Statue of William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, one-time Chancellor of Oxford. Bodleian Library, Oxford
The first library for Oxford University – as distinct from the colleges – was housed in a room above the Old Congregation House, begun on a site to the north of the chancel of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. The building stood at the heart of Oxford’s ‘academic quarter’, close to the schools in which lectures were given. The library was built with funds supplied by Thomas de Cobham, Bishop of Worcester, but was still unfinished when he died in 1327. The room, which still exists as a vestry and meeting room for the church, is neither large nor architecturally impressive, and it was superseded in 1488 by the library known as Duke Humfrey’s, which constitutes the oldest part of the Bodleian complex. The occasion for moving to a new building was the gift to the University by Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, younger brother of King Henry V, of his priceless collection of more than 281 manuscripts, including several important classical texts. These volumes would have made the existing library desperately overcrowded, and in 1444 the University decided to erect a new library over the Divinity School, begun in about 1424 on a site at the northern end of School Street, just inside the town wall. Because of chronic shortages of funds the building was still unfinished in the 1440s, and the library was not begun in earnest until 1478; it was finally opened ten years later.
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Keywords: -time, 3rd, bodleian, camera, chancellor, degree, earl, herbert, humfrey, library, oxford, oxford., pembroke, statue, student, william
