Record.

The Book and Paper Gathering on the conservation of Oxford's University College Buttery Books ...

There was a College tradition, and one that was maintained into the 19th century, of writing your name in the Buttery Book on your first day in College. A good example of the Buttery Books being able to tell a story begins with the signature of Ezreel Tonge, who first made his mark on the college records during the week of 24 May 1639, at the bottom of the list of the poorest undergraduates. Tonge is, according to the College archivist Dr Robin Darwall-Smith, one of University College’s few historical villains.

With the irritating luck that seems to be common to all such base creatures, this unpleasant character gradually worked his way up the pecking order. In the list of the same poor undergraduates from a few pages later in the 1639 buttery book, Tonge’s name has moved up a few notches. He was to rise even higher in subsequent books but is remembered for his transgressions rather than his achievements. As a Fellow and Bursar in the 1650s he caused financial chaos, and then in the late 1670s he teamed with Titus Oates as one of the ringleaders of the Popish Plot, a nasty, McCarthyite-like campaign created to whip up hysteria and hatred against Catholics. So the Buttery Books add considerably to our understanding of the social structures built up within a generation within the College.

Aside from the individual stories these books tell, this breakdown of who was in College during the late 1630s and early 1640s is made doubly important by the historical context: they span the beginnings of the English Civil War, and by the time pen was put to paper in the final volume Charles I was permanently resident in a besieged Oxford. So they become a record of both loyalty and poverty: those who were staying and throwing in their lot with the crown and those who were too poor to leave.