A royal foundation: 700 years of Oriel College

Oriel College occupies a large site in the very heart of Oxford, with its main buildings grouped around three quadrangles that extend in a single rectangular plot from the High Street in the north to Merton Lane in the south. The principal entrance, however, is to one side, overlooking Oriel Square, and attractively sequestered from the noise of the city. This year, Oriel celebrates its 700th anniversary and it’s still possible to trace the long institutional development of the college in the fabric of its buildings.

The founder of the college was a royal clerk, Adam de Brome, a modest landholder probably born in Suffolk. De Brome entered royal service as an administrator to Edward I and performed a wide variety of roles before his ordination as a priest in 1301. Thereafter, he acquired a series of church livings, including, in 1320, the valuable rectory of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, a church that was becoming a focus of university activity. In the same year, work began to what is now known as the Old Congregation House and the first university library, both attached to it.

De Brome was clearly connected with these works, later becoming involved in a controversy over the library books. This presumably explains why, on April 20, 1324, he acquired a licence to establish ‘a certain college of scholars studying various disciplines in honour of the Virgin’, comprising a provost and 10 fellows. Among the properties he collected to endow for this institution was Tackley’s Inn, comprising a hall, chambers and a row of shops on the High Street, and three lodging houses on Broad Street, including Perilous Hall. There was also a lucrative advowson of the church of Aberford, Yorkshire.

Towards the end of 1325, however, de Brome changed his plans. As a means of securing his endowment and adding to the prestige of the project, he gave these various properties to Edward II, who refounded the college in his own name: the royal charter is dated January 21, 1326. A few months later, the King was further persuaded to allow the new college to appropriate the rectory of St Mary the Virgin, adding its valuable tithes and dues to the revenue of the foundation. This rectory was a gift of Henry Burghersh, Bishop of Lincoln.

The Bishop’s gift effectively turned St Mary the Virgin into a chapel of the college and the fellowship had obligations throughout the Middle Ages to maintain certain chantries and devotions within the building (even when it had another chapel of its own). It also brought with it the rectory house, which faced the church on the far side of the High Street. This property developed into an academic hall with its own students under the governance of a principal, also the vicar of St Mary the Virgin. Known as St Mary Hall, it was only subsumed within the main college in 1902.

Between 1329 and 1392, the remainder of the present site was bought up or given to the college. Among the properties acquired was a large house known as ‘La Oriole’, facing onto what is now Oriel Square. It had been given by Eleanor of Castile, Edward I’s Queen, to her nephew James of Spain, who passed it to the provost and fellows in 1329. In return, he and his deceased aunt received prayers and the fraternity of the college. This gives Oriel a claim to be the first Oxford college to admit a woman, albeit posthumously. Yet it was also the last to receive women as undergraduates, opening its doors to them in 1985.

It is from ‘La Oriole’, of course, that the college takes its familiar name. Properly, it is: ‘The House of the Blessed Mary the Virgin in Oxford, commonly called Oriel College, of the Foundation of Edward the Second of Famous Memory Sometime King of England.’

The medieval collegiate buildings, incorporating a chapel and hall, stood on the site of the present entrance quadrangle. They are pictured in a woodcut view of the college of 1566 by John Bereblock, but little is securely known about them. The quadrangle we see today gradually took shape from 1619 and took two decades to complete; Dr John Prideaux, Bishop of Worcester and Vice Chancellor of the University, consecrated the new chapel in summer 1642, only weeks before Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham Castle and the kingdom slid into civil war.

Provost John Tolson, a theologian and college fellow with particular flair for fundraising, drove forward the project, adopting the idea of a benefactors’ book to record all donations. To alumni, he represented the college as ‘your decayed mother’, adding in one letter to Sir Thomas Cave of Stanford Hall, Northamptonshire that ‘our walls are tottering’. Writing to Sir Robert Harley in 1637, he explained that ‘we have adventured upon a great worke, no less then the fabricke of a new and well composed building out of the ruines of an old castle of ragges’. His various appeals cumulatively raised the impressive sum of £3,062.

The new quadrangle was laid out in what had become a standard Oxford plan, ultimately derived from the late-14th-century example of New College (Country Life, October 16, 2019). In conformity with the architectural taste of the period, however, here the design is strictly regularised and the buildings enlivened with a busy crown of gables. Facing the visitor as they pass through the vaulted gatehouse passage are the hall and chapel with identical Gothic windows (Fig 1). Between them is a projecting central porch with the figures of two kings — presumably Edward II and Charles I — and the Virgin and Child above. This grand façade is enclosed by lodging ranges on three sides.

