The Far Four Colleges

The Far Four Colleges are MacNaughton College, Free Hall, Bester College, and Old Carroll.

Founded in quick succession by act of a single convention of Regent House, the Far Four are located at the extreme eastern end of the High Street - as distant from the rest of the University as they can get while remaining within the walls of the city. This is as petty and symbolic as it sounds.

History

After the founding of Newgrave, the University went for over a hundred years without creating another college. The decision to suddenly charter four at once was the result of the single greatest schism in the history of Regent House.

While Aldergate had benefited enormously from its cozy (not to say symbiotic) relationship with the machinery of the British Empire, the abiding Aldergatian skepticism of external authority fostered increasingly vocal opposition to the University's habit of "infesting" the executive ranks of colonial bureaucracies and national joint-stock companies. This dissatisfaction was hardly assuaged by 35th Vice-Chancellor Hubertus de Vries, whose cozy relationship and immense personal investment in the Dutch East India Company resulted in the frequent vandalism of publications bearing his name and title to read "H. de Vries, V(O)C."

Besides those skeptical of Crown and Company interests, the burgeoning humanistic and independence movements in Paris and the American colonies had both leaders and sympathizers within Aldergate. Alice Mowbray, then the Head of Guildford College, crystallized the insurgent resistance in 1760 with an impassioned address to the Regents that invoked both the University's and her own (apocryphal) heritage. In part:

"My twenty-times-great-grandsire did not stand before King John so that I might kneel before John Watts. Shall this University kneel before George Frederick [the recently-crowned King George III] as it has knelt before George White?"

de Vries died in 1773, and - after a protracted period of wrangling within Regent House - Mowbray was elected to succeed him. Factional struggles within the Colleges themselves were resolved by the decision to charter four new colleges to receive the Disestablishmentarian scholars.