The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Colleges of Oxford: Their History and Traditions, by Various, Edited by Andrew Clark

Transcriber’s Note:
The editor of this book did not trouble himself to impose a consistent style on the contributing authors’ spelling, hyphenation, etc. The transcriber of this e-text has not ventured to do so either.

THE COLLEGES OF OXFORD.

THE COLLEGES OF OXFORD:
THEIR HISTORY AND TRADITIONS.

XXI CHAPTERS
CONTRIBUTED BY MEMBERS OF THE COLLEGES.

EDITED BY
ANDREW CLARK, M.A.,
FELLOW OF LINCOLN COLLEGE, OXFORD.

Methuen & Co.,
18, BURY STREET, LONDON, W.C.
1891.

[All rights reserved.]

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
London & Bungay.

PREFACE.

The history of any one of the older Colleges of Oxford extends over a period of time and embraces a variety of interests more than sufficient for a volume. The constitutional changes which it has experienced in the six, or four, or two centuries of its existence have been neither few nor slight. The Society living within its walls has reflected from age to age the social, religious, and intellectual conditions of the nation at large. Its many passing generations of teachers and students have left behind them a wealth of traditions honourable or the reverse. Yet it seems not impossible to combine in one volume a series of College histories. What happened in one College happened to some extent in all; and if, therefore, certain periods or subjects which are fully dealt with in one College are omitted in others, a single volume ought to be sufficient, not merely to narrate the salient features of the history of each individual College, but also to give an intelligible picture of College life generally at successive periods of time.

This is what the present volume seeks to do. Brasenose and Hertford chapters give a hint of the multiplicity of halls for Seculars out of which the Colleges grew; in Trinity and Worcester chapters we have a glimpse of the houses for Regulars which for a while mated the Colleges, but disappeared at the Reformation. In Queen’s College, early social conditions are described; in New College, early studies. Balliol College gives prominence to the Renaissance movement; Corpus Christi to the consequent changes in studies. In Magdalen College we see the divisions and fluctuations of opinions which followed the Reformation; in S. John’s, the golden age of the early Stuarts; in Merton, the dissensions of the Civil War; in Exeter College, the strong contrast between Commonwealth and Restoration. University College naturally enlarges on the Romanist attempt under James II. The bright and dark sides of the eighteenth century are exhibited in Pembroke and Lincoln. To Corpus, which had described the Renaissance, it belongs almost of right to depict the renewed love of letters which distinguishes the present century. And as with successive phases of social and intellectual life, so with other matters of interest. Oriel College gives a full account of the different books of record of a College, and of the long warfare of contested elections. Lincoln College sets forth the constitutional arrangements of a pre-Reformation College. Lincoln and Worcester show through what uncertainties projected Colleges have to pass before they are legally settled. Christ Church suggests the architectural and artistic wealth of Oxford.

It is only fair to the writers of the separate chapters to say that the limits of length imposed on them, and the selection of subjects for special treatment, are not of their own choosing. Space for fuller treatment in each case is of necessity wanting; but somewhat greater latitude has been allowed to those less fortunate Colleges which have no history of their own, extant or in prospect. Colleges which have found their historian, will not, it is hoped, grudge their sisters this consolation.

A. C.

August 1891.

CONTENTS.

ERRATUM.

[Page 427, lines 25 and 26,] should read:—‘surmounted by three shields (of which two bear respectively the arms of Ramsey Abbey and St. Alban’s).’

ERRATA.

[p. 288, line 31,] for 1567 read 1568

[p. 298, line 4,] for (perhaps) read (most probably)

[” line 7,] for Miles Smith, &c., read John Spenser, President of the College, and Miles Smith, Bishop of Gloucester, both amongst the translators of the Bible;

I.
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE.

By F. C. Conybeare, M.A., sometime Fellow of University College.

The popular mind concerning the origin of University College is well exampled in the form of prayer which after the reform of religion was used in chapel on the day of the yearly College Festival, and which begins in these words—

“Merciful God and loving Father, we give Thee humble and hearty thanks for Thy great Bounty bestow’d upon us of this place by Alfred the Great, the first Founder of this House; William of Durham, the Restorer of it; Walter Skirlow, Henry Percy, Sir Simon Benet, Charles Greenwood, especial Benefactors, with others, exhibitors to the same.”[1]

However, Mr. William Smith, Rector of Melsonby, and above twelve years Senior Fellow of our Society, who in the year 1728 published his learned Annals of the College, sets it down that King Alfred was not mentioned in the College prayers as chief founder until the reign of Charles I., and he relates how “that Dr. Clayton, after he was chosen Master (in 1665), when he first heard King Alfred named in the collect before William of Durham, openly and aloud cried out in the chapel, ‘There is no King Alfred there.’”

For at an earlier date it had been of custom to pray indeed for the soul of King Alfred, but only in the following order—

“I commend also unto your devout Prayers, the souls departed out of this world, especially The Soul of William of Durham, our chief Founder. The Soul of Mr. Walter Skirlaw, especial Benefactor. The Soul of King Alfred, Founder of the University. The Soul of King Henry the 5th. The Souls of Henry Percy, first Earl of Northumberland; Henry the 2nd Earl, and my Ladies their Wives, with all their Issue out of the World departed.… The Souls of all them that have been Fellows, and all good Doers. And for the Souls of all them that God would have be prayed for.”

The date of this form of prayer is concurrent with Philip and Mary; between whose reign and that of Charles I. it is therefore certain that King Alfred was lifted in our prayers from being Founder only of the University to the being Founder of our College. And in so much as during many generations the belief that this college was founded by King Alfred has, by all who are competent to judge, been condemned for false and erroneous, I will follow the example of the learned antiquarian already mentioned, and recount its true foundation by William of Durham; eschewing the scruples of those brave interpreters of the law, who in the year 1727 said in Westminster Hall, “that King Alfred must be confirmed our Founder, for the sake of Religion itself, which would receive a greater scandal by a determination on the other Side, than it had by all the Atheists, Deists, and Apostates, from Julian down to Collins; that a succession of Clergymen for so many years should return thanks for an Idol, or mere Nothing, in Ridicule and Banter of God and Religion, must not be suffered in a court of Justice.”[2]

The historical origin of University College dates from the thirteenth century, and was in this wise. There was in the year 1229, so Matthew Paris relates, a great falling out between the students and citizens of Paris, and, as was usual for Academicians then to do, all the scholars removed to other places, where they could have civiller usage, and greater privileges allowed them, as the Oxonians had done in King John’s time, when three thousand removed to Reading and Maidstone (and as some say to Cambridge also). It appears that the English king, Henry III., was not blind to the advantages which would accrue to his country from an influx of scholars, and therefore published Letters Patent on the 14th July, of that very year, to invite the masters and scholars of the University to England; and foreseeing they would prefer Oxford before any other place, the said king sent several Writs to the Burgers of Oxon, to provide all conveniences, as lodgings, and all other good Entertainment, and good usage to welcome them thither.[3] Among other Englishmen who left Paris in consequence of these dissensions, was Master William of Durham, who repaired at first to Anjou only. But we may well suppose that his attention was drawn by the fostering edicts of the English king to Oxford as a centre of schools. It is certain that when he died, at Rouen, on his way home from Rome, twenty years later, in 1249, “abounding in great Revenues, eminently learned, and Rector of that noble Church of Weremouth, not far from the sea,” he bequeathed to the University of Oxford the sum of three hundred and ten marks, for purchase of annual rents, unto the use of ten or eleven or twelve, or more Masters, who should be maintained withal.

The above information is derived from a report drawn up in 1280, by certain persons delegated by the University of Oxford to enquire into the Testament of Master William of Durham; which report is still kept among the muniments of the College, and constitutes our earliest statutes.

In the thirteenth century there was not the same choice of investments as to-day. The best one could do was to lend out one’s money to the nobles and king of the Realm, or to purchase houses therewith. The former security corresponded to, but was not so secure as, the consolidated funds of a later age. Nor was house property entirely safe. For in an age when communication between different parts of the country was slow and insecure, it was not of choice, but of necessity, that one bought house property in one’s own city; since farther afield and in places wide apart one lacked trusty agents to collect one’s rents; but in a single city a plague might in one year lay empty half the houses, and so forfeit to the owners their yearly monies.

In laying out William of Durham’s bequest, the University had recourse to both these kinds of security. As early as the year 1253, a house was bought for thirty-six marks from the priors and brethren of the hospital of Brackle; perhaps for the reception of William of Durham’s earliest scholars. This house stood in the angle between School Street and St. Mildred’s Lane (which to-day is Brazenose Lane), and corresponded therefore with the north-east corner of the present Brazenose College. Two years later, in 1255, was purchased from the priors of Sherburn, a house in the High Street, standing opposite the lodge of the present college, where now is Mr. Thornton’s book-shop. For this piece of property the University paid, out of William of Durham’s money, forty-eight marks down.

This house, the second purchase made out of the founder’s bequest, after belonging to the College for upwards of six hundred years, was lately sold to Magdalen College instead of being exchanged as it should have been, if it was to be alienated at all, with a house belonging to Queen’s College, numbered 85 on the opposite side of the street. And at the same time, all properties and tenements, not already belonging to us, except the aforesaid No. 85, intervening between Logic Lane and the New Examination Schools, were purchased, to give our College the faculty of some day, if need be, extending itself on that side.

The third house bought out of the same bequest adjoined (to the south) the former of the two already mentioned, and fronting on School Street, was called as early as A.D. 1279, Brazen-Nose Hall. It cost £55 6s. 8d. sterling, and on its site stands to-day Brazen-nose College gate and chapel. The purchase was completed in 1262. The last of the early purchases made by the University for the College consisted of two houses east of Logic Lane on the south side of the High Street. (The old Saracen’s Head Inn on the same side of Logic Lane only came to the College in the last century by the bequest of Dr. John Browne, who became master in 1744.) These two houses paid a Quit Rent of fifteen shillings, for which the University gave, A.D. 1270, seven pounds of William of Durham’s money, proving, as Mr. Smith notes, that in the thirteenth century houses were purchased in Oxford at ten years’ purchase, so that you received eleven per cent. interest on your money.

The rents of all these houses, so we learn from the Inquisition of the year 1280 already mentioned, amounted to eighteen marks. As to the rest of the money bequeathed, the Masters of Arts appointed by the University in 1280 to enquire found, “That the University needing it for itself, and other great men of the Land that had recourse to the University; the rest of the money, to wit, one hundred Pounds and ten Marks, had been made use of, partly for its own necessary occasions, and partly lent to other persons, of which money nothing at all is yet restored.”

The barons to whom the University thus lent money had long been at strife with King Henry for his extortions, and in May of 1264 won the Battle of Lewes against him. With them the University took side against the king, so far at least as to advance them money out of William of Durham’s chest. It is not certain—though it seems probable—that some few scholars were as early as 1253 invited by the University to live together, as beneficiaries of William of Durham, in the Hall which was in that year purchased out of his bequest. If it be asked how were they supported, it may be answered: with the interest paid by the nobles upon the hundred pounds lent to them; for, since the capital sum was afterwards repaid, it is fair to suppose that the interest was also got in year by year from the first. Although the University drew up no statutes for William of Durham’s scholars till the year 1280, yet his very will—which is now lost—may have served as a prescription ruling their way of life, even as it was made the basis of those statutes of 1280. Perhaps, however, his scholars were scattered over the different halls until 1280, when, after the pattern of the nephews and scholars of Walter de Merton, they were gathered under a single roof for the advancement of their learning and improvement of their discipline. Even if they lived apart, the title of college can hardly be denied to them, for—to quote Mr. William Smith—“taking it for granted and beyond dispute, that William of Durham dyed A.D. 1249, and that several purchases were bought with his money shortly after his death, as the deeds themselves testifie; all the doubt that can afterwards follow is, whether William of Durham’s Donation to ten, eleven, or twelve masters or scholars, were sufficient to erect them into a society? and whether that society could properly be called a college?” And the same writer adds that a college “signifies not a building made of brick or stone, adorned with gates, towers, and quadrangles; but a company, or society admitted into a body, and enjoying the same or like privileges one with another.” Such was a college in the old Roman sense.

We will then leave it to the reader to decide whether University College is or is not the earliest college in Europe, even though its foundation by King Alfred is mythical, and will pass on to view the statutes made in the year 1280. In that year at least the Masters delegated by the University “to enquire and order those things which had relation to the Testament of Master William of Durham,” ordained that “The Chancellor with some Masters in Divinity, by their advice, shall call other masters of other Faculties; and these masters with the Chancellor, bound by the Faith they owe to the University, shall chuse out of all who shall offer themselves to live of the said rents, four Masters, whom in their consciences they shall think most fit to advance, or profit in the Holy Church, who otherwise have not to live handsomely without it in the State of Masters of Arts.… The same manner of Election shall be for the future, except only that those four that shall be maintained out of that charity shall be called to the election, of which four one at least shall be a Priest.

“These four Masters shall each receive for his salary fifty shillings sterling[4] yearly, out of the Rents bought.…

“The aforesaid four masters, living together, shall study Divinity; and with this also may hear the Decretum and Decretalls, if they shall think fit; who, as to their manner of living and learning, shall behave themselves as by some fit and expert persons, deputed by the Chancellor, shall be ordered. But if it shall so happen, that any ought to be removed from the said allowance, or office, the Chancellor and Masters of Divinity shall have Power to do it.”

By the same Statutes a procurator or Bursar was appointed to take care of rents already bought and procure the buying of other rents. This Bursar was to receive fifty-five shillings instead of fifty. He was to have one key of William of Durham’s chest, the Chancellor another, and a person appointed by the University Proctors the third.

Three points are evident from these statutes: firstly, that in its inception the College of William of Durham was entirely the care of the University, which thus held the position of Visitor. Secondly, theology was to be the chief, if not sole study of the beneficiaries. Perhaps the founder viewed with jealousy the study of Roman law, which was beginning to engross some of the best minds of the age. Thirdly, only Masters were admissible as Fellows. It was the custom at the time to have graduated in Arts before proceeding to teach Divinity.

After a lapse of twelve years, A.D. 1292, at the Procurement of the Executors of the Venerable Mr. William of Durham, who were, it seems, still living, the University made new statutes for the College. In these new statutes we hear for the first time of a Master of the College, of commoners, and of a College library. The Senior Fellow was to govern the Juniors, and get half a mark yearly for his diligence therein. Thus the headship of the College went at first by succession, and not until 1332 by election; after which date the master was required to be cæteris paribus proxime Dunelmiam oriundus, or at least of northern extraction.

The first alien to the College who was elected Master was Ralph Hamsterley, in 1509. Previously he was a fellow of Merton College, where in the chapel he was buried. (Brodrick, Memorials of Merton College, p. 240.) He was “nunquam de gremio nostro neque de comitiva,” and was therefore chosen Master conditionally upon the visitors granting a dispensation to depart from the ordinary rule. (W. Smith’s MSS., xi. p. 2.)

The Master had until lately as much or as little right to marry as any of the Fellows, and in 1692 the Fellows, before electing Dr. Charlet, exacted from him a promise that he would not marry, or, if he did, would resign within a year. It seems that in old days Fellows of Colleges who were obliged to be in Holy Orders were free to marry after King James the I.’s parliament had sanctioned the marriage of clergymen. Already in 1422 the Master is called the custos, but he was till 1736, when new statutes made a change, called “the Master or Senior Fellow, Magister vel senior socius.” He had the key of the College, but in time delegated the function of letting people in and out to a statutory porter. The introduction of commoners or scholars not on the foundation is thus referred to in these statutes of 1292: “Since the aforesaid scholars have not sufficient to live handsomely alone by themselves, but that it is expedient that other honest persons dwell with them; it is ordained that every Fellow shall secretly enquire concerning the manners of every one that desires to sojourn with them; and then, if they please, by common consent, let him be received under this condition, That before them he shall promise whilst he lives with them, that he will honestly observe the customs of the Fellows of the House, pay his Dues, not hurt any of the Things belonging to the House, either by himself, or those that belong to him.”

In the year 1381 we find from the Bursar’s roll that the students not on the foundation paid £4 18s. as rents for their chambers, a considerable sum in those days.

As to the books of the College, it was ordained that there be put one book of every sort that the House has, in some common and secure place; that the Fellows, and others with the consent of a Fellow, may for the future have the benefit of it.

For the rest it was ordained that the Fellows should speak Latin often, and at every Act have one Disputation in Philosophy or Theology, and have one Disputation at least in the principal Question of both Faculties in the Vespers, and another in the Inception in their private College. In these disputations it is clear that rival disputants sometimes lost their tempers from the following ordinance—

“No Fellow shall under-value another Fellow, but shall correct his Fault privately, under the Penalty of Twelve-pence to be paid to the common-Purse; nor before one that is no Fellow, under the Penalty of two shillings; nor publickly in the Highway, or Church, or Fields, under the penalty of half a mark; and in all these cases, he that begins first shall double what the other is to pay, and this in Disputations especially.”

In those days a lesson was read during dinner. In these degenerate days all the above salutary rules are inverted, and it is customary for the senior scholar to sconce in a pot of beer any junior member who quotes Latin during the Hall-dinner.

In the year 1311 fresh statutes were ordained by convocation for the College, which, however, add little to the former ones. Of candidates for a Fellowship, otherwise duly qualified, he was to be preferred who comes from near Durham. After seven years a Fellow was to oppose in the Divinity Schools, which was equivalent to nowadays taking the degree of Doctor of Divinity. Each Fellow or past-Fellow was to put up a mass once a year for the Repose of the soul of William of Durham; and all alike were to cause themselves to be called, so far as lay in their power, the scholars of William of Durham. Lastly, the Senior Fellow was to be in Holy Orders. This, however, must not be taken to mean that the other Fellows were not to be so likewise. They were till recently expected to be ordained within four years of their degree, and the Statutes of 1311 A.D. were reaffirmed in that sense by the visitors under the chancellorship of Dr. Fell, 1666 A.D., when it was sought to remove Mr. Berty, a Bennet Fellow, because he had not taken orders.

In or about the year 1343 the scholars of William of Durham removed to the present site of the College, where a house called Spicer’s Hall, occupying the ground now included in the large quadrangle, had been bought for them. At the same time White Hall and Rose Hall, two houses facing Kybald Street—which joined the present Logic Lane and Grove Street half-way down each—were bought, and made part of the College. Ludlow Hall, on the site of the present east quadrangle, was bought at the same time, and a tenement, called in 1379 Little University Hall, and occupying the site of the Lodgings of the Master (which in 1880, on the completion of the Master’s new house, were turned into men’s rooms), was bought in 1404. But Ludlow Hall and Little University Hall were not at once added to the College premises.

During the first hundred years of the life of the College its members were called simply University Scholars, and the ordinance of A.D. 1311, that they should call themselves the Scholars of William of Durham, proves that that was not the name in common vogue. Their old house at the corner of what is to-day Brazen-nose College was called the Aula Universitatis in Vico Scholarum (the Hall of the University in School Street). After 1343, the probable year of their migration, until at least 1361, the College was called as before Aula Universitatis, only in Alto Vico, i. e. in High Street. After 1361 they assumed the official title of Master and Fellows of the Hall of William of Durham, commonly called Aula Universitatis. It was not till 1381 that the present title Magna Aula Universitatis, or Mickle University Hall, was used, in distinction from the Little University Hall, which was only separated from it by Ludlow Hall. But the nomenclature was not uniform, and in Elizabeth’s reign, as in Richard II.’s, it was called the College of William of Durham.

The legend of the foundation of the College by King Alfred has been mentioned, and here is a convenient place to conjecture how and when it arose. The first mention of it we meet with in a petition addressed in French to King Richard II., A.D. 1381, by his “poor Orators, the Master and Scholars of your College, called Mickil University Hall in Oxendford, which College was first founded by your noble Progenitor, King Alfred (whom God assoyle), for the maintenance of twenty-four Divines for ever.” Twenty years before, in 1360, Laurence Radeford, a Fellow, had bought for the College various messuages, shops, lands and meadows yielding rents of the yearly value of £15. This purchase was made out of the residuum of William of Durham’s money, now all called in. But it turned out that the title to the new property was bad, and, after forging various deeds without success, the College appealed in the above petition to the king, Richard II., to exercise his prerogative, and take the case out of the common courts, in which—so runs the petition—the plaintiff, Edmond Frauncis, citizen of London, “has procured all the Pannel of the Inquest to be taken by Gifts and Treats.”

The petition prays the king to see that the College be not “tortiously disinherited,” and appeals to the memory of the “noble Saints John of Beverley, Bede, and Richard of Armagh, formerly scholars of the College.” A petition so full of fictions hardly deserved to lead to success, and the College was eventually compelled to redeem its right to the estate by payment of a large sum of money to the heirs of Frauncis. The interest of this petition, however, lies in the fact that in 1728, on the occasion of a dispute arising for the mastership between Mr. Denison and Mr. Cockman, it formed the ground upon which, in the King’s Bench at Westminster, it was held that the College is a Royal foundation, and the Crown the rightful visitor; the truth being that the whole body of Regents and non-Regents of the University were and always had been the true and rightful visitor.

But the French Petition to Richard II. was not the only fabrication to which William of Durham’s unworthy beneficiaries had recourse in order to establish a fictitious antiquity and deny their real founder. About the same time they stole the chancellor’s seal and affixed its impress to a forged deed purporting to have been executed in A.D. 1220, the 4th of Henry III., May 10th, by Lewis de Chapyrnay, Chancellor. This false deed records the receipt of four hundred marks bequeathed by William, Archdeacon of Durham, for the maintenance of six Masters of Arts, and the conveyance of certain tenements to Master Roger Caldwell, Warden and senior Fellow of the great hall of the University. The reader will the more agree that this forgery was worthier of Shapira than of “honest and holy clerks,” when he reads in Antony à Wood (City of Oxford, ed. Andrew Clark, vol. i. p. 561)—who was not deceived by it—that it was written “on membrane cours, thick, greasy, whereas, in the reign of Henry III. parchment was not so, but fine and clear.” There never were such persons as Chapyrnay and Caldwell, and William of Durham did not die till 1249, and then left only three hundred and ten marks. Mr. Twine, the author of the Apology for the Antiquity of Oxford, said of this deed, “mentiri nescit, it cannot lie.” “But,” says quaintly Mr. William Smith, “if ever there was a lie in the world, that which we find in that Charter is as great a one as ever the Devil told since he deceived our first Parents in Paradise.”

It would oppress the reader to detail all the other fictions which followed on this early one. One lie makes many, and as time went on outward embellishments were added to the College commemorative of its mythical founder. Thus a picture of King Alfred was bought in the year 1662 for £3—perhaps the same which one now sees in the College library. There was—so Mr. Smith relates—an older picture of him in the Masters’ lodgings.

A statue of Alfred also stood over the chapel door, and was removed by Mr. Obadiah Walker, Master in 1676, to a niche over the hall door to make place for a statue of St. Cuthbert, the patron saint of Durham, on whose day the gaudy used to be celebrated until 1662, at which date it was changed to the day of Saints Simon and Jude, out of respect to the memory of Sir Simon Benet, who had lately bequeathed four Fellowships, four scholarships, and various other benefits. This was the real cause of the 28th of October being chosen for the gaudy, although afterwards the Aluredians absurdly pretended that it was the day of King Alfred’s obit. The statue of Alfred above-mentioned was given by Dr. Robert Plot, the well-known author of The Natural History of Oxfordshire, who was a Fellow-commoner of the College, and it cost £3 1s. 5d. to remove it, as related, in the year 1686. A hundred years later a marble image of Alfred was given to the College by Viscount Folkestone, which is now set up over the fireplace in the oak common-room. A relief of him is also set over the fireplace in the college-hall, and was given by Sir Roger Newdigate, a member of the College, and founder of the University annual prize for an English poem.

A picture of St. John of Beverley, mentioned in the French petition to Richard II., was, we learn from Gutch’s edition of Antony Wood’s Colleges and Halls (ed. 1786, p. 57), set in the east window of the old chapel in the beginning of the seventeenth century. The same authority assures us that until Dr. Clayton’s time (Master, 1605) there were in a window on the west side of the little old quadrangle pictures of King Alfred kneeling and St. Cuthbert sitting, … the king thus bespeaking the saint in a pentameter, holding the picture of the College in his hand, “Hic in honore tui collegium statui,” to whom the saint made answer, in a scroll coming from his mouth—“Quæ statuisti in eo pervertentes maledico.”

In a window of the outer chapel were also the arms of William of Durham, which were, “Or, a Fleur de lis azure, each leaf charged with a mullet gules.” Round these arms was written on a scroll: “Magistri Willielmi de Dunelm … huius collegii”; the missing word, so Wood had been informed, was “Fundatoris,” erased, no doubt, by an Aluredian. The arms of the College to-day are those of Edward the Confessor, to wit—“Azure, a cross patonce between five martlets Or.” We would do well to resign our sham royalty, and return to the arms of William of Durham, our true founder.

The crowning fiction was the celebration in the year 1872 of the millennium of the College, during the mastership of the Rev. G. G. Bradley, afterwards Dean of Westminster. It is said that a distinguished modern historian ironically sent him a number of burned cakes, purporting to have been dug up at Athelney, to entertain King Alfred’s scholars withal. It is not recorded if they were served up or no to the guests, among whom were Dean Stanley and Mr. Robert Lowe, both past tutors of the College. At the dinner which graced this festal occasion, the late Dean of Westminster is said to have ridiculed the idea of King Alfred having bestowed lands and tenements on scholars in Oxford, which place was in A.D. 872 in possession of Alfred’s enemies the Danes; whereupon Mr. Lowe made the happy answer, that this latter fact was itself a confirmation of the legend, for King Alfred was a man much before his time, who in the spirit of some modern leaders of the democracy took care to bestow on his followers, not his own lands, but those of his political opponents.

