In the year 1311 fresh statutes were ordained by convocation for the College, which, however, add little to the former ones. Of candidates for a Fellowship, otherwise duly qualified, he was to be preferred who comes from near Durham. After seven years a Fellow was to oppose in the Divinity Schools, which was equivalent to nowadays taking the degree of Doctor of Divinity. Each Fellow or past-Fellow was to put up a mass once a year for the Repose of the soul of William of Durham; and all alike were to cause themselves to be called, so far as lay in their power, the scholars of William of Durham. Lastly, the Senior Fellow was to be in Holy Orders. This, however, must not be taken to mean that the other Fellows were not to be so likewise. They were till recently expected to be ordained within four years of their degree, and the Statutes of 1311 A.D. were reaffirmed in that sense by the visitors under the chancellorship of Dr. Fell, 1666 A.D., when it was sought to remove Mr. Berty, a Bennet Fellow, because he had not taken orders.
In or about the year 1343 the scholars of William of Durham removed to the present site of the College, where a house called Spicer’s Hall, occupying the ground now included in the large quadrangle, had been bought for them. At the same time White Hall and Rose Hall, two houses facing Kybald Street—which joined the present Logic Lane and Grove Street half-way down each—were bought, and made part of the College. Ludlow Hall, on the site of the present east quadrangle, was bought at the same time, and a tenement, called in 1379 Little University Hall, and occupying the site of the Lodgings of the Master (which in 1880, on the completion of the Master’s new house, were turned into men’s rooms), was bought in 1404. But Ludlow Hall and Little University Hall were not at once added to the College premises.
During the first hundred years of the life of the College its members were called simply University Scholars, and the ordinance of A.D. 1311, that they should call themselves the Scholars of William of Durham, proves that that was not the name in common vogue. Their old house at the corner of what is to-day Brazen-nose College was called the Aula Universitatis in Vico Scholarum (the Hall of the University in School Street). After 1343, the probable year of their migration, until at least 1361, the College was called as before Aula Universitatis, only in Alto Vico, i. e. in High Street. After 1361 they assumed the official title of Master and Fellows of the Hall of William of Durham, commonly called Aula Universitatis. It was not till 1381 that the present title Magna Aula Universitatis, or Mickle University Hall, was used, in distinction from the Little University Hall, which was only separated from it by Ludlow Hall. But the nomenclature was not uniform, and in Elizabeth’s reign, as in Richard II.’s, it was called the College of William of Durham.
The legend of the foundation of the College by King Alfred has been mentioned, and here is a convenient place to conjecture how and when it arose. The first mention of it we meet with in a petition addressed in French to King Richard II., A.D. 1381, by his “poor Orators, the Master and Scholars of your College, called Mickil University Hall in Oxendford, which College was first founded by your noble Progenitor, King Alfred (whom God assoyle), for the maintenance of twenty-four Divines for ever.” Twenty years before, in 1360, Laurence Radeford, a Fellow, had bought for the College various messuages, shops, lands and meadows yielding rents of the yearly value of £15. This purchase was made out of the residuum of William of Durham’s money, now all called in. But it turned out that the title to the new property was bad, and, after forging various deeds without success, the College appealed in the above petition to the king, Richard II., to exercise his prerogative, and take the case out of the common courts, in which—so runs the petition—the plaintiff, Edmond Frauncis, citizen of London, “has procured all the Pannel of the Inquest to be taken by Gifts and Treats.”
The petition prays the king to see that the College be not “tortiously disinherited,” and appeals to the memory of the “noble Saints John of Beverley, Bede, and Richard of Armagh, formerly scholars of the College.” A petition so full of fictions hardly deserved to lead to success, and the College was eventually compelled to redeem its right to the estate by payment of a large sum of money to the heirs of Frauncis. The interest of this petition, however, lies in the fact that in 1728, on the occasion of a dispute arising for the mastership between Mr. Denison and Mr. Cockman, it formed the ground upon which, in the King’s Bench at Westminster, it was held that the College is a Royal foundation, and the Crown the rightful visitor; the truth being that the whole body of Regents and non-Regents of the University were and always had been the true and rightful visitor.
