# Literary Landmarks of Oxford/Oriel

ORIEL
"The College of St. Mary the Virgin," which received its charter in 1326, is about half a century older than New. Curious is it to read in the annals, ancient and modern, the reasons given for the name "Oriel," by which now it is universally called; not half its students, perhaps, knowing, or caring, why. Mr. Wade's theory, as being as clear as any, will, perhaps, serve here. "La Oriole, or Le Oriole, as the name is always spelt in contemporary writings [—this was set down in 1817], is merely the French form of Oriolum, a word which frequently occurs in the Monkish writings, and other Latin documents of the Middle Ages, in the sense of a gateway, porch, or portal. This part of every handsome building was usually adorned with a large projecting window over the entrance; and hence all windows of that shape and character by degrees acquired the name of Oriole, or Oriel, windows. The building of which we are speaking seems to have been distinguished by its gateway, and the name of the most remarkable part was, probably, extended to the whole. . . . The name of Oriole became so fixed that it prevailed over the corporate style of the Foundation, ​which is 'The House of the Blessed Mary the Virgin in Oxford'; for in a deed, nearly coeval with the Foundation, to this description is subjoined [the words] ' Commonly called Oriole College.'"
When in 1410, Oriel gave a breakfast hour not stated—to the Bailifs of Oxford and their wives, in the Provost's chamber, the total cost was ten shillings and eight pence half penny. This may, perhaps, be accounted for by the fact that the symposium took place in Lent, when the fare might have been meagre. Meat, in those days, was a farthing, or half a cent, a pound; cheese a half penny, or a cent, a pound; eggs cost four pence half penny for ten dozen; French wine and mild ale were a penny a gallon; and salt was six pence and five-eighths of a penny a bushel. The prices of oats, peas, beans, barley, leeks, and onions, the chief staple of a Lenten repast, are not recorded.
Oriel, at about that same period, the beginning of the Fifteenth Century, became a little ungentlemanly in its manners. There is an ancient account of three Fellows, who headed a band of ruffians by night this was in 1411 who beat, wounded, and spoiled men, and caused murder. "They haunted taverns, day and night, and they did not enter college before ten, or eleven, or even twelve ​o'clock, when they would even scale the walls, to the disturbance of quiet students; and also bring in armed strangers to spend the night. One of these obstreperous Fellows, Thomas Wilton by name, did come over the wall at ten one evening, did knock at the Provost's door, so as to wake him up, did abuse him as a liar; and did challenge him to go out and fight!"
The term "Distinguished Son" is as familiar in the annals of Oxford, as is the epithet "Venerable Pile." One of the most distinguished of the sons of Oriel was Sir Walter Raleigh the Historian of the World.
Wood says that in "1568, or thereabouts, Raleigh became a Commoner of Oriel, where, his natural parts being strangely advanced by academical learning under the care of an excellent tutor, he became the ornament of the juniors, and was worthily esteemed a proficient in oratory and philosophy. After he had spent about three years in that House, where he had a good ground and some foundation to build thereon, he left the University,"—without a degree.
Gilbert White, the Naturalist, was graduated from Oriel in 1743, and made a Fellow the next year; holding the position for the following half century of his natural life, and as such distinguishing himself, chiefly, by his absence from Oriel! It ​is said that he was in residence during 1752 and 1753, but never before, or after, for any perceptible length of time.
John Keble became a Fellow of Oriel in 1811, after leaving Corpus with all the honors of a Double First. In 1813 he was a Public Examiner, and a Tutor of Oriel. In 1823 he resigned, and left Oxford; but he returned to be Professor of Poetry from 1831 to 1841. A shy, homely man, and unambitious, he was, strangely enough, nevertheless, a prime factor in the great religious movement of his time; and Keble College, at Oxford, erected as a tribute to his memory, and opened in 1869, is his most enduring monument ; but it is too young in years yet to have Literary Landmarks of its own.
His rooms at Oriel are vaguely described as having been " up one flight of steps, on the left." But tradition does not say up which flight of steps, or on the left of what!
A Fellowship at Oriel was, and is, a coveted honor, obtained with difficulty and subject to much competitive examination. Only the fittest of the aspirants are selected; and the list of Fellows, naturally, is a brilliant one; although many of the men once Fellows of Oriel who have made their way upward in the World of Letters, did very little, while Fellows, that is worthy of record here.
​Thomas Arnold held a Fellowship at Oriel from 1815 to 1819; when he went about doing good, as he always did, but in no especially marked way. He lodged then at No. 115 High Street, in the rooms afterwards occupied by Arthur Stanley. John Henry Newman, a graduate of Trinity, became a Fellow of Oriel on the I2th of April, 1822, "a day which he ever felt to be the turning-point of his life, and of all days most memorable." In 1826 he became a Tutor, when he wrote to his mother how much he realized that there was always a danger of the love of literary pursuits assuming too pronounced a place in the thoughts of a college teacher. A danger which is not always realized, now, in a very serious way! Newman resigned his Tutorship in 1829, on account of some difficulty between the Provost and himself, regarding his duties and responsibilities. And that is the brief chronicle of his personal "Movement" out of the Oxford University life; except that he was at one time the incumbent at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, in the old University Town.
Newman occupied rooms at Oriel near the Chapel, on "No. Three Staircase." One account states that they were "on the middle floor to the left"; and a different account places them "on the first floor to the right."
​Arthur Hugh Clough was a Fellow at Oriel from 1842 to 1848, but unfortunately there seems to be no available record of his life there.
