RETURN TO THE OXBRIDGE COLLEGES HOMEPAGE
A churchman who, as a lad, had profited and was influenced by William of Wykeham’s newly established educational system at Winchester and Oxford, and whose career was largely spent in the law and diplomacy, was the founder of All Souls, and his college reflected the complex of his character and experiences.
Fig 1. The gate tower. The lower niches contain statues of Henry VI and of Chichele.
Henry Chichele, son of a Higham Ferrers draper, as is believed, began his education at Winchester and became a scholar of New “in the thirty seventh week of the first year of the College, 1386.” He was a Fellow in 1392 and took a degree in civil law. Wykeham, who had been Chancellor of the kingdom until 1391 and lived till 1404, may well have personally pushed forward this promising pupil. He took Orders and soon obtained Church preferment in great abundance and of a kind that did not imply residence, for he was soon busy as an ecclesiastical lawyer, and his rapidly gained success and reputation earned him diplomatic advancement by the time he was forty. In 1405 we find him on a mission to the Pope and helping to negotiate a peace with France. Two years later he is again at Rome, and, the See of St. David’s falling vacant, it was given to him by the Pope with the King’s consent, and thus it was as a bishop that, with the Bishop of Salisbury, he represented England at the Council of Pisa in 1409; while in the following year he was sent on embassy to France. After Henry IV died, in 1413, a still wider sphere of influence awaited him. Archbishop Arundel, Chancellor and trusted Minister to Henry IV, was not a persona grata to young Henry V, who, on ascending the throne, removed him from office and, when he died in 1414, made Chichele primate, and relied much upon his wisdom and statesmanship. So considerable was his influence that it came to be believed, and was roundly asserted by sixteenth-century annalists, that he was the prime promoter of the war with France that began brilliantly under Henry V, but ended disastrously – alike for the country and the dynasty – under Henry VI. That Chichele favoured the war policy – of which Agincourt, in 1415, was the first fruit – is true enough. It was a very insignificant minority that thought otherwise. No war was begun with more general enthusiasm; it was popular alike with cleric and layman, noble and merchant, craftsman and peasant. But when age and disillusion came to the archbishop – when, in the closing period of an active life, he saw not merely France lost, but England rent by discord – the flower of her chivalry dead abroad or at deadly enmity at home – he may well have regretted a policy that had bred such evils, and so gave an expiatory touch to his action of lavishing his wealth on a college, the chief glory of which was to be a sumptuous chapel where, at seven altars, masses might be said for “All Faithful Souls Departed.”
Fig 2. The reredos. Dating from the days of Chichele, it was wrecked at the Reformation, but the renovation of it was begun in 1872.
But this was not the only, or even the main, object of his foundation. It was to fit men for active life, for the furtherance of the Church and the furnishing of the civil professions. Lollardry in the fifteenth century, like Methodism in the eighteenth, profited by the inefficiency and absenteeism of the secular clergy. Chichele’s own career as lawyer and diplomatist after benefiting from his time at New College showed him the national advantage of offering such facilities to poor lads of promise. All this was in his mind when, reaching septuagenarian age, he found himself with the means and felt the call to give practical effect to his thoughts. His college should consist of a Warden and forty Fellows, chosen from youths disposed “towards the priesthood,” poor and indigent,” already versed in grammar, but anxious for further knowledge. After a probationary year as scholars they were to become full Fellows, but yet their aim and purpose was to continue to study – to teach themselves and not others. Amid many changes, this characteristic of All Souls has persisted, and it remains the one Oxford College that has no undergraduates. As Mr. Grant Robertson puts it in his history of the College, “All Souls begins, continues and ends a Society of Masters and Doctors.” It was a definite injunction of the founder that, of the forty Fellows, twenty-four should take the degree of M.A. and sixteen of D.C.L.; they were to be “artists” and “jurists” in that proportion. Thus, Chichele did not contemplate enduring fellowships or long residence at Oxford. He aimed at a steady flow of worthy candidates for advancement in Church and State. There were to be no inducements, no facilities for staying on. Fellowships were to provide means of existence until proficiency was reached and some other field opened. They did not offer a life of ease. Little beyond lodging, food and livery was bestowed. Property to the value of a hundred shillings, or a benefice of about ten marks a year, brought fellowships to an end. During their continuance, secular as the college was in intent, the rule of life was to be of a monastic severity. No Fellow was to sleep out, he must not even walk out alone. In hall the Bible was to be read aloud, and there was to be no lingering there. On special occasions only might there be a fire and indulgence in the recreation of “songs and other proper solaces, poems, the chronicles of the realm, the marvels of this world and other things fitting a clerical estate.” No female was to employed, except, indeed, at a push, and “in fault of a male washer, a laundress was permissible.”
