The Project Gutenberg EBook of Oxford and Her Colleges, by Goldwin Smith
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Title: Oxford and Her Colleges
Author: Goldwin Smith
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Language: English
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OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES
[Illustration]
[Illustration: RADCLIFFE LIBRARY.]
OXFORD
AND HER COLLEGES
A View from the Radcliffe Library
BY
GOLDWIN SMITH, D.C.L.
AUTHOR OF "THE UNITED STATES: AN OUTLINE OF
POLITICAL HISTORY," ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS REPRODUCED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
New York
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND LONDON
1895
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1893,
BY MACMILLAN AND CO.
Norwood Press:
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
PREFACE.
The writer has seldom enjoyed himself more than in showing an American
friend over Oxford. He has felt something of the same enjoyment in
preparing, with the hope of interesting some American visitors, this
outline of the history of the University and her Colleges. He would
gladly believe that Oxford and Cambridge, having now, by emancipation
and reform, been reunited to the nation, may also be reunited to the
race; and that to them, not less than to the Universities of Germany,
the eyes of Americans desirous of studying at a European as well as at
an American University may henceforth be turned.
It was once the writer's duty, in the service of a Royal Commission of
Inquiry, to make himself well acquainted with the archives of the
University and its Colleges. But he has also availed himself of a number
of recent publications, such as the series of the Oxford Historical
Society, the history of the University by Mr. Maxwell Lyte, and the
volume on the Colleges of Oxford and their traditions, edited by Mr.
Andrew Clark, as well as of the excellent little Guide published by
Messrs. James Parker and Co.
[Illustration]
OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.
To gain a view of Oxford from a central point, we mount to the top of
the Radcliffe Library. We will hope that it is a fine summer day, that,
as we come out upon the roof, the old city, with all its academical
buildings lying among their gardens and groves, presents itself to view
in its beauty, and that the sound of its bells, awakening the memories
of the ages, is in the air. The city is seen lying on the spit of gravel
between the Isis, as the Thames is here called, which is the scene of
boat races, and the Cherwell, famed for water-lilies. It is doubtful
whether the name means the ford of the oxen, or the ford of the river
(_oxen_ being a corruption of _ousen_). Flat, sometimes flooded, is the
site. To ancient founders of cities, a river for water carriage and rich
meads for kine were prime attractions. But beyond the flat we look to a
lovely country, rolling and sylvan, from many points of which, Wytham,
Hinksey, Bagley, Headington, Elsfield, Stowe Wood, are charming views,
nearer or more distant, of the city. Turner's view is taken from Bagley,
but it is rather a Turner poem than a simple picture of Oxford.
* * * * *
There is in Oxford much that is not as old as it looks. The buildings of
the Bodleian Library, University College, Oriel, Exeter, and some
others, mediæval or half mediæval in their style, are Stuart in date. In
Oxford the Middle Ages lingered long. Yon cupola of Christ Church is the
work of Wren, yon towers of All Souls' are the work of a still later
hand. The Headington stone, quickly growing black and crumbling, gives
the buildings a false hue of antiquity. An American visitor, misled by
the blackness of University College, remarked to his host that the
buildings must be immensely old. "No," replied his host, "their colour
deceives you; their age is not more than two hundred years." It need
not be said that Palladian edifices like Queen's, or the new buildings
of Magdalen, are not the work of a Chaplain of Edward III., or a
Chancellor of Henry VI. But of the University buildings, St. Mary's
Church and the Divinity School, of the College buildings, the old
quadrangles of Merton, New College, Magdalen, Brasenose, and detached
pieces not a few are genuine Gothic of the Founders' age. Here are six
centuries, if you choose to include the Norman castle, here are eight
centuries, and, if you choose to include certain Saxon remnants in
Christ Church Cathedral, here are ten centuries, chronicled in stone. Of
the corporate lives of these Colleges, the threads have run unbroken
through all the changes and revolutions, political, religious, and
social, between the Barons' War and the present hour. The economist goes
to their muniment rooms for the record of domestic management and
expenditure during those ages. Till yesterday, the codes of statutes
embodying their domestic law, though largely obsolete, remained
unchanged. Nowhere else in England, at all events, unless it be at the
sister University, can the eye and mind feed upon so much antiquity,
certainly not upon so much antique beauty, as on the spot where we
stand. That all does not belong to the same remote antiquity, adds to
the interest and to the charm. This great home of learning, with its
many architectures, has been handed from generation to generation, each
generation making its own improvements, impressing its own tastes,
embodying its own tendencies, down to the present hour. It is like a
great family mansion, which owner after owner has enlarged or improved
to meet his own needs or tastes, and which, thus chronicling successive
phases of social and domestic life, is wanting in uniformity but not in
living interest or beauty.
* * * * *
Oxford is a federation of Colleges. It had been strictly so for two
centuries, and every student had been required to be a member of a
College when, in 1856, non-collegiate students, of whom there are now a
good many, were admitted. The University is the federal government. The
Chancellor, its nominal head, is a non-resident grandee, usually a
political leader whom the University delights to honour and whose
protection it desires. Only on great state occasions does he appear in
his gown richly embroidered with gold. The acting chief is the
Vice-Chancellor, one of the heads of Colleges, who marches with the
Bedel carrying the mace before him, and has been sometimes taken by
strangers for the attendant of the Bedel. With him are the two Proctors,
denoted by their velvet sleeves, named by the Colleges in turn, the
guardians of University discipline. The University Legislature consists
of three houses,--an elective Council, made up equally of heads of
Colleges, professors, and Masters of Arts; the Congregation of
residents, mostly teachers of the University or Colleges; and the
Convocation, which consists of all Masters of Arts, resident or
non-resident, if they are present to vote. Congregation numbers four
hundred, Convocation nearly six thousand. Legislation is initiated by
the Council, and has to make its way through Convocation and
Congregation, with some chance of being wrecked between the academical
Congregation, which is progressive, and the rural Convocation, which is
conservative. The University regulates the general studies, holds all
the examinations, except that at entrance, which is held by the
Colleges, confers all the degrees and honours, and furnishes the police
of the academical city. Its professors form the general and superior
staff of teachers.
* * * * *
Each College, at the same time, is a little polity in itself. It has its
own governing body, consisting of a Head (President, Master, Principal,
Provost, or Warden) and a body of Fellows. It holds its own estates;
noble estates, some of them are. It has its private staff of teachers or
tutors, usually taken from the Fellows, though the subjects of teaching
are those recognised by the University examinations. The relation
between the tutors teaching and that of the professor is rather
unsettled and debatable, varying in some measure with the subjects,
since physical science can be taught only in the professor's
lecture-room, while classics and mathematics can be taught in the
class-room of the tutor. Before 1856 the professorial system of teaching
had long lain in abeyance, and the tutorial system had prevailed alone.
Each College administers its domestic discipline. The University
Proctor, if he chases a student to the College gates, must there halt
and apply to the College for extradition. To the College the student
immediately belongs; it is responsible for his character and habits. The
personal relations between him and his tutor are, or ought to be, close.
Oxford life hitherto has been a College life. To his College the Oxford
man has mainly looked back. Here his early friendships have been formed.
In these societies the ruling class of England, the lay professions and
landed gentry mingling with the clergy, has been bred. It is to the
College, generally, that benefactions and bequests are given; with the
College that the rich and munificent _alumnus_ desires to unite his
name; in the College Hall that he hopes his portrait will hang, to be
seen with grateful eyes. The University, however, shares the attachment
of the _alumnus_. Go to yonder river on an evening of the College boat
races, or to yonder cricket ground when a College match is being played,
and you will see the strength of College feeling. At a University race
or match in London the Oxford or Cambridge sentiment appears. In an
American University there is nothing like the College bond, unless it be
that of the Secret, or, to speak more reasonably, the Greek Letter
societies, which form inner social circles with a sentiment of their
own.
* * * * *
The buildings of the University lie mainly in the centre of the city
close around us. There is the Convocation House, the hall of the
University Legislature, where, in times of collision between theological
parties, or between the party of the ancient system of education and
that of the modern system, lively debates have been heard. In it, also,
are conferred the ordinary degrees. They are still conferred in the
religious form of words, handed down from the Middle Ages, the candidate
kneeling down before the Vice-Chancellor in the posture of mediæval
homage. Oxford is the classic ground of old forms and ceremonies. Before
each degree is conferred, the Proctors march up and down the House to
give any objector to the degree--an unsatisfied creditor, for
example--the opportunity of entering a _caveat_ by "plucking" the
Proctor's sleeve. Adjoining the Convocation House is the Divinity
School, the only building of the University, saving St. Mary's Church,
which dates from the Middle Ages. A very beautiful relic of the Middle
Ages it is when seen from the gardens of Exeter College. Here are held
the examinations for degrees in theology, styled, in the Oxford of old,
queen of the sciences, and long their tyrant. Here, again, is the
Sheldonian Theatre, the gift of Archbishop Sheldon, a Primate of the
Restoration period, and as readers of Pepys's "Diary" know, of
Restoration character, but a patron of learning. University
exercises used, during the Middle Ages, to be performed in St. Mary's
Church. In those days the church was the public building for all
purposes, that of a theatre among the rest. But the Anglican was more
scrupulous in his use of the sacred edifice than the Roman Catholic. In
the Sheldonian Theatre is held the annual commemoration of Founders and
benefactors, the grand academical festival, at which the Doctorate
appears in its pomp of scarlet, filing in to the sound of the organ, the
prize poems and essays are read, and the honorary degrees are conferred
in the presence of a gala crowd of visitors drawn by the summer beauty
of Oxford and the pleasures that close the studious year. In former
days the ceremony used to be enlivened and sometimes disgraced by the
jests of the _terræ filius_, a licensed or tolerated buffoon whose
personalities provoked the indignation of Evelyn, and in one case, at
least, were visited with expulsion. It is now enlivened, and, as
visitors think, sometimes disgraced, by the uproarious joking of the
undergraduates' gallery. This modern license the authorities of the
University are believed to have brought on themselves by encouraging
political demonstrations. The Sheldonian Theatre is also the scene of
grand receptions, and of the inauguration of the Chancellor. That
flaunting portrait of George IV. in his royal robes, by Lawrence,
with the military portraits of the Emperor of Russia and the King of
Prussia by which it is flanked and its gorgeousness is rebuked, mark the
triumphs of the monarchs, whose cause had become that of European
independence, over Napoleon. Perhaps the most singular ceremony
witnessed by these walls was the inauguration of the Iron Duke as
Chancellor of the University. This was the climax of Oxford devotion to
the Tory party, and such was the gathering as to cause it to be said
that if the roof of the Sheldonian Theatre had then fallen in, the party
would have been extinguished. The Duke, as if to mark the incongruity,
put on his academical cap with the wrong side in front, and in reading
his Latin speech, lapsed into a thundering false quantity.
[Illustration: DIVINITY SCHOOL, FROM EXETER GARDENS.]
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF SHELDONIAN THEATRE.]
The Clarendon was built with the proceeds of the history written by the
Minister of the early Restoration, who was Chancellor of the University,
and whose touching letter of farewell to her, on his fall and flight
from England, may be seen in the Bodleian Library. There, also, are
preserved documents which may help to explain his fall. They are the
written dialogues which passed between him and his master at the board
of the Privy Council, and they show that Clarendon, having been the
political tutor of Charles the exile, too much bore himself as the
political tutor of Charles the king. In the Clarendon are the University
Council Chamber and the Registry. Once it was the University press, but
the press has now a far larger mansion yonder to the north-west, whence,
besides works of learning and science, go forth Bibles and prayer-books
in all languages to all quarters of the globe. Legally, as a printer of
Bibles the University has a privilege, but its real privilege is that
which it secures for itself by the most scrupulous accuracy and by
infinitesimal profits.
[Illustration: THE BODLEIAN.]
