 1827. The following 
 table shows the years of her pre-eminence : 
 
 *1839 (1 day) 
 
 1847 (7 days) 
 
 * 1840 (9 days) 
 
 *1852 (7 „ ) 
 
 *1841 (4 „ ) 
 
 *1853 (8 „ ) 
 
 * 1845 (6 „ ) 
 
 * 1854 (8 „ ) 
 
 ♦1846 (8 „ ) 
 
 1855 (7 „ ) 
 
 * In these years it finished Head. 
 
114 
 
 BRASENOS 
 
 ;e college 
 
 *1865 (2 days) 
 
 1877 (2 days) 
 
 *1866 (7 „ ) 
 
 *1889 (5 „ ) 
 
 *1867 (8 „ ) 
 
 *1890 (6 „ ) 
 
 1868 (2 „ ) 
 
 *1891 (6 ,, ) 
 
 *1876 (7 „ ) 
 
 1892 (1 day) 
 
 Her record in the Torpids is equally brilliant. 
 Between 1839 and 1851,. when the Torpids were rowed 
 in the Summer Term after the Eights, B. N. C. left 
 off head in 1842, 1845, 1850, and 1851. Since 1852, 
 B. N. C. has started head on 104 days. 
 
 *1852 (3 days) 
 
 1883 (3 days) 
 
 1853 (5 
 
 '' J 
 
 *1886 (4 „ ) 
 
 1854 (4 
 
 >} > 
 
 * 1887 (6 „ ) 
 
 1859 (2 
 
 >) ) 
 
 *1888 (6 „ ) 
 
 *186l (5 
 
 )i ) 
 
 *1889 (6 „ ) 
 
 *1862 (6 
 
 )) J 
 
 * 1890 (6 „ ) 
 
 1863 (5 
 
 }f i 
 
 *1891 (6 „ ) 
 
 *1866 (5 
 
 " i 
 
 * 1892 (6 „ ) 
 
 1867 (2 
 
 » > 
 
 *1893 (6 „ ) 
 
 *1874 (2 
 
 i' t 
 
 *1894 (6 „ ) 
 
 *1875 (6 
 
 '> . 
 
 *1895 (No rowing on 
 
 1876 (1 
 
 day) 
 
 account of frost) 
 
 1882 (2 days; 
 
 1896 (1 day) 
 
 Neither in Eights nor Torpids has B. N. C. ever fallen 
 below the ninth place, and the number of days she has 
 been Head of the River is far in excess of the record of 
 
 * In these years it finished Head. 
 
COLLEGE AND SPORTING HISTORY 115 
 
 any other College. Her Henley performances are no 
 less remarkable. The Wingfield Sculls have gone three 
 times to a B. N. C. man ; the Silver Goblets six times to 
 a Pair in which there was at least one oar from the 
 College ; we have won the Diamond Sculls five times ; 
 the Stewards' twice; the Ladies' twice; the Visitors' 
 five times ; and the Wyfold once. In the University 
 Pairs one B. N. C. man at least has rowed in the 
 winning boat some fifteen times. The College has won 
 the University Sculls nine times and the Fours eight 
 times. Finally, a B. N. C. man has stroked the Oxford 
 boat in fourteen contests. 
 
 Boating has always been the foremost sport in the 
 College, but in cricket the record is highly creditable. 
 It is hard to find trustworthy ciicketing annals, for the 
 club usually omitted the formality of a minute-book ; 
 in athletics and football the difficulty is still greater. 
 
 ' In about 1835/ Mr. Madan says, ' the only clubs which 
 had cricket-grounds of their own were the Brasenose and 
 the Bullingdon (Ch. Ch.), and even in 1847 the Magdalen, 
 i.e., the University Club, was the only additional one.' 
 
 But the great yeare of B. N. C. cricket were the early 
 seventies, the days of the famous Ottaway. In May 
 1871 a B. N. C. sixteen challenged an eleven of All 
 England and beat them by eleven wickets. The match 
 took place on the Christ Church ground, and the 
 
116 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 Field of the time is lost in admiration of" Mr. Towns- 
 hend's batting and Mr. Hadow's bowling. Seven 
 out of the sixteen found places in the Oxford eleven, 
 Mr. Townshend, Mr. Law, Mr. Ottaway, Mr. Hadow, 
 Mr. Marriott, Mr. Francis, and Mr. Butler, so that the 
 College achieved the unique distinction of having eight 
 representatives at Lord's. The result was a foregone 
 conclusion, Oxford winning with eight wickets to spare 
 in spite of Mr. Bray's bowling. In 1872 for the 
 second time eight B. N. C. men played for Oxford, Mr. 
 Isherwood and Mr. C. A. Wallroth taking the places 
 of Mr. Hadow and Mr. Pauncefote. In June 1873 a 
 College sixteen played against a United North of 
 England eleven, and defeated them by 131 i-uns. In 
 the Oxford eleven of that year, which beat Cambridge 
 by three wickets, Mr. Law, Mr. Wallroth, Mr. Otta- 
 way, Mr. Francis, and Mr. Butler were B. N. C. men. 
 In 1895 subscriptions were raised for a new pavilion 
 on the B. N. C. cricket-ground, and various other 
 improvements were carried out which have made 
 the place one of the best of College grounds. To 
 inaugurate the changes an interesting two days' match 
 was played on May 24 and 25 between Past and 
 Present elevens of the College. It resulted in a draw, 
 the Past making 320 runs for their two innings and 
 the Present 162 for one. The Past consisted of Mr. 
 J. H. Hornsby, Mr. Miles, Mr. Barry, Mr. Ainall- 
 
COLLEGE AND SPORTING HISTORY 117 
 
 Thompson (a former Blue), Mr. Berens, Mr. Garrett, 
 Mr. Heath, Mr. Edwards, Mr. Anderson, Mr. Lyon, 
 and Mr. Child; the Present representatives were Mr. 
 Hodson, Mr. Gibbes, Mr. Baiss, Mr. Chinnock, Mr. 
 Wallroth, Mr. Ellis Jones, Mr. May, Mr. Donaldson, 
 Mr. Lewis, Mr. C. J. Jones, and Mr. Jenkins. 
 
 In Athletic Sports the College has always had a fair 
 number of Blues, and at least one very distinguished 
 athlete. In 1876, Mr. M. J. Brooks of B. N. C. was 
 President of the O. U. A. C, and at the sports in 
 March cleared 21 feet 4 inches in the long j ump. At 
 the meeting with Cambridge in April at Lillie Bridge, 
 Mr. Brooks did 21 feet 8| inches in the long jump, and 
 in the high jump achieved the astonishing record of 6 
 feet 2J inches. " Great things," says a writer in the 
 Field of the time, " were expected of Mr. Brooks, the 
 President, and great things were certainly accomplished 
 by him. The exploit of clearing 6 feet 2J inches has 
 never before been achieved either by amateur or pro- 
 fessional. It is certainly wonderful and almost in- 
 credible, but none the less ti*ue. Mr. Brooks stands 6 
 feet high, and thus cleared 2J inches beyond his own 
 height." 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE COLLEGE AND ITS FAMOUS MEN 
 
 The last and most grateful task of a College historian 
 is to compile some sort of roll of the famous whose 
 names were once on its books. Some have been already 
 considered, but there remains that large number whose 
 distinction was in no way connected with the College 
 history. 
 
 To begin with, there is the inevitable tradition which 
 gives us Duns Scotus as a member of the old Brasenose 
 Hall. One theory makes the nose of brass a simulacrum 
 of part of his face, and the sceptic is refen-ed to the 
 bust of Erigena above the Hall entrance. An equally 
 persistent tradition connects Roger Bacon with the 
 College — a story which apparently rose out of a con- 
 fusion between the famous Friar Bacon of popular story 
 and his Brazen Head and the humbler ornament of the 
 College. M. Charles, in his Roger Bacon, sa Vie, ses 
 Ouvrages, ses Doctrines, declares that he was educated 
 " au College de Merton ou a celui du Nez de Bronze,"' 
 regardless, says Mr. Maxwell Lyte, of the facts " that 
 
ITS FAMOUS MEN 119 
 
 Merton College was not founded till he was about fifty 
 years of age, and that he lived at least two hundred 
 years before the foundation of Brasenose.""' In Greene's 
 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay^ published in 1591, we 
 have the same myth refen*ed to : 
 
 " Why flock you thus to Bacon's secret cell, 
 A Friar newly stalled in Brazen-nose ? " 
 
 Nowell, the Dean of St. Paul's, who matriculated in 
 1521, has already been spoken of. He is said, in his 
 biography, to have been the chamber-fellow at Oxford 
 of John Foxe, the martyrologist. There is some doubt 
 whether the latter was ever at Brasenose, as he is not 
 in the College books ; but there is considerable evidence 
 in favour of the view. According to the ordinary 
 account he attracted the notice of a certain John 
 Harding, or Hawarden, a Fellow of Brasenose, by his 
 studiousness, and by his means was entered at the 
 College. In the dedication of his Syllogisticon Foxe 
 writes of Hawarden as his tutor, and it is undeniable 
 that Nowell became his life-long friend. In his Actes 
 and Monuments he thrice refers to Brasenose, but 
 gives no autobiographical details. "If he resided at 
 Brasenose at all,*" says Mr. Sidney Lee, " it was probably 
 only for a brief period as Hawarden's private pupil."" 
 A better authenticated Brasenose worthy was Sampson 
 Erdeswicke, the antiquary and historian of Staffordshire, 
 
120 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 who was at the College in 1553. He was a gentleman- 
 commoner, and afterwards returned to his house of 
 Sandon to pass the rest of his days in the leisured 
 pursuits of the country gentleman. 
 
 In or about the year 1556 Thomas Egerton entered 
 as a commoner, ''the natural son of Sir Richard 
 Egerton of Ridley, Cheshire, by one Alice Sparke.""* 
 He was called to the Bar in 1572; acquired a great 
 practice in the Chancery Courts; became Solicitor- 
 General in 1581 and Attorney-General in 1592. In 
 1593 he was knighted, in 1594 he was raised to the 
 Bench as Master of the Rolls, and two years later was 
 made Lord Keeper " by the Queen''s own choice, without 
 any competitor or mediator.'' "I think no man," 
 wrote Reynolds to Essex, " ever came to this dignity 
 with more applause than this worthy gentleman." He 
 was long a friend of the Earl of Essex, and was present 
 at the famous scene in the Council-chamber when Essex 
 insulted the Queen and had his ears boxed for his pains. 
 With the accession of James his fortunes continued to 
 prosper, and on July 24, 1603, he became Lord Chan- 
 cellor with the title of Baron Ellesmere. His chief legal 
 performances during the next years were his determina- 
 tion of the Act of Union of Scotland and England in 
 1606 and 1607, and his " Postnati " decision in 1608. 
 In 1616 he was created Viscount Brackley ("^' Break-law," 
 Coke christened him), and on March 15, 1617, he died. 
 
ITS FAMOUS MEN 121 
 
 After his death his son was created Earl of Bridgewater. 
 Ellesmere was a great lawyer, a patron of letters, and 
 much loved by his friends. He held out a friendly 
 hand to the young Francis Bacon as early as 1596, and 
 worked hard to secure the Attorney -Generalship for his 
 friend. Ben Jonson has three epigrams in his honour, 
 and Samuel Daniel an indifferent rhyming epistle. 
 
 In 1561, Sir Henry Savile matriculated at Brasenose. 
 He was afterwards Fellow and Warden of Merton, Pro- 
 vost of Eton, the author of numerous learned works, 
 something of a Court favourite, and esteemed the " most 
 learned Englishman in profane literature of the age of 
 Elizabeth.*" There is a good portrait of him at Eton 
 and one at Oxford in the University Gallery, while we 
 have Aubrey's testimony that "he was tall and an 
 extraordinary handsome man, no lady having a finer 
 complexion.'"* In those happy days men could be 
 learned and still keep a wholesome colour. While at 
 Eton, as Aubrey tells us, he could not abide " witts.*" 
 When a young scholar was recommended to him for a 
 good wit, he declared, " Out upon him, give me the 
 plodding student. If I would look for ' witts ' I would go 
 to Newgate, there be the ' witts \'^ — an opinion which 
 many provosts of Eton have held since then, for the 
 bizarre is not " quod Etona miretur.'"* 
 
 John Guillim the herald was at Brasenose about 
 1585, coming from the Cathedral School of Hereford. 
 
122 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 After leaving Oxford he went to London, and was made 
 a member of the College of Arms. In 1610 he published 
 his famous Display of Heraldrie which went through 
 many editions, and represents the first serious attempt 
 to systematise the science. Richard Barnfield, the poet, 
 who was at the College in 1589, has already been spoken 
 of. He was born in 1574, at Norbury in Shropshire, 
 the son of Richard Barnfield, Gentlemen, and Maria 
 Skrimsher, his wife. In the November of 1594 he pub- 
 lished his first book. The Affectionate Shepherd, with 
 a dedication to the famous Penelope, Lady Rich. Next 
 year appeared his Cynthia, and three years after the 
 Poems in Divers Humours, containing " If Music and 
 Poetry sweet agree " and " As it fell upon a day," 
 which were so long attributed to Shakespeare. He died 
 in 1627 at his country-house of Dorlestone, in the parish 
 of Stone, in Staffordshire. 
 
 A greater figure is Robert Burton, who in 1593 came 
 from his Leicestershire home as a commoner to Brase- 
 nose. He was born in 1577, the second son of Ralph 
 Burton of Lindley. Six years after his matriculation 
 he was elected student of Christ Church, whence he 
 passed to the Rectory of Segrave. In 1606 he wrote a 
 Latin comedy,* which was acted at Christ Church on 
 
 * Privately printed in quarto for presentation to the Roxburghe 
 Club by the Rev. W. E. Buckley of Middleton Cheney, the owner 
 of one of the two existing MS. copies. 
 
ITS FAMOUS MEN 123 
 
 Shrove Monday. In 1621 appeared his extraordinary 
 work — The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is : With 
 all the Kinds, Cavses, Symptomes, PrognosticJces, and 
 severall Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with 
 their several Sections, Members, and Subsections, Philo- 
 sophically, Medicinally, Historically, opened and cut up. 
 By Democritu^ Junior. With a Satyricall Preface 
 conducing to the following Discourse: Macrob. Omne 
 meum. Nihil meum. In the said "Satyricall Preface" 
 he writes: — 
 
 " I have lived a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life, 
 miki et Musis, in the university, as long almost as Xaio- 
 craies in Athens, ad seiiectam fere, to learn wisdom as he 
 did, penned up most part in my study. For I have been 
 brought up a student in the most flourishing colledge of 
 Europe (' Christ Church in Oxford ' he adds in a gloss), 
 Augustissimo Collegio, and can brag with Jovius almost, in 
 ea luce domicilii Vaticani totius orbis celeberrimi, per SI annos 
 multa opportunaque didici ; for thirty years I have con- 
 tinued (having the use of as good libraries as ever he had) 
 a scholar, and would be, therefore, loth either by living as 
 a drone to be an unprofitable or unworthy a member of so 
 learned and noble a societie, or to write that which would 
 be any way dishonourable to such a royal and ample 
 foundation." 
 
 Apparently his affections were centred more on his 
 later than on his earlier College, for we find no allusion 
 to Brasenose. He wrote of melancholy, he said, " by 
 
124 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 being busy to avoid melancholy.'*'' He was reported by 
 his friends to be in company " very merry, facete, and 
 juvenile.^ Like his famous namesake in this century, 
 Sir Richard Burton, and like most good and great men 
 in the world's history, he was devoted to bargees. 
 "Whenever he fell into despondency,'*'* says Bishop 
 Kennet, "he could only get relief" (like his own 
 Democritus) " by going to the bridge-foot at Oxford 
 and hearing the bargemen swear at one another, at 
 which he would set his hands to his sides and laugh 
 most profusely.'*'' He is buried in the north aisle of 
 Christ Church Cathedral, and beneath his bust is the 
 immortal epitaph which he wrote himself: "Paucis 
 notus, paucioribus ignotus, hie jacet Democritus 
 Junior, cui vitam dedit et mortem Melancholia."'* The 
 curious may still see his poi-trait in Brasenose Hall. 
 He has had his reward among those of his own craft, 
 for much of the inspiration oi V Allegro and // Pense- 
 roso is drawn from his quaint volume ; Lamb is full of 
 echoes of the "fantastic old great man"; and the 
 Anatomy had actually the power to raise Dr. Johnson 
 out of his bed two hours sooner than he intended. 
 