This legend of King Alfred sprang up in the fourteenth century, when people had forgotten the Norman Conquest and time had long healed all the scars of an alien invasion. Then historians began to feel back to a more remote period for the origin of institutions really subsequent. In so doing they fed patriotic pride by establishing an unbroken continuity of the nation’s life. So to-day we see asserting itself, and with better historical warranty, a belief in the antiquity of English ecclesiastical institutions. The best minds are no longer content with that idol of the Evangelicals, a parliamentary church dating back no more than three centuries. It may be even that a good deal of the Aluredian legend was earlier in its origin than the fourteenth century, and shaped itself at the first out of anti-Norman feeling. In the reign of King Richard, anyhow, all sections of the now united nation accepted it, and not only have we the writ of King Richard II., dated May 4th, 1381 (in answer to the French petition), setting down the College to be “the Foundation of the Progenitors of our Lord the King, and of his Patronage,”[5] but in that very reign, if not later, a passage was interpolated in MSS. of Asser’s Life of Alfred, identifying the schools—which Alfred undoubtedly maintained—with the schools of Oxford. The Fellows of University only took advantage of a feeling which was abroad, and by which they were also duped, when they declared themselves in the French petition to be a royal foundation. Antony Wood was not deceived by the legend, though he credits it in regard to the University. It is strange to find Hearne the antiquary, and Dr. Charlet, Master, 1692-1722, both acquaintances of Mr. W. Smith, adhering to the belief. Mr. Smith declares that Dr. Charlet did so from vanity, because he thought that to be head of a royal foundation added to his dignity. Obadiah Walker had sided with the Aluredians, because he was a papist, and because Alfred had been a good Catholic king and faithful to the Pope. What is most strange of all is that, although the king’s attorney and solicitor-general, being duly commissioned to inquire, had, in October 1724 pronounced that the College was not a royal foundation, nor the sovereign its legitimate visitor, yet the Court of King’s Bench three years after decided both points in just the opposite sense. It is an ill wind that blows no one any good. We then lost the University as our visitor, but have since obtained gratis on all disputed points the opinion of the highest law officer of the realm, the Lord Chancellor.

Between the years 1307 and 1360 as many as sixteen halls in the parishes of St. Mary, St. Peter, St. Mildred, and All Hallows were bought for the College. They were no doubt let out as lodgings to University students, and were in those days, as now, a remunerative form of investment; some of them standing on sites which have since come to be occupied by colleges.

It was not till the fifteenth century that the College acquired property outside Oxford, and then not by purchase, but by bequest. In those days locomotion was too difficult for a small group of scholars to venture on far-off purchases. But in 1403 Walter Skirlaw, Bishop of Durham, left to our College the Manor of Mark’s Hall, or Margaret Ruthing, in Essex. The proceeds were to sustain three Fellows “chosen out of students at Oxford or Cambridge, and if possible born in the dioceses of York and Durham.” It has already been remarked how closely connected was the College with the North of England. No other conditions were attached to the benefaction save this, that “all the Fellows shall every year, for ever, celebrate solemn obsequies in their chapel upon the day of the Bishop’s death, with a Placebo and Dirige, and a Mass for the dead the day after.” Is it altogether for good that we have outgrown those customs of pious gratitude to the past? Bishop Skirlaw’s Fellowships, it may be added, figure in the Calendar as of the foundation of Henry IV., because the lands were passed as a matter of legal form through the sovereign’s lands in order to avoid certain difficulties connected with mortmains.

The next great benefactor of the College after Bishop Skirlaw was Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, who in 1442 left property and the advowson of Arncliffe in Craven in Yorkshire. Three Fellows drawn from the dioceses of Durham, Carlisle, and York were to be sustained out of his benefaction. The next chief benefaction was that of John Freyston or Frieston, who in 1592 bequeathed property in Pontefract for the support of a Fellow or Exhibitioner, who should be a Yorkshire man, and also by his will made the College trustee to pay certain yearly sums to the grammar schools of Wakefield, Normanton, Pontefract, and Swillington.

Coming to the seventeenth century, we find a Mr. Charles Greenwood, a past-Fellow, leaving a handsome bequest to the College, out of which, however, only £1500 was secured from his executors, which money paid for the present fabric to be partially raised; the north side of the quadrangle, the chapel, and hall and old library being first begun A.D. 1634. The present library was partly built out of money given by the executors and trustees of the second Lord Eldon, past-Fellow of the College. It shelters the colossal twin-image of his kinsmen, and was designed by Sir G. G. Scott, and is better suited to be a chapel than a library. Then in 1631, Sir Simon Bennet, a relative and college pupil of Mr. Greenwood’s, left lands in Northampton to maintain eight Fellows and eight scholars; though they turned out sufficient to maintain but four of each sort. The last great benefactor of this century was the famous Dr. Radcliffe, formerly senior scholar, of whom the eastern quadrangle, built by his munificence, remains as a monument. Beside completing the fabrics he founded two medical Fellowships, and, dying in 1734, bequeathed in trust to the College for its uses his estate of Linton in Yorkshire.

It is beyond the limits of a short article to narrate all the vicissitudes which during the epochs of the Reformation and Commonwealth the College underwent. In the reign of Elizabeth it sided with the Roman Catholics, and the Master and several Fellows were ejected on that account. Later on, in 1642, the College lent its plate, consisting of a silver flagon, 8 potts, 9 tankards, 18 bowles, one candle-pott, and a salt-sellar to King Charles I., one flagon alone being kept for the use of the Communion. The gross weight as weighed at the mint was 738 oz. The Fellows and commoners also contributed on 30th July, 1636, the sum of 19li. 10s. for entertaining the king; and again on 17th Feb., 1636, 4li. 17s. 6d. Subsequently the College sustained for many months 28 soldiers at the rate of 22li. 8s. per month. After all this show of loyalty we expect to learn that Cromwell ejected the Master, Thomas Walker, and instituted a Roundhead, Joshua Hoyle, in his place.

Another member of the College of the same name, but who achieved more fame, was Obadiah Walker, who was already a Fellow under Thomas Walker’s mastership, and was ejected by the Long Parliament along with him, and also with his old tutor, Mr. Abraham Woodhead. Woodhead and O. Walker retired abroad and visited Rome and many other places. At the Restoration they both regained their Fellowships, but Woodhead never more conformed to the English Church. O. Walker, however, continued to take the Sacrament in the College chapel, and after that he was elected Master distributed it to the other Fellows, till, on the accession of James II., he “openly declared himself a Romanist, and got a dispensation from his Majesty for himself and two Fellows, his converts, who held their places till the king’s flight, notwithstanding the laws to the contrary.” William Smith, who was a resident Fellow at the time, has “many good things to say of Obadiah Walker, as that he was neither proud nor covetous, and framed his usual discourse against the Puritans on one side, and the Jesuits on the other, as the chief disturbers of the peace, and hinderers of all concessions and agreement amongst all true members of the Catholic Church.” He complains, however, that “as soon as he declared himself a Roman Catholic, he provided him and his party of Jesuits for their Priests; concerning the first of which (I think he went by the name of Mr. Edwards) there is this remarkable story, that having had mass said for some time in a garret, he afterwards procured a mandate from K. James to seize on the lower half of a side of the quadrangle, next adjoining to the College chapel, by which he deprived us of two low rooms, their studies and their bed-chambers; and after all the partitions were removed, it was someway or other consecrated, as we suppose, to Divine services; for they had mass there every day, and sermons at least in the afternoons on the Lord’s Day.”

Smith goes on to relate how the Jesuit chaplain was one day preaching from the text, “So run that you may obtain,” when one of many Protestants, who were harkening at the outside of the windows in the quadrangle, discovering that the Jesuit was preaching a sermon of Mr. Henry Smith, which he had at home by him, went and fetched the book, and read at the outside of the window what the Jesuit was preaching within. For this it seems the particular Jesuit got into trouble. Smith complains also that by mandate of the king, Walker sequestred a Fellowship towards the maintenance of his priest, and incurred the College much expense in putting up the statue of James II., presented by a Romanist,[6] over the inside of a gate-house. He adds that “Mr. Walker that had the king’s ear, and entertained him at vespers in their chapel, and shewed the king the painted windows in our own, so that the king could not but see his own statue in coming out of it, never had the Prudence nor kindness to the College, as to request the least favour to the society from him.”

That Mr. William Smith, who writes the above, could also make himself a persona grata to the great men of State who came to Oxford to attend on the king, we see from the following letter written by Lord Conyers, who in 1681 lodged with his son in University College, on the occasion of the Parliament meeting in Oxford. It is dated Easter Thursday, London, 1681, and is as follows (MSS. Smith):—

“Sir,

I cannot satisfy my wife without giving you this trouble of my thanks for your very greate kindnesse to me and my sonn: we gott hither in v. good time on Thursday to waite on y^e king before night; who was in a course of physick, but God be praised is v. well & walked yesterday round Hide Parke. My son also desires his humble services to you: And we both of us desire our services & thanks to Mr. Ledgard & Mr. Smith for y^r great civilities to us; & whenever I can serve any of you or the College, be most confident to find me

“Y^r most affect. friend &

“humble Servant

“Conyers.”

In 1680, March 30, London, Lord Conyers writes to O. Walker about sending his son to the College, “who is growne too bigge for schoole tho’ little I fear in scholarship … he is very towardly & capable to be made a scholar.” He desires [letter of London, April 9, 1682] Mr. Walker to provide a tutor for “his young man.”

Smith’s account of Obadiah Walker’s doings at the College is fitly completed by the following passage from a letter sent by a Romanist priest at Oxford, Father Henry Pelham, to the Provincial of the Jesuits, Father John Clare (Sir John Warner, Bart.), preserved in the Public Record Office in Brussels, and given in Bloxam’s Magdalen College and James II. (p. 227)—

“Oxford, 1690, May 2.—Hon. Sir, You are desirous to know how things are with us in these troublous times, since trade (religion) is so much decayed. I can only say that in the general decline of trade we have had our share. For before this turn we were in a very hopeful way, for we had three public shops (chapels) open in Oxford. One did wholly belong to us, and good custom we had, viz. the University (University College Chapel); but now it is shut up. The Master was taken, and has been ever since in prison, and the rest forced to abscond.”

Thus ended the last attempt to force the Romanist religion upon Oxford. In the following December we find “Obadiah Walker” in the list of prisoners remaining at Faversham under a strong guard until the 30th of December, and then conducted some to the Tower, some to Newgate, and others released. Mr. Obadiah Walker lived for many years afterwards, and added to the literary work he had already accomplished in Oxford a history of the Ejected Clergy. His memory long survived in Oxford, and with the mob was kept alive in a doggrel ballad which bore the refrain, “Old Obadiah sings Ave Maria.”

In University College, under Obadiah Walker, were focussed all the propagandist influences of the time. Dr. John Massey, Dean of Christchurch, 1686, referred to in Pelham’s letter, was originally a member of University College, and was converted by Obadiah Walker. There was also a printing press kept going in University to publish books of a Romanist tendency, which the University would not authorize to be printed by its Press.

The official College record (in the Register of Election) of the deposition of Mr. Obadiah Walker from the headship of the College is as follows (MSS. of Will. Smith, vol. vii. p. 113)—

“About the middle of Dec., A.D. 1688, Mr. Obadiah Walker attempted to flee abroad, but was taken at Sittingbourne in Kent, and carried to London, and there lodged in the Tower on a charge of high treason.

“On Jan. 7, 1689, the Fellows of University deputed Master Babman to go to him and ask him if he would resign his post, to whom, after deliberation lasting many days, Walker answered that he would not.

“On Jan. 22, after this answer had been brought to Oxford and conveyed to the Vice-Chancellor, the latter summoned the Fellows to appear before the Visitors on Jan. 26, in the Apodyterium of the Venerable House of Convocation.

“Where on Jan. 26, between 9 and 10 a.m., there appeared in person and as representing the College the following Fellows—Mr. Will. Smith, Tho. Babman, Tho. Bennet, Francis Forster, and besought the Vice-Chancellor, Proctors, and Doctors of Divinity representing Convocation to remedy certain grievances in the College, specially concerning the Master and two Fellows. To them a citation was then issued by the Vice-Chancellor, Proctors, Doctors of Divinity, and others, as the ordinary and legitimate patrons and visitors of the College, to appear before them in the College Chapel on Monday, Feb. 4 following between 8-9 a.m.

“On the appointed day there met in the chapel between 8-9 a.m. the Vice-Chancellor, Gilbert Ironsyde, S.T.P., Rob. Say, Byron Eaton, Master of Oriel, W. Lovett, Tho. Hyde, Chief Librarian, Tho. Turner, President of C.C.C., Jonath. Edwards, S.T.P., Thom. Dunstan, Pres. of Magdalen College, Will. Christmas, Jun. Proctor, and others. After the Litany had been repeated, the Vice-Chancellor prorogued the meeting to the common-room, where were present the afore-mentioned Fellows, and in addition Edw. Farrar, Jo. Gilve, Jo. Nailor, Jo. Hudson. The Fellows preferred a complaint that the statutes of the Realm, of the University, and of the College had been violated by Obadiah Walker, Master or Senior Fellow of the College. They objected in particular that he had left the religion of the Anglican Church, established and confirmed by the statutes of this Realm, and betaken himself to the Roman or papistical religion; that he had held, fostered, and frequented illegal conventicles within the aforesaid College; that he had procured to be sequestred unto wrong uses and against the statutes the income and emoluments of the Society; also that he had had printed books against the Reformed religion, and that within the College, and had published the same unto the grave scandal as well of the University as of the College. All these charges were amply proved by trustworthy witnesses, whereupon the visitors decreed that the post of Mr. Obadiah Walker was void and vacant. At the same time, at the instance of the said Fellows, Masters Boyse and Deane, Fellows of the College, who had left the religion of the reformed Anglican Church, were ordered to be proceeded against so soon as a new Master or Senior Fellow was chosen.”

Mr. Obadiah Walker lived for many years after the accession of William and Mary. He was a man of great piety and vast and varied learning, as is shown by his books upon Religion, Logic, History, and Geography. He wrote a book upon Greenland, and made experiments in physics. A near friend of the great benefactor of the College, Dr. John Radcliffe, he sought to convert that famous physician to the Roman faith, but found him as little inclined to believe in transubstantiation as “that the phial in his hand was a wheelbarrow.” In spite of their want of religious sympathy, however, the two men liked each other’s society, and the great physician, who respected Walker’s learning, gave him a competency during the latter years of his life. In the College archives is an elegant letter addressed by O. Walker, then Master, to Radcliffe, thanking him for his gift of the east window of the College chapel. It runs thus:

“Sir, we return you our humble and hearty thanks for your noble and illustrious benefaction to this ancient foundation; your generosity hath supplyed a defect and covered a blemish in our chapell; the other lesse eminent windows seemed to upbraid the chiefest as being more adorned and regardable than that which ought to be most splendid; till you was pleased to compassionate us and ennoble the best with the best work. Other benefactions are to be sought out in registers and memorialls, yours is conveyed with the light. The rising sun displays the gallantry of your spirit, and withall puts us in mind as often as we enter to our devotions to remember you and your good actions towards us. Nor can we salute the morning light without meditating on y^e Shepherds and y^e Angells adoring the true Sun. And y^r holy praise and prostration by your singular favour is continually proposed, as to our sight and consideration, so to our example also. And so we do accept and acknowledge it, not only as an object moving our devotions, but as praise of y^e artificer who hath not only observed much better decorum and proportion in his figures, but hath all so ingeniously contrived that the light shall not be hindred as by y^e daubery of y^e others.”—The letter concludes with a prayer that Dr. Radcliffe may prosper in his profession.

The following quaint “letter sent by the College to begge contributions towards the building the East Side of the quadrangle about y^e end of 1674 or beginning of 1675 to the gentlemen in the North Parts” may fitly conclude our notice of this college (vide MSS. W. Smith, x. 239).

“Gentlemen,

“Your aged mother, and not yours alone, but of this whole University, if not all other such nurseries of Learning, at least in this nation, craves your assistance in the Time of her Necessity. It is not long since her walls Ruining and her Buildings, almost, after so many years, decayed; It pleased God to excite two of her sonnes in especiall manner, M^r Charles Greenwood, the tutor, and S^r Simon Benett, his pupill, to compassionate her decay, Repair her Ruins and Renew with Great Augmentation her former glory. But the late civil warrs and other alterations intervening not only interrupted that progresse which in a small time would have finished the work; But also disappointed her of the Assistance of Diverse, who were willing to contribute to her repairs.

“And we have very good Hopes that you will not be wanting to us in this our Necessity; this being a college designed for and most of the preferment in it limitted to Northern Scholars. A college which hath had the felicity to be herselfe at this present time DCCC. years old.… In recompense she may justly expect that as she hath fostered your youths, so you would cherish her age.”

Additional Notes.

[p. 9.] On Clerical Fellows.—It should be added that the statutes of 1736 provided that the two senior Fellows of the foundation of Sir Simon Bennet might study Medicine or Law. In 1854 the general ordinances of the Commissioners provided that there should be six (i. e. half of the) Fellows in Holy Orders. More recently clerical Fellowships have been practically abolished in the College.

[p. 14.] Anti-Norman feeling.—A spirit of Rivalry with Cambridge may with more reason be alleged in explanation of the acceptance of the Aluredian Legend.

[p. 14.] On the Legend of King Alfred.—The Court of King’s Bench only decided that the College is a Royal Foundation, not that it was actually founded by King Alfred. Cp. the Preamble of Statutes of 1736: “it manifestly appears by a Judgement lately given in our Court of Kings Bench that the college of the great Hall of the University, commonly called University College, in Oxford, is of the foundation of our Royal Progenitors.”

[p. 23.] On Northern Scholars.—The College lost its one-sided Northern character in 1736, when new statutes ordained that Sir Simon Bennet’s Fellows were to come from the Southern Province of Canterbury (in partibus regni nostri Australibus oriundi).

II.
BALLIOL COLLEGE.[7]

By Reginald L. Poole, M.A., Balliol College.

The precedence of Balliol over Merton College depends upon the fact that John Balliol made certain payments not long after 1260 for the support of poor students at Oxford, while Walter of Merton’s foundation dates from 1264; but it was not until the example had been set by Merton that the House of Balliol assumed a corporate being and became governed by formal statutes. The “pious founder” too was at the outset an involuntary agent, for the obligation to make his endowment was part of a penance imposed on him together with a public scourging at the Abbey door by the Bishop of Durham.[8] John Balliol, lord of Galloway, was the father of that John to whom King Edward the First of England adjudged the Scottish crown in 1292. His wife, the heiress, was Dervorguilla, grandniece to King William the Lion. It is to her far more than to her husband that the real foundation of the College bearing his name is due, and husband and wife are rightly coupled together as joint-founders, the lion of Scotland being associated with the orle of Balliol on the College shield. A house was first hired beyond the city ditch on the north side of Oxford, hard by the church of St. Mary Magdalen, and here certain poor scholars were lodged and paid eightpence a-day for their commons.[9] It was in the beginning a simple almshouse, founded on the model already existing at Paris, it depended for its maintenance upon the good pleasure of the founder, and possessed (so far as we know) no sort of organization, though customs and rules were certain to shape themselves before long without any positive enactment.

This state of things lasted until 1282, when Dervorguilla,—her husband had died in 1269,—took steps to place the House of Balliol upon an established footing. By her charter deed[10] she appointed two representatives or “proctors” (one, it seems probable, being always a Franciscan friar, and the other a secular Master of Arts) as the governing body of the House. The Scholars were, it is true, to elect their own Principal, and obey him “according to the statutes and customs approved among them,” but he and they were alike subordinate to the Proctors or (as they came to be distinguished) the Extraneous Masters. The Scholars, whose number is not mentioned, were to attend the prescribed religious services and the exercises at the schools, and were also to engage in disputations among themselves once a fortnight. Three masses in the year were to be celebrated for the founders’ welfare, and mention of them was to be made in the blessing before and grace after meat. Rules were laid down for the distribution of the common funds; if they fell short it was ordered that the poorer Scholars were not to suffer. The use of the Latin language (apparently at the common table) was strictly enjoined upon the Scholars. Whoever broke the rule was to be admonished by the Principal, and if he offended twice or thrice was to be removed from the common table, to eat by himself, and be served last of all. If he remained incorrigible after a week, the Proctors were to expel him. One feature of the Balliol Statutes which deserves particular notice is that none of them, until we reach the endowments of the sixteenth century, placed any sort of local restriction upon those who were capable of being elected to the Foundation.

This charter was plainly but the giving of a constitution to a society which had already formed for itself rules and usages with respect to discipline and other matters not referred to in it. The “House of the Scholars of Balliol” was placed on a still more assured footing when its charter was confirmed by Bishop Sutton of Lincoln two years later,[11] in which year the Scholars removed to a house bought for them by the foundress in Horsemonger-street, a little to the eastward of their previous abode;[12] and soon afterwards the Bishop permitted them to hold divine service, though they still attended their parish Church of St. Mary Magdalen on all great festivals.[13] Before the middle of the fourteenth century the society had considerably enlarged its position. It had bought houses on both sides of its existing building, so that it now occupied very nearly the site of the present front-quadrangle.[14] It received from private benefactors endowment for two Chaplains; and in 1327, with help furnished through the Abbot of Reading,[15] the building of a Chapel dedicated to Saint Catherine—the special patron whom we find first associated with the College in the letter of Bishop Sutton—was carried into effect. But the College remained dependent upon its parish Church for the celebration of the Mass until the Chapel was expressly licensed for the purpose by Pope Urban the Fifth in April 1364. As early as 1310 the College had become possessed of a messuage containing four schools on the west side of School-street, which were, according to the usual practice, let out to those who had exercises to perform, and thus added to the resources of the College.[16] Some unused land on this property was afterwards conveyed to the University to form part of the site of the Divinity School, and the University still pays the College a quitrent for it.[17]

During this time there seems to have been an active dispute among the Scholars as to the studies which they were permitted to pursue. Bishop Sutton had expressly ordained that they should dwell in the House until they had completed their course in Arts. It seemed naturally to follow that it was not lawful for them to go on to a further course of study, for instance, in Divinity, without ceasing their connection with the House. At length in 1325 this inference was formally ratified by the two Extraneous Masters in the presence of all the members as well as four graduates who had formerly been Fellows (a title which now first appears in our muniments as a synonym for Scholars) of the House.[18] One of the Extraneous Masters was Nicolas Tingewick, who is otherwise known to us as a benefactor of the Schools of Grammar in the University;[19] and one of the ex-Fellows was Richard FitzRalph, afterwards Vice-Chancellor of the University and Archbishop of Armagh, the man to whom above all others John Wycliffe, a later member of Balliol, owed the distinguishing elements of his teaching.[20] It was thus decided that Balliol should be a home exclusively of secular learning; and it reads as a curious presage, that thus early in the history of the College the field should be marked out for it in which, in the fifteenth century and again in our own day, it was peculiarly to excel.

But the theologians soon had some compensation, for in 1340 a new endowment was given to the College by Sir Philip Somerville for their special benefit. From the Statutes which accompanied his gift[21] we learn that the existing number of Fellows was sixteen; this he increased to twenty-two (or more, if the funds would allow), with the provision that six of the Fellows should, after they had attained their regency in Arts, enter upon a course of theology, together with canon law if they pleased, extending in ordinary cases over not more than twelve or thirteen years from their Master’s degree in Arts. Such was the rigour of the demands made upon the theological student in the University system of the middle ages; with what results as to solidity and erudition it is not necessary here to say.

Somerville’s Statutes further made several important changes in the constitution of the Hall or House, as it is here called. The Principal still exists, holding precedence among the Fellows, much like that of the President in some of the Colleges at Cambridge; but he is subordinate to the Master, who is elected by the society subject to the approval of a whole series of Visitors. After election the Master was first to present himself and take oath before the lord of Sir Philip Somerville’s manor of Wichnor, and then to be presented by two of the Fellows and the two Extraneous Masters to the Chancellor of the University, or his Deputy, and to the Prior of the Monks of Durham at Oxford. By these his appointment was confirmed. There was thus established a complicated system of a threefold Visitatorial Board. The powers of the lords of Wichnor were indeed probably formal; but those of the Extraneous Masters subsisted side by side by, and to some extent independently of, the Chancellor and the Prior. The former retained their previous authority over the Fellows of the old foundation; they were only associated with the Chancellor and Prior with respect to the new theological Fellows. Finally, over all the Bishop of Durham was placed, as a sort of supreme Visitor, to compel the enforcement of the provisions affecting Somerville’s bequest. One wonders how this elaborate scheme worked, and particularly how the society of Balliol liked the supervision of the Prior of Durham College just beyond their garden-wall. But the curious thing is that the benefactor declares that in making these Statutes he intends not to destroy but to confirm the ancient rules and Statutes of the College, as though some part of his extraordinary arrangements had been already in force.[22]

It is easy to guess that the scheme was impracticable, and in fact so early as 1364 a new code had to be drawn up. This was given, under papal authority, by Simon Sudbury, Bishop of London, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury; but unfortunately it is not preserved. We can only gather from later references that it changed more than it left of the existing Statutes, and that it established Rectors (almost certainly the old Proctors or Extraneous Masters under a new name[23]) to control the Master and Fellows, and possibly a Visitor over all. But the one thing positive is that a right of ultimate appeal was now reserved to the Bishop of London, who thus came to exercise something more than the power which was in later times committed to the Visitor. It was by his authority that in the course of the fifteenth century the property-limitation affecting the Master was abolished, and he was empowered to hold a benefice of whatever value;[24] and that Chaplains were made eligible, equally with the Fellows, for the office of Master.[25] On the one hand the dignity of the Master was increased; on the other the ecclesiastical element was brought to the front.

