Posted by: Martin Bojam
on Oct 26, 2009
Met up with Barbara Anderson last week. Barbara, as many of you may know, is the Academic Registrar at Gresham College. You may not know much about Gresham (I certainly didn’t) but its history and its role today are fascinating.
Its founder, Sir Thomas Gresham (1519 to 1579), traded cloth and linens between England and the Low Countries at a time when Cambridge and Oxford had a duopolistic hold on higher education in England. A Cambridge man himself (Caius College), if Gresham’s skippers had visited an Oxbridge College they would, at best, have had the door of a college opened to them and then been laughed at in Latin for their ignorance. Sir Thomas died (of apoplexy) in 1579, bequeathing funds to the Corporation of London and to the Mercers’ Company, and charging them with the nomination of seven Professors to lecture in Astronomy, Divinity, Geometry, Law, Music, Physic and Rhetoric. He required the lectures to be in Latin and, horror of horrors, English. In effect, Sir Thomas used his will anti- monopolistically to crack the Oxbridge oligopoly by bribing seven professors to give lectures to the public, in English.
