Reg Little joins alumni and guests of Merton for the 750th anniversary celebrations of one of Oxford’s finest places

As celebrations go it certainly deserved to be a big one last Friday as 300 Mertonians toasted their Oxford college. For the dinner at the 16th-century Middle Temple Hall in central London marked the last in a whole year of events staged by the college, to bring to an end Merton College’s 750th anniversary year.

More than 4,000 Merton College alumni and members of the public have taken part in the college’s celebrations both in Oxford and across the world.

There have been musical premieres from the college’s choir, a summer ball and a three-day long Birthday Weekend, which rivalled the University of Oxford’s own alumni weekend in size, by bringing back 1,200 old college members to celebrate the college’s inception.

The range of speakers involved in Merton’s 750th anniversary celebrations has included current members of the college such as the great mathematician Sir Andrew Wiles, famous for proving Fermat’s Last Theorem, and Bodley Fellow Professor Robert MacLaren, whose research is developing new treatments for blindness.

There have been appearances too from friends of the college, from television personalities such as Stephen Fry and Professor Brian Cox to the director of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti.

On Friday it was author Bill Bryson’s turn to have his say as guest of honour. Bryson once ruffled a few feathers at Merton by describing the college’s Warden’s Lodgings as being “like a toaster with windows” in his book Notes from a Small Island.

The college later showed it not to be an institution to harbour a grudge when it invited him to reopen the lodgings after the refacing of its facade, with a new simulated stone frontage to match the adjacent college walls.

As well as celebrating 750 years of academic excellence, the college is also celebrating reaching its £30m fundraising campaign target, with £7m going towards essential restoration and renovation of Merton’s seriously historical buildings.

For Merton’s greatest claim to fame is surely its antiquity.

As former The Oxford Times journalist David Horan tells us in his book on Oxford: “It is not a noisy college like Christ Church or Balliol, not flashy like Magdalen or New College.

“It might well be that Balliol and Univ can claim greater age by a few years, but there can be no doubt that Merton was the first real college as we know them in Oxford.

“It was the first self-governing community of scholars administering its own properties under its own statues.

“Some years later when the Bishop of Ely was founding the first Cambridge college, Peterhouse, he sent for Merton’s statutes to use as a model.”

The college was founded by one of the leading figures of the 13th century, Walter de Merton, sometime Chancellor of England and later Bishop of Rochester, who was educated at Merton Priory in Surrey before enjoying a long and successful career serving the church and Henry III.

He bought a house in St John Street in Oxford (now Merton Street) from Jacob, son of Master Moses of London — the house being located at what is now staircases two and three of the Front Quad.

It was conceived as an educational innovation, independent of church and state. As the prototype college its structure can said to have been copied by all the Oxford and Cambridge colleges and by early American East Coast colleges.

Mob Quadrangle, the oldest quadrangle in the university, was built in three phases, starting in 1288 with the Treasury.

Mob Library is the oldest continuously functioning library for university academics and students in the world, while the Gatehouse dates from the early 15th century, when Henry V granted a royal “license to crenellate”, which allowed for the construction of the battlement tower above the present-day lodge.

Oxford Mail:
Merton seen from the rear

Merton Chapel was begun in the late 1280s as part of the Church of St Mary and St John. It was built to replace the parish church of St John the Baptist, which stood on the site now occupied by the north wing of Mob Quad. To this day the chapel contains one of the finest pre-Reformation lecterns surviving in England, originally given to College in 1504. A screen by Christopher Wren was added in 1673.

Merton was originally founded for 20, admitted in the early 1380s. It was then that John Wyliot, a former fellow and sub warden, endowed a number of scholarships known at Merton as postmasterships.

Given its background, unsurprisingly Merton became a nursery for bishops and during the 14th century produced four Archbishops of Canterbury.

Over the centuries the eminent scholars and cultural leaders to have called Merton home include four Nobel Prize winners, the physician who discovered the circulation of blood, and the founder of Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.

It also has impressive, if not altogether happy, links with English queens.

Katherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII, stayed at Oxford while visiting Oxford to pray for a healthy pregnancy at the shrine of St Frideswide.

During the English Civil War staunchly Royalist Merton provided lodgings for Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria. Her rooms are still known as the Queen’s Rooms.

When Charles II moved his court to Oxford in 1665 to escape the plague in London, Charles’s childless queen, Catherine of Braganza, took the Queen’s Rooms, while his mistress, Barbara Castlemaine, had other rooms in the college and gave birth to one of the king’s illegitimate children while she was there.

In a his speech on Friday, the warden of Merton, Sir Martin Taylor, said: “We can be proud at the end of an amazing year, and grateful that this college has stood the test of Walter de Merton’s vision over 750 years.

“We know what Merton’s values, traditions and achievements have been. For we were the first college to have statutes and to state an academic sense of purpose. From Thomas Bodley and the Oxford Calculators to Sir Alec Jeffreys’s discovery of DNA Fingerprinting and Sir Andrew Wiles’s solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem, Merton has stood for achievement.”

And compared with the money swilling around American universities, it all seems to have been done quite cheaply, well at least according to Bill Bryson.

After telling his favourite bear story (the one about bear dung with bells in it) the best-selling American told guests: “I once sat next to the head of fundraising at the University of Virginia who told me that they had a five-year fundraising target of $3bn. To achieve this they employed a team of 250 fundraising staff.

“Here’s the thing: they were, when I most recently checked, 130th out of the world’s top universities. Britain has, despite the austere economy here, three of the top 10 universities and 11 of the top 100. It has one per cent of the world’s population but 11 per cent of the very best universities.”