The latter point becomes more than ever clear in the Statutes which were framed for the College in 1507, and which remained substantially in force until the Universities Commission of 1850. The cause of their promulgation is obscurely referred to the violent and high-handed action of a previous—possibly the existing—Visitor. The matter was laid before Pope Julius the Second, and he deputed the Bishops of Winchester and Carlisle, or one of them, to draw up an amended body of Statutes which should preclude the repetition of such misgovernment. The Statutes[26] themselves are the work of the Bishop of Winchester, the same Richard Fox who left so enduring a monument of his piety and zeal for learning in his foundation of Corpus Christi College. That foundation however was ten years later, and Fox had not yet, it should seem, formed in his mind the pattern according to which a College in the days of revived and expanded classical study should be modelled. In Balliol he saw nothing but a small foundation with scanty resources and without the making of an important home of learning. The eleemosynary character of its original Statutes he left as it was, only slightly increasing the commons of the Fellows.[27] The Master was to enjoy no greater allowance than Fellows who were Masters of Arts, but he retained the right to hold a benefice. He was no longer necessarily to be chosen from among the Fellows. The unique privilege of the College to elect its own Visitor—how the privilege arose we know not—is expressly declared. But the essential changes introduced in the Statutes of 1507 are those which gave the College a distinctively theological complexion, and those which established a class of students in the College subordinate to the Fellows.

We have seen how the Chaplains had been long rising in dignity, as shown by the fact that, though not Fellows, they had since 1477[28] been equally eligible with the Fellows for the office of Master. By the new Statutes two of the Fellowships were to be filled up by persons already in Priest’s orders to act as Chaplains. This was in part a measure of economy, since Fellows could be found to act as Chaplains, but the increased importance of the latter is the more significant since these same Statutes reduced the number of Fellows from at least twenty-two to not less than ten. Besides this, every Fellow of the College was henceforth required to receive Priest’s orders within four years after his Master’s degree. Doubtless from the beginning all the members of the foundation had been—as indeed all University students were—clerici; but this did not necessarily imply more than the simple taking of the tonsure. The obligation of Priest’s orders was something very different. The Fellows were as a rule to be Bachelors of Arts at the time of election. Their studies were limited to logic, philosophy, and divinity; but they were free to pursue a course of canon law in the long vacation. The Master’s degree was to be taken four years after they had fulfilled the requirements for that of Bachelor. It may be noticed that, instead of their having, according to the modern practice, to pay fees to the College on taking degrees, they received from it on each occasion a gratuity varying according to the dignity of the degree.

The reduction in the number of Fellowships was evidently made in order to provide for the lower rank of what we should now-a-days call Scholars. In the Statutes indeed this name is not found, for it was not forgotten that Fellow and Scholar meant the same thing: and so the old word scholasticus, which was often used in the general sense of a “student,” was now applied to designate those junior members of the College for whom Scholar was too dignified a title. They were to be “scholastics or servitors,” not above eighteen years of age, sufficiently skilled in plain song and grammar. One was assigned to the Master and one to each graduate Fellow, and was nominated by him; he was his private servant. The Scholastics were to live of the remnants of the Fellows’ table, to apply themselves to the study of logic, and to attend Chapel in surplices. They had also the preference, in case of equality, in election to Fellowships. We may add that, although the position of these Scholars (as they came to be called) unquestionably improved greatly in the course of time, the Statute affecting them was not revised until 1834.[29]

The Statutes throw a good deal of light on the internal administration of the College at the close of the middle ages. Of the two Deans, the senior had charge of the Library, the junior of the Chapel; they were also to assist the Master generally in matters of discipline. The Master, Fellows, and Scholastics were bound on Sundays and Feast-days to attend matins, with lauds, mass, vespers, and compline; and any Fellow who absented himself was liable to a fine of twopence, while Scholastics were punished with a flogging or otherwise at the discretion of the Master and Dean. The senior Dean presided at the disputations in Logic, which were held on Saturdays weekly throughout the term, except in Lent, and attended by the Bachelors, Scholastics, and junior Masters. The more important disputations in philosophy were held on Wednesdays, and were not intermitted in Lent. They were even held during the long vacation until the 7th September. At these all the Fellows were to be present, and the Master or senior Fellow to preside. Theological disputations were also to be held weekly or fortnightly in term so long as there were three Fellows who were theologians to make a quorum. The College was empowered to receive boarders not on the foundation—what we now call commoners or persons who pay for their commons,—on the condition of their following the prescribed course of study (or in special cases reading civil or canon law); and the fact of their paying seems to have given them a choice of rooms.

The Bible or one of the Fathers was to be read in hall during dinner, and all conversation to be in Latin, unless addressed to one—presumably a guest or a servant—ignorant of the language. French was not permitted, as it was at Queen’s,[30] but the Master might give leave to speak English on state occasions,—evidently on such a feast as that of Saint Catherine’s day, when guests were invited and an extraordinary allowance of 3s. 4d. was made. The condition of residence was strictly enforced; nevertheless in order that when, as ofttimes comes to pass, a season of pestilence rages, the Muses be not silent nor study and teaching of none effect by reason of the strength of fear and peril, it was permitted that the members of the College should withdraw into the country, to a more salubrious place not distant more than twelve miles from Oxford, and there dwell together and carry on their life of study and their accustomed disputations so long as the plague should last.[31] The gates of the College were closed at nine in summer and eight in winter, and the keys deposited with the Master until the morning. Whoever spent the night out of College or entered except by the gate, was punished, a Fellow by a fine of twelve pence, a Scholastic by a flogging.

Having now sketched the constitutional history of the College to the end of the middle ages, we have now to mention a few facts of interest during that time. These group themselves first round the name of John Wycliffe the reformer of religion, and then round the band of learned men and patrons of learning, the reformers of classical study, in the century after him.

In 1360 and 1361 John Wycliffe is mentioned in the College muniments as Master of Balliol. That this was the famous teacher and preacher is not disputed, but there has been much controversy as to his earlier history. That he began his University life at Queen’s is indeed known to be a mistake; but the entry of the name in the bursar’s rolls at Merton under the date June 1356 has led many to believe that he was a Fellow of that College. It seems nearly certain that there were two John Wycliffes at Oxford at the time; and since the Master of Balliol could only be elected from among the Fellows, the inference seems clear that the Wycliffe who was Master of Balliol cannot have been Fellow of Merton. Besides, it has been pointed out that Wycliffe the reformer’s descent from a family settled hard by Barnard Castle, the home of the Balliols, would naturally lead him to enter the Balliol foundation at Oxford; there was another Wycliffe also at Balliol, and three members of the College—one himself Master—were given the benefice of Wycliffe-upon-Tees between 1363 and 1369. Fellowships were obtained by personal influence, and ties of this kind would easily help his admission. Moreover, it was not common for a northerner to enter a College like Merton, which appears in fact to have formed the head-quarters of the southern party at Oxford.[32]

Whatever be the truth in this matter, Wycliffe’s connection with Balliol is scarcely a matter of high importance. Men did not in those days receive their education within the College walls. The College was the boarding-house where they dwelt, where they were maintained, and where they attended divine service. It is true that disputations were required to take place within the House; but this was only to ensure their regularity. It was an affair of discipline, not of tuition, for the College tutor was an officer undreamt of in those days; the duty of the Principal on these occasions was only to announce the subject, to preside over the discussion, and to keep order. Nor again was Wycliffe Master for more than a short time. He was elected after 1356, and he resigned his post shortly after accepting the College living of Fillingham in 1361. When in later years he lived in Oxford he took up his abode elsewhere than in Balliol; perhaps at Queen’s, then, according to many, at Canterbury Hall, finally at Black Hall: Balliol, it should seem, at that time had room only for members of the foundation. The chief interest residing in his connection with the College lies in the fact, to which we have alluded, that his great exemplar, Richard FitzRalph, had been a Fellow of it about the time of Wycliffe’s birth, and was probably still resident in Oxford when Wycliffe came up as a freshman.

The age succeeding Wycliffe’s death is the most barren time in the history of the University. Scholastic philosophy had lost its vitality and become over-elaborated into a trivial formalism. Logic had ceased to act as a stimulus to the intellectual powers, and had rather become a clog upon their exercise; and men no longer framed syllogisms to develop their thoughts, but argued first and thought, if at all, afterwards. When, however, towards the middle of the fifteenth century, the revival of learning which we associate with the name of humanism began to influence English students, it was not those who stayed in England who caught its spirit, but those who were able to pursue a second student’s course in Italy, and there devote their zeal to the half-forgotten stores of classical Latin literature and the unknown treasure-house of Greek. It was only the ebb of the humanistic movement which in England, as in Germany, turned to refresh and invigorate the study of theology. In the earlier phase, so far as it affected England, Balliol College took a foremost position, though indeed there is less evidence of this activity among the resident members of the House than among those who had passed from it to become the patrons and pioneers of a younger generation of scholars. They were almost all travelled men, who collected manuscripts and had them copied for them, founded libraries and sowed the seed for others to reap the fruit.

First among these in time and in dignity was Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, the Good Duke Humphrey, by whose munificence the University Library grew from a small number of volumes chained on desks in the upper chamber of the Congregation House at Saint Mary’s,[33] into a collection of some six hundred manuscripts, of unique value, because, unlike the existing cathedral and monastic libraries, it was formed at the time when attention was being again devoted to classical learning and with the help of the foreign scholars, whose work the Duke loved to encourage, and whom he employed to transcribe and collect for him. His library contained little theology; it was rich in classical Latin literature, in Arabic science (in translations), and in the new literature of Italy, counting at least five volumes of Boccaccio, seven of Petrarch, and two of Dante.[34] Unhappily the whole library was wrecked and brought to nothing in the violence of the reign of King Edward the Sixth, and the three volumes which are now preserved in the re-founded University Library of Sir Thomas Bodley were recovered piecemeal from those who had obtained possession of them in the great days of plunder.[35] That Duke Humphrey was a member of Balliol College is attested by Leland[36] and Bale,[37] but further evidence is wanting.

Almost at the same time as the University Library was thus enriched, five Englishmen are mentioned as students at Ferrara under the illustrious teacher Guarino:[38] four of the five are claimed by our College, William Grey, John Tiptoft, John Free, and John Gunthorpe. Of these, two were men of letters and munificent patrons of learning, the third was himself a scholar of high repute, and the last combined, perhaps in a lesser degree, the characteristics of both classes. William Grey stands in a peculiarly close relation with the College. A member of the noble house of Codnor, he resided for a long time at Cologne in princely style, and maintained a magnificent household. Here he studied logic, philosophy, and theology. He was Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1440 to 1442, and then went forth again for a more prolonged course of study in Italy, at Florence, Padua, and Ferrara. Removing in 1449 to Rome, as proctor for King Henry the Sixth, he lived there an honoured member of the learned society in the papal city, and continued to collect manuscripts and to have them transcribed and illuminated under his eyes, until he was recalled in 1454 to the Bishopric of Ely. It was his devotion to humanism and his patronage of learned men that naturally found favour with Pope Nicolas the Fifth, and his elevation to the see of Ely was the Pope’s act. After his return to England he was not regardless of the affairs of State,—indeed for a time in 1469 and 1470 he was Lord Treasurer,—but his paramount interest still lay in his books and his circle of scholars, himself credited with a knowledge not only of Greek but of Hebrew. It was his desire that his library should be preserved within the walls of his old College. One of its members, Robert Abdy, heartily coöperated with him, and the books—some two hundred in number, and including a printed copy of Josephus,—were safely housed in a new building erected for the purpose, probably just before the Bishop’s death in 1478. Many of the codices were unhappily destroyed during the reign of King Edward the Sixth, and by Wood’s time few of the miniatures in the remaining volumes had escaped mutilation.[39] But it is a good testimony to the loyal spirit in which the College kept the trust committed to them, that no less than a hundred and fifty-two of Grey’s manuscripts are still in its possession.[40]

Part of the building in which the library was to find a home was already in existence. The ground-floor, and perhaps the dining-hall (now the library reading-room) adjoining, are attributed to Thomas Chase, who had been Master from 1412 to 1423, and was Chancellor of the University from 1426 to 1430. It was the upper part of the library which was expressly built for the purpose of receiving Bishop Grey’s books, and it was the work of Abdy, who as Fellow and then, from 1477 to 1494, as Master devoted himself to the enlargement and adornment of the College buildings, Grey helping him liberally with money. On more than one of the library windows their joint bounty was commemorated:—

Hos Deus adiecit, Deus his det gaudia celi:

Abdy perfecit opus hoc Gray presul et Ely.

And again:—

Conditor ecce novi structus huius fuit Abdy:

Presul et huic Hely Gray libros contulit edi.

The bishop’s coat of arms may still be seen on the panels below the great window of the old solar, now the Master’s dining-hall; and elsewhere in the new buildings might be seen the arms of George Nevill, Archbishop of York, the brother of the King-Maker, who was also a member, and would thus appear to have been a benefactor, of the College.[41] The future Archbishop was made Chancellor of the University in 1453 when he was barely twenty-two years of age.[42] His installation banquet, the particulars of which may be read in Savage’s Balliofergus,[43] was of a prodigality to which it would be hard to find a parallel: it consisted of nine hundred messes of meat, with twelve hundred hogsheads of beer and four hundred and sixteen of wine; and if, as it appears, it was held within the College, the resources of the house must have been severely taxed to make provision for the entertainment of the company, which included twenty-two noblemen, seventeen bishops and abbots, a number of noble ladies, and a multitude of other guests, not to speak of more than two thousand servants.

The other Balliol scholars who followed the instruction of Guarino at Ferrara were a good deal younger than Grey; for Guarino lived on until 1460, when he died at the age of ninety. Tiptoft, who was created Earl of Worcester in his twenty-second year, in 1449, was an enthusiastic traveller. He set out first to Jerusalem; returned to Venice, and then spent several years in study at Ferrara, Padua, and Rome.[44] During this time he collected manuscripts wherever he could lay hands on them, and formed a precious library, with which he afterwards endowed the University of Oxford: its value was reckoned at no less than five hundred marks.[45] His later career as Treasurer and High Constable belongs to the public history of England. It is to be lamented that he brought back from the Italian renaissance a spirit of cruelty and recklessness of giving pain, unknown to the humaner middle ages, which made him one of the first victims of the revolution that restored King Henry the Sixth to the throne. But in his death the cause of letters received a blow such as we can only compare with that which it suffered by the execution of the Earl of Surrey in the last days of King Henry the Eighth. It is a strange coincidence that one of the leaders of the restoration movement, one of those chiefly chargeable with Tiptoft’s death, was his own Balliol contemporary, Archbishop Nevill, the new Lord Chancellor.[46]

John Free, who graduated in 1450,[47] was a Fellow of Balliol College, and was afterwards a Doctor of Medicine of Padua. During a life spent in Italy he became famous as a poet and a Greek scholar, a civilist and a physician.[48] Pope Paul the Second made him Bishop of Bath and Wells, but he died almost immediately, in 1465.[49] Gunthorpe was his companion in study at Ferrara, and he too became distinguished as a scholar: but he was still more a collector of books, some of which he gave to Jesus College, Cambridge—at one time he was Warden of the King’s Hall in that University,—while others came to several libraries at Oxford. Gunthorpe is best known as a man of affairs, a diplomatist and minister of state. He became Dean of Wells, and is still remembered in that city by the guns with which he adorned the Deanery he built.[50] He survived all his fellow-scholars we have named, and died in 1498.[51]

From the end of the middle ages down to the present century Balliol College presents none of those characteristics of distinction which we have remarked in the fifteenth century. During this time, indeed, although in the nature of things a large number of men of note continued to receive their education at Oxford, there was no College or Colleges which could be said to occupy anything like a position of peculiar eminence or dignity. In the general decline of learning, education, and manners, Balliol College appears even to have sunk below most of its rivals, and its annals show little more than a dreary record of lazy torpor and bad living.[52] The Statutes of the College received no alterations of importance. Its power to choose its own Visitor was indeed for a time overridden by the Bishop of Lincoln, who was considered ex officio Visitor until Bishop Barlow’s death in 1691;[53] and the Scholastici became distinguished as Scholares from an inferior rank of Servitores with which the Statutes of 1507 had identified them. Another lower class of students, called Batellers, also came into existence. Every Commoner was required by a rule of 1574 to be under the Master or one of the Fellows as his Tutor;[54] Scholars being apparently ipso facto subject to the Fellows who nominated them. In 1610 it was ordered, with the Visitor’s consent, that Fellow Commoners might be admitted to the College and be free from “public correction,” except in the case of scandalous offences; they were not bound to exhibit reverence to the Fellows in the quadrangle unless they encountered them face to face,—reverentiam Sociis in quadrangulo consuetam non nisi in occursu praestent. Every such Commoner was bound to pay at least five pounds on admission for the purchase of plate or books for the College.[55] The sum was in 1691 raised to ten pounds.[56] As the disputations in hall tended to become less and less of a reality, and the lectures in the schools became a pure matter of routine for the younger Masters, provision had to be made for something in the way of regular lectures, but fixed tuition-fees were not yet invented, and so the richest living in the gift of the College—that of Fillingham in Lincolnshire, which had been usually held by the Master and was now attached to his office—was in 1571 charged with the payment of £8 13s..4d. to three Prelectors chosen by the College who should lecture in hall on Greek, dialectic, and rhetoric.[57] The lectures, it was soon after decided, were to be held at least thrice a week during term, except on Feast Days or when the lecturer was ill. Any one who failed to fulfil his duty—either in person or by a deputy—was to pay twopence to be consumed by the other Fellows at dinner or supper on the Sunday next following.[58] In 1695 the famous Dr. Busby, who had before shown himself a friend to the College,[59] established a Catechetical Lecture to be given on thirty prescribed subjects through the year, at which all members of the College were bound to be present.[60] This Lecture was maintained until recent years.

During the two centuries following the reign of King Edward the Third the College had received little or no addition to its corporate endowments, though, as we have seen, it had been largely helped by donations towards its buildings, and above all by the foundation of its precious library.[61] Between the date of the accession of Queen Elizabeth and the year 1677, in the renewed zeal for academical foundations which marked that period, the College received a number of new benefactions; and these introduced a new element into its composition. Hitherto all the Fellowships had been open without restriction of place of birth or education; and although it is likely that the College in its earlier days drew its recruits mainly from the north of England, yet there was nothing in the Statutes to authorize the connection. The College, it is true, was a very close corporation, for Fellow nominated Scholar, and out of the Scholars the Fellows were generally elected. Still, in contradistinction to the majority of Colleges, there were no local limitations upon eligibility to Scholarships. The new endowments, on the other hand, with the exception of those of the Lady Periam, were all so limited. First, by a bequest of Dr. John Bell, formerly Bishop of Worcester, two Scholarships confined to natives of his diocese were founded in 1559,[62] and in 1605 Sir William Dunch established another for the benefit of Abingdon School.[63] A little later Balliol nearly became possessed of the much larger endowment, of seven Fellowships and six Scholarships, attached to the same school by William Tisdale. Indeed part of the money was paid over, six Scholars were appointed, and Cesar’s lodgings—of which more hereafter—were bought for their reception.[64] But a subsequent arrangement diverted the endowment, which in 1624 helped to change the ancient Broadgates Hall into Pembroke College.[65] In the meanwhile a more considerable benefaction, also connected with a local school, accrued to Balliol between 1601 and 1615, when in execution of the will of Peter Blundell one Fellowship and one Scholarship were founded to be held by persons educated at Blundell’s Grammar School at Tiverton, and nominated by the Trustees of the School.[66] The next endowment in order of time was that of Elizabeth, widow of Chief Baron Periam and sister of Francis Bacon. The nomination to the Fellowship and two Scholarships which she founded in 1620, she reserved to herself for her lifetime; afterwards they were to be filled up in the same manner as the other Fellowships of the College.[67]

After the Restoration two separate benefactions set up that close connection between the College and Scotland which saved Balliol from sinking into utter obscurity in the century following, and which has since contributed to it a large share of its later fame. Bishop Warner of Rochester, who died in 1666, bequeathed to the College the annual sum of eighty pounds for the support of four scholars from Scotland to be chosen by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Rochester; and about ten years later certain Exhibitions were founded by Mr. John Snell for persons nominated by Glasgow University. The latter varied in number according to the proceeds of Mr. Snell’s estate; at one time they were as many as ten and of the yearly value of £116, but their number and value have since been reduced. Both of these foundations were expressly designed to promote the interests of the Episcopal Church in Scotland.[68] Their importance in the history of the College cannot be overestimated, and it is to them that it owes such names among its members as Adam Smith, Sir William Hamilton, and Archbishop Tait, to say nothing of a great company of distinguished Scotsmen now living. The Exhibitioners have also as a rule offered an admirable example of frugal habits and hard work; and perhaps it was in consideration of their national thriftiness that the rooms assigned them are noticed in 1791 as mean and incommodious.[69]

Among more recent benefactions to the College the most important is that of Miss Hannah Brakenbury who, besides the questionable service of contributing towards the rebuilding of the front quadrangle, endowed eight Scholarships for the encouragement of the studies of Law and Modern History. Nor should we omit to mention the two Exhibitions of £100 a-year each, founded under the will of Richard Jenkyns, formerly Master, which are awarded by examination to members of the College, and the list of holders of which is of exceptional brilliancy. But in recent years the number of Scholarships and Exhibitions has been most of all increased not by means of any specific endowment but by savings from the annual internal income of the College. In pursuance of the ordinances of the Universities’ Commission of 1877, Balliol became the owner of New Inn Hall on the death of its late Principal; and the proceeds of the sale of the Hall, when effected, are to be applied to the establishment of Exhibitions for poor students.

We now resume the history of the College buildings. We have seen that the Chapel was built early in the reign of King Edward the Third, and that the hall and library buildings were added in the following century.[70] A new Chapel was built between 1521 and 1529,[71] which lasted until the present century. It contained a muniment-room or treasury, “which,” says Anthony Wood, “is a kind of vestry, joyning on the S. side of the E. end of the chappel;”[72] and there was a window opening into it, as at Corpus, from the library.[73] With the present Chapel in one’s mind it is hard to estimate the loss which from a picturesque point of view the College has suffered by the destruction of its predecessor. In modern times Oxford has ever been a prey to architects. The rebuilding of Queen’s is an example of what happily was not carried into effect at Magdalen and Brasenose in the last century; but in the present, Balliol is almost peculiar in the extent to which these depredations have run, and those who remember the line of buildings of the Chapel and library as they looked from the Fellows’ garden say that for harmony and quiet charm they were of their kind unsurpassed in Oxford. Among the special features of the old Chapel were the painted windows, particularly the great east window given by Lawrence Stubbs in 1529. The fragments of this are distributed among the side windows of the modern Chapel, and even in their scattered state are highly regarded by lovers of glass-painting.[74] Of the later buildings of the College, “Cesar’s lodgings” must not pass without notice. It had its name from Henry Caesar, afterwards Dean of Carlisle—the brother of Sir Julius Caesar, Master of the Rolls (1614-1636),—and stood opposite to where the “Martyrs’ Memorial” now is. Being currently known as Cesar, an opposite stack of buildings to the south of it was naturally called Pompey. The two were pulled down, not before it was necessary, in the second quarter of the present century.[75] Hammond’s lodgings, which came to the College in Queen Elizabeth’s time, and stood on the site of the old Master’s little garden and the present Master’s house, were occupied by the Blundell and Periam Fellows.[76]

Before the front of the College was a close, planted with trees like that in front of St. John’s.

“Stant Baliolenses maiore cacumine moles,

Et sua frondosis praetexunt atria ramis;

Nec tamen idcirco Trinam sprevere minorem

Aut sibi subiectam comitem sponsamve recusant—”

ran some verses of 1667.[77] But if we may judge from a story to be told hereafter of the respective prosperity of the two Colleges, it was rather Trinity which had the right to look down upon its rival at that time. In the eighteenth century the buildings of Balliol were considerably enlarged by the erection of two staircases westward of the Master’s house, by Mr. Fisher of Beere, and of three running north of these over against St. Mary Magdalen Church. The fronts of the east side of the quadrangle, reputed to be the most ancient part of the College, and of part of the south side adjoining it, were rebuilt.[78] The direction of the hall was reversed, so that instead of the passage into the garden, the entrance to the hall, and the buttery being beneath the Master’s lodgings, they were placed on the northern extremity of the hall.[79] In the present reign a further addition to the College was made in the place of the dilapidated “Cesar,” and with it a back porch with a tower above it was built. Then followed the rebuilding of the Chapel and, after an interval, of two sides of the front quadrangle and of the Master’s house. A little later the garden was gradually enclosed by buildings on the north side, which were completed in 1877 by a hall with common room, buttery, kitchen, and a chemical laboratory beneath it.

It is very difficult to obtain any accurate knowledge of the number of persons ordinarily inhabiting a College in past times. A few lists happen to have been preserved, but their accuracy is not free from suspicion. Thus, a census of 1552 enumerates under the head of Balliol seven Masters, six Bachelors, and seventeen others, these seventeen including the manciple, butler, cook, and scullion.[80] In ten years this list of thirty names has grown to sixty-five: six Masters, thirteen Bachelors, and forty-six others, eight of whom were Scholars, five “poor scholars”—presumably batellers,—and four servants.[81] By 1612 the number appears to have nearly doubled, and comprises the Master and eleven Fellows, thirteen Scholars, seventy commoners, twenty-two “poor scholars,” and ten servants; in all a hundred and twenty-seven:[82] a total the magnitude of which is the more perplexing since the College matriculations between 1575 and 1621 averaged hardly more than fifteen a-year.[83] No doubt, in the days when several students shared a bedroom, it was possible even for a small College to give house-room to a far larger number than we can imagine at the present time; but still it is hard to understand how so many as a hundred and twenty persons could be accommodated in the then existing buildings of Balliol. According to the procuratorial cycle of 1629, Balliol ranks with University, Lincoln, Jesus, and Pembroke, among the smallest Colleges.[84] In recent times, taking years by chance, we find the number of Fellows, Scholars, and Commoners in the University Calendar for 1838 to be 102, in that for 1859 to be 122, in 1878 about 195, and in 1891 about 187.[85] That the College has been able to count so many resident members is partly owing to the extension of the College buildings, but much more to the modern Statute whereby all members of the College are not necessarily required to live within the College walls.

