In this fascinating study of the early history of Exeter College, commissioned to mark the 700th anniversary of its foundation, John Maddicott, for nearly forty years a teaching Fellow of the College, trawls Exeter’s rich archives to paint a vivid picture of one of the best-documented, but hitherto one of the least studied, Oxford colleges. Beginning with a lengthy discussion of the college’s foundation by Bishop Stapeldon of Exeter in 1314, he takes us through the difficulties which the fledgling community faced as a result of its inadequate endowment, the long struggle it had to make ends meet, the partial recovery it experienced in the late fifteenth century, the prospect of utter collapse looming before it in the 1560s and, finally, the munificent re-foundation by Sir William Petre in 1566, which launched it on the road to recovery.

He shows that it was the founder’s highly prescriptive statutes which, more than anything, were to determine the character and future direction of the college. Stapeldon established his college as an arts-only institution, making no provision for the Fellows’ admission to higher degrees, his vision being that those graduating would proceed quickly to service in the parishes. Even when, as in the fifteenth century, the bishop’s statutes were amended to allow Fellows to proceed to higher degrees in theology, the community remained predominantly arts-based, and those who wanted to study law had to go elsewhere. One consequence of the founder’s limitation was that, in the Middle Ages, Exeter was generally lacking in members who attained distinction in later life, the great figures in the late medieval Church generally being lawyers. The founder’s statutes were to define Exeter’s character in one other respect: they made it a strongly West Country institution. The Fellows, it was prescribed, were to come from the bishop’s own diocese of Exeter, eight from the three archdeaconries of Devon and four from the archdeaconry of Cornwall. This was a stipulation that was to have major implications in the age of the Reformation, for it made Exeter a very conservative community. The body of Fellows, recruited from a part of the country that clung to Catholic beliefs, were of broadly Catholic disposition themselves. Much of what Dr Maddicott has to say about Exeter’s history – the daily routines of the Fellows, their acquisition of books, the rise of an undergraduate population in the fifteenth century – is expressive of trends in Oxford in general in the late medieval and early modern periods.

In many ways, however, it is rather the distinctiveness of Exeter’s experience that stands out. The college’s slender endowment, the regional base of its recruitment, the anomaly of the annual election of the Rector, the community’s heavy dependence on its Visitor: these are all features unparalleled in most other Oxford colleges. It was only in the 1560s, when Sir William Petre re-founded the college and granted it new statutes, that the community’s problems were overcome and it was able to enter into the university mainstream. Precisely why Petre should have acted so munificently towards a college with which he had no previous connection is one of the abiding mysteries of Exeter’s history. Dr Maddicott, however, suggests that it is religion which again holds the key. Exeter was Catholic-leaning, and Petre’s own sympathies were with Catholicism.

John Maddicott’s book gives us perhaps the fullest picture yet of life in a late medieval and early modern Oxford college. His account is no pietistic tribute to an alma mater, however, but a richly textured study which sets the history of Exeter in the context of the wider life of the university at the time. If it is true that the book is stronger on the institutional life of the college than the intellectual, this is less the result of any conscious disciplinary preference than of an inevitable reliance on the rectors’ accounts, the main source, which are concerned principally with the business and quotidian aspects of college life. It is unfortunate that so little of the medieval fabric of Exeter College should have survived the extensive later rebuilding. The most substantial medieval structure that remains is Palmer’s Tower, built in the 1430s and perpetuating the name of William Palmer, rector at the time, who is in many ways the hero of the medieval part of the book. While the actual buildings have gone, however, the rich early college archive has survived, and Dr Maddicott has put it to excellent use in this book. This history of Exeter is a pleasure to read and a mine of fascinating information.