transferring himself to anybody’s obedience, by being absent except on
College business or by special leave of the Provost for more than the
greater half of a full term, or for wilfully neglecting to take the
prescribed steps of advancement in study.
Offences generally were to be tried by the Provost and two assessors,
and punished by the Provost with the consent of the scholars.
The College was to bake its own bread and brew its own beer within
the College, by its own servants acting under the supervision of the
steward of the week and of the treasurer’s clerk. Every loaf before it
was baked was to weigh 46_s._ 8_d._ sterling, from whatever market the
corn came, and of whatever kind the bread was; and this weight was not
to be changed whatever was the price of corn.
A sum of £40 specially given for this purpose by the founder was always
to remain in hand, to be set apart at the beginning of each year, and
accounted for at the end as ready-money or floating balance, to be used
for buying stores of victuals and fuel, and not to be employed in part
or whole for any other purpose.
The Scholars were to have a horse-mill of their own to grind their
wheat, barley, and other corn within the College, or at least very near
thereto, to save the excessive tolls and payments to millers which
might otherwise fall upon them.
With these and similar injunctions the founder launched the College on
its voyage across the centuries. Into the details of that voyage there
is no further room to go. Whatever affected the history of the country
affected the history of the University, and whatever affected the
history of the University affected the history of the College. Wycliff
stayed within the College, and Nicholas of Hereford, who translated
for him the Old Testament, was a Fellow. Henry Whitfield, Provost, and
three Fellows, one of them John of Trevisa, all four west-countrymen,
were expelled for Wycliffism. The phases of the Reformation in England
are accurately reflected in the College accounts. A Royal Commission
visits the College in 1545, and Rudd, one of the Fellows, is expelled.
Eightpence is paid, “pro vino & orengis commissionariis.” Three years
later 6_s._ 2_d._ is paid, “dolantibus meremium & diripientibus
imagines in sacello.” The wheel comes round, and in 1555, 9_s._
is paid, “pro ligatione et coopertura unius portiphorii, duorum
processionalium, unius missalis, unius gradalis, unius antiphonarii
& unius hymnarii.” But the reaction is only temporary, and in 1560
appears 4_s._ 8_d._, “pro destruendo altaria.”
The College contributes others besides the Wycliffites and Rudd as
victims to the struggles of the times. John Bost is a martyr for
Roman Catholicism; as Michael Hudson later, for the King against the
Parliament. Thomas Smith’s case is the hardest of all; as, having been
turned out of his Fellowship at Magdalen for refusing to elect Bishop
Parker as President, he is turned out again later on for refusing to
take the oath of allegiance to William III.
The College shared the fortunes of the University in the days of the
Stuarts. His Majesty desires the College, 5th Jan., 1642-3, to lend him
all plate of what kind soever belonging to the College, and promises
to see the same repaid after the rate of 5_s._ per ounce for white,
and 5_s._ 6_d._ for gilt plate; and nine days later Mr. Stannix,
thesaurarius, delivers to Sir William Parkhurst for his Majesty’s use
such a collection of tankards, two-eared potts, white large bowles
and lesser bowles, salts and gilt bowles, and spoones and gobletts,
as the College shall never see again, 2319 oz. of both sorts, worth
in all £591 1_s._ 9_d._ And then the Provost and scholars, as things
grow worse, petition Sir Thomas Glemham that--whereas parcel of the
works on the west side of Northgate had been assigned to Magdalen and
Queen’s College jointly, and Queen’s College had already performed
more than in a due proportion would have come to their share, most of
them labouring in their own persons by the space of twelve days at
the least, while those of Magdalen assisted, some very slenderly and
some not at all--that a proportionable part of the work yet unfinish’d
may be set forth to themselves in particular apart from Magdalen;
and this is ordered to be done. And then the king goes down, and the
parliamentary visitors appear; and “This is the answer of mee, Jo.
Fisher (Master of Arts and Chaplaine of Queenes Colledge), and which
I shall acknowledge is myne: That I cannot without perjury submitt
to this visitation, and therefore I will not submitt. _Ita est_: Jo.
