Gloucester College, Oxford

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Gloucester College, Oxford was a Benedictine institution of the University of Oxford, from the late thirteenth century until the Dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century. It was never a typical college of the University, in that there was an internal division in the College, by staircase units, into parts where the monasteries sending monks had effective authority.^[1] The overall head was a Prior.^[2]

The initial foundation was from 1283. John Giffard gave a house, in Stockwell Street, Oxford.^[3] There was early friction with the local Carmelites.^[4] This was a donation to the Benedictines of the province of Canterbury. Control of the 13 places for monks fell to the abbey of St. Peter, Gloucester.^[5] The first prior was Henry de Heliun.

Pope Benedict XII in 1337 laid down, in the bull Pastor bonus, that 5% of Benedictine monks should be university students.^[6] But from the middle of the fourteenth century onwards there was an alternative, at the University of Cambridge.^[7] There were also the Benedictine Durham College, Oxford, and Canterbury College, Oxford. Even though the catchment area after 1337 included the Province of York, numbers of students were never high, one reason being the cost of living in Oxford (which the home monastery had to meet). After the Black Death, Gloucester College was closed for a time. In 1537 it was found to have 32 students.^[8]

At the Dissolution the property passed to the English Crown, then to the Bishop of Oxford in 1542[2], who sold it to Sir Thomas Whyte. Whyte was the founder of St. John's College, Oxford, and Gloucester Hall, as it then became, was treated as an Annexe to St. John’s. The position changed only in the eighteenth century, when the college was refounded in 1714 by Richard Blechynden as Worcester College, Oxford. Oxford's Gloucester Green, which was opposite the old College, preserves the name.

[edit] Alumni

Those who studied at the College include:

• Henry Bradshaw (poet)[3]
• John Feckenham
• John Lydgate (supposed)

[edit] Notes

1. ^ David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England vol. II (1955) p.14 calls it ‘something of a patchwork’ and (p.17) ‘a loose confederation of small groups rather than a college.’
2. ^ Appointed by the Abbot of Malmesbury, but there was a regent master appointed by the provincial Benedictine presidents. (Knowles p.14)
3. ^ Stockwell Street no longer exists, but it ran northwards from the Castle along the line of the present Worcester and Walton Streets (page on Nicholas de Stockwell).
4. ^ This persisted into the sixteenth century.[1].
5. ^ Houses of Benedictine monks: Gloucester College, Oxford', A History of the County of Oxford: Volume 2 (1907), pp. 70-1 Date accessed: 23 January 2007.
6. ^ Knowles p.15.
7. ^ Knowles p.17.
8. ^ 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, article Schools.