Fig 3. The ante-chapel, looking north.
Next to fundamental principles, the college needed an area on which to stand, and on December 14th, 1437, Berford Hall, “standing at the corner of Cat Street directly opposite the eastern end of St. Mary’s Church,” was purchased. Despite the financial straits and civil broils that then prevailed, spare means were found by a few prominent men for religious and educational establishments. Henry VI gave the lead, and founded Eton College in 1440 and King’s College in 1441. A dozen years before that Chichele had begun to devote part of his archiepiscopal revenues to such objects. His college for eight priests at his birthplace of Higham Ferrers dates from 1429, and was on a par with Lord Treasurer Cromwell’s Tattershall church and college, dating from 1440. They were essentially mass-saying, and not educational, corporations. Soon afterwards, however, the archbishop established Chichele’s Hutch, a fund or chest to be held by the University of Oxford for the benefit of the many poor students who belonged to various little halls and sat under teachers at the various “schools” which then represented the University lecture rooms. Then, a year before the purchase of Berford Hall, he had bought five acres lying north of the city walls, and built “a college house of free stone quadrantwise,” which he handed over to the Cistercians, and which, in the sixteenth century, was transformed into St. John’s College. For All Souls a larger site than the Berford Hall corner was needed, and premises on either side of it were added, including such as Skibbowe’s Tenement, Tingswick Inn and Stodely’s Entry. Thus a more or less rectangular area was obtained much on a par with that lying on its eastern boundary, which we lately saw Eglesfield aggregating in the fourteenth century for his Hall of the Queen. As at Queen’s so at All Souls, there was room for gardens and other adjuncts to the modest quadrangle, and, although Chichele worked on a larger and more expensive scale than Eglesfield, yet a single and by no means large quadrangle sufficed to accommodate his chapel and library, his hall and offices, his lodgings for Warden and Fellows. When the year 1438 opened all was ready for the builders, and on February 10th the foundation stone was laid. Here we have none of the difficulties that we met with at Queen’s, of piecing together from mere scraps of evidence the date and character of the first set of buildings, for at All Souls the buildings themselves and also the accounts of their cost survive. The latter are in the shape of a calf-bound folio volume. It is a good example of beautiful and well preserved fifteenth century calligraphy, and gives us month by month a full and carefully kept record of expenditure both as to wages and as to the obtaining and carriage of material. Stone mainly comes from Headington and Teynton. Timber from neighbouring woodlands, such as Shotover and Cumnor, twelve trees being given by the King. Each year begins with a decorative heading, stating who is in charge. At first we find that it is the account of John Druell, supervisor of the works (Johis Druell Clerici supervisoris opis). Thus it continues for four years, and then Druell’s name gives way to that of Roger Keys as supervisor. But in the following year Keys becomes the second Warden of the college and so is described as custos as well as supervisor of the works, with the conclusion of which there comes a call elsewhere for his architectural abilities. In 1445 Henry VI asks for him to carry on the building of Eton, which he had founded five years earlier.
Fig 4. The ante-chapel, looking south. The monument with the urn is that of George Clarke, to whom the eighteenth century buildings are largely due.
While the edification of All Souls was in progress a hired hall housed the first Fellows under the Wardenship of Richard Andrewe, one of Chichele’s righthand men in Church and State, who returned to public life as soon as the buildings were sufficiently far forward to allow of occupation in 1442, in which year, “on St. Editha’s Day,” Chichele himself, assisted by four suffragans, consecrated the chapel. It occupies the north side of Chichele’s quadrangle, its ante-chapel forming a lofty north end to the east range and having a projecting porch of entry. Opposite the chapel rises the tower of the gateway giving entry from the High Street (Fig 1). On that side the tower is adorned with three canopied niches, one of moderate size on either side of the first-floor window, the third above it and much larger. The lower niches contain statues of Henry VI and of Archbishop Chichele. The great niche was occupied by a bas relief of the Resurrection, which had above it a figure of Our Lord. As Warden Hoveden’s 1598 view of the college shows the niches without statues, the inference is that they were destroyed in 1549. But, as regards the Resurrection, Wood tells its that in 1642 a passing trooper shot at it, but did no harm, but that it was defaced in 1649 by order of a new Bursar, installed after the college had been “purged” of Royalists.
