St Edmund Hall Oxford

The field stone buildings of the north side of Front Quad, on the left of the picture, were built during the reign of Elizabeth at the end of the 1500s. The mini Classical palace front in the corner which forms the ante chamber to the Chapel and had a library over, was built in 1682 by a local family builder Bartholomew Peisley. The Peisleys, who seem to all have been called Bartholomew, were also responsible for Trinity Chapel, and were one of the contractors at Blenheim Palace. No architect is known so Peisley and, the then Master, Stephen Penton must have worked out the design together. It is a charming and wonderfully naïve piece of Jacobean High Renaissance. The two Corinthian columns rising over both floors are an example of the Giant Order, first used in 1536 by Michelangelo on the Capitoline Hill, though here surmounted by a tiny pediment. They crowd the ground floor windows, so Peisley made the upper inner windows smaller and shifted them over. The well is something of a rarity in Oxford colleges and is older than the buildings.