 About 1617 Richard Mather, the grandfather of the 
 famous Cotton Mather, the Puritan theologian, was at 
 Brasenose, coming up from Winwich School " to gain 
 more than he could by private study, and hoping to 
 converse with Learned Men, and by advantage of dis- 
 
ITS FAMOUS MEN 125 
 
 putations, Lectures, &C.5 to obtain a Treasure of know- 
 ledge." History does not say whether or not he was 
 disappointed in his expectations. Another famous 
 inmate of the College at a slightly later date was the 
 Royalist, Sir John Spelman. He was educated at 
 Cambridge, but, after the outbreak of the Civil War, 
 was summoned from his retirement in Norfolk to attend 
 the King's Court at Oxford. He took up his quarters 
 in the loyal College of Brasenose, attended Charles I.'s 
 privy council, and would have been appointed a secre- 
 tary of state had he not died of the plague in 1643. 
 While at Brasenose he compiled a Life of Alfred the 
 Great, its so-called founder. The Royalist Court 
 brought Elias Ashmole also to Oxford, who, under the 
 influence of Sir George Wharton, fell so much in love 
 with natural science that he entered himself at Brase- 
 nose to study physics and mathematics. Afterwards 
 came troublous times, and when he went back to 
 London he dabbled a good deal in astrological sciences. 
 He was an indefatigable virtuoso and collector, 
 thoroughly credulous and unfailingly active. His 
 friends included all manner of people, from " Master 
 Backhouse, a venerable Rosier ucian, who called him 
 son, and opened himself very freely touching the great 
 secret,'*'' and who finally told him " the true matter of 
 the philosopher's stone," to John Tradescant, who 
 bequeathed him his great collection. He bestowed his 
 
126 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 museum upon the University of Oxford — twelve wagon- 
 loads in all, the nucleus of the present Ashmolean. 
 Throughout his life he was an industrious, whimsical, 
 good-hearted being, much troubled with the gout, and 
 eternally in matrimonial difficulties. 
 
 A hundred years later we find Dr. John Latham, the 
 famous physician, at Brasenose. He became President 
 of the College of Physicians, and attained to an enor- 
 mous private practice. Two of his sons, John and 
 Henry, were at Brasenose as contemporaries of Reginald 
 Heber. Both were what is euphemistically called 
 " poetical writers,''' and both produced Latin verses of 
 some elegance. 
 
 Reginald Heber himself has been already spoken of, 
 but the other members of the coterie demand further 
 notice. Chief among them was the philanthropist, 
 Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne, the " S. G. 0.'' of the 
 Times letters. He became the brother-in-law of 
 Kingsley and James Anthony Froude, and had some- 
 thing of the social enthusiasm of the former. During 
 the Crimean War he journeyed to the East at his own 
 expense, and inspected the hospitals at Scutari, receiv- 
 ing the thanks of Parliament for his efforts. He was 
 an authority on the Irish question, and showed always 
 a keen interest in the condition of the English agricul- 
 tural labourer. 
 
 Barham, who " first naturalised the French metrical 
 
ITS FAMOUS MEN 127 
 
 conte^'' has, of all Brasenose men of his time, the 
 gi-eatest title to literary fame. Born in 1788, he was 
 educated at St. PauPs, and originally intended for the 
 Bar. He seems to have found Brasenose very expensive 
 — the Principal, Cleaver, used to declare that " he hated 
 a College of paupers" — and now and then his debts 
 were considerable. The death of a College friend had 
 a good deal to do with changing his purpose in life, and 
 in 1813 he took orders. He gi-aduated with a Bachelor's 
 degree, but never took his Master''s, a circumstance 
 which once brought down upon him the wrath of 
 Bishop Copleston. " On the occasion of some Uni- 
 versity contest,**' writes his son in th^ Life of his father, 
 " the Bishop inquired how he was going to vote. 
 
 " ' I am not going to vote at all, my lord.' 
 
 " ' Not vote ? ' repeated his lordship. ' I have no 
 respect, sir, for indolence or indifference. It is a 
 question upon which every man must have formed an 
 opinion, and it is his duty to record it by giving a vote 
 on one side or the other.' 
 
 " ' But there may be a third course open to him,' 
 suggested Mr. Barham. 
 
 " ' I can't imagine one.' 
 
 "'Not, my lord, when a man has no vote to 
 give.?'" 
 
 It seems to have been the custom in Brasenose 
 Common Room for the members to meet and decide 
 
128 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 which way they should vote, and afterwards solidly 
 support one side or the other. The right of private 
 opinion was not recognised, and refractory members 
 had often to decide between offending their conscience 
 and offending the College. 
 
 In 1817 Barham was presented by the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury to the living of Snargate in Romney 
 Marsh. In 1819 he published his first novel, Baldwin, 
 which was wholly unsuccessful. In 1821 he became 
 a minor Canon of St. Paul's, and in 1827 Rector 
 of St. Mary Magdalene and St. Gregory. His best- 
 known novel, J/t/ Cousin Nicholas, was published in 
 Blackzaood in 1834. He died in 1844, having been 
 Divinity Lecturer at St. Paul's since 1842. 
 
 Richard Heber, elder brother of the more famous 
 Reginald, was bom at Westminster in 1773. He was 
 extraordinarily precocious, and at seventeen is said to 
 have begun an edition of Persius. He graduated B.A. 
 in 1796, and M.A. the year later. In 1792 he had 
 published an edition of Silius Italicus, and had com- 
 pleted part of an edition of Claudian. At first his 
 interest lay chiefly in the classics, but the accidental 
 purchase of a copy of Henry Peecham's Vallie of 
 Vanitie (1639) interested him in early English litera- 
 ture. He inherited large Yorkshire and Shropshire 
 properties from his father in 1804, and thenceforth 
 could indulge his taste in book- buying to the full. He 
 
ITS FAMOUS MEN 129 
 
 stood for Oxford in 1806, but was defeated by Lord 
 Colchester. After the Peace of 1815 he seems to have 
 travelled widely in France and the Netherlands to 
 collect books. He was elected member for Oxford in 
 1821. In 1824 he joined with some others in founding 
 the Athenaeum Club. His chief title to fame rests on 
 his enormous collection of books, of which, at his death, 
 he had eight houses full — two in London, one at Hodnet, 
 one in Oxford High Street, others at Paris, Brussels, 
 Antweip, and Ghent. There seem to have been alto- 
 gether about 146,827 volumes besides countless pam- 
 phlets and loose papers. The hobby had been with 
 him from his earliest days, for Dibdin once saw a 
 catalogue of his library at the age of eight. He dis- 
 liked large paper copies ; and another of his whims was 
 to buy many copies of a book he liked and lend them 
 generously. " No gentleman,**' he used to say, " can be 
 without three copies of a book, — one for use, one for 
 show, and one for borrowers." The " fiercest and 
 strongest of all bibliomaniacs,"''' the poet Campbell called 
 him ; and Dibdin, in his grandiloquent way, styled him 
 " the Atticus who united all the activity of De Witt 
 and Lomenie, with the retentiveness of Magliabecchi 
 and the learning of Lelong.'' Scott, in a letter to Ellis, 
 talks of " Heber the magnificent, whose library and 
 cellar are so superior to all others in the world." The 
 fine Introduction to Canto Sixth in Marmion is 
 
130 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 addressed to him, and his collections and generosity are 
 thus pleasantly commemorated : 
 
 " Hoards, not like theirs whose volumes rest 
 Like treasures in the Franch'mont chest. 
 While gripple owners still refuse 
 To others what they cannot use ; 
 Their pleasure in the books the same 
 The magpie takes in pilfer'd gain. 
 Thy volumes, open as thy heart. 
 Delight, amusement, science, art. 
 To every ear and eye impart ; 
 Yet who of all who thus employ them. 
 Can like the owner's self enjoy them ? " 
 
 Henry Hart Milman was born in 1791, and educated 
 at Eton and Brasenose. In 1821 he was elected Pro- 
 fessor of Poetry, an office in which he was succeeded by 
 Keble. In 1828, having taken orders, he was presented 
 to the living of St. Mary's, Reading. His play " Fazio," 
 which he had written while at Oxford, was acted at the 
 Surrey Theatre and at Bath under the title of " The 
 Italian Wife," and, finally, taken up by the management 
 of the Covent Garden Theatre. Charles and Fanny 
 Kemble appeared in it both in England and America, 
 and in an Italian translation it had a considerable 
 success on the Continent. Then came a succession of 
 long poems of very unequal value — "Samor, Lord of 
 the Bright City " (begun at Eton), " The Fall of Jeru- 
 
ITS FAMOUS MEN 131 
 
 salem,'*' " The Martyr of Antioch,'' " Belshazzar,'' and 
 " Anne Boleyn." He was Bampton Lecturer in 1827, 
 and in 1830 published his famous "History of the 
 Jews,"*' which made a stir in ecclesiastical sheepfolds. 
 In 1835, Sir Robert Peel macje him a Canon of West- 
 minster and Rector of St. Margaret's, Westminster. 
 His "History of Christianity under the Empire" 
 appeared in 1840, and in 1849 Lord John Russell gave 
 him the Deanery of St. PauFs. In 1855 he published 
 his famous " History of Latin Christianity down to the 
 Death of Pope Nicholas V."*' — so warmly praised by 
 Mr. Lecky. His " Memoiials of St. PauPs Cathedral '" 
 was published by his son after his death in 1868. In 
 addition he did a large amount of miscellaneous writing. 
 All his life he lived in intimacy with many of the more 
 notable writers of his time — Macaulay, Hallam, Sydney 
 Smith, and John Gibson Lockhai-t. 
 
 After the epoch of Heber, Barham and Milman, the 
 next member of the College who rose to fame was 
 Frederick William Robertson, who in 1837 matriculated 
 at Brasenose, coming south from Edinburgh University. 
 After leaving Oxford he passed some miserable years in 
 curacies, conscious of the power within him, and chafing 
 against the restraint of his position. Then Bishop 
 Wilberforce gave him the parish of St. Ebbe's in 
 Oxford, and shortly after he became Incumbent of 
 Trinity Chapel, Brighton, a place always to be asso- 
 
132 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 ciated with his name. His career there reads like a 
 fairy tale. In six years he had built up an influence 
 which can hardly be paralleled in modern ecclesiastical 
 history. Above- parties and party quarrels, he went his 
 own way fearlessly, though the effort wore him to a 
 shadow. The typical gi*eat preacher, full of fire and 
 nervous energy, and at the same time a master of 
 English style, he may fairly claim to be one of the 
 greatest of the sons of the College. He died in 1853, 
 killed by his work and the worry and strain it entailed. 
 He was essentially a fighter, and he carried his military 
 zeal, which had made him at one time desirous of enter- 
 ing the army, into his church work. All parties were 
 opposed to him, and yet all were made to bow before 
 the masterful power of the man. His " Sermons " have 
 been read more than any recent theological work of the 
 kind, and will continue to be read as long as there are 
 men to admire a living English style, and the fire and 
 intensity of genius. 
 
 A College history makes strange companions, audit is 
 a far cry from a distinguished preacher to Sir Tatton 
 Sykes. But I cannot help regarding that great York- 
 shire squire as in a peculiar degree representative of 
 the College, and what the College has at all times 
 delighted to honour. Hearty, kindly, a prince of 
 sportsmen and good fellows, he was one ©f the last 
 members of an ancient and honourable community, the 
 
ITS FAMOUS MEN 133 
 
 old English country gentlemen. He was bom in August 
 1772, and came to Brasenose from Westminster School. 
 Unfortunately no tradition of his College life is pre- 
 served, but his lot fell in the happy days of 'abuses when 
 men used the College as a hunting-box, and took their 
 degrees as a matter of course. For a little he was with a 
 firm of attorneys in London, and then came to Hull to 
 learn the business of a country banker. On his first Satur- 
 day there he walked home to his father's house of Sledmere 
 after the day's business was done, thirty-two miles, and 
 repeated the performance on Monday morning, arriving 
 perfectly fresh and fit for his work. When he succeeded 
 to his estates he settled down to the life of a country 
 gentleman, and gave himself to agriculture and his well- 
 beloved sports. He was perfectly catholic in his tastes ; 
 a good sheep, a good horse, a good dog were all alike 
 welcome, and he attained to celebrity equally as a 
 breeder of prize stock, a rider, and an owner of famous 
 racehorses. His famous colours — orange and purple — 
 were well known at Malton and Doncaster, though he 
 rarely went to south country races, and never to Epsom. 
 His feats on horseback almost pass belief. When he 
 went to London it was always on his little blood-mare, 
 and he would return as far as Barnet the same night. 
 " If," wrote one of his friends, " he is asked to go a 
 hundred miles to ride a race, he puts a clean shirt in his 
 pocket, his racing jacket under his waistcoat, a pair of 
 
134 BRASENOSE COLLEGE " 
 
 overalls above his leathers, and, jumping upon some 
 thoroughbred, arrives there the next day by the time of 
 starting, and, when the race is over, canters his thorough- 
 bred home again.'" It was in this fashion that he once 
 rode from Sledmere to Aberdeen to ride his friend the 
 Marquis of Huntly's KutosofF, and when the race was 
 over, started off home again without waiting to dine, 
 and slept the first night at Brechin. He took six days 
 to the performance, and the distance there and back 
 was not much off 720 miles. 
 
 It has been the custom to decry Sir Tatton''s fame as 
 a breeder of race-horses, but the fact remains that his 
 hundred and twenty brood mares were of the best blood 
 in the English Stud-Book, and from his stables came 
 Grey Momus, The Lawyer, St. Giles, Gaspard and 
 Elcho. When he was seventy-four, he led back a horse 
 called by his name as St. Leger winner, and from that 
 day till his death a shake of his hand and a kindly 
 word were the reward of every jockey who rode the 
 winning horse. But perhaps he is more justly famous 
 as a fox-hunter. He was long one of the most popular 
 Masters of Foxhounds in England. Until he resigned 
 in his seventy-seventh year he rarely missed a day's 
 hunting and rode as straight as the youngest. 
 
 In appearance he was tall, over six feet, but slim and 
 wiry, and was accustomed to ride eleven stone. Until 
 his last day he maintained the fashion of his youth in 
 
ITS FAMOUS MEN 135 
 
 his dress — a long frock-coat, drab breeches, top-boots 
 and a frilled shirt. His habits were most simple and 
 regular. He rose at five in winter and at dawn in 
 summertime, often being in the saddle and visiting his 
 kennels at Eddlethorpe (fifteen miles from Sledmere) by 
 daybreak. His favourite breakfast was a jug of new 
 milk and an immense apple-pie. Then he would go 
 out and send the first stone-breaker he met up to the 
 house for a meal, while he broke stones for his morning's 
 exercise. His lunch was generally a crust of brown 
 bread, Yorkshire cream cheese, and a pint of the famous 
 Sledmere ale. His ales were famous over the whole 
 north of England, and, be it said in his honour, no 
 hungry man was ever turned from his door. His figure 
 was well known at every cattle-fair and race-meeting. 
 He and his servant would travel quietly together to 
 some race, master and man riding side by side and 
 eating at the same table ; and with it all he was always 
 the gi'eat gentleman. Yorkshire regarded him as her 
 peculiar pride, and it used to be said that natives of 
 the county had three things which they wished all 
 visitors to see. The first was York Minster, the second 
 Fountain's Abbey, and the third, without fail. Sir 
 Tatton. 
 
