In Beke’s rectorship (1434-1460) the orphan College found good patrons to carry out the intentions of its deceased founder.
Before 1437 John Forest, Dean of Wells, built the Hall, the Kitchen, the Library (now the Subrector’s room), the Chapel (now the Senior Library), with living rooms above and below the Library and below the Chapel, so that he deservedly was recognized by the College as its “co-founder.”
In 1444 William Finderne, of Childrey, gave a large sum of money towards the buildings, and his estate of Seacourt, a farm at Botley near Oxford; in return the College was to appoint an additional Fellow (“sacerdos et collega”) to pray for Finderne.
In 1436, we have evidence of a Rector, seven Fellows, and two Chaplains of Lincoln College. An account-book of 1456 has been preserved, showing the Rector and five Fellows in residence and in receipt of commons.
Beke resigned in 1460, and was succeeded in Jan. 1460-1 by the third Rector, John Tristrop, who had been resident in College as a Commoner in 1455, and had probably at one time been Fellow.
In the first year of Tristrop’s rectorship the dissolution of the College was threatened. The charter of incorporation had been obtained from Henry VI.; and now that he had been deposed (on 4th March, 1460-1) by Edward IV., some powerful person seems to have coveted the possessions of the College, and suggested that Edward IV. should not grant it a charter, but seize it into his own hands. The College besought the protection of George Nevill, Bishop of Exeter, Lord High Chancellor, himself a graduate of Oxford. By Nevill’s influence the College secured from Edward IV., on 23rd Jan., 1461-2, pardon of all offences and release of all amercements incurred by them, and on 9th Feb., 1461-2, a charter confirming the College and extending its right to hold lands in mortmain. The reality of the danger and the gratitude of the College for preservation are sufficiently apparent by the way in which the Rector and Fellows tendered their thanks to Bishop Nevill: although he had given nothing to the College, yet by a solemn instrument, dated 20th Aug., 1462, they assigned him the same place in their prayers as the founder himself, “because he had delivered the College from being torn to pieces by dogs and plunderers.”
This danger averted, and confidence in the legal position of the College restored, the stream of benefactions again began to flow.
In 1463 the College purchased from University College three halls lying next to it in St. Mildred’s (now Brasenose) Lane and in Turl Street, thus doubling its original ground-plot.
In 1464 Bishop Thomas Beckington’s executors, out of the monies he had left to be applied by them to charitable uses, gave £200 to build a house for the Rector at the south end of the hall, consisting of a large room on the ground-floor and another on the first floor (the dining-room and drawing-room of the present Rector’s Lodgings), with cellar and attic. On the west front of this building was carved Beckington’s rebus[161]—a flourished T, followed by a beacon set in a barrel (i. e. “beacon”—“tun”) for “T. Beckington”—and his coat of arms, with the rebus, on the east front.
In 1465 the founder’s nephew, Robert Fleming, Dean of Lincoln, gave the library thirty-eight MSS., chiefly of classical Latin authors, comprising Cæsar, Cicero, Aulus Gellius, Horace, Juvenal, Livy, Plautus, Quintilian, Sallust, Suetonius, Terence, Virgil. Most of these, along with the old plate of the College, were embezzled by Edward VI.’s commissioners, under pretence of purging the library of Romanist books.