Merton College

Merton College is marked by its honey-colored stone walls and its fifteenth-century gatehouse, which features a prominent battlement tower added after King Henry the Fifth granted the college a license to crenellate. Founded in twelve sixty-four by Walter de Merton, the college established an academic model of self-governance that shaped the development of other institutions at Oxford and Cambridge. Its Mob Quadrangle, built in stages between twelve eighty-eight and thirteen seventy-eight, is recognized as the oldest quadrangle in the university, while the library within its walls remains the oldest continuously functioning university library in the world.