uring the Civil War the highway past Magdalen was blocked up to prevent horsemen from entering the town, and a small gate opened close to the Chaplains'quad. Loads of stone were carried up to the top of the tower, which was used as a post of observation. After Edgehill the King’s “ordnance and great guns ”were driven into Magdalen College Grove; a mound of earth was thrown up to join the wall of the Physic Garden and guns mounted upon it; the trees in the walks were felled, means provided for flooding the meadows, and batteries erected in various parts.
Two months after Oxford surrendered to the Parliamentary forces Anthony Wood records that it was “empty as to scholars, but pretty well replenished with Parliamentarian soldiers... as for the young men of the city and university... many of them... have been debauched by bearing” (p.111) armes and doing the duties belonging to soldiers, as watching, warding and sitting in tipling houses for whole nights together. ”Many of the members of the college refused to submit to the Parliamentary visitors, and were forced to resign their positions, but the greater number returned after the Restoration, and their names were engraved on the Grace Cup known as the Restoration Cup, which is still passed round in Hall on the 29th May and 20th October. At the Restoration too the chime of bells was put up in the tower, the Elm Grove planted, and a little later the walk round the meadows laid out.
In 1688 took place the “Golden Election” of demies, so called because an unusual number of them afterwards became distinguished. Of these the greatest were Joseph Addison and Henry Sacheverell, fast friends and chamber fellows, who occupied rooms in the north-east corner of the cloister buildings near the gate of Addison’s Walk, but the building has since been restored and they cannot now be pointed out.
The eighteenth century, that time of stagnation in Oxford, has little to mark it in Magdalen. Edward Gibbon was admitted as a gentleman-commoner in 1752, and spent in the college the fourteen months which he afterwards described as “ the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.”He made some severe criticisms upon the college and maintained that only one member of it in his time was a real student.
The New Buildings which face us as we leave the cloisters by a passage on the north side were begun in 1735 and West’s Buildings in 1783; the latter were the result of a legacy from Dr Thomas West, who entered the college in 1720 as a chorister and remained there until his death in 1781.
Bibliography
Lang, Elsie M. The Oxford Colleges. London: T. Werner. HathiTrust online version of a copy in the University of Michigan Library. Web. 8 November 2022.
Last modified 27 November 2022