The Library of Durham College, Oxford

Abstract

IN 1290 THE MONKS of Durham Cathedral erected their locum Oxonie on a site which they had owned -since 1286, lying to the north of Broad Street, Oxford. The early years of the house's existence saw a considerable amount of academic activity, but against a background of financial instability. This was alleviated, at least partially, by the refounding of the College in the late 1370s by Thomas Hatfield, bishop of Durham, still as a cell of the Priory, but with a greater degree of independence than it had previously enjoyed. It was not until the beginning of the fifteenth century that the financial position of the College became stable enough to allow large-scale building, including a new chapel, begun in 1405 and dedicated in 1409,· and the library. The College was finally dissolved in 1540, along with Durham Priory. The buildings and land were eventually purchased by an Oxfordshire landowner and courtier, Sir Thomas Pope of Wroxton, who founded Trinity College on the site.l Of the many Durham monks who received a university education at the Oxford college during the later Middle Ages, few remained more than six years; indeed for the majority the College seems to have been little more than a finishing school before they returned north to take up administrative positions in the hierarchy of the mother house or one of its other cells. One or two monks did establish themselves permanently in the College, although fewer examples of this are to be found at Durham College than at Canterbury College, the Oxford college founded by the Benedictine monks of Canterbury.2 During their time in Oxford, the Durham monks would