Matthew Arnold went to Oriel as a Fellow in 1844; but his biographers dismiss his association with that College and with the University, by the remark that he made no post-graduate stay, of any length, in Oxford.
"Tom Brown at Rugby," in his "School Days" a boy's boy, is a much more interesting character than is "Tom Brown" a man's man, "at Oxford"; and his later educational experiences are not so highly regarded by the general masculine readers of his own country and University, as they are by the Boys and the Men who are his cousins across the Ocean. The "St. Ambrose" to which Tom Brown went is unquestionably the Oriel of his creator Tom Hughes.
In his first letter from Oxford to Arthur, dated Eighteen Hundred and Forty-blank, Tom Brown said: "Our college is a fair specimen. A venerable old front of crumbling stone, fronting the street, into which two or three other colleges look also. "These are, of course, Merton, Christ Church,
​than ours at Rugby, and a much more solemn and sleepy sort of a place, with its gables and old mullioned windows. One side is occupied by the Hall and Chapel; the Principal's house takes up half another side, and the rest is divided into staircases, on each of which are six or eight sets of rooms inhabited by us undergraduates, with here and there a Tutor or Fellow dropped down amongst us, not exactly to keep order, but to act as a sort of ballast. . . . My rooms are what they call garrets, right up in the roof, with a commanding view of college tiles and chimney pots, and of houses at the back. No end of cats, both college Toms and strangers, haunt the neighborhood, and I am rapidly learning cat-talk from them."
This is a very fair picture of the Oriel of to-day. And a friend of Tom Brown's, of long years standing, talked cat-talk to the descendants of Tom Brown's College Toms on more than one sunny afternoon during the unusually sunny summer of 1899.
Mr. Hughes's rooms, as a freshman, are said to have been "on No. Five Staircase, Second Quadrangle, Three-pair Back"; but other and more accessible apartments of his were pointed out by the Hall-porter, to the old friend in question, during the pauses in the conversation with the cats.
In this same first letter to Arthur, Tom said: ​"I was very nearly forgetting a great institution of the College, which is the Buttery-hatch, just opposite the hall-door. Here abides the fat old butler (all the servants at St. Ambrose's are portly) who serves out limited bread, butter, and cheese, unlimited beer, brewed by himself, for an hour in the morning, at noon, and again at supper-time. Your scout always fetches you a pint or so, on each occasion, in case you want it; and if you don't, it falls to him; but I can't say that my fellow gets much, for I am naturally a thirsty soul, and cannot often resist the malt myself, coming up as it does, fresh and cool, in one of the silver tankards of which we seem to have an endless supply."
The Buttery-hatch itself is an institution as absolutely unknown to American colleges as is the unlimited distribution of beer. It must be said, in defence of the Buttery-hatch and of Mr. Tom Brown, that while the beer is certainly cool and fresh, it is invariably very mild; and it is as harmless a beer as can be brewed.
Hughes was graduated from Oriel in 1845.
When Edward Freeman was appointed to the chair of Modern History in 1886, he wrote, from Trinity College: "I have come up here, taken possession of my quarters for the term, received Her Majesty's sign-manual as Professor, been admitted Fellow of Oriel, dined with the ​Provost, and admired the legs of the Bishop of Chester. It seems very odd being in college, and still more being in two colleges. I am living in Trinity where I am only an Honorary Fellow; not in Oriel, where I am a real Fellow; but as yet I feel more at home where my actual and my old associates are. Then the question comes, 'Where shall we dine?' And I suppose that Oriel, strictly the College of our Lady, comes nearer the notion of The Salutation Inn than Trinity does; moreover it seems that I shall gain half a crown every time that I dine in Oriel, while I shall certainly pay something every time I dine in Trinity; yet, somehow, I fancy Trinity most."
Not long after this Freeman occupied the house No. 16 St. Giles Street; dining in either college, and telling his occasional guests, with a humorous twinkle of his eye, that he not only had the pleasure of entertaining them at Oriel, but was well paid for the privilege, in the silver coin of the realm. Such it is to be a Fellow of Oriel. What is now left of St. Mary's Hall (otherwise "Skimmery" in the vernacular), built on the site of the Parsonage of St. Mary the Virgin, is on the east side of Oriel Street, back of the High Street, as one turns toward Oriel College. It is older than Oriel, but it has always been, more or less, ​associated with Oriel; and as a part of Oriel now, its graduates and undergraduates are here treated.
The name of Erasmus is associated by tradition with St. Mary's Hall, but by tradition only. There is another tradition to the effect that when asked by the authorities to sign the necessary "Thirty Nine Articles," Theodore Hook expressed his entire willingness to sign Forty Articles, if it would do any good! No doubt Hook said this, under the circumstances; although it was not original with him; and he put it, later, into the mouth of one of his own creations. He was more than of age when he entered St. Mary's Hall as an undergraduate, and he was a post-graduate in the art of horse-play and practical joking. He had already perpetrated, among many other similar feats, the immortal Berner Street Hoax; and naturally he was an impossible factor in any college. St. Mary's at that period had no very high standard of rigidity of morals, or of temperance in living. It has been described as the most "gentlemanly" residence in Oxford; a "gentleman " being then defined as a man who did nothing, who spent his own and his father's money with brilliant indifference to consequences, and who applied his mind solely to the indulgence of frolic of all kinds. But even "Skimmery" ​could not submit to the incessant frolic of Hook; and he saved himself the frolic of being expelled by retiring, voluntarily, after a brief course of frolic at Oxford, to frolic all the rest of his life away, in other fields.