Close by is the University Library, the Bodleian, one of those great
libraries of the world in which you can ring up at a few minutes' notice
almost any author of any age or country. This Library is one of those
entitled by law to a copy of every book printed in the United Kingdom,
and it is bound to preserve all that it receives, a duty which might in
the end burst any building, were it not that the paper of many modern
books is happily perishable. A foundation was laid for a University
Library in the days of Henry VI., by the good Duke Humphrey of
Gloucester, who gave a collection of books. But in the rough times which
followed, the Duke's donation perished, only two or three precious
relics being saved from the wreck. Sir Thomas Bodley, a wealthy knight
and diplomatist of the time of James I., it was who reared this pile,
severely square and bare, though a skilful variation of the string
course in the different stories somewhat relieves its heaviness. In the
antique reading-room, breathing study, and not overthronged with
readers, the bookworm finds a paradise. Over the Library is the
University Gallery, the visitor to which is entreated to avert his eyes
from the fictitious portraits of founders of early Colleges, and to fix
them, if he will, on the royal portraits which painfully attest the
loyalty of the University, or, as a relief from these, on Guy Fawkes's
lantern. Beneath the Library used to be the Schools or examination-rooms
of the University, scenes of youthful hopes and fears; perhaps, as the
aspirants to honours were a minority, of more fears than hopes; and at
those doors formerly gathered the eager crowd of candidates and their
friends to read the class lists which were posted there. But the
examination system has outgrown its ancient tenement and migrated to
yonder new-built pile in High Street, more fitted, perhaps, by its
elaborate ornamentation for the gala and the dance, than for the torture
of undergraduates. In the quadrangle of the Bodleian sits aloft, on the
face of a tower displaying all the orders of classical architecture, the
learned King and royal theologian. The Bible held in his hand is
believed to have fallen down on the day that Mr. Gladstone lost his
election as Member for the University of Oxford and set forth on a
career of liberalism which has since led him to the disestablishment of
the Church. We stand on the Radcliffe, formerly the medical and physical
library, now a supplement and an additional reading-room of the
Bodleian, the gift of Dr. Radcliffe, Court Physician and despot of the
profession in the times of William and Anne, of whose rough sayings, and
sayings more than rough, some are preserved in his "Life." He it was who
told William III. that he would not have His Majesty's two legs for his
three kingdoms, and who is said to have punished the giver of a
niggardly fee by a prediction of death, which was fulfilled by the
terrors of the patient. Close at hand is the Ashmolean, the old
University Museum, now only a museum of antiquities, the most precious
of which is King Alfred's gem. Museum and Medical Library have together
migrated to the new edifice on the north side of the city.
But of all the University buildings the most beautiful is St. Mary's
Church, where the University sermons are preached, and from the pulpit
of which, in the course of successive generations and successive
controversies, a changeful and often heady current of theology has
flowed. There preached Newman, Pusey, and Manning; there preached
Hampden, Stanley, and the authors of "Essays and Reviews."
[Illustration: THE HIGH STREET.
University College.
St. Mary's Church.
Queen's College.]
Oxford and Cambridge were not at first Universities of Colleges. The
Colleges were after-growths which for a time absorbed the University.
The University of Oxford was born in the twelfth century, fully a
century before the foundation of the first College. To recall the Oxford
of the thirteenth century, one must bid vanish all the buildings which
now meet our eyes, except yonder grim castle to the west of the city,
and the stern tower of St. Michael's Church, at once the bell tower of
the Church and a defence of the city gate facing the dangerous north.
The man-at-arms from the castle, the warder from the gate, looks down
upon a city of five or six thousand inhabitants, huddled for protection
under the castle, and within those walls of which a fine remnant is seen
bounding the domain of New College. In this city there is a concourse of
students brought together to hear a body of teachers who have been led,
we know not how, to open their mart of knowledge here. Printing not
having been invented, and books being scarce, the fountain of knowledge
is the lecture-room of the professor. It is the age of an intellectual
revival so remarkable as to be called the Mediæval Renaissance. After
the migrations and convulsions, by which the world was cast in a new
mould, ensues a reign of comparative peace and settled government, under
which the desire of knowledge has been reawakened. Universities have
been coming out all over Europe like stars in the night; Paris, famous
for theology and philosophy, perhaps being the brightest of the
constellation, while Bologna was famed for law and Salerno for medicine.
It was probably in the reign of Henry I. that the company of teachers
settled at Oxford, and before the end of the thirteenth century students
had collected to a number which fable exaggerates to thirty thousand,
but which was really large enough to crowd the little city and even the
bastions of its walls. A light had shone on youths who sat in the shadow
of feudal servitude. There is no more romantic period in the history of
human intellect than the thirteenth century.
The teachers, after the fashion of that age, formed themselves into a
guild, which guarded its monopoly. The undergraduate was the apprentice;
the degree was a license to teach, and carried with it the duty of
teaching, though in time it became a literary title, unconnected with
teaching, and coveted for its own sake. The University obtained a
charter, elected its Chancellor, formed its academical Legislature of
graduates, obtained jurisdiction over its own members. In time it
marshalled its teachers and students into regular Faculties of theology,
law, and medicine, with arts, or general and liberal culture, if the
name can be applied to anything so rudimentary as the literature and
science of that day, forming the basis of all. At first the professors
taught where they could; in the cloisters, perhaps, of St. Frydeswide's
monastery, subsequently absorbed by Christ Church; in the porches of
houses. A row of lecture-rooms, called the Schools, was afterwards
provided in School Street, which ran north and south just under the
Radcliffe. So little anchored was the University by buildings, that when
maltreated at Oxford it was ready to pack up its literary wares and
migrate to another city such as Northampton or Stamford. Many of the
undergraduates at first were mere boys, to whom the University was a
grammar school. For the real University students the dominant study was
that of the School philosophy, logical and philosophical, with its
strange metaphysical jargon; an immense attempt to extract knowledge
from consciousness by syllogistic reasoning, instead of gathering it
from observation, experience, and research, mocking by its barrenness of
fruit the faith of the enthusiastic student, yet training the mind to
preternatural acuteness, and perhaps forming a necessary stage in the
mental education of the race. The great instrument of high education was
disputation, often repeated, and conducted with the most elaborate forms
in the tournaments of the Schools, which might beget readiness of wit
and promptness of elocution, but could hardly beget habits of calm
investigation or paramount love of truth. The great event in the
academical life was Inception, when the student performed exercises
which inaugurated his teachership; and this was commonly celebrated by a
feast, the expenditure on which the University was called upon to
restrain. Oxford produced some of the greatest schoolmen: Duns Scotus,
the "subtle," who had written thirteen folio volumes of arid metaphysics
before his early death; Bradwardine, the "profound," and Ockham, the
"invincible and unmatched." The idol was Aristotle, viewed mainly as
the metaphysician, and imperfectly understood through translations. To
reconcile Aristotelian speculation with orthodox theology was a hard
task, not always successfully performed. Theology was, of course, first
in dignity of the Faculties, but the most lucrative was the civil and
canon law practised in the ecclesiastical courts and, as Roman, misliked
by the patriotic Parliament. Philosophy complained that it had to trudge
afoot while the liegemen of Justinian rode high in the car of
preferment. Of physical science the hour was not yet come, but before
its hour came its wonderful and almost miraculous precursor, Roger
Bacon, who anticipated the invention of gunpowder and the telescope,
and whose fabled study stood over Folly Bridge, till, with Carfax's
monument and Cranmer's prison, it was cleared away by an improving city
corporation. Roger Bacon was, of course, taken for a dealer in black
arts; an astrologer and an alchemist he was, and at the same time an
illustrious example of the service indirectly rendered by astrology and
alchemy in luring to an investigation of nature which led to real
discoveries, just as Columbus, seeking a western passage to the golden
cities of the East, discovered America.
* * * * *
All the Universities belonged not to one nation but to Latin
Christendom, the educated population of which circulated among them. At
one time there was a migration to Oxford from the University of Paris,
which had got into trouble with the government. Of all the Universities
alike, ecclesiastical Latin was the language. The scholars all ranked
with the clerical order, so that at Oxford, scholar and clerk, townsman
and layman, were convertible terms. In those days all intellectual
callings, and even the higher mechanical arts, were clerical. The
student was exempted by his tonsure from lay jurisdiction. The Papacy
anxiously claimed the Universities as parts of its realm, and only
degrees granted by the Pope's authority were current throughout
Christendom. When, with Edward III., came the long war between England
and France, and when the confederation of Latin Christendom was
beginning to break up, the English Universities grew more national.
* * * * *
Incorporated with the buildings of Worcester College are some curious
little tenements once occupied by a colony from different Benedictine
Monasteries. These, with the Church of St. Frydeswide, now Christ Church
Cathedral, and the small remains of Osney Abbey, are about the only
relics of monastic Oxford which survived the Reformation. But in the
Middle Ages there were Houses for novices of the great Orders,
Benedictines, Cistercians, Carmelites, Augustinians, and most notable
and powerful of all, the two great mendicant Orders of Dominicans and
Franciscans. The Mendicants, who came into the country angels of
humility as well as of asceticism, begging their bread, and staining the
ground with the blood from their shoeless feet, soon changed their
character, and began in the interest of Holy Church to grasp power and
amass wealth. The Franciscans especially, like the Jesuits of an after
day, strove to master the centres of intellectual influence. They strove
to put the laws of the University under their feet. Struggles between
them and the seculars, with appeals to the Crown, were the consequence.
Attraction of callow youth to an angelic life seems to have been
characteristic of the Brethren of St. Francis, and it is conjectured
that in this way Bacon became a monk. Faintly patronised by a liberal
and lettered Pope, he was arraigned for necromancy by his Order, and
ended his days in gloom, if not in a monastic prison. The Church of the
Middle Ages with one hand helped to open the door of knowledge, with the
other she sought to close it. At last she sought to close it with both
hands, and in her cruel panic established the Inquisition.
* * * * *
Tory in its later days, the University was liberal in its prime. It took
the part of the Barons and De Montfort against Henry III., and a corps
of its students fought against the King under their own banner at
Northampton. Instead of being the stronghold of reaction, it was the
focus of active, even of turbulent aspiration, and the saying ran, that
when there was fighting at Oxford there was war in England. Oxford's
hero in the thirteenth century was its Chancellor, Grosseteste, the
friend of De Montfort and the great reformer of his day, "of prelates
the rebuker, of monks the corrector, of scholars the instructor, of the
people the preacher, of the incontinent the chastiser, of writings the
industrious investigator, of the Romans the hammer and contemner." If
Grosseteste patronised the Friars, it was in their first estate.
* * * * *
At first the students lodged as "Chamberdekyns" with citizens, but that
system proving dangerous to order, they were gathered into hostels, or,
to use the more dignified name, Halls (_aulæ_) under a Principal, or
Master of the University, who boarded and governed them. Of these Halls
there were a great number, with their several names and signs. Till
lately a few of them remained, though these had lost their original
character, and become merely small Colleges, without any foundation
except a Principal. The students in those days were mostly poor. Their
indigence was almost taken for granted. Some of them begged; chests were
provided by the charitable for loans to them. A poor student's life was
hard; if he was earnest in study, heroic. He shared a room with three or
four chums, he slept under a rug, his fare was coarse and scanty, his
garment was the gown which has now become merely an academical symbol,
and thankful he was to be provided with a new one. He had no fire in his
room, no glass in his window. As his exercises in the University Schools
began at five in the morning, it is not likely that he read much at
night, otherwise he would have to read by the light of a feeble lamp
flickering with the wind. His manuscript was painful to read. The city
was filthy, the water polluted with sewage; pestilence often swept
through the crowded hive.
* * * * *
Mediæval students were a rough set; not less rough than enthusiastic;
rougher than the students of the Quartier Latin or Heidelberg, their
nearest counterparts in recent times. They wore arms, or kept them in
their chambers, and they needed them not only in going to and from the
University over roads beset with robbers, but in conflicts with the
townspeople, with whom the University was at war. With the townspeople
the students had desperate affrays, ancient precursors of the
comparatively mild town and gown rows of this century. The defiant horns
of the town were answered by the bells of the University. Arrows flew;
blood was shed on both sides; Halls were stormed and defended; till
Royalty from Abingdon or Woodstock interfered with its men-at-arms,
seconded by the Bishop with bell, book, and candle. A Papal Legate, an
Italian on whom national feeling looks with jealousy, comes to Oxford.
Scholars crowd to see him. There is a quarrel between them and his
train. His cook flings a cauldron of boiling broth over an Irish
student. The scholars fly to arms. The Legate is ignominiously chased
from Oxford. Excommunications, royal thunders, and penitential
performances follow. Jews settle in Oxford, ply their trade among the
scholars, and form a quarter with invidiously wealthy mansions. There is
a royal edict, forbidding them to exact more than forty-three per cent
interest from the student. Wealth makes them insolent; they assault a
religious procession, and with them also the students have affrays.
Provincial feeling is strong, for the students are divided into two
nations, the Northern and the Southern, which are always wrangling, and
sometimes fight pitched battles with bows and arrows. The two Proctors,
now the heads of University police, were appointed as tribunes of the
two nations to settle elections and other matters between them without
battle. Amusements as well as everything else were rude. Football and
other rough games were played at Beaumont, a piece of ground to the
north of the city; but there was nothing like that cricket field in the
parks, nor like the sensation now created by the appearance of a
renowned cricketer in his paddings before an admiring crowd, to display
the fruit of his many years of assiduous practice in guarding his
stumps. The Crown and local lords had to complain of a good deal of
poaching in Bagley, Woodstock, Shotover, and Stowe Wood.