Notices of the domestic history of Balliol during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries are surprisingly scanty. In the following pages we have gathered together such particulars as we have thought of sufficient interest to be recorded in a brief sketch like the present. Early in the seventeenth century the life of the College was varied by the presence of two Greek students, sent over by Cyril Lucaris, the Patriarch of Constantinople, to whom England owes the gift of the Codex Alexandrinus. One of these, Metrophanes Critopulos, became Patriarch of Alexandria. The other, Nathaniel Conopios, we are told “spake and wrote the genuine Greek (for which he was had in great Veneration in his Country), others using the vulgar only,” and was a proficient in music. He took the degree of B.D., and was made Bishop of Smyrna. Evelyn remarks that he was the first he “ever saw drink coffee, w^ch custom came not into England until 30 years after.”[86] Our next note is of a different character. Soon after the Scholars endowed by Tisdale[87] were established in Cesar’s lodgings, a dispute arose between one of them, named Crabtree, and Ferryman Moore, a freshman of three weeks’ standing. Crabtree called Moore an “undergraduate” and pulled his hair; whereupon Moore drew his knife and stabbed him so that he died. In the trial that followed Moore pleaded benefit of clergy and was condemned to burning in the hand, but at the petition of the Vice-Chancellor, Mayor, and other Justices, received the Royal pardon on the 19th November, 1624,—the very year in which the benefaction that had brought his victim to Balliol was settled in its lasting home in Pembroke College.[88] A little later, in 1631, we find one Thorne, a member of Balliol, preaching at St. Mary’s against the King’s Declaration on Religion of 1628: he was expelled the University by Royal order.[89] The famous John Evelyn, who was admitted a Fellow Commoner of the College in May 1637, being then in his seventeenth year, tells us that “the Fellow Com’uners in Balliol were no more exempt from Exercise than the meanest scholars there, and my Father sent me thither to one Mr. George Bradshaw,” who was Master from 1648 to 1651. “I ever,” he adds, “thought my Tutor had parts enough, but as his ambition made him much suspected of y^e College, so his grudge to Dr. Lawrence, the governor of it (whom he afterwards supplanted), tooke up so much of his tyme, that he seldom or never had the opportunity to discharge his duty to his scholars. This I perceiving, associated myself with one Mr. James Thicknesse, (then a young man of the Foundation, afterwards a Fellow of the House,) by whose learned and friendly conversation I received great advantage. At my first arrival, Dr. Parkhurst was Master; and after his discease, Dr. Lawrence, a chaplaine of his Ma’ties and Margaret Professor, succeeded, an acute and learned person; nor do I much reproach his severity, considering that the extraordinary remissenesse of discipline had (til his coming) much detracted from the reputation of that Colledg.” Later Evelyn mentions that his Tutor managed his expenses during his first year. In January 1640 “Came my Bro. Richard from schole to be my chamber-fellow at the University,” so that even Fellow Commoners did not always have rooms to themselves. It is noticeable that the chief studies which Evelyn speaks of engaging in are those of “the dauncing and vaulting Schole” and music; and one is not surprised to read that when he quitted Oxford in April 1640, without taking a degree, and made his residence in the Middle Temple, he should observe, “My being at the University, in regard of these avocations, was of very small benefit to me.”[90]

When King Charles was at Oxford, Balliol, with the great majority of Colleges, handed over its plate to him, 20 January 1642/3. The weight of the metal was only 41 lb. 4 oz., less than that of any other College recorded.[91] When the Parliamentary Visitation began in 1647. Thomas Lawrence was Master and also Margaret Professor of Divinity. After a while he submitted to the Visitors’ authority and then resigned his offices. In the Mastership he was succeeded by George Bradshaw, Evelyn’s tutor.[92] Apparently about half the members of the College in time made their submission.[93] From 1651 the Mastership was held by Henry Savage, a man of cultivation, who had travelled in France, and here at least deserves to be remembered as the author of the first and only history of his College, a work to which we have been constantly indebted for its transcripts and extracts from the muniments.[94] On his death in 1672 he was succeeded by Thomas Good,—one of the first of those who submitted to the Parliamentary Visitors[95]—whom Wood describes as when resident in College “a frequent preacher, yet always esteemed an honest and harmless puritan.”[96] He is best known from the stories which Humphrey Prideaux tells about him. According to him the Master “is a good honest old tost, and understands business well enough, but is very often guilty of absurditys, which rendreth him contemptible to the yong men of the town.”[97] One of these stories he does “not well beleeve; but however you shall have it. There is over against Baliol College a dingy, horrid, scandalous alehouse, fit for none but draymen and tinkers and such as by goeing there have made themselves equally scandalous. Here the Baliol men continually ly, and by perpetuall bubbeing ad art to their natural stupidity to make themselves perfect sots. The head, beeing informed of this, called them togeather, and in a grave speech informed them of the mischiefs of that hellish liquor cald ale, that it destroyed both body and soul, and adviced them by noe means to have anything more to do with it; but on of them, not willing soe tamely to be preached out of his beloved liquor, made reply that the Vice-Chancelour’s men drank ale at the Split Crow,[98] and why should not they to? The old man, being nonplusd with this reply, immediately packeth away to the Vice-Chancelour,[99] and informed him of the ill example his fellows gave the rest of the town by drinkeing ale, and desired him to prohibit them for the future; but Bathurst, not likeing his proposall, being formerly and [sic] old lover of ale himselfe, answared him roughly, that there was noe hurt in ale, and that as long as his fellows did noe worse he would not disturb them, and soe turned the old man goeing; who, returneing to his colledge, calld his fellows again and told them he had been with the Vice-Chancelour, and that he told them there was noe hurt in ale; truely he thought there was, but now, beeing informed of the contrary, since the Vice-Chancelour gave his men leave to drinke ale, he would give them leave to; soe that now they may be sots by authority.”[100]

Another story of the same time connecting Balliol and Trinity Colleges is told of Dr. Bathurst, President of Trinity and the “Vice-Chancelour” named in the foregoing quotation. “A striking instance,” says Thomas Warton, “of zeal for his college, in the dotage of old age, is yet remembered. Balliol College had suffered so much in the outrages of the grand rebellion, that it remained almost in a state of desolation for some years after the restoration: a circumstance not to be suspected from its flourishing condition ever since. Dr. Bathurst was perhaps secretly pleased to see a neighbouring, and once rival society, reduced to this condition, while his own flourished beyond all others. Accordingly, one afternoon he was found in his garden, which then ran almost contiguous to the east side of Balliol-college, throwing stones at the windows with much satisfaction, as if happy to contribute his share in completing the appearance of its ruin.”[101]

Indeed, that Balliol was by no means in a state of prosperity after the Restoration may be gathered from the facts that it is described as possessing but half the income of Exeter, Oriel, and Queen’s, and containing but twenty-five commoners;[102] and that in 1681 the College was taken by the opposition Peers for lodgings during the Oxford Parliament.[103] In January the Earl of Shaftesbury, together with the Duke of Monmouth, the Earls of Bedford and Essex, and twelve other Peers, subscribed a petition praying that the Parliament should sit not at Oxford but at Westminster; and when they found they could not move the King, Shaftesbury promptly set about securing rooms at Oxford. John Locke, who conducted negotiations for him, reported on the 6th February that the Rector of Exeter would be happy to place three rooms in his house at his Lordship’s disposal, “but that the whole college could by no means be had.” Dr. Wallis’s house was also inspected, and it was soon discovered that Balliol College was at the Peers’ service. From a letter however from Shaftesbury to Locke, of the 22nd February, it seems that he himself and Lord Grey occupied Wallis’s house, and “dieted” elsewhere, no doubt at Balliol.[104] On their departure Shaftesbury and fourteen other Peers—almost exactly the same list as that of the petitioners of the 25th January—presented to the College “a large bole, with a cover to it, all double guilt, 167 oz. 10 dwts,”[105] which was melted down into tankards many years since.

The history of the College during the greater part of the eighteenth century coincides with the life of Dr. Theophilus Leigh, who took his Bachelor’s degree from Corpus in 1712, was appointed Master of Balliol fifteen years later, and held his office until 1785. Hearne records the circumstances of his election in a way which implies that he owed his success to an informality, with more than a hint of nepotism on the part of the Visitor.[106] Six years after his death Martin Routh was elected President of Magdalen College. He died in 1855; so that the academical lives of these two men overlapping just at the extremities cover a period of not less than a hundred and forty-six years. In Leigh’s days Balliol was sunk in the heavy and sluggish decrepitude which characterized Oxford at large. The Terrae Filius—doubtless an authority to be received with caution—reviles the Fellows for the perpetual fines and sconces with which they burthened the undergraduates;[107] and it is stated that Adam Smith, when a member of the College, was severely reprimanded for reading Hume.[108] It is certain that, at least when Leigh was first a Fellow, the College did not even trust the undergraduates with knives and forks, for these, we are assured, were chained to the table in hall, while the trenchers were made of wood.[109] There was “a laudable custom” which lasted on to a later generation “of the Dean’s Visiting the Undergraduats Chambers at 9 o’ Clock at Night, to see that they kept good hours.”[110]

It was before nine o’clock on the 23rd February 1747-8 that a party was gathered there which led to serious consequences. In spite of the failure of the rebellion of 1745 the zealous ardour of some Jacobite members of the College waxed so warm that they and their guests paraded down the Turl shouting G—d bless k—g J——s, until they reached Winter’s coffee-house near the High Street, where Mr. Richard Blacow, a Canon of Windsor, was sitting “in company with several Gentlemen of the University and an Officer in his Regimental Habit,” about seven o’clock in the evening. Mr. Blacow tells us with righteous indignation how he not only heard treasonable and seditious expressions in favour of the exiled family, but also such cries as d—n K—g G——e. Being a young Master of Arts and very much on his dignity, he went forth into the street to check the outrage, but was only met by a rough handling on the part of the rioters, who stood shouting in St. Mary Hall Lane in front of Oriel College; so that Mr. Blacow was glad to make good his retreat within the College gate. Reappearing after a while he was on the point of being attacked, when his assailant was carried off by the Proctor. Another, Luxmoore, B.A. of Balliol, took to his heels. After this the loyal Canon sought in vain to induce the Vice-Chancellor to take steps for the trial of the offenders; but he could by no means be prevailed upon. At length, as the scandal spread abroad, the Secretary of State, the Duke of Newcastle, requested Mr. Blacow to lay an information before him; and three members of the University were tried for treason in the King’s Bench. Of the two who belonged to Balliol one, Luxmoore, was acquitted; the other Whitmore, with Dawes of St. Mary Hall,—both undergraduates barely twenty years of age,—were sentenced to a fine, to two years’ imprisonment, to find securities for their good behaviour for seven years, “to walk immediately round Westminster Hall with a libel affixed to their foreheads denoting their crime and sentence, and to ask pardon of the several courts.”[111]

The letters of Robert Southey, who entered Balliol as a commoner in 1792, do not give an unfavourable impression of the condition of the College just after Leigh’s death. His own peculiarities of taste and temper placed him doubtless in uncongenial surroundings,—he refused the assistance of the College barber and wore his curly hair long,—but his complaint is not of the College but of the University system in general. The authorities are “men remarkable only for great wigs and little wisdom.” “With respect to its superiors, Oxford only exhibits waste of wigs and want of wisdom; with respect to the undergraduates, every species of abandoned excess.” In his second year, with the haughty air of a senior man, he found the freshmen “not estimable”; but he made friends in College, and two of his first four comrades in the great Pantisocratic scheme were Balliol men. Even his tutor, Thomas Howe, delighted him by being “half a democrat,” and still more by the remark—“Mr. Southey, you won’t learn any thing by my lectures, Sir; so, if you have any studies of your own, you had better pursue them.” Rowing and swimming, Southey used to say, were all he learned at Oxford; but with two years’ residence, and a term missed in them, with Pantisocracy and Joan of Arc, we may doubt whether it was all Oxford’s fault.[112]

The real revival of Balliol College began after the election of John Parsons as Master in 1798. He succeeded to the Vice-Chancellorship in 1807 unexpectedly, on the death of Dr. Richards, Rector of Exeter, after a single year of office. “He was a good scholar,” says Bedel Cox, “and an impressive preacher, though he did not preach often; above all, he was thoroughly conversant with University matters, having been for several years the leading, or rather the working, man in the Hebdomadal Board. Indeed, he had the great merit of elaborating the details of the Public Examination Statute at the end of the last century. His subsequent promotion” to the Bishopric of Peterborough “was considered as the well-earned reward of that his great work. Dr. Parsons had also the credit of laying the foundation of that collegiate and tutorial system which Dr. Jenkyns afterwards so successfully carried out.”[113] Those who may think the establishment of the examination system a questionable benefit may be comforted by knowing that for many years it was conducted entirely vivâ voce, while the requirements for degrees in the time preceding the change were so notoriously perfunctory that the old method could not possibly be maintained. In the Colleges too the tutorial system, in its principle—as still at Cambridge—a disciplinary system, had long outlived its vitality; and Dr. Parsons deserves credit not merely for invigorating it, but for setting on a firm foundation an organization for teaching undergraduates as well as for keeping them in order.

But it was not to be expected that these reforms should bear full fruit for many years. Sir William Hamilton, who was at Balliol from 1807 to 1810, describes himself as “so plagued by these foolish lectures of the College tutors that I have little time to do anything else—Aristotle to-day, ditto to-morrow; and I believe that if the ideas furnished by Aristotle to these numbskulls were taken away, it would be doubtful whether there remained a single notion. I am quite tired of such uniformity of study.”[114] He was however unfortunately placed under an eccentric tutor named Powell, who lived furtively in rooms over the College gate and was never seen out except at dusk. “For a short time Hamilton and his tutor kept up the formality of an hour’s lecture. This however soon ceased, and for the last three years of his College life Hamilton was left to follow his own inclinations.”[115] But, as Dr. Parsons said, “he is one of those, and they are rare, who are best left to themselves. He will turn out a great scholar, and we shall get the credit of making him so, though in point of fact we shall have done nothing for him whatever.”[116] Yet in later years the philosopher speaks of the “College in which I spent the happiest of the happy years of youth, which is never recollected but with affection, and from which, as I gratefully acknowledge, I carried into life a taste for those studies which have contributed the most interesting of my subsequent pursuits.”[117]

Hamilton’s freshman’s account of the daily life and manners of the College deserves quotation: its date is 13 May, 1807. “No boots are allowed to be worn here, or trousers or pantaloons. In the morning we wear white cotton stockings, and before dinner regularly dress in silk stockings, &c. After dinner we go to one another’s rooms and drink some wine, then go to chapel at half-past five, and walk, or sail on the river, after that. In the morning we go to chapel at seven, breakfast at nine, fag all the forenoon, and dine at half-past three.”[118]

Under Dr. Parsons as Master, and Mr. Jenkyns as Tutor and then Vice-Master on the Head’s elevation to the see of Peterborough, the College continued steadily to improve. Mr. Jenkyns succeeded to the Mastership on the Bishop’s death in 1819. But there were still two points in the constitution of the College which were felt to be out of keeping with the spirit of modern education. One was the direct nomination of each Scholar, except those on the Blundell Foundation, by a particular Fellow in turn; and the other, the obligation under which all the Fellows lay of taking Priest’s orders. The former arrangement was revised by a new Statute sanctioned by the Visitor in 1834, which placed all the Scholarships, with the exception named, in the appointment of the Master and Fellows after examination. At the same time the College yielded to the tendency of the time which brought undergraduates to the University older than formerly, and raised the age below which candidates were admissible to scholarships from eighteen to nineteen.[119] The other question was settled by a decision in 1838 that the obligation of Fellows to take holy orders did not debar candidates from election who had no such purpose in mind, provided of course that their tenure of Fellowships terminated at the date by which according to the Statutes they were bound to be ordained.[120]

In the same year that this decision was given Mr. Benjamin Jowett, afterwards Regius Professor of Greek and since 1870 Master of the College, was elected to a Fellowship. He has committed to writing in a most interesting letter to the son of William George Ward, famous for his share in the Oxford Movement and for his degradation by Convocation in 1845, his recollections of the Fellows as they were when he was elected to their membership; but we have only room here for a short extract from his account of Master Jenkyns, “who was very different from any of the Fellows, and was held in considerable awe by them. He was a gentleman of the old school, in whom were represented old manners, old traditions, old prejudices, a Tory and a Churchman, high and dry, without much literature, but having a good deal of character. He filled a great space in the eyes of the undergraduates. ‘His young men,’ as he termed them, speaking in an accent which we all remember, were never tired of mimicking his voice, drawing his portrait, and inventing stories about what he said and did.… He was a considerable actor, and would put on severe looks to terrify Freshmen, but he was really kind-hearted and indulgent to them. He was in a natural state of war with the Fellows and Scholars on the Close Foundation; and many ludicrous stories were told of his behaviour to them, of his dislike to smoking, and of his enmity to dogs.… He was much respected, and his great services to the College have always been acknowledged.”[121]

When we consider the progress made by Balliol College during the years between 1813, when Jenkyns became Vice-Master, and 1854, when he died, we may perhaps venture to question whether the balance between “old manners, old traditions, old prejudices,” and new manners, new traditions, new prejudices, does not hang very evenly. But into this we are not called upon to enter. The Statutes made by the University Commission of 1850 made fewer changes in the condition of Balliol than of most Colleges, because the most inevitable reforms had been carried into effect already. The Close Fellowships were opened, and the majority of the Fellowships were released from clerical obligations. The moment which witnessed the promulgation of the new Statutes witnessed also the death of Dean Jenkyns and the succession of Robert Scott. But here we may well conclude the story of the Balliol of the past. To carry it down further would require much more space than the limits of this chapter permit; and besides, the Balliol of the present is a new College in a different sense from perhaps any other College in Oxford. No other College has so distinctly parted company with its traditions beyond the lifetime of men now living. The commemoration of founders and benefactors on St. Luke’s Day has long been given up, and the Latin grace in hall has not been heard for many years. The College buildings are for the greater part the work of the present reign. In the new hall the portraits which strike the eye behind the high table are all those of men who were alive when the hall was opened in 1877. Bishop Parsons and Dean Jenkyns are seen above them, while in the obscurity of the roof may be discerned the pictures—unhistorical, as in other Colleges, it need not be said—of John Balliol and Dervorguilla his wife. A visitor from the last century would see little that he could recognize; but when he entered the common room after dinner he would notice one highly conservative custom revived. In 1773 it had been the lament of older men, that

“Nec Camerae Communis amor, qua rarus ad alta

Nunc tubus emittit gratos laquearia fumos;”[122]

but in late years the practice of smoking has been regularly admitted even in those sacred precincts.

Every College has its own ideal, and that of Balliol has been by a steady policy adapted to the modern spirit of work, employing the best materials not so much for learning as an end in itself as a means towards practical success in life. In this field, in the distinctions of the schools, of the courts, and of public life, it has been seldom rivalled by any other College. But it is remarkable that in the long and distinguished list of its men of mark we find, speaking only of the dead, no Statesman and not many scholars of the first rank. The College has excelled rather in its practical men of affairs, diplomatists, judges, members of parliament, civil service officials, college tutors, and schoolmasters. At the present moment it counts among former members no less than seven of her Majesty’s Judges and seven Heads of Oxford Colleges. But to show that another side of culture has been represented at Balliol in the present reign, we must not forget the band of Balliol poets, Arthur Hugh Clough, Matthew Arnold, and Algernon Charles Swinburne.

III.
MERTON COLLEGE.[123]

By the Hon. George C. Brodrick, D.C.L., Warden of Merton College.

In the year 1274, “the House of the Scholars of Merton,” since called Merton College, was solemnly founded, and settled upon its present site in Oxford, by Walter de Merton, Chancellor to King Henry III. and King Edward I. Ten years earlier, in the midst of the Civil War, this remarkable man had already established a collegiate brotherhood, under the same name, at Malden, in Surrey, but with an educational branch at Oxford, where twenty students were to be maintained out of the corporate revenues. The Statutes of 1264 were very slightly modified in 1270; the Statutes of 1274, issued on the conclusion of the peace, and sealed by the King himself, were a mature development of the original design, worked out with a statesman-like foresight. These statutes are justly regarded as the archetype of the College system, not only in the University of Oxford, but in that of Cambridge, where they were adopted as a model by the founder of Peterhouse, the oldest of Cambridge Colleges. In every important sense of the word, Merton, with its elaborate code of statutes and conventual buildings, its chartered rights of self-government, and its organized life, was the first of English Colleges, and the founder of Merton was indirectly the founder of Collegiate Universities.

His idea took root and bore fruit, because it was inspired by a true sympathy with the needs of the University, where the subjects of study were then as frivolous as it was the policy of Rome to make them, where religious houses with the Mendicant Friars almost monopolized learning, and where the streets were the scenes of outrageous violence and license. To combine monastic discipline with secular learning, and so to create a great seminary for the secular clergy, was the aim of Walter de Merton. The inmates of the College were to live by a common rule under a common head; but they were to take no vows, to join no monastic fraternity, on pain of deprivation, and to undertake no ascetic or ceremonial obligations. Their occupation was to be study, not the claustralis religio of the older religious orders, nor the more practical and popular self-devotion of the Dominicans and Franciscans, “the intrusive and anti-national militia of the Papacy.” They were all to read Theology, but not until after completing their full course in Arts; and they were encouraged to seek employment in the great world. As the value of the endowments should increase, the number of scholars was to be augmented; and those who might win an ample fortune (uberior fortuna) were enjoined to show their gratitude by advancing the interests of “the house.” While their duties and privileges were strictly defined by the statutes, they were expressly empowered to amend the statutes themselves in accordance with the growing requirements of future ages, and even to migrate from Oxford elsewhere in case of necessity. The Archbishop of Canterbury, as Visitor by virtue of his office, was entrusted with the duty of enforcing statutable obligations.

The Merton Statutes of 1274, as interpreted and supplemented by several Ordinances and Injunctions of Visitors, remained in force within living memory, and the spirit of them never became obsolete. The Ordinances of Archbishop Kilwarby, issued as early as 1276, with the Founder’s express sanction, chiefly regulate the duties of College officers, but are interesting as recognizing the existence of out-College students. Those of Archbishop Peckham, issued in 1284, are directed to check various abuses already springing up, among which is included the encroachment of professional and utilitarian studies into the curriculum of the College; the admission of medical students on the plea that Medicine is a branch of Physics is rigorously prohibited, and the study of Canon Law is condemned except under strict conditions and with the Warden’s leave. The Ordinances of Archbishop Chicheley, issued in 1425, disclose the prevalence of mercenary self-interest in the College, manifested in the neglect to fill up Fellowships, in wasteful management of College property, and so forth. The ordinances of Archbishop Laud, issued in 1640, are specially framed, as might be expected, to revive wholesome rules of discipline, entering minutely into every detail of College life. Chapel-attendance, the use of surplices and hoods, the restriction of intercourse between Masters and Bachelors, the etiquette of meals, the strength of the College ale, the custody of the College keys, the costume to be worn by members of the College in the streets, and the careful registration in a note-book of every Fellow’s departure and return—such were among the numerous punctilios of College economy which shared the attention of this indefatigable prelate with the gravest affairs of Church and State. A century later, in 1733, very similar Injunctions were issued by Archbishop Potter; and on several other occasions undignified disputes between the Wardens and Fellows called for the decisive interference of the Visitor. But the general impression derived from a perusal of the Visitors’ Injunctions is, that a reasonable and honest construction of the Statutes would have rendered their interference unnecessary, and that it was a signal proof of the Founder’s sagacity to provide such a safeguard against corporate selfishness and intestine discord, in days when public spirit was a rare virtue.

While the University of Oxford has played a greater part in our national history than any other corporation except that of the City of London, the external annals of Merton, as of other Colleges, are comparatively meagre and humble. The corporate life of the College, dating from the Barons’ War, flowed on in an equable course during a century of French Wars, followed by the Wars of the Roses. We know, indeed, that in early times Merton was sometimes represented by its Wardens and Fellows in camps and ecclesiastical synods, as well as in Courts, both at home and abroad. For instance, Bradwardine, afterwards Archbishop, rendered service to Edward III. in negotiations with the French King; Warden Bloxham was employed during the same reign in missions to Scotland and Ireland; two successive Wardens, Rudborn and Gylbert, with several Fellows, are said to have followed Henry V. as chaplains into Normandy, and to have been present at Agincourt; Kemp, a Fellow and future Archbishop, attended the Councils of Basle and Florence; and Abendon, Gylbert’s successor in the Wardenship, earned fame as delegate of the University at the Council of Constance. But the College, as a body, was unmoved either by continental expeditions, or by the storms which racked English society in the Middle Ages; and its “Register,” which commences in 1482, is for the most part ominously silent on the great political commotions of later periods. During the reign of Henry VII., indeed, occasional mention of public affairs is to be found in its pages. Such are the references to extraordinary floods, storms, or frosts; to the Sweating Sickness; to the Battle of Bosworth Field; to Perkin Warbeck’s Revolt, and other insurrectionary movements of that age; to notable executions; to the birth, marriage, and death of Prince Arthur; to the death of Pope Alexander VI., and to Lady Margaret’s endowment of a Theological Professorship. After the reign of Henry VII. the brief entries in this domestic chronicle, like the monotonous series of cases in the Law Reports, almost ignore Civil War and Revolution, betraying no change of style or conscious spirit of innovation; and it is from other sources that we must learn the events which enable us to interpret some passages in the Register itself.

