Henry Symeonis

With a new academic Term looming and members of the University of Oxford returning to the city I think we can be confident that amongst them will not be Henry Symeonis. One reason for this is that he has been dead for well over seven hundred years, but even if he did turn up he would not be welcome.

The Special Correspondent has shared with me a very interesting article from the Archives and Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library blog about the curious case of Henry Symeonis and his unique ‘commemoration’ by the University of Oxford long after his death. The article can be read at The persistence of tradition: the curious case of Henry Symeonis

Thus, as I am not the first to point out, St John Henry Newman and the founding fathers of the Oxford Movement would all have taken this oath as much as any other Oxford MA, including inter alia John Wyclif, episcopal college founders such as Fleming, Chichele and Wainflete, Cardinals Wolsey and Pole, St Edmund Campion, Archbishop Laud, Christopher Wren, and Edmund Halley, before the requirement was removed in 1827.