 The stories which cling to his memory are countless, 
 turning chiefly on great feats of endurance. Not only 
 was he an extraordinary horseman and pedestrian, but 
 
136 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 he had been a pupil in old days of "Gentleman 
 Jackson " and kept to the last a great respect for the 
 Ring. Once he was travelling on one of his expeditions 
 and stopped at a little alehouse for refreshment. Two 
 great ruffianly-looking drovers were leaning against the 
 bar, and when his ale was served one of them coolly 
 lifted the pot and drained it. Sir Tatton said nothing 
 but quietly ordered more. When it was brought the 
 second drover played the same trick with it. Sir 
 Tatton with indescribable meekness ordered a third 
 supply, drank it, and then, buttoning his coat, asked 
 them sweetly which he should take first. In a quarter 
 of an hour the slim quiet- tempered man had given the 
 two louts the best thrashing they had ever received. 
 Like George Borrow he always regretted the degrada- 
 tion of the Fancy, and for an eminent practitioner like 
 Tom Sayers he had the warmest esteem. But there 
 was one point of conduct which few great sportsmen 
 have cultivated and which was part of his peculiar 
 charm. His speech and manner were singularly quiet 
 and dignified, and he never was heard to use an oath. 
 He was a perfect type of the old-fashioned gentleman, a 
 wiser and shrewder Sir Roger de Coverley. Till two 
 years before his death he continued to show in pink, 
 and he had great hopes of living to the age of a hundred. 
 His natural spirits remained unabated, for three years 
 before his death he would have gone to El Hamir 
 
ITS FAMOUS MEN 137 
 
 Pasha's sale at Cairo, but he could find no one to 
 accompany him. In 1861, at the age of ninety-one, he 
 finally succumbed to the effects of a chill which he had 
 caught two years before. In his eighty-ninth year he 
 had been hard at work breaking stones and was in a 
 great heat, so that after his servant had brought him 
 his midday bread and ale, he fell soundly asleep on the 
 ground. He awoke badly chilled; gout followed, and 
 then the more fatal dropsy, and in two yeai-s the world 
 was the poorer by the loss of one of the greatest of all 
 sportsmen. 
 
 It is hard to know in what words to write of that 
 member of the College who has made the name of 
 Brasenose especially familiar to all lovers of the rarer 
 and purer qualities of style. After a record of College 
 sport and College escapades it seems a little incon- 
 gruous to speak of one whose work and interests were 
 so wholly aloof. And yet it is a task which cannot be 
 shirked, for to Walter Pater the College stood for 
 much; he was for long a member of its governing 
 body ; his rooms above the Bursary were the gathering- 
 place of much of the best wit and culture in England ; 
 and over a small body of undergraduates he exercised a 
 profound influence. The outstanding facts of his life 
 are few, for he spent most of his days in Oxford. As 
 an undergraduate he was at Queen's, taking a second in 
 his schools like so many distinguished men. In 1864 
 
138 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 he was elected Fellow of Brasenose, apparently one of 
 the first non-clerical Fellows which the College elected. 
 At one time he had thought of becoming a Unitarian 
 minister, but after his election he gave up the idea and 
 devoted himself to his literary work. In later years he 
 had a house in St. Giles'*s, but his real home was always 
 in his College rooms, and to the last he performed his 
 various College duties. He died suddenly in his house 
 in Oxford on Monday, July 30, 1894, and was buried 
 in the Churchyard of St. Giles. 
 
 It would be a vain task in this place to enter on an 
 exposition of the shining merits of his style, or the 
 curious and subtle qualities of his thought and fancy. 
 But it seems reasonable to attempt a short and all too 
 imperfect account of his share in the College life and 
 that aspect of the man which was apparent to his friends. 
 The present writer was one of the unfortunates who 
 came up one year too late to know the personal 
 influence of the man ; but the College is still full of his 
 memory, and many have only just gone down who 
 enjoyed the privilege of his teaching. Pater acted for 
 some time as Dean and Tutor of the College, though 
 he always shrank from the responsibility of any 
 University office. It is almost impossible to imagine 
 him as Proctor; not since Gilbert White of Oriel 
 filled the office would discipline have had so shy an 
 exponent. It was while he was an acting member of 
 
ITS FAMOU 
 
 the governing body that the Cain and Abel statue, 
 reported to be by Giovanni da Bologna, was removed 
 and sold for old lead. Apparently he believed it 
 genuine, for, according to Mr. Gosse, " in later years a 
 perfectly unfailing mode of rousing him would be to 
 say, artlessly, ' Was there not once a group by John of 
 Bologna in the College ? ' However sunken in reverie, 
 however dreamily detached. Pater would sit up in a 
 moment, and say, with great acidity, 'It was totally 
 devoid of merit, no doubt." "" Plato and Platonism was 
 originally delivered as lectures, and we wonder how 
 far the audience ("keen young students'' Mr. Gosse 
 calls them) followed the lecturer. But in the last years 
 of his life his chief tutorial work consisted in reading 
 essays which were voluntarily brought to him by some 
 of the more serious members of the College. His 
 criticism was invariably kind, generally ending in some 
 diffident hint at a possible improvement. He can 
 never have been a very practical guide in matters of 
 " schools,*" but his few pupils did not forget his words. 
 Specially famous, too, were the dinners which, in 
 company with his friend Dr. F. W. Bussell, the present 
 Vice-Principal of Brasenose, he used to give to under- 
 graduates in his quaint green-panelled rooms. Towards 
 the end he showed signs of becoming a strict discip- 
 linarian, and he used often to wish that Sunday morning 
 chapel were made compulsory. But his attitude towards 
 
140 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 the noisy undergraduate life of the place was always 
 kindly and wise. The ordinary commoner of Brasenose 
 is a great and a good man, but he is not always a 
 person of nice perceptions and subtle appreciations. 
 But the life was rough and honest and appealed to a 
 genuine man. Hence he opposed grandmotherly legisla- 
 tion for the Universities. Once in Brasenose Common 
 Room he disconcerted the present Bishop of London 
 with the remark, " I do not know what your object is. 
 At present the undergi'aduate is a child of nature ; you 
 want to turn him into a turnip, rob him of all his grace, 
 and plant him out in rows.''"' 
 
 His rooms in Brasenose held often distinguished com- 
 pany, and Bonamy Price, Mr. Swinburne, Dr. Mandell 
 Creighton, and the Rector of Lincoln were often his 
 guests. He disliked the distinguished foreigner, and 
 when such notables visited Brasenose he would disappear 
 till they had gone. Mr. Gosse records a saying of his : 
 " Between you and me and the post, I hate a foreigner." 
 In later years his most intimate friend was Dr. Bussell, 
 and he wrote the letterpress for Mr. Rothenstein's 
 portrait of that gentleman in Oxford Characters. As 
 was natural in the case of one with so marked a per- 
 sonality, a whole mythology of Pater stories arose. 
 Many are mere caricatures, some are wholly foolish, but 
 one or two are highly characteristic. Once in the 
 Scholarship examination he was set to read the English 
 
ITS FAMOUS MEN 141 
 
 essays, but when the examiners came to compare marks, 
 Pater had none. He could only explain wearily, " They 
 did not much impress me." To help his memory the names 
 were read out in alphabetical order, but he could only 
 shake his head mournfully as each was read and murmur, 
 "I do not recall him." At last came the name of 
 Sanctuary ; at once Pater^^s face brightened up, and he 
 said, " Ah, yes ; I remember ; I liked his name." His 
 advice to a lecturer on Plato''s Republic is worth quota- 
 tion : " Begin by telling them that Socrates is not such 
 a fool as he seems, and you will get through nicely in 
 two terms." And best of all is his famous expression of 
 that love of bonfires which every honest man feels : " I 
 like them; they light up the spire of St. Mary'*s so 
 beautifully." 
 
 But, indeed, the Pater of many tales, the prototype 
 of Mr. Rose in the New Republic, who staked his belief 
 in immortality on the beauty of marmalade — "for 
 surely, surely, marmalade can never die " — was never the 
 real man. In a sense he was very modern, for no man 
 felt more keenly the problems of his age, and if one can 
 talk about storm and conflict at all in connection with 
 so placid a life, there was certainly much mental striving, 
 much seeking and toiling in vain efforts to reconcile the 
 eternally irreconcilable. In Mr. Gosse''s fine words, 
 " When he tried, as he bade us try, ' to bum always 
 with the hard, gem-like flame ** of aesthetic observation, 
 
142 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 the flame of another altar mingled with the fire and 
 darkened it. Not easily or sm-ely shall we divine the 
 workings of a brain and a conscience scarcely less com- 
 plex, less fantastic, less enigmatical, than the face of 
 Mona Lisa herself.'" And yet with it all Walter Pater 
 belonged to an older and quieter Oxford, an Oxford 
 where talking was still a fine art, and where men had 
 leisure to preserve quaint niceties of conduct and form, 
 and follow select pursuits unchidden. If Lewis Carroll 
 belonged in spirit to the Oxford of croquet and early 
 Victorian manners, and little girls in short frocks and 
 straight-bi-ushed hair, it is equally true that Pater lived 
 and moved in an atmosphere which was still academic 
 and not yet cosmopolitan. It is easy to write hard 
 things of the old Oxford of survivals, but it is simpler 
 to recognise its charm. And that it was a very unique 
 and exquisite quality we are only too willing to admit 
 now that the former things are passing away. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 In bringing a sketch of a college'*s history to a close, 
 it is the habit of historians to embark on theories of 
 college character and college spirit. I am not sure if 
 any such pocket epigrams are very accurate, for you 
 cannot label a place " intellectual "" or " sporting ""^ with- 
 out cheapening the terms themselves, and doing a grave 
 injustice. But one can say very distinctly what epithets 
 Brasenose does not merit. Its history has been the 
 history of a reaction ending in a compromise, the con- 
 servative without the fanatical. In the best sense of 
 the word it has held a middle place, without at any 
 time descending to mediocrity. It has never fallen into 
 a clumsy conventional orthodoxy; nor, on the other 
 hand, has it gone after strange fashions and crude 
 enthusiasms. It has attained to high distinction, fre- 
 quently in the schools, and almost consistently in sport. 
 If it has been untouched by most of the countless crazes 
 which at intervals agitate Oxford, it is not by any 
 means because the College is a backwater of University 
 
144 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 life, but because it has better things to occupy its atten- 
 tion. Blue china, amateur road-making, and under- 
 graduate politics will have small attraction for those 
 whose minds are set on sensible pursuits. Of course this 
 extreme healthiness of spirit lends itself to caricature, and 
 there is a libellous story of an unlucky man in past days 
 who so far departed from a supposed College tradition 
 as to be classed in some Honours school, and was 
 promptly put under a pump by his irate contem- 
 poraries. 
 
 It is a notable fact that of Oxford colleges Brasenose 
 is one of the most familiar, even to those who have no 
 knowledge of the place. This may partly be attributed 
 to the curious name, partly to the unequalled sporting 
 record, which made the College familiar at Henley and 
 Lord''s, and partly to its undoubted social distinction in 
 past centuries. The name came into English prover- 
 bial literature as early as the time of Henry VIH., for 
 when that monarch debased the coinage, it was said 
 that " testons had gone to Oxford to study in Brazen- 
 nose." The College is frequently mentioned in Eliza- 
 bethan, Jacobean, and Georgian plays, and in modern 
 fiction it is perhaps more common than its friends 
 desire. It may or may not be the original of St. Boni- 
 face in Peiidennis, but it was certainly the college of 
 " Verdant Green," though the sportive author confuses 
 matters by talking of the chance of Brazenface bumping 
 
CONCLUSION 145 
 
 Brasenose, and of rejoicings in the former College 
 because the Brasenose bow had been seen with a cigar 
 in his mouth, and also eating pastry in Hall. But 
 Verdanfs supposed rooms are still pointed out, two 
 sets, one on the Kitchen staircase, and one on No. VI. 
 being rivals for the honour. The latter look out both 
 on the old Quadrangle and on RadclifFe Square, but 
 apparently the former have the better claim, for the 
 hero's window " was said to look with a sunny aspect 
 down upon the quad, while, over the opposite buildings, 
 were seen the spires of the churches, the dome of the 
 Radcliffe, and the gables, pinnacles, and turrets of 
 other colleges."" "You could not find a much better 
 college than Brazenface,"" was the advice of Mr. Larkyns, 
 the rector. "It always stands well in the class-list and 
 keeps a good name with its tutors. They are a nice, 
 gentlemanly set of men there." The portrait of the 
 mild Dr. Portman would, perhaps, scarcely pass for 
 Cleaver or Hodson, but the Hall with its huvre is 
 rightly described. 
 
 " Perceiving on one side a row of large windows, with 
 buttresses between, and a species of steeple on the high- 
 pitched roof, he made bold (just to try the effect) to 
 address Mr. Filcher by the name assigned to him at an 
 early period of life by his godfathers and godmothers, and 
 inquired if that building was the chapel. 
 
 " ' No, sir,' replied Robert, ' that there's the 'All, sir. 
 
146 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 that is, — where you dines, sir, leastways when you ain't 
 ' aeger ' or elseweer. That at the top is the lantern, sir, 
 that is ; called so because it never has no candle in it.' " 
 
 Verdant is elaborately crammed on the subject of the 
 Brazen nose much as Sorbiere was deceived two 
 centuries before. 
 
 '' They had now turned round by the west end of St. 
 Mary's, and were passing Brasenose ; and Mr. Larkyns 
 drew Verdant's attention to the brazen nose that is such a 
 conspicuous object over the entrance gate. 'That,' said 
 he, ' was modelled from a cast of the principal feature of 
 the first Head of the College; and so the college was 
 named Brazen-nose. The nose was formerly used as a 
 place of punishment for any misbehaving Brazenosian, who 
 had to sit upon it for two hours, and was not countenanced 
 till he had done so. These punishments were so frequent 
 that they gradually wore down the nose to its present 
 small dimensions.' " 
 
 Readers of Mr. Blackmore will remember in Cripps 
 the Carrier the Reverend Thomas Hardenow, fellow 
 and tutor of Brasenose, " the most popular tutor (being 
 the only one who ever tried to teach)."" His ideas of 
 work were fundamentally wrong in the eyes of the other 
 tutors, but " he was permitted to have his own \yay 
 because of the trouble there might be in stopping him."" 
 He lived before the days of athletics and training, and 
 by way of keeping his men in good trim he used to take 
 
CONCLUSION 147 
 
 some dozen of them for a fifteen-mile walk of an after- 
 noon — a " very admirable coat-tail chase,"" Mr. Black- 
 more calls it. It is in his rooms that the famous 
 dialogue between Cripps and Russel Overshute takes 
 place. 
 
 "Thus was he led through well-known ways to the 
 modest gate of Brasenose, which, being passed, he went 
 up a staircase near the unpretentious hall of that very 
 good society. ' Why am I here } ' thought Cripps, but, 
 with his usual resignation, added, 'I have a-seed finer 
 places nor this.' This, in the range of his great experi- 
 ence, doubtless was an established truth. But even his 
 view of the breadth of the world received a little twist of 
 wonder when, over a narrow dark doorway, he read — for 
 read he could — these words : ' Rev. Thomas Hardenow.' 
 ' May I be danged,' said Cripps, ' if I ever come across 
 such a queer thing as this here be.' 
 
 "However, he quelled his emotions and followed the 
 lengthy-striding Overshute into a long low room contain- 
 ing uncommonly little furniture. There was no one there, 
 except Overshute, and a scout, who flitted away in ripe 
 haste with an order upon the Buttery. 
 
 " ' Now, Cripps, didst thou ever taste college ale ? ' Mr. 
 Overshute asked, as he took a chair like the dried bones of 
 Ezekiel. ' Master Carrier, here thou hast the tokens of a 
 new and important movement. In my time chairs were 
 comfortable, but they make them now only to mortify the 
 flesh.' 
 
 " ' Did your Worship mean me to sit down-f*' asked Cripps, 
 
148 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 touching the forelock which he kept combed for that 
 purpose. 
 
 " ' Certainly, Cripps. Be not critical ; but sit/ 
 
 "'I thank your Worship kindly/ he answered, with 
 little cause for gratitude. ' I have a-druv many thousand 
 mile on a seat no worse nor this, perhaps.' / 
 
 "'Your reservation is wise, my friend. Your driving- 
 board must have been velvet to this. But the new lights 
 are not in our Buttery yet. If they get there, they will 
 have the worst of it. Here comes the tankard! Well 
 done, old Hooper. Score a gallon to me for my family.' 
 
 " ' With pleasure, sir,' answered Hooper truly, while he 
 set on the table a tray filled with solid luncheon. ' Ah, I 
 see you remember the good old times, when there was 
 those in this college, sir, that never thought twice about 
 keeping down the flesh; and better flesh, sir, they had 
 ever so much than these as are always a-doctoring of it. 
 Ah, when I comes to recall to my mind what my father 
 said to me when first he led me in under King Solomon's 
 nose. " Bob, my boy," he says to me " ' 
 
 " ' Now, Hooper, I know that his advice was good. The 
 fruit thereof is in yourself. You shall tell me all about it 
 the very next time I come to see you.' 
 
