Wood calls this Hall “that venerable piece of antiquity.” He believes that St. Frideswyde’s Priory had here a distinguished mansion, from which the canons received an immemorial quit rent, and that here their novices were instructed. In Domesday it is called Segrim’s Mansions, a family of that name then and for generations afterward holding it from the priory in demesne, with obligation to repair the city wall. But in the 38th of Henry III. Richard Segrym, by a charter of quit claim, surrenders for ever to God and the Church of St. Frideswyde, “that great messuage which is situated in the corner of the churchyard of St. Aldate’s,” the canons agreeing to receive him into their family fraternity, and after his death to find a chaplain canon to celebrate service yearly for his soul, the souls of his father and mother, and the soul of Christiana Pady.
From a very early date this house was occupied by clerks, studying the Civil and Canon Law. It is described as a “nursery of learning,” and “the most ancient of all Halls.” It retained the name Segrym (sometimes Segreve) Hall till the accession of Henry VI., when, a large entrance being made,[317] it came thenceforth to be called Broadgates Hall, though there were in Oxford several other houses of this name. It was the most distinguished of a number of hostels occupied by legists, and clustered round St. Aldate’s Church, then a centre of the study of Civil Law, which had come into vogue in the twelfth century. A chamber built over the south aisle (Docklington’s aisle) of that church was used as a Civil Law School and also as a law library, the books being kept in chests, but afterwards chained. Such a library of chained books still exists over one of the aisles of Wimborne Minster. The aisle below was used by the students before and after the Reformation. The “Chapel in St. Eldad’s” (Hutten[318] tells us) “is peculier and propper to Broadgates, where they daily meete for the celebration of Divine Service.” The fine monument of John Noble, LL.B., Principal of Broadgates, was formerly in this aisle.
The importance of the Halls dates from 1420, when unattached students were abolished, and every scholar or scholar’s servant was obliged to dwell in a hall governed by a responsible principal. After the great fire of 1190 they were built of stone. They contained a common room for meals, a kitchen, and a few bedrooms, each scholar paying 7s. 6d. or 13s. 4d. a year for rent. Every undergraduate was bound to attend lectures. Discipline however was not very strict. One summer’s night in 1520, an ever-recurring dispute happening between the University and the city respecting the authority to patrol the streets, certain scholars of Broadgates had an encounter with the town watch, in which one watchman was killed and one severely hurt. The delinquents fleeing were banished by the University, but allowed after a few months to return on condition of paying a fine of 6s. 8d., contributing 1s. 8d. to repair the staff of the inferior bedell of Arts, and having three masses said for the good estate of the Regent Masters and the soul of the slain man.
Broadgates Hall becoming a place of importance, and being obliged to extend its limits, acquired a tenement to the east belonging to Abingdon Abbey, the monks of which owned also a moiety of St. Aldate’s Church, the other moiety having passed to St. Frideswyde’s, according to a curious story related by Wood.[319] A little further east still was a tenement which the Principal of Broadgates rented from New College (temp. Henry VII.) for 6s. 8d. In 1566 Nicholas Robinson[320] mentions Broadgates among the eight leading Halls, and as especially given up to the study of Civil Law. In 1609 Nicholas Fitzherbert[321] says it was a resort of young men of rank and wealth. In 1612 it had 46 graduate members, 62 scholars and commoners, 22 servitors and domestics, in all 131 members, being exceeded in numbers by only five Colleges and one Hall, viz. Christ Church, 240; Magdalen, 246; Brasenose, 227; Queen’s, 267; Exeter, 206; Magdalen Hall, 161. A century later Pembroke had only between 50 and 60 residents, and in the preceding century, when Oxford had been for a while almost empty, the numbers must have been few. The zeal of the reforming Visitors in 1550 had left the chamber above Docklington’s aisle four naked walls. “The ancient libraries were by their appointment rifled. Many MSS., guilty of no other superstition than red letters in the front or titles were condemned to the fire … such books wherein appeared angles [angels] were thought sufficient to be destroyed because accounted Papish, or diabolical, or both.” We read of two noble libraries being sold for 40s. for waste paper.
Henry VIII., in 1546, annexed Broadgates, together with the housing of Abingdon to the new College established by Wolsey under a Papal bull on the site and out of the revenues of St. Frideswyde’s—successively Cardinal College, King Henry VIII.’s College, and Christ Church.