Fisher.” And John Fisher and others are reported to the Committee of
Lords and Commons and lose their places. And George Phillip and James
Bedford and William Barksdale and Moses Foxcraft appear in the Register
of Fellows as “Intrusi tempore usurpationis, exclusi ad Restaurationem
Caroli Secundi.”
And in all these crises, and those which have followed, “sons of
Eglesfield” have been called to play their part. Thomas Barlow, Bishop
of Lincoln; Henry Compton, Bishop of London; Thomas Cartwright, Bishop
of Chester; Thomas Lamplugh, Archbishop of York; Edmund Gibson, Bishop
of London; William Nicholson, Archbishop of Cashel; Thomas Tanner,
Bishop of St. Asaph; William Van Mildert, Bishop of Durham; William
Thomson, Archbishop of York, among Prelates: John Owen, Dean of
Christ Church; John Mill and Richard Cecil, among Divines: Sir John
Davies, Sir Thomas Overbury, William Wycherly, Joseph Addison, Thomas
Tickell, William Collins, William Mitford, Jeremy Bentham, Francis
Jeffrey, among men of letters: Gerard Langbaine, Thomas Hyde, Thomas
Hudson, Edward Thwaites, Christopher Rawlinson, Edward Rowe Mores,
Thomas Tyrwhitt, among scholars; Edmund Halley and Henry Highton,
among men of science; Sir Edward Nicholas, Sir John Banks, and Sir
Joseph Williamson, among lawyers and statesmen--are but a selection
of the more distinguished of those to whose equipment the College has
contributed in a greater or less degree. May those who now and shall
hereafter occupy their places avoid their errors and emulate their
virtues.
VII.
NEW COLLEGE.
BY THE REV. HASTINGS RASHDALL, M.A., LATE SCHOLAR OF NEW COLLEGE,
FELLOW OF HERTFORD COLLEGE.
[A MS. life of Wykeham ascribed to Warden Chaundler, but
probably only corrected by him, remains in the possession
of the College. The _Historica Descriptio complectens vitam
ac res gestas Wicami_, Londini 1597, is the work of Martyn.
There are two scholarly lives of the Founder by Lowth (edit.
2, London 1759) and G. H. Moberly (Winchester 1887), but they
give little information about the College. Walcott’s _William
of Wykeham and his Colleges_ (Winchester 1852) is the fullest
College history that we possess, but it leaves something to be
desired. I have to thank the Warden of New College, the Rev.
W. A. Spooner, and the Rev. H. B. George for several valuable
suggestions or corrections.]
More has been written about the lives of the Oxford College founders
than about the institutions which they founded. In some cases the
life of a founder properly belongs to the history of his College; the
life of William of Wykeham is part of the history of England. For our
present purpose, therefore, it is unnecessary to trace his public
and political career; but we cannot appreciate the aim of such an
institution as New College without understanding the kind of man in
whose brain the scheme originated.
William of Wykeham was an ecclesiastic; but in the Middle Ages that
meant something very different from what it means now. “The Church” was
a synonym for “the professions.” In Northern Europe the Church supplied
almost the only opportunity of a civil career to the cadet of a noble
house, the sole opportunity of rising to the ambitious plebeian. The
servants of the Crown, the diplomatists, the secretaries, advisers,
or “clerks” of great nobles, the host of ecclesiastical judges and
lawyers, many even of the secular lawyers, the physicians, the
architects, sometimes even the astrologers, were ecclesiastics. William
of Wykeham rose to eminence as a civil servant of the Crown, and was
rewarded in the usual way by ecclesiastical preferment, culminating
in a bishopric. Such men had usually taken a degree in Canon or Civil
Law at the Universities. William of Wykeham is not known to have been
a University man; he rose to eminence in the King’s Office of Works,
and became surveyor at Windsor Castle, which was half rebuilt under
his direction. He was the greatest architect of his day. Afterwards he
held a series of political appointments--eventually the Chancellorship.
As a politician, he was the champion of the old order of things rudely
shaken by the Wycliffite heresy and the political movements with which
it was associated; the leader of the Church, or Conservative, party;
a moderate and far-sighted man withal, but still a sturdy opponent of
reform; a pious man in the conventional fourteenth-century way, but
still a devoted supporter of all the abuses against which Wyclif had
declaimed, as became one who was himself the greatest pluralist of his
day.