* * * * *
To this Oxford, with its crowd of youth thirsting for knowledge, its
turbulence, its vice, its danger from monkish encroachment, came Walter
de Merton, one of the same historic group as Grosseteste and
Grosseteste's friend, Adam de Marisco, the man of the hour, with the
right device in his mind. Merton had been Chancellor of Henry III.
amidst the political storms of the time, from which he would gladly turn
aside to a work of peaceful improvement. It was thus that violence in
those ages paid with its left hand a tribute to civilisation. Merton's
foundation is the first College, though University and Balliol come
before it in the Calendar in deference to the priority of the
benefactions out of which those Colleges grew. Yonder noble chapel in
the Decorated style, with its tower and the old quadrangle beneath it,
called, nobody knows why, Mob Quad, are the cradle of College life.
Merton's plan was an academical brotherhood, which combined monastic
order, discipline, and piety with the pursuit of knowledge. No monk or
friar was ever to be admitted to his House. The members of the House are
called in his statutes by the common name of Scholars, that of Fellows
(_Socii_), which afterwards prevailed here and in all the other
Colleges, denoting their union as an academical household. They were to
live like monks in common; they were to take their meals together in the
Refectory, and to study together in the common library, which may still
be seen, dark and austere, with the chain by which a precious volume was
attached to the desk. They had not a common dormitory, but they must
have slept two or three in a room. Probably they were confined to their
quadrangle, except when they were attending the Schools of the
University, or allowed to leave it only with a companion as a safeguard.
They were to elect their own Warden, and fill up by election vacancies
in their own number. The Warden whom they had elected, they were to
obey. They were to watch over each other's lives, and hold annual
scrutinies into conduct. The Archbishop of Canterbury was to visit the
College and see that the rule was kept. But the rule was moral and
academical, not cloistral or ascetic. The mediæval round of religious
services was to be duly performed, and prayers were to be said for the
Founder's soul. But the main object was not prayer, contemplation, or
masses for souls; it was study. Monks were permanently devoted to their
Order, shut up for life in their monastery, and secluded from the world.
The Scholars of Merton were destined to serve the world, into which they
were to go forth when they had completed the course of preparation in
their College. They were destined to serve the world as their Founder
had served it. In fact, we find Wardens and Fellows of Merton employed
by the State and the Church in important missions. A Scholar of Merton,
though he was to obey the College authorities, took no monastic vow of
obedience. He took no monastic vow of poverty; on the contrary, it was
anticipated that he would gain wealth, of which he was exhorted to
bestow a portion on his College. He took no monastic vow of celibacy,
though, as one of the clerical order, he would of course not be
permitted to marry. He was clerical as all Scholars in those days were
clerical, not in the modern and professional sense of the term. The
allowances of the Fellow were only his Commons, or food, and his Livery,
or raiment, and there were to be as many Fellows as the estate could
provide with these. Instruction was received not in College, but in the
Schools of the University, to which the Scholars of Merton, like the
other Scholars, were to resort. A sort of grammar school, for boys of
the Founder's kin, was attached to the College. But otherwise the work
of the College was study, not tuition, nor did the statutes contemplate
the admission of any members except those on the foundation.
[Illustration: MERTON COLLEGE, FROM FIELDS.]
* * * * *
Merton's plan, meeting the need of the hour, found acceptance. His
College became the pattern for others both at Oxford and Cambridge.
University, Balliol, Exeter, Oriel, and Queen's were modelled after it,
and monastic Orders seem to have taken the hint in founding Houses for
their novices at Oxford. University College grew out of the benefaction
of William of Durham, an ecclesiastic who had studied at Paris, and
left the University a sum of money for the maintenance of students of
divinity. The University lodged them in a Hall styled the Great Hall of
the University, which is still the proper corporate name of the College.
In after days, this Hall, having grown into a College, wished to slip
its neck out of the visitorial yoke of the University, and on the
strength of its being the oldest foundation at Oxford, claimed as
founder Alfred, to whom the foundation of the University was ascribed by
fable, asserting that as a royal foundation it was under the visitorship
of the Crown. Courts of law recognised the claim; a Hanoverian court of
law probably recognised it with pleasure, as transferring power from a
Tory University to the King; and thus was consecrated a fiction in
palliation of which it can only be said, that the earliest of our
literary houses may not improperly be dedicated to the restorer of
English learning. Oriel was founded by a court Almoner, Adam de Brome,
who displayed his courtliness by allowing his Scholars to speak French
as well as Latin. Queen's was founded by a court Chaplain, Robert
Egglesfield, and dedicated to the honour of his royal mistress, Queen
Philippa. It was for a Provost and twelve Fellows who were to represent
the number of Christ and his disciples, to sit at a table as Egglesfield
had seen in a picture the Thirteen sitting at the Last Supper, though
in crimson robes. Egglesfield's building has been swept away to make
room for the Palladian palace on its site. But his name is kept in mind
by the quaint custom of giving, on his day, a needle (_aiguille_) to
each member of the foundation, with the injunction, Take that and be
thrifty. Yonder stone _eagles_ too on the building recall it. Exeter
College was the work of a political Bishop who met his death in a London
insurrection.
As the fashion of founding Colleges grew, that of founding Monasteries
decreased, and the more as the mediæval faith declined, and the great
change drew near. That change was heralded by the appearance of
Wycliffe, a genuine off-spring of the University, for while he was the
great religious reformer, he was also the great scholastic philosopher
of his day. To what College or Hall his name and fame belong is a moot
point among antiquaries. We would fain imagine him in his meditations
pacing the old Mob Quadrangle of Merton. His teaching took strong and
long hold of the University. His reforming company of "poor priests"
drew with it the spiritual aspiration and energy of Oxford youth. But if
his movement has left any traces in the shape of foundations, it is in
the shape of foundations produced by the reaction against it, and
destined for its overthrow.
[Illustration: NEW COLLEGE, CLOISTERS AND TOWER.]
[Illustration: NEW COLLEGE CHAPEL.]
Yonder rises the bell tower of New College over a famous group of
buildings, with ample quadrangle, rich religious chapel, a noble Hall
and range of tranquil cloisters, defaced only by the addition of a
modern upper story to the quadrangle and Vandalic adaptation of the
upper windows to modern convenience. This pile was the work of William
of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, a typical character of the Middle
Ages, prelate, statesman, and court architect in one, who negotiated the
peace of Bretigny and built Windsor Castle. The eye of the great
architect as well as of the pious Founder must have ranged with delight
over his fair creation. It is likely that New College, as a foundation
highly religious in its character, was intended to counteract Wycliffism
as well as to replenish the clergy which had been decimated by the Black
Death. Wykeham was a reformer in his way, and one of the party headed by
the Black Prince which strove to correct the abuses of the court in the
dark decline of Edward III. But he was a conservative, religious after
the orthodox fashion, and devoted to the worship of the Virgin, to whom
his College was dedicated, after whom it was named, and whose image
surmounts its gate. The College of St. Mary of Winton his foundation was
entitled. In its day it might well be called New College. New it was in
its scale, having seventy Fellows and Scholars besides ten Chaplains,
three Clerks, and sixteen Choristers for the services of the Chapel,
which is still famous for its choir. New it was in the extent and
magnificence of its buildings. New it was in the provision made for
solemn services in its Chapel, for religious processions round its
cloisters, for the daily orisons of all its members. New it was in the
state assigned to its Warden, who was not to be like the Warden of
Merton, only the first among his humble peers, living with them at the
common board, but to resemble more a great Abbot with a separate
establishment of his own, keeping a sumptuous hospitality and drawn by
six horses when he went abroad. New it was in having undergraduates as
well as graduates on the foundation, and providing for the training of
the youth during the whole interval between school and the highest
University degree. Even further back than the time of admittance to the
University, stretched the care of the reformer of education. The most
important novelty of all, perhaps, in his creation, was the connection
between his College and the school which he founded at Winchester, his
cathedral city, to feed his College with a constant supply of model
Scholars. This was the first of those great Public Schools which have
largely moulded the character of the ruling class in England. The
example was followed by Henry VI. in connecting King's College,
Cambridge, with Eton, and would have been followed by Wolsey had he
carried out his design of connecting Cardinal College with his school at
Ipswich. From the admission of an undergraduate element into the College
it naturally followed that there should be instruction of the juniors by
the seniors, and superintendence of study within the College walls. This
was yet another novelty, and Wykeham seems to have had an additional
motive for adopting it in the low condition of the University Schools,
from the exercises of which attention had perhaps been diverted by the
religious movement. In the careful provision for the study of
Grammatica, that is, the elements of Latin, we perhaps see a gleam of
the Renaissance, as the style of the buildings belonging to the last
order of mediæval architecture indicates that the Middle Age was
hastening to its close. But it was one of Wykeham's objects to
strengthen the orthodox priesthood in a time of revolutionary peril. Ten
of his Fellows were assigned to the study of civil, ten to that of
canon, law. Two were permitted to study medicine. All the rest were to
be theologians. The Founder was false to his own generous design in
giving a paramount and perpetual preference in the election of Fellows
to his own kin, who, being numerous, became at length a fearful incubus
on his institution. It is not likely that his own idea of kinship was
unlimited, or extended beyond the tenth degree. All the Fellows and
Scholars were to be poor and indigent. This was in unison with the
mediæval spirit of alms-giving as well as with the mediæval theory of
poverty as a state spiritually superior, held, though not embodied, by
wealthy prelates. Study, not teaching, it is always to be remembered,
was the principal duty of those who were to eat the Founder's bread.
* * * * *
[Illustration: MAGDALEN COLLEGE, FROM STREET.]
The Statutes of New College are elaborate, and were largely copied by
other founders. They present to us a half-monastic life, with the
general hue of asceticism which pervades everything mediæval. Here, as
in the case of Merton, there are no vows, but there is strict
discipline, with frugal fare. The Commons, or allowances for food, are
not to exceed twelve pence per week, except in the times of dearth. Once
a year there is an allowance of cloth for a gown. There is a chest for
loans to the very needy, but there is no stipend. The Warden rules with
abbatial power, though in greater matters he requires the consent of the
Fellows, and is himself under the censorship of the Visitor, the Bishop
of Winchester, who, however, rarely interposed. Every year he goes on
"progress" to view the College estates, there being in those days no
agents, and is received by tenants with homage and rural hospitality.
The Fellows and Scholars are lodged three or four in a room, the seniors
as monitors to the juniors. Each Scholar undergoes two years of
probation. As in a baronial hall the nobles, so in the College Hall the
seniors, occupy the dais, or high table, while the juniors sit at tables
arranged down the Hall. In the dining-hall the Fellows and Scholars sit
in silence, and listen to the reading of the Bible. In speaking they
must use no tongue but the Latin. There is to be no lingering in the
Hall after dinner, except when in winter a fire is lighted on some
church festival. Then it is permitted to remain awhile and rehearse
poems, or talk about the chronicles of the kingdom, the wonders of the
world, and other things befitting clerical discourse. This seems to be
the principal concession made to the youthful love of amusement. As a
rule, it appears that the students were confined to the College and its
cloisters when they were not attending the Schools of the University.
They are forbidden to keep hounds or hawks, as well as to throw stones
or indulge in any rough or noisy sports. The injunctions against
spilling wine and slops in the upper rooms, or beer on the floor of the
Hall, to the annoyance of those who lodged beneath, betoken a rough
style of living and rude manners. The admission of strangers is
jealously restricted, and on no account must a woman enter the College,
except a laundress, who must be of safe age. There were daily prayers
for the Founder's soul, daily masses, and fifty times each day every
member of the College was to repeat the salutation to the Virgin. The
Founder's obit was to be celebrated with special pomp. Self-love in a
mediæval ascetic was not annihilated by humility, though it took a
religious form. Thrice every year are held scrutinies into life and
conduct, at which the hateful practice of secret denunciation is
admitted, and the accused is forbidden to call for the name of his
accuser. Every cloistered society, whether monastic or academic, is
pretty sure to seethe with cabals, suspicions, and slanders. Leave of
absence from the College was by statute very sparingly allowed, and
seldom could the young Scholar pay what, in the days before the letter
post, must have been angel's visits to the old people on the paternal
homestead. The ecclesiastical and ascetic system of the Middle Ages had
little regard for domestic affection. It treated the boy as entirely a
child of the Church. In times of pestilence, then common, the inmates of
the Colleges usually went to some farm or grange belonging to the
College in the neighbourhood of Oxford, and those were probably pleasant
days for the younger members. Oaths of fearful length and stringency
were taken to the observation of the statutes. They proved sad traps for
conscience when the statutes had become obsolete, a contingency of which
the Founders, ignorant of progress and evolution, never dreamed.
