William Poole is really having too much fun in his college library

I have been turning over the pages of hundreds and hundreds of antiquarian books in my college library. I’ve been looking for early marks of ownership, annotations, cries of joy or horror, the odd interesting stain.

I have been richly rewarded: in the middle of an exquisite and extravagantly valuable early edition of Galileo, some bored don of my college – no idea when, but perhaps in the early 18th century – has amused himself by sketching in a new constellation, supposedly discovered by Nostradamus in 1563. I doubt it: but his loving illustration of the ‘penis volans’ or ‘flying penis’ had our librarians, and me, in fits. You can see it on our library website.

I remember my first such spot among the college books, years ago now. It was actually found by a student: he was pointing to the blank back pages of a first edition (1516) of Thomas More’s Utopia, on which were some Latin verses written out by hand.

These turned out to be hitherto unnoticed lines on the state of my college in the 1630s, penned by a departing lawyer. This fastidious chap enumerated recent improvements: new stained glass in the chapel; a kitchen-garden for hall; and a splendid communal latrine.

He also remarked that plane trees had just recently been planted in the gardens to the east – and this must be the explanation for the enormous plane tree there. Wonderful to find the origins of this giant of trees peeping out from some hidden-away lines penned from the 1630s.

A further line puzzled me at first, for it translated literally as ‘if you delight in balls, then we’ve room for you’ – which seems an excitable admissions policy, even in these liberated times. Gradually I realised that the author was talking about bowling. “We’ve got a new bowling alley,” was what he was struggling to put into Latin verse.

Indeed we did – when the Parliamentary authorities swept through the college not two decades later, they ejected at least 50 fellows, four chaplains, 12 choristers, 13 servants – and reduced the hours in which bowling was allowed.

Thinking of old books and stained glass, the other good Oxford story I know, connecting the two, concerns the East Window of the chapel in Wadham College.

This college was founded in 1610, by a rich West Country family. You would expect such types to be righteous Prots, but not so – the Wadhams were, if not quite recusants, then of known Roman Catholic sympathies.

The East Window, however, was made by one Bernard van Linge, a craftsman from Emden who had fled from Paris to London, and for whom the Wadham glass was his first major English commission.

He was a Protestant refugee, but the undoubted source for his window was, ironically, an impressive 1593 Antwerp book of engravings already in the fledgling college’s library – a book written and illustrated by Jesuits.

Jacobean Wadham, therefore, severely Protestant in tone yet founded by semi-recusants, displayed Catholic-influenced glass, made by a Huguenot refugee.

Now that is (unintentional) tolerance.