Trinity College was founded as a training house for Catholic priests in the sixteenth century. The site of the college, now very much in the city centre, was originally chosen for its quiet, rural aspect. Trinity became a pillar of the Anglican establishment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and a centre of educational reform in the nineteenth.
Trinity College was founded by Sir Thomas Pope in 1555. A devout catholic with no surviving children, Thomas Pope saw the foundation of an Oxford college as a means of ensuring that he and his family would always be remembered in the prayers offered in the Chapel by the college’s members. He came from a family of small landowners in Oxfordshire, trained as a lawyer, and rose rapidly to prominence under King Henry VIII. As Treasurer of the Court of Augmentations Thomas Pope handled the estates of the monasteries dissolved at the Reformation, and amassed a considerable personal fortune.