Whether John Wyclif was actually a Fellow of Merton is still an open question, though no sufficient evidence has been produced to rebut a belief certainly held in the next generation after the great Reformer’s death. That his influence was strongly felt at Merton is an undoubted fact, and the liberal school of thought which he represented had there one of its chief strongholds until the Renaissance and the Reformation. Being anti-monastic by its very constitution, and having been a consistent opponent of Papal encroachments, Merton College might naturally have been expected to cast in its lot with the Protestant cause at this great crisis. A deed of submission to Henry VIII. as Supreme Head of the Church, purporting to represent the unanimous voice of the College, and professing absolute allegiance not only to him, but to Anne Boleyn and her offspring, is preserved in the Public Record Office. This deed bears the signatures of the Sub-Warden and fifteen known Fellows, besides those of three other persons who were perhaps Chaplains, but not that of Chamber, the Warden, though his name is expressly included in the body of the deed. Nevertheless, the sympathies of the leading Fellows appear to have been mainly Catholic. William Tresham, an ex-Fellow, zealous as he was in the promotion of learning, was among the adversaries of the Reformation movement, and was rewarded by Queen Mary with a Canonry of Christ Church. Though he signed the acknowledgment of the Royal Supremacy, Richard Smyth was a still more active promoter of the Catholic re-action. He also received a Canonry of Christ Church, with the Regius Professorship of Divinity, and preached a sermon before the stake when Ridley and Latimer were martyred, on the unhappy text—“Though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.” Dr. Martiall, another Fellow of Merton, acted as Vice-Chancellor on the same occasion, and his brother Fellow, Robert Ward, appears on the list of Doctors appointed to sit in judgment on the doctrines of the Protestant bishops. Parkhurst, afterwards Bishop of Norwich, is the only Fellow of Merton recorded by Anthony Wood to have sought refuge beyond the seas during the Marian persecution. On the other hand, four only, including Tresham, are mentioned as having suffered the penalty of expulsion for refusing the Oath of Supremacy under Elizabeth, though Smyth was imprisoned in Archbishop Parker’s house, and Raynolds, the Warden, on refusing that Oath, was deposed by order of a new Commission.

A more important place was reserved for Merton College in the great national drama of the following century. Having been one of the Colleges in which members of the Legislature were lodged during the Oxford Parliament of 1625, and upon which the officers of a Parliamentary force were quartered in 1641, it was selected, in July 1643, for the residence of Queen Henrietta Maria, who then joined the King at Oxford, and remained there during the autumn and winter. She occupied the present dining-room and drawing-room of the Warden’s house, with the adjoining bedroom, still known as “the Queen’s Room.” The King, who held his Court at Christ Church, often came to visit her by a private walk opened for the purpose through Corpus and Merton gardens; and doubtless took part in many pleasant re-unions, of which history is silent, though a graphic picture of them is preserved in the pages of John Inglesant.

It does not follow that Royalist opinions preponderated among the Merton Fellows, and there is clear evidence that both sides were strongly represented in the College. Sir Nathaniel Brent, the Warden, being a Presbyterian, and having openly espoused the Parliamentary cause, absented himself, and was deposed in favour of the illustrious Harvey, Charles I.’s own physician, recommended by the King, but duly elected by the College. Ralph Button, too, a leading Fellow and Tutor, quitted Oxford, when it became the Royal head-quarters, lest he should be expected to bear arms for the King. On the other hand, Peter Turner, one of the most eminent Mertonians of his day, accompanied a troop of Royalist horse as far as Stow in the Wold, was there captured, and was committed to Northampton Gaol. A third Fellow, John Greaves, Savilian Professor of Astronomy, drew up and procured signatures to a petition for Brent’s deposition; and two more, Fowle and Lovejoy, actually served under the Royal standard. But we search the College Register in vain for any formal resolution on the subject of the Civil War. It is certain that Merton gave up the whole of its plate for the King’s use in 1643, and no silver presented at an earlier date is now in the possession of the College. But it is interesting, if not consolatory, to know that in the previous reign a large quantity of old plate had been exchanged for new, so that, from an antiquarian point of view, the sacrifice made to loyalty was not so great as might be imagined. No College order directing the surrender is extant, and two of the Fellows afterwards mutually accused each other of having thus misappropriated the College property.

Other notices of the great struggle then convulsing the nation are few and far between in the minutes of the College Register. It is remarkable that, so far back as August 1641, the College directed twelve muskets and as many pikes to be purchased, bello ingruente, for the purpose of repelling any roving soldiers who might break in for the sake of plunder. Anthony Wood particularly observes, that during the Queen’s stay at Merton there were divers marriages, christenings, and burials in the Chapel, of which all record has been lost, as the private register in which the Chaplain had noted them was stolen out of his room when Oxford was finally surrendered to Fairfax. The confusion that prevailed during the Royalist occupation of Oxford is, however, officially recognized by the College. It is duly chronicled, for instance, that on August 1st, 1645, the College meeting was held in the Library, neither the Hall nor the Warden’s Lodgings being then available for the purpose; and several entries attest the pecuniary straits to which the College was reduced. At last it is solemnly recorded, under the date of October 19th, 1646, that by the Divine goodness the war had at last been stayed, and the Warden (Brent) with most of the Fellows had returned, but that as there were no Bachelors, hardly any Scholars, and few Masters, it was decided to elect but one Bursar and one Dean. It is added that, as the Hall still lay situ et ruinis squalida, the College meeting was held in the Warden’s Lodgings.

When the scenes were shifted, and a solemn Visitation of the University was instituted by “The Lords and Commons assembled in Parliament,” Merton College may be said to have set the example of conformity to the new order in Church and State. Sir Nathaniel Brent himself was President of the Commission. Among his colleagues were three Fellows of Merton, Reynolds, Cheynell, and Corbet, who had already been appointed with four other preachers to convert the gownsmen through Presbyterian sermons. The earlier sittings of the Commission were held in the Warden’s dining-room, or, during his absence, in Cheynell’s apartments. When the members of the College, including servants, were called before the Visitors and required to make their submission, about half of them, according to Anthony Wood, openly complied: most of the others made answers more or less evasive, declaring their readiness to obey the Warden, or submitting in so far as the Visitors had authority from the King. French, who, as official guardian of the University Register, had refused to give it up, now made his submission, but justified it on the strange ground that he was bound by the capitulation of Oxford to Fairfax. One Fellow only, Nicholas Howson, boldly refused submission, declaring that he could not reconcile it with his allegiance to the King, the University, and the College. He was of course removed; and the same fate befell Turner, Greaves, French, and one other Fellow, with a larger number of Postmasters, of whom, however, some were condemned as improperly elected, and some were afterwards restored through Brent’s influence. Even while the Commission was sitting, a Royalist spirit must have lingered in the College, since we read that four of the Fellows, three of whom had submitted, were put out of commons for a week and publicly admonished by the Warden for drinking the King’s health with a tertiavit, and uncovered heads. Brent resigned the Wardenship in 1651; whereupon the Parliamentary Visitors proceeded to appoint, by their own authority, but on the express nomination of the Protector, Dr. Jonathan Goddard, who had been head physician to Cromwell’s army in Ireland and Scotland—thereby improving on Charles I.’s paternal but constitutional recommendation of Harvey.

With the suspension of this great Visitation, shortly to be followed by the Restoration of Charles II., the short-lived connection of Merton College with general history may be said to have closed. It had the honour of lodging the Queen and favourite ladies of Charles II. in the plague-year, 1665; it cashiered a Probationer-Fellow in 1681 for maintaining that Charles I. died justly; it took part in the enlistment of volunteers for the suppression of Monmouth’s rebellion; and it joined other Colleges in the half-hearted reception of William III. But its records are devoid of political interest, except so far as it became a chief stronghold of Whig principles in the University during the Jacobite re-action which followed the Revolution, was encouraged by the avowed Toryism of Queen Anne, and almost broke out into civil war on the accession of George I. Charles Wesley expressly mentions it with Christ Church, Exeter, and Wadham, as an anti-Jacobite society; and Meadowcourt, a leading member of the College, was the hero of a famous scene at the Whig “Constitution Club,” when the Proctor, breaking in, was reluctantly obliged to drink King George’s health. Shortly afterwards the following entry appeared in the University “Black Book”:—“Let Mr. Meadowcourt, of Merton College, be kept back from the degree for which he next stands, for the space of two years; nor be admitted to supplicate for his grace, until he confesses his manifold crimes, and asks pardon on his knees”—a penalty, however, which he managed to evade, being afterwards thanked for his loyalty by the Whig government.

In the absence of contemporary letters or biographies, it is only from casual notices in Visitors’ Injunctions, Bursars’ Rolls, and (after 1482) the College Register, that we can obtain any light on the life and manners of Merton scholars, whether senior or junior, before the Reformation-period. That it was a haven of rest for quiet students, and a model of academical discipline to extra-collegiate inmates of halls and lodgings, during the incessant tumults of the fourteenth century, admits of no doubt whatever. A notable proof of this is the special exemption of Merton “et aularum consimilium”—probably University, Balliol, Exeter, Oriel, and Queen’s Colleges—from the general rustication of students which followed the sanguinary riot on St. Scholastica’s day in 1354. But the rules laid down by the Founder, and enforced by successive Visitors, were expressly directed to secure good order in the Society. By the Statutes of 1274, summary expulsion was to be the penalty of persistence in quarrelsome or disorderly behaviour. By the Ordinances of Archbishop Peckham and several other Visitors, the inmates of the College are strictly prohibited from taking meals in the town or entering it alone, and enjoined always to walk about in a body, returning before nightfall. Other Regulations, of great antiquity, but of somewhat uncertain date, emphatically warn the Fellows against aiding and abetting, even in jest, the squabbles between the Northern and Southern “Nations,” or between rival “Faculties.” In 1508, the College itself legislated directly against the growing practice of giving out-College parties in the city and coming in late, “even after ten o’clock.” By the Injunctions of Archbishop Laud, it was ordered that the College gates should be closed at half-past nine and the keys given to the Warden, none being allowed to sleep in Oxford outside the College walls, or even to breakfast or dine, except in the College Hall, carefully separated according to their degrees. Whether the scholars of Merton, old and young, originally slept in large dormitories, or were grouped together by threes and fours in sets of rooms, like those occupied singly by modern students, is a question which cannot be determined with certainty. The structure of “Mob Quadrangle,” however, together with the earliest notices in the Register, justifies the belief that most of them lived in College rooms, and that in those days the College Library, far larger than could be required for the custody of a few hundred or thousand manuscripts, was the one common study of the whole College, perhaps serving also as a covered ambulatory. This building is known to have been constructed, or converted to its present use, about 1376; but the dormer windows in the roof were not thrown out until more than a century later; and in the meantime readers can scarcely have deciphered manuscripts on winter-days, in so dark a chamber, without the aid of oil lamps. Fires were probably unknown, except in the Hall, whither inmates of the College doubtless resorted to warm themselves at all hours of the day. It is to be hoped that, at such casual gatherings, they were relieved from the obligation to converse in Latin imposed upon them during the regular meals in Hall. But intimacy between juniors and seniors was strictly prohibited; and though Archbishop Cranmer allowed the College to dispense with the practice of Bachelors “capping” Masters in the Quadrangle, it was thought necessary to revive it. As for manly pastimes, which occupy so large a space in modern University life, they are scarcely to be traced in the domestic history of Merton, though a ball-court is known to have existed at the west-end of the Chapel. Football, cudgel-play, and other rough games, were certainly played by the citizens in the open fields on the north of Oxford; but if Merton men took part in them, it was against the spirit of Merton rules, since these playful encounters were a fertile source of town and gown rows. There seem to have been no academical sports whatever; rowing was never practised, cricket was not invented, archery was cultivated rather as a piece of warlike training; and it is to be feared that poaching in the great woods then skirting Oxford on the north-east was among the more favourite amusements of athletic students.

It must not be forgotten, however, that, by the original foundation, all the members of the College were both Scholars and Fellows, of equal dignity, except in standing, the Scholar being nothing but a junior Fellow, and the Fellow nothing but an elder Scholar. There were a few boys of the Founder’s kin, for whom a separate provision was made; and “commoners” were admitted from time to time at the discretion of the College, but these were mere supernumeraries, at first of low degree, afterwards of higher rank, and on the footing of fellow-commoners. It was not until the new order of Postmasters (portionistae) was founded by Wylliott, about 1380, that a second class of students was recognized by the College; and this institution of College “scholarships,” in the modern sense, long remained a characteristic feature of Merton. Unlike the young “Scholares,” the Postmasters did not rise by seniority to what are now called Fellowships, and were, in fact, the humble friends of the Master-Fellows who had nominated them. It would appear that at the end of the fifteenth century, if not from the first, each Master-Fellow had this right; and the number of Postmasters was always to be the same as that of the Master-Fellows. Until that period they seem to have been lodged in the separate building, opposite the College gate, long known as “Postmasters’ Hall.” It is not clear whether they took meals in the College Hall, or lived on rations served out to them; but it is perfectly clear that they fared badly enough until their diet was improved in the reign of James I. by special benefactions of Thomas Jessop and others. In the previous reign, they had been removed into the College itself; and thenceforward for several generations they slept, probably on truckle-beds, in the bedrooms of their respective “Masters.” Indeed, a College-order of 1543 leads us to suppose that some of them were expected to wait upon the Bachelor-Fellows in Hall.

Another institution characteristic of Merton in the olden times is one now obsolete, but formerly known as the “Scrutiny.” The Founder had expressly ordained in his statutes that a “Chapter or Scrutiny” should be held in the College itself thrice a year—a week before Christmas, a week before Easter, and on July 20; and that on these occasions a diligent enquiry should be made into the life, behaviour, morals, and progress in learning of all his scholars, as well as into all matters needing correction or improvement. He also decreed that, once a year, the Warden, bailiffs of manors, and all others concerned in the management of College property, should render a solemn account of their stewardship before the Vice-Warden and all the Scholars, assembled at “one of the manors.” The bailiffs and other agents of the College were to resign their keys, without reserve, into the hands of the Warden; but the Warden himself was to undergo a like inquisition into his own conduct, and was apparently to be visited with censure or penalties, in case of delinquency, by the College meeting. It is by no means easy to understand why this annual audit, for such it was, should not have been appointed to be held at one of the stated “Chapters or Scrutinies,” or why “one of the manors” should have been designated as the lawful place for it. At all events, the distinction between a Scrutiny and an Audit-meeting seems to have been lost at a very early period. Scrutinies, or Chapters, were held frequently, though at irregular intervals; but at least once a year the Scrutiny assumed the form of an Audit, not only into accounts, but into conduct, being sometimes held in the College Hall, and sometimes at Holywell Manor. The earliest notice of such a Scrutiny in the College Register is under the date 1483, when three questions were propounded for discussion:—(1) the conduct of College servants; (2) the number of Postmasters; and (3) the appointment of College officers. Two years later, however, we find three other questions laid down as the proper subjects for consideration:—(1) the residence and conduct of the Warden; (2) the condition of the manors; and (3) the expediency of increasing the number of Fellows. At a later period, the regular questions were—(1) the expediency of increasing the number of Postmasters; (2) the conduct of College servants (as before); and (3) the appointment of a single College officer, the garden-master. Practically, the Scrutiny often resolved itself into a sort of caucus, at which a free and easy altercation took place among the Fellows upon all the points of difference likely to arise in a cloistered society absorbed in its own petty interests. In Professor Rogers’ interesting record of a Scrutiny held in 1338-9, long before the College Register commences, every kind of grievance is brought forward, from the Warden’s neglect of duty to the slovenly attire of the Chaplain, the excessive charge for horses, and the incessant squabbles between three quarrelsome Fellows. The same freedom of complaint shows itself in the briefer notices of later Scrutinies to be found in the Register. Undue indulgence in games of ball, loitering about the town, the introduction of Fellow-commoners into Hall, the prevalence of noise in the bed-chambers at night, as well as enmities among the Fellows, and abuses in the estate-management, were among the stock topics of discussion at Scrutinies; and in 1585 complaints were made at a Scrutiny against suspected Papists. It is evident that reflections were often cast upon the Warden; but it was known that he could only be deposed by the Visitor after three admonitions from the Sub-Warden; and, though in one case these admonitions were given, the Visitor, Archbishop Sancroft, declined to adopt the extreme course. The practice of reviewing the conduct of the Warden at Scrutinies appears, indeed, to have been finally dropped under Warden Chamber, who, as Court physician to King Henry VIII., had a good excuse for constantly absenting himself; but the practice of inviting personal charges against Fellows survived much longer, and Scrutinies were nominally held in the last century.

A third institution distinctive of Merton was the system of “Variations,” or College disputations, of the same nature as the exercises required for University degrees. This custom is thus described by John Poynter, in a little work on the curiosities of Oxford, published in 1749. “The Master-Fellows,” he says, “are obliged by their Statutes to take their turns every year about the Act time, or at least before the first day of August, to vary, as they call it, that is, to perform some public exercise in the Common Hall, the Variator opposing Aristotle in three Latin speeches, upon three questions in Philosophy, or rather Morality; the three Deans in their turns answering the Variator in three speeches in opposition to his, and in defence of his Aristotle, and after every speech disputing with him syllogistically upon the same. Which Declamations or Disputations were amicably concluded with a magnificent and expensive supper, the charges of which formerly came to £100, but of late years much retrenched.” He adds that the audience was composed of the Vice-Chancellor and Proctors, with several Heads of Houses, besides the Warden and all the members of the College. As Variations were still in force when Poynter wrote, we may accept his description of them as tolerably accurate; but he is evidently wrong in supposing them to have taken place at one season of the year only, for the College Register clearly proves the actual date of them to have been moveable, so long as they were performed within the two years of “Regency” following Inception. By the old rule of the University, all Regent-Masters were obliged to give “ordinary” lectures during that period. This obligation was enforced at Merton by the oath required of Bachelor-Fellows before their Inception; and by the same oath they bound themselves during the same period, not only to engage in the logical and philosophical disputations of the College, but also to “vary twice.” The system was regularly established, and is mentioned as of immemorial antiquity, before the end of the fifteenth century. From that time forward Variations are frequently and fully recorded in the Register; and, whenever dispensations were allowed, the fact is duly noted. In 1673 a Fellow was fined £12—a large sum in those days—for neglecting his second Variations; and the significant comment is appended:—“we acquitted him, so far as we could, of his perjury.” Even the subjects chosen by the Variators are carefully specified, and astonish us by their wide range of interest. At first, metaphysical and logical questions predominate; but there is a large admixture of ethical questions, and a few bearing on natural philosophy. At the end of the sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth century, politics enter largely into the field of disputation; while in the eighteenth century a more discursive and literary tone of thought makes itself clearly felt. Upon the whole, we can well believe that, in the age before examinations, these intellectual trials of strength played no mean part in education, quickening the wits of Merton Fellows, if they did not encourage the cultivation of solid knowledge.

It is to be hoped, no doubt, that they were preceded and supplemented by sound private tuition; but upon this, unhappily, the Merton records throw no light. It seems to be assumed in the original Statutes that Scholars of Merton, though bound to study within the House, will receive their instruction outside it. The only exception was the statutable institution of a grammar-master, who was to have charge of the students in grammar, and to whom “the more advanced might have recourse without a blush, when doubts should arise in their faculty.” This institution was treated by Archbishop Peckham as of primary importance; and he specially censures the College for practically excluding boys who had still to learn the rudiments of grammar. There is good reason to believe that John of Cornwall, who is mentioned as the first to introduce the study of English in schools, and to abandon the practice of construing Latin into French, actually held the office of grammar-master in Merton College. These Merton grammar-masters (who continued to be appointed in the sixteenth century) were probably the earliest type of College tutors—an order which inevitably developed itself at a later period, but of which the history remains to be evolved from very scanty materials. The medical lectures founded by Linacre, and the Divinity lectures founded by Bickley, in the sixteenth century, as well as the lectures delivered by Thomas Bodley on Greek, were essentially College lectures, but seem to have been professorial rather than tutorial. A College order of June 9th, 1586, the first year of Savile’s wardenship, requires the Regent-Masters to deliver twenty public lectures to the Postmasters on the Sphere or on Arithmetic, as the Warden should think fit. Probably this rule was soon neglected; and it is not until a much later period that we find the modern relation of tutor and pupil a living reality in Colleges.

We may pass lightly over some other strange, though not unique, customs of Merton which fill a large space in the Register and the pages of Anthony Wood. One of these was the annual election of a Rex Fabarum, or “Christmas King,” on the vigil of St. Edmund (Nov. 19th), under the authority of sealed letters, which “pretended to have been brought from some place beyond sea.” This absurd farce, reminding us of the rough burlesques formerly practised on board ship in crossing the Equator, was solemnly enacted year after year, and recorded in the Register with as much gravity as the succession of a Warden. The person chosen was the senior Fellow who had not yet borne the office; and, according to Wood, his duty was “to punish all misdemeanours done in the time of Christmas, either by imposing exercises on the juniors, or putting into the stocks at the end of the Hall any of the servants, with other punishments that were sometimes very ridiculous.” This went on until Candlemas (Feb. 2nd), “or much about the time that the Ignis Regentium was celebrated.” The Ignis Regentium seems to have been nothing more than a great College wine-party round the Hall fire, attended with various traditional festivities, and provided at the cost of all the Regent-Masters, or only of the Senior Regent, whose munificent hospitality is sometimes expressly commended. Of a similar nature were the practical jokes and rude horse-play described by Anthony Wood as carried on, by way of initiating freshmen, on All Saints Eve and other Eves and Saints’ Days up to Christmas, as well as on Shrove Tuesday, when the poor novices were compelled to declaim in undress from a form placed on the High Table, and rewarded, or punished with some brutality, for their performances. It is significant that, under the Commonwealth, these old-world jovialities were disused, and soon afterwards died out. The old custom of singing Catholic hymns in the College Hall, on the Eves and Vigils of Saints’ Days between All Saints and Candlemas Day, had been modified at the Reformation by the substitution of Sternhold and Hopkins’ Psalms, which continued to be sung in Anthony Wood’s times. Not less curious, and more important, are the detailed regulations made for the health of the College during frequent outbreaks of the plague, when the majority of Fellows and students migrated to Cuxham, Stow Wood, Islip, Eynsham, or elsewhere, and communication between the College and the town was strictly limited.

Were it possible for a Merton Fellow of the Plantagenet, Tudor, or Stuart period to revisit his College in our own day, he would find but few survivals of the quaint usages once peculiar to it. The recitation of a thanksgiving prayer for benefits inherited from the Founder at the end of each chapel-service, the time-honoured practice of striking the Hall table with a wooden trencher as a signal for grace, and the ceremonies observed on the induction of a new Warden, are perhaps the only outward and visible relics of its ancient customary which the spirit of innovation has left alive. But he would feel himself at home in the noble choir of the Chapel, with its stonework and painted glass almost untouched by the lapse of six centuries; in the Library, retaining every structural feature of Bishop Rede’s original work down to its minutest detail; in the Treasury, with its massive high-pitched roof, under which the College archives have been preserved entire since the reign of Edward I., together with a coeval inventory of the documents then deposited there; in the College Garden, surrounded on two sides by the town-wall of Henry III., extended eastward since the close of the Middle Ages by purchases from the City, but curtailed westward by sales of land for the site of Corpus. Perhaps, on reviewing the unbroken continuity of College history through more than twenty generations, crowded with vicissitudes in Church and State, with transformations of ancient institutions, and with revolutions in human thought, he would cease to repine over changes which the Founder himself foresaw as inevitable, and would rather marvel at the vitality of a collegiate society, which can still maintain its corporate identity, with so much of its original structure, in an age beyond that which mediæval seers had assigned for the end of the world.

IV.
EXETER COLLEGE.

By the Rev. Charles W. Boase, M.A., Fellow of Exeter College.

In 1314 Walter de Stapeldon, Bishop of Exeter, founded Stapeldon Hall, soon better known as Exeter College, for “Scholars” (i. e. Fellows), born or resident in Devon and Cornwall, eight from the former and four from the latter county; and he also founded a grammar-school at Exeter, to prepare boys for Oxford. He had, at first, bought ground in and near Hart Hall (now Hertford College); but this site not proving large enough, he removed the students to St. Stephen’s Hall in St. Mildred’s parish, and gave them Hart Hall, that by its rent their rooms might be kept in repair and be rent-free.

The object of the early founders of Colleges was to pass as many men as possible through a course of training that would fit them for the service of Church or State: and so Stapeldon fixed fourteen years as the outside period of holding his scholarships; he had no idea of giving fellowships for life. The twelve scholars were to study Philosophy; and a thirteenth scholar was to be a priest studying Scripture or Canon Law. Aptness to learn, good character, and poverty were the qualifications required of them; and they were to be chosen without regard to favour, fear, relationship, or love. They were kept in order by punishments, increasing from a stoppage of commons to expulsion, at the discretion of the Rector, who was chosen annually after the audit in October. The Rector also looked after the money, and rooms, and servants; but, if two Fellows demanded the expulsion of a servant he was to appoint another. The Rector must have been always under thirty; it was the younger Masters of Arts that then directed education in the University. Disputations were held twice a week, and of three disputations, two were in Logic, one in Natural Science. Tenpence a week was allowed for commons, and each scholar received in addition the sum of ten shillings a year, the Rector and the Priest twenty shillings each. If any scholar was away for more than four weeks his commons were stopped; and by an absence of five months he forfeited his scholarship.

Stapeldon endowed his Hall with the great tithes of Gwinear in Cornwall, and of Long Wittenham in Berks; and any surplus or legacy was to go to public purposes, such as increasing the number of scholars or buying books. There was a common chest with three keys, kept by the Rector, the senior Scholar, and the Priest; and the audit-rolls (computi) are extant from 1324, though with gaps, as for instance during the Black Death (1349). There is something touching in the number of legacies which Stapeldon left to individual poor scholars in his will.