* * * * *
In the interval between the foundation of New College and the
revolution, religious and intellectual, which we call the Reformation,
were founded Lincoln, All Souls', Magdalen, and Brasenose. Lincoln, All
Souls', and Brasenose lie immediately round us, close to what was the
centre of academical life. Magdalen we recognise in the distance by the
most beautiful of towers. Lincoln was theological, and was peculiar in
being connected with two of the Churches of Oxford, which its members
served, and the tithes and oblations of which formed its endowment. Its
Founder, Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, had as a graduate resident at
Oxford been noted for sympathy with the Wycliffites. But when he became
Bishop of Lincoln, the fact dawned upon him that the Scriptures too
freely interpreted were dangerous. He went over to the Reaction, burned
Wycliffe's body, and determined to found a little college of true
students in theology, who would "defend the mysteries of the sacred page
against those ignorant laics who profaned with swinish snouts its most
holy pearls." His successor, Bishop Rotherham, being of the same mind,
carried forward the work, and gave the College statutes enjoining the
expulsion of any Fellow convicted of favouring in public or in private
heretical tenets, and in particular the tenets of "that heretical sect
lately sprung up which assails the sacraments, diverse orders and
dignities, and properties of the Church." Rotherham had evidently a keen
and just sense of the fact, that with the talismanic sacraments of the
Church were bound up its dignity and wealth. The two orthodox prelates
would have stood aghast if they could have foreseen that their little
College of true theologians would one day number among its Fellows John
Wesley, and that Methodism would be cradled within its walls. They would
not less have stood aghast if they could have foreseen that such a chief
of Liberals as Mark Pattison, would one day be its Rector. The history
of these foundations is full of lessons for benefactors who fancy that
they can impress their will upon posterity.
All Souls' was designed by its Founder, Archbishop Chicheley, _ad
orandum_ as well as _ad studendum_; it was to serve the purpose of a
chantry not less than of a College. The sculptured group of souls over
the gateway in High Street denotes that the Warden and Fellows were to
pray for the souls of all Christian people. But particularly were they
to pray for the souls of "the illustrious Prince Henry, late King of
England, of Thomas, Duke of Clarence, and of all the Dukes, Earls,
Barons, Knights, Esquires, and others who fell in the war for the Crown
of France." Of that unhappy war Chicheley had been the adviser; and
seeing the wreck which his folly, or, if the suspicion immortalised by
Shakespeare is true, his selfish policy, as the head of a bloated
Establishment threatened with depletion, had wrought, he may well have
felt the sting of conscience in his old age. The figures in the new
reredos of the Chapel tell the story of the foundation.
* * * * *
[Illustration: ST. JOHN'S PULPIT.
Magdalen College, First Quadrangle.]
Magdalen was the work of Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor
of Henry VI., another statesman-prelate who turned from the political
storm to found a house of learning. Of all the houses of learning in
England, perhaps of any country, that which Waynflete founded is the
loveliest, as he will say who stands in its cloistered and ivy-mantled
quadrangle, either beneath the light of the summer's sun or that of the
winter's moon. Some American architect, captivated by the graces of
Magdalen, has reproduced them in his plan for a new University
in California. Those courts, when newly built, were darkened by the
presence of Richard III. Waynflete came to Oxford to receive the king;
and this homage, paid by a saintly man, seems to show that in those
fierce times of dynastic change, Richard, before the murder of his
nephews, was not regarded as a criminal usurper, perhaps not as a
usurper at all. The tyrant was intellectual. In him, as still more
notably in Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, nicknamed for his cruelty the
Butcher, but literary and a benefactor to the University, was something
like an English counterpart of the mixture in the Italian Renaissance of
culture with licentiousness and crime. But as he sat beside Waynflete
in the Hall wooing popularity by apparent attention to the exercises,
Richard's thoughts probably were far away. A red rose among the
architectural ornaments is found to have been afterwards painted white.
It changed, no doubt, with fortune, when she left the red for the white
rose. A new relation between College and University is inaugurated by
the institution at Magdalen of three Readers to lecture to the
University at large.
* * * * *
The old quadrangle of Brasenose remains much as it was left by its
co-founders, a munificent Bishop and a pious Knight. It is of no special
historic interest, and its importance belongs to later times. It
absorbed several Halls, the sign of one of which was probably the brazen
nose which now adorns its gate, and so far it marks an epoch.
* * * * *
The quiet and sombre old quadrangle of Corpus Christi lies yonder, by
the side of Merton, much as its Founder left it. Now we have come to the
real dawn of the English Renaissance, a gray dawn which never became a
very bright day; for in England, as in Germany and other Teutonic
countries, reawakened and emancipated intellect turned to the pursuit of
truth rather than of beauty, and the great movement was less a birth of
literature and of art than of reformation in religion. This is the age
of Grocyn, the teacher of Greek; of Linacre, the English Hippocrates; of
Colet, the regenerator of education; of Sir Thomas More, who carried
culture to the Chancellorship of the realm, and whose "Utopia" proclaims
the growth of fresh aspirations and the opening of a new era in one way,
as Rabelais did in another. Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, uncle of Henry
VI., had perhaps opened the epoch at Oxford by his princely gift of
books, in which the Renaissance literature was strongly represented, and
which was the germ of the University Library. Soon Erasmus will visit
Oxford and chant in elegant Latin the praises of the classical and
cultured circle which he finds there. Now rages the war between the
humanists of the new classical learning, called the Greeks, and its
opponents, the Trojans, who desired to walk in the ancient paths, and
who, though bigoted and grotesque, were, after all, not far wrong in
identifying heresy with Greek, since the study of the New Testament in
the original was subversive of the mediæval faith. Again, as in the
cases of Merton, Wykeham, and Waynflete, a statesman-prelate turns in
old age from the distractions of State to found a house of learning.
Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, was the chief counsellor and diplomatist of
Henry VII., in whose service he had no doubt passed anxious hours and
trodden dark paths. It may have been partly for the good of his soul
that he proposed to found a house in Oxford for the reception of young
monks from St. Swithin's Priory in Winchester while studying in Oxford.
He was diverted from that design, and persuaded to found a College
instead, by his friend Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, who is represented
as saying, "What, my Lord, shall we build houses and provide livelihoods
for a company of bussing monks whose end and fall we ourselves may live
to see? No, no. It is more meet, a great deal, that we should have care
to provide for the increase of learning and for such as by their
learning shall do good in the Church and Commonwealth." Supposing the
prognostication embodied in these words genuine, they show that to an
enlightened Bishop the dissolution of the Monasteries seemed inevitable.
The statutes of Foxe's College are written in a style which affects the
highest classical elegance. They elaborate throughout the metaphor of a
bee-hive with its industrious insects and its store of intellectual
honey. They embody the hopes of the Renaissance and depict a College of
the Humanities. There is to be a Reader in Greek, and for the subjects
of his lectures a long list of great Greek authors is assigned. There is
to be a Reader of Latin, for whose lectures a similar list of Latin
authors is given, and who is to keep "barbarism," that mortal sin in
the eyes of a devotee of the Renaissance, out of the hive. Theology is
not forgotten. The Founder pays a due, possibly somewhat conventional,
tribute to its surpassing importance. Of this, also, there is a
Professor, but its guides in interpreting Scripture are not to be the
mediæval textbooks, such as Aquinas and the Master of the Sentences, but
the Greek and Latin Fathers, including the daring Origen and Augustine
the favourite of Luther. The Readers are to lecture not to the College
only, but to the University at large, a new provision, connecting the
College with the University, which hardly took effect till very recent
times. One of the first Readers was the learned Spaniard, Juan Luis
Vives, whose appointment bespoke the cosmopolitan character of the
humanist republic of letters. The statutes were signed by the Founder
with a trembling hand eight months before his death, so that only in
imagination did he see his literary bees at work.
* * * * *
Yonder to the south is Tom Tower, where hangs the great bell, which,
"swinging slow with sullen roar," was heard by Milton at Forest Hill. It
was tolled a hundred and one times for the hundred and one students of
Wolsey's House. The Tower, or Cupola, was the work, not of Wolsey but
of Wren. Around the great quadrangle over which it rises are seen the
lines for cloisters which were never built. The balustrade on the top of
the quadrangle is an alien work of modern times. The Church of St.
Frydeswide's Monastery does duty as the College Chapel, in place of the
grand Chapel in the perpendicular style, which, had the Founder's plan
taken effect, would have stood there. Moreover, that which should have
been wholly a College is made to serve and to expend a part of its power
as the Chapter of the Diocese of Oxford, lending its Chapel as the
Cathedral, a niggardly arrangement which has been productive of strained
relations between occupants of the See and Heads of the College. Ample
and noble are the courts of Wolsey. Worthy of his magnificence is the
great Hall, the finest room, barring Westminster Hall, in England, and
filled with those portraits of _Alumni_, which, notwithstanding the
frequency of pudding sleeves, form the fairest tapestry with which hall
was ever hung. But it all falls short of Wolsey's conception. Had
Wolsey's conception been fulfilled, Ipswich would have been a nursery of
scholars for Cardinal College, as Winchester was for New College, and
Eton for King's College, Cambridge. The Cardinal was an English Leo X.
in morals, tastes, perhaps in beliefs; a true Prince, not of the Church
but of the Renaissance. For him, perhaps, as for Foxe, it was a
refreshment to turn from public life, full, as it must have been, of
care and peril for the Vizier of a headstrong and capricious despot, to
the calm happiness of seeing his great College rise, and gathering into
it the foremost of teachers and the flower of students. But in the midst
of his enterprise the sky of the Renaissance became overcast with
clouds, and the storm of religious revolution, which had long been
gathering, broke. Forewarnings of the storm Wolsey had received, for he
had found that in opening his gates to the highest intellectual activity
he had opened them to free inquiry and to heterodoxy. Himself, too, had
set the example of suppressing monasteries, though he did this not for
mere rapine or to gorge his parasites, but to turn useless and abused
endowments to a noble use. Wolsey all but drew his foundation down with
him in his fall. The tyrant and his minions were builders of nothing but
ruin. Christ Church, as at last it was called, was threatened with
confiscation and destruction, but was finally spared in its incomplete
condition, appropriated by Henry as his own foundation, and dedicated to
the honour of the king, whose portrait, in its usual attitude of
obtrusive self-conceit, occupies in the Hall the central place, where
the portrait of the Cardinal should be. The Cardinal's hat, on the
outer wall of the house, is left to speak of the true Founder. That the
College was to be called after its Founder's name, not, like the
Colleges of Wykeham and Waynflete, after the name of a Saint, seems a
symptom of the pride which went before Wolsey's fall.
* * * * *
Now come upon the hapless University forty years of religious
revolution, the monuments of which are traces of destruction and records
of proscription. All the monastic houses and houses for monastic novices
were forfeited to the Crown, and their buildings were left desolate,
though, from the ruins of some of them, new Colleges were afterwards to
rise. Libraries which would now be priceless, were sacked and destroyed
because the illumination on the manuscripts was Popish. It was the least
to be deplored of all the havoc, that the torn leaves of the arid tomes
of Duns Scotus were seen flying about the quadrangle of New College,
while a sporting gentleman of the neighbourhood was picking them up to
be used in driving the deer. There is a comic monument of the religious
revolution in the coffer shrine at Christ Church, in which the dust of
Catherine, wife of the Protestant Doctor, Peter Martyr, is mingled with
that of the Catholic Saint, Frydeswide. Catholicism, in its hour of
triumph under Mary, had dug up the corpse of the heretic's concubine and
buried it under a dung-hill. Protestantism, once more victorious,
rescued the remains, and guarded against a repetition of the outrage, in
case fortune should again change, by mingling them with those of the
Catholic Saint. A more tragic memorial of the conflict is yonder
recumbent cross in Broad Street, close to the spot, then a portion of
the town ditch, where Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley died. Bocardo, the
prison over the neighbouring gate of the city, from the window of which
Cranmer, then confined there, witnessed the burning of Latimer and
Ridley, was pulled down at the beginning of this century. The Divinity
School, Christ Church Cathedral, and St. Mary's Church witnessed
different scenes of the drama. St. Mary's witnessed that last scene, in
which Cranmer filled his enemies with fury and confusion by suddenly
recanting his recantation, and declaring that the hand which had signed
it should burn first. College archives record the expulsion,
readmission, and re-expulsion of Heads and Fellows, as victory inclined
to the Protestant or Catholic side. So perished the English Renaissance.