Fig 5. The chapel, looking west. Except for reparations, the woodwork, including the roof, is original, with the exception of the screen, which dates from 1719.
Above the stone-vaulted entrance archway were the treasury for the college chest and the muniment room for its archives. The Warden’s lodging was contiguous to these and had a private entry to them. It lay directly east of the tower, and its windows commanded the gateway; thus he could have one eye on the college valuables and the other on the entrances and exits of the Fellows under his charge. Fellows’ rooms occupied the rest of the south and the whole of the west range, while much of the first floor of the east range was devoted to the library. Beyond, and lineable with this, was the hall, its roof line broken by a high octagonal louvre, as we know it from a print in Loggan’s Oxonia Illustrata, for the hall itself was pulled down in the eighteenth century to make way for the present one. Its west side lay against the east end of the chapel, while east of it, about a back court, were grouped kitchen, offices and stables. Such was the scheme of essential buildings, but to them Chichele added a feature that would easily occur to a Wykehamist. At both Winchester and Oxford Wykeham had introduced cloisters, not designed, as usual in abbeys, in the manner of corridors to reach under cover all important parts of the monastery, but as a sheltered and secluded byway for conference and meditation. At New the cloisters lie just beyond the west side of the ante-chapel, but they are not an approach to it or to anything else. Just so at All Souls, the cloisters stood not even against, but beyond, the north side of the chapel, and thus occupied the north-west corner of the college site, as we see in Warden Hoveden’s bird’s-eye view. Its garth was to be used as the burial place of members of the college. Chichele, like Eglesfield a century earlier, had deemed it prudent for the safety and prosperity of his college to enlist the interest of both King and Pope. In 1438 he surrendered all the properties he designed for it to Henry VI, who, by charter, then bestowed them on the college, calling himself co-founder with Chichele. The latter, in the following year, sent Warden Andrewes to the Pope to obtain ratification. By the Bull of June, 1439, the college is authorised to have a chapel independent of the bishop of the see and the vicar of the parish, and to possess a cemetery within its consecrated precincts. The cloister, begun, as Wood tells us, in the time of the founder, was completed in 1491, chiefly through the benefaction of Goldwell, Bishop of Norwich, who had been previously instrumental in erecting the high rood screen that separated chapel from ante-chapel, and was replaced by the present Renaissance archway early in the eighteenth century.
Fig 6. One of the return stalls. The beautiful poppy-head is original: the niches behind are part of the 1719 screen.
In designing the chapel Chichele again took New College as his model. We saw a few weeks ago that Queen’s, when its chapel was enlarged early in the sixteenth century, was the fifth of the Oxford colleges to give its chapel the form of a naveless or truncated cruciform church. The first had been Merton, but that was unintentional, a nave with aisles having been intended, but never built; but Wykeham used the idea as a complete and consistent plan. The church designers of the Perpendicular period introduced the system of running nave and chancel under one
unbroken roof-line, making the division between them not an archway, but a rood screen. To the extent of chapel and ante-chapel, that is the arrangement at New and at its derivatives, All Souls and Magdalen. At All Souls, which has preserved its admirable hammer-beam roof, the effect, standing on the altar steps and looking west-ward, is excellent (Fig 5), while the division of the ante-chapel into a centre and transepts by pairs of tall arches (Fig 4) is as picturesque as anything I know in Perpendicular architecture. It was this arrangement that gave, as well as the high altar, six subsidiary ones. There was a pair – separated, no doubt, by a “trellys” or parclose – against the east wall of each transept, while those against the screen were probably in arched recesses on either side of the arched entrance to the chapel, an arrangement which we still find at Lord Treasurer Cromwell’s collegiate church at Tattershall, where the stone screen, with pulpitum, is intact, and where the foundation of a warden and six priests provided fully for the service of the same number of altars. At All Souls, as at New, the position of the hall against the east end of the chapel precluded the glory of a great pictured window above the high altar, but a stone reredos of niched saints rising from floor to roof gave equal dignity and richness to this culminating