The scholars were very poor; and to relieve them, Ralph Germeyn (Precentor of Exeter), Richard Greenfield (Rector of Kilkhampton in Cornwall), and Robert Rygge (Fellow 1362-1372; afterwards Canon and Chancellor of Exeter), at several times founded “chests” for making loans to them without interest, on security of books or plate; but all such funds have now disappeared, having been, it seems, absorbed in Charles I’s war-chest. The College itself sometimes borrowed; in 1358 the College accounts show a payment of “£3 for a Bible redeemed from Chichester chest”; in 1374, of “four marks to our barber for a Bible pledged to him in the time of Dagenet” (John Dagenet had been Rector in 1371-1372).

The life was simple. Besides the “commons” (i. e. allowances for food), “liveries” (i. e. clothes) were supplied about once in three years. The scholars were to wear black boots (caligæ); and conform to clerical manners according to their standing as Sophists, Bachelors, or Masters. Meals were taken in the hall (which stood a little north of the present hall), where there was always a large bason with hanging towels. A charcoal fire burned in the middle of the hall, under an opening to let out the smoke; but men were not allowed to linger round the fire, and they went off to bed early because candles were dear, nearly 2d. a pound, i. e. 2s. of our money—they lacked therefore the genial inspiration of writing by good candle-light. All had to be in College by nine o’clock in the evening; and the key of the gate was kept in the Rector’s room, which was over the gate. Lectures began at six or seven in the morning; dinner was at ten; supper at five. Of the servants, the manciple received five shillings a term, the cook two, barber twelvepence, washerwoman fifteen pence. The barber was the newsmonger of that as of other ages.

The scholars might by common consent make any new statutes, not contrary to the Founder’s ordinances; and were to refer all doubts to the Visitor.

The Bishops of Exeter were kind Visitors; and gave books and money several times. Gradually more halls and lodging-houses were obtained, some lying on the lane[124] which ran all along inside the city wall, others along St. Mildred’s (now Brasenose) lane, and others along the Turl. A tower was built on the site of St. Stephen’s Hall, with a gate opening into the lane under the city wall; two windows of this tower survive in the staircase of the present Rector’s house. The present garden is on the site of some of the old buildings, but the ivy-clad buttresses of the Bodleian and the great fig-trees along the College buildings, which make such a show in summer, of course do not date from such early times.

An agreement had to be made with the Rector of St. Mildred’s parish, who feared lest the College-chapel should interfere with his rights. This early chapel had rooms under it, and a porch. The computus for building a library in 1383, shows that the building cost £57 13s. 5½d., the leaded roof costing £13 13s. 4d.; and it was completed between Easter and Michaelmas, before the beginning of the Academic year. The timber came from Aldermaston in Berks, the stone from Taynton in Gloucestershire and Whatley near Frome—the latter corresponding to our present Bath stone. Carpenters and masons were paid 6d. a day, and the masons had breakfast and dinner (merenda and prandium). David, the foreman, had 6d. a week for “commons,” and he held the place of a modern architect.

The regard paid to poverty brought forward some distinguished men, such as Walter Lihert (Fellow 1420-1425), Bishop of Norwich, a miller’s son from Lanteglos by Fowey in Cornwall. This consideration for poor scholars did not often fail. Long afterwards John Prideaux (Fellow 1601, Rector 1612-1642) used to say, “If I could have been parish clerk of Ubber (Ugborough in Devon), I should never have been Bishop of Worcester.” Benjamin Kennicott was master of a charity school at Totnes till friends helped him to come to Oxford, where (in 1747) he obtained a Fellowship in Exeter College, and became a great Hebrew scholar. William Gifford, the critic, was apprentice to a shoemaker at Ashburton, where a surgeon helped him to gain a Bible clerkship at Exeter (1779); when he became a leader in the literary world, he remembered his own rise in life, and founded an Exhibition at Exeter for poor boys from Ashburton school. Thus the Universities had formerly something of the character of popular bodies in which learning and study were recommendations, and the avenues of promotion were not closed even to the poorest.

The Wiclifite movement largely influenced Exeter College, and a number of the Fellows suffered in the cause. But, mixed with this, was a wish to uphold the independence of the University, as against the Archbishop of Canterbury’s power of visitation; and perhaps a feeling for the lay government, as against the clergy. A former Fellow, Robert Tresilian, was among Richard II’s chief supporters; and his fate is the first legend in The Mirror for Magistrates, written by William Baldwin in 1559. Later on several Fellows were connected with the House of Lancaster. Michael de Tregury (Fellow 1422-1427) was in 1431 made Rector of the new University, set up at Caen by the English during their rule in France. The physicians of Henry VI. and Margaret were both Fellows. But when Margaret was at Coventry in 1459, levying an army for the War of the Roses, she took “Queen’s gold” from the College, i. e. a tenth of an old fine paid the King for ratifying the grant of a house.

The College was favourably known in the Revival of Learning. William Grocyn taught Greek in the hall; and Richard Croke and Cornelius Vitelli lodged in rooms in the College. Some of the Fellows too were connected with Wolsey; but the College on the whole sided with the opposition to Henry VIII’s measures, like their friends in the West. John Moreman (Fellow 1510-1522) opposed Catherine’s divorce, and was imprisoned under Edward VI. The Cornish insurgents in 1549 demanded that “Dr. Moreman and Dr. Crispin should be safely sent to them.” Moreman was also famous as a schoolmaster; and as Vicar of the College living of Menheniot, he taught the Creed, Lord’s Prayer, and Commandments in English, the people having hitherto used only the old Cornish tongue.

The Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535 states the College revenues at only £83 2s. But Sir William Petre, a statesman trained under Thomas Cromwell, wishing to benefit his old College, gave it some lands and advowsons which he bought of Queen Elizabeth, and added eight Fellowships for the counties in which his family held or should hold land. Elizabeth’s Charter of Incorporation is dated 22nd March, 1566.

New Statutes were then framed by Petre and the Visitor. The Rectorship had already been made perpetual. Petre allowed the Fellows to retire to the Vicarage of Kidlington in time of plague, an oft-recurring trouble. Under a later ordinance a Fellow was allowed, with Lord Petre’s approval, to travel abroad for four years to study Medicine or Civil Law.

Petre also gave the College a curious Latin Psalm-book, which had been the family Bible of the Tudors, the most learned royal family in Europe. It is from it that we know the birthday of Henry VII., 28th Jan. 1457.

Exeter was still in sympathy with the old faith. Ralph Sherwine (Fellow 1568-1575) was hanged by the side of Edmund Campian of St. John’s, in 1581; and several Fellows fled abroad, such as Richard Bristowe, the chief of the translators who put forth the Douai Bible. Elizabeth remedied this by getting two loyal men appointed Rectors successively, Thomas Glasier in 1578, and Thomas Holland in 1592—the latter was one of the translators of the Authorised Version. Under them Exeter became remarkable for discipline and learning, tinged by Puritan views.

John Prideaux was an equally well-known Rector under Charles I., and came into conflict with Laud. There was more intercourse then between English and foreign Protestant Universities than there is now; and Sixtinus Amama, the Dutch Hebraist, speaks in the most grateful terms of the kindness he received from Prideaux and the Fellows. Exeter was now training men like Sir John Eliot, William Strode, William Noye, and John Maynard. Maynard afterwards gave his old College money to found a Catechetical and a Hebrew lectureship. In 1612 the members included 134 commoners, 37 poor scholars, and 12 servitors—the number of the whole University was 2920. Western friends, the Aclands, Peryams, and others, now built a new hall; and John Peryam also built the rooms between the hall and the library, while George Hakewill, a Fellow, gave money to build a new chapel in 1623.

As to the life of the place, Shaftesbury, the famous statesman, who was a member of the College in 1637, gives an amusing account of “coursing” (now become a sort of free fight) in the schools; of how he stopped the evil custom of “tucking” freshmen (i. e. grating off the skin from the lip to the chin); and how he prevented the Fellows “altering the size of” (i. e. weakening) “the College beer.” Shaftesbury’s future colleague in the Cabal, Clifford, was also at Exeter.

Charles I., in 1636, gave an endowment out of confiscated lands to found Fellowships for the Channel Islands at Exeter, Jesus, and Pembroke, that men so trained might devote themselves to work in the Islands. He made John Prideaux (Rector 1612-1642) and Thomas Winniff (Fellow 1595-1609), Bishops, the former of Worcester, the latter of Lincoln, when he at last tried to conciliate the gentry, who were almost all opposed to Laud’s innovations.

In the Civil War most of the Fellows took the King’s side, and Archbishop Usher sojourned in some wooden buildings then known as Prideaux Buildings, situated behind the old Rector’s house, buildings now partly re-erected in the Turl. The College plate was taken by Charles, although the Fellows had redeemed it by a gift of money; but the King’s needs were overwhelming.

Under the Commonwealth John Conant became Rector, and increased the fame of the College for learning and discipline. “Once[125] a week he had a catechetical lecture in the Chapel, in which he went over Piscator’s Aphorisms and Woollebius’ Compendium Theologiæ Christianæ; and by the way fairly propounded the principal objections made by the Papists, Socinians, and others against the orthodox doctrine, in terms suited to the understanding and capacity of the younger scholars. He took care likewise that the inferior servants of the College should be instructed in the principles of the Christian religion, and would sometimes catechise them in his own lodgings. He looked strictly himself to the keeping up all exercises, and would often slip into the hall in the midst of their lectures and disputations. He would always oblige both opponents and respondents to come well prepared, and to perform their respective parts agreeably to the strict law of disputation. Here he would often interpose, either adding new force to the arguments of an opponent, or more fullness to the answers of the respondent, and supplying where anything seemed defective, or clearing where anything was obscure in what the moderator[126] subjoined. He would often go into the chambers and studies of the young scholars, observe what books they were reading, and reprove them if he found them turning over any modern author, and send them to Tully, that great master of Roman eloquence, to learn the true and genuine propriety of that language. His care in the election of Fellows was very singular. A true love of learning, and a good share of it in a person of untainted morals and low circumstances, were sure of his patronage and encouragement. He would constantly look over the observator’s roll and buttery-book himself, and whoever had been absent from chapel prayers or extravagant in his expenses, or otherwise faulty, was sure he must atone for his fault by some such exercise as the Rector should think fit to set him, for he was no friend to pecuniary mulcts, which too often punish the father instead of the son. The students were many more than could be lodged within the walls: they crowded in here from all parts of the nation, and some from beyond the sea. He opposed Cromwell’s plan of giving the College at Durham the privileges of a University, setting forth the advantages of large Universities and the dangers which threaten religion and learning by multiplying small and petty Academies. He was instrumental in moving Mr. Selden’s executors to bestow his prodigious collection of books, more than 8000 volumes, on the University. In his declining age he could scarce be prevailed upon by his physicians to drink now and then a little wine. He slept very little, having been an assiduous and indefatigable student for about threescore years together. Whilst his strength would bear it, he often sat up in his study till late at night, and thither he returned very early in the morning.”

The Restoration put an end alike to learning and to discipline, to the grief of a few good men, such as Ken, though the Royalists in general issued numerous squibs and satires against the Puritans, which still impose on some writers. Anthony Wood, a strong Royalist and constant resident in Oxford, makes frequent allusion in his diaries to the disastrous effects of the Restoration. “Some cavaliers that were restored,” he says in one place, “were good scholars, but the generality were dunces.” “Before the war,” he says in another place, “we had scholars that made a thorough search in scholastic and polemical divinity, in humane learning, and natural philosophy: but now scholars study these things not more than what is just necessary to carry them through the exercises of their respective Colleges and the University. Their aim is not to live as students ought to do, viz. temperate, abstemious, and plain and grave in their apparel; but to live like gentry, to keep dogs and horses, to turn their studies into places to keep bottles, to swagger in gay apparell and long periwigs.” The difference between a Puritan and a Restoration Head of a House is strongly set out by the contrast between Conant’s government of Exeter and that of Joseph Maynard, who was elected on Conant’s ejection for refusing submission to the Act of Conformity (1662). Wood says—“Exeter College is now (1665) much debauched by a drunken governor; whereas before in Dr. Conant’s time it was accounted a civil house, it is now rude and uncivil. The Rector (Maynard) is good-natured, generous, and a good scholar; but he has forgot the way of a College life, and the decorum of a scholar. He is given much to bibbing; and when there is a music-meeting in one of the Fellows’ chambers, he will sit there, smoke, and drink till he is drunk, and has to be led to his lodgings by the junior Fellows.”

In 1666 pressure was put upon Maynard to resign, and he did so on advice of the Visitor and his brother, Sir John Maynard. The resignation was made smooth for him by the understanding that he should be appointed Prebendary of Exeter in room of Dr. Arthur Bury, who was now elected Rector of Exeter. Dr. Bury wrote a book, famous in the Deist controversy, called The Naked Gospel, which had the distinction of being impeached by several Masters of Arts, and formally condemned and burnt by order of the Convocation of the University. About the time of its publication, Bury got into trouble with Trelawney the Visitor, the same whose name became a watchword in the West (“and shall Trelawney die”), over questions of discipline and jurisdiction. The Visitor expelled Bury and his supporters, July 1690; the decision was appealed against in the Court of King’s Bench, and in the House of Lords, but was finally upheld.

The evil effects of the Restoration in studies and in morals continued. Later on, Dean Prideaux can still say, “There is nothing but drinking and duncery. Exeter is totally spoiled, and so is Christ Church. There is over against Baliol, a dingy, horrid, scandalous ale-house, fit for none but dragooners and tinkers. Here the Baliol men, by perpetual bubbing, add art to their natural stupidity to make themselves perfect sots.”

Exeter and Christ Church were both reformed by John Conybeare,[127] a writer famous for his answer to the Christianity as old as the Creation of Matthew Tindal, also an Exeter man.

Jacobite feeling was strong in Oxford, and at the election of county members in 1755, when the Jacobites guarded the hustings in Broad Street, twenty men deep, the Whigs passed through Exeter and succeeded in voting. The Vice-Chancellor, a strong Jacobite, remarked on “the infamous behaviour of one College”; and this led to a war of pamphlets. Christ Church, Exeter, Merton, and Wadham were the four Whig Colleges.

Early in the eighteenth century the front gate and tower and the buildings between this and the Hall were erected by the help of such friends as Narcissus Marsh, Archbishop of Armagh, formerly a Fellow. But in 1709 the library was burnt. The fire began “in the scrape-trencher’s room. This adjoining to the library, all the inner part of the library was destroyed, and only one stall of books or thereabouts secured.” The wind was west, and the smoke must have reached the nostrils of Hearne as he lay abed at St. Edmund Hall, for “he was strangely disturbed with apprehensions of fire.” The library was rebuilt in 1778, and had many gifts of books and manuscripts, and a fund for buying more was established by Dr. Hugh Shortridge.

When the time of religious revival came, John Wesley influenced some members of the College, such as Thomas Broughton (Fellow 1733-1741). During the present century other Fellows were noted in the Evangelical movement; and in the Tractarian movement the names of William Sewell, John Brande Morris, and John Dobree Dalgairns (better known as Father Dalgairns), were conspicuous.

Nor did the College lack among the fellows and scholars names in Science, such as Milman and Rigaud; or in Oriental Learning, as Kennicott and Weston; or in Classics and Literature, as Stackhouse and Upton; or in Law, as Judge Coleridge; or in Theology, as Forshall the editor of Wiclif’s Bible, and Milman, Bishop of Calcutta, and Jacobson, Bishop of Chester; while among its other members it counted Sir Gardner Wilkinson and Sir Charles Lyell. Of the living men who uphold the repute of the College, this is not the place to speak.

In 1854 the Commissioners threw the Fellowships open, and turned eight of them into scholarships, ten open, ten for the diocese of Exeter, and two for the Channel Islands. In the same year new buildings were begun facing Broad Street, and next year a library, and the year after a chapel and a rectory. Since the chapel absorbed the site of the former rector’s house (east of the old chapel), the new house was built on the site of St. Helen’s quadrangle. The liberality of the members was conspicuous on the occasion of these buildings. Stained-glass and carved oak stalls have been since given to the chapel, and some fine tapestry, representing the Visit of the Magi, executed by Burne Jones and William Morris, old members of the College.

Many changes have been made in old arrangements, but the foundation of the new scholarships carried out the real spirit of the Founder’s views, in passing men rapidly through a University training. It is hoped that Walter de Stapeldon would, if now living, approve of the care for educating scholars which he had so much at heart.

V.
ORIEL COLLEGE.

By C. L. Shadwell, M.A., Fellow of Oriel College.

Adam de Brome, the actual, though not the titular, founder of Oriel College, was at the beginning of the fourteenth century a well-endowed ecclesiastic, in the service of King Edward the Second. He held the living of Hanworth, Middlesex; he was Chancellor of Durham and Archdeacon of Stow; he held the office of almoner to the King; and in 1320 he was presented by the King to the Rectory of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford.

The College of Walter de Merton had then been in existence nearly half a century; and the type which he had created, a self-governing, independent society of secular students, well lodged and well endowed, was that to which the aims of the struggling foundations of William of Durham, Devorguilla of Balliol, and Bishop Stapeldon were directed. The poor masters established out of William of Durham’s fund, and now beginning to be known as the scholars of University Hall, were still subject to Statutes issued by the University, and had not yet attained to an independent position. It was not till 1340 that the scholars of the Lady Devorguilla were set free from the authority of extraneous Procuratores, and allowed to be governed by a Master of their own choosing. The office of Rector of Stapeldon Hall was an annual one; he was appointed by the scholars from among themselves, or if they disagreed, by the Chancellor of the University, and his principal duties were bursarial. But for the standard set by the completely organised House of Merton, the development of these infant societies might have taken a very different direction.

Adam de Brome appears to have chosen Merton as his model, and his foundation was from the first intended to be styled a College, a title perhaps till then exclusively enjoyed by Merton.[128]

By Letters Patent, dated at Langley, 20th April, 1324, he obtained the royal license to purchase a messuage in Oxford or its suburbs, and therein to establish “quoddam collegium scolarium in diversis scientiis studentium,” to be styled the College of St. Mary in Oxford, with power to acquire lands to the annual value of thirty pounds. In the course of the same year he purchased the advowson of the church of Aberford, in Yorkshire; and, in Oxford, Perilous Hall, in St. Mary Magdalen parish, and Tackley’s Inn in the High Street; and by his charter dated 6th December at Oxford, and confirmed by the King, 20th December, 1324, at Nottingham, he founded his College of scholars “in sacra theologia & arte dialectica studentium,” appointing John de Laughton as their Rector, and assigning to them Tackley’s Inn as their residence. This Society, if it ever came into actual existence at all, lasted only a little more than a twelvemonth; and on the first of January, 1325-6, its possessions were surrendered by Adam de Brome into the King’s hands, as a preliminary to its re-establishment under the King’s name. Edward the Second had already shown an interest in the maintenance of academical students at the sister University; and the scholars whom he supported there were the germ of the institution afterwards developed by his son under the name of King’s Hall. He also founded the Cistercian house at Oxford. He lent himself readily to the suggestion of his Almoner; and by his Letters Patent, dated at Norwich, 21st January, 1325-6, he refounded the College, with Adam de Brome as its head with the title of Provost, restoring the old endowments, further augmented by the grant of the advowson of St. Mary’s. Leave was given to appropriate the church to the use of the College on condition of maintaining four chaplains for the performance of daily service. License was given to take and hold lands in mortmain to the annual value of sixty pounds. The original statutes are dated on the same day as the charter of foundation. By these statutes, nearly all the provisions of which are taken verbatim from the Merton statutes of 1274, the College was to consist of a Provost, and ten scholars to be nominated in the first instance by Adam de Brome, and thereafter to be elected by the whole body. The ten first nominated were to study Theology; those elected in future were to study Arts and Philosophy, until they were allowed to pass to the study of Theology or (to the number of five or six out of ten) of Civil or Canon Law. The Provost was to be chosen by the whole body of scholars from among themselves and presented to the King’s Chancellor for admission. The second officer of the College was the Dean, corresponding to the Sub-Warden at Merton, filling the Provost’s place in his absence, and acting with him at all times in the College government. Provision was made, similar to that at Merton, for the appointment of other subordinate Deans, such as were established elsewhere and in later foundations; this power has however never been exercised, and the Dean of Oriel, alone of all who bear that title, is in power and dignity second only to the head of the College. The scholars were to be chosen from among Bachelors of Arts, without preference for any locality, place of birth, or kindred. Three chapters were to be held in the year, at the same times as those appointed at Merton, Christmas, Easter, and St. Margaret’s day, at which inquiry was to be made into the conduct of the members, and newly elected scholars were to be admitted.

The foundation was now in contemplation of law, complete. The new Society was a corporate body, having a license to hold land, and with a common seal.[129] It probably was at first established either in St. Mary’s Hall, the Manse or Rectory House of St. Mary’s Church, or in Tackley’s Inn, a large messuage in the High Street, on the site now occupied by the house No. 106.

But the College had not long been founded before Adam de Brome perceived that the protection afforded by the King’s name would be insufficient, unless he could also obtain the support of the Bishop of Lincoln, Henry de Burghash. The Bishop’s approbation of the foundation was not given until a new body of statutes had been drafted, differing in many important particulars from the Foundation Statutes, and placing the College under the control not of the Crown but of the Bishop. The Provost when elected is to be presented to the Bishop for approval or confirmation. Only three of the Fellows may be allowed to study Civil or Canon Law, all the rest being required to betake themselves to Theology. The Bishop is everywhere substituted for the King or his Chancellor; his approval is required for alterations in the statutes; the power of interpreting them on the occasion of any dispute is vested in him; and he is constituted the sole and final judge in the removal of a Provost or scholar for misconduct. Prayers are to be said for the Bishop’s father and mother, Robert Lord Burghash and Matilda his wife, his brothers Robert and Stephen, as well as for the King and Adam de Brome; the name of Hugh le Despenser is significantly omitted. These statutes were issued by the College 23rd May, and confirmed by the Bishop 11th June, 1326; the Bishop’s charter approving the foundation was first given on 13th March, but apparently was kept back until the constitution of the College had been settled to his satisfaction, and was only finally granted on 19th May. In the course of the same year the appropriation of the church of St. Mary was approved by the Bishop and the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln; and on Adam de Brome’s resignation, the College was duly inducted by the Prior of St. Frideswide (August 10).

By the close of the year the Queen’s party, to which Bishop Burghash belonged, had triumphed over the Despensers, the deposition of the King following in January 1327. The Bishop made use of the favour in which he stood with the new government to obtain some substantial benefits for the College which he had taken under his protection. The advowson of Coleby, Lincolnshire, purchased by Adam de Brome, was secured to the College by a Royal grant, with a view to its ultimate appropriation. The Hospital of St. Bartholomew, near Oxford, and of Royal foundation, was annexed to the College. The maintenance of the almsmen was provided by a charge on the fee farm rent of the city; but the possessions of the Hospital, consisting principally of tenements and rents in Oxford, went to augment the slender endowments of the College.[130] But the most important accession which the institution now received was by the grant of a messuage, called “La Oriole,” the nucleus of the site of the present College buildings. This messuage stood in St. John Baptist’s parish, fronting Schidyard Street and St. John Street, and occupying nearly the whole of the southern half of the present quadrangle; the south-east corner, the site of the present chapel, was not acquired till later. It had anciently been known as Senescal Hall, but had since acquired the name of La Oriole. Queen Eleanor, wife of Edward the First, had granted it to her chaplain and kinsman James of Spain, and the reversion was now (Dec. 1327) conferred upon the College. The life interest was surrendered in 1329, and the Society probably removed there in that year.[131]

The increase in the College revenues since its first establishment was probably the occasion of issuing some further supplementary statutes, 8th December, 1329. The commons or weekly allowance was raised from twelve to fifteen pence a week for each scholar. The stipend of the Provost was increased to ten marks. Ten shillings were allowed to the Dean; five shillings apiece to the two Fellows, “collectores reddituum,” who collected the income derived from the oblations in St. Mary’s Church, and the rents of house and other property in Oxford; five shillings to the collector of the Littlemore tithes; pittances were allowed to the Fellows at Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide. The Provost was allowed to keep a separate table, and to maintain a private servant. By a more important provision, ex-Fellows were made eligible to the office of Provost. These statutes were confirmed by the Visitor 26th Feb. 1330, and with those of May 1326, by Royal Letters Patent, 18th March, 1330.

The first chapter in the history of the College, recording the birth and establishment of Adam de Brome’s foundation, closes with the Papal Bulls ratifying and confirming the acts of the King and the Bishop, and authorising the appropriation of the three benefices of St. Mary’s, Aberford, and Coleby. These were obtained in answer to a letter of the King, dated 4th December, 1330, in which the design of the foundation is becomingly set forth. In a postscript to this letter the King calls the Pope’s attention to another matter, the inconvenience arising from the frequent occurrence of disturbances in St. Mary’s Church and Churchyard, arising from the gatherings that habitually took place there, and which led to “effusiones sanguinis” within the consecrated precincts, calling for the Bishop’s sentence of reconciliation. This was not always easily to be obtained, the Bishop being engaged elsewhere in his extensive diocese; and the King suggests that the Pope should authorise the Bishop to give a standing commission to the Abbots of Oseney and Rewley to act for him whenever occasion should require, and effect the necessary reconciliation. The Pope, having taken six months to consider this application, issued on the 23rd June, 1331, four separate Bulls, three of which provided for the appropriation to the College of the three churches, and the fourth dealt with the matter last referred to, the use of St. Mary’s Church for secular assemblies, but very differently from the King’s expectations. Instead of acceding to the proposal that a simple and expeditious machinery should be provided for the reconciliation of the Church, on the not unusual occurrence of a riot within its walls, he proceeded to forbid, under penalty of excommunication, the holding of any meetings whatever, “mercationes aliquas emendo vel vendendo seu conventiculas illicitas,” in the church or churchyard. The Bulls authorising the appropriations asked for were promptly put into execution, and the benefices secured to the College, though Aberford did not fall vacant till 1341, and Coleby not till 1346. But the fourth Bull was suffered to lie unemployed in the College custody, until an opportunity[132] arose in which it was thought likely to prove serviceable.

