Volume 1

Brasenose College quatercentenary monographs.

Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Brasenose College quatercentenary monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    i. The High Street Frontage. A. All Saints’ Parish. I. Broadgates Hall. The New Buildings of Brasenose reach the High Street at their westernmost limit between what are at present Nos. 23 and 24, that is to say, at a point about 178 feet from the south- east corner of the Principal’s House and about 112 feet from the nearest point of All Saints’ Church. In the western portion of these 112 feet we may safely place Burwaldescote Hall,^ and in the 65 feet within All Saints’ Parish which will be occupied by the New Buildings we may place Broadgates Hall, which is stated by Wood to have ‘ had its entrance at the wide or broad gate at the utmost house save one of the limits of this parish from S. Marie’s and almost opposite to the Swan Inne ’ (the court of which was cut through by King Edward Street). Mr. Hurst is satisfied, from some New College leases, that the entrance to the Hall was just east of Amsterdam Passage, which passage is between Nos. 25 and 26 High Street. The Hall itself (Aula Latae Portae, Aula Latarum Portarum, Aula Late- portensis) stood back from the street, and broadened out at the back. The garden of Olifant Hall in Brasenose Lane (see p. 17) was its northern boundary (information from the Rev. H. E. Salter). Broadgates Hall—which is not to be confused with the Hall of the same name which became Pembroke College, nor with six others enumerated by Wood in his History of the City^ edited by A. Clark—must have been of considerable size. Wood speaks of a large court and of a chapel with other edifices which were only pulled down in 1661. There can be no doubt that it even had the right of sanctuary, for in Munimenta A cademica it is recorded that as late as 1463 one Johannes Harry, a tailor, having wounded a man, fled to the ‘ Aula Latae Portae ’ and claimed a right of sanctuary, which the record states to have been ^ Wood states in connexion with a rental of 1426-7 that the two halls described in this paragraph are identical, Broadgates being the later name, but this cannot be the fact.