Robert Hovenden

He was educated at the University of Oxford, was elected a Fellow of All Souls' College in 1565, and graduated BA in the following year, and MA in 1570.

[4] Hovenden entered on his duties as Warden of All Souls while the college was striving to preserve its Catholic 'monuments of superstition' in the chapel from demolition, but in December 1573 the orders of the commissioners in the matter were too stringent to be any longer disobeyed.

Hovenden succeeded in recovering for the college the rectory of Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire, which had been granted to it by Cardinal Pole, but resumed by the crown on the accession of Elizabeth.

He completed the Warden's lodgings, which had been begun about fifteen years before; enlarged the grounds of the college by adding the site of a house known as 'The Rose,' where there was a famous well; rearranged the old library, now disused, and converted into rooms; introduced a better system of keeping the college books and accounts; and put in order and catalogued the archives.

[4] The main alteration which he made in the constitution of the college was the admission of poor scholars (servientes), who in 1612 numbered thirty-one, but they were discontinued during the Commonwealth, and were later represented only by four bible clerks.

He was buried at Stanton Harcourt in 1610, having married Margery Powys, sister of the Warden's wife.

The second brother, George (1562–1625), was Rector of Harrietsham, Kent, a living also in the gift of All Souls, and held the tenth prebend in Canterbury Cathedral from 15 December 1609 till his death at Oxford 24 October 1625.