For the cultivation of the humanities there could be no room in a centre
of religious strife.
* * * * *
Fatal bequests of the religious war were the religious tests. Leicester,
as Chancellor, introduced subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles to
keep out Romanists; King James, that to the three articles of the
Thirty-sixth Canon to keep out Puritans. These tests, involving scores
of controverted propositions in theology, were imposed on the
consciences of mere boys. The Universities were thus taken from the
nation and given to the State Church, which, in the course of time, as
dissent from its doctrines gained ground, came to be far from identical
with the nation.
* * * * *
[Illustration: ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE--GARDEN FRONT.]
In the first lull, however, new Colleges arose, partly out of the ruins
of the monastic houses of the past. Trinity College, of which the quiet
old quadrangle is curiously mated with a fantastic Chapel of much later
date, was founded out of the ruin of Durham College, a Benedictine
House. Its Founder, Sir Thomas Pope, was one of that group of highly
educated lay statesmen, eminent both in the councils of kings and among
the patrons of learning, which succeeded the great Prelates of the
Middle Ages. He was a Catholic, as his statutes show; but a liberal
Catholic, not unfriendly to light, though little knowing perhaps whither
it would lead him. Among his friends was Sir Nicholas Bacon, who
bequeathed to him the splendid whistle, then used to call servants,
which is seen round his neck in his portrait. Another of his friends was
Pole, who showed his intellectual liberality by recommending him to
enjoin in his statutes the study of Greek. St. John's College, again,
rose out of the wreck of a Bernardine House. The Founder was not a
statesman or a prelate, but a great citizen, Sir Thomas White, sometime
Lord Mayor of London, who had amassed wealth in trade, and made a noble
use of it. White also was of the olden faith. That the storm was not
over when his College was founded is tragically shown by the fate of
Campion, who, when White was laid in the College Chapel, preached the
funeral sermon, and afterwards becoming a Jesuit and an emissary of
his Order, was brought to the rack and to the scaffold. There was also a
great secession of Fellows when the final rupture took place between
Rome and Elizabeth. In the group of cultivated Knights and statesmen,
who patronised learning and education, may be placed Sir William Petre,
the second Founder of Exeter College, whose monument is its old
quadrangle, and Sir Thomas Bodley, whose monument is the Bodleian
Library. If Petre and Bodley were Protestants, while Pope and White were
Catholics, the difference was rather political than religious. In
religion the public men changed with the national government, little
sharing the passions of either theological party.
* * * * *
Jesus, whose old quadrangle, chapel, and hall belong to early Stuart
times, was the first distinctly Protestant College. This its name, in
contrast with Colleges named after Saints, denotes. The second
Protestant College was Wadham, the buildings of which stand in their
pristine beauty, vying with Magdalen, perhaps even excelling it in the
special air of a house of learning, and proving that to be interesting
and impressive it is not necessary to be mediæval. At the same time
Wadham shows how long the spirit of the Middle Ages clung to Oxford; for
the style of the Chapel is anterior by a century and a half to the date.
Here we have a conscious desire, on the part of the architect, to
recall the past. The Founder, Sir Nicholas Wadham, was a wealthy Western
land-owner. We may dismiss the tradition that his first design was to
found a College of Roman Catholic priests in Italy, and his second to
found a Protestant College at Oxford, as at most significant of the
prolonged wavering of the religious balance in the minds of a number of
the wealthier class. The statutes were, in the main, like those of the
mediæval Colleges, saving in making the Fellowship terminable after
about twenty-two years, thus more clearly designating the College as a
school for active life. The prohibition of marriage was retained, not as
an ascetic ordinance, but as a concomitant of the College system. In
the mediæval Colleges it was not necessary to extend the prohibition to
the Heads, who, being priests, were bound to celibacy by the regulations
of their Order; but marriage being now permitted to the clergy
generally, the prohibition was in the statutes of Wadham expressly
extended, in the interest of the College system, to the Head. Hence it
is an aspersion on the reputation of Dame Dorothy Wadham, who, after her
husband's death, carried out his design, and whose effigy kneels
opposite that of her loving lord in the old quadrangle, to say that she
was in love with the first Warden, and because he would not marry her,
forbade him by statute to marry any other woman.
[Illustration: WADHAM COLLEGE--GARDEN FRONT.]
* * * * *
These foundations, followed by that of Pembroke and the building of the
South quadrangle of Merton, of the South quadrangle of Lincoln, of the
West front of St. John's, of the quadrangle and hall of Exeter, of part
of the quadrangle of Oriel, of the West quadrangle of University
College, as well as of the Bodleian Library, the Schools' quadrangle,
the Convocation House, and of the gateway of the Botanic Garden, prove
that, though the old University system, with its scholastic exercises,
had become hollow, there was life in Oxford, and the interest of patrons
of learning was attracted to it during the period between the
Reformation and the Rebellion. It was also felt to be a centre of power.
Elizabeth twice visited it, once in the heyday of her youthful glory,
and again in her haggard decline. On the first occasion she exerted with
effect those arts of popularity which were the best part of her
statesmanship. On both occasions she was received with ecstatic flattery
and entertained with academical exercises at tedious length, and plays,
to our taste not less tedious, performed in College Halls. Her successor
could not fail to exhibit himself in a seat of learning, where he felt
supreme, and, to do him justice, was not unqualified, to shine. To his
benignity the University owes the questionable privilege of sending two
members to the House of Commons, whereby it became entangled in
political as well as in theological frays.
* * * * *
Great changes, however, had by this time passed or were passing over the
University. As in former days the Halls had absorbed the Chamberdekyns,
so the Colleges had now almost absorbed the Halls. They did this, not by
any aggression, but by the natural advantages of wealth, their riches
always increasing with the value of land, and by their reputation. Most
of them, in addition to the members on the foundation, took students as
boarders, and they got the best and wealthiest. Universities, losing
their pristine character as marts of available knowledge, and becoming
places of general education, ceased, by a process equally natural, to be
the heritage of the poor and became the resort of the rich. The mediæval
statutes of the Colleges still limited the foundations to the poor, but
even these in time, by cunning interpretation, were largely evaded.
Already in the later Middle Ages Oxford had received, and, it seems, too
complacently received, young scions of the aristocracy and gentry, the
precursors of the noblemen and the silk-gowned gentleman-commoners of a
later day. The Black Prince had been for a short time at Queen's
College. In the reign of Henry VI., George Neville, the brother of the
King-maker, had celebrated the taking of his degree, a process which was
probably made easy to him, with banquets which lasted through two days
on a prodigious scale. At the same time and for the same causes the
system of College instruction grew in importance and gradually ousted
the lectures of University Professors. Fellows of Colleges were not
unwilling to add to their Commons and Livery the Tutor's stipend. Thus
the importance of the College waxed while that of the University waned,
and the College Statutes became more and more collectively the law of
the University. These Statutes were mediæval and obsolete, but they
were unalterable, the Heads and Fellows being sworn to their observance,
and there being no power of amendment, since the Visitor could only
interpret and enforce. Thus the mediæval type of life and study was
stereotyped and progress was barred. The Fellowships having been
originally not teacherships or prizes, but aids to poor students, the
Founders deemed themselves at liberty in regulating the elections to
give free play to their local and family partialities, and the
consequence was a mass of preferences to favoured counties or to kin.
With all these limitations, the teaching body of the University was now
practically saddled. Even the restrictions to particular schools--as to
Winchester in the case of New College, to Westminster, which had been
substituted for Wolsey's Ipswich, in the case of Christ Church, and to
Merchant Tailors' School in the case of St. John's--were noxious, though
in a less degree, albeit their bad influence might be redeemed by some
pleasant associations. Worst of all, however, in their effect were the
restrictions to the clerical Order. This meant little in the Middle
Ages, when all intellectual callings were clerical, when at Oxford
gownsman and clerk, townsman and laic, were convertible terms. Wykeham,
Foxe, and Wolsey themselves were thorough laymen in their pursuits and
character, though they had received the tonsure, were qualified, if
they pleased, to celebrate mass, and derived their incomes from
bishoprics and abbeys. But the Reformation drew a sharp line between the
clerical and the other professions. The clergyman was henceforth a
pastor. The resident body of graduates and the teaching staff of Oxford
belonging almost exclusively to the clerical profession, the studies and
interests of that profession now reigned alone. Whatever life remained
to the University was chiefly absorbed in theological study and
controversy. This was the more deplorable as theology, in the mediæval
sense, was a science almost as extinct as astrology or alchemy. Oxford
was turned into the cock-pit of theological party. At the same time she
was bound hand and foot to a political faction, because her clergymen
belonged to the Episcopal and State Church, the patrons and upholders of
which, from political motives, were the Kings and the Cavaliers, or, as
they were afterwards called, the Tories. Cambridge suffered like Oxford,
though with some abatement, because there, owing to the vicinity of a
great Puritan district, high Anglicanism did not prevail, and, for
reasons difficult to define, the clergy altogether were less clerical.
Newton was near forfeiting his Fellowship and the means of prosecuting
his speculations because he was not in Holy Orders. Luckily, a Lay
Fellowship fell just in time. Let Founders, and all who have a passion
for regulating the lives of other people, for propagating their wills
beyond the reach of their foresight, and for grasping posterity, as it
were, with a dead hand, take warning by a disastrous example.
* * * * *
As the Colleges became the University, their Heads became the governors
of the University. They formed a Board called the Hebdomadal Council,
which initiated all legislation, while the executive was the
Vice-Chancellorship, which, though legally elective, was appropriated by
the Heads, and passed down their list in order. With a single exception,
the Headships were all clerical, and they were almost always filled by
men of temperament, to say the least, eminently conservative. Thus
academical liberty and progress slept.
* * * * *
[Illustration: ST. MARY'S CHURCH.]
On the eve of another great storm we have a pleasant glimpse of Oxford
life and study in Clarendon's picture of Falkland's circle, at Great
Tew, within ten miles of Oxford, whither, he says, "most polite and
accurate men of that University resorted, dwelling there as in a College
situated in a purer air, so that his was a University bound in a less
volume, whither his intellectual friends came not so much for repose as
study, and to examine and refine those grosser propositions which
laziness and consent made current in conversation." This indicates that,
while study was going on, liberal inquiry was also on foot. But clouds
again gathered, the storm again came, and once more from the
ecclesiastical quarter. The triumph of the Reformation, the accession of
a Protestant Queen, and the Chancellorship of Leicester, who, for
politic purposes, played the Puritan, had been attended by a general
expulsion or secession of the Romanising party, which left the
University for a time in the hands of the Calvinists and Low Churchmen.
Hooker, the real father of Anglicanism, had, for a time, studied Church
antiquity in the quiet quadrangle of Corpus, but he had come into
collision with Puritanism, and had, for a time, been driven away by it.
Perhaps its prevalence may have ultimately inclined him to exchange the
University for a far less congenial sphere. The clergy, however, of an
Episcopal Church, and one which laid claim to Apostolical succession,
was sure in time to come round to High Church doctrine. To High Church
doctrine the clergy of Oxford did come round under the leadership of
Laud, University Preacher, Proctor, President of St. John's College, and
afterwards Chancellor of the University. Of Laud there are several
memorials at Oxford. One is the inner quadrangle of St. John's College,
ornamented in the style of Inigo Jones, where the Archbishop and
Chancellor, in the noontide of his career, received with ecstasies of
delight, ecclesiastical, academical, and political, his doomed king and
master with the fatal woman at Charles's side. Another is a fine
collection of oriental books added to the Bodleian Library. A third and
more important is the new code of statutes framed for the reformation of
the University by its all-powerful Chancellor. A fourth is the statue of
the Virgin and Child over the porch of St. Mary's Church, which, as
proof of a Romanising tendency, formed one of the charges against the
Archbishop, though it was really put up by his Chaplain. The fifth is
the headless corpse which lies buried in the Chapel of St. John's
College, whither pious hands conveyed it after the Restoration. Laud was
a true friend of the University and of learned men, in whom, as in
Hales, he respected the right of inquiry, and to whom he was willing to
allow a freedom of opinion which he would not allow to the common herd.
He was not so much a bigot as a martinet. It was by playing the martinet
in ecclesiastical affairs that he was brought into mortal collision with
the nation. In the code of statutes which by his characteristic use of
autocratic power he imposed on Oxford the martinet is betrayed; so is
the belief in the efficacy of regulation. We see the man who wrecked a
kingdom for the sake of his forms. Nor had Laud the force to deliver
University education from the shackles of the Middle Ages and the
scholastic system. But the code is dictated by a genuine spirit of
reform, and might have worked improvement had it been sustained by a
motive power.
