Founders and Fellowship

Exeter College was the fourth collegiate foundation at Oxford, and, until the appearance of John Maddicott’s engaging and comprehensive study of its early history, one whose internal development was least well understood, in spite of the rich resource, for historians, of more than two hundred surviving rector’s accounts earlier than 1500. The founder, as with most collegiate founders of the age, was a self-made man whose advancement had been made possible by his university education; but Walter de Stapeldon, a north Devon man whose family seems originally to have looked to the patronage of the powerful Dinham clan, had made his early career in the remote diocese of Exeter, had become its bishop and then, in an excess of ambition, had served Edward II all too well and had paid for it with his life. Before, and indeed during, this dangerous final phase of his career, Stapeldon continued to be a conscientious bishop devoted to the interests of his diocese and the pastoral care of its people, which his college was designed to further. Most of the early Oxford colleges had enhanced the opportunities for advancement of clerks from the highland zone regions of England; Balliol, University College and, to some extent, Merton had provided for northerners from the dioceses of Durham and York; Queen’s would do the same for clerks from the see of Carlisle. Exeter College, catering for the analogous south-western extension of the highland zone, might appear to be a parallel institution: but, as Maddicott shows, there are significant differences. Fourteenth-century Exeter gave no scope for its alumni to rival the ruthless mafia of Yorkshire clerks—the Thoresbys, Ravensers and Ferribys—who colonised the royal chancery and the king’s diplomatic service. In spite of the patronage of Stapeldon’s two immediate successors, John Grandisson and Thomas Brantingham (both of them well ensconced in the service of Edward III), fellows of Exeter were confined to local careers as diocesan, or at best cathedral, clergy in their native patria

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