The Catholic halls
Benedictine monks and Dominican friars had been teaching and studying at the University from the thirteenth century until the late 1530s when their Halls were suppressed as part of Henry VIII’s Reformation. Members of their orders returned to England following the French Revolution of 1789 and began to set up educational facilities for monks and lay Catholics. The Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) – an order founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540 – had opened schools on the continent for English Catholic children from 1593 onwards. When the Jesuits were also forced to flee the French Revolution, they came to England, re-opening Stonyhurst School (previously based at St Omers in the Spanish Netherlands) in Lancashire in 1794.
In 1871, Catholics were allowed to be full members of the University of Oxford, but until 1896 the Pope barred them from attending. On the removal of the ban, Catholic Halls began to be founded. The first one, now called Campion Hall, was established by the Jesuits in 1896. Originally situated in St Giles, it grew too big for the site, and in 1834 the architect Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) designed a new building for it on Brewer Street. It became a Permanent Private Hall of the University in 1918.
The second Catholic Hall to be created in Oxford is what is now St Benet’s Hall. Founded by the Prior of Ampleforth in 1897 to give an Oxford education to Benedictine monks, it also became a Permanent Private Hall in 1918 and then took the name ‘Aula Sancti Benedicti’, St Benet’s Hall. It moved to its present sites in St Giles in 1922 and to Norham Gardens in 2015, now admitting students of all genders and of all faiths or none.
The friars were a little later to arrive. In 1910 the Capucin Franciscans set up a friary, known as St Anselm's, which was recognized by the University as a House of Studies. On completion of the building now on Iffley Road in 1930, it took the name of Greyfriars and in 1957 was licensed as a Permanent Private Hall. in 2008, the Hall closed, but the building is still a landmark on the Iffley Road.
Dominican friars returned to Oxford in 1921 and established their new priory within 600 metres of the original site at St Giles. In 1929, they re-established the Dominican Studium in the priory, and in 1994 Blackfriars joined the University as a Permanent Private Hall, retaining the Stadium independently for training priests.