Qualla: Jesus College, Oxford

Jesus College, Oxford: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Quadrangleditor, CC BY-SA 4.0. Hugh Price, a Welsh churchman from Brecon, wanted to spend his money educating young men from Wales. He petitioned Queen Elizabeth I for permission to found a college at Oxford 'that he might bestow his estate of the maintenance of certain scholars of Wales to be trained up in good letters.' Elizabeth signed the royal charter on 27 June 1571, naming Jesus College the first new Oxford foundation since her Catholic sister Mary's reign. Then Price died in 1574 and it turned out that his promised legacy of £60 a year was actually a lump sum of £600. The college survived anyway, scraping along on the strength of Welsh ambition for the next four centuries.

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Image: Quadrangleditor | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jesus College, Oxford: The Welsh Pinnacle

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Quadrangleditor, CC BY-SA 4.0. The 1571 charter never restricted entry to Welshmen, but in practice Jesus became 'the pinnacle of the academic ambition of the young men of Wales.' For nearly 350 years the principal was almost always Welsh or of Welsh descent. The exception, Francis Howell, served briefly under...

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Image: Quadrangleditor | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jesus College, Oxford: Lawrence's Thesis

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Krzysztof Iłowiecki, CC BY-SA 2.0. T. E. Lawrence arrived to read history. Before he became Lawrence of Arabia - before the Arab Revolt of 1916 to 1918, before Seven Pillars of Wisdom, before he became one of the most famous Englishmen of the twentieth century - he was an undergraduate at Jesus who walked across n...

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Image: Krzysztof Iłowiecki | CC BY-SA 2.0

Jesus College, Oxford: Three Prime Ministers and a Punch Bowl

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown photographer, Public domain. Harold Wilson arrived at Jesus in 1934 as a grammar-school boy from Yorkshire and took a first in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1964 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976. Norman Washington Manley, who had come up ea...

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Image: Unknown photographer | Public domain

Jesus College, Oxford: Four Quadrangles Over 450 Years

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bryan Koo, CC BY 2.0. The first quadrangle was started in 1571 and finished in stages through the 1620s. The chapel was dedicated in 1621 and given an east window in 1636 that Giles Worsley calls Gothic Revival rather than Gothic Survival - by then classical architecture had become the only respectabl...

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Image: Bryan Koo | CC BY 2.0

Jesus College, Oxford: Daffodils and the Red Book

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. Every March 1, the chapel is decked with daffodils and the choir sings Evensong entirely in Welsh - most of them are not native Welsh speakers, but they have learned the service phonetically for Saint David's Day. The Red Book of Hergest, a vast Welsh-language manuscript compiled...

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Image: N Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0