Broadgates Hall then had filled no inconsiderable part as a place of learning when it became Pembroke College. The history of the foundation of Pembroke is interesting. Thomas Tesdale, or Tisdall (descended from the Tisdalls of Tisdall in the north of England), was a clothier to Queen Elizabeth’s army, and afterwards attended the Court. Having settled at Abingdon as a maltster he there filled the posts of Bailiff, principal Burgess and Mayor. Finally he removed to Glympton, Oxon, where trading in wool, tillage, and grazing he attained to a very great estate, of which he made charitable and pious use, his house never being shut against the poor. He maintained a weekly lecture at Glympton, and endowed Christ’s Hospital in Abingdon. The tablet placed in Glympton Church to his wife Maud records the many parishes where “she lovingly annointed Christ Jesus in his poore members.” A fortnight before Tesdale’s decease in 1610, he made a will bequeathing the large sum of £5000 to purchase lands, etc., for maintaining seven Fellows and six Scholars to be elected from the free Grammar School in Abingdon into any College in Oxford. This foundation Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, sometime Fellow of Balliol (his brother Robert at this time being Master), was anxious to secure for that Society; and the Mayor and burgesses of Abingdon falling in with the plan a provisional agreement was signed, on the strength of which Balliol College bought, with £300 of Tesdale’s money, the building called Cæsar’s Lodgings, for the reception of Tesdale’s new Fellows and scholars, and they for a time were housed there.
Meanwhile, however, a second benefaction to Abingdon turned the thoughts of the citizens in a more ambitious direction. Richard Wightwick, B.D.—descended from a Staffordshire family, formerly of Balliol, and afterward Rector of East Ilsley, Berks, where he rebuilt the church tower and gave the clock and tenor bell—agreed, twelve or thirteen years after Tesdale’s death, to augment the Tesdale foundation so as to support in all ten Fellows and ten Scholars. For this purpose he gave lands, bearing however a 499 years’ lease (not yet expired), the rents of which amounted at that time to £100 a year. Thereupon, the Mayor, bailiffs, and burgesses of Abingdon, abandoning the previous scheme, desired the foundation of a separate and independent College, for which purpose no place seemed more suitable than Broadgates Hall. An Act of Parliament having been obtained, they presented a petition to the Crown, in reply to which King James I. by Letters Patents dated June 29th, 1624, constituted the said Hall of Broadgates to be “one perpetual College of divinity, civil and canon law, arts, medicine and other sciences; to consist of one master or governour, ten fellows, ten scholars, or more or fewer, to be known by the name of ‘the Master, Fellows, and Scholars of the College of Pembroke in the University of Oxford, of the foundation of King James, at the cost and charges of Thomas Tesdale and Richard Wightwicke.’” The better, we are told, to strengthen the new foundation and make it immovable, they had made the Earl of Pembroke, then Chancellor of the University, the Godfather, and King James the Founder of it, “allowing Tesdale and Wightwick only the privileges of foster-fathers.” James liked to play the part of founder to learned institutions, and the Earl of Pembroke was a poet and patron of letters—“Maecenas nobilissimus” Sir T. Browne calls him. In his honour the Chancellor was always to be, and is still, the Visitor of the College. Moreover, as a Hall Broadgates had had the Chancellor for Visitor. Wood says that “had not that noble lord died suddenly soon after, this College might have received more than a bare name from him.”
On August 5th, 1624, Browne, as senior commoner of Broadgates, now Pembroke, delivered one of four Latin orations in the common hall. The new foundation was described as a Phœnix springing out of the rubble of an ancient Hall, and the right noble Visitor, it was foreseen, would create a truly marble structure out of an edifice of brick. Dr. Clayton, Regius Professor of Medicine, last Principal of Broadgates and first Master of Pembroke, spoke the concluding oration of the four. The Letters Patents were then read, as well as a license of mortmain, enabling the Society to hold revenues to the amount of £700 a year. The ceremony was witnessed by a distinguished assembly, including the Vice-Chancellor and Proctors, many Masters of Arts, a large company of the nobility and gentry of the neighbourhood, and the Mayor, Recorder, and burgesses of Abingdon. Indeed, great and wide interest seems to have been taken in this youngest foundation, carrying on as it did the life of a very ancient and not unfamous place of academic learning. The students of Broadgates were now the members of Pembroke, and the speeches on the day of the inauguration of the College still affectionately style them “Lateportenses.” A commission issued from the Crown to the Lord Primate, the Visitor, the Vice-Chancellor, the Master, the Recorder of Abingdon, Richard Wightwick, and Sir Eubule Thelwall, to make statutes for the good government of the House. The statutes provided that all the Fellows and scholars should proceed to the degree of B.D. and seek Holy Orders. Some were to be of founders’ kin, but, with this reservation, the double foundation was to be entirely for the benefit of Abingdon. These provisions have been for the most part repealed by later statutes. But the tutorial Fellows are still bound to celibacy.