point. We find the same at New and at Magdalen; but there can be no doubt that that at All Souls, as we see it in its restored state, was the most successfully contrived and most admirably executed. There are three divisions, each of three tiers of figures, but they do not, as at New and Magdalen, run through in an unbroken line. The central division takes an upward tilt, its end figures higher than those of the side divisions, and its inner figures rising above the outer ones (Fig 2). Thus, the main lines of the reredos are in structural harmony with the lines of the roof. Above the altar is a Crucifixion, and Our Lord, seated in judgment, surrounded by archangels, was the due culmination of this noble composition, to which colouring gave an added richness. Thus, nothing could be more offensive to the sixteenth-century reformers and the seventeenth-century Puritans. After they had wrecked it there was nothing to be done but to bury the shattered framework of the wonderful crocketted niches beneath a covering of plaster; but when, in 1872, the plaster was removed, enough was disclosed to give a practised eye a full knowledge of its original details and appreciation of its merits, so that Sir Gilbert Scott declared that “it must have been the most beautiful of the age which has come down to us.” Under him a successful effort to give back to the chapel something of its original aspect was then made. The roof, which had been plastered below the rafters, was again fully revealed, the sedilia and piscina were restored, and the reredos was entirely renovated. The woodwork, happily, had not suffered severely; the range of stalls, hacked by traceried panelling and fitted with misericords, remained, and needed only moderate repair. The desks were in less perfect state, but the poppy heads are original, and those of the Warden’s and sub-Warden’s seats (Fig 6) are figure compositions delightfully treated. These seats, being on the return, show in their backing a complete change of style, for it is part of the Late Renaissance screen, and niches, with the carved and perforated work of that age, are framed between Corinthian pilasters. Yet the whole composition is not inharmonious. Gothic and classic meet without clashing; they may not be kith and kin, but there is no vendetta between them. The screen is an excellent example of the good designing and fine joinery of the age of Wren, and it strikes an interesting historical note, for Wren was a Fellow of the college.
Fig 7. Ironwork in the north door of the ante-chapel. It looks through into the cloister, or piazza, built by Hawksmoor early in the eighteenth century.
Colour was loved by our fifteenth-century church builders, and at All Souls they used it profusely. Gold and red, blue and green were all used on the reredos, and the hammer-beam roof still shows traces of the original pigments. But brilliance centred in the windows; there are nineteen of them, all large, that at the west end enormous. They were glazed with storied glass in 1442 ready for the consecration ceremony, at the cost of one shilling per square foot, which was about the normal fifteenth-century price. Thus, at Tattershall, where accounts giving the names of the makers and the subjects of the glass survive, fourteen-pence per foot was charged for the more elaborate windows, and tenpence for the simpler ones.
Fig 8. The old library. Built by Chichele, it was refitted under the Elizabeth by Warden Hovenden. It is now a lecture room, the well designed furniture dating from before the War.
At All Souls original glass yet remains in the four three-light, two-tiered west windows of the ante-chapel. Under splendid canopies the Twelve Apostles range along the upper tier, and below them are female saints, such as the Virgin and Mary Magdalene, tall, stately figures richly framed by elaborate architectural tracery and finialling. The north door of the ante-chapel (Fig 3) probably once gave into the vestibulum, or mediaeval vestry, fitted, as we hear, with a holy-water stoop and an altar. All that has disappeared, and the north door now opens straight on to Hawksmoor’s piazza, as seen-when a pair of shutters are thrown back-through a wrought-iron grille (Fig 7) of scrolls of leaves, and flowers of rose and thistle, a very delightful example. It is decidedly earlier than the date of Tijou’s advent in England and of the great development of technique in the smith’s craft which then took place. Before that, as Evelyn tells us, the English locksmiths were famous, but the hammering of railings, screens and panels was, generally, simple. If, as Mr Starkey Gardner opined, the ironwork at the north chapel door is English of the Restoration period, it is a very rare as well as a beautiful specimen.
Fig 9. Doorway to the old library. It is on the east side of the old quadrangle and has Chichele’s arms above it.
