St Benet's Hall, Oxford
St Benet's Hall was a permanent private hall of the University of Oxford, originally a Roman Catholic religious house of studies. It closed in 2022. The principal building was located at the northern end of St Giles' on its western side, close to the junction with Woodstock Road, Oxford.
History
Benedictine antecedents
monks had studied at Oxford since at least 1281, when Gloucester Abbey founded Gloucester College. The area today known as Gloucester Green was named after this college. In 1291, Durham Abbey founded Durham College, and in 1362, Christ Church Priory in Canterbury founded Canterbury College. All three Benedictine houses of study were closed between 1536 and 1545, during the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. Gloucester College was eventually re-founded as Worcester College. Durham College was re-founded as Trinity College, but the original college's name is preserved in Trinity's Durham Quadrangle. Canterbury College's property was acquired by Christ Church. Until the establishment of St Benet's Hall in 1897, the Benedictines had been absent from the university for over 350 years.St Benet's Hall was not a re-foundation of any of the former Benedictine colleges of Oxford. Rather, the hall had a tenuous connection with Westminster Abbey by virtue of its establishment by Ampleforth Abbey. In the 960s or early 970s, Saint Dunstan, assisted by King Edgar, installed a community of Benedictine monks at Westminster. Although the Benedictine priories and abbeys in England were closed during the dissolution of the monasteries, one solitary Benedictine monastery was re-established in Westminster Abbey in 1553 by Mary I as part of her unsuccessful attempt to restore Catholicism in England. After Queen Mary's death, Elizabeth I dissolved the monastery once again. By 1607, only one of the Westminster monks was still alive, Dom Sigebert Buckley. In 1608, Buckley "aggregated" two English exiles who had become monks of the Italian Cassinese Congregation, and thereby allegedly passed on to them the "rights and privileges" of the mediaeval English Benedictine abbeys. In 1615, these two English monks became part of a community which took up residence in the abandoned collegiate church of Saint Laurent, in the town of Dieulouard, near Nancy in the Lorraine region of north-eastern France. The monks adopted St Lawrence as their patron saint. In 1792, Dieulouard Priory was closed and the monks were expelled from France as part of the hostility against the clergy associated with the French Revolution. They opted to return to England.
At that time a Benedictine monk-priest, Fr Anselm Bolton, was the chaplain to Lady Anne Fairfax at Gilling Castle, North Yorkshire. She was the only daughter of Charles Gregory Fairfax, 9th and last Viscount Fairfax of Emley. She built Ampleforth Lodge for Fr Bolton just before she died in 1792. In 1802, Bolton handed this house over to his brethren from Dieulouard who had been living in England without a permanent home for a decade. The lodge became their new monastery, Ampleforth Priory. In 1803, the monks established Ampleforth College, today an independent Catholic secondary school.
The priory was elevated to the status of an independent abbey in 1899 by Pope Leo XIII in the papal bull Diu quidem est. Ampleforth Abbey renamed the hall of studies as St Benet's Hall in 1918 when it became a permanent private hall of the university.
Private hall of studies
In October 1897, the priory had established a private hall of studies at Oxford for the purpose of enabling its monks to read for secular degrees at the University of Oxford. The hall was not founded as a theological college but rather as a place where student monks could read for a degree in any secular subject.Private halls of study at the university took their name from their Master, and so the hall was known successively as Hunter-Blair's Hall and Parker's Hall. It was initially housed at 103 Woodstock Road. This house is still in existence, opposite SS Philip and James Church, and is now a guest-house. The hall was there until 1904, when it moved to the former Grindle's Hall in Beaumont Street, from which it removed in 1922 to the present buildings of 38 and 39 St Giles. The Beaumont Street houses were demolished in 1938 to make space for the Oxford Playhouse theatre.
Permanent private hall of the University of Oxford
St Benet's became a permanent private hall of the university in 1918, after new university legislation created the status of PPH. It took as its official name Aula Privata Sancti Benedicti: in English, "St Benedict's Private Hall". It was named after St Benedict of Nursia, the founder of the Benedictine order, father of western monasticism and a patron saint of Europe and of students.The character of the hall changed over the years, acquiring fellows in imitation of the university's constituent colleges. However, as a PPH of the university, the hall's fellows did not constitute its governing body. Rather, they shared with the master the day-to-day running of the hall, and elected one of their number to serve as a trustee of the St Benet's Trust when that charity was founded in 2012. Before then, the hall was a private possession of Ampleforth Abbey. The hall matriculated students to be members of the university, so those of its student body who matriculated were full members of the university in all ways, and were able to supplicate for degrees on the successful completion of their studies. For most of its members the only noticeable difference made by the hall's legal status is that it was very much smaller than any of the Oxford constituent colleges.