New College was intended to be another stronghold of the old system in
Church and State. It was to increase the supply of clergy, which the
statutes declare to have been thinned by “pestilences, wars, and the
other miseries of the world.” Some have seen in these words a special
allusion to the Black Death of 1348; but it was more probably a mere
flourish of mediæval rhetoric, or possibly a fashion which had survived
from 1348. The general idea of the College was not fundamentally
different from that of its predecessors. William of Wykeham, once
raised to the splendid See of Winchester, was anxious to do something
for the Church; and the general opinion of the day was that monks were
out of date, that the Church herself was rich enough, and that to send
capable men to the Universities was the best way to fight heresy, to
strengthen the Church system, and to save the donor’s soul.
Wykeham’s ultimate purpose in founding his College was conventional
enough; in the manner of carrying it out there was much that was
original. It was, however, rather the greater scale of the whole design
than any one original feature that gives an historical appropriateness
to the name “New” which has accidentally cleaved to “St. Marie
Colledge of Wynchester” in Oxford. In the number of the scholars, in
the liberality of their allowances, in the architectural splendour of
the buildings of his College, Wykeham eclipsed all previous Oxford
College-founders. In many respects the founder of Queen’s had, indeed,
aimed as high as Wykeham; but he had begun to build and was not able
to finish; his Provost and apostolic twelve never grew to the seventy
which he contemplated. What Eglesfield designed, Wykeham accomplished.
The most original feature of Wykeham’s design was the connection of his
College at Oxford with a grammar-school at a distance. The fundamental
vice of mediæval education was the prevalent neglect of grammatical
discipline and the absurdly early age at which boys were plunged into
the subtleties of Logic and the mysteries of the Latin Aristotle,
the very language of which, unclassical as it was, they could hardly
understand. Wykeham had no thought of a Renaissance, or of any
fundamental change in the educational system of the day; he was only
anxious to remedy a defect which all practical men acknowledged. Boys
were still to be taught Latin chiefly that they might read Aristotle,
and Peter the Lombard or the Corpus Juris; but they were to learn to
walk before they were encouraged to run.
Hard by his own cathedral, the Bishop erected a College for a Warden,
Sub-Warden, ten Fellows, a Head Master, Usher, and seventy scholars,
with a proper staff of chaplains and choristers. From this College
exclusively were to be selected the seventy scholars of St. Marie
Colledge of Wynchester in Oxford; and no one could be elected before
fifteen or after nineteen, except in the case of “Founder’s-kin”
scholars, who were eligible up to thirty. This implies that the usual
age of Wykehamists upon entering the University would be much above
the average, since it was quite common for boys to begin their course
in Arts at fourteen or earlier. By the erection of his College at
Winchester, Wykeham became the founder of the English public-school
system.
The Oxford College consisted of a Warden and seventy “poor clerical
scholars,” together with ten “stipendiary priests” or chaplains, three
stipendiary clerks, and sixteen boy-choristers for the service of the
chapel. It entered on a definite existence not later than 1375, the
scholars being temporarily lodged in Hart Hall (now Hertford College)
and other adjoining houses while the buildings were being completed.
The foundation charters were granted in 1379; the foundation-stone
laid at 8 a.m. on March 5th, 1379-80; on April 14th, 1387, at 9 a.m.
the society, “with cross erect, and singing a solemn litany,” marched
processionally into the splendid habitation which their Founder had
been preparing for them in an unoccupied corner within the walls of the
town.
New College is the first, and still almost the only, College whose
extant buildings substantially represent a complete and harmonious
design as it presented itself to the founder’s eye. The quadrangle
of New College may indeed have been the first completed quadrangle
in Oxford. In that case we might attribute to the architect Bishop
the origination of the type to which later English Colleges have so
tenaciously adhered. At any rate completeness is the characteristic
feature of Wykeham’s buildings; every want of his scholars was provided
for from their academical birth, if need be to the grave.
