Gresham College: A Look At London’s Oldest Higher Education Institution

Tucked just off busy Holborn, amongst a dense cluster of much newer buildings is a rare survivor of both the Great Fire and the Blitz: Barnards Inn Hall.

This historic gem is now home to Gresham College, an extraordinary institution that has been providing free public lectures for more than 400 years, continuing a tradition that stretches back to the Elizabethan period.

Thomas Gresham: Merchant, Financier, Diplomat 

Gresham College was founded back in 1597, making it London’s oldest higher education institution. It was established under the will of a man called Sir Thomas Gresham to provide free, public education in English, rather than latin, to the citizens of London. 

Born in 1519 into a wealthy mercantile family in London, Thomas was educated at Cambridge and admitted to the Mercers’ Company in 1543. His father, Sir Richard Gresham, was also a mercer, merchant and went to become Lord Mayor of the City of London and Member of Parliament for London. 

Immediately after joining the Mercers, Thomas relocated to Antwerp to build his trading empire, where he quickly mastered international finance, shipping, and intelligence-gathering. In 1544 he married Anne Ferneley, with whom he had one child who sadly predeceased them. 

He worked for Henry VIII to procure armaments and smuggle gold, before being made the official Royal Agent in Antwerp by Henry’s son Edward VI in 1551. He advised the Crown during the ‘Great Debasement’, a period of extreme currency devaluation. An economic principle, ‘Gresham’s Law’, is associated with him, ‘Bad money drives out good’.

Founding The Royal Exchange

Gresham also famously financed and built the first Royal Exchange in 1565 to provide London with a dedicated hub for merchants and international finance. He had been inspired by the Bourse in Antwerp and wanted to create something similar in London.

The Royal Exchange building we have today is the third version, constructed in 1841, but still displays the Gresham grasshopper on its weathervane.

The grasshopper comes from the coat of arms of the Gresham family. Their family story goes that the founder of the Gresham dynasty, Roger de Gresham, in the 13th century was abandoned by his parents in a field. A woman walking through the field was alerted to the baby’s presence by the chirping of a nearby grasshopper. The other theory is that it is a play on the family name, i.e. ‘gresh’ to ‘grass’ to ‘grasshopper’. I know which I prefer…

Establishing Gresham College

Thomas Gresham died suddenly in 1579 of ‘apoplexy’, most likely a stroke, and was buried at St Helen’s Bishopsgate church. He left the vast majority of his fortune to his wife, but stipulated that after she died, the money and estates would go to establishing a college. Thus, Gresham College was born. His aim was to provide accessible, practical education to the citizens of London, traditionally reserved for elite scholars at Cambridge or Oxford. 

The college was initially housed in Gresham’s Bishopsgate mansion, roughly where Tower 42 is today.

There were seven original professorships (all of which still are in place): Astronomy, Divinity, Geometry, Law, Music, Physic and Rhetoric. Professors received £50 a year to give a series of lectures, generally holding the positions for three years. Their salaries were funded partially by rents from shops in the Royal Exchange. 

The college has seen many famous names as professors. Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723) was a professor of Astronomy and Robert Hooke (1635-1703) was a professor of Geometry. 

On 28th November 1660, following a lecture by Wren, a group of intellectuals gathered at the college to establish an organisation for experimental science. This organisation became known as the Royal Society after they received their royal charter in 1662.  For its first 50 years the Royal Society held its meetings, experiments, and lectures at Gresham College. 

The college remained in Gresham’s mansion until 1768 when it moved to various locations and then settled for many years in a purpose-built building on Gresham Street, close to Guildhall. 

In 1991 the college moved again to its current home in Barnard’s Inn Hall. 

The History Of Barnard’s Inn Hall

Barnard’s Inn was recorded as part of the estate of Sir Adam de Basing, Mayor of London, in 1252. In 1454 the property was established as an Inn of Chancery, a school for law students, who then passed on to the Inns of Court. I have written previously about Lincoln’s Inn for example. 

The Hall itself, where lectures today take place, dates from the late 14th century, part of the original mansion, with early 16th century linen-fold wooden panelling.

If you go down into the Council Chamber below the hall you can see an exposed section of chalk and tile walling. This is even older, probably dating from the Saxon or early medieval periods.

Barnard’s Inn was damaged in the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780. There was a distillery next door owned by a Roman Catholic, Mr Langdale. His premises were burned down by the rioters, and he apparently only escaped by scrambling through a small hole in the cellars into Barnard’s Inn.

In 1892 the freehold was purchased by the Mercers’ Company and the building housed the Mercers’ School from 1894 until 1959. You can see plenty of Mercers Maiden symbols, the emblem of the Mercers’ Company around the site today. I have written about the Mercers Maiden before here.

Barnard’s Inn is mentioned in Dickens’ Great Expectations, being where Pip primarily stays when he is in London. 

Pip does not give the accommodation a rave review. He describes the inn as the ‘dingiest collection of shabby buildings’ that felt like a graveyard, home to the ‘most dismal trees, dismal sparrows, dismal cats, and dismal houses’ he had ever seen. The courtyard he described as having a smell of ‘dry rot and wet rot and all the silent rots’ that moan in neglected cellars. 

Gresham College Today 

The college continues today as it ever has, giving regular free lectures, more than 90 a year, mostly during the academic term from September until the end of June. Since 2001, these have been available online, you can find their Youtube channel here. 

Three newer professorships have been added to the original eight: Commerce in 1985, Environment in 2014 and Information Technology in 2015. 

You can find their website here with a full schedule of upcoming talks and a link to sign up to their newsletter. 

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