Johnwilkins and the Gardens of Wadham College

chapter 8 John Wilkins and the Gardens of Wadham College* Scott Mandelbrote Wadham College was founded on the site of a former Augustinian Friary, whose buildings were already in ruins at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries. According to the king’s commissioner, Dr John London, the friars held only six or seven acres of land.1 In 1609, Dorothy Wadham, the College’s widowed foundress, purchased the ground from the city of Oxford (which had owned it since 1588–1589) for £600. Intervention from the crown, after James vi and I had seen the designs of William Arnold (Wadham’s architect), lowered the price significantly below the figure of £1,000 which the city council had originally sought. Wadham acquired a roughly rectangular parcel of land, of about five and a half acres, bounded to the south by Holywell Street and to the west by what is now Parks Road. It was enclosed to the north by an east-west wall which still bounds the Fellows’ garden: ‘the ground wheare the Colledg shalbe buylt contayneth betwene 4 and 5 acres & ys the most absolutest place that Oxford canne yelde & hath a very strong wall about yt of viii foote highe, which will save 300li’.2 The buildings initially erected by the College covered two acres, and the Warden and Fellows leased out the northern two acres (thus generating an income for the College which was already factored into the cost of its endowment). It is the history of that area of land in the mid-seventeenth century that forms the principal subject of this chapter. Beyond it lay property of Merton College, which like the land that Wadham leased out, was employed * Research for this chapter was conducted together with John Steane, mostly in the period 1999–2002. Parts of the text are based on a draft prepared by Mr Steane, who initiated the project and oversaw the archaeological work commissioned for it. I am grateful for his encouragement to develop this material here. Extensive use has been made of D.J. Mabberley, ‘The Gardens’,in C.S.L. Davies and Jane Garnett, eds., Wadham College (Oxford, 1994), 100–121. Thanks are also due toWill Poole and Gaye Morgan for assistance in securing the illustrations. 1 A.G. Little, ‘House of Austin Friars’, in William Page, ed., The Victoria History of the County of Oxford. Volume Two (London, 1907), 143–148. 2 Sir Edward Hext to John, Lord Petre, 27 March 1610, quoted in Nancy Briggs, ‘The Foundation of Wadham College, Oxford’, Oxoniensia 21 (1956), 61–81, at 69. See also C.S.L. Davies, ‘A Woman in the Public Sphere: Dorothy Wadham and the Foundation of Wadham College, Oxford’, English Historical Review 118 (2003), 883–911, at 895. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004348097_009 200 mandelbrote by market gardeners to grow their crops, and which was eventually purchased by Wadham between 1794 and about 1835. It may be worth saying a little more about the walls that currently bound the property of Wadham, whose value so impressed the overseers of Nicholas Wadham’s will. That to the west appears to have been built in three phases: the first medieval, using Corallian limestone rubble; the second, repairs of Headington freestone and some Taynton stone with occasional fire-reddened limestone lumps, using mostly secondhand materials perhaps available in the seventeenth century; the last and upper part of the wall being more recent, perhaps from the last century. The cross wall, which runs east-west and bounds the current Warden’s garden on the north, enclosing the Fellow’s garden on that side, may also be medieval in date. It is similar in construction to the wall already described. These walls may both be seen in the aerial view (fig. 8.1) of Oxford published by the Danish engraver, David Loggan (1635–1700?). Loggan exhibited drawings and views of the city and colleges in 1669, when he was appointed as engraver to the University, and, by January 1675, he had completed the plates for his Oxonia illustrata (published in June 1675, and intended as a complement to Anthony Wood’s Historia et antiquitates universitatis Oxonien- sis, which appeared in 1674).3 A further wall is just visible in Loggan’s aerial view, which divides the Warden’s garden to the west from the Fellows’ garden to the east. As will be seen, it is possible to establish that the division must have been made between 1640 and 1650, and that the wall is likely to date from the end of that time. It is inferior structurally to the earlier walls described above, being made of limestone rubble without the small Corallian blocks that they contain. It has big blocks of Headington stone with very wide mortar joints, which appear to be of a single phase, and is constructed more neatly on the side of the Warden’s garden. Walls were important to seventeenth-century gardens not only because of the protection and definition of space that they provided. Contemporary horticultural writers stressed that both gardens and orchards ‘require a strong and shrowding fence’.4 The interest of John Evelyn (1620–1706) in the garden at Wadham coincided with his initial attempts to compose an encyclopaedic work on gardening, the Elysium Britannicum, which he first mentioned in print in December 1658, and which he had perhaps conceived in 1652, when he began laying out his own gardens at Sayes Court in Deptford. Evelyn recommended ‘a good, strong and substantiall Wall of two foote in thicknesse, and thirteene 3 See Falconer Madan, Oxford Books, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1895–1931), 3: 289–291, 304–308. 4 William Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden (London, 1631), 85..

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