William Smith (antiquary)

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.

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.

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).

[7] Smith, as he combed through the university archives, abstracted or transcribed every manuscript he sorted, keeping his records in several volumes of personal notes.

While he completed these duties, Smith kept up correspondence with antiquaries, including Ralph Thoresby and Henry Bourne, and his college fellows, keeping abreast of university politics.

[1][3] One such event was a controversy surrounding the Mastership of University College, wherein two Masters - Thomas Cockman and William Dennison - had both been admitted into office in 1722 in contesting elections, leading to a conflict between their respective supporters.

When the vice-chancellor of Oxford decided in favour of Dennison, Cockman's supporters held that only the Crown, as 'Visitor of the College', could determine the result of the election, citing an apocryphal medieval claim that University College had been founded by King Alfred the Great, a claim backed by Anthony Wood, and held by the Court of King's Bench in 1727.

Though Smith himself had no partisan affiliations, his book was taken to be strongly in favour of Dennison, attacking the royal argument and upholding the vice-chancellor's judgement.

[20] Thomas Hearne, who was personally committed to this Alfredian myth, repudiated the book as a "Rhapsody of Lyes" to fellow antiquaries, accusing Smith of "making everything spurious that happens to be against himself".

[21][3] For a century Smith's scholarship "made not the slightest difference to the pride which the University continued to take in its Alfredian identity", according to Simon Keynes.

[6] William Carr praised Smith as "that most honest and accurate of workers among past records, at a crisis in the College history, feeling himself bound to support a view which he believed to be just".

In September 1732, Smith funded the erection of some almshouses in Easby, sometimes known collectively as 'Smith's Hospital', which were built to house four poor citizens and, as he requested to his descendants, a schoolmaster, in two rooms.

[3][12][8] An oil portrait was painted of Smith, gifted to the Melsonby rectory in 1796 by Thomas Zouch, and given to University College by Rev.