The college archives retain its Royal charters. The original one, granted by Henry VI in May, 1438, still has its green seal attached to it, and there is a notarial copy by Lindwood – one of the foremost ecclesiastical lawyers of his age and Vicar General of the Province of Canterbury – dated two months later. That is followed in the next year by the Bull of Pope Eugenius IV licensing the college to have chapel and cemetery; after which, in 1442, comes a second and supplementary Royal charter granting additional privileges. That obtained, Chichele set Lindwood to draw up an elaborate set of statutes, which he sealed on April 2nd, 1443. It was among the last acts of the great archbishop, for ten days later he passed away, leaving to the long line of his successors in the primatial see the duty as Visitors of safeguarding against exterior aggression the rights of the college and of ensuring within its walls the observance of the statutes by Warden and Fellows.
Fig 10. A panel in the old library. It dates from the days of Warden Hovenden.
For nearly a century the college progressed under a sky obscured by no very angry clouds. Then came a period of storm and stress. Fortunately, a man of tact was then at the helm. John Warner, elected Warden in 1536, maintained that position and the rights and property of the college under all four Tudor sovereigns, just as one of the Fellows, Sir William Petre, served them all as Secretary of State, when men less wary and accommodating went one after another in tragic procession to the block on Tower Hill. No sooner was Warner elected Warden in 1536 than the policy of monastic suppression prevailed. What Oxford houses were to be included? Those which were monkish, like Chichele’s Cistercian foundation, certainly yes; but the secular and educational colleges, certainly not. In which category was to be All Souls, a foundation of secular priests, indeed, but, by its very name, a chantry in character? It needed Warner’s prudence and flexibility to ensure the survival of the college statutes, while agreeing to the destruction of its chapel organisation. The Royal Commissioners of 1549 issued orders that:”There is but one altar, or rather Lord’s table in the chapel; all the remaining altars, images, statues, tabernacles, the things they call organs, and all similar monuments of superstition and idolatry are to be altogether removed.”
To all appearances, the order was fully carried out. As Professor Burrows writes, in his Worthies of All Souls:
“The magnificent reredos, of which mention has already been made, was now ‘defaced.’ Every one of its fifty statues and eighty-six statuettes was thrown down, and broken to pieces; while the projecting portions of the structure were chipped away till the whole was left a ruin. The altars were destroyed and the “Lord’s table” placed in the centre of the Chapel.”
Much of the splendid furniture and costly religious objects that had been accumulating ever since Chichele’s time shared the same fate yet it is quite clear that, unlike Cox, Dean of Christ Church, who took the lead in Oxford iconoclasm, Warner, while he perforce had to agree outwardly, inwardly had reservations, so that, twenty years later, we find trouble rising out of the retention by the college of “superstitious and idolatrous monuments.” Except for this secret cache, the college, in name only, remained that of “All Faithful Souls Departed.” Nor was that the only change contemplated by the Commission. Fortunately, the new constitution they suggested was never adopted, and Warner, except for the revolution that took place in the appearance and uses of the chapel, still ruled in accordance with the original statutes.
Fig 11. The ceiling of the old library. It is an outstanding example of the barrel form that came into vogue in the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign.
Soon, however, Fortune’s wheel takes another turn. Mary rules as a Catholic queen, and Cardinal Pole is Archbishop and Visitor. A “purge” of heretics takes the place of the previous purge of Romans. The purge, however, had only to be very partial, for the corporate feeling of All Souls had been largely against the Edwardian, and was in favour of the Marian régime. Although there is no longer any mention of images, a hidden tabernacle and two reliquaries come forth from their hiding place. Roman rites and even chantry services are revived, and one of the Fellows bequeathes £3 to buy ornaments. All this Warner accepted for a time, and then, either from conviction or from prescience, he resigned; but was so far from being classed with the “hereticks” that he not only retained a prebendal stall given to him under Edward VI, but received an additional rectory. His reading of the omens was not at fault. His successor, refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy to Elizabeth after her accession in 1558, was sent to the Marshalsea, and there died. Warner returned to his wardenship, but was given the deanery of Winchester. He was a man of many sides and many functions. As well as its original and important body of jurists, All Souls, before the fifteenth century closed, developed a medical side. The great Linacre, through whose efforts the College of Physicians received its charter in 1518, had become a Fellow of All Souls in 1484. He was noted as a Greek scholar, and among his pupils was Sir Thomas More. But he also studied medicine, taking his M.D. degree at Padua, and it is as “the father of modern medicine” that he stands in the Temple