 " ' Ah, they never cares now to hearken,' said Hooper 
 to himself, as, with the resignation of an ancient scout, he 
 coughed and bowed and stroked the cloth and contem- 
 plated Cripps with mild surprise, and then made a quiet 
 exit. As for listening at the door, a good scout scorns 
 such benefit. He likes to help himself to something more 
 solid than the words behind him, " 
 
CONCLUSION 149 
 
 And so Cripps falls on the luncheon and talks, and 
 gives at the end in his usual fashion his verdict 
 on the ale — " better I have tasted, but not often." 
 
 If in Mr. Blackmore''s story we have a portrait of the 
 Brasenose tutor and the College servant, in Henry 
 Kingsley''s Ravenshoe we have a sketch of the Brase- 
 nose undergraduate of the early ""fifties. It was in the 
 company of a Brasenose man that Charles Ravenshoe 
 had the " noble stramash on Folly-bridge," as he told 
 Lieutenant Hornby. When the hero is rusticated, Mr. 
 Marker of Brasenose sends him the news of the place in 
 a letter which is in its way a typical production of a 
 certain class of Oxford man in past days. 
 
 "Mr. Marker, of Brazenose, began by remarking 
 that— 
 
 ''He didn't know what was come over the place; it 
 was getting confoundedly slow, somehow. They had had 
 another Bloomer ball at Abingdon, but the thing was a 
 dead failure, sir. Jemmy Dane, of University, had driven 
 two of them home in a cart, by way of Nuneham. He had 
 passed the Pro's at Magdalen turnpike, and they never 
 thought of stopping him, by George. Their weak intel- 
 lects were not capable of conceiving such glorious audacity. 
 Both the Proctors were down at Coldharbour turnpike, 
 stopping every man who came from Abingdon way. About 
 forty men had been rusticated over this business, and some 
 good fellows, too." (Here followed a list of names, which 
 I could produce if necessary ; but seeing that some names 
 
150 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 on the list are now rising at the Bar or in the Church, 
 think it better not.) " Pembroke had won the Fours, very 
 much in consequence of Exeter having gone round the 
 flag, and, on being made to row again, of fouling them in 
 the Gut. The water was out heavily, and had spoilt the 
 boating. The Christchurch Grind had been slow, but the 
 
 best that year. L n was going down, and they said 
 
 was going to take the Pychley. C n was pretty safe 
 
 of his first — so reading men said. Martin, of Trinity, had 
 got his testamur, at which event astonishment, not un- 
 mixed with awe, had fallen on the University generally. 
 That he himself was in for his viva voce two days after 
 date, and he wished himself out of the hands of his 
 enemies." 
 
 Mr. Kipling, too, has taken the name of the College 
 for his excellent Lieutenant in the " Taking of Lung- 
 tungpen.*" Parodied to " Brazenface,'' it occasionally 
 figures in Punch as the stronghold of the humorous 
 undergraduate, and in the pages of a certain agreeable 
 story-teller it is a synonym for Philistia. The fame of 
 a certain epigrammatist had penetrated everywhere — 
 even, it was said, to Brasenose. In the works of the 
 ordinary lady-novelist it is the chosen home of des- 
 perate sporting people who row in the boats untrained, . 
 and have magnificent race-meetings in the Port 
 Meadow. 
 
 A catalogue of distinguished living alumni of a 
 college would be out of place in a short sketch of its 
 
CONCLUSION 151 
 
 history. In letters of late years it has been peculiarly 
 prominent, as a glance at the imposing collection of 
 Brasenose authors in the Library will show. Among those 
 who have been connected with the College, scholarship 
 is represented by Professor Lodge of Glasgow, Professor 
 Balwin Brown of Edinburgh, Professor Rucker, and the 
 present Provost of Eton ; literature by Mr. Humphrey 
 Ward ; the Service by Lord Chesterfield, a former 
 captain of the Corps of Gentlemen-at-arms ; the Church 
 by Canon Hicks, the archaeologist, the Dean of Rochester 
 and the Dean of Manchester ; and the Law by Judge 
 Baylis, Q.C., the Presiding Judge of the Lord Mayor's 
 Court of Passage since 1876. 
 
 If one can talk of college spirit as something which 
 persists through the generations, it may not be wrong 
 to say that in Brasenose a certain pertinacity, vigoiu- 
 and clannishness are the dominant qualities. It has 
 always had abundant enthusiasm in its pursuits, and at 
 times has shown that brave industry in a losing game 
 which is the chief ingredient in the fine virtue of pluck. 
 Perhaps it has now and then shown some disregard for 
 the ornamental side of life, a fault, if it be a fault, 
 which is almost praiseworthy. Who shall blame the 
 College if it has once and again taken Weir of Hermis- 
 ton'*s words to itself ? — " I have no call to be bonny. 
 I'm a man that gets through with my day's business, 
 and let that suffice." Elegance is so often the hand- 
 
152 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 maid of incompetence, and wholesome roughness is 
 always welcome in a foppish world. So much for a 
 tradition. Those to whom the grey old-fashioned walls 
 are endeared by memories are willing to believe that a 
 College which has always held a high place in the sport 
 and social life of Oxford has also won, and will con- 
 tinue to maintain, a place of distinction in the humaner 
 arts. 
 
From a draiciii^] [by B. C. Boulter 
 
 VIEW OF RADCLIFFE CAMERA 
 
 FROM WINDOW IX OLD QUADRANGLE 
 
L IB r7 
 
APPENDICES 
 
APPENDIX A 
 
 Principals of Brasenose Hall. 
 Circa 
 
 1435. William Long, B.A. 
 
 1436. R. Marcham or Markham, M.A. 
 1438. Roger Grey. 
 
 1444. R. Marcham, his, 
 
 1451. William Cui-th or Church, M.A. d 1461. 
 
 1461. William Braggys, M.A. 
 
 1461. William Wryxham, M.A. 
 
 1462. William Braggys, his. 
 1462. John Molyneux. 
 1462. Henry Molineux (?). 
 
 1465. Adam Heylle. {See Oriel Treasurer's Accounts, 
 
 May 13, 1465.) 
 1469. William Sutton, M.A. 
 
 1501| Edmund Croston, M.A., who died Jan. 27, 
 1503/ 150J ; his brass is in St. Mary's Church. 
 
 ^^^^] John Formby, M.A. ; resigned Aug. 24, 
 1505 \ 
 
 1508-1510J ^^^^• 
 
 1510-1512. Matthew Smyth, B.D. 
 
156 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 Principals of the College. 
 Elected 
 
 1512. Matthew Smyth. 
 
 {Original Fellows : John Haster, John Forihby, 
 Roland Messenger, John Legh. Soon after : 
 Richard Shirwood, Richard Gunston, Simon 
 Starkey, Richard Ridge, Hugh Charnock, Ralph 
 Bostock.) 
 
 15|^, Feb. 27. John Hawarden. 
 
 15|4j Eeb. Thomas Blanchard. 
 
 15ff, Feb. 16. Richard Harrys. 
 
 1595, Sept. 6. Alexander Nowell. 
 
 1595, Dec. 29. Thomas Singleton. 
 
 1614, Dec. 14. Samuel Radcliffe (ejected by the Oxford 
 
 Commissioners Jan. 6, 1647 ; died 
 
 June 26, 1648). 
 1648, April 13. Daniel Greenwood (ejected Aug. 10, 
 
 1660.) 
 1648, July 13. Thomas Yate (ejected, but reinstated 
 
 Aug. 10, 1660). 
 1681, May 7. John Meare. 
 1710, June 2. Robert Shippen. 
 1745, Dec. 10. Francis Yarborough. 
 1770, May 10. William Gwyn. 
 1770, Sept. 4. Ralph Cawley. 
 1777, Sept. 14. Thomas Barker. 
 1785, Sept. 10. William Cleaver. 
 
APPENDIX A 157 
 
 1809, June 21. Frodsham Hodson. 
 
 1822, Feb. 2. Ashurst Turner Gilbert. 
 
 1842, June 9. Richard Harington. 
 
 1853, Dec. 7. Edward Hartopp Cradock. 
 
 1886, Feb. 26. Albert Watson. 
 
 1889, Oct. 1. Charles Buller Heberden. 
 
APPENDIX B 
 
 In the Muniment a Academka four lists of the Halls 
 and their Principals are recorded during the fifteenth 
 century. As I have dealt in the text with Brasenose 
 Hall alone, it seems only fair to print in an appendix 
 such facts as are known about the other Halls which 
 equally went to the making of the College. In the 
 lists. Brasenose is generally refeiTed to as Aula Aenea, 
 In the same lists we sometimes find more than one 
 Principal for the same Hall, which would seem to point 
 to brief tenures of office. The names of sureties are also 
 given, in some cases the Master himself, but oftener 
 non-collegians. 
 
 1438. 
 
 Principalis aulae "Brasenose" Magister R. (oger) 
 Grey. Fidejussores, Petrus Schotesbroke, Wykham,* 
 bedellus. 
 
 Principalis aulae " Salesurry " (Salisbury), Magister 
 J. Northfolke, item per tenemento (?) nomine Magistri 
 J. Wylley. 
 
 * Perhaps the William Wryxham who was Principal in 1461. 
 
APPENDIX B 159 
 
 Principalis aulas Vitreae (Glass Hall), Magister 
 Johannes Malteby. 
 
 Principalis aulae Stapulinae * (Staple Hall), Magister 
 J. Trope. 
 
 Principalis aulae Nigrae in vice Scholarum, Magister 
 Multone, per Kumberwerth. 
 
 Principalis aulae " Haburdashe '' (Haberdashers' Hall), 
 Ricardus Folcarde. 
 
 Principalis aulae "Yvy"" juxta '' Brasenose^ ex- 
 burhale; fidejussores Thomas Averey, Johannes 
 Wikham. 
 
 (Of the last place, " Ivy Hall,"" near Brasenose, I can 
 find no other trace.) 
 
 1451. 
 
 Aula parva Nigra in vico Scholarum, nomine Magistri 
 Tenawute. 
 
 Aula Vitrea, nomine Magistri Wulstani Browne. 
 
 Aula Aenea, nomine Magistri W. Chirche. 
 
 Aula parva Universitatis in vico Scholarum, nomine 
 W. Altophte. 
 
 Aula " Haburdashe," nomine Magistri Petri Parys. 
 
 Aula " Salesbury," nomine Magistri Walteri 
 Hopton. 
 
 Aula S. Edmundi in vico Scholarum, nomine 
 Magistri Roberti Gary. 
 
 * A Statutmi pro Determinatoribus {circa 1409) decides the site of 
 the obscure Staple Hall. It must have been on the E. side of 
 Schools Street. 
 
160 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 Aula Stapulina, nomine Magistri Henrici Danyell. 
 
 1458. 
 
 Magister Chirch, nomine proprio, pro aula " Brasy- 
 nose," fidejussor Thomas M. de Brasnose (?). 
 
 Magister Chirch, nomine Magistri Johannis Moly- 
 neux, pro " Seynte Mary entre "" in vico Scholarum, 
 fidejussores Thomas M. de Brasnose et Johannes 
 Wybymbury. 
 
 Magister Wilhelmus Greene, nomine Magistri Henrici 
 Gellis, pro " Stapul-Haller 
 
 Magister Johannes Tregansown nomine Magistri 
 Roberti Abdy pro « Blak-Halle.'' 
 
 Magister Symon Fosdyke nomine Magistri Thomae 
 Jolyff, pro aula Vitrea. 
 
 Robertus Skarlett, nomine Magistri Johannis Redyng, 
 pro « Haburdash Halle/' 
 
 Magister Chirch, nomine Roberti Benet, pro 
 " Salesurry '' in vico Scholarum. 
 
 Magister Johannes Attewille nomine Magistri 
 Johannis Brecon, pro " Stapulle Halle/"* 
 
 1462. 
 
 Pro Aula " Haburdasche" Magister Johannes 
 Comysche. 
 
 Pro Aula Aenea Magister W. Braggys, nomine suo 
 proprio. 
 
 Idem, Magister pro Aula Universitatis in vico 
 Scholarum, nomine domini Johannis Warnar. 
 
APPENDIX B 161 
 
 Pro aula Vitrea Magister Bonifacius Blundell nomine 
 Magistri J. Gregory. 
 
 Idem Bonifacius exhibuit cautionem pro aula Aenea 
 nomine suo proprio. 
 
 Pro parva aula Universitatis in vico Scholarum 
 Magister W. Gregeforde. 
 
 Pro aula Aenea in vico Scholarum, Magister Johannes 
 Molyneux. 
 
 Idem Magister Johannes pro aula parva S. Thoniae 
 infra praecinctum Aulae Aeneae, nomine Magistri Henrici 
 Molyneux.* 
 
 Etiam pro gardino juxta aulam S. Thomae, nomine 
 Magistri Adami Hele. [This Adam Hele or Heylle is 
 mentioned in the Oriel Treasurer s Account for May 13, 
 1465, as Principal of Brasenose Hall.] 
 
 Idem pro parvo introitu S. Mariae in vico Scholarum, 
 nomine Magistri J. Lane. 
 
 Pro aula Stapulina, tlominus Johannes Hurste, 
 nomine Magistri Henrici Gellys. 
 
 Magister W. Bragg (or Braggys) exhibuit fidejussores 
 pro aula Aenea, Thomam Stremer, W. Caterike, et 
 Robertum GefFray. 
 
 Magister Henricus Molyneux exhibuit fidejussores 
 pro eadem aula Aenea, W. GryfFyn et Nicholaum Kele. 
 
 * This is the only mention I can find of a St. Thomas's Hall within 
 the precincts of Brasenose Hall. It may have been a small insti- 
 tution governed by a relative of the then Principal of Brasenose, 
 J. Molyneux. 
 
APPENDIX C 
 
 An Indenture of the Goods of Master Thomas 
 Cooper of Brasenose Hall, found locked up in 
 his Room when it was broken open by order of 
 the Chancellor. July 31, 1438.* 
 
 Memorandum, quod hsec est una copia indenturae 
 cujusdam, cujus una pars remanet penes Magistrum 
 Johannem Gorsuch, sacrae Theologiae Professorem, pro 
 tunc venerabilis viri Magistri Johannis Carpenter, pars 
 penes Magistrum Rogerum Grey, principalem aula de 
 Brasenose, de quibusdum bonis ab eo receptis, Magistro 
 Thomae Cooper pertinentibus, in quodam studio ejus- 
 dem aulae contentis, de mandato Cancellarii in praesentia 
 virorum subsequentium apei*to, et eidem Magistro 
 Rogero deliberatis, cujus tenor est talis. 
 
 HcBc indentura, facta ultimo die mensis Julii, anno 
 Domini millesimo quadringentesimo tricesimo octavo, 
 testaticr, quod haec sunt bona reperta in studio clauso 
 quondam Magistri Thomae Cooper, per decretum Can- 
 
 * Munimenta Academica, p. 514, &c. 
 
APPENDIX C 163 
 
 cellarii aperto in praesentia Magistri Johannis Northfolk,* 
 domini Johannis Gothill, vicarii ecclesiae Beatae Mariae 
 Virginis Oxoniae, Wilhelmi Gryffyn f et David Glower. 
 
 In primis, unus liber Homeliarum, secundo folio in 
 textu '' peccato absolvitur.'^ 
 
 Item, alius libri codex, secundo folio " quam plurimas.'''' 
 
 Item, magna cista cerata. 
 
 Item, una cathedra. 
 
 Item, una mensa cum tripodibus. 
 
 Itevn, unum lectrinum, videlicet cum cistula et cum 
 quatuor tabulis antiquis superpositis. 
 
 Item, unus vetustus abacus. 
 
 Item, una antiqua cithara. 
 
 Item, una " lute ^'' fracta. 
 
 Item, una securis. 
 
 Item, unum par tripodum. 
 
 Item, unus gladius. 
 
 Item, duae baslardae vetustae. 
 
 Item, " one morter and pestelle." 
 
 Item, una olla aenea cum fracto pede. 
 
 Item, quatuor parvae tabulae longitudinis duorum 
 pedum. 
 
 Item, duodecim veteres disci ligni. 
 
 Item, una tabula quinque pedum cum uno ** legge.'''' 
 
 Item, pes unius lectrini. 
 
 Item, one " twister "" fen-i. 
 
 * Perhaps the Principal of Salisbury Hall in 1438. See 
 Appendix B. 
 t Surety (fidejussor) for Brasenose Hall in 1462. 
 
164 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 Item, unus arcus cum viginti sagittis. 
 
 Item, unum par follium. 
 
