Magdalen College

“Oxoniam missus” is the terse entry in Camden's Memorabilia for 1566. The records for the Oxford years are spare and questions abound right from the start. Idiomatic though his Latin is, one wonders how he intended the self-effacing passive construction? Was he “sent” or did he go? Who sent him? Why Oxford, where the Earl of Leicester had recently (1564) been made chancellor, rather than Cambridge, where Lord Burghley had been chancellor since 1559? Whom did he know there when he arrived? The more we know about the years when he was at Oxford, the more vexing the questions become.

When the fifteen-year-old Camden went to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1566, he was just the age one might expect an entering undergraduate to be. Taking the perspective of the anxious parent, we might simply observe that Camden left St Paul's a student of frail health but alive and undisfigured, as “smart” as a parent could wish, personable and already having opportunities for making useful social connections. Of course, as all theories of personality development would agree, by fifteen he was, for all intents, fully developed; aside from academic “accidentals” to be picked up here and there, he is the man that he will become, psychologically, morally, emotionally, and for this reason I have spent some time trying to understand something about his youth. To start his life with his university career is to overlook the dynamics of all that must have been working on him as he began to make his very uncertain way in life.