Adam de Brome died 16th June, 1332, on which day his obit. was long observed by the College. By his will, proved in the Mayor of Oxford’s Court, certain houses in Oxford—Moses Hall in Penyferthyng Street, and Bauer Hall in St. Mary Magdalen parish—which he had acquired for the further endowment of his College, were devised to Richard Overton, clerk, his executor. Overton may have been one of the Fellows; at all events he was intimately associated with Adam de Brome in the establishment of the College and in the acquisition of its endowments; and the property now left to him, and other property afterwards acquired, were all ultimately secured to Oriel.

Adam de Brome was succeeded in the Provostship by William de Leverton, Fellow and Master of Arts, unanimously elected by the College, and instituted by the Bishop, 27th June. Leverton died 21st Nov. 1348, and William de Hawkesworth, Doctor in Theology, was elected in his place. The Bishop annulled this election on the ground of informality, and himself appointed Hawkesworth to be Provost by his own authority.[133] Hawkesworth’s tenure of the Provostship was short, and it is chiefly memorable for the part he played in the disputed election to the Chancellorship of the University, which occurred early in 1349. Hawkesworth, who had already acted as the Chancellor’s Commissary, was the candidate of the Northerners, the party with which the College appears throughout to be connected; John Wylliot, Fellow of Merton, was the candidate of the Southerners. On the 19th of March 1349, Hawkesworth, as Chancellor, with his Proctors proceeded to St. Mary’s for the performance of Divine service, and they were there attacked by Wylliot and his party. It was then that Hawkesworth had recourse to the neglected Bull of Pope John XXII., which had hitherto lain unused in the College Treasury. It was now produced and publicly read in the Church, with what immediate result does not appear, though Wylliot’s action was complained of to the King, and a Commission sent to inquire into the matter. Hawkesworth’s death followed soon after, April 8th; he was buried in St. Mary’s, where an inscription still remains to his memory. Before the election of his successor, an order was received from the Bishop, prescribing the procedure to be followed, probably with the object of preventing the irregularities which had vitiated the last election. William de Daventre, who was now chosen, had been an active member of the College for some years; his name occurs frequently in deeds relating to the Oxford property. In 1361 the College found itself rich enough to obtain the King’s license to add to its possessions divers messuages and small pieces of ground in Oxford, which had been accumulating since the foundation, and which were, up to this time, held in the name of members of the society in trust. The earliest roll of College property, the rental for the year 1363-4, was drawn up shortly after the license had been obtained and acted upon; and as a consequence of this increase in their corporate revenues, a new ordinance or statute was issued in 1364, augmenting the weekly commons, and assigning additional stipends to the Provost, and to certain College servants.

Daventre died in June 1373, and was succeeded by John de Colyntre, then one of the Fellows, and for some years past one of its leading members. The entry of his election in the Lincoln Register records the names of the electing Fellows, eight besides Colyntre himself, and describes him in eulogistic language, “virum in spiritualibus et temporalibus plurimum circumspectum literarum sciencia vita et moribus merito commendandum scientem et valentem jura domus nostrae efficaciter prosequi et tueri quin immo propter vite sue munditiam et excellentiam virtutum apud omnes admodum gratiosum.” It was long before the Fellows were again as completely in harmony upon the choice of their head. Colyntre’s rule lasted till his death in 1385 or 1386.

All through the latter part of the fourteenth century the College was engaged in increasing its scanty endowment, by the purchase, as opportunity offered, of houses, quit-rents, and other property in Oxford, contiguous to or in the neighbourhood of La Oriole. The chantry of St. Mary in the church of St. Michael Southgate, founded by Thomas de la Legh, was annexed to the College in 1357; as was also the chantry of St. Thomas in the church of St. Mary the Virgin in 1392. Other acquisitions were secured by successive licenses in mortmain, granted in 1376, in 1392, and in 1394. In this way the greater part of the ground lying between La Oriole and St. Mary’s Hall was acquired and appropriated to the enlargement of the College buildings and garden.

The name of St. Mary’s College, the legal description of the College, seems to have been little used: the Society is sometimes described as the King’s Hall, or the King’s College, but it was more generally known by the old name of the mansion in which it was lodged. The first instance of the use of the name “Oriel” by the College itself in a formal document is in 1367; but it was no doubt a popular designation at a much earlier date.

In 1373 license was granted by the Bishop for the celebration of masses and other divine offices in a chapel constructed, or to be constructed, within the College. Previous to this the church of St. Mary had been resorted to for all purposes. The legends on the painted glass windows in this chapel, preserved by Wood, record its erection by Richard Earl of Arundel, and by his son Thomas Arundel, about the year 1379.

Next in importance for the society of students which Adam de Brome had founded, after providing them with a house to lodge in, a church or chapel to worship in, and means to maintain them, was books for them to study; and this he had, as he believed, secured in the infancy of the foundation, by acquiring the library which Thomas Cobham, Bishop of Worcester, had brought together, and which he had placed in the new building he had erected adjoining St. Mary’s Church. The building and the books placed in it were intended by the Bishop to be made over to the University for the use of all its students; but his intention was frustrated by his premature death; and his executors, finding his estate unequal to the payment of his debts and funeral expenses, were driven to pawn the books for the sum of fifty pounds. Adam de Brome, who, as Rector of the church, had allowed the building to be erected on his ground, pressed for the completion of the Bishop’s undertaking; and the executors, unable otherwise to help him, told him to go in God’s name, and redeem the books and hold them for the use of his College. Acting upon this permission, he redeemed the books, brought them to Oxford, and gave them, with the building which had been built for their reception, to his newly founded Society. This account of the transaction was not acquiesced in by the University; and in the Long Vacation of 1337, five years after Adam de Brome’s death, the Chancellor’s Commissary, at the head of a body of students, made forcible entry into the building, and carried off the books, the few Fellows who were then in residence not daring, as the College plaintively records, to offer any resistance. Thirty years later, proceedings were taken in the Chancellor’s Court to recover possession of the building itself; and notwithstanding an urgent petition of the College imploring the Bishop of Lincoln to interfere on its behalf, the University took possession, and established, in the upper story of what is still known as the Old Congregation House, the nucleus of its first library. The College continued for a long time to assert its claim; and it was not till 1410 that the dispute was finally set at rest. But although disappointed in this quarter, other donors and benefactors rapidly came forward to compensate the College for its loss. Adam de Brome probably gave largely. Master Thomas Cobildik appears in the earliest catalogue as the donor of a considerable part of the then recorded collection. William Rede, Bishop of Chichester, who died in 1385, left ten books to Oriel, and made a similar bequest to most of the then existing Colleges. Provost Daventre, who died in 1373, left the residue of his books to the College. Two Fellows, Elias de Trykyngham and John de Ingolnieles, whose names occur together in a deed of 1356, gave books which are still in the College library. In 1375 a catalogue was compiled, which is still preserved;[134] this comprises about one hundred volumes, arranged according to the divisions of academical study, the Arts, the Philosophies, and lastly, the higher departments of Law—Civil and Canon—and Theology.

The Society for whose use it was intended was still a small one; the number of Fellows remained, as Adam de Brome had left it, at no more than ten. The average tenure of a Fellowship was about ten years. The requirement to proceed to the higher faculties produced little result; either it was disregarded, or the Fellowship was vacated from other causes before the time came for obeying it. By the statutes a vacancy was caused by entering religion, obtaining a valuable benefice, or ceasing to reside and study in the College. Marriage must always have been reckoned as a variety of the last disqualification; and it is especially enumerated in a deed of 1395 reciting the various causes which might bring about the avoidance of a Fellowship.

The Provost, on the other hand, generally held his office till his death. This is the case during the whole of the first century of the College (1326-1425).

Besides the members of the corporate society, room appears to have been found in the Oriole for a few other members, graduates, scholars, bible-clerks, commensales. Thomas Fitzalan, or Arundel, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, is the most eminent name recorded in the fourteenth century.

It is perhaps worth while here to dispose of the claim of the College to be connected with the authorship of Piers Ploughman. The real name of the author of this remarkable poem was, no doubt, William Langlande; but a misunderstanding of a passage in the opening introduction led Stowe hastily to infer that it was written by one John Malverne; and a name something like this, John Malleson, or Malvesonere, occurring as that of one of the Fellows of Oriel in deeds of the year 1387 and subsequently, was sufficient ground for identification. It is enough now to say that the poem was not written by any John Malverne, and that no person of that name was ever Fellow of Oriel; that the only Fellow with a name at all resembling it first appears some time after the date of the poem (c. 1362); and that the internal evidence makes it highly improbable that the writer was ever at any University. There has been, however, this indirect advantage to the College, that, on the ground of its supposed connexion, a valuable MS. of the poem was presented to its library in the seventeenth century, which ranks among the best authorities for the text.

On the death of Provost Colyntre in 1386 began the first of a long series of disputes concerning the election of a head. The Fellows were divided in their choice between Dr. John Middleton, Fellow and Canon of Hereford, and Master Thomas Kirkton. Middleton had the support of five, Kirkton of four of the Fellows. An attempt was made, though whether before or after the election does not clearly appear, to deprive Master Ralph Redruth, B.D., of his Fellowship, though on appeal to the King he succeeded in retaining his place. Kirkton presented himself to the Bishop of Lincoln, and was confirmed. From the Bishop appeal was made to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and to the King. On the 18th of April, 1386, Letters Patent were issued, ordering two of the Fellows, John Landreyn, D.D., and Master Ralph Redruth, to assume the government of the College, pending the termination of the dispute; and by other letters of May 23rd, the Archbishop, Robert Rugge, Chancellor of the University, and John Bloxham, Warden of Merton, were commissioned to hear the parties and give final judgment and sentence. Under this commission some sentence may have been given in favour of Kirkton, though of this no record has been discovered. At all events the King’s Sergeant-at-arms was ordered, October 26th, to put him in peaceable possession of the Provostship. This order was again, January 4th, 1386-7, revoked by Letters Patent, reciting that Kirkton had before Arundel, then Chancellor and Bishop of Ely, renounced all his claims. Meanwhile the Archbishop had proceeded independently and more slowly. On the 4th of May he had commissioned Master John Barnet, official of the Court of Canterbury, and Master John Baketon, Dean of Arches, to hear Middleton’s appeal; and a like commission to Barnet alone was issued on the 21st of November. Under the last commission sentence was given in favour of Middleton, and an order was sent, 26th February, 1386-7, to the Chancellor of Oxford, and to John Landreyn for his due induction.

Middleton died at Hereford, 27th June, 1394, and was succeeded by John Maldon, M.A., B.M., and Scholar in Divinity, “nuper & in ultimis diebus consocius et conscolaris juratus.” In the record of the election in the Lincoln Register, the names of twelve other Fellows appear as electors. The most important memorial of his period of office now preserved is the Register of College muniments, compiled in 1397, perhaps under the hand of Thomas Leyntwardyn, Fellow, and afterwards Provost. This valuable record consists of a carefully arranged catalogue of all the deeds, charters, and muniments of title then in the College possession. Prefixed to the Register is a Calendar, noting the anniversaries, obits, and other days to be observed in the College in commemoration of its founders and benefactors. Maldon died early in 1401-2. By his will, dated January 21st, he made various bequests to the College, and to individual Fellows. One book, at least, belonging to him is still in the library.

Hitherto the materials for the history of the College have mainly consisted of the title-deeds relating to the property from time to time acquired, the purchases being in the first instance made in the names of a certain number of the Fellows, these again handing it on to some of their successors, until the College felt itself in a position to apply for a license in mortmain to enable it to hold the property in its corporate character. In this way it is possible to make out a tolerably full list of the early members of the College. From about the time of the compilation of the earliest Register, in 1397, this source of information is no longer very productive. Compared with the abundance of deeds of the fourteenth century, which are catalogued in the Register of 1397, the fifteenth century is singularly deficient. Fortunately, however, the want is supplied by other sources of information of more interest. The earliest book of treasurer’s accounts, still preserved, extends from 1409 to 1415. The income of the College was made up of the rents of Oxford houses, about £53; the tithes of its three churches, Aberford, Coleby, and Littlemore, belonging to St. Mary’s, about £35; and the proceeds of offerings in St. Mary’s Church, about £28. The net income, after deducting repairs and other outgoings on property, was between £80 and £90. The principal items of expenses were (1) the commons of the Provost and Fellows, at the rate of 1s. 3d. per week per head; (2) battells, the charge for allowances in meat and drink to other persons employed in and about the College, servants, journeymen, labourers, tilers, and the like, including also the entertainment of College visitors, the clergy of St. Mary’s, or the city authorities; (3) exceedings, “excrescentiae,” the cost incurred on any unusual occasion of College festivity, wine drunk on the feasts of Our Lady, pittances distributed among the members of the College on certain prescribed days, and similar extraordinary expenses. The amounts expended are accurately recorded for each week, the week ending, according to the practice which continues at Oriel to the present day, between dinner and supper on Friday. The total of these charges amounted to about £40. The stipends of the Provost and of the College officers, the payments to the Vicar of St. Mary’s and the four chaplains, the wages of College servants, and the ordinary cost of the College fabric, are the principal other items of expenditure.

In 1410, the long-standing dispute with the University as to Cobham’s library was set at rest, through the mediation of Archbishop Arundel. Not long afterwards a sum of money was raised by contributions from members of the College, and from parishioners of St. Mary’s, for renewing the internal fittings of the church, the University giving £10 pro choro. On the completion of the work, the Chancellor and the whole congregation of regents and non-regents were regaled with wine, at a cost of eight shillings, including oysters for the scrutineers.

It would not be easy to discover in the dry pages of the College accounts, any indication of the domestic quarrels which at this time violently divided the Society. The attempts made by the Archbishop, with the support of the King, to suppress the Lollard doctrines, aroused considerable opposition in the University. In 1395, Pope Boniface IX. had issued a Bull, in answer to a petition from the University, by which the Chancellor was confirmed as the sole authority over all its members, to the exclusion of all archbishops and bishops in England. This Bull, though welcome to the majority of the Congregation, consisting largely of Masters of Arts, was resisted by the higher faculties, and especially by the Canonists; and the King, at the instance of the Archbishop, compelled the University, by the threat of withdrawing all its privileges, to renounce the exemption. Another burning question was the condemnation of the heretical doctrines of Wycliffe. Under considerable pressure from Archbishop Arundel, the University appointed twelve examiners to search Wycliffe’s writings, and extract from them all the erroneous conclusions which deserved condemnation. This task was performed in 1409; but the recalcitrant party among the residents continued to throw considerable difficulty in the way of the Archbishop’s wishes; and Oriel seems to have been an active centre of resistance. In 1411, the Archbishop visited the University, with the double object of asserting his metropolitical authority, which had been threatened by the Papal Bull of exemption, and of crushing out the Lollard heresies. He was not immediately successful; but he had behind him the support of the King, and by the end of the year the obnoxious Bull was revoked, and order was restored. It was probably after this settlement that an enquiry was held at Oriel into the conduct of some of the Fellows who had taken an active part in opposition. William Symon, Robert Dykes, and Thomas Wilton, all Northerners, are charged with being stirrers up and fomenters of discord between the nations; they frequent taverns day and night, they come into College at ten, eleven, or twelve at night, and if they find the gate locked, climb in over the wall. Wilton wakes up the Provost from his sleep, and challenges him to come out and fight. On St Peter’s Eve, 1411, when the College gate was shut by the Provost’s order, he went out with his associates, attacked the Chancellor in his lodgings, and slew a scholar who was within. One witness deposed to seeing him come armed into St. Mary’s Church, and when his sword fell out of his hand, crying out, “There wyl nothing thryve wyt me.” In support of the charge that Oriel College suffered in reputation by reason of the misbehaviour of its Fellows, Mr. John Martyll, then Fellow, deposes that many burgesses of Oxford and the neighbourhood are minded to confiscate the College lands, rents, and tenements. Upon these general charges of domestic misconduct, follow others against Symon and against Master John Byrche of more public importance. Byrche was Proctor in 1411, and Symon in 1412.[135] Both appear to have taken an active part in opposing the attempt of the Chancellor and the Archbishop to correct the ecclesiastical and doctrinal heresies of the University. Byrche as Proctor contrived to carry in the Great Congregation a proposal to suspend the power of the twelve examiners appointed to report on Wycliffe’s heresies; and when the Chancellor met this by dissolving the Congregation, Byrche next day summoned a Small Congregation, and obtained the appointment of judges to pronounce the Chancellor guilty of perjury, and by this means frightened him into resigning his office. When the Archbishop arrived for his visitation, Byrche and Symon held St. Mary’s Church against him, and setting his interdict at naught, they opened the doors, rang the bells, and celebrated high mass. When summoned in their place in College to renounce the Papal Bull of Exemption, they declined to follow the example of their elders and betters, and flatly refused to comply.

Upon these charges a number of witnesses were examined; some, possibly townsmen, giving evidence as to the disturbances in the streets between the Northern and Southern nations; others, notably John Possell, the Provost, Mr. John Martyll, and Mr. Henry Kayll, Fellows, Mr. Nicholas Pont, and Mr. John Walton, speaking to the occurrences in College and in the Convocation House. It does not seem that any very serious results followed from the inquiry; Symon, and a young bachelor Fellow, Robert Buckland, against whom no specific charge was made, confessed themselves in fault; as to the others, nothing more is recorded. A number of further charges were prepared against a still more important member of the College, the Dean, John Rote (or Root), who by his connivance, and by his refusal to support the Provost’s authority, made himself partaker in the misconduct of the younger Fellows, and was justly held to be the “root” of all the evil. Such was the weight of his character in College, that none would venture to go against his opinion; his refusing to interfere, his sitting still and saying nothing when these enormities were reported to the Provost, was a direct encouragement to the offenders. At other times, in Hall, and in the company of the Fellows, he uttered the rankest Lollardism. “Are we to be punished with an interdict on our church for other people’s misdoings? Truly it shall be said of the Archbishop, ‘The devil go with him and break his neck.’ The Archbishop would better take care what he is about. He tried once before to visit the University, and was straightway proscribed the realm. I have heard him say, ‘Do you think that Bishop beyond the sea’—meaning the Pope—‘is to give away my benefices in England? No, by St. Thomas.’” What was this but the battle-cry of the new sect, “Let us break their bonds asunder, and cast away their cords from us”? But no evidence was offered on these charges, and Root remained undisturbed in his College eminence.

Possell, who is stated to have been sixty years of age at the time of the commission of enquiry, seems to have died in September 1414; and the proceedings which followed further illustrate the divided condition of the College. A prominent candidate for the Provostship was Rote, already conspicuous for his outspoken Lollardism, and who, by his adversaries’ own admissions, was of far more weight and influence in the College than the old and timid Provost. An election was held, seemingly in the following October, at which he was chosen; and he obtained confirmation from the Bishop of Lincoln on November 17th. But the validity of the proceedings was at once contested by Mr. John Martyll, one of the Fellows, on the ground of want of notice; and Rote’s claim to the office was kept in suspense, pending an appeal to Rome. From the College accounts, the payments due to the Provost seem to have been made to Rote, under a salvo, pending the appeal. Archbishop Courtenay, who had lately succeeded Arundel, interfered, and summoned the parties before him at Lambeth, where on 14th February, 1415, Rote renounced his claims. A new election took place, at which Dr. William Corffe was chosen; and he was confirmed by the Bishop of Lincoln, on the 16th of March following, by John Martyll, his proxy. He appears then to have been absent from England, representing the University at the Council of Constance. From this embassy he perhaps never returned; the proceedings of the Council record him as present in June 1415; and a note in a MS. in the College library states that he died at Constance. His name occurs as Provost in a deed dated 14th May, 1416; and he is mentioned as “in remotis agens” 3rd April, 1417. His death may be presumed to have occurred about September 1417.

The period from 1429 to 1476, during which the College was under the rule of its four great provosts—John Carpenter, Walter Lyhert, John Hals, and Henry Sampson—was one of exceptional brilliance and prosperity. Hitherto the College had been one of the most slenderly endowed; but during this period a stream of benefactions flowed in upon it, which materially altered its position. The first and most considerable addition which it received was the legacy of John Frank, Master of the Rolls, who left the sum of £1000 for the support of four additional Fellows. The money was judiciously invested in the purchase of the Manor of Wadley, near Faringdon, once the property of the Abbey of Stanley, Wilts, and which had lately been forfeited to the Crown. This property was acquired in 1440, and the statute providing for the enlargement of the Foundation is dated 13th May, 1441. The adjoining estate of Littleworth was purchased some time later by Hals, then Bishop of Lichfield, and also given to the College. The manors of Dene and Chalford,[136] in the parishes of Spelsbury and Enstone, Oxon, were acquired by Carpenter, who had become Bishop of Worcester in 1443, and were given by his will to the College, for the support of a Fellow from the diocese of Worcester. Somewhat later William Smyth, Bishop of Lincoln, and afterwards one of the founders of Brasenose College, founded another Fellowship for his own diocese, and endowed the College with the manor of Shenington, near Banbury. The last considerable addition to the College property was made by Richard Dudley, sometime Fellow, who in 1525 gave the manor of Swainswick, near Bath, to maintain two Fellows. The whole of these new endowments, which exceed many times over the value of the original possessions of the College, were acquired in a period of less than a hundred years, and they are the lasting memorial of what until recent times must be considered the most splendid period in the College history.

By these benefactions the number of Fellows, fixed at ten in the Foundation Statutes, was raised to eighteen, at which it remained down to the changes of recent times. Four of these, founded by John Frank, were to be chosen out of the counties of Wilts, Dorset, Somerset, and Devon; one, founded by Bishop Carpenter, from the diocese of Worcester; and one, founded by Bishop Smyth, from the diocese of Lincoln. The two Fellowships founded by Dudley were not made subject to any restriction; but the College bound itself, in acknowledgment of Carpenter’s benefaction, to assign one of the original Fellowships also to the diocese of Worcester. This provision was repealed in 1821. There were therefore from the reign of Henry VIII. onwards seven Fellowships limited in the first instance to certain counties and dioceses, and eleven which were subject to no restriction. And there never grew up at any time any class of junior members of the Foundation, entitled by statute or custom to succeed to Fellowships, or indeed any class whatever, corresponding to the scholars, postmasters or demies, to be found at most other Colleges. Certain Exhibitions were indeed established by Bishop Carpenter and Bishop Lyhert, and charged upon lands given by them to St. Anthony’s Hospital in London. Others, again, were founded by Richard Dudley. But neither the Exhibitions of St. Anthony nor the Dudley Exhibitions ever grew to the least importance. The small stipends originally assigned to them were never increased; and with the change in the value of money, they sank into complete insignificance.

New statutes to regulate these additions to the Foundation were enacted in 1441, 1483, and in 1507. From another statute in 1504 dates the establishment of the College Register, which thenceforward becomes the sole authentic record of the history of the College. This Register is directed to be kept not by the Provost, but by the Dean; and a similar practice was established about the same time in several other Colleges, such as Merton, where the Register begins in 1482, Magdalen, Brasenose, and others. It was probably thought that the duty would be better discharged by a subordinate officer, who could be called to account by his superior, than by the Head himself, whose negligence it was no one person’s business to correct. The Oriel Register, though first instituted by the statute of 1504, contains also the record of some transactions of earlier date; and the statute was probably intended to put upon a regular footing a practice which had already begun, and which was found to be of service. If this Register had been employed as the statute directed, in recording “omnia acta et decreta, per Praepositum et Scholares capitulariter facta,” it would be invaluable for the history of the College; but unfortunately the tendency soon showed itself to confine the entries to a limited number of cases, such as the elections and admissions of the Provost and Fellows, and to leave unnoticed many matters belonging to the ordinary daily life of the Society, for the insertion of which no exact precedent was found. When at a later time the character of the College changed from a small Society of graduate students to an educational institution, receiving undergraduate members, scarcely any notice is to be discovered in the Register which betrays the existence of tutors or pupils, or of any other members of the Society besides the Provosts and Fellows.

Another important source of information is the series of Treasurer’s accounts, known as the Style. These begin in 1450, almost immediately after the election of Provost Sampson, and the plan then introduced, of which he may possibly have been the author, has lasted in unbroken continuity to the present time. For some time this account records the whole of the pecuniary transactions of the College; but after the act of Elizabeth (18 Eliz. c. 6) came into operation, and the surplus revenue of each year became divisible among the Provost and Fellows, the practice soon established itself of excluding from both sides of the account items of a novel or exceptional character. The rents of the College estates are given in the fullest detail; but no mention is made of the fines taken on the renewal of leases, although these began very early to form an important part of the College revenue. The whole of the domestic side of the account, the charges upon members outside the Foundation, and the cost of their maintenance, the fees paid by undergraduates to tutors and College officers, servants’ wages, and other similar items, are nowhere noticed. When in the seventeenth century the whole fabric of the College was pulled down and rebuilt, it would be difficult to find in the pages of the Style any entry which would give a hint that any unusual outlay was in progress.

The century which followed the resignation of Provost Sampson in 1475, presents very little of general interest. At the visitation of the College by Atwater, Bishop of Lincoln, in 1520, among other matters of minor consequence, occurs the first recorded instance of an abuse which was probably then and for long afterwards not unfrequent. Thomas Stock had resigned his Fellowship in favour of John Throckmorton, keeping back his resignation until he was sure that Throckmorton would be elected. “Hoc potest trahi in exemplum perniciosum. Ita quod in posterum socii resignabunt loca sua quibus voluerint. Dominus injunxit ne deinceps aliquis talia faceret in electionibus ibidem.” The Injunctions of Bishop Longland, following on his visitation in 1531, seem to show a growing laxity of discipline. The Provost, then Thomas Ware, is admonished to be personally resident in the College, and to attend more diligently to his duties. The Bachelors are to observe the regular hours of study in the library at night, and not to introduce strangers into their sleeping-rooms. The new classical learning (“recentiores literae, lingua Latina, et opera poetica”) is not to be pursued to the prejudice of the older studies, the “Termini Doctorum antiquorum.” The disputations and exercises are to be kept up as in former times; the Provost, Dean, and senior masters are to attend the disputations, and to be ready to solve the doubtful points. No Fellow is to go out of residence without the leave of the Provost or the Dean, and then only for a limited time, whether in term or vacation. The vacant Fellowships are to be filled up in a month’s time, and no Fellowship to remain vacant in future longer than one month.