* * * * *
The period of the Civil War is a gap in academical history. Its
monuments are only traces of destruction, such as the defacement of
Papistical images and window paintings by the Puritan soldiery, and the
sad absence of the old College plate, of which two thousand five hundred
ounces went to the Royal mint in New Inn Hall, only a few most sacred
pieces, such as the Founder's drinking-horn at Queen's, and the covered
cup, reputed that of the Founder, at Corpus, being left to console us
for the irreparable loss. Exeter College alone seems to have shown
compunction; perhaps there had remained in her something of the free
spirit for which in the days of Wycliffe she had been noted. Art and
taste may mourn, but the University, as a centre of Episcopalianism, had
little cause to complain; for the war was justly called the Bishops'
war, and by the Episcopal Church and the Queen, between them, Charles
was brought to the block. Oxford was bound by her ecclesiasticism to
the Royal cause, and she had the ill luck to be highly available as a
place of arms from her position between the two rivers, while she formed
an advanced post to the Western country in which the strength of the
King's cause lay. During those years the University was in buff and
bandolier, on the drill ground instead of in the Schools, while the
Colleges were filled with the exiled Court and its ghost of a
Parliament. Traces of works connecting the two rivers were not long ago
to be seen, and tradition points to the angle in the old city wall under
Merton College as the spot where Windebank, a Royalist officer, was shot
for surrendering his post. There was a reign of garrison manners as
well as of garrison duties, and to the few who still cared for the
objects of the University, even if they were Royalists, the surrender of
the city to the Parliament may well have been a relief.
* * * * *
Then came Parliamentary visitation and the purge, with the inevitable
violence and inhumanity. Heads and Fellows, who refused submission to
the new order of things, were turned out. Mrs. Fell, the wife of the
Dean of Christ Church, deposed for Royalism, refused to quit the
Deanery, and at last had to be carried out of the quadrangle, venting
her wrath in strong language as she went, by a squad of Parliamentary
musketeers. But the Puritans put in good men: such as Owen, who was
made Dean of Christ Church; Conant, who was made Rector of Exeter;
Wilkins, who was made Warden of Wadham; and Seth Ward, the
mathematician, who was made President of Trinity College. Owen and
Conant appear to have been model Heads. The number of students
increased. Evelyn, the Anglican and Royalist, visiting Oxford, seems to
find the academical exercises, and the state of the University
generally, satisfactory to his mind. He liked even the sermon, barring
some Presbyterian animosities. Nor did he find much change in College
Chapels. New College was "in its ancient garb, notwithstanding the
scrupulosity of the times." The Chapel of Magdalen College, likewise,
was "in pontifical order," and the organ remained undemolished. The
Protectorate was tolerant as far as the age allowed. Evelyn was
cordially received by the Puritan authorities and hospitably
entertained. Puritanism does not seem to have been so very grim,
whatever the satirist in "The Spectator" may say. Tavern-haunting and
swearing were suppressed. So were May-poles and some innocent
amusements. But instrumental music was much cultivated, as we learn from
the Royalist and High Church antiquary Anthony Wood, from whom, also, we
gather that dress, though less donnish, was not more austere. Cromwell,
having saved the Universities from fanatics who would have laid low all
institutions of worldly learning, made himself Chancellor of Oxford, and
sought to draw thence, as well as from Cambridge, promising youths for
the service of the State. Even Clarendon admits that the Restoration
found the University "abounding in excellent learning," notwithstanding
"the wild and barbarous depopulation" which it had undergone; a
miraculous result, which he ascribes, under God's blessing, to "the
goodness and richness of the soil, which could not be made barren by all
the stupidity and negligence, but choked the weeds, and would not suffer
the poisonous seeds, which were sown with industry enough, to spring
up." Puritanism might be narrow and bibliolatrous, but it was not
obscurantist nor the enemy of science. We see this in Puritan Oxford as
well as in Puritan Harvard and Yale. In Puritan Oxford the scientific
circle which afterwards gave birth to the Royal Society was formed. Its
chief was Warden Wilkins, and it included Boyle, Wallis, Seth Ward, and
Wren. It met either in Wilkins's rooms at Wadham, or in those of Boyle.
Evelyn, visiting Wilkins, is ravished with the scientific inventions and
experiments which he sees. On the stones of Oxford, Puritanism has left
no trace; there was hardly any building during those years. There were
benefactions not a few, among which was the gift of Selden's Library.
Upon the Restoration followed a Royalist proscription, more cruel, and
certainly more lawless, than that of the Puritans had been. All the good
Heads of the Commonwealth era were ejected, and the Colleges received
back a crowd of Royalists, who, during their exclusion, had probably
been estranged from academical pursuits. Anthony Wood himself is an
unwilling witness to the fact that the change was much for the worse.
"Some Cavaliers that were restored," he says, "were good scholars, but
the majority were dunces." "Before the War," he says in another place,
"we had scholars who 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, temperate, abstemious,
and plain 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 apparel and long periwigs." Into the Rectorship of Exeter, in place
of the excellent Conant, was put Joseph Maynard, of whom Wood says,
"Exeter College is now much debauched by a drunken Governor; whereas,
before, in Doctor Conant's time, it was accounted a civil house, it is
now rude and uncivil. The Rector is good-natured, generous, and a good
scholar, but he has forgot the way of College life, and the decorum of a
scholar. He is much given to bibbing, and when there is a music meeting
in one of the Fellow's chambers, he will sit there, smoke, and drink
till he is drunk, and has to be led to his lodgings by the junior
Fellows." This is not the only evidence of the fact that drinking,
idling, and tavern-haunting were in the ascendant. Study as well as
morality, having been the badge of the Puritan, was out of fashion.
Wilkins's scientific circle took its departure from Oxford to London,
there to become the germ of the Royal Society. The hope was gone at
Oxford of a race of "young men provided against the next age, whose
minds, receiving the first impressions of sober and generous knowledge,
should be invincibly armed against all the encroachments of enthusiasm."
The presence of the merry monarch, with his concubines, at Oxford, when
his Parliament met there, was not likely to improve morals. Oxford sank
into an organ of the High Church and Tory party, and debased herself by
servile manifestos in favour of government by prerogative.
Non-conformists were excluded by the religious tests, the operation of
which was more stringent than ever since the passing of the Act of
Uniformity. The love of liberty and truth embodied in Locke was expelled
from Christ Church; not, however, by the act of the College or of the
University, but by Royal warrant, though Fell, Dean of Christ Church,
bowed slavishly to the tyrant's pleasure; so that Christ Church may look
with little shame on the portrait of the philosopher, which now hangs
triumphant in her Hall. The Cavaliers did not much, even in the way of
building. The Sheldonian Theatre was given them by the Archbishop, to
whom subscriptions had been promised, but did not come in, so that he
had to bear the whole expense himself. He was so deeply disgusted that
he refused ever to look upon the building.
* * * * *
Over the gateway of University College stands the statue of James II.
That it should have been left there is a proof both of the ingrained
Toryism of old Oxford, and of the mildness of the Revolution of 1688.
Obadiah Walker, the Master of the Colleges, was one of the political
converts to Roman Catholicism, and it was in ridicule of him that "Old
Obadiah, Ave Maria," was sung by the Oxford populace. A set of rooms in
the same quadrangle bears the trace of its conversion into a Roman
Catholic Chapel for the king. It faces the rooms of Shelley. Reference
was made the other day, in an ecclesiastical lawsuit, to the singular
practice which prevails in this College, of filing out into the
ante-chapel after the sacrament to consume the remains of the bread and
wine, instead of consuming them at the altar or communion table. This
probably is a trace of the Protestant reaction which followed the
transitory reign of Roman Catholicism under Obadiah Walker. All are
familiar with the Magdalen College case, and with the train of events by
which the most devoutly royalist of Universities was brought, by its
connection with the Anglican Church and in defence of the Church's
possessions, into collision with the Crown, and arrayed for the moment
on the side of constitutional liberty. After the Revolution the recoil
quickly followed. Oxford became the stronghold of Jacobitism, the scene
of treasonable talk over the wine in the Common Room, of riotous
demonstrations by pot-valiant undergraduates in the streets, of Jacobite
orations at academical festivals, amid frantic cheers of the assembled
University, of futile plotting and puerile conspiracies which never put
a man in the field. "The king to Oxford sent a troop of horse." But the
troop of horse was not called upon to act. There was a small Hanoverian
and constitutional party, and now and then it scored a point against its
adversaries, who dared not avow their disloyalty to the reigning
dynasty. A Jacobite Proctor, having intruded into a convivial meeting of
Whigs, they tendered him the health of King George, which, for fear of
the treason law, he was fain to drink upon his knees.
* * * * *
[Illustration: STAIRCASE, CHRIST CHURCH.]
In the early part of the eighteenth century there was some intellectual
life in Christ Church, to which Westminster still sent up good scholars,
and which was the resort of the nobility, in whom youthful ambition and
desire for improvement might be stirred by the influences of political
homes, and the prospects of a public life. Dean Aldrich was a scholar
and a virtuoso. The spire of All Saints' Church is a soaring
monument of his taste, if not of his genius, for architecture. In the
controversy with Bentley about the Epistles of Phalaris, Christ Church,
though she was hopelessly in the wrong, showed that she had some
learning and some interest in classical studies. Otherwise the
eighteenth century is a blank, or worse than a blank, in the history of
the University. The very portraits on the College walls disclose the
void of any but ecclesiastical eminence. That tendency to torpor, which,
as Adam Smith and Turgot have maintained, is inherent in the system of
endowments, fell upon Oxford in full measure. The Colleges had now, by
the increase in value of their estates, become rich, some of them very
rich. The estates of Magdalen, Gibbon tells us, were thought to be worth
thirty thousand pounds a year, equivalent to double that sum now.
Instead of being confined to their original Commons and Livery, the
Heads and Fellows, as administrators of the estate, were now dividing
among themselves annually large rentals, though they failed to increase
in equal proportion the stipends of the Scholars and others who had no
share in the administration. The statutes of mediæval Founders had
become utterly obsolete, and were disregarded, notwithstanding the oath
taken to observe them, or observed only so far as they guarded the
interest of sinecurists against the public. Nor were any other duties
assumed. A few of the Fellows in each College added to their income by
holding the tutorships, the functions of which they usually performed in
the most slovenly way, each Tutor professing to teach all subjects,
while most of them knew none. In the Common Room, with which each of the
Colleges now provided itself, the Fellows spent lives of Trulliberian
luxury, drinking, smoking, playing at bowls, and, as Gibbon said, by
their deep but dull potations excusing the brisk intemperance of youth.
Even the obligation to residence was relaxed, and at last practically
annulled, so that a great part of the Fellowships became sinecure
stipends held by men unconnected with the University. About the only
restriction which remained was that on marriage. Out of this the Heads
had managed to slip their necks, and from the time of Elizabeth
downwards there had been married Heads, to the great scandal of Anthony
Wood and other academical precisians, to whom, in truth, one lady, at
least, the wife of Warden Clayton of Merton, seems to have afforded some
grounds for criticism by her usurpations. But in the case of the
Fellows, the statute, being not constructive, but express, could not be
evaded except by stealth, and by an application of the aphorism then
current, that he might hold anything who would hold his tongue. The
effect of this, celibacy being no longer the rule, was to make all the
Fellows look forward to the benefices, of a number of which each College
was the patron, and upon which they could marry. Thus devotion to a life
of study or education in College, had a Fellow been inclined to it, was
impossible, under the ordinary conditions of modern life. Idleness,
intemperance, and riot were rife among the students, as we learn from
the novels and memoirs of the day. Especially were they the rule among
the noblemen and gentlemen-commoners, who were privileged by their birth
and wealth, and to whom by the servility of the Dons every license was
allowed. Some Colleges took only gentlemen-commoners, who paid high
fees and did what they pleased. All Souls' took no students at all, and
became a mere club which, by a strange perversion of a clause in their
statutes, was limited to men of high family. The University as a
teaching and examining body had fallen into a dead swoon. Few of the
Professors even went through the form of lecturing, and the statutory
obligation of attendance was wholly disregarded by the students. The
form of mediæval disputations was kept up by the farcical repetition of
strings of senseless syllogisms, which were handed down from generation
to generation of students. The very nomenclature of the system had
become unmeaning. Candidates for the theological degree paced the
Divinity School for an hour, nominally challenging opponents to
disputation, but the door was locked by the Bedel, that no opponent
might appear. Examinations were held, but the candidates, by feeing the
University officer, were allowed to choose their own examiners, and they
treated the examiner after the ordeal. The two questions, "What is the
meaning of Golgotha?" and "Who founded University College?" comprised
the examination upon which Lord Eldon took his degree. A little of that
elegant scholarship, with the power of writing Latin verses, of which
Addison was the cynosure, was the most of which Oxford could boast.
