Reverend William Smith ( – December 1735) was an English antiquary responsible for the cataloguing of the archives of University College, Oxford, and composing an original and controversial history of the college, The Annals of University College. Smith was a Fellow of Oxford University, from 1675 to 1704, and then the rector of Melsonby, from 1704 to 1735.
Born in Easby, Richmondshire, Smith attended University College, Oxford from 1668 to 1678, gaining a BA and MA. Soon after elected a fellow of the college, Smith set about organizing, cataloguing and transcribing the contents of the college archives, creating archival resources still in use today. After a scandalous marriage as a fellow, Smith moved the college to purchase the living of Melsonby, and was appointed to its rectorship in 1704. There he lived for the rest of his life, corresponding with antiquaries and keeping abreast of the politics of University College.
In one controversy a Master of the college rested his legitimacy on an apocryphal claim that King Alfred had founded University College. This inflamed Smith sufficiently that he set about writing a history of the college refuting these medieval claims, much to the chagrin of those who were personally invested in the myths. The resultant work, The Annals of University College (1728), has been called by scholars both "maddening" and "chaotic", but also "the first scholarly history [...] of any Oxford or Cambridge college" and a "most honest and accurate" work. Smith composed one more book, in 1729, on the composition of the Roman denarii and embarked on several constructions in Easby, before dying in Melsonby in December 1735.
Early life and education
William Smith was born around 1653, as one of three children of Anne (d. 5 November 1691) and William Smith (d. 28 May 1713) of Easby. Anne was the daughter of Francis Layton, Master of the Jewel House in Charles I's reign, and Margaret, née Brown. He was likely educated at the nearby Richmond Grammar School and matriculated from University College on 28 May 1668. He graduated with a BA in 1672, proceeding with an MA on 18 March 1675. He was soon after elected a fellow of University College. In 1678, he was given an MA at Cambridge, and made senior fellow, a post which he maintained for twelve years, refusing the position of Master. He seems not to have been popular during his time at Oxford, as the diarist Thomas Hearne reminisced that 'this Smith, when of Oxford, used to be called (from his dark muddy head) Puzzle Cause and often Old Crust'.
Fellowship at Oxford and University College archives
While completing his tenure as an Oxford fellow, Smith stumbled across the poorly organized archives of University College. University College, founded in 1249, had made no attempt to catalogue its contents up until the late 17th-century. Obadiah Walker, Master of University College (1676–89), had instituted a short-lived pigeonhole system, and, in the 1690s, Hugh Todd, a Cumberland antiquarian, made a faulty attempt at cataloguing the archives, which Smith later characterized as "without any Coherence or Dependance", and was quickly distracted by a clerical career in his home county. In his antiquarian passion, Smith went about cataloguing, copying, abstracting, and sorting all of the college's documents. To catalogue the various deeds, Smith created an almost modern archival system, with three hierarchical levels: fonds (as he called them, "Pyxides"), series ("fascicula"), and items (i.e. the individual documents). In the view of Robin Darwall-Smith and Michel Riordan, this was a "much more modern system of arranging documents than any of his predecessors so far encountered", though his ideal archival system stumbled when his "Pyxides" (which were each separated by physical boxes in the archive) could not hold all the documents in a fond, and so had to be awkwardly separated.