British Students at Leiden University

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a diverse set of primary resources to examine this British presence in the United Provinces, including their varied reasons for attending an overseas and relatively new institution, relations with locals and other students, and details of daily life. Leiden University was founded in 1575 and is the oldest university in the Northern Netherlands. Some students spent a sojourn at the university while on their Grand Tour, enjoying the pleasures of intellectual exchange as part of the desired experiences of travel. The risks were presumably carefully weighed; these included not just vanishing students, or the usual troubles caused by young men abroad. The Netherlands was particularly enticing to English students during times of turmoil at home – notably the middle of the seventeenth century – with similarly fluctuating changes in the rate of admission for Scottish students and, likely, the sons of displaced Dutch families from the Eighty Years’ War.