Oriel: the college that shaped the spiritual heart of 19th century Britain

Oriel was only the fifth college to be founded in Oxford, in 1326. Although it has gone through periods of relative obscurity in the intervening seven centuries, it has also, at other times, been at the very centre of the intellectual life, not only of the university but of the nation. In the early 19th century, the Senior Common Room was dominated by the Noetics. These broad churchmen, who included Thomas Arnold, a fellow of the college before he became a famous head-master, believed in the acceptance of utilitarian economics, but also an application of Christian principles to society at large.

Against them, and in the same common room, were the high churchmen or Tractarians, the most hypnotic of whom, John Henry Newman, was the closest Oxford ever got to possessing a guru. Many of those Oriel men who would later eschew Newman’s outlook — Matthew Arnold (a fellow) or James Anthony Froude (a commoner and later a fellow) — recognised the stupendous impact made by Newman on the English imagination.