Previous Colleges had for the most part occupied the choir of some
existing parish church for the solemn services of Sunday and Holy-day;
at most they had a little “oratory” in which a priest or two said
mass. With Wykeham the chapel formed an integral part of the original
design. In spite of the ravages of Puritan iconoclasm, the chapel
has always retained the perfect proportion which it received from
its founder’s hands. It is now regaining, under the touch of modern
restoration, so much of its ancient beauty as the cold taste of the
present day will tolerate; but we shall never see again the blaze of
colour on windows and walls, on groined roof and on sculptured image
which it presented to its founder’s eye. Wykeham’s design provided
not merely for things needful, but for ornament. Not only was the
chapel a choir of cathedral magnitude, with transepts, though without
a nave--henceforth the typical form of the College chapel; there was
outside the wall (nowhere else could it have stood so conveniently),
the great Bell-tower. There was an ample hall or refectory, the
oldest now remaining in Oxford. There were cloisters, round which
every Sunday the whole College, in copes and surplices, were to go in
procession, “according to the use of Sarum,” and within which members
of the College might be buried, by special papal bull, without leave
of parish-priest or bishop. There was a tower specially provided over
the hall staircase with massive doors of many locks to serve as a
muniment-room and treasury. There was a library, stored with books by
the founder; and an audit-room on the north side of the east gate.
Just outside the main entrance were the brewery and the bake-house.
A spacious garden supplied the College with vegetables, and perhaps
the scholars with room for such exercise as was permitted by the
high standard of “clerical” behaviour demanded of Wykeham’s tonsured
undergraduates. And all remains now substantially as the founder
designed it, marred only by the addition (in 1675) of a third story to
the front quadrangle, and by the modernization of the windows.
The religious aim of College-founders is often exaggerated, or at
least misapprehended. It is true that all Oxford Colleges, like the
University itself, were intended for ecclesiastics. But in the earlier
Colleges not even the Head is required to be in Holy, or even in
minor, Orders; nor are students of any rank required to go to church
or chapel except on Sundays and holy-days. As time went on, the
ecclesiastical character of Colleges is more and more emphasized; but
even then, more is thought of providing for the repose of the founder’s
soul than of the moral or religious training of his scholars, or the
spiritual wants of those to whom they were to minister. Colleges, like
monasteries, were largely endowed out of the “impropriated” tithes
properly belonging to the parochial churches. But if College Fellows
are required to become priests at a certain stage of their career,
it is that they may say masses for the founder. If the chapels are
provided with a staff of chaplains, it is with the same object. In
William of Wykeham’s College the ecclesiastical character is at its
maximum: Wykeham aimed in fact at erecting a great Collegiate Church
and an Academical College in one. The ecclesiastical duties--the masses
and canonical hours--were chiefly performed by the hired chaplains.
But even the studious part of the community was required to make some
return for the founder’s liberality by saying certain prayers for him
and his royal “benefactors” immediately after rising and before going
to bed. They are further required to go to mass daily--it is the first
Oxford College where daily chapel is required--and while there (or
at some other time) every scholar is to say sixty _Paters_ and fifty
_Aves_ in honour of the Virgin.
Wykeham was indeed the first College-founder, at Oxford at all events,
who conceived the idea of making his College not a mere eleemosynary
institution, but a great ecclesiastical corporation, which should
vie both in the splendour of its architecture and the dignity of its
corporate life with the Cathedral chapters and the monastic houses.
The earlier Heads had been raised above the scholars or Fellows by
the luxury of a single private room: they dined in the common hall
with the rest. The Warden of New College was to live, like an abbot,
in a house of his own, within the College walls, but with a separate
hall, kitchen, and establishment. His salary of £40 was princely by
comparison with the 40_s._, with commons, assigned to the Master of
Balliol, or even the forty marks allotted to the Warden of Merton.
Instead of the jealous provisions against burdening the College
with the entertainment of guests which we meet with in the Paris
College-statutes, ample provision is made for the hospitable reception
of important strangers by the Warden in his own Hall, or (in his
absence) by the Sub-Warden and Fellows in the Great Hall, as they would
have been entertained in a Benedictine abbey by the abbot or the prior
(the Sub-Warden being evidently intended to hold a position analogous
to the latter). The Master of Peterhouse in Cambridge was allowed to
have a single horse, on the ground that it would be “indecent for
him to go afoot, nor could he, without scandal to the College, hire
a hack” (_conducere hakenys_): the Warden of New College is to have
_six_ horses at his disposal, for himself and the “discreet, apt, and
circumspect Fellow,” with four servants, who attended upon the annual
“progress” over the College estates--more than some provincial canons
allowed to a cathedral dean. In chapel the Warden was placed on a level
with cathedral canons by the permission to wear an amice _de grisio_
(vair or ermine).