With the decline of monastic vocations beginning in the 1960s, more and more Roman Catholic laymen were admitted - especially under Master James Forbes OSB, including some Old Amplefordians. Under Master Philip Holdsworth OSB, the hall again emphasised a monastic ethos and also became more theological in character, with many monks from the English Benedictine Congregation and other Benedictine Congregations studying theology at Blackfriars Hall. Master Henry Wansbrough started again to admit laymen, thus creating a mixed focus on theology, philosophy and the humanities.
There was never a policy that lay members of the Hall, both undergraduates and postgraduates, should be Catholics - and in the 21st century most were not. However, all members were asked to be supportive of the monks' life and values.
A review of the PPHs conducted by the university in 2007 concluded that St Benet's had a "good sense of its place within the collegiate University" and drew attention to the "commitment and care" of the hall's academic staff. In May 2013 the Student Barometer survey results showed that St Benet's Hall had the highest overall student satisfaction score out of the 44 constituent colleges and permanent private halls of the university.
Sexual abuse scandal
In 1996 Bernard Green OSB, a monk of Ampleforth Abbey, was convicted of sexually abusing a 14-year old schoolboy at the monastery's school, Ampleforth College, in the previous year. He was put on probation and prohibited from teaching. Despite this, the abbey sent him to reside and teach at St Benet's Hall in 2000 without, allegedly, informing the hall of his conviction. He was issued with a "final" letter of warning by the university in 2005, after being accused of sexually harassing a 19-year-old undergraduate member of the hall. This letter was supposedly unknown to the hall until 2006, but Green was subsequently kept in residence until 2012 when he was finally dismissed. The scandal came to the notice of the national media.Final decade
Until 2012, the Master of the hall was always a Benedictine monk from Ampleforth. On 1 September of that year, Werner Jeanrond, formerly holder of the 1640 Chair of Divinity at the University of Glasgow, became the new Master. He was the first Catholic layman ever to run the hall. Jeanrond became a full member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford and was engaged in both teaching and research, as well as serving as head of house.Until 2016, St Benet's was the last constituent body of the University of Oxford admitting only men. It was also the last single-sex college or hall in the university after St Hilda's College, the last all-women's college in Oxford, admitted men in 2008. In November 2013, under Professor Jeanrond, the hall announced its intention to admit women graduate students within one year and women undergraduates as soon as additional housing facilities were obtained. Women were admitted as graduate students in October 2014, and as undergraduates in October 2016. Thus 2016 was the year when all constituent colleges and halls of the university became fully coeducational.
To allow for the admission of undergraduate women, in October 2015 St Benet's Hall acquired a hall of residence owned by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, at 11 Norham Gardens, next to University Parks and near Lady Margaret Hall. So the hall became a co-educational academic community, latterly consisting of 84 undergraduate students and 48 graduate students of all faiths and none.
The degree subjects to which the last undergraduate students were admitted by St Benet's were: Theology, Philosophy and Theology, Theology and Oriental Studies, History, History and Politics, History and Economics, Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Classics, Classics with Oriental Studies, Oriental Studies, Oriental Studies with Classics, and Human Science. The hall admitted graduate students from the same subjects as undergraduates as well as those who studied at the Blavatnik School of Government, the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, and the Saïd Business School.
Closure
In September 2021, it was announced that the John and Daria Barry Foundation, a philanthropic trust run by the venture capitalist John F. Barry III, was making a £40 million rescue offer to enable the hall to become completely independent of Ampleforth Abbey. This was on condition that the buildings would be purchased from the Ampleforth Abbey Trust for £15 million, that the St Benet's Trust was to be made completely separate from the abbey and that the chair was to be the prominent conservative philosopher and academic Robert P. George of Princeton University. Barry himself was on record as describing the venture as a Hail Mary pass, indicating limited expectations of success.However, in December of that year, the university stated that without the abbey's continued financial support, "it cannot be confident that the hall can support a new undergraduate cohort for the full duration of their studies". The major issues were that the hall's endowments were inadequate, the two buildings were owned by Ampleforth Abbey and operational deficits were being covered by subsidies from the abbey.
So, the university announced that it would temporarily cease to accept undergraduate matriculations from the hall, owing to these serious financial issues. May 2022 was the deadline for deciding this point as regards the academic year 2022–3.
In that month it was made public that the University Council had decided not to renew the hall's PPH licence, which implied that the hall would close at the end of the 2022 academic year. The university had decided that the new arrangements proposed by the Barry Foundation would not be financially viable and questioned the implications of the new board, and so they were rejected.
In June 2022 it was finally announced that the buildings would be vacated by October 2022, and that the university was seeking alternative colleges to which existing students would transfer. The buildings were subsequently purchased by St Hilda's College. The hall was formally closed on 30 September 2022. The last member of staff vacated the St Giles house on 7 October. The wine cellar of 1,100 bottles was donated to Blackfriars Hall. Students relocated individually to other colleges and halls of the university to continue their studies. The St Benet's Hall Boat Club continues to operate.