The college hall preserves its 17th-century open-timber roof (Fig 2). At its centre originally stood an open hearth, the smoke escaping through a louvre in the roof, now glazed. The present panelling dates largely from 1710 and the windows contain modern heraldic glass commemorating benefactors and notable members of the college by Sir Ninian Comper (1864–1960). He undertook the wholesale restoration of the interior and the character of this has been respected during the most recent restoration of the hall by Richard Griffiths Architects, the work of which, from 2020, has included lime-washing the walls and the re-painting of heraldry.

The chapel follows a conventional collegiate plan with stalls running the length of the interior (Fig 5) and an internal screen dividing off the entrance area as an antechapel. Its fine eagle lectern was donated in 1654 by undergraduate Nathaniel Napier (although the lectern’s maker is unknown), and, in 1677–78, the marble floor was donated by two fellows, Samuel Short and Charles Perrot. The glass includes a window by William Peckitt that was donated to the college by the Duke of Beaufort in 1767. Peckitt had previously worked at New College and this depiction of Christ’s Presentation in the Temple originally filled the window above the altar.

In 2001, a stained-glass window was also installed in memory of St John Henry Newman, who served as a tutor at Oriel and as a chaplain between 1826 and 1831 and again from 1833–35. It fills the oriel of the Newman Oratory adjoining the chapel. The window was designed by Vivienne Haig and executed by Douglas Hogg through the generosity of Norma, Lady Dalrymple-Champneys.

When Oxford became the royalist capital in 1642 (Country Life, September 21, 2022), the newly completed college was conveniently placed between the lodgings of the King and Queen respectively in Christ Church and Merton. It became the home of the Lord Treasurer, Francis Cottington, the Dean of the Chapel Royal and 35 other royal servants and officers. It also operated as the office for Mercurius Aulicus, the mouthpiece of Royalist propaganda. Several fellows were removed from the college during the Commonwealth and, following the Restoration in 1660, the figure of the Virgin and Child above the hall door had to be returned to its place.

The development of Oriel’s Second Quadrangle reflects the changing social character of Oxford during the 18th century. Sharing chambers (or ‘chumming’ as it was termed) became increasingly unacceptable and demand grew for private accommodation. At Oriel, this prompted the gradual enclosure of the former garden between the 17th-century First Quadrangle and St Mary Hall. The first stage of this transformation was the construction of the Robinson Building to one side of the garden in about 1720. It was designed and built by William Townesend, a member of the distinguished dynasty of masons responsible for much of Oxford’s 18th-century architecture.

A decade later, the Carter Building was erected through a benefaction of Provost George Carter. Stylistically, the two buildings form a harmonious pair. Detached within the garden for almost a century, they were conceived in a Jacobean idiom, echoing the architecture of the First Quadrangle. In 1818–19, the two ranges were incorporated into a more coherent quadrangle. These works followed Henry Hakewill’s remodelling of the Provost’s Lodgings in 1815–17, during which a new hall and stair were introduced and part of the Carter Building adapted as the provost’s study.

Completing Second Quadrangle is the Senior Library (Fig 4), designed by James Wyatt following the bequest of a substantial collection of books by Edward, Lord Leigh of Stoneleigh Abbey. Begun in 1788 and completed in 1795, it was Wyatt’s third major Oxford commission and forms a striking contrast to the antiquarian character of the Robinson and Carter Buildings. The interior is being restored.

Beneath the library were two common rooms (Fig 3), among the earliest purpose-built examples in Oxford, reflecting the growing importance of collegiate sociability in the later 18th century. The east common room retains a chimneypiece designed by Richard Westmacott. In 1970, its interior was redecorated under the guidance of the celebrated designer John Fowler and at the instigation of college fellow and historian Prof Hugh Trevor-Roper.

The Third Quadrangle has a distinct character, reflecting its origins as the separate institution of St Mary Hall. The timber-frame and rendered house to one side was erected in about 1743 by the then principal of the hall, William King, who evidently intended even more ambitious works. The building is referred to today as the ‘Dolls’ house’. The quadrangle was enlarged from 1826 by Daniel Robertson, whose Gothic Revival additions brought greater architectural coherence to what had long been an assemblage of buildings of different dates. The final stage came with the construction of the Rhodes Building, designed by Basil Champneys and completed in 1911.

Funded through the benefaction of Cecil Rhodes, it replaced the ancient High Street frontage with a substantial range of student accommodation in an assured Edwardian Gothic style. Although intended to harmonise with its historic surroundings, the building was not universally admired. In 1930, Evelyn Waugh famously observed that ‘a very small expenditure on dynamite should be enough to rid us for ever of [...] the High Street front of Oriel’. Whatever its early critics may say, the Rhodes Building now forms an integral part of the college’s architectural composition, and, to those who pass along Oxford’s busy High Street, it is the public face of Oriel.

Find out more about Oriel College.

See more of the best skip the rest — add us as a preferred source in Google and you'll see more from Country Life when you're online.

This feature originally appeared in the October 7, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.