Oxford's First Palace

In the first of two articles, John Goodall looks at the most widely copied university college in England, a building inspired by a great 14th-century palace

- John Goodall

ON October 10, 1356, Edward III responded to astonishing news from France. At Poitiers, on September 19, his son, Edward of Woodstock—posthumously familiar as the Black Prince—had utterly vanquished a much larger French army and captured its leader, John II. Edward III’s claim to the Capetian throne assumed a new authority and he instructed his bishops to offer thanksgiving for the capture of his rival ‘John de Valois, usurper of the kingdom of France’.

Confident in victory, Edward III embarked on a new initiative to remodel his seat at Windsor. He had been engaged in building works in the castle since his Arthurian celebrations there in 1346, from which emerged the royal chivalric brotherhood of the Order of the Garter. His new initiative, however, was to create a palace in the upper ward on a scale to match anything in contemporary Europe. This palace can claim to be the single greatest building project initiated by an English medieval king, costing the stupendous sum of about £44,000, much of it paid for by the ransom of King John.

It must have been at the inception of this undertaking, October 30, 1356, that a previously obscure figure, one William, a clerk from Wickham (or Wykeham) in Hampshire was put in charge of the Windsor operations. William had evidently caught the king’s eye, because he now advanced with extraordinary speed through the ranks of the royal administration until, as the chronicler Froissart expressed it ‘he stood so high in the King’s favour that… everything was done by his consent, and nothing was done without it’. Just over a decade later, in 1367, he was consecrated Bishop of Winchester, one of the richest sees in Christendom.