 Item, una antiqua mantica. 
 
 Item, unum par cultellorum trium in una vagina 
 unius sectae, cum manubriis rotundis de " dogyn *" 
 argentatis. 
 
 Item, Boethius super libro Porphyrii, secundo folio 
 " confirmat.'''' 
 
 /i^^m,Commentarium Boethii Aristotelispraedicamenta, 
 secundo folio " ait cequivoca.'^ 
 
 Item, Ovidius, De Remedio Amoris. 
 
 Item, liber geometncae, secundo folio N. F. D. 
 
 Quae sunt omnia bona alicujus valoris in praedicto 
 studio contenta. 
 
 Haec bona fueinint praedicto Magistro Thomae 
 Cooper. 
 
 We know nothing of Master Cooper**s status in the 
 College, but the furnishing of his room would argue 
 something more than the undergi-aduate. It is a queer 
 medley with its bow and arrows and its old cloak, its 
 broken lute, and Ovid's Cure for Love. 
 
APPENDIX D 
 
 Letter of Dean Nowell to Lord Burghley, con- 
 cerning HIS own and his Brother Robert's 
 Benefactions to Brasenose College.* 
 
 " I beseeche y'^ good Lordshipp to take this as written 
 at y"^ Lordshipp's commandment, and as by an exequutor, 
 readie to gyve accompt unto y'* Lordshipp, beyng over- 
 seer of my brothers wylle, specially uppon some com- 
 playnt mayde of me unto y*" lordshipp, rather than as 
 proceedyng of vanitie in boastyng of that, which ought 
 with silence to be layd upp in the lappe of the poore, 
 and in Godde's memorie only. 
 
 My brother Robefi, late attorney of her Ma*^®^ courte 
 of wardes, about vi houres before he dyed, said unto 
 me : Forget not Myddleton Schole, and the College oj 
 Brasen-nose, where ive were brought upp in our youth ; 
 and yf yow woMe procure any thynge to cont'mue, with 
 my money ^ yow shall doe it heste and moste surely in the 
 Queues Ma^^" name, whose poore officer I have bene. 
 And uppon those woords I was occasioned to thinke of 
 
 * From MSS. Burghley LXXXII., No. 48,5dated with a pencil on 
 the back " 1596 " (Churton's Life of Nowell). 
 
166 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 the fundation of Myddelton Schole, & of certen scholars 
 to be chosen out of that schole unto the college of 
 Brasen-nose, ther to be maynteyned with certen 
 exhibition. 
 
 And fyrste for three yers space, before I obteyned the 
 saide fundation I sent yerely xx" to the principall and 
 fellowes of that college to be bestowed uppon vi poore 
 scholars. And whan by y'' Lordshipps and S'^ Walter 
 Myldmays meanes I had obteyned the fundation of the 
 schole, her Maiestie most gratiously and bounteously 
 gyvyng frely that xx" yerely for ever, which I wold 
 have purchased of her Ma"®. I was therby more 
 inflamed to goe throgh with that which I fyrste 
 intended. I purchased in reversion of the Lorde Cheny 
 the manor of Uppehury, with the parsonage of Gyllyng- 
 ham in the countie of Kente, which is worth one hun- 
 dred marks or more yerely : for the which I payed my 
 lorde ix°" an x" with a purse of xP to my ladie for her 
 consent. 
 
 And for that my lorde Cheny hath reserved unto hyni 
 selffe the rente, duryng hys lieffe, I prayed M"" Auditor 
 TooJce, who in consideration of a lease of Esyndon in the 
 countie of Hertford^ was contented to pay me yerely 
 xv" for the space of xvi yeares, to assure the same unto 
 the college of Brasen-nose, which I do yerely make upp 
 to the somme of xx" to the use of vi poore scholars, in 
 the saide college, named in the fundation Quene Eliza- 
 beths scholars. And I payed to M"* Henrie Poole of 
 
APPENDIX D 167 
 
 Dalhy in Leicestershyre who maide a title to the saide 
 Esyndon for hys interest cxx". 
 
 And for that the lower chambers of the college were 
 dampeshe and unholsome beyng unboorded, I caused the 
 same throghly to be boorded, which cost above xl". 
 
 The mortmaynes, fynes, licence of Alienation, fees, 
 fyne and recouerie of Upphury and Gyllyngham^ wryt- 
 inge in sette hand of the fundation, and twoe exempli- 
 fications under the Great Scale : exemplification of my 
 lorde Chenys evidence under the Great Scale, with other 
 wrytyngs coste above one hundreth pounds, as I have in 
 particulars to showe. 
 
 I have dealte with my lorde Cheny to purchase hys 
 interest for terme of hys lieffe, that I might put the 
 college in full possession, as well of the rente as of the 
 lands; which yf I could compasse, ther shold be xiii 
 scholars founde in Brasen-nose ; and the husher of the 
 schole hys wages sholde be mayde upp x", which yet but 
 vi" viii^ iiii*^. 
 
 I had allso buylded er now, a fayre 'scholehowse with 
 lodgyngs for the schole m'" and husher, savyng that 
 yonge M"^ Ashton, lorde of Myddleton, beynge under 
 age can make noe assurance of the grounde, wheruppon 
 to buylde the same. I wyll bestow, or leave to that use 
 with the college uppon bond yf I dye before, two hun- 
 dreth marks at the leaste. 
 
 And for that my saide brother not longe before hys 
 death, dely verynge me hys key of the cheste, wheare hys 
 
168 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 other keys were, and hys rynge allso, prayed me not to 
 deceyve hym, but that the poore shold have all hys 
 goods, hys debtes, legacies, and funeralls beyng fyrste 
 discharged ; for that he made y'' good Lordshipp over- 
 seer, I think I am occasioned therby summarily to showe 
 how the reste of hys goods were bestowed. And I dare 
 to advouche to showe y^" lordshipp in particulars, with 
 the names of persons/' 
 
 The following sentences from a letter of March 18, 
 159i (MSS. LXXVIII. No. 18) show the difficulties 
 which attended the bequest : 
 
 " My humble duty to y'* honorable lordshipp remem- 
 bered : Mighte it please the same favourably to hear 
 mine and my brother Roberts sometime attorney in the 
 Court of Wardes his humble suite in his last wylle and 
 testament, by the words written in the schedule in- 
 closed, who specially charged me upon his death-bed to 
 procure the fundation of Myddleton Schule in the 
 countie of Lancaster, where we and other o^* brethren 
 were taught in o'' childhoode, 8z the said Schole to be 
 annexed unto Brasen-nose Colledge in Oxf^ whear we 
 were poor students in the time of o'' youthe.*" 
 
 Then follows an account of the foundation of the 
 School " by y"^ Lordshipps and S^ Walter Mildmays com- 
 mendation of my humble suit,"" to her Majesty, and of 
 the dispute with Sir Edward Hody or Hoby, who had 
 " holden the estates by coler of a Lease made by the 
 
APPENDIX D 169 
 
 lord Cheyney, now by the space of six yeares and more 
 — whereby the college was inforced lastly to seek their 
 remedie by the law and did brynge an action against him, 
 for part of the said arrearages to the value of v*^". — By 
 means of all which long suits and delays continuing now 
 five yeares and more, the said college is greatly impover- 
 ished & her Ma"®^ xiii poore scholars are shortly to 
 forsake the University, and her Highness free Schole, 
 so lately by her gi-atiously founded, is in danger to be 
 dissolved ; unless it might please y'^ honourable lord- 
 shipp of y'' authority (which the s*^ S'" Edward doth 
 most reverence) to bring him to some reason ; unto the 
 which, if he did know that y'" good lordshipp did mis- 
 like of his such dealings, he would, we trust, be 
 brought: wherby three hundreth poor scholars and 
 students shall be bounden continually to pray for y' 
 good Lordshipp unto Almighty God, Who have the 
 same, and all y", always in His most blessed keeping and 
 protection. 
 Martii 1594 
 
 y"^ honorable Lordshipps 
 humble at commandm^ 
 
 Alexander Nowell 
 
 Superscribed " To the rytt honorable, my verie good 
 lord, the Lord Highe Tresauif of England.'' 
 
APPENDIX E 
 
 The Verses Inscribed on the Picture of Joyce 
 Frankland in Brasenose Hall. 
 
 " Trapsi nata sui, Saxy sponsata marito, 
 
 Guilelmo mater visa beata meo, 
 Mors matura patrem, sors abstulet atra maritum, 
 
 Filius heu rapida morte peremptus obit. 
 Parca quid insultas ? quasi nunc effeceris orbam ? 
 
 En ego multiplici prole beata magis. 
 Me namque agnoscit studiis Domus Aenea matrem, 
 
 Prole sua semper nobilitata domus ; 
 Digna domus meritis, et laeta et grata patronae : 
 
 Sola mea est soli laus placuisse Deo."*"* 
 
 Anno Dom. 1586, oetat 55. 
 
 " In one of the windows of the Hall were formerly 
 these arms for Frankland : Argent : on a bend cotised, 
 Azure, three Eagles displayed of the first, the motto 
 ' Virtutijbrtuna cedit.'' 
 
 Impaling for Trapps, Quarterly, first and fourth, 
 Argent, three Cal traps, sable. Second and third. 
 
APPENDIX E 171 
 
 Azure, a chevron between three crosses patee, Or. The 
 motto, ' Suffer and serve.' Which impalement was 
 encompassed about with this inscription ; ' Vende quod 
 habes, et da pauperibus ' "'"' (Wood^^s Colleges^ p. 368). 
 
 Joyce Frankland'*s portrait — as also Dean NowelPs — 
 is finely engraved in Churton'*s Life of Nowell. The 
 watch which the good lady holds in her hand is a 
 hunting one of a curious pattern. 
 
APPENDIX F 
 
 Extracts from Vice-Principals' Register. 
 
 I.— Feb. 15, 1810. 
 
 Convocation having lately revived a statute prohibit- 
 ing more strictly than ever residence out of college, in 
 order to comply with this statute it was necessary 
 either to reduce the number of the members or increase 
 that of the rooms. The reduction not being practicable 
 without great present inconvenience to many individuals 
 lately admitted, and still greater injury to many parts 
 of our establishment, it was resolved as a lesser evil that 
 twelve rooms should be built on the quad, commonly 
 called the Fellows"* Garden. 
 
 II.— April 26, 1821. 
 
 His most Christian Majesty, Louis XVIII., King of 
 France, having during a short visit to the University in 
 the year 1808 (?) graciously condescended to accept on 
 Jan. 11th of the hospitality of the Principal and 
 Fellows of the College, and to partake of a cold 
 
APPENDIX F 173 
 
 collation, which he was pleased to permit to be served 
 in the Hall to himself and the distinguished persons in 
 his suite; — It had long been determined by the 
 Seniority to record that event so honourable to this 
 Society by the erection of some appropriate monument. 
 Accordingly on this day there was placed in its destined 
 situation in the South window over the Dais in the 
 Hall the painted glass which had been ordered for that 
 purpose, exhibiting in the two central compartments 
 the arms of England and France surmounted each by 
 the proper crown and flanked in the next compartments 
 respectively by the Collars of the Royal Orders of the 
 Garter and the Holy Ghost, likewise surmounted by the 
 crown proper to the sovereign. In the nearest lateral 
 compartments succeed the arms together with their 
 crests of the Principal of that time and of the present 
 Principal, auspiciously supported, and the whole 
 enclosed by those of our pious Founder in the extreme 
 divisions. 
 
 III. 
 
 (This is a pathetic correspondence between the 
 Fellows and Principal of Brasenose and the Visitor, 
 the Bishop of Lincoln. It shows a sudden poverty 
 in the College, which was little more than a century 
 old.) 
 
 To the right honourable and reverend father in 
 God, John Lord Bishop of Lincolne, the honourable 
 
174 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 Visitour of Brasen-nose Colledge in Oxford, the humble 
 Petition of the Principal 1, and fellowes of the said 
 Colledge. 
 
 Whereas James Mason, Batchelour in Divinity, and 
 fellowe of Brasen-nose Colledge lately deceased, indebted 
 to severall Bursars, during the time of his sickness for 
 severall yeares, in a gi'eat summe of money; by which 
 meanes the said Bursars are not able to paye Bakers 
 and Brewers, to the scandal] of the Colledge ; and, for 
 as much as neither the execution of statute or decree 
 was able to prevent this debt, being for meat and 
 drinke, unlesse we should have suffered him, sick and 
 weake in body as he was, without naturall compassion 
 and fellow-feeling to have famished in Prison, as also 
 during that time his weaknes disinabled him to reade to 
 Schollars; neither had he any frend or kinsman that 
 would either then releive him, or whom we can hope for 
 now : soe as there was a necessitie of falling into the 
 debt, which in regard of the slendernes of our 
 revennewes we cannot beare : 
 
 We, the Principall and fellowes of the said Colledge, 
 whose names are under-written, most humbly pray and 
 beseech that your lordshipp wilbe pleased, out of your 
 lordshipps accustomed and speciall care of the welfare 
 of our Colledge, with favour to intei-prett that clause 
 of the statute in Cap : 6 de electione Sociorum (absque 
 omni dolo et fraude intra quadraginta dies alius 
 eligatur) : that we may heepe hw fellow-ship voyde till 
 
APPENDIX F 175 
 
 the proffits have discharged soe necessarie and un- 
 avoydable a debt. 
 
 The Bishop of Lincoln replied : — 
 
 To the Right Worshipfull Master Doctor RadclifFe, 
 Principall of Brasen-nose Col ledge and the fellowes of 
 the same. 
 
 After my verie harty commendaciouns, Whereas I am 
 given to understand, you are to proceede to the election 
 of a new fellow into your Colledge at or before Saturday 
 the xxist of this instant June, according to the time 
 limited by your Statutes: Yet, notwithstanding, in 
 regard of an accident hapned in your College, which (as 
 I am informed) doth much conceme your election and 
 the state of your Colledge : I doe grant you full 
 permission to deferr the said election for six monthes to 
 commence from the said xxist day of this month : at 
 or before which time you shall receive further order 
 from me concerning this business. And soe I committ 
 you to God, restinge 
 
 Your very lovinge freind, 
 
 Jo. Lincoln. 
 
APPENDIX G 
 
 I. — Statistics. 
 
 Censiis of tlie College^ Aug. 1552 : — Principal, 8 
 M.A.X 12 B.A/s, 49 who had not taken a degree, 
 including the steward and the cook ; in all 70 in 
 residence. 
 
 Censtcs in 156f : — Principal, 31 graduates, 57 under- 
 graduate scholars and commoners, 8 poor scholars, 5 
 matriculated servants : in all 102 names on the 
 books. 
 
 Census in 1612 : — Principal, 21 Fellows, 29 Scholai-s, 
 145 Commoners, 17 poor scholars, 14 batellers and 
 matriculated servants : in all 227 members in residence. 
 Revenue d^600 a year. Principal's income <£*80. — 
 (Gutch, Miscellanea Curiosa. Oxford, 1781. I. p. 
 197.) 
 
 Census in 1891 : — Principal, 13 Fellows, 26 Scholars, 
 20 Exhibitioners, 75 Commoners. 
 
II.— 
 
 
 APPENDIX G 
 
 177 
 
 -List of Brasenose Matriculations 
 
 . 
 
 21 
 
 1601 . 
 
 m 
 
 
 19 
 
 1602 . 
 
 35 
 
 
 70 
 
 1603 . 
 
 19 
 
 
 50 
 
 1604 . 
 
 33 
 
 
 29 
 
 1605 . 
 
 41 
 
 
 45 
 
 1606 . 
 
 31 
 
 
 38 
 22 
 
 1607 . 
 
 1608 . 
 
 17 
 6 
 
 
 24 
 
 1609 . 
 
 43 
 
 
 20 
 
 1610 . 
 
 45 
 
 
 25 
 
 1611 . 
 
 "4 
 
 
 28 
 18 
 50 
 29 
 
 1612 . 
 
 1613 . 
 
 1614 . 
 
 1615 . 
 
 1616 . 
 
 3 
 
 30 
 34 
 
 
 11 
 29 
 
 1617 . 
 
 1618 . 
 
 90 
 8 
 
 
 15 
 
 1619 . 
 
 9 
 
 
 52 
 
 1620 . 
 
 29 
 
 
 14 
 
 1621 . 
 
 55 
 
 
 17 
 
 1622 . 
 
 41 
 
 
 . 26 
 
 1623 . 
 
 33 
 
 
 35 
 
 1624 . 
 
 33 
 
 
 30 
 
 1625 . 
 
 30 
 
 
 14 
 
 1626 . 
 
 41 
 
178 
 
 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 1627 . 
 
 42 
 
 1654 
 
 1628 . 
 
 20 
 
 1655 
 
 1629 . . . 
 
 43 
 
 1656 
 
 1630 . 
 
 32 
 
 1657 
 1658 
 
 1631 . 
 
 44 
 
 1659 
 
 1632 , 
 
 34 
 
 1660 
 
 1633 . 
 
 26 
 
 
 1634 . 
 
 39 
 
 1661 
 
 1635 . 
 
 27 
 
 1662 
 
 1636 . 
 
 29 
 
 1663 
 
 1637 . 
 
 28 
 
 1664 
 
 1638 . 
 
 31 
 
 1665 
 
 1639 . 
 
 19 
 
 1666 
 
 1640 . 
 
 24 
 
 1667 
 
 1641 . 
 
 16 
 
 1668 
 
 1642 . 
 
 14 
 
 1669 
 
 1643 . 
 
 4 
 
 1670 
 
 1644 . 
 
 2 
 
 
 1645 . 
 
 __ 
 
 1671 
 
 1646 . 
 
 8 
 
 1672 
 
 1647 . 
 
 13 
 
 1673 
 
 1648 . 
 
 12 
 
 1674 
 
 1649 . 
 
 34 
 
 1675 
 
 1650 . 
 
 26 
 
 1676 
 1677 
 
 1651 . 
 
 27 
 
 1678 
 
 1652 . 
 
 22 
 
 1679 
 
 1653 . 
 
 35 
 
 1680 
 
APPENDIX G 
 
 32 
 
 1708 
 
 19 
 
 1709 
 
 25 
 
 1710 
 
 25 
 
 
 21 
 
 1711 
 
 25 
 
 1712 
 
 16 
 
 1713 
 
 17 
 
 1714 
 
 23 
 
 1715 
 
 16 
 
 1716 
 
 
 1717 
 
 28 
 
 1718 
 
 19 
 
 1719 
 
 24 
 
 1720 
 
 26 
 
 1721 
 
 22 
 
 1722 
 
 31 
 
 1723 
 
 26 
 
 1724 
 
 29 
 
 1725 
 
 22 
 
 1726 
 
 18 
 
 1727 
 
 
 1728 
 
 23 
 
 1729 
 
 22 
 
 1730 
 
 17 
 
 , 
 
 16 
 
 1731 
 
 13 
 
 1732 
 
 10 
 
 1733 
 
 27 
 
 1734 
 
 179 
 
 23 
 20 
 
 27 
 26 
 25 
 28 
 16 
 34 
 17 
 25 
 20 
 27 
 
 26 
 22 
 14 
 24 
 13 
 16 
 18 
 21 
 20 
 17 
 
 17 
 12 
 17 
 19 
 
180 
 
 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 1735 . 
 
 16 
 
 1763 . 
 
 
 1736 . 
 
 11 
 
 1764 . 
 
 
 1737 . 
 
 21 
 
 1765 . 
 
 
 1738 . 
 
 20 
 
 1766 . 
 
 
 1739 . 
 
 21 
 
 1767 . 
 
 
 1740 . 
 
 15 
 
 1768 . 
 
 
 1741 . 
 
 1742 . 
 
 15 
 
 18 
 
 1769 . 
 
 1770 . 
 
 
 1743 . 
 
 9 
 
 1771 . 
 
 
 1744 . 
 
 10 
 
 1772 . 
 
 
 1745 . 
 
 13 
 
 1773 . 
 
 
 1746 . 
 
 9 
 
 1774 . 
 
 
 1747 . 
 
 15 
 
 1775 . 
 
 
 1748 . 
 
 11 
 
 1776 . 
 
 
 1749 . 
 
 9 
 
 1777 . 
 
 
 1750 . 
 
 15 
 
 1778 . 
 
 
 1751 . 
 
 1752 . 
 
 13 
 17 
 
 1779 . 
 
 1780 . 
 
 
 1753 . 
 
 22 
 
 1781 . 
 
 
 1754 . 
 
 14 
 
 1782 . 
 
 
 1755 . 
 
 8 
 
 1783 . 
 
 
 1756 . 
 
 13 
 
 1784 . 
 
 
 1757 . 
 
 13 
 
 1785 . 
 
 
 1758 . 
 
 13 
 
 1786 . 
 
 
 1759 . 
 
 12 
 
 1787 . 
 
 
 1760 . 
 
 15 
 
 1788 . 
 
 
 1761 . 
 
 14 
 
 1789 . 
 
 
 1762 . 
 
 15 
 
 1790 . , 
 
 

 APPENDIX a 
 
 181 
 
 14 
 
 1818 . 
 
 29 
 
 
 16 
 
 1819 . 
 
 34 
 
 
 14 
 
 1820 . 
 
 37 
 
 
 16 
 
 
 
 
 19 
 
 1821 . 
 
 33 
 
 
 18 
 
 1822 . 
 
 37 
 
 
 18 
 
 1823 . 
 
 42 
 
 
 18 
 
 1824 . 
 
 41 
 
 
 9 
 
 1825 . 
 
 29 
 
 
 22 
 
 1826 . 
 
 26 
 
 
 
 1827 . 
 
 27 
 
 
 . 19 
 
 1828 . 
 
 19 
 
 
 28 
 
 1829 . 
 
 22 
 
 
 17 
 
 1830 . 
 
 32 
 
 
 25 
 
 
 
 
 27 
 
 1831 . 
 
 22 
 
 
 24 
 
 1832 . 
 
 36 
 
 
 27 
 
 1833 . 
 
 40 
 
 
 26 
 
 1834 . 
 
 21 
 
 
 26 
 
 1835 . 
 
 20 
 
 
 34 
 
 1836 . 
 
 34 
 
 
 
 1837 . 
 
 36 
 
 
 24 
 
 1838 . 
 
 25 
 
 
 29 
 
 1839 . 
 
 33 
 
 
 28 
 
 1840 
 
 33 
 
 
 . 39 
 
 
 
 
 41 
 
 1841 . 
 
 35 
 
 
 34 
 
 1842 . 
 
 27 
 
 
 35 
 
 1843 . 
 
 24 
 
l82 
 
 brasenose college 
 
 1844 . 
 
 29 
 
 1871 
 
 1845 . 
 
 33 
 
 1872 
 
 1846 . 
 
 32 
 
 1873 
 
 1847 . 
 
 25 
 
 1874 
 
 1848 . ' . 
 
 27 
 
 1875 
 
 1849 . 
 
 28 
 
 1876 
 
 1850 . 
 
 22 
 
 1877 
 
 1851 . 
 
 1852 . 
 
 1853 . 
 
 24 
 26 
 
 37 
 
 1878 
 1879 
 1880 
 
 1854 . 
 
 27 
 
 1881 
 
 1855 . 
 
 17 
 
 1882 
 
 1856 . 
 
 20 
 
 1883 
 
 1857 . 
 
 30 
 
 1884 
 
 1858 . 
 
 20 
 
 1885 
 
 1859 . 
 
 30 
 
 1886 
 
 1860 . 
 
 31 
 
 1887 
 
 1861 . 
 
 1862 . 
 
 1863 . 
 
 29 
 28 
 27 
 
 1888 
 1889 
 1890 
 
 1864 . 
 
 28 
 
 1891 
 
 1865 . 
 
 ^ 28 
 
 1892 
 
 1866 . 
 
 28 
 
 1893 
 
 1867 . . . 
 
 29 
 
 1894 
 
 1868 . 
 
 37 
 
 1895 
 
 1869 . 
 
 31 
 
 1896 
 
 1870 . 
 
 37 
 
 1897 
 
APPENDIX H 
 
 Principal Benefactions 
 
 Bishop William Smyth, the founder, gave Basset's 
 Fee in Oxford, and the property of the suppressed 
 Priory of Cold Norton. The priory was apparently 
 purchased from the Crown by the Convent of St. 
 Stephen's, Westminster, which made a good bargain by 
 selling it at a profit to the Bishop of Lincoln, who in 
 turn presented it to the College. The property seems 
 to have given the College a good deal of trouble in the 
 Chancery coui-ts. 
 
 Sir Richard Sutton gave lands in Leicestershire ; 
 the White Hart in the Strand, London ; and lands in 
 Cropredy, North Ockington, Garsington and Cowley. 
 
 Elizabeth Morley, of Westminster, widow, in 1515 
 gave the manor of Pinchpole or Pinchpoll in Chipping 
 Faringdon, as well as other lands in the same neigh- 
 bourhood, to " provide a Priest, who is to be a Fellow, 
 to preach in person or by deputy once a year at 
 St. Margaret's, Westminster, and there expressly to 
 name Elizabeth Morley." If this service was neglected 
 
184 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 a fine of 20,y. was due to the Warden and Fellows of New 
 College. 
 
 John Port, Serjeant at law, in behalf of John 
 Williamson, Rector of St. George's in Canterbury, in 
 1522 gave £W0 to purchase lands of the yearly value 
 of £9 for the maintenance of two fellows. 
 
 John Elton or Baker, Canon of the Cathedral 
 Church of Salisbury, gave lands in Stanlake and 
 Ducklington in Oxfordshire, and at Kennington in 
 Gloucestershire. 
 
 Joyce Frankland, of London, widow, in 1586, gave 
 the Red Lion in Kensington, "certain marsh ground 
 known by the name of Mesday in the County of Kent," 
 and considerable sums of money, which were laid out in 
 the purchase of land at Water-eaton in Berkshire. 
 
 John Claymond, President of Corpus Christi College, 
 in 1538 left ^£^480 to purchase lands, as well as certain 
 rents chargeable on properties in Cheshire. The money 
 was to go to establish six scholarships to be called by 
 his name. 
 
 Sir John Port, Knight, in 1560 bequeathed ^200 
 to found readerships in philosophy and history. 
 
 John Lord Mordaunt, in 1571 gave by will the 
 Manor of Tiptofts and Highams in Essex and other 
 lands to maintain three scholars, to be called Mordaunfs 
 Scholars. 
 
 Queen Elizabeth, in 1572 and 1579, founded Middle- 
 ton School in liancashire, connected it with the College 
 by scholarships, and presehted the manor of UpbeiTy, 
 
APPENDIX H 185 
 
 the Rectory of Gillingham, and the Chapel of 
 Lidsing. 
 
 Richard Harper in 1572 left certain lands in Derby 
 to found a Greek lectureship. 
 
 Samuel Radcliffe, Principal of the College, in 1648 
 left ^1000 for building the Chapel and .£600 for the 
 Cloisters. 
 
 Sarah Duchess of Somerset in 1679 gave Somerset 
 Iver and Somerset Thornhill Scholarships, and alternate 
 presentation to Wootton Rivers. 
 
 Thomas Yate in 1680 left lands and money to endow 
 three scholarships. 
 
 William Hulme in 1691 left land producing £4}0 a 
 year for four exhibitions from Lancashire to Brasenose. 
 The property, which lay in the Hulme district of 
 Manchester, has now become very valuable and provides, 
 besides High Schools in Manchester and a Hulme Hall 
 connected with the Victoria University, eight Senior 
 and twelve Junior Exhibitions, of the value of .^'ISO 
 and c£'80 respectively. 
 
 Sir Francis Bridgeman in 1701 left money for an 
 annual composition, originally in praise of James the 
 Second, but now given for any essay in history or 
 philosophy. 
 
 William Grimbaldson, M.D., in 1725 left c£*1000 to 
 buy books for the Library. 
 
 The three Misses Colquitt of Green Bank in 
 Lancashire in 1842 founded three Colquitt Exhibitions 
 "to assist in the education for the Ministry in the 
 
186 • BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 Church of England of the sons of indigent or deceased 
 clergymen or of such laymen as cannot unaided support 
 the expense of a College Education." 
 
 In 1875 an open Classical Scholarship of the value of 
 dE'lOO yearly was founded by Mrs. Jane Robinson in 
 memory of her brother, the Rev. John Watson, M.A., 
 sometime Fellow of the College, 
 
APPENDIX I 
 
 Graces before and after Meals 
 
 Ante Prandkim, 
 
 Oculi omnium spectant in te, Domine! Tu das 
 illas escas tempore opportuno. Aperis manum tuam et 
 imples omne animal tua benedictione. Mensae ccelestis 
 nos participes facias, Deus, rex aetemae gloriae. 
 
 Post Prandium. 
 
 Qui nos creavit, redemit, et pavit, sit benedictus in 
 seternum. Deus, exaudi orationem nostram. Agimus 
 tibi gratias. Pater Ccelestis, pro Guilielmo Smith 
 Episcopo, et Richardo Sutton Milite, Fundatoribus 
 nostris ; pro Alexandro Nowell et Jocosa Frankland, 
 aliisque Benefactoribus nostris; humiliter te precantes 
 ut eorum numerum benignissime adaugeas. Ecclesiam 
 Catholicam, et populum Christianum custodi. Hasreses 
 et errores omnes extirpa. Victoriam Reginam nostram 
 et subditos ejus defende. Pacem da et conserva per 
 Christum Dominum nostrum. 
 
188 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 Ante Coenam, 
 
 Omnipotens et sempiteme Deus, sine quo nihil est 
 dulce, nihil odoriferum, misericordiam tuam humiliter 
 imploramus, ut nos coenamque nostram benedicas ; ut 
 corda nostra exhilares; ut quae suscepturi sumus 
 alimenta, tuo honori, tuaeque beneficentiae accepta 
 referamus ; per Christum Dominum nostrum. 
 
 Post Coenam. 
 
 Quod corpora nostra, Deus optime maxime, cibo 
 potuque abunde refecisti, agimus tibi gratias, quantas 
 possumus maximas ; simulque precamur, ut animas 
 nostras Verbo et Spiritu deinde pascas ; ut omnia mala 
 fugiamus; ut quae sint tibi placitura perfecte in- 
 telligamus, diligenter meditemur, et ad ea praestanda 
 toto impetu feramur ; per Christum Dominum 
 nostrum. 
 
APPENDIX J 
 
 A Letter from John Clayton of Brasenose to 
 John Wesley, August 1, 1732* 
 
 " Bocardo, I fear, grows worse upon my hands ; they 
 have done nothing but quaiTel ever since you left us ; 
 and they carried matters so high on Saturday that the 
 bailiffs were sent for, who ordered Tomlyns to be 
 fettered and put in the dungeon, where he lay some 
 hours and then, upon promise of his good behaviour, 
 was released again. 
 
 " The Castle is, I thank God, in much better condi- 
 tion. All the felons were acquitted except Salmon, 
 who is referred to be tried at Warwick ; and the sheep- 
 stealer ^^ho is burnt in the hand, and who, I verily 
 believe, is a great penitent. Jempro is discharged, and 
 I have appointed Han'is to read to the prisoners in his 
 stead. Two of the felons likewise have paid their fees 
 and are gone out, both of them able to read mighty 
 well. There are only two in the gaol who want the 
 accomplishment — John Clanville, who reads but moder- 
 
 * This letter is valuable as showing that an interest in the new 
 Methodism existed in the Jacobite and Tory College. 
 
190 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 ately, and the horse-stealer, who cannot read at all. 
 He knows all his letters, however, and can spell most of 
 the common monosyllables, I have them both read 
 three times a week ; and, I believe, Salmon hears them 
 so many times a day. 
 
 '*' One of my college scholars has left me, but the 
 others go on mighty well. The woman, who was a 
 perfect novice, spells tolerably ; and so does one of the 
 boys ; and the others make shift to read with spelling 
 every word that is longer than ordinary. The boys can 
 both say their Catechism as far as the end of the Com- 
 mandments ; and can likewise repeat the morning and 
 evening prayer for children in Kent's Manual. 
 
 " Mrs. Tireby has been very ill this last week, so that 
 she has made no great profi<jiency. I am to go down at 
 six o''clock to hear the determination of a meeting of 
 St. Thomas'* parish respecting separating Bossum and 
 his wife. When I had promised to give a crown 
 towards clothing the woman, and the overseer had 
 determined to take her in upon that condition, the 
 churchwarden would needs have him try to foist the 
 man upon me too, to get a crown towards clothing 
 him ; but, as he is able to work for his living, I don't 
 think him a proper object for charity; nor can I at 
 this time afford to do anything for him, because I am 
 apprehensive that I must be forced to contribute to 
 Salmon's relief, who will want near twenty shillings to 
 subpoena proper witnesses to Warwick at his trial ; and 
 I cannot but think it a much greater act of charity to 
 
APPENDIX J 191 
 
 relieve a suffering innocent than to relieve an idle 
 beggar. 
 