Even this there could hardly have been had not the learned languages
happened to have formed an official part of the equipment of the
clerical profession. Of science, or the mental habit which science
forms, there was none. Such opportunities for study, such libraries,
such groves, a livelihood so free from care could scarcely fail, now and
then, to give birth to a learned man, an Addison, a Lowth, a Thomas
Warton, an Elmsley, a Martin Routh.
* * * * *
The Universities being the regular finishing schools of the gentry and
the professions, men who had passed through them became eminent in after
life, but they owed little or nothing to the University. Only in this
way can Oxford lay claim to the eminence of Bishop Butler, Jeremy
Bentham, or Adam Smith, while Gibbon is her reproach. The figures of
Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell, whose ponderous twin statues sit side by
side in the Library of University College, were more academical,
especially that of Lord Stowell, who was Tutor of his College, and held
a lectureship of Ancient History. Here and there a Tutor of the better
stamp, no doubt, would try to do his duty by his pupils. A rather
pathetic interest attaches to Richard Newton, who tried to turn Hart
Hall into a real place of education, and had some distinguished pupils,
among them Charles Fox. But the little lamp which he had kindled went
out in the uncongenial air. On the site, thanks to the munificence of
Mr. Baring, now stands Hertford College. Johnson's residence at Pembroke
College was short, and his narrative shows that it was unprofitable,
though his High Church principles afterwards made him a loyal son and
eulogist of the University. One good effect the interdiction of marriage
had. It kept up a sort of brotherhood, and saved corporate munificence
from extinction by the private interest of fathers of families. As the
College revenues increased, building went on, though after the false
classical fashion of the times and mostly for the purpose of College
luxury. Now rose the new quadrangle of Queen's, totally supplanting the
mediæval College, and the new buildings at Magdalen and Corpus. A plan
is extant, horrible to relate, for the total demolition of the old
quadrangle of Magdalen, and its replacement by a modern palace of
idleness in the Italian style. To this century belong Peckwater and
Canterbury quadrangles, also in the classical style, the first redeemed
by the Library which fills one side of the square, and which has a heavy
architectural grandeur as well as a noble purpose. To the eighteenth
century we also mainly owe the College gardens and walks as we see them;
and the gardens of St. John's, New College, Wadham, Worcester, and
Exeter, with the lime walk at Trinity and the Broadwalk--now unhappily
but a wreck--at Christ Church, may plead to a student's heart for some
mitigation of the sentence on the race of clerical idlers and
wine-bibbers, who, for a century, made the University a place, not of
education and learning, but of dull sybaritism, and a source, not of
light, but of darkness, to the nation. It is sad to think how different
the history of England might have been had Oxford and Cambridge done
their duty, like Harvard and Yale, during the last century.
* * * * *
[Illustration: CHRIST CHURCH--FRONT.]
At the end of the last or beginning of the present century came the
revival. At the end of the last century Christ Church had some
brilliant classical scholars among her students, though the great scene
of their eminence was not the study but the senate. The portraits of
Wellesley and Canning hang in her Hall. In the early part of the present
century the general spirit of reform and progress, which had been
repressed during the struggle with revolutionary France, began to move
again over the face of the torpid waters. Eveleigh, Provost of Oriel,
led the way. At his College and at Balliol the elections to Fellowships
were free from local or genealogical restrictions. They were now opened
to merit, and those two Colleges, though not among the first in wealth
or magnificence, attained a start in the race of regeneration which
Balliol, being very fortunate in its Heads, has since in a remarkable
manner maintained. The examination system of Laud had lacked a motive
power, and had depended, like his policy, on his fiat instead of vital
force. There was no sufficient inducement for the examiner to be strict
or for the candidate to excel. The motive power was now supplied by a
list of honours in classics and mathematics, and among the earliest
winners in the first class in both schools was Robert Peel.
* * * * *
Scarcely, however, had the University begun to awake to a new life, when
it was swept by another ecclesiastical storm, the consequence of its
unhappy identification with clericism and the State Church. The liberal
movement which commenced after the fall of Napoleon and carried the
Reform Bill, threatened to extend to the religious field, and to
withdraw the support of the State from the Anglican Church. This led the
clergy to look out for another basis, which they found in the
reassertion of High Church and sacerdotal doctrines, such as apostolical
succession, eucharistical real presence, and baptismal regeneration.
Presently the movement assumed the form of a revival of the Church of
the Middle Ages, such as High Church imagination pictured it, and
ultimately of secession to Rome. Oxford, with her mediæval buildings,
her High Church tradition, her half-monastic Colleges, and her body of
unmarried clergy, became the centre of the movement. The Romanising
tendencies of Tractarianism, as from the "Tracts for the Times" it was
called, visible from the first, though disclaimed by the leaders,
aroused a fierce Protestant reaction, which encountered Tractarianism
both in the press and in the councils of the University. The Armageddon
of the ecclesiastical war was the day on which, in a gathering of
religious partisans from all sections of the country which the
Convocation House would not hold, so that it was necessary to adjourn
to the Sheldonian Theatre, Ward, the most daring of the Tractarian
writers, after a scene of very violent excitement, was deprived of his
degree. This was the beginning of the end. Newman, the real leader of
the movement, though Pusey, from his academical rank, was the official
leader, soon recognised the place to which his principles belonged, and
was on his knees before a Roman Catholic priest, supplicating for
admission to the Church of Rome. A ritualistic element remained, and now
reigns, in the Church of England; but the party which Newman left,
bereft of Newman, broke up, and its relics were cast like drift-wood on
every theological or philosophical shore. Newman's poetic version of
mediæval religion, together with the spiritual graces of his style and
his personal influence, had for a time filled the imaginations and
carried away the hearts of youth, while the seniors were absorbed in the
theological controversy, renounced lay studies, and disdained
educational duty except as it might afford opportunities of winning
youthful souls to the Neo-Catholic faith. Academical duty would have
been utterly lost in theological controversy, had it not been for the
Class List, which bound the most intellectual undergraduates to lay
studies by their ambition, and kept on foot a staff of private teachers,
"coaches," as they were called, to prepare men for the examinations,
who did the duty which the ecclesiastical Fellows of the University
disdained. The Oxford movement has left a monument of itself in the
College founded in memory of Keble, the gentle and saintly author of
"The Christian Year." It has left an ampler monument in the revival of
mediæval architecture at Oxford, and the style of new buildings which
everywhere meet the eye. The work of the Oxford Architectural Society,
which had its birth in the Neo-Catholic movement, may prove more durable
than that movement itself. Of the excess to which the architectural
revival was carried, the new Library at University College, more like a
mediæval Chapel than a Library, is a specimen. It was proposed to give
Neo-Catholicism yet another monument by erecting close to the spot where
Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley died for truth, the statue of Cardinal
Newman, the object of whose pursuit through life had been, not truth,
but an ecclesiastical ideal. Of the reaction against the Tractarian
movement the monument is the memorial to the Protestant martyrs Cranmer,
Latimer, and Ridley, the subscription for which commenced among the
Protestants who had come up to vote for the condemnation of Ward, and
which Tractarians scornfully compared to the heap of stones raised over
the body of Achan.
* * * * *
[Illustration: GATE TOWER AND CLOISTERS, MAGDALEN.]
Here ended the reign of ecclesiasticism, of the Middle Ages, and of
religious exclusion. The collision into which Romanising Oxford had been
brought with the Protestantism of the British nation, probably helped to
bring on the revolution which followed, and which restored the
University to learning, science, and the nation. The really academical
element in the University invoked the aid of the national government and
Legislature. A Royal Commission of Inquiry into the state of the
University and its Colleges was appointed, and though some Colleges
closed their muniment rooms, and inquiry was obstructed, enough was
revealed in the Report amply to justify legislative reform and
emancipation. An act of Parliament was passed which set free the
University and Colleges alike from their mediæval statutes, restored the
University Professoriate, opened the Fellowships to merit, and relaxed
the religious tests. The curriculum, the examination system, and the
honour list were liberalised, and once more, as in early times, all the
great departments of knowledge were recognised and domiciled in the
University. Science, long an exile, was welcomed back to her home at the
moment when a great extension of her empire was at hand. Strictly
professional studies, such as practical law and medicine, could not be
recalled from their professional seats. Elections to Fellowships by
merit replaced election by local or school preferences, by kinship, or
by the still more objectionable influences which at one time had been
not unfelt. Colleges which had declined the duty of education, which had
been dedicated to sinecurism and indolence, and whose quadrangles had
stood empty, were filled with students, and once more presented a
spectacle which would have gladdened the heart of the Founder. A
Commission, acting on a still more recent Act of Parliament, has carried
the adaptation of Oxford to the modern requirements of science and
learning further than the old Commission, which acted in the penumbra of
mediæval and ecclesiastical tradition, dared. The intellectual Oxford
of the present day is almost a fresh creation. Its spirit is new; it is
liberal, free, and progressive. It is rather too revolutionary, grave
seniors say, so far as the younger men are concerned. This is probably
only the first forward bound of recovered freedom, which will be
succeeded in time by the sober pace of learning and scientific
investigation. Again, as in the thirteenth century, the day of
Grosseteste and Simon de Montfort, Oxford is a centre of progress,
instead of being, as under the later Stuarts, the stronghold of
reaction. Of the College revival, the monuments are all around in the
new buildings, for which increasing numbers have called, and which
revived energy has supplied. Christ Church, New College, Magdalen,
Merton, Balliol, Trinity, University have all enlarged their courts, and
in almost every College new life has been shown by improvement or
restoration. Of the reign of mediævalism the only trace is the
prevalence in the new buildings of the mediæval style, which
architectural harmony seemed to require, though the new buildings of
Christ Church and Trinity are proofs of a happy emancipation from
architectural tradition. The University revival has its monument in the
new examination Schools in High Street, where the student can no longer
get his degree by giving the meaning of Golgotha and the name of the
Founder of University College. There are those who, like Mark Pattison,
look on it with an evil eye, regarding the examination system as a
noxious excrescence and as fatal to spontaneous study and research;
though they would hardly contend that spontaneous study and research
flourished much at Oxford before the revival of examinations, or deny
that since the revival Oxford has produced the fruits of study and
research, at least to a fair extent. The restoration of science is
proclaimed by the new Museum yonder; a strange structure, it must be
owned, which symbolises, by the unfitness of its style for its purpose,
at once the unscientific character of the Middle Ages, and the
lingering attachment of Oxford to the mediæval type. Of the abolition of
the religious tests, and the restoration of the University to the
nation, a monument is Mansfield College for Congregationalists, a vision
of which would have thrown an orthodox and Tory Head of a College into
convulsions half a century ago. Even here the mediæval style of
architecture keeps its hold, though the places of Catholic Saints are
taken by the statues of Wycliffe, Luther, John Knox, Whitefield, and
Wesley. By the side of Mansfield College rises also Manchester College
for Independents, in the same architectural style. Neither of them,
however, is in the Oxford sense a College; both are places of
theological instruction.
* * * * *
On the North of the city, where fifty years ago stretched green fields,
is now seen a suburb of villas, all of them bespeaking comfort and
elegance, few of them overweening wealth. These are largely the
monuments of another great change, the removal of the rule of celibacy
from the Fellowships, and the introduction of a large body of married
teachers devoted to their profession, as well as of the revival of the
Professorships, which were always tenable by married men. Fifty years
ago the wives of Heads of Houses, who generally married late in life if
they married at all, constituted, with one or two officers of the
University, the whole female society of Oxford. The change was
inevitable, if education was to be made a profession, instead of being,
as it had been in the hands of celibate Fellows of Colleges, merely the
transitory occupation of a man whose final destination was the parish.
