Free Hall (formally The Independent Resident Scholars of Free Hall) is the twenty-first founded college of the University of Aldergate.
Liberhalians have a reputation for being the Aldergatian equivalent of the sort of American who wears Gadsden flag underpants and rails about their right to shoot heroin and machine guns simultaneously. This stereotype is simultaneously spot-on and utterly false, depending on how you look at it; your typical Liberhalian is to your typical anarcho-libertarian as a research oncologist is to a faith healer.
If you know an Aldergatian, but you don't know what college they belong to, they're probably a Liberhalian.
History[]
(Main article: The Far Four Colleges)
Free Hall was the second of the Far Four colleges.
The College occupies the extreme southeast corner of the City of Aldergate. Founded by the fieriest of the separatist firebrands, for the first few decades of its existence Free Hall did not officially acknowledge itself to be a college at all, but rather an independent community of scholarship. Over time, as the Liberhalians realized that their willingness to abdicate the title of College did not extend to a willingness to forego the attendant privileges, Free Hall gradually settled into its role as a coequal member of the University family. This is true only of the College's administration, however; Free Hall scholars remained (and remain) as unbothered as ever.
The distinctly Liberhalian ethos continued to evolve, however. In its present form, it finds its strongest roots in John Locke's notion (propounded while he was hiding out in Guildford College after the Rye House Plot) of "the inevitability of bondage within relationships." All jokes aside, the Free Hall school of philosophy views human liberty not as a state of unconstrained isolation within a howling moral void, but as a sort of personal equilibrium within a complex ecosystem of persons and institutions. It's an "all men count with you, but none too much" sort of arrangement; not a blanket rejection of authority and constraint, but rather an ongoing effort to limit the power and influence of individual relationships to whatever may be considered their proper role.
If this seems like an unnecessarily deep dive into one college's character, well ... that's Free Hall for you. One can't really talk about the College as a whole, because it doesn't act like one. Liberhalians do their own thing.
Architecture[]
The hub of the College is Free Hall itself, rather a grim old Georgian pile that had briefly housed the Aldergate City Council during that unfortunate body's brief existence. Efforts at self-rule by the civilian population of the City of Aldergate have never prospered, and indeed the construction of what is now Free Hall represents the single greatest achievement of any such body. backed against the City Wall. The rest of it's a bit of a mess, because it wasn't until the late 1800s that the College grudgingly acknowledged the necessity of regulating who was allowed to build what where. As a result, the original buildings that had occupied the college grounds at the time of its founding are encrusted with haphazard additions of all types and styles.
The picture is of Leinster House