 " I have been twice at the school, namely, on Tuesday 
 and Saturday last, and intend to go again as soon as I 
 have finished this letter. The children all go on pretty 
 well except Jervaise's boy, who, I found, truants till 
 eleven o'clock in a morning. I threatened the boy 
 what we would do to him if ever he truanted any more, 
 and he has promised (as all children do) that he will do 
 so no more ; nay, his mother assures me that she will 
 take care for the future that he shall not. I got a 
 shilling for her from our Vice-Principal, and gave her 
 sixpence myself to prevent the gown that is in pawn 
 from being sold ; and the woman who has it promised 
 not to sell it, provided Jervaise will bring her sixpence 
 a week towards redeeming it. 
 
 " I have obtained leave to go to St. Thomas"* workhouse 
 twice a week. I am sure the people stand much in 
 need of instruction, for there is hardly a soul that can 
 read in the whole house, and those that can don't 
 understand one word of what they read. Pray don't 
 forget a few Common Prayer-books for the Castle." 
 
APPENDIX K 
 
 Extracts from Letters of Richard Dod Baker 
 WHO Matriculated at Brasenose in 1801* 
 
 Oxford, Odh. 14, 1801. 7 o'clock. 
 
 My dear Cousins, 
 
 I should not feel perfectly content without 
 addressing a few lines to you just to inform you how I 
 am fixed in this seat of Learning. I took possession of 
 my rooms t on Saturday, and I assure you they are 
 much more comfortable than I expected — my sitting- 
 room is as large as your little parlour and to appearance 
 much more comfortable — a bureau, 5 chairs and a table 
 in it. My drawing-room (for so I please to call it) is 
 smaller, but neater, a glass door out of my sitting-room 
 to it with two chairs and 2 tables. My bedroom is a 
 little larger than sitting-room with a very comfortable 
 bed, bureau, etc., all together, as if it were our three 
 
 * I have printed these letters because they seem to give a sort of 
 picture of Oxford life at a transition period. 
 
 t The only rooms which suit the description are those on the 
 Library staircase, at present occupied by the Vice-Principal. 
 
APPENDIX K 193 
 
 parlours at Highfields, but a door to each out of my 
 S.R. I have been this morning with some of the Tutors 
 to buy myself a set of tea-things, Candlesticks, silver tea 
 spoons, sheets, towels, etc., and though Oxford is the 
 most improving place in the world it could not I think 
 cheat us enough in our small articles. Figure to your- 
 self a venerable elderly man and myself with our caps 
 and gowns choosing and buying the best China, good 
 judges, Pm sui*e I could not tell China from common 
 
 ware Oxford is at this time extremely dull, the 
 
 young men not coming up till the 17th, there are but 
 
 13 of us here, on Sunday we shall be quite full 
 
 We all dine together in the Common Hall with servants 
 to wait, and you order what you like. Supper at 9. 
 Prayers 7 morning, 5 evening. 
 
 II. 
 
 Oxford, Dec. 10, 1801. 
 My dear Cousin, 
 
 Though I received yours on 26th Nov. I hope 
 you will not attribute my not having written before to 
 any neglect ; for I have been so very busy with one 
 thing and another that I have scarcely had time to 
 wonder what I am about, but for a short time the 
 
 storm will subside as the term ended this morning 
 
 I daresay little as you know of this seat of learning you 
 have heard that our examinations for degrees have 
 always hitherto been laughed at as trifling and a mere 
 
194 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 matter of form, but now they have assumed a very 
 serious aspect, and as your Cousin is to take one you 
 will not deem the following short account of the end 
 Examination I have to undergo at all improper. There 
 is now a large room fitted up for the purpose which will 
 contain I should imagine 300 persons, there are benches 
 for the Vice-Chancellor, Proctors, Drs., Heads of 
 Colleges and Halls, etc., who are all required to attend 
 at this most solemn occasion and about 200 auditors. 
 There are perhaps six examined at a time and this 
 occupies from 9 in the morning till 3 in the afternoon ; 
 so that whoever thinks of taking a degree must fag. I 
 have formed a very respectable and agreeable acquaint- 
 ance, but it was long before I thought I should form 
 any, and nothing is so dull and melancholy as having 
 no one to speak to me, as was my case for a fortnight or 
 more. 
 
 III. 
 
 Brasenose College. 
 No date. 
 My dear Cousin, 
 
 .... After a very pleasant journey we anived 
 at this celebrated seat of learning on Thursday last 
 and although the College rules do not want our attend- 
 ance till 17th I found everything very comfortable, 
 .... On Friday my father introduced me to a Mrs. 
 Smith — a lady of considerable property in the neigh- 
 bourhood. Such an acquaintance will be very pleasant 
 
APPENDIX K 195 
 
 at least very different from the noisy riot of a College 
 evg., without Company of some sort Oxford I do assure 
 you would be quite intolerable, and the man who pens 
 himself up in his attic poring everlastingly over his 
 book can be compared to nothing better than an " Owl 
 in a Desart."'* Study however affords many an hour's 
 rational amusement, but like everything else there may 
 be too much of it ; for my own part I think 6 hours in 
 the day quite sufficient, much time therefore must be 
 devoted to other objects and it should be our own care 
 to spend it in the best manner. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abingdon, 26, 149 
 Alderson, Joseph, 63 
 Ale Verses, 72-75 
 Alfred, King-, 78, 86, 125 
 All Saints' Church, 82 
 All Souls' CoUe^^e, 48, 49, 58, 80, 84 
 Amherst (terrcnjilius), 51, 54 
 Anatomy of Melancholy , The, 123-124 
 Andrew of Durham, 6 
 An«;llng, 45 {note), 87-88 
 Animals in College, 43 
 Aristotle, 44, 91 
 Arms of CoUegfe, 94-95 
 Arran, Earl of, 48 
 Ashmole, Elias, 125-126 
 Ashmolean Museum, 126 
 Athenaeum Club, 129 
 Athletics. See Sports 
 ^ Aula. See Halls 
 Aularis. See Halls 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 121 
 
 Bacon, Friar, and Friar Bungay, 
 
 118-119 
 Bacon, Roger, 64, 118-119 
 Badminton on Rowing:, 98 
 Bagley, 40 
 
 Baker's Comedies, 60 
 Baker, John. See Elton 
 Baker, Richard Dod, 192-194 
 Baldwin Brown, Professor, 161 
 Baliudon, Simon de, 6 
 Ball, Fancy Dress, and I'olka, 73 
 Balliol College, 30, 40, 45, 86, 97, 99 
 Barham, R. H., 68, 61-62, 63, 126-128 
 Barker, Thomas, 31, 62, 70, 90, 156 
 Barntield, Richard, 46, 122 
 Baxter, H. F., 104 
 Bay lis. Judge, 151 
 Beaumont, The, 40 
 
 Bellewes, G. O., 77 
 
 Bell's Life, quoted, 100, 102 
 
 Bembo, Cardinal, 91 
 
 Benefactions, 18-20, 26-28, 183-186 
 
 Bentley, Richard, 90 
 
 Berkeley, Bishop, 46 
 
 Bethell. See Westbury, Lord 
 
 Bible-reader, 41 
 
 Black Hall, 2, 14, 159-161 
 
 Blackmore, R. D., his Cripps the 
 
 Carrier, 146-149 
 Blackwood's Magazine, (luoted, 36 
 
 {note), 63-66, 67,128 
 Blanchard, Thomas, 156 
 Blandford, Bishop, 83 
 lioethius, 164 
 
 Bologna, Giovanni da, 79, 139 
 Borrow, George, 136 
 Bostock, Ralph, 156 
 Brackley, Viscount. See Ellesmere 
 Braggys, William, 155 
 Brasenose Debating Society, 76-77 
 BrasenoseHall,!, 2,6-17,38,158-161 
 Brasenose Lane. See Lane 
 Brasinium or Brew House, 93 
 Bridgeman, Sir Francis, 27-28, 185 
 Bridgewater, Earl of, 121 
 Brooks, M. J., 117 
 Buckingham, Marquis of, 87 
 Buckinghamshire, 84 
 Buckley, W. E., 77, 91, 122 {note) 
 Bullingdon Club, 115 
 Bunbury, J. McC, 107 
 Burghley, Lord, 166-169 
 Burgon, Deau, 95 
 Burnet, Bishop, 48 
 Burton, Sir Richard, 124 
 Burton, Robert, 87, 122-124 
 Bussell, Dr. F. W., 139-140 
 Buttery, 92-93 
 
198 
 
 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 CamBRIIKJE, 44, 63, 90, 99-113, 125 
 
 Carroll, Lewis, 142 
 
 Castle of Oxford, 7, 189-191 
 
 Cawley, Ralph, 31, 84, 156 
 
 Cazenove, J. G., 77 
 
 Census of the College, 176 
 
 Chapel, 40-41 
 
 Charles I., 21, 79, 125 
 
 Charles, M., his Roger Bnc n, sa Vie, 
 
 118-119 
 Charnock, Hugh, 156 
 Cheny, Lord, 166-169 
 Cheshire, 18, 40, 120 
 Cheshiiilt, 10 
 Chesterfield, Lord, 151 
 Child of Hale. See Middleton, John 
 Christ Church, 21, 26, 49, 55, 80, 96, 
 
 122-124 
 Church, Thomas, 36 
 Churton, llalph, 19, 46 (wo<e), 92 
 
 {note), 165 {note), 171 
 Cicero, 44 
 
 Clarke, Dr. George, 79 
 Clay rnond, John, 18 19, 36, 184 
 Claymondiue Scholars, 19 
 Claj'ton, John, 189-191 
 Cleaver, William, 31, 69-70, 87, 127, 
 
 156 
 Clitherow, 86 
 Club. See Athenaeum, Bullingdon, 
 
 Constitution, Etonian, Gridiron, 
 
 Hell-flre, riioenix, Kota 
 Clyfton, William, 18 
 Coke, Sir Edward, 120 
 Colchester, Lord, 129 
 Colet, Dean, 9 
 Colquitt, Misses, 185-186 
 Commission, Is'ew University, 34-36 
 Constitution Club, 29, 50 
 Cooper, Master Thomas, of Brasenose 
 
 Hall, 8, 162-164 
 Copleston, Bishop, 127 
 Corpus Christi College, 9, 13, 19, 95 
 Coverley, Sir Koger de, 136 
 Cowley, Mrs., 54 
 
 Cox, G. v., his Recollections, 69-72 
 Cradock, Edward Hartopp, 34, 36 
 
 {vote), 87, 157 
 Cranmer's Litany, 91 
 Creighton, Mandell. See London, 
 
 Bishop of 
 Cricket. See Sport 
 Croston or Croftou, Edmund, 10, 90, 
 
 155 
 
 Curth or CImrch, William, 155 
 Curzon, Hon. Ashton, 86 
 
 Daniel, Samuel, 121 
 Davis, Stephen, the Boat- builder, 96 
 Day's Psalter, of 1563, 91 
 Deer-park, The, 81, 83, 89, 92 
 Derwentwater, Lord, 49 
 Dibdin, tlie Bibliophile, 129 
 Dilet, Adam, 6 
 Doncastei', 133 
 
 Edinburch University, 131 
 
 Edward I., 4 
 
 Edward III., 7 
 
 Edwardes-Moss, T. C, 108-110 
 
 Egerton. See Ellesmere 
 
 Eldon, Lord, 64 
 
 Elizabeth, (iuecn, 20, 121, 184 
 
 Ellesmere, Thomas Baron, 87,120-121 
 
 Elton, John, 184 
 
 Epsom, 133 
 
 Erasmus, 9 
 
 Erdeswicke, Sampson, 119-120 
 
 Essex, 54 
 
 Essex, Earl of, 44, 120 
 
 Eton, 121, 130, 151 
 
 Etonian Club, 99, 107 
 
 Exeter College, 97 
 
 Exeter Gardens, 1, 59, 66 
 
 Eynsham, 2 
 
 Fellows' Garden, 81, 172 
 Field, The, quoted, 108-109 
 Fines and Penalties, 5, 6, 42, 64 
 Formby, John, 155-156 
 Fortesque, Lord, 63 
 Foundation of College, 13 
 Foxe, John, 90 {note), 119 
 Frankland, Joyce, 19, 36, 87, 92 
 
 {note), 120-171, 184, 187 
 Fronde, J. A., 126 
 Fuller's Worthies^ 46 {note) 
 
 Games tn College, 43 
 Garnett, W. B., 98 
 Gay, John, 53 
 Gentleman Jackson, 136 
 Gentlemen-Commoners, 16, 29, 50, 
 
 56, 61 
 Germaine, K. A., 77 
 Gibbon, Edward, 53 
 Gilbert, Ashurst Turner, 32-34, 69, 
 
 87, 157 
 
INDEX 
 
 199 
 
 Glass Hall, 2, 14,159-161 
 
 Glendall, John, 63 
 
 Gloucester, 51 
 
 Gloucester Hall, 53 
 
 Goodwyn, J. W., 107 
 
 Gosse, Edmund, 139-141 
 
 Graces before and after Meals, 187- 
 
 188 
 Grant, Miss, of Rothiemurchus, 46 
 Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar 
 
 Bungay^ 119 
 Greenwood, Daniel, 22, 156 
 Grenville, LordGeorj^e, 61, 63, 69 
 Grey, Koger, 155 
 Gridiron Club, 52 
 Grimbaldson, Dr., 91, 185 
 Grocyne, 9 
 
 GuilUm, John, 121-122 
 Gunstou, llichard, 156 
 Gutch's Miscellanea Curiosa, 176 
 Gwyn, William, 31, 156 
 
 Haberdashers' Hall, 1, 2, 169-161 
 
 Halcombe, T. K., 77 
 
 Hale, 92 
 
 Hall. See Brasenose Hall, Little 
 University, Little St, Edmund's, 
 Haberdashers', Salisbury, Black, 
 Glass, Staple, Ivy, Hinksey, Hart, 
 St. Alban's, Gloucester, Kettle. 
 