of Fame. Warner followed the same bent, took his M.D. degree a year before he became Warden, and was Oxford’s first Regius Professor of Medicine. Under Elizabeth he was elected a Fellow of the College of Physicians, and it was neither at his deanery nor at his warden’s lodgings that he died in 1665, but “at his house in Warwick Lane, London.” Yet he had set his mark upon the warden’s lodgings. They were no longer the two rooms next the tower that Chichele’s plan provided. He lengthened the High Street frontage eastward by building a set of six chambers, including the great dining-room, now Sir Charles Oman’s chamber. Such was the beginning of the Warden’s quadrangle, soon after developed by Robert Hovenden. He became a Fellow just before Barber succeeded Warner as Warden in 1565; and when, six years later, Barber died, Hovenden, although only twenty-seven years of age, was elected summo consensu. Thus began a period of rule that extended to 1614. He found Archbishop Parker, one of whose chaplains he had been, still angered over the survival at the college of Romish ways and objects. As long ago as 1566, Parker, as Visitor, had written about the plate that offended “diverse men by its superstitious fashion,” and in the following year, as head of a High Commission, he had ordered “in the Queen’s name” that all sorts of outrageous things, even including ” a great Pricke-song book,” should be sent to Lambeth. Yet, as late as 1573 a still more Protestant Commission had to he quite peremptory and declare that, “as you will answer to the contrary at your peril,” there must be a defacing “within eight days of all copes, vestments, albs, mass hooks, crosses and such superstitious and idolatrous monuments.” Hovenden’s merit, however, was not as a puller down, but as a builder up. He sorted and catalogued all the college archives. He introduced better account-keeping and reorganised the administration of the college estates. He caused to be drawn on parchment and hound in great vellum-covered volumes a set of maps showing every field and holding of every college property, and first of all these maps is the famous typus colleqii, occupying a double page of the great volume and giving a meticulously accurate and beautifully executed bird’s-eye view of the whole of the college buildings as they were in his day. It shows the old quadrangle, with the cloisters lying north beyond the chapel, and it also shows the completed High Street front, with its second entrance archway leading through into the warden’s quadrangle. That has kitchen and offices to the north of it, and to the west a garden, once the Rose Inn, then, being purchased and given to the college by Petre, remaining a waste space until 1573, when:
“Master R. Hovenden desired the Compy to grant it him and he would enclose it and remove the well which was called the Rosewell standg in it (whereof it was said merrily the fellows wash’d every day in Rose water) upon his own charges.”
Fig 12. Window in the tower room.
He added somewhat to Warner’s lodgings and saw to the refitting of its great dining-room and other chambers. The former has an extremely fine chimneypiece of the period between its two south windows. A pillared doorway at its north-east corner leads to a bedroom that still shows below its ceiling the spring of its original open roof of wrought oak. It was, probably, at the same period that the old provost’s lodging next to the tower was wainscoted in the same manner and received its elaborate chimneypiece. Through a stone doorway at its north-west corner (Fig 13) we go up a set of steps to the chamber over the archway and below the original muniment room. Besides its outlook over the High Street, it has, on the quadrangle side, two little cusped single-light windows with ancient shutters (Fig 12). Excellent as these rooms are as examples of Hovenden’s time, his most important piece of decoration was in the old library. As already mentioned, it occupies much of the upper floor of the eastern range of the quadrangle built by Chichele, whose arms are over the doorway (Fig 9), through which a steep stairway reaches what was his library, but is now a lecture room (Fig 8). The most striking feature of this room is the barrel-shaped ceiling, an admirable example of Elizabethan enriched plasterwork, with very unusual lantern-shaped pendentives. The narrow, curved ribbing leaves spaces treated with shields within wreaths. Wreaths we again find in the lunettes at either end. The Royal arms occupy the south end (Fig 11), and they are flanked by the arms of Chichele and of the University. At the north end the central object is Chichele’s shield with its swan supporters. There is woodwork also of Hovenden’s time, two pilastered chimneypieces and a set of arched panels enriched by carving and having shields at their base (Fig 10). This excellent relic of Elizabeth’s later days has not at all suffered by being turned into a lecture room, for tables and benches, admirably designed to serve both their purpose and the harmonious furnishing of the room, were introduced shortly before the war.
Fig 13. Doorway in the old Warden’s lodgings next to the tower.
With Warden Hovenden’s changes ends the early chapter of the College’s architectural history, the later chapter of which does not open until the eighteenth century is reached. But the seventeenth-century annals of collegiate existence are full of interest and movement, and with them next week’s article will begin.
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