Fifteen years later another set of Injunctions was issued by the same Bishop. The Fellows are again enjoined to be diligent in their studies, giving themselves to philosophy for three years following their admission, and then going on to divinity. The unseemly behaviour of Mr. Edmund Crispyne calls for special reprimand; he is to give up blasphemy and profane swearing; he is not to let his beard grow, or to wear plaited shirts, or boots of a lay cut; he is to be respectful and obedient to the Provost and Dean, on pain of excommunication and deprivation of his Fellowship. Mention is made of St. Mary Hall as a place of education under the control of the College, but distinct from it. The door opening from the College into the Hall is to be walled up, and no communication between the two to be allowed henceforth. The College is to appoint a fit person to be Principal of the Hall, who is to provide suitable lectures for the instruction of the students there.

The Reformation makes but little mark in the recorded history of the College. No difficulty was met with by the King’s Commissioner, Dr. Cox, when he came in 1534 to require the acknowledgment of the Royal supremacy. Four years later came the orders for depriving Becket of the honours of saintship, and for removing his name from all service-books. The thoroughness with which these orders were carried out is remarkably illustrated at Oriel, where even in so obscure a place as the Calendar prefixed to the Register of College Muniments, the days marked for the observance of St. Thomas have been carefully obliterated. There was, however, one member of Oriel, Edward Powell, who distinguished himself by his opposition to the King’s policy. He had been Fellow of the College from about 1495 to 1505; afterwards he became Canon of Salisbury, and also held other ecclesiastical preferments. On the first appearance of Luther’s writings he was selected by the University as one of the defenders of orthodoxy, and recommended as such to the King. When, however, the question of the King’s divorce arose, Powell was retained by Queen Katherine as her ablest advocate; and from that time he was conspicuous by his resistance to the King. In 1540 he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Smithfield for denying the Royal supremacy, and for refusing to take the oath of succession.

In the pages of the College Register the affairs of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital play a much more important part than any changes in religion. It was in 1536 that the long-standing dispute between the College and the City respecting the payment appropriated to the support of the almsmen was finally settled. The charge, £23 0s. 5d., out of the fee farm rent of the town, had been granted by Henry I. on the first establishment of the Hospital; but ever since the annexation to the College by Edward III., great difficulty had been experienced in obtaining punctual payment. Charters confirming the charge had been obtained from nearly every sovereign through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; but the City persevered in disputing its liability. In 1536 both parties agreed to stand to the award of two Barons of the Exchequer, and by their decision the payment was settled at the reduced amount of £19 a year, and the nomination of the almsmen was transferred to the city.

On the resignation of Provost Haynes in 1550, the King’s Council endeavoured to procure the election of Dr. William Turner, a prominent Protestant divine, honourably known as one of the fathers of English Botany. The Fellows, perhaps anticipating interference, held their election on the day of Haynes’ resignation, and chose Mr. John Smyth, afterwards Margaret Professor of Divinity. Smyth was promptly despatched to the Bishop of Lincoln for confirmation, and on his return to the College was duly installed Provost. Some days afterwards the Dean was summoned to attend the Council and to give an account of the College proceedings. His explanations were apparently accepted, and no further action was taken. Smyth retained his place through all the changes of religion under Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth. On his resignation in 1565, Roger Marbeck of Christchurch, and Public Orator, was chosen, although not statutably qualified, having never been a Fellow. It is possible, though not hinted at in the account of the election, that he was recommended either by the Queen or by some other powerful personage; and a dispensation was obtained from the Visitor authorising a departure from the regulations of the Statutes. Marbeck held the office only two years, and was succeeded by John Belly, Provost 1566 to 1574.

The long reign of the next Provost, Anthony Blencowe, covers the period of transition from the old to the new era. The College of the medieval type consisted of the Fellows only. Already Bachelors of Arts at the time of their election, they carried on their studies under the direction of the Head and seniors, proceeding to the higher degrees, and ultimately passing from Oxford to ecclesiastical employment elsewhere. William of Wykeham had indeed made one important innovation on the type which Walter de Merton had created; for the younger members of his foundation were admitted direct from school, and only obtained their first University degree after they had been some years at College. The example of New College was followed at Magdalen and Corpus; but in these cases, as at New College, the admission of undergraduates was only introduced as part of the regulations for members of the Foundation, and it was not in contemplation to make the College a school for all comers. No doubt a few extranei, graduate or undergraduate, were occasionally admitted to share the Fellows’ table, and to profit by their advice and companionship; but the bulk of the younger students remained outside the Colleges, lodging in the numerous Halls in the town, and subject only to the discipline of the University. Instances of such extranei are Thomas Arundel, already mentioned as a member of Oriel in the fourteenth century; Henry, Prince of Wales, afterwards Henry V., at Queen’s College; Doctor Thomas Gascoigne, who at different times resided at Oriel, at Lincoln, and at New College. This class survived to recent times in the Fellow commoners, or gentlemen commoners, whose connexion with the Colleges is historically older than the more numerous and important class of commoners, which has overshadowed and ultimately extinguished them. It is worth observing that the three Colleges of William of Wykeham’s type, New College, Magdalen, and Corpus, although they received gentlemen commoners, did not admit ordinary commoners until the changes which followed on the University Commission of 1854. All Souls has remained to the present day a College of Fellows alone.

The religious changes of the sixteenth century were followed by great alterations in the discipline of the University. Acting on pressure from without, a Statute was passed in 1581 requiring all matriculated students to reside in a College or Hall. The old Halls had nearly all disappeared; of the few remaining most were connected more or less closely with one of the Colleges. Queen’s College claimed, and was successful in retaining, St. Edmund’s Hall. Merton had purchased Alban Hall in the earlier part of the century. Magdalen Hall was dependent on Magdalen College. The connexion between Oriel and St. Mary Hall was older and closer than any. The Principal was, invariably, chosen or appointed from among the Fellows. The holders of the small Exhibitions founded by Bishop Carpenter and Dr. Dudley were lodged not in the College but in the Hall; in times of plague the members of the Hall were allowed to remove to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, for a purer air. In the census of the University, taken in 1572, Oriel appears to have numbered forty-two members; of these the Provost and Fellows account for nineteen; three were servants; the remaining twenty, one of whom may be perhaps identified with Sir Walter Raleigh, represent the favoured class of extranei, of which we have already spoken. In the same year the members of St. Mary Hall numbered forty-six. The next half century sees this proportion completely reversed. The matriculations at Oriel from 1581 to 1621 average a little over ten a year; those at St. Mary Hall sink to five. The control over the Hall was taken away by the Chancellor, Lord Leicester, though the College might well have made out as good a claim as that successfully asserted by Queen’s College over St. Edmund’s Hall. But the Principals continued to be chosen from among Fellows of Oriel down to the time of the Commonwealth.

As has been already stated, the Register contains but few notices from which it could be gathered that any great change in the character of the College took place at this time. In 1585 the Provost admonishes the Fellows as to the behaviour of their scholars, and they are ordered to be responsible to the butler for the battels of their scholars or pupils. In 1594 an order was made that no Fellow should have more than one poor scholar under the name of batler. In 1595 the Dean is invested with the power of catechising. In 1606 one of the Fellows is appointed public catechist for the instruction of the youth, as required by University Statute. In 1624 a Mr. Jones, not a Fellow, is appointed, on his own application, Praelector in Greek. A Register of the admission of commensales, that is the members of the higher order only, or Fellow commoners, was begun in 1596, and continued to 1610. It contains eighteen names only, the first being that of Robert Pierrepont, afterwards Earl of Kingston. With this exception the admissions into the College have to be collected from the University Matriculation Register, supplemented from about 1620 by the Caution Book.

It was this enlargement of its numbers that made it necessary for the College to take in hand the question of rebuilding the fabric in a manner suitable to the new requirements. The buildings then existing had been erected at different times, and had gradually been brought into the form of a quadrangle, occupying the site of the older part of the present College. These are shown in Neale’s drawing, made in 1566. The chapel on the south side was that built by Richard, Earl of Arundel, about 1373. The Hall on the north side had been rebuilt about the year 1535, partly by the contributions of former Fellows. Provost Blencowe died in 1618, and was succeeded by Mr. William Lewis, Chaplain to Lord Bacon, and afterwards Master of St. Cross, and Prebendary of Winchester. Lewis’ election was not unanimous, and though he was duly presented to the Bishop of Lincoln and confirmed by him, he thought it necessary to obtain a further ratification of his title from his patron. This proceeding is remarkable, as it is almost the solitary instance in which the original statutes of January 1326, superseded almost immediately after their issue by the Lincoln statutes of May in the same year, were quoted or acted upon. The Chancellor, assuming cognizance of the case as of an election in discord, pronounced in favour of Lewis, and by an order entered in the College Register and authenticated by his own hand, confirmed Lewis in his place. Lewis held the office for three years only, during which time, however, the design of the new building was determined upon, and the first part completed. Blencowe had left the sum of £1300 to be applied in the first instance to the west side—“the primaria pars Collegii.” This was undertaken in 1619, and in the following year the south side was also taken down and rebuilt. Besides Blencowe’s legacy, £300 was forthcoming from a College fund, and plate was sold to the value of £90. The College groves at Stowford and Bartlemas supplied some of the timber; the stone came from the College quarry at Headington. Timber was also sold from other College estates. But it was in obtaining contributions from former members, and from great people connected with Oriel, that Provost Lewis’ talent was most remarkable. His skill in writing letters—“elegant, in a winning, persuasive way”—was long quoted as an example to other heads of Colleges. This “art, in which he excelled,” had recommended him to Lord Bacon, and it was by his patron’s advice that he employed it in the service of the College. Among those whom he laid under contribution were the Earl of Kingston and Sir Robert Harley, whose arms are still to be seen in the windows of the Hall. Lewis resigned the Provostship in 1621, and was succeeded by John Tolson. The completion of the new quadrangle was postponed for some years, though the design had probably been determined on from the first. In 1636 large sums of money were again raised by contributions from present and former members, and the north and east sides of the quadrangle were erected.

The plan of the new College is in its main features similar to that of Wadham, erected 1613, and of University, which was built some years after Oriel. In all of these the chapel and hall stand together opposite to the gateway, and form one side of a quadrangle. The other three sides are of uniform height, consisting of three stories, containing chambers for the Fellows and other members. In Oriel the library occupied a part of the upper story on the north side. The hall is approached by a flight of steps under a portico on the centre of the east side; above this portico are the figures of the Virgin and Child, to whom the College is dedicated, and of King Edward II., the founder, and King Charles I. in whose reign it was set up. Round the portico ran the legend in stone—“Regnante Carolo.” By an unaccountable blunder, this last figure has been described in all accounts of the College as being that of King Edward III.; but there can be no doubt, both from the dress and from the features, that it represents King Charles, and no one else. Over the doorways round the quadrangle were stone shields bearing the arms of the four great benefactors—Frank, Carpenter, Smyth, and Dudley, and of the three Provosts—Blencowe, Lewis, and Tolson—under whom the new building was planned and executed. Blencowe’s are also to be seen in the treasury in the tower, and upon the College gate. The whole building was completed in 1642, when the chapel was first used for divine service.

This great work had scarcely been completed when the Civil War broke out. In January 1642-3, the King being at Oxford, the College plate was demanded: 29 lbs. 0 oz. 5 dwt. of gilt, and 52 lbs. 7 oz. 14 dwt. of white plate was given, the College retaining only its founder’s cup, and two other small articles—a mazer bowl and a cocoa-nut cup, believed to have been the gift of Bishop Carpenter. A few days afterwards a weekly contribution of £40 was assessed upon the Colleges and Halls for the expenses of fortifying the city; the charge upon Oriel was fixed at £1. This charge was joyfully acquiesced in by the College, “ita quod faxit Deus Musae una cum Rege suo contra ingrassantes hostium turmas tutius agant ac felicius.” But these hopes were not to be realised; and the hardships of the siege soon came to tell heavily on the College finances. The high price of provisions, the difficulty of getting in rents, the debts incurred for the College building, must have seriously crippled their resources; and grievous complaints of their inability to complete the October audit occur in the years 1643, 1644, and 1645. In the last of these years extraordinary expedients had to be resorted to in order to maintain even the common table; leases were renewed or promised in reversion on almost any terms; the Oxford tenants were solicited to pay their rents in advance, on the promise of considerate treatment at their next renewal; all the timber at Bartlemas was felled at one stroke and converted into money. Even these heroic remedies were inadequate; and in March 1645-6 the commons’ allowance was reduced to one-half, and the elections to vacant Fellowships suspended. The surrender of the city to the Parliament in the summer of 1646 must have been felt as a great relief. From that time, although the times were not altogether prosperous, the distress of the years of siege never reappeared with the same acuteness. The numbers of the undergraduate members, which had sunk to almost nothing, soon revived; and the College was able to build a Ball Court for their diversion in the back part of their premises. The Hospital of St. Bartholomew was rebuilt in 1651. Although now converted to other uses, this good gray stone house, with its eight chambers for the eight almsmen, still stands and bears its history on its face. On the several doorways, and also on the chapel, which, though not rebuilt, was refitted and beautified, are the date of the work, and the initials of the College,[137] the Provost, and the Treasurers.

The Parliamentary Visitation which descended upon Oxford in the year following the siege dealt on the whole very tenderly with Oriel. It is possible that Prynne, an old Oriel man, who was an active member of the London Committee, may have stood its friend. The answers of the Provost and Fellows to the Visitors’ questions were in almost every case such as merited expulsion; but in the result only five Fellows were removed, and of these two were soon afterwards allowed to return to their place. Two Fellowships were suspended by the Visitors’ order, in order to pay off the debts under which the College lay. Others were filled up by the Visitors or the London Committee during the years 1648 and 1652. After the latter year no further interference seems to have taken place, and on the death of Saunders, in 1652-3, Robert Say was elected in the accustomed form, and admitted without any confirmation from external authority. He held office till 1691, when he died after a long but uneventful reign of nearly forty years.

Of the Fellows of the College during the seventeenth century, not many achieved any distinction. Humphrey Lloyd, elected Fellow in 1631, and removed by the Visitors in 1648, became Bishop of Bangor. William Talbot, successively Bishop of Oxford, Salisbury, and Durham; Sir John Holt, who, after the Revolution, became Lord Chief Justice of England; and Sir William Scroggs, one of his predecessors, who gained an unenviable reputation in the political trials which arose out of the Popish Plot, were educated at Oriel, but were not Fellows. The most eminent name among the Fellows is undoubtedly John Robinson, Bishop of Bristol and afterwards of London, Lord Privy Seal, and the chief negotiator of the Peace of Utrecht. Soon after his election in 1675, he obtained leave to reside abroad, as chaplain to the English Minister at Stockholm. His benefactions to the College will be more conveniently mentioned later. With these exceptions the list of Fellows contains very few eminent names; and the same remark continues to be true in the main throughout the eighteenth century. The truth probably is that the system of election to Fellowships was tainted with corruption. Buying and selling of places was a common practice in the age of the Restoration, and it has survived to our own time in the army. In many Colleges this evil was to some extent kept in check by the establishment of a regular succession from Scholars to Fellows; but at Oriel, as has been already observed, the choice of the electors was absolutely free, and, valuable as this freedom may be when honestly exercised, it is capable of leading to corruption of the worst kind. In 1673 a complaint was made to the Bishop of Lincoln, the Visitor, by James Davenant, Fellow, against the conduct of the Provost at a recent election. The Bishop issued a commission to the Vice-Chancellor (Peter Mews, Bishop of Bath and Wells), Dr. Fell (Dean of Christ Church), and Dr. Yates (Principal of Brasenose), to visit the College. The conduct of the business seems to have been chiefly in Fell’s hands; and in his letters to the Bishop he expresses in strong terms his opinion of the state of things he found in Oriel. He writes, 1st Aug. 1673—“When this Devil of buying & selling is once cast out your Lordship will I hope take care that he return not again lest he bring seven worse than himself into the house after ’tis swept and garnisht.” He recommends various regulations for checking the evil; among them that the election be by the major part of the whole Society, “else ’twill always be in the Provost’s power to watch his opportunity & when the house is thin strike up an election”; also that the successor be immediately admitted, “for there is a cheat in some houses by keeping the successor out for a good while after the election.” The Bishop on this report issued a decree, 24th Jan., 1673-4, prescribing the proceeding in elections. Not to be baffled, the Provost, Say, hit upon the ingenious device of obtaining a Royal letter of recommendation for the candidate whose election he desired, and a letter was sent in favour of Thomas Twitty for the next vacancy. He was probably elected and admitted upon this recommendation; though the Vice-Chancellor refused to allow him to subscribe as Fellow. The Bishop made his remonstrances at Court, and obtained the withdrawal of the King’s letter, and Twitty’s election was annulled before it had been entered in the College Register. The Provost seems to have written an insolent letter to the Bishop, such (says Fell) “as in another age a valianter man would not have written to a Visitor.” Fell goes on—“Though I am afraid that with a very little diligence the being a party to Twitty’s proceedings may be made out, yet it will not be safe to animadvert on that act, however criminal, as a fault, for notwithstanding the present concession, the Court will never endure to have the prerogative of laying laws asleep called in question. As to the letter I think ’twill be much the best way not to answer it. It is below the dignity of a Visitor to contest in empty words. If the Provost goes on with his Hectoring ’tis possible he may run himself so in the briers that ’twill not be easy for him to get out.”

The regulations of Bishop Fuller were more fully established by a statute made by the College with the Visitor’s approval in 1721, when the day of election was fixed to the Friday in Easter week, and the examination on the Thursday before. But new disputes had already begun which led to unexpected but most important consequences. At the Fellowship election in July 1721, Henry Edmunds, of Jesus, the hero of the ensuing struggle, received the votes of nine Fellows against those of three other Fellows and the Provost. The Provost rejected Edmunds and admitted his own candidate. Edmunds appealed to the Visitor, who upheld the Provost. On the Friday after Easter, 1723, Edmunds stood again, and he and four other candidates were chosen by a majority of the electors into the five vacant Fellowships. The Provost refused to admit them, and was again upheld by the Visitor, who claimed that the right of filling up the vacancies had devolved upon himself. Three places he proceeded to fill up at once; as to the other two he seems to have been in consultation with the Provost as to his choice, but not to have made any nomination. At the election in the following April 1724, two candidates received the votes of eight of the Fellows, against the votes of the Provost and of one other Fellow only, Mr. Joseph Bowles. The Provost as before refused to admit them. Edmunds now brought his action in the Common Pleas on behalf of himself and his four companions, claiming to have been legally elected. He took his stand on the original Foundation Statutes of January 1326, and claimed that the Crown and not the Bishop of Lincoln was the true and lawful Visitor of the College. These statutes, as has been already mentioned, were superseded within six months of their issue, and although in a few rare instances, questions had been brought before the King or his Chancellor, the Visitatorial authority of the Bishop had never before been disputed, but had been repeatedly exercised and acquiesced in for four hundred years. The case was tried at bar, before Chief Justice Eyre, and the three puisne judges, and a special jury; and on the 14th May, 1726, judgment was given in Edmunds’ favour. The authority of the statutes of Jan. 1326 was established, and the Crown declared to be the sole Visitor. Edmunds and his four co-plaintiffs, as also the two candidates chosen in 1724, were admitted to their Fellowships in July 1726 by the Dean, the Provost refusing, on the ingenious plea that if the Crown was Visitor, it was for the Crown and not for the Common Pleas to decide on the validity of the election.

Dr. Carter died in September 1727, and notwithstanding his disagreement with the Fellows, he showed his affection for the College by leaving to it his whole residuary estate. He had already, by the help of Bishop Robinson, obtained the annexation to his office of a prebend at Rochester, and he provided for its further endowment by leaving £1000 for the purchase of a living to be held by the Provost. With this money the living of Purleigh, in Essex, was bought in 1730. Hitherto the Provostship had been but scantily endowed. The Parliamentary Visitors in 1648 had scheduled it as one of the Headships that required augmentation. The fixed stipend and the allowances prescribed by the statutes had, with the change in the value of money, shrunk to small proportions; the principal part of his income was derived from the dividend and the fines.

Both these sources of income were of modern growth. By the Act 18 Eliz., leases of College estates were limited to twenty-one years, and one-third of the old rent was to be reserved in corn. House property might be let for not longer than forty years. The beneficial effect of these Acts on the corporate revenue was not immediate; in many cases long terms had been granted shortly before, which did not expire for many years. Notably the College estate at Wadley had been let in 1539 for 208 years; and in 1736, when this long period was approaching its end, the lessees petitioned Parliament to interfere and prevent them being deprived of what they had so long treated as their own property. But few leases were of this extravagant duration; and in the course of the seventeenth century the College income was considerably increased. The Provost, however, received no more than one Fellow’s share and a half in the dividend, i. e. the surplus income of the year, and one share only of the fines. The ecclesiastical preferment which Provost Carter secured to the Headship resulted in making it one of the best endowed places in Oxford, without imposing any additional charge on the College.

Bishop Robinson, who obtained the Rochester stall for the Provost, was also a benefactor in other ways. He founded three Exhibitions, to be held by bachelor students; and he also erected at his own expense an additional building on the east side of the College garden, containing six sets of chambers, three of which were to be occupied by his Exhibitioners. Dr. Carter erected at the same time a similar building on the west side.

The effect of the decision given in the Court of Common Pleas, was to restore the authority of the Foundation Statutes of January 1326. Under these Statutes only an actual Fellow could be chosen Provost, and the election must be unanimous. On Dr. Carter’s death, Mr. Walter Hodges was chosen by a majority of votes only, but he was confirmed by the Lord Chancellor, Lord King, upon whom, under these circumstances, the election had devolved. Henceforward, the Fellows agreed to make the formal election unanimous in every case, and no further instance of a disputed election occurred.

The history of the College during the remainder of the eighteenth century was quiet, decorous and uneventful. Its undergraduate members were drawn from all classes, but always included many young men of rank and family. Some of these showed their affection for the College in after life by benefactions more or less important. Henry, fourth Duke of Beaufort, founded four exhibitions for the counties of Gloucester, Monmouth and Glamorgan. Mrs. Ludwell, a sister of Dr. Carter, gave an estate in Kent for the support of two exhibitioners from that county. Edward, Lord Leigh, who died in 1786, bequeathed to the College the entire collection of books in his house at Stoneleigh. For the reception of this bequest, the new Library was built in the following year at the north end of the College garden.

Of the few eminent names connected with the College in the last century, that of Bishop Butler is the greatest. He entered Oriel in 1715, and his early rise in his profession was in a great measure due to the acquaintance he there made with Charles Talbot, afterwards Lord Chancellor, who recommended him to the patronage of his father, the Bishop of Durham, also an old member of the College. William Hawkins, elected Fellow in 1700, was an eminent lawyer, whose treatise of the Pleas of the Crown still keeps its place as a standard legal work. William Gerrard Hamilton, admitted in 1745, is still remembered as an early patron of Burke, and for his speech in the great debate in Nov. 1755, by which he gained his nickname. Gilbert White, of Selborne, among all the Fellows of Oriel of this period, has left the most lasting name. Yet his College history is in curious contrast to the reputation which is popularly attached to him. Instead of being, as is often supposed, the model clergyman, residing on his cure, and interested in all the concerns of the parish in which his duty lay, he was, from a College point of view, a rich, sinecure, pluralist non-resident. He held his Fellowship for fifty years, 1743-1793, during which period he was out of residence except for the year 1752-3, when the Proctorship fell to the College turn, and he came up to claim it. In 1757 he similarly asserted his right to take and hold with his Fellowship the small College living of Moreton Pinkney, Northants, with the avowed intention of not residing. Even at that time the conscience of the College was shocked at this proposal, and the claim was only reluctantly admitted. White continued to enjoy the emoluments of his Fellowship and of his College living, while he resided on his patrimonial estate at Selborne; and although it was much doubted whether his fortune did not exceed the amount which was allowed by the Statutes, he acted on the maxim that anything can be held by a man who can hold his tongue, and he continued to enjoy his Fellowship and his living till his death.

It was not till near the close of the century that the College took the decisive step which at once lifted it above its old level of respectable mediocrity, and gave it the first place in Oxford. As has been already shown, the election to Fellowships was singularly free from restriction; for most of them there was no limitation of birth, locality, or kindred; and no class of junior members had any title to succession or preference. When in 1795 Edward Copleston was invited from Corpus to stand for the vacant Fellowship, the first precedent was set for making the Oriel Fellowship the highest prize of an Oxford career. The old habit of giving weight to personal recommendations was not at once immediately laid aside. Even when Thomas Arnold was elected in 1815, it was still necessary for the Fellows to be lectured against allowing themselves to be prejudiced by the reports in Oxford that the candidate was a forward and conceited young man. But the better principle had the victory: the last election in which the older motives were allowed to prevail was in 1798, and from that time the College continued year after year to renew itself without fear or favour out of the most brilliant and promising of the younger students.

It was the head of Oriel, Provost Eveleigh, who, backed by the growing reputation of his College, induced the Hebdomadal Board to institute the new system of examination for honours. Under this system Oriel soon took and long retained the first place. It was an Oriel Fellow who, as Headmaster of the Grammar School at Rugby, succeeded, as was foretold of him, in changing the whole face of Public School Education in this country. It was another Fellow who brought about that religious movement which has worked a still greater change in the Church of England.