FACULTY RESEARCH & ACHIEVEMENTS
Enjoying the Fellowship of Clare Hall: Professor Tom McSweeney and Professor Brent Allred
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BY JAIME WELCH-DONAHUE
Professor Tom McSweeney (left) and Professor Brent Allred were Visiting Fellows in fall 2019 at Clare Hall, a college of the University of Cambridge. Photo of Cambridge by Niki Redmon ‘19 Opposite Page L: Brent and Kristyn Allred enjoyed exploring the University of Cambridge, which comprises Clare Hall and 30 other colleges, during their free time. R: While the libraries were a huge draw for Professor Tom McSweeney, he, his wife, Abby, and children enjoyed all there was to see and do around the historic campus. Courtesy Photos
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WORLD MINDED
illiam & Mary professors Tom McSweeney and Brent Allred did not know that each had been selected as Visiting Fellows at Clare Hall, a college of the University of Cambridge, for the fall 2019 semester. In fact, they did not know each other at all. They traveled to the U.K. with their families and settled into apartments that, as it turned out, bordered the same college garden. McSweeney guesses that they had crossed paths at William & Mary, because a few days after he arrived he recognized Allred as a familiar face as he scrolled through the roster of new fellows. He took a closer look, then reached out to Allred to introduce himself. The professors and their families soon met and struck up a warm friendship.
For Allred, a professor at the Mason School of Business, and McSweeney, a professor at William & Mary Law School, the semester-long residencies at Clare Hall offered time to concentrate on their scholarship, engage with an international group of fellows and graduate students from different disciplines, and enjoy Cambridge’s centuries-old grounds, history and traditions. Clare Hall is “relatively young,” observes McSweeney. It was created in 1966 as a center
for advanced study within Clare College, which was founded in 1326 and is the second oldest of Cambridge’s 31 colleges. Clare Hall became an independent college within the university in 1984, and its community today comprises university faculty and staff, graduate students and Visiting Fellows. Visiting Fellows become Life Members after completing their residencies and are welcome to return to Clare Hall for work or pleasure for the rest of their lives. McSweeney says that one of the special benefits of the fellowship was the access it gave him to the large collection of “statute books” in Cambridge University Library. These books usually contain short treatises on the common law, some of which date to the late thirteenth century. “These treatises constitute some of the earliest evidence for legal education in the common law,” he says, with a number that seem “to derive from lecture courses that we otherwise know nothing about.” Among the treatises, the Summa de Bastardia (“The Treatise on Bastardy”) captured his attention. “It’s a Latin text written in the form of hypothetical cases on illegitimacy and how that affects inheritance,” he explains, and notes that the abundance of surviving manuscripts in which it appears would indicate “it must have been wildly popular.” Yet, it has received scant scholarly attention. He focused much of his stay at Clare Hall on translating the text and looking for clues for the date it was written. He also had the chance to
