A witty and sometimes waspish account of Oxford University life as it was being led four decades into the 18th century is supplied by a female commentator whose musings – long a subject of academic study – have only lately found published form.

Memoirs of the City and University of Oxford in 1738 (Oxford Historical Society, £25) is the work of a well-connected young woman, Elizabeth Sheppard, writing under the pseudonym Shepilinda.

Raised in Great Rollright, she moved to Oxford with her parents at the age of 23, the aim being, it would seem – as with so many women before and since – to secure a good marriage from among the men of the university. Her father, William, was the Principal of Hart Hall, where Hertford College now stands.

Her college-to-college visits were made with a friend nicknamed ‘Scrippy’. It was to her that the resulting memoir was gifted, along with a collection of poems.

The manuscript eventually found its way to the Bodleian Library. In forwarding it there in 1930, The Provost of The Queen’s College, the nonogenarian John Magrath, wrote: “I think it will be well worth printing if it can be edited by a person who is willing by research to steep himself in Eighteenth Century Oxford Social life and to fit himself to explain and illustrate its somewhat libellous remarks.”

Almost a century on, that man was found in Geoffrey Neate, who until retirement worked at the Bodleian, where he computerised the catalogue entries for books published before 1920.

His editing is scrupulous, with his extensive footnotes a joy in themselves and sometimes reflecting the jocular attitude often shown by Shepilinda.

After her visit to Lincoln College, for instance, she takes some pains in her description of the Rector, the Rev Dr Euseby Isham. She always made a special study of heads of houses since, at the time, these were the only college fellows permitted to marry. An exception was the Warden of Wadham, which perhaps helps explain events described in the article below.

Of Isham, Shepilinda writes: [H]is person is agreeable enough for one of his age, which is 40 or thereabouts, rather more than less; NB his nose is too little for the Breadth of his face.”

Neate tells readers that he has seen a portrait of him which “shows, in this editor’s view, that Shepilinda had a point but opinions will no doubt vary”.

There is in Shepilinda’s writing a breezy, almost journalistic quality. That she has mastered the art of the ‘intro’ – a word not in use for about a century after she wrote – is evident in the opening sentences of her articles about two of Oxford’s noblest institutions.

“Now for the college of colleges New College I mean,” she writes of William of Wykeham’s great benefaction (with her usual disregard for punctuation); “in this Sweet mansion is everything agreable .”

And about the largest and smartest of the colleges, she begins: “Now pen do thy Best for Cristchurch [sic] is to be thy employment.”

The choice descriptions on which that pen is used include a comic tale of a professor who felt it necessary to create cat flaps for both a mother moggy and (smaller) her kitten.

Ever with an eye for the unusual, Shepilinda tells us at Worcester College of “a wigg of a Sable Hue equal in Size, to four of the largest Wiggs, that was ever Made”.

But it had a more remarkable feature still, since it was said “that who ever wore it when Studying Physick; should learn more in One half Hour than all that is Contain’d in both those Celebrated Authors Hippocrates & Galen.”

Wow! Medical students must have queued up to give it a try. Where, one wonders, is it now?

The ‘Wigg’, if passed around, would have left those 18th-century students with plenty of time for what were even (perhaps especially) then the principal activities of collegiate life. At Lincoln, these are defined by Shepilinda to be“Gaming and Guzzling”.

At The Queen’s College she observes a sideboard “well Stock’d with nutmegs pipe tobacco Wax Candle & every other Utensil fitt for topers and Smoakers with which this foundation abounds”.

How times (might) have changed!

Sordid sexual scandal was nipped in the bud

THE sort of sex scandal that might be expected to punctuate Oxford University life has in my experience rarely been forthcoming. When an offence becomes known, this is generally dealt with inside the college without involving the police.

There was an instance of this some years ago with the abrupt departure of a head of house after allegations of a homosexual nature involving members of the rowing club.

Memoirs of the City and University of Oxford, which I consider above, highlights another such scandal of the 18th century; indeed, it throws some new light upon it.

This is the notorious case of the Warden of Wadham, Robert Thistlethwaite (1690-1744), who in 1737 was accused of a sexual assault on a student called William French. There were further allegations against him involving the college barber and its butler.

Thistlethwaite fled to Boulogne, beyond the reach of British law, to avoid a court appearance.

A contemporary account records that it was the college Manciple who was sent to conduct 19-year-old French to the Warden’s lodgings. He figures (and despite what follows it was a he) in cutting comments made in the Memoirs by the author Shepilinda (Elizabeth Sheppard).

She writes (and I maintain her capitalisation and punctuation): “[T]here is a Warden one Dr Thistlethwaite; a Humdrum sort of an Animal. tho’ not a very Harmless one – he has a She Manciple, in whom he much delights & keeps a Chariot for her to air her Carcase in.”

The Memoir’s editor, Geoffrey Neate, astutely observes in a footnote: “Shepilinda’s account is interesting in that it shows that [Thistlethwaite’s] proclivities were apparently well known before the actual scandal.”