The Snell Exhibition is an annual scholarship awarded to students of the University of Glasgow to allow them to undertake postgraduate study at Balliol College, Oxford. The award was founded by the bequest of Sir John Snell in a will made in 1677, although the original stipulation referred to the University of Oxford, rather than Balliol in particular. Snell died on 6 August 1679, but wrangling over the will meant that it was nearly twenty years before the first scholarships were awarded; the first four Snell Exhibitioners were admitted to Balliol in mid-1699.
Snell had been a Royalist in the Civil War, and was later secretary to the Duke of Monmouth and had the management of his Scottish estates. He intended the bequest to be used to educate Scottish clergymen for the then-established Scottish Episcopal Church. By Adam Smith's day, the bequest was mostly regarded as an educational charity, though its exact status was not settled until later. "By the will of John Snell his exhibitors were under bond to take Anglican orders and return to Scotland, but the penalty was not enforced in the case of Adam Smith and numerous others." (C. R. Fay, quoting The Times obituary of Smith.) Snell is buried in St Cross Church, which since 2011 has housed Balliol's Special Collections Library, being next to the college's graduate centre, Holywell Manor.
Each year, there is an annual dinner held at Balliol and attended by delegates of Balliol, Glasgow and St John's College, Cambridge, in honour of the foundation.
The Scottish Enlightenment was the period in 18th- and early-19th-century Scotland characterised by an outpouring of intellectual and scientific accomplishments. By the eighteenth century, Scotland had a network of parish schools in the Scottish Lowlands and five universities. The Enlightenment culture was based on close readings of new books, and intense discussions which took place daily at such intellectual gathering places in Edinburgh as The Select Society and, later, The Poker Club, as well as within Scotland's ancient universities.
Balliol College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. One of Oxford's oldest colleges, it was founded around 1263 by John I de Balliol, a landowner from Barnard Castle in County Durham, who provided the foundation and endowment for the college. When de Balliol died in 1268, his widow, Dervorguilla, a woman whose wealth far exceeded that of her husband, continued his work in setting up the college, providing a further endowment and writing the statutes. She is considered a co-founder of the college.
Dugald Stewart was a Scottish philosopher and mathematician. Today regarded as one of the most important figures of the later Scottish Enlightenment, he was renowned as a populariser of the work of Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith. His lectures at the University of Edinburgh were widely disseminated by his many influential students. In 1783 he was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In most contemporary documents he is referred to as Prof Dougal Stewart.
John Campbell Shairp was a Scottish critic and man of letters.
Sir Donald Neil MacCormick was a Scottish legal philosopher and politician. He was Regius Professor of Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations at the University of Edinburgh from 1972 until 2008. He was a Member of the European Parliament 1999–2004, member of the Convention on the Future of Europe, and officer of the Scottish National Party.
Sir John Snell, founder of the Snell Exhibitions at the University of Oxford, was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, the son of a blacksmith. He attended the University of Glasgow from 1642 to 1644.
John Smith (1721–1797) was a Scottish physician and academic.
The Regius Chair of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow was founded in 1861 by Queen Victoria, and is the only Regius Professorship in the Faculty of Arts.
James Bonar was a Scottish civil servant, political economist and historian of economic thought. He was born in Perth but brought up, from the age of four, in Glasgow where his father was a Church of Scotland Minister. This clerical background extends to two uncles, both ministers who 'came out' in the disruption of 1843, both later serving terms as Moderator of the Free Church General Assembly. From Glasgow Academy Bonar graduated MA in Mental Philosophy from Glasgow University in 1874. He followed the same lengthy undergraduate career that Adam Smith pursued more than a century before gaining a Snell Exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford from which he graduated with a first in 1877.
St Cross Church is a former parish church, now a historic collections centre, in Oxford, England, to the northeast of the centre of the city. The church is on St Cross Road at the junction with Manor Road, just south of Holywell Manor. Also close by is Holywell Cemetery.
The Memorial Gates at the University of Glasgow were erected in 1952 as a celebration of the university's quincentenary, or five hundredth anniversary. They form a portal through the University Avenue side of the perimeter fence around the university's current site on Gilmorehill. They stand before the Hunter memorial and Hunterian Museum, on the other side of the John McIntyre Building from the Main Gate. The large gates in the centre are generally locked, although the small pedestrian gates to the left and right are opened during the day. The gates bear the names of thirty distinguished figures associated with the university. The gates are protected as a category B listed building.
Thomas (Tom) Douglas Campbell (1938–2019) was a Scottish philosopher and jurist. He held academic positions in Scotland and Australia, and was a professorial fellow of the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) in Canberra.
John Cameron Bryce was a Scottish academic, first Bradley Professor of English Literature in the University of Glasgow and editor of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith.
John Macmillan Brown was a Scottish-New Zealand academic, administrator and promoter of education for women.
Thomas Martin Lindsay FRSE (1843–1914) was a Scottish historian, professor and principal of the Free Church College, Glasgow. He wrote chiefly on church history, his major works including Luther and the German Reformation (1900), and A History of the Reformation (1906–1907).
Events from the year 1740 in Scotland.
Rev James Menteath, in later life James Stuart Menteath of Closeburn was a Scottish clergyman of the Church of England, and friend of Adam Smith.
Diane Watt is a British medievalist, currently Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Surrey. She previously held a personal chair at Aberystwyth University, where she was Deputy Director of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS). She was Charles A. Owen Jr. Distinguished Visiting Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Connecticut in 2005. She was awarded a Snell Exhibition to study at Balliol College, University of Oxford, and was awarded her DPhil in English Literature in 1993. She is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.
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