The persistence of custom: the curious case of Henry Symeonis
Christmas is a time for custom, and the College of Oxford is well-known for diligently preserving its traditions for hundreds of years. Many of those have lengthy outlived the individuals who established them, and a few are so previous and mired in obscurity that even the College itself has no thought what they’re or how they got here to be. One such instance of that is the unusual case of Henry Symeonis.
In 1827 the College undertook a significant overview of its statutes. The statutes had been, and nonetheless are, the written algorithm and laws which ruled the whole lot that went on within the College. A product of many centuries, a few of these had been over already 500 years previous by 1827. In going by way of the statutes as a part of this overview, the College discovered one thing somewhat odd within the part regarding Bachelors of Arts and the oaths they needed to swear with a purpose to turn into a Grasp of Arts.
In addition to being required to swear that they’d observe the College’s statutes, privileges, liberties and customs, as you would possibly anticipate; and to not lecture elsewhere, or resume their bachelor research after getting their MA, the Bachelors of Arts additionally needed to swear that they’d by no means conform to the reconciliation of Henry Symeonis (‘quod numquam consenties in reconciliationem Henrici Simeonis’).
The oaths required of these continuing to MAs, from Corpus Statutorum (Statute Tit VII part 1. 5)
Nowhere within the statutes did it clarify who this Henry Symeonis (or Simeonis) was, what he was alleged to have executed or why these getting their MAs ought to by no means conform to be reconciled with him. Who was Henry Symeonis and why was he particularly named like this within the College’s governing laws? What had he executed to offend the College a lot?
For a lot of the operational lifetime of the oath, no-one seems to have recognized. Brian Twyne, first Keeper of the Archives and famend antiquary of the seventeenth century, claimed in his Antiquitatis Academiae Oxon Apologia of 1608 that Symeonis was a Regent in Arts at Oxford who fraudulently claimed he had a BA with a purpose to get hold of admission to a international monastery. Twyne gave no proof or supply for this so we don’t know the place which may have come from.
Anthony Wooden, in his printed Life and Instances writes in regards to the College’s earlier overview of its statutes in January 1651/2 when it was first proposed to abolish the statute regarding Henry Symeonis. He notes that the proposal to take away the oath was refused however provides no cause why. Even by that point, one suspects that the oath was of such antiquity that no-one knew something about it and it was thought finest to depart or not it’s.
The id of Henry Symeonis was solely (re-)found in 1912 by the then Keeper of the College Archives, Reginald Lane Poole. In an article for the English Historic Evaluate, he appeared on the curious statute and tried to resolve the Henry Symeonis thriller.
Poole recognized the person in query as Henry, son of Henry Symeonis. Henry Symeonis the elder was the son of a person named Simeon, therefore the patronymic surname of Simeonis (or Symeonis) being handed all the way down to his son and grandson. Henry Simeon, our Henry’s father, was a really rich townsman of Oxford; within the early 1200s, there have been few richer. Our Henry was additionally rich, proudly owning a number of properties in Oxford and each their names are discovered in lots of property deeds of the interval.
For instance, Henry is listed as a witness to a grant of c1243 of a boundary wall in Cat Avenue from William Burgess to Nicholas de Kingham. He’s named as ‘Henry son of Henry son of Simeon’.
Grant of a boundary wall together with Henry Symeonis as a witness, nd (c1243) (OUA/WPbeta/F/43)
However what was making Henry’s condemnation by the College to 5 and a half centuries of infamy? It was a homicide. In 1242 he and numerous different males of the city of Oxford had been discovered responsible of murdering a scholar of the College. Henry and his accomplices had been fined £80 by King Henry III in Could 1242 and had been made to depart Oxford because of this, compelled to remain away (and allowed no nearer than Northampton) not less than till the King returned from overseas. The King returned within the autumn and by the spring of the next 12 months, we all know (from information of his property dealings) that our Henry, son of Henry Symeonis, was already again in Oxford.
What occurred subsequent just isn’t straightforward to work out. There are few College information from that point and we’ve to depend on others’ accounts of what was taking place to decipher the info of the case. The chroniclers of these instances notoriously disagree with one another, and the image is muddy, to say the least. We all know that over 20 years after the homicide, on 12 March 1264, Henry III suspended the College and despatched it away from Oxford, saying that he couldn’t shield its masters and students within the metropolis and that they’d be safer elsewhere. The King was making Oxford the centre of his navy operations and was unable to ensure the security of the scholars and masters. Many left, a big quantity shifting to Northampton in spring that 12 months the place a thriving college was rising.
A fortnight after this, on 25 March 1264, the King issued letters patent saying that he’d pardoned Henry Symeonis for the homicide which had taken place 22 years earlier. He ordered the College to permit Henry to return to Oxford to stay there in peace supplied he was ‘of fine behaviour’ and demanded that the College didn’t depart Oxford in protest. The letters patent acknowledged:
… that the chancellor and college can be content material that Henry son of Henry Simeonis, who withdrew for the loss of life of a person, would return to Oxford and keep there, in order that the college shouldn’t retire from the stated city on account of his staying there; then they need to allow him to return with out obstacle and have the king’s peace; the king, on the occasion of Nicholas de Yatingden, of his additional grace, has pardoned the stated Henry the stated loss of life, provided that he stand his trial if any will proceed in opposition to him, and has granted that he could return and dwell there as long as he be of fine behaviour and that the college don’t withdraw from the stated city on account of his return and the loss of life of the stated Henry
The interpretation of this collection of occasions is troublesome. Poole, in his 1912 article, linked the College’s departure from Oxford in 1264 to its unhappiness at having Henry Symeonis pardoned and thrust again upon them from exile. He prompt {that a} severe eruption of town-gown violence broke out because of the pardon. This can’t be the case, nevertheless, because the King didn’t pardon Henry Symeonis till after the College had been informed to depart Oxford. Apart from, Henry had already been again in Oxford for a few years and it will have been a bit late to behave on that.
City-gown relations had been, right now, fairly unstable, the issue being that Oxford wasn’t large enough for 2 our bodies preventing for supremacy in a comparatively small area. This had typically led to violence, and apparently did once more in February 1264 when the longstanding dangerous feeling between the 2 flared up. However evidently this was not, regardless of some chroniclers attributing it to that, the reason for the College leaving Oxford. Henry Symeonis’s pardon by the King would, nevertheless, have solely added gasoline to the city’s fireplace that the College was all the time unjustly favoured by the monarch on the city’s expense.
We all know that the Authorities was conscious of the unstable relationship between city and robe and was involved, in 1264, on the prospect of the College leaving Oxford in protest if Henry was allowed to return. That is presumably why it was made a situation of Henry’s return that the College needed to promise to not depart.
We additionally know that each the city and College of Oxford had been sad in regards to the development of a rival college in Northampton. Henry III had allowed a college to be established there in 1261 (on the request of the burgesses of the city), the third in England, behind Oxford and Cambridge. On the time, it was believed that it wouldn’t harm its older rivals however such numerous masters and college students from Oxford migrated there that Northampton was quickly felt to be a menace to the 2 extra historic universities. Town of Oxford pressed the King to terminate this menace and on 1 February 1265 he formally closed down the college at Northampton and forbade the institution of any future college there. All this was enjoying out in opposition to a backdrop of civil conflict and political unease, with Henry III engaged in a conflict together with his brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, and each Oxford and Northampton being closely concerned within the battle.
Additional analysis is required to find the precise particulars of what occurred right here however evidently Henry Symeonis had purchased the King’s pardon and his permission to return to Oxford. The King was prepared to permit his return if the College agreed to it. However the College refused and selected to disregard the King’s order of 25 March 1264, resuming its hostility to Henry Symeonis. In truth, it felt so strongly about it, that it gave Henry Symeonis the distinctive honour of being named in its personal statutes, making the College’s dislike of him official and perpetual.
The oath in opposition to Henry Symeonis continued within the College’s statutes for hundreds of years after the occasions of 1264. Having survived earlier evaluations of the College’s statutes, it was lastly abolished 5 and a half centuries later. The information of the choice taken in 1827 are frustratingly transient and unenlightening. Convocation (the physique of MAs of the College and its chief decision-maker on the time) took the choice to abolish the oath in February that 12 months, however no background data nor cause for the choice is recorded. It’s potential that’s as a result of no person knew precisely what they had been abolishing.
The case of Henry Symeonis is a really unusual instance of the longevity of some College customs, lengthy after they’ve misplaced relevance or which means. The persistence of custom within the College is known, however this seems to have been an excessive instance of utilizing custom to carry a really, very lengthy grudge. By naming Henry Symeonis in its statutes as a determine of institutional hatred for hundreds of years, it truly resulted in prolonging his celeb, immortalising a person whom it had thought of a villain.
For RL Poole’s 1912 article within the English Historic Evaluate (vol 27, no 107, July 1912 pp515-517) see https://www.jstor.org/stable/550611#metadata_info_tab_contents
A lovely coda to the story is that Henry III’s ban on a college at Northampton was lastly led to 2005 when a brand new college was established there, a mere 740 years after the suppression of its predecessor. See Drew Grey’s article on the ‘Historic College of Northampton’ on the College of Northampton’s web site at Microsoft Word – Ancient_University_of_Northampton[2].docx
The migration of Oxford college students to Northampton is mentioned in ‘The Alleged Migration of the College of Oxford to Northampton in 1264’ by FM Powicke in Oxoniensia (vol 8/9, 1943-4) at powicke.pdf (oxoniensia.org)
And for extra data on Oxford and the Second Barons’ Warfare see The University of Oxford and the Chronicle of the Barons’ Wars on JSTOR within the English Historic Evaluate (Jan 1980, vol 95, no 374, pp99-113).