Celebrating Dervorguilla, Balliol’s co-founder

The buildings at the Master’s Field and Jowett Walk (which together are Balliol’s predominant site for undergraduate and graduate accommodation) are to be known collectively as the ‘Dervorguilla site’, in honour of Balliol’s first benefactor, Dervorguilla of Galloway.

While it was her husband, John de Balliol, who established the ‘House of the Scholars of Balliol’, it was Dervorguilla who guaranteed Balliol’s future financially in 1269 and gave it its first Statutes in 1282, as Balliol Library (in ‘Dervorguilla and Daughters’, 2019) explains:

‘Tradition has it that John de Balliol founded Balliol College around 1263 as penance for insulting the Bishop of Durham. After his death, his widow, Dervorguilla of Galloway, took the reins as patroness, making her husband’s endowment permanent. 

‘Dervorguilla was a powerful woman, wealthier than her husband, and whose lineage was the basis of her son’s claim to the throne of Scotland. She saw herself as Balliol’s joint founder, a status which has echoed down the centuries in art and architecture, and is still found in the College’s coat of arms today. Embraced as an icon of Balliol, she and her romantic story have inspired poetry and legends (the masonry in the Fellows’ Garden is not her tomb, for example), and she has lent her name to societies, scholarships, funding appeals and even a crater on Venus …

‘Her Statutes take the form of a letter addressed to her agents directing them to supervise the College. In them she sets out rules for the daily life and work of scholars, enabling them to hold property collectively and appoint their own Master, thus giving the informal academic society established by her husband a corporate identity and a measure of self-government. The Statutes were issued from Buittle Castle in Galloway, south-west Scotland, not far from Dervorguilla’s other foundation, Sweetheart Abbey, where she was buried with her husband’s embalmed heart. Her seal inspired later portraits, and its devices still feature in Balliol College’s arms today.’¹

You can read more about the founders of Balliol College and their families here and about the College arms here.

Above right: close-up of the seal of Dervorguilla’s Statutes. Below, Dervorguilla’s Statutes and seal:

Depiction of Dervorguilla from the Fremantle murals in Staircase II Room V by Christopher Fremantle (Balliol 1925), 1933. Dervorguilla is represented presenting her Statutes to her agent:

Portrait of Dervorguilla, c.17th century [Balliol Portrait No. 13]. In her right hand she holds the arms of the Balliols. Her left hand ought to bear her own arms: what actually appears was probably meant to be the royal arms of Scotland. To her sides are the arms of the Earldoms of Huntingdon and Chester, to which she was heiress:

Depiction of Dervorguilla from a volume of drawings by A.W.N. Pugin, 1843 [Balliol Manuscript 469]: