Education – Reformation history and Oxford's lost college

Gerard Kilroy - The Tablet - Mon, Oct 17th 2022

Hammer beams from St Mary’s College were incorporated into the ceiling of Brasenose College Chapel in the seventeenth century.
PHOTO: ALAMY, JON BOWER

St Mary’s College, which was recently unearthed by construction workers in Oxford, was not a victim of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, as was widely reported. Like so much of the long Reformation, its story is more complicated.

There has been excitement in Oxford over the discovery (during the building of the Frewin annexe to Brasenose) of the remains of St Mary’s College. Although the college in New Inn Hall Street was founded for Augustinian canons in 1435, the stone construction of the chapel (“of very faire fabric built”) and cloistered quadrangle (perhaps modelled on Magdalen), went ahead only under Cardinal Wolsey between 1502 and 1520.

The discovery achieved national coverage, but all the published accounts report that the college was demolished and ceased to exist after the suppression of the monasteries (800 religious houses across the land) between 1536 and 1540. In fact, one of the greatest Oxford antiquarians, Anthony Wood (1632-1695), records that the college was hardly damaged in 1541, and that it became the subject of a fierce dispute in 1556, during the reign of Mary Tudor, between John Wayte, then the Mayor of Oxford, and Dr William Tresham, the vice- chancellor for that year.

Tresham made an expensive journey to London lasting 32 days, during which, on behalf of the university, he invited Cardinal Pole to be chancellor, and established the title of St Mary’s College as belonging to John Fettiplace. The cardinal supported Tresham’s plea for St Mary’s, and Wayte was “commanded to make no further spoile there”; Wayte had clearly been selling off the lead, timber, glass and stone as he continued to do in the 1560s.

William Tresham was helped, as his carefully recorded gifts of gratitude (gloves, wine and so forth) make clear, by several key figures in the Marian restoration in Oxford, a subject quietly erased from our national history. Dr George Owen (d. 1558), physician to three monarchs, was rewarded by them with many grants of monastic lands (notably Godstow, Oseney, Rewley, Alban Hall and Durham College); he promptly returned these for use within the university. Later, his son Richard handed over many more lands from these monasteries (and the chantry of St Mary Magdalen) to St John’s.

In the case of St Mary’s, George Owen paid for the legal searches. Owen and Tresham were also supported, Wood makes clear, by one of the greatest Tudor benefactors, Sir Thomas White (c. 1495-1567), who was in the final phase of founding St John’s and about to purchase, in 1560, the old Benedictine house, Gloucester College, where the last Abbot of Westminster, John Feckenham (c. 1510-1584), had studied. This became Gloucester Hall (and much later Worcester College). Sir Thomas Pope (1507-1559), White’s great friend, who had received Durham College from Dr Owen, and founded Trinity in its ruins in 1555, is also thanked by Tresham for his help with St Mary’s: “Item, for gloves sente to Sir Thomas Pope and my Ladie his wife with lettres of thanksgiving from the Universitie ... 6s 8d.”

John Fettiplace, whose title to the property had been proved by the searches, is thanked for granting “his interest of St Marie College to the Universitie for ever under his seale of armes”. Fettiplace, from a prominent Oxfordshire family with branches in Swinbrook, Sherborne and Buckland, gave the university and scholars this gift with the plea “that they should pray for his and his parents’ soules”. Humphrey Fettiplace was summoned on 16 July 1581 from Buckland as the Justice of the Peace to conduct the arrest of Edmund Campion.

What Wood’s records show is that Sir Thomas White, a great mayor and alderman of the City of London, and Sir Thomas Pope, who had wept with Thomas More when he told him he was to be executed, were not random individual merchants who happened to found Trinity, St John’s and Gloucester Hall; rather, they carried out a coherent plan of restoration. The hidden link in this chain of friends is almost certainly John Feckenham, monk of Evesham and Gloucester College, and the man appointed as abbot for the restored Westminster Abbey, inaugurated in 1556. At least eight men connected with the early history of St John’s had connections with Feckenham; Henry Holland was a nephew, and Thomas Bramstone was given leave by the founder to be a companion to him in the Tower “becawse Mr Fecknam ys my deare frende, whose request I may not denye”. Feckenham was left £40 in White’s will.

Several men associated with the foundation of St John’s were former monks and one of the largest donors to the college library was Thomas Paynell, an Augustinian canon of St Mary’s College, who gave 152 volumes, per- haps saved from his own college library. The fact that several of those involved in the restoration of these three colleges received monastic lands should be seen as evidence not of their incriminating involvement in the suppression but of their ultimate goal: to retain them for academic use. All the evidence suggests that Dr Owen always intended to use his monastic properties for academic pur- poses, and he worked closely with Feckenham, Tresham, Sir Thomas White and Sir Thomas Pope. The details of the saving of St Mary’s prove that these men were working as a team.