 Halls, Early, 3-6, 38-40, 168-161 
 
 Hamilton's, 52 
 
 Harding. See Hawarden 
 
 Hardwick, Philip, 82 
 
 Harington, Richard, 34, 63, 157 
 
 Harper, Richard, 185 
 
 Harrys, Richard, 156 
 
 Hart Hall, Death of Principal of, 9 
 
 Haster, John, 156 
 
 Hawarden, Hugh, 9 
 
 Hawarden, John, 119, 156 
 
 Hawksmoor, Nicholas, 82 
 
 Hearne, 29, 30-31, 41 {note), 48, 73 
 {note), 79 
 
 Hebdomadal Council, 48 
 
 Heber, Reginald, 58-61, 62, 63, 69, 
 73, 126 
 
 Heber, Richard, 38, 59, 128-130 
 
 Heberden, Charles BuUer, 37, 157 
 
 Hell-flre Club, 66-69 
 
 Henley, Hugh, 36 
 
 Henley Regatta, 99-115, 144 
 
 Henry IV., 95 
 
 Hereford, Cathedral School of, 122 
 
 Hey lie, Adam, 155, 161 
 
 Hicks, Canon, 151 
 
 Higden, Brian, 18 
 
 High Street, 1, 29 
 
 Hinksey Hall, 9 
 
 Hodson, Frodsham, 31, 57, 60, 62, 63, 
 
 70, 87, 157 
 Hogarth, 47 
 
 Holland, W.F., 110-113 
 Holywell, 46, 53 
 Hook, Theodore, 61 
 Horses — Kutosoff, Grey Momus, The 
 
 Lawyer, Gaspard, St. Giles, 
 
 Elcho, 134 
 Hulme, William, 27, 185 
 Huntly, Marquis of, 134 
 
 Iffley Lock, 97 
 Ingoldsby Essay Club, 77 
 Ingoldsby Legends, 61 
 Inquisition of 1278, 6 
 Ivy Hall, 159 
 
 Jackson, Cyril, 55 
 Jackson, T. G., 82 
 Jacobite Oxford, 28, 47-53 
 James I. of England, 14, 78 
 James II., panegyric on, 28 
 James IIL, 29-30, 49 
 Jesus College, 96 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 52, 124 
 Jonson, Ben, 121 
 Junior Common Room, 82-83 
 Jussell, Jetlry, 6 
 
 Kaye, Bishop, 91 
 
 Kennet, Bishop, 124 
 
 Kent, C. W., 110-113 
 
 Kettle Hall, 53 
 
 King's Head Tavern, 29 
 
 Kingsley, Charles, 126 
 
 Kingsley, Henry, his Itavenshoe, 149 
 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 150 
 
 Kitchen, 92 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 124 
 Lancashire, 10, 18, 71, 92 
 Lane, Brasenose, 1, 2, 67-63 
 Latham, Dr. John, 87, 126 
 Lathbury, D. C, 77 
 Latin, use of, 5, 27, 41 
 Laud, Archbishop, 21 
 Lecky, W. E., 131 
 Lee, Richard {PortculUs), 95 
 
200 
 
 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 Lee, Sidney, 119 
 
 Leg-h, John, 15G 
 
 Library, 87-91 
 
 Liclifield, See of Coventry and, 11 
 
 Linacre, 9, 44 
 
 Lincoln, Bishop of, 16, 178-176. See 
 
 also Smyth, Longland, Kussell 
 Lincoln College, 11, 14, 37, 94 
 Lincolnshire, 7 
 Little St. Edmund's Hall, 1, 2, 14, 
 
 169-161 
 Little St. Thomas's Hall, 161 
 Little University Hall, 1, 2, 12, 38, 
 
 86. 159-161 
 Lockhart, J. G., his Life of Scoti, 
 
 59-61 
 Lodge, Professor, 161 
 Loggan's View of the College, 79 
 Logic, Study of, 44, 47 
 London, Bishop of, 140 
 Long, William, 185 
 Longland, John, Bishop of Lincoln, 
 
 90 
 Lord's, 144. See also Cricket 
 Louis XVIII. of France, 86, 172 
 Luther, 10 (note) 
 Lyne'a Coffee-house, 52 
 Lyte, Maxwell, 118 
 
 Macdonell, p. J., 77 
 
 Madan, F., quoted, 28, 79, 91, 115 
 
 Magdalen College, 43, 74, 112, 115 
 
 Malton, 133 
 
 Manchester, 26, 27, 31 
 
 Manchester, Dean of, 151 
 
 Mar, Earl of, 49 
 
 Marcham or Markham, R., 166 
 
 Marrrdon^ quoted, 130 
 
 Marriott, H. P., 108-110 
 
 Maskell, W., 67 
 
 Mason, Dr. Henry, 90 
 
 Mason, James, 174 
 
 Mather, Cotton, 124 
 
 Mather, Richard, 124 
 
 Matriculations, list of Brasenose, 
 
 177-182 
 Meare, John, 31, 156 
 Medmenham, 66 
 Merlin, prophecy of, 7 
 Mermaid Tavern, 46 
 Merton College, 9, 21, 48, 49, 74, 
 
 118-119, 121 
 Merton Fields, 62 
 Messenger, Roland, 13, 156 
 
 Methodism, 189-191 
 
 Middleton Grammar School, 32-33 
 
 165-169 
 Middleton, John, 92 
 Milman, Henry Hart, 61-62, 130-131 
 Milton, John, 124 
 Mitre Tavern, 53 
 Molyneux, Henry, 155, 161 
 Molyneux, John, 9, 155, 161 (note) 
 Mordaunt, John Lord, 87, 184 
 Morley, Elizabeth, 183-184 
 Munimenta Academica, 8, 158-164 
 Music in College, 43 
 
 New College, 78, 112-113 
 
 Neto Oxford Guide^ 55 
 
 New Jlepublic, The, 141 
 
 Newdigate Prize, 58-59, 62 
 
 Northerners, 7, 9, 10, 38-39 
 
 Nose, the brazen, 8, 86 
 
 Notes and Queries, 95 
 
 Nowell, Alexander, Dean of St. 
 Paul's, 19-20, 32, 33, 45, 87-88, 
 119, 156, 165-169, 171,187 
 
 Nugent, Lord. See Grenville, Lord 
 George 
 
 Oakley, J., 77 
 
 Ogle, Humphrey, 36 
 
 Oriel College, 1, 2, 11, 13, 29, 45, 57 
 
 Oriel Treasurer's Accounts, 155 
 
 Ormond, Duke of, 29, 48, 49 
 
 Osborne, Lord Sidney Godolphin, 63, 
 
 126 
 Oseney, Abbey and Canons of, 2, 13 
 Ovid, 50, 164 
 
 Oxford Almanack of 1723, 82 
 Oxford, Ingram's Memorials of, 82, 
 
 87 (note) 
 Oxonia, Williams's, 82 
 
 Papal Legate, 39 
 
 Paradise Garden, 52 
 
 Paris, Statue of, 4 
 
 Parker, H. R., 110 
 
 Parkinson, Robert, 11 
 
 Parliamentarians in Oxford, 21-23 
 
 Parr, Dr., 65 
 
 Past and Present Cricket Match, 
 
 116-117 
 Pater, Walter, 84, 137-142 
 Pattison, Mark, 67, 140 
 Pauling, R., 25 
 Pearson, Bishop, 91 
 
INDEX 
 
 201 
 
 Peckwater's Inn, 9 
 
 Peecham, Henry, his Vallie of 
 
 Vanitie, 128 
 Peel, Sir Robert, 70, 131 
 Pembroke College, 36 (no<e), 51, 52, 53 
 Pendennis, 144 
 
 Pepys, Samuel, his visit to Oxford, 25 
 Petty, Sir William, 23 
 Philip, " obsonator Eneanasensis," 8 
 Phoenix Common Room, 31, 01,62-63 
 Pinock, William, 28 
 Plate Book, 92 (note) 
 Plato and Platonism, 139 
 Pocklington, D., 105 
 Poole, K. H., 110 
 Port, Bernard, 63-65 
 Port, John, 18, 185 
 Port Meadow, The, 150 
 Poussin's Assumption of St. Paul, 84 
 Preston, 49 
 Price, Bonamy, 140 
 Principals of the College, 14, 15 
 Principals of the Halls, 4, 8-9 
 Priscian, 44 
 Punch, 150 
 
 Quadrangles, 78-83 
 Quintilian, 44 
 
 Kadcliff, Dr. Samuel, 22, 83, 87, 
 
 156, 175, 185 
 Radcliffe Library, 2, 80 
 Radcliffe Square, 54, 59, 85, 89, 145 
 Ralegh, Sir Walter, 45 
 Restoration in Oxford, The, 23-25 
 Resurrectionists, 93 
 Richmond, Margaret Lady, 10 
 Ridge, Richard, 156 
 Robertson, F. W., of Brighton, 84, 
 
 131-132 
 Robinson, Mrs. Jane, 186 
 Rochester, Dean of, 63, 151 
 Rota Club, 23 
 Rowing. See Sport 
 Royds, F. C, 100-104 
 Rucker, Professor, 151 
 Russell, Lord John, 131 
 Ru8S€ll,Johu,Bishop of Lincoln, 2, 80 
 
 Sacheverell, 43 
 
 St. Alban's Hall, 9 
 
 St, John's College, 21 
 
 St. Leger, The, 134 
 
 St. Mary's Church, 2, 80, 83, 141 
 
 St. Mary's College, 84 
 
 St. Mary's Entry, 1, 2, 13, 158-161 
 
 Salisbury Hall, 1, 2, 13, 158-161 
 
 Saunderson, John, 44 
 
 Savile, Sir Henry, 121 
 
 Saxye, William, 92 {note), 170 
 
 Sayers, Tom, 136 
 
 Schools Street, 1, 2 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 59-61, 129-130 
 
 Scotus, Duns, 25, 64, 78-79, 118 
 
 Seagar, Stephen, 28 
 
 Seal of College, 94 
 
 Senior Common Room, 14, 69, 83, 
 
 127-128 
 Shakespeare, 45, 122 
 Sharpe, Charles Kirkpatrick, 55, 65 
 Shepherd, R., 104 
 Shippen, Robert, 31, 156 
 Shirwood, Richard, 156 
 Shotover, 40 
 Singleton, Thomas, 156 
 Sledmere, 133-136 
 Smarts, Oxford, 51-53, 69 
 Smith, Sidney, 131 
 Smyth, Matthew, 14, 155-156 
 Smyth, William, Bisliop of Lincoln, 
 
 10-16, 86, 90, 94, 183, 187 
 Soane, Sir John, 82 
 Somerset, Sarah, Duchess of, 26-27, 
 
 87, 185 
 Sorbi6re, 25, 146 
 Spagnoletto, 84 
 Spelman, Sir John, 125 
 Sport, College, 76, 96-117 
 Staffordshire, 45, 119, 122 
 Stamford, 7-8 
 Staple Hall, 2, 159-161 
 Starkey, Simon, 156 
 Slatuta Aularia, 5 
 Statutes of College, 15, 40-43 
 Statutumpro Determinatoribus{liOO), 
 
 159 
 Stephanus, Henry, 90 (note) 
 Stevenson, R. L., 66, 151-152 
 Stewart, W. B., 113 
 Stoddard, James, 36 
 Suffield, Lord, 32 
 Suicide Club, 66 
 Sutton, Sir Richard, 10, 12-15, 85, 
 
 91, 94-95, 183, 187 
 Sutton, William, 8, 12, 155 
 Sutton Society, 77 
 Swinburne, A. C, 74, 140 
 Sykes, Sir Tatton, 132-187 
 
202 
 
 BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 Tatham, E. E. H., 77 
 
 Tattersall, Cecil, 61 
 
 Taverns. See Mitre, King's Head, 
 
 Mermaid 
 Terence, 60, 91 
 "Toe, Dr.," 63-66 
 Torpids, 99-114 
 Toryism, 46, 47-50, 53 
 Tractarian Movement, The, 71-72 
 Tradescant, John, 125 
 Trapps, Kobert, 19, 170 
 Trinity College, 24, 74 
 
 Union Debating Society, The, 73- 
 
 74,77 
 University College, 2, 12, 13, 46, 83 
 
 Valentia, Lord, 63 
 Verdant Green, 144-146 
 Visitors of the College, 16, 35 
 
 Wadham College, 24, 30 
 
 Walden, Leonard, 49 
 
 Wales, President of, 11 
 
 Walls, R. G., 98 
 
 Walton, Izaak, 87-88 
 
 Ward, T. Humphrey, 74-75, 151 
 
 Wasse, Christopher, 90 
 
 Watson, Albert, 37, 157 
 
 Wesley, John, 189-191 
 
 Westbury, Lord, 33-34, 36 
 
 Westminster School, 20, 133 
 
 Wharton, Sir George, 125 
 
 Whig Oxford, 47-53 
 
 Whippiad, The, 63-65 
 
 White, Gilbert, 138 
 
 Whitefield, George, 50 
 
 Wilberforce, Bishop, 131 
 
 Wilkinsons, P., 111-112 
 
 William of Durham, 1 
 
 Wood, Antony, 6, 19, 20, 22, 24, 53, 
 
 93 (note), 171 
 Woodgate, W. B., 98, 104-106 
 Woodstock, 40, 52 
 Woodward's Ecclesiastical Heraldry, 
 
 quoted, 95 
 Worseley, Sir William, 79 
 Wrangham, D. C, 77 
 Wren, Sir Christopher, 83, 89 
 Wryxham, William, 155 
 
 Yarborough, Francis, 31, 87, 89, 
 
 90, 156 
 Yate, Thomas, 23, 31, 36, 87, 156, 185 
 York, 18, 133-137 
 Yvy Hall. See Ivy Hall. 
 
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 . . B. W. Henderson, M.A. 
 
 
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 . . W. K. Stride, M.A. 
 
 
 Oriel . . 
 
 . . D. W. Rannie, M.A. 
 
 
 Queen's . . 
 
 . . Rev. J. R. Magrath, D.D. 
 
 
 New . . . 
 
 . . Rev. Hastings Rashdall, M.A. 
 
 
 *Lincoln . 
 
 . . Rev. Andrew Clark, M.A. 
 
 
 All Souls' 
 
 . . C. Grant Robertson, M.A. 
 
 
 Magdalen 
 
 . . Rev. H. A. Wilson, M.A. 
 
 
 *Brasenose 
 
 . . J. BUCHAN. 
 
 
 *Corpus Chri 
 
 sti . Rev. T. Fowler, D.D. 
 
 
 Christ Chun 
 
 :h . . Rev. H. L. Thompson, M.A. 
 
 
 *Trinity . 
 
 . . . Rev. H. E. D. Blakiston, M.A. 
 
 
 *St. John's 
 
 . . . Rev. W. H. HuTTON, B.D. 
 
 
 Jesus . . 
 
 . . . E. G. Hardy, M.A. 
 
 
 Wadham. 
 
 . . J. Wells, M.A. 
 
 
 Pembroke 
 
 . . . Rev. Douglas Macleane, M.A. 
 
 
 Worcester 
 
 . . . Rev. C. H. O. Daniel, M.A. 
 
 
 Hertford . 
 
 . . . S. G. Hamilton, M.A. 
 
 
 Keble . . 
 
 . . . D. J. Medley, M.A. 
 
 
 Peterhouse 
 
 . . . Rev. T. A. Walker, LL.D. 
 
 
 Clare . . 
 
 . . J. R. Wardale, M.A. 
 
 
 Pembroke 
 
 . . . W. S. Hadley. M.A. 
 
 
 Caius . . 
 
 . . . J. Venn, Sc.D., F.R.S. 
 
 
 Trinity Hal) 
 
 . . H. T. Trevor Jones, M.A. 
 
 
 *Corpus Chr 
 
 isti . Rev. H. P. Stokes, LL.D. 
 
 
 King's . 
 
 . . Rev. A. Austen Leigh, M.A. 
 
 
 Queens' . 
 
 . . . Rev. J. H. Gray, M.A. 
 
 
 St. Catharin 
 
 e's . The Lord Bishop of Bristol. 
 
 
 Jesus . . 
 
 . . . A. Gray, M.A. 
 
 
 Christ's . 
 
 . . . J. Peile, Litt.D. 
 
 
 St. John's 
 
 . . . J. Bass Mullinger, M.A. 
 
 
 Magdalene 
 
 . . . W. A. Gill, M.A. 
 
 
 Trinity . 
 
 . . . Rev.A. H.F. Boughey, M.A.,andJ. 
 Clark, M.A. 
 
 Willis 
 
 Emmanuel 
 
 . . . E. S. Shuckburgh, M.A. 
 
 
 Sidney 
 
 . . . G. M. Edwards, M.A. 
 
 
 Downing . 
 
 . . . Rev. H. W. Pettit Stevens, M.A. 
 
 LL.M. 
 
 Selwyn . 
 
 . . . Rev. A. L. Brown, M.A. 
 ♦ Ready. 
 
 
The Oxford and Cambridge volumes will be 
 succeeded by the following : 
 
 University of St. Andrews. 
 
 J. Maitland Anderson, Librarian^ Registrar ^ and 
 Secretary of the University. 
 
 University of Glasgow. 
 
 Professor W. Stewart, D.D., Clerk of Senaius. 
 
 University of Aberdeen. 
 
 Robert S. Rait, M.A. Aberdon., Exhibitioner of 
 New College^ Oxford. 
 
 University of Edinburgh. 
 
 Sir LuDovic J. Grant, Bart., Clerk of Senatus, and 
 Professor of Public Law. 
 
 University of Dublin. 
 
 W. Macneile Dixon, Litt.D., Professor of English 
 Language and Literature^ Mason University 
 College, Birmingham. 
 
 University of Wales and its Constituent 
 Colleges. 
 W. Cadwaladr Davies, Standing Counsel of the 
 University of Wales, 
 
"IT IS CUT OUT FOR A SCHOOL PRIZE."-QUEEN 
 Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 3s. 6d. 
 
 THE COUNSELS OF WILLIAM DE 
 BRITAINE 
 
 A VOLUME OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY 
 PRECEPTS AND APHORISMS 
 
 Revised by HERBERT H. STURMER 
 
 Author of " Some Poitevin Protestants in London" 
 SOME PRESS NOTICES 
 
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 you are sure to find some good thing confronting you." 
 
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 THE GUARDIAN'S INSTRUCTION 
 
 Or, The Gentleman's Romance 
 
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 SCORES OF THE 
 
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 Compiled, with Index and occasional Notes, by 
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