Series R - Rooms / Residence

In early times the main value of a Fellowship or scholarship consisted not of money but the right to rooms and commons. The actual money received was small and most of this depended on the recipient having resided in college. Accordingly, books were kept in which the days of departure, and return to college, are recorded. So long as these 'Absence Books' were kept up there is now information, with almost the detail of a journal, of the coming and going of each scholar and Fellow. The earliest of this genre of book commences in 1592 (Exit and Redit Book). The early books include only the people who were 'on the foundation'. By 1962 the Absence Book had changed to become a record of rooms occupied in college. There is no records as to the residence of the ordinary pensioners and the fellow-commoners until the ealiest of the 'Cooks' books' which commenced about 1775.