This piece was written and delivered by Fellow Emeritus Andrew Somerville at the official reopening of the Rubrics on Wednesday, 14 February, 2024.

In early 1699 the future site of the Rubrics was vacant, and the closest College building to it was the east end of the old Chapel, located where the Campanile now stands.

Building work began during 1699, and the Rubrics was finished in 1702, as a free-standing and isolated building, centred on the extended east-west axis of the seventeenth-century College. That remains the east-west axis of the western part of the College in 2024, and it probably provides a link with the ground-plan of the former Priory of all Hallows. The Priory was dissolved during the sixteenth century, and its site became the site of the College at its foundation in 1592.

The name Rubrics seems to be a coinage of the twentieth century – I have not seen it in any written source before 1946. In earlier centuries it was the ‘east building’, and its cost of construction was around £4,000. Most of the cost was covered by a parliamentary grant of £3,000 – the first ever cash grant to the College from the parliament of Ireland, or from any other central agency. It may be significant that about one quarter of the members of the 1695–99 parliament were Trinity alumni. Today the College is a tobacco-free zone, but we should be grateful to smokers nonetheless: the parliamentary £3,000 was paid out of the government duties on tobacco.

The grant was augmented by a bequest of £1,200 from the estate of Provost George Browne. He has a singular place in our history, as the first – and I hope the last – provost to die a violent death. During a student riot Browne was hit on the head by a brickbat (a lump of brick used as a missile), and he died later, in June 1699.

The Rubrics today differs from the building of 1702 in a number of respects, of which I shall mention just three. First, from the 1720s until 1837, it adjoined the Library in the south and the original no. 27 in the north, so the only routes between Library Square and College Park were by way of the foot-passages to the north and south of no. 24. With the completion of New Square, routes for wheeled traffic were needed, and consequently three bays at each end of the Rubrics were removed in 1838 and 1840. The building became free-standing again, as it had been originally, but of course it had also become shorter.

Secondly, by 1894, the roof was in very bad condition: this is evident from nineteenth-century photographs in the Lawrence Collection. Until 1894, the third floor was a dormered attic, and the eaves were slightly above the second-floor windows. Under the direction of the architect Robert Stirling, the roof was removed, the walls were raised in height by about seven or eight feet, and a new roof was put on with a much higher ridge. Stirling replaced the attic dormers with the gables that now give the building its distinctive Dutch flavour, and he re-faced the west façade with new Portmarnock brick. Original red brick may be seen in the newly-exposed panels of old brick in the passages beside number 24: this is an imaginative point of detail of the recent work.

I should mention two remarkable features of the work of 1894. First, the lower three floors remained occupied throughout. Secondly, the contractors arrived on site in June, and were gone before the new year: this was, I suggest, an extraordinarily short time for the completion of such a massive reconstruction.

The third and final major change came gradually, and because it was internal it did not affect the appearance of the building. Until the early twentieth century, a fellow occupied most of the space below the garrets in numbers 23 to 25: that is, one fellow per house. For example from 1842 until he became provost in 1888, George Salmon had two-thirds of number 24 below the garret. The sets in the Rubrics were by no means the grandest of the fellows’ sets before 1900. For example, for many years before he became provost in 1852, Richard MacDonnell’s rooms were East Chapel – he had the entire building, except for one bay at the south end, which accommodates the staircase to the Chapel’s gallery. In the twentieth century, these large sets held by fellows were gradually eliminated throughout College, and David Webb’s ‘duplex’ in number 23 was the last of them, although it survives as two guest rooms. Webb’s private staircase still exists, and is now used to house the cleaning lady’s Hoover.

After more than three centuries, we now we have the Rubrics splendidly refurbished, and good for another three, thanks to the vision of two successive provosts and their officers, and to the architects, conservation specialists, contractors and others who have brought it all about.

This piece was written and delivered by Fellow Emeritus Andrew Somerville at the official reopening of the Rubrics on Wednesday, 14 February, 2024.