Unfortunately, the preservation of St Mary’s was shortlived, perhaps, as Wood suggests, because Fettiplace’s title was uncertain, or because it had a determined predator within the city. Two years later, on 17 November 1558, the Queen and the cardinal died. The college (in Wood’s guarded irony) “coming into the hands of the earls of Huntingdon” was returned in 1562 to John Wayte, who had “pretended that he had interest and that he was lord of the same”. “The unprincipled Wayte” (as John Blair calls him) established that the college should be a Bridewell (house of correction) and be used to maintain “10 poore children ... always habited with blew coates”, by whom Wayte was “still remembered with hatred in their old age”.

In 1576 the city council closed the school, and the recusant mayor, Richard Williams, whose wife ran the Star Inn (where the Randolph Hotel is now) as a Mass centre for Catholics, “demised” the college and its gardens for an annual rent to John Wayte, who kept “tame coneyes in the chapel parcel”; perhaps the rabbits were more kindly treated than the children.

In 1580 the widowed Countess of Huntingdon and her son, the earl, complaining that St Mary’s was not being used for its intended purpose, conveyed the property to Brasenose College, but during the 21 years it was under Wayte’s management, the buildings, “especially the cloister”, were “much ruinated and demolished”. The chapel was evidently still standing until the Civil War, when it was used for casting cannon.

In 1649 Brasenose obtained a lease to pull it down and use the materials for a new chapel of its own. In March 1656 scaffolding was placed on the chapel and, by 19 April, the glorious hammer-beam roof, designed by Henry VIII’s master carpenter, Humphrey Coke, and built by Robert Carow between 1516-1518 (the team responsible for the halls of Corpus Christi and Christ Church), was dismantled, a dangerous task for which extra payments were made. The beams were stored until, in 1657, they were finally hauled up to form the glorious roof for Brasenose Chapel whose dimensions they dictated; the plaster fan vaulting was added between 1659 and 1662.

This story is significant far beyond the confines of Brasenose, architectural history or archaeology. It reminds us that surrounding the walled medieval University of Oxford was a tight network of 11 religious houses, with their gardens, their mills, their hospices and their libraries. From Blackfriars outside the Southgate to Austin Friars in the north-west (where Wadham is now), the university was protected by – and intertwined with – a swathe of monastic property.

The university lost, with the dissolution, the three Benedictine houses of study: Gloucester College, Durham College and Canterbury College; the Cistercian St Bernard’s College; Oseney Abbey; and the two houses of study for Augustinian canons – St Frideswide’s Priory and St Mary’s College. Wood is especially elegiac in his account of the dissolution of the beautiful Franciscan Greyfriars, with its cloister, garden, fishponds and two fine libraries; the Dominican Blackfriars, with its “library, schoole and cloister”, was sold for £1,094. Both were erased from the scene.

Until 1535, these eight houses were an important part of the university and its academic excellence; 700 canons, monks and friars, it is estimated, between 1500 and 1535, were from Europe. Erasmus of Rotterdam, an Augustinian canon, spent the Michaelmas term of 1499 at St Mary’s College, leaving in January 1500. By 1556, when William Tresham and his friends began to restore the fabric of the university, most of these buildings were roofless ruins, the libraries had been despoiled and dispersed, the foreign monks and friars had returned home and there was a severe shortage of theologians. On 1 June 1560, John Jewel (1522-1571), an ardent reformer, com- plained to Pietro Martire Vermigli, his “father and most esteemed master in Christ”, that “everything [in Oxford] is falling into ruin and decay; for the colleges are now filled with mere boys, and empty of learning”.

The Martyrs’ Memorial of 1843 (a reaction to the Oxford Movement) has succeeded in putting the programme of burning under Mary’s reign at the front of our consciousness; we need now to remember the massive con- tribution the Marian restoration of learning made to the university. One of Mary’s most popular moves was the grant of lands for the restoration of the Scholae Publicae: 10 lecture rooms for the seven liberal arts and three branches of philosophy. These were knocked down 60 years later to make way for the new Bodleian quadrangle. Numbers of students in the uni- versity, which had dropped to about 1,000 in 1552, were, by 1568, back to 1,764.

St Mary’s College, demolished and buried as a result of the “alteration of religion” and individual greed, is an emblem of what happened to the historical memory of the Marian restoration. It is not only St Mary’s College that has been lost to history, but a pivotal moment in the history of the University of Oxford. It is time to recognise what a massive and coherent contribution a small group of laymen and their monastic friends, aided by the chancellor, Cardinal Pole, made to the revival of learning in Marian Oxford. Three of their colleges – Trinity, St John’s and Gloucester Hall (now Worcester) – survive. The uncovered foundations of St Mary’s remind us that the long Reformation was played out for more than a century in contested land, transferred roofs and quietly suppressed histories.

Gerard Kilroy is professor at the Jesuit University Ignatianum, Krakow, senior research fellow at Campion Hall, Oxford and the author of Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (Routledge).