[5] When Wolsey fell from power in 1529, Littlemore Priory, along with the rest of his wealth and estates, escheated to the Crown.

[6] Henry VIII then granted St Alban Hall to George Owen, D.M., who was both the king's physician and a Fellow of Merton College.

By permission of Edward VI, in 1547 they transferred the Hall to John Pollard and Robert Perrot, Esquires, who sold it to the Warden and Fellows of Merton College.

As later recalled by Dr Henry Robinson, in the mid-1830s there was only one undergraduate, John Robert Tennant,[11] who was known as "the solitary tenant of Alban Hall".

Robinson had found St Alban Hall "rather an expensive place, the number being so few, and there was no endowment.

In 1877 Prime Minister Disraeli appointed commissioners under Lord Selborne and later Mountague Bernard to consider and implement reform of the university and its colleges.

[14] In 1881, the commissioners made a University Statute which provided for St Alban Hall to be united with Merton College in the event of Principal Salter's resignation or death.

[7] In 1887, a similar Statute extinguished New Inn Hall and combined it with Balliol College, on the death of Henry Hubert Cornish.