The “commons,” or weekly allowance of a Fellow, was to be a shilling
in times of plenty, which might rise in times of scarcity to 16_d._,
or when the bushel of corn should be at 2_s._, to 18_d._ But though
the College allowances were equal, the money was expended by the
officers for the Fellows, and not by the Fellows themselves; and it was
expressly provided that the quality of the victuals supplied should
vary with “degree, merit and labour.” The Sub-Warden and Doctors of
superior Faculties sat at the High Table, to which also might be
admitted Bachelors of Theology in defect of sufficient Doctors; their
plates or courses (_fercula_) might not exceed four. But when the
Warden dined in Hall (which he was only privileged to do on certain
great festivals), he was to sit in the middle of the table and to
be “served alone,” _i. e._ to have luxuries provided for him in
which his neighbours were not to participate. At the side-tables sat
the Graduate-Fellows and chaplains; in the middle of the Hall, the
probationers and other juniors. During meals the Bible was read, and
silence required. As to the hours of meals it may be observed (though
the statutes are silent on this head) that the usual hour for dinner
was 10 a.m., and supper was at 5 p.m. There is no trace of breakfast in
any mediæval College till near the beginning of the sixteenth century,
when it became usual for men to go to the buttery for a hunk of bread
and a pot of beer, which were either consumed at the buttery or taken
away--the first meal taken in rooms, and the origin of that tradition
of breakfast-parties which is still characteristic of University life.
But when it is remembered that the day began at five or six, it were a
pious opinion that some kind of “hasty snack” at an early hour (such as
the _jentaculum_ of a later day) was winked at in the case of weaker
brethren.
Besides the commons every Fellow received an annual “livery,” or suit
of clothes, suitable to his University rank, but also of uniform cut
and colour; and the rooms were no doubt rudely furnished at the expense
of the College.
A Fellow received no other allowance, unless he was of Founder’s-kin
and poor, or a priest, or an officer, or a tutor, the latter receiving
5_s._ a year for each pupil. A Fellow in need of such assistance might
also have the heavy expenses of graduation, especially of banqueting
the Regents, defrayed by the College.
In the lower rooms, each of which had four windows and four studies
(_studiorum loca_), four scholars were quartered; in the upper rooms,
three. The chaplains and clerks slept in rooms under the Hall, which
are now appropriated to the College stores. A senior was placed in
each room who was responsible for the diligence and good conduct of
the juniors, and was bound to report irregularities to the Warden,
Sub-Warden, or Dean, “so that such manner of Fellows and scholars
suffering defect in their morals, negligent, or slothful in their
studies, may receive competent castigation, correction, and punition.”
Whether the last terrors of scholastic law are contemplated under the
head of “castigation” is not quite clear; but Fellows of all ranks were
liable to “subtraction of commons”; and were in that case, perhaps, not
able to live upon their neighbours in the convenient manner practised
by modern New College men “crossed at the buttery.”
Only a Doctor might have a separate servant; but all were required to
have separate beds, a luxury not altogether a matter of course in the
Middle Ages. At Magdalen, for instance, the younger Demies slept two in
a bed.
All kinds of service were to be performed by males; though a
washerwoman might be tolerated (“in defect of a male washer”),
provided she were of such “age and condition” as to be above “sinister
suspicions.” One of the servants was to be specially entrusted with the
task of carrying the scholars’ books to the public schools.
The statutes of New College are extraordinarily minute and detailed in
their disciplinary regulations, being more than three times as long
as those of Merton. In their ample prohibitory code we may probably
see a fair picture of undergraduate life in the Middle Ages, as it
was outside the Colleges. It was the Colleges which gradually broke
down the ancient liberty of the boy-undergraduate; and at last, by the
sixteenth century, succeeded in making him a mere school-boy _sub virga
et ferula_.