But the French Petition to Richard II. was not the only fabrication to which William of Durham’s unworthy beneficiaries had recourse in order to establish a fictitious antiquity and deny their real founder. About the same time they stole the chancellor’s seal and affixed its impress to a forged deed purporting to have been executed in A.D. 1220, the 4th of Henry III., May 10th, by Lewis de Chapyrnay, Chancellor. This false deed records the receipt of four hundred marks bequeathed by William, Archdeacon of Durham, for the maintenance of six Masters of Arts, and the conveyance of certain tenements to Master Roger Caldwell, Warden and senior Fellow of the great hall of the University. The reader will the more agree that this forgery was worthier of Shapira than of “honest and holy clerks,” when he reads in Antony à Wood (City of Oxford, ed. Andrew Clark, vol. i. p. 561)—who was not deceived by it—that it was written “on membrane cours, thick, greasy, whereas, in the reign of Henry III. parchment was not so, but fine and clear.” There never were such persons as Chapyrnay and Caldwell, and William of Durham did not die till 1249, and then left only three hundred and ten marks. Mr. Twine, the author of the Apology for the Antiquity of Oxford, said of this deed, “mentiri nescit, it cannot lie.” “But,” says quaintly Mr. William Smith, “if ever there was a lie in the world, that which we find in that Charter is as great a one as ever the Devil told since he deceived our first Parents in Paradise.”
It would oppress the reader to detail all the other fictions which followed on this early one. One lie makes many, and as time went on outward embellishments were added to the College commemorative of its mythical founder. Thus a picture of King Alfred was bought in the year 1662 for £3—perhaps the same which one now sees in the College library. There was—so Mr. Smith relates—an older picture of him in the Masters’ lodgings.
A statue of Alfred also stood over the chapel door, and was removed by Mr. Obadiah Walker, Master in 1676, to a niche over the hall door to make place for a statue of St. Cuthbert, the patron saint of Durham, on whose day the gaudy used to be celebrated until 1662, at which date it was changed to the day of Saints Simon and Jude, out of respect to the memory of Sir Simon Benet, who had lately bequeathed four Fellowships, four scholarships, and various other benefits. This was the real cause of the 28th of October being chosen for the gaudy, although afterwards the Aluredians absurdly pretended that it was the day of King Alfred’s obit. The statue of Alfred above-mentioned was given by Dr. Robert Plot, the well-known author of The Natural History of Oxfordshire, who was a Fellow-commoner of the College, and it cost £3 1s. 5d. to remove it, as related, in the year 1686. A hundred years later a marble image of Alfred was given to the College by Viscount Folkestone, which is now set up over the fireplace in the oak common-room. A relief of him is also set over the fireplace in the college-hall, and was given by Sir Roger Newdigate, a member of the College, and founder of the University annual prize for an English poem.
A picture of St. John of Beverley, mentioned in the French petition to Richard II., was, we learn from Gutch’s edition of Antony Wood’s Colleges and Halls (ed. 1786, p. 57), set in the east window of the old chapel in the beginning of the seventeenth century. The same authority assures us that until Dr. Clayton’s time (Master, 1605) there were in a window on the west side of the little old quadrangle pictures of King Alfred kneeling and St. Cuthbert sitting, … the king thus bespeaking the saint in a pentameter, holding the picture of the College in his hand, “Hic in honore tui collegium statui,” to whom the saint made answer, in a scroll coming from his mouth—“Quæ statuisti in eo pervertentes maledico.”
In a window of the outer chapel were also the arms of William of Durham, which were, “Or, a Fleur de lis azure, each leaf charged with a mullet gules.” Round these arms was written on a scroll: “Magistri Willielmi de Dunelm … huius collegii”; the missing word, so Wood had been informed, was “Fundatoris,” erased, no doubt, by an Aluredian. The arms of the College to-day are those of Edward the Confessor, to wit—“Azure, a cross patonce between five martlets Or.” We would do well to resign our sham royalty, and return to the arms of William of Durham, our true founder.