Those who remember the old Common Room life, which is now departing,
cannot help looking back with a wistful eye to its bachelor ease, its
pleasant companionship, its interesting talk and free interchange of
thought, its potations neither "deep" nor "dull." Nor were its symposia
without important fruits when such men as Newman and Ward, on one side,
encountered such men as Whately, Arnold, and Tait, on the other side, in
Common Room talk over great questions of the day. But the life became
dreary when a man had passed forty, and it is well exchanged for the
community that fills those villas, and which, with its culture, its
moderate and tolerably equal incomes, permitting hospitality but
forbidding luxury, and its unity of interests with its diversity of
acquirements and accomplishments, seems to present the ideal conditions
of a pleasant social life. The only question is, how the College system
will be maintained when the Fellows are no longer resident within the
walls of the College to temper and control the younger members, for a
barrack of undergraduates is not a good thing. The personal bond and
intercourse between Tutor and pupil under the College system was
valuable as well as pleasant; it cannot be resigned without regret. But
its loss will be compensated by far superior teaching. Half a century
ago conservatism strove to turn the railway away from Oxford. But the
railway came, and it brings, on summer Sundays, to the city of study and
thought not a few leaders of the active world. Oxford is now, indeed,
rather too attractive; her academical society is in danger of being
swamped by the influx of non-academical residents.
* * * * *
[Illustration: THE RIVER--BOATS RACING.]
The buildings stand, to mark by their varying architecture the
succession of the changeful centuries through which the University has
passed. In the Libraries are the monuments of the successive generations
of learning. But the tide of youthful life that from age to age has
flowed through college, quadrangle, hall, and chamber, through
University examination-rooms and Convocation Houses, has left no
memorials of itself except the entries in the University and College
books; dates of matriculation, which tell of the bashful boy standing
before the august Vice-Chancellor at entrance; dates of degrees, which
tell of the youth putting forth, from his last haven of tutelage, on
the waves of the wide world. Hither they thronged, century after
century, in the costume and with the equipments of their times, from
mediæval abbey, grange, and hall, from Tudor manor-house and homestead,
from mansion, rectory, and commercial city of a later day, bearing with
them the hopes and affections of numberless homes. Year after year they
departed, lingering for a moment at the gate to say farewell to College
friends, the bond with whom they vowed to preserve, but whom they were
never to see again, then stepped forth into the chances and perils of
life, while the shadow on the College dial moved on its unceasing round.
If they had only left their names in the rooms which they had occupied,
there would be more of history than we have in those dry entries in the
books. But, at all events, let not fancy frame a history of student life
at Oxford out of "Verdant Green." There are realities corresponding to
"Verdant Green," and the moral is, that many youths come to the
University who had better stay away, since none get any good and few
fail to get some harm, saving those who have an aptitude for study. But
the dissipation, the noisy suppers, the tandem-driving, the fox-hunting,
the running away from Proctors, or, what is almost as bad, the childish
devotion to games and sports as if they were the end of existence,
though they are too common a part of undergraduate life in the
University of the rich, are far from being the whole of it. Less than
ever are they the whole of it since University reform and a more liberal
curriculum have increased, as certainly they have, industry and
frugality at the same time. Of the two or three thousand lamps which
to-night will gleam from those windows, few will light the supper-table
or the gambling-table; most will light the book. Youthful effort,
ambition, aspiration, hope, College character and friendship have no
artist to paint them,--at least as yet they have had none. But whatever
of poetry belongs to them is present in full measure here.
INDEX.
Addison, Joseph, 136.
Aldrich, Henry, 128.
Alfred (King), 24, 51.
All Souls' College, 67 _et sq._
Amusements, mediæval, 43.
Antiquity, apparent, of the buildings, 3.
Architectural revival at Oxford, 147, 148.
Aristotle, 31.
Ashmolean Museum, 24.
Augustinians, 35.
_Aulæ_, 39.
Bacon, Roger, 32, 33, 37.
Bacon, Sir Nicholas, 91.
Balliol College, 50;
intellectual revival in, 141.
Baring, T. C., 138.
Benedictines, 35.
Bentham, Jeremy, 137.
Bentley, Richard, 129.
Black Prince, the, 100.
Bocardo, 88.
Bodleian Library, 19, 20, 21, 97.
Bodley, Sir Thomas, 20, 93.
Bologna, University of, 29.
Botanic Garden, 97.
Boyle, Charles, 119.
Bradwardine, Thomas, 31.
Brasenose College, 67 _et sq._, 74, 75.
Broadwalk, the, 140.
Brome, Adam de, 52.
Buildings, dates of, 3 _et sq._
Butler, Bishop, 137.
Cardinal College, 83.
Carmellites, 35.
Celibacy enjoined on Heads of Colleges, 96;
effects of its withdrawal, 132, 133.
Chamberdekyns, 39, 99.
Charles I. at Oxford, 113, 114.
Charles II. at Oxford, 123.
Chicheley, Archbishop, 70, 71.
Christ Church Cathedral, 35.
Christ Church College, 80 _et sq._;
intellectual revival in, 128, 129, 140, 141.
Cistercians, 35.
Civil War, Oxford in the time of the, 112 _et sq._
Clarendon, Earl of, 18, 107.
Clarendon Building, 18, 19.
Clarendon Press, 19.
Class Lists, 142.
Clayton, Thos., wife of, 132.
Clerical profession, dominance of, 104.
Colet, John, 76.
College life, 9 _et sq._
Colleges, administration and government of, 9 _et sq._;
growing importance of, 99 _et sq._;
the present intellectual revival in the, 152 _et sq._
Commemoration, 15.
Common Room life, 157.
Commons, 49.
Commonwealth, Oxford in the time of the, 114 _et sq._
Conant, John, 116.
Congregation, 8.
Convocation, 8.
Convocation House, 13, 14, 97.
Corpus Christi College, 75.
Cranmer, Archbishop, 88, 89.
Cromwell, Oliver, Chancellor of Oxford, 118.
Degrees, manner of conferring, 13.
Disputation, stress laid upon, 30.
Divinity School, 14.
Dominicans, 36.
Duns Scotus, 31.
Durham College, 91.
Egglesfield, Robert, 52.
Eldon, Lord, 135, 137.
Elizabeth (Queen), 98.
Elmsley, Peter, 136.
Erasmus, D., 76.
"Essays and Reviews," authors of, 24.
Eton, 59.
Eveleigh, John, 141.
Evelyn, John, 116, 119.
Examinations, 21, 22.
Examination system, the, 153, 154.
Examination-rooms. _See_ Schools.
Exeter College, 50, 53 _et sq._
Faculties, 28.
Falkland, Viscount, 107.
Fawkes's (Guy) lantern, 21.
Fell, John, 124.
Fellows, 46.
Fellowships, 102.
Fleming, Bishop, 68.
Founders, portraits of, 21.
Foxe, Bishop, 77.
Franciscans, 36.
Frydeswide, St., 87.
Gibbon, Edward, 137.
Gladstone, W. E., 22.
Graduation. _See_ Degrees.
Great Hall of the University, the, 51.
Great Tew, 107.
Grocyn, William, 76.
Grosseteste, Robert, 38, 44.
Halls, 39, 98, 99.
Hart Hall, 137.
Hebdomadal Council, 106.
Hertford College, 138.
High Church Traditions at Oxford, 144 _et sq._
Hooker, Richard, 108.
Houses, monastic, 50.
Humanists, the, 77.
Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 20, 76.
Inception, 31.
Jacobitism at Oxford, 127, 128.
James I., 22, 98.
James II., statue of, 125.
Jesus College, 94.
Jews at Oxford in the Middle Ages, 42.
Johnson, Samuel, at Oxford, 138.
Keble, John, 147.
Keble College, 147.
Laud, Archbishop, 109 _et sq._
Leicester, Earl of, 108.
Lime Walk at Trinity College, the, 140.
Linacre, Thomas, 76.
Lincoln College, 67 _et sq._
Livery, 49.
Locke, John, 124.
Lowth, Robert, 136.
Magdalen College, 67 _et sq._, 72 _et sq._, 130.
Magdalen College Case, 126.
Manchester College, 155.
Manning, H. E., 24.
Mansfield College, 155.
Marisco, Adam de, 44.
Martyr, Catherine, 87.
Maynard, Joseph, 121.
Mendicant Orders, 36.
Merton, Walter de, 44, 45.
Merton College, 45 _et sq._
Mob Quad, 45.
Monastic Orders, 35.
Monastic Oxford, 35.
Monasteries, 35, 37, 50, 53.
Montfort, Simon de, 37, 38.
More, Sir Thomas, 76.
Museum, the Ashmolean. _See_ Ashmolean.
Museum, the University, 153, 154.
Neo-Catholicism. _See_ Tractarianism.
Neville, George, 101.
Newman, J. H., 14, 24, 145, 148.
New College, 55 _et sq._
Newton, Isaac, 105.
Newton, Richard, 137.
Non-conformists excluded, 123.
Ockham, 31.
Oldham, Hugh, 78.
Oriel College, 50, 52.
Osney Abbey, 35.
Owen, John, 116.
Oxford (the name), derivation of, 2.
Oxford Architectural Society, 147.
Oxford (the city), situation of, 1;
environs of, 1, 2;
of the 13th century, 27 _et sq._
Oxford (the University),
administration and government of, 7 _et sq._, 106 _et sq._;
origin and growth of, 25 _et sq._;
political proclivities of, 28, 37, 105;
in the 18th century, 130 _et sq._;
in the 19th century, 140 _et sq._;
intellectual revival of, in the present day, 152.
Oxford Movement, the. _See_ Tractarianism.
Oxford University Commissions (1850 and 1876), 149, 151.
Papacy, the, and the Universities, 34, 37.
Paris, University of, 27, 34.
Pattison, Mark, 70.
Pembroke College, 97.
Peel, Robert, 142.
Petre, Sir William, 93.
Philippa, Queen, 52.
Philosophy, Scholastic, early addiction to, 30.
Pope, Cardinal, 92.
Pope, Sir Thomas, 91.
Portraits of Founders, 21.
Press, the University (_see also_ Clarendon Press), 19.
Proctors, 10, 13, 14.
Professors, 10.
Protectorate, the. _See_ Commonwealth.
Puritanism and Oxford, 115 _et sq._
Pusey, E. B., 24, 145.
Queen's College, 50, 52.
Radcliffe, Dr. John, 23.
Radcliffe Library, 23.
Reformation, influence of, on Oxford, 108, 110.
Religious tests, 90.
Renaissance, the Mediæval, 23.
Restoration, the, and Oxford, 120 _et sq._
Revolution, the (1688), and Oxford, 125, 127.
Richard III. at Oxford, 73, 74.
Rotheram, Bishop, 69.
Routh, Martin, 136.
Royal Commissions. _See_ Oxford University Commissions.
Royal Society, The, 119 _et sq._
St. Frydeswide's Church, 35.
St. John's College, 92.
St. Mary of Winton, College of, 56.
St. Mary's Church, 15, 24.
St. Michael's Church, 25.
Salerno, University of, 27.
Scholars, 46 _et sq._
Schools, the, 21.
Schools, the new examination, 153.
Sermons, University, 24.
Sheldon, Archbishop, 14.
Sheldonian Theatre, 14, 15, 124, 125.
Smith, Adam, 137.
_Socii_, 46.
Sports, 162.
Statutes, fettering influence of, 101, 102;
disregarded, 130.
Stowell, Lord, 137.
Student life, mediæval, 39 _et sq._, 63 _et sq._
Students, mediæval, 39, 41 _et sq._;
their affrays with the townspeople, 41, 42;
their amusements, 43.
Suburbs of Oxford, 156 _et sq._
Teachers, the first, at Oxford, 28.
Tests. _See_ Religious tests.
Theology, 32.
Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, 73.
Tom Tower, 81.
Tractarianism, 145 _et sq._
Trinity College, 91.
"Trojans, The," 77.
Turner's picture of Oxford, 2.
Tutors, 9.
Undergraduate life, modern, 162, 163.
Universities, rise of, in Europe, 27.
University College, 51.
University Gallery, 21.
"Verdant Green," 162.
Vice-Chancellorship, the, 106.
Vives, Juan Luis, 81.
Wadham, Dorothy, 96.
Wadham, Sir Nicholas, 95.
Wadham College, 94.
Walker, Obadiah, 126.
Ward, Seth, 116.
Ward, W. G., 145.
Warton, Thomas, 136.
Waynflete, Bishop, 72, 73.
Wellington, Duke of, his inauguration as Chancellor, 17.
Wesley, John, 70.
White, Sir Thomas, 92, 93.
Wilkins, John, 116, 119, 122.
William of Durham, 50.
William of Wykeham, 55 _et sq._
Winchester School, 58.
Windebank, Thos., 114.
Wolsey, Cardinal, 59, 81, 82 _et sq._
Wood, Anthony (_quoted_), 120, 121.
Worcester College, 35.
Wren, Christopher, 3, 82.
Wycliffe, John, 54.
Wykeham. _See_ William of Wykeham.
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