1530, May 12. Haberdasher, Little St. Edmund, Glass and Black Halls are granted to the College on a lease of ninety-six years by Oseney Abbey, the first being at once converted by payment into the property of the College, but the others not till March 6, 1655/6. 1556, Nov. 2. Staple Hall, which had once belonged to the Abbey of Eynsham, is leased by Lincoln College to Brasenose for ever at a rent of 20_s._ per annum. * * * * * “Rome was not built in a day,” and it is curious to note how the old and new foundations overlap each other. The College building clearly began at the south-west corner of the present front quadrangle, and Brasenose Hall was no doubt left until the building naturally reached it. Thus John Formby was Principal of the Hall till Aug. 24, 1510, when Matthew Smyth succeeded him, and in Smyth’s name on Sept. 9, 1511 Roland Messenger still became surety for the dues payable by the Hall to the University, for the ensuing year; and even on Sept. 9, 1512, Smyth himself “cautioned,” as it was called, for the moribund hall. Moreover, a scholar of the Hall was locked up in August 1512 for interfering with the workmen who were building Corpus. The first occasion on which the College appears in the University Registers is in Sept. 1514, when Matthew Smyth, “Principal of the College or Hall of Brasen Nose” is mentioned; but there is evidence that the corporate action of the College dates from at least as early as Nov. 1512. We thus have before us the successive steps by which a College gradually grew, and literally piece by piece took the place of the precedent Halls. It is now time to turn to the statutes, the buildings being reserved for a later section. The Charter of Foundation is dated Jan. 15, 1511/2, and the original statutes were no doubt shortly after drawn up and ratified by the two founders, but no copy of them remains. Bishop Smyth’s executors in about 1514 revised and signed a modification of the code, which still exists, and finally at the request of the College Sir Richard Sutton once more revised them, on Feb. 1, 1521/2. As in conception and in form of buildings, so in respect of their statutes also, Merton and New College are the two cardinal foundations. From the latter were derived the statutes of Magdalen, founded in 1458, and from these latter the earliest statutes of Brasenose. The general sense of the Code of 1514 with Sutton’s changes in 1522, can be well gathered from the Churton’s abstract in his _Lives of … (the) Founders of Brazen Nose College_ (Oxf. 1800), pp. 315-40. The preamble is as follows, the original being in Latin--