We were delighted to welcome Caroline Metcalf to our meeting on Wednesday 4th June to give us a talk on Sackville College, Then and Now. Caroline is a guide for visitors at both Sackville College and St Swithun’s parish church. She has a great love of history and has spent her adult life studying and teaching History. She has a MA in Medieval Studies and is working on a fifteenth – century manuscript. Caroline gave a fascinating talk which told us much about the history of the college.
The College was founded in the year 1609 by the Will of Robert Sackville, 2nd Earl of Dorset. This provided a sum of money with which to buy land and ‘build a convenient house of brick and stone’ to be an almshouse. For many years part of the College was also used to provide overnight accommodation for the Sackville family, as they journeyed to and from their estates in Sussex.
The College is a charitable foundation which operates according to an Act of Parliament of 1624, and a Royal Charter of 1631. Today the College Warden lives in part of the wing that once served the Sackville family. However, the College’s primary use has never altered: it still provides accommodation, now modernised and comfortable, for local elderly people. They enjoy the seclusion of their own flats and the use of communal rooms, behind the walls of the perfectly preserved and peaceful quadrangle.
In the Warden’s Study next to the College Chapel, visitors can see where the Victorian hymnologist, the Revd. Dr. John Mason Neale, Warden from 1846 to 1866, wrote many well- known hymns and carols, including ‘Good King Wenceslas’ and ‘Jerusalem the Golden’. Dr. Neale was associated with the Oxford Movement, which endeavoured to revitalise High Church practices. He also founded one of the first post Reformation Anglican sisterhoods, the Society of St. Margaret. He died here in 1866, after twenty years as Warden, and he is buried in St Swithun’s Churchyard.
We have raised money for Sackville College over the years through our Art group and our annual Mince Pie morning.