BRASENOSE COLLEGE
[Original]
THE first thing about this College to excite a stranger's curiosity is its name. The explanation is trivial enough. Brasenose Hall (which was in existence in the thirteenth century and became Brasenose College in 1509) was so called from the brass knocker—the head of a lion with a very prominent nose—which adorned its gateway. In 1334 the members of the Hall, from whatever reason, migrated into Lincolnshire, taking the knocker with them, and set up their rest at Stamford. "There is in Stamford," wrote Antony Wood, "a building in St. Paul's parish, near to one of the tower gates, called Brazenose to this day, and has a great gate, and a wicket, upon which wicket is a head or face of old cast brass, with a ring through the nose thereof. It had also a fair refectory within, and is at this time written in leases and deeds Brazen Nose." This building was bought by "B. N. C." (to adopt Oxford phraseology) in 1890, and the knocker brought back to Oxford, none the worse for its prolonged rustication.
The College named after this venerable relic owes its foundation to a pair of friends, William Smyth, Bishop of Lincoln, and Sir Richard Sutton of Sutton, in the county of Cheshire, an ecclesiastically-minded layman, who became Steward of the monastery of Sion, near Brentford. "Unmarried himself," the knight's biographer informs us, "and not anxious to aggrandize his family, Sir Richard Sutton bestowed handsome benefactions and kind remembrances among his kinsmen; but he wedded the public, and made posterity his heir."
The College which grew up under the personal supervision of these two friends, occupies the ground on which stood no less than eight Halls: a fact which seems to shew that these institutions were not large in bulk. The Founders purchased Brasenose Hall, Little University Hall, Salisbury Hall, with St. Mary's Entry—a picturesque lane, which appears in the first of Mr. Matthison's illustrations; and five more. Tennyson's phrase, "the tumult of the Halls," must have been peculiarly applicable in mediaeval Oxford. Distinctly mediaeval were the statues of the new Foundation; those who drew them up adhered to the training of the schoolmen, and made no provision for the new learning. When John Claymond, first President of Corpus, endowed six scholarships at Brasenose (in 1536), he stipulated that the scholars appointed should attend the lectures of the Latin and Greek Readers of his own College. However, Brasenose had her own lecturers in these humaner studies, before the century was out.
