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_.

One piece of rough mediæval horse-play which incurs the founder’s especial wrath is that “most vile and horrid sport of shaving beards, which is wont to take place on the night preceding the inception of Masters of Arts.” Among the more ordinary pastimes forbidden by the founder are the haunting of taverns and “spectacles,” the keeping of dogs, hawks, or ferrets; the games of chess, hazard, or ball; and other “noxious, inordinate, or illicit” games, “especially those played for money”; shooting with “arrows, stones, earth, or other missiles” to the danger of windows and buildings; the “effusion of wine, beer, or other liquor” (some unpleasant details are added under this head) upon the floor of upper chambers; “dancing or wrestling or other incautious or inordinate games” in the hall or “perchance in the chapel itself,” the reason alleged for this last prohibition being that danger might be done to the sculptured “image of the Holy and Undivided Trinity,” and other ornaments on the wall between the chapel and the hall. After this comprehensive list of unlawful amusements, the reader may be inclined to ask, “What recreations did the good bishop allow his scholars?” Only one seems contemplated by the statutes: the founder’s experience of human nature told him that “after bodily refection by the taking of meat and drink, men are made more inclined to scurrilities, base talk, and (what is worse) detraction and strife”; he accordingly provides that on ordinary days after the loving cup has gone round, there is to be no lingering in hall after dinner or supper (except for the usual “potation” at curfew), but on festivals and other winter-nights, “on which, in honour of God and his Mother, or some other saint,” there is a fire in the hall, the Fellows are allowed to indulge in singing or reading “poems, chronicles of the realm, and wonders of the world.”

Such were the modest amusements of the first Wykehamists. How was the bulk of their time passed or meant to be passed? It must be remembered that Colleges were, in the first instance, not intended for teaching-institutions at all; their members resorted for lectures to the public schools. Wykeham is the first Oxford founder who contemplates any instruction being given to his scholars in College.[151] By his provisions on this head he became the founder of the Oxford tutorial system. Both at Paris and in Oxford, College teaching was destined, in process of time, practically to destroy University teaching in the Faculty of Arts. But the process took place in totally different ways. The form which College-teaching has assumed in Oxford was inaugurated by Wykeham. He, or his academical advisers, saw the unsuitableness of formal lectures in the public schools as a means of teaching mere boys. Hence he provides that for the first three years of residence, the scholar was to be placed under the instruction of a tutor (“Informator”), selected from the senior Fellows. By about 1408 the system had so far spread, that the lectures of the public schools were attended mainly by Bachelors.

Let us briefly trace the career of a young Wykehamist newly arrived from Winchester.

For two years he is a probationary “scholar”; after that he becomes a full member or “Fellow” of the College. It may be noticed that the New College statutes are the earliest in which the term “Socius,” originally applied to the students who live in the same house or hall, begins to be used in a technical way to distinguish the full member of the society (“verus et perpetuus socius”) from the mere probationer or chaplain or chorister: it is not till a still later date that the term “scholar” is confined to a Foundation-student who is not a Fellow.

At the end of the two years, the Fellow, though still an undergraduate, takes his share in the government of the house on such occasions as the election of a Warden. The ordinary administration, however, is in the hands of a certain number of Seniors (varying in different cases). The discipline was mainly in the hands of the Sub-Warden and the five deans--two Artists, a Canonist, a Civilian, and a Theologian--who presided over the disputations of their respective Faculties. But every one was compelled to act as a check upon every one else by means of the three yearly “chapters” or “scrutinies,” at which every Fellow was invited and required to reveal anything which he might have observed amiss in the conduct of his brethren since the last “Chapter.” Thus, the discipline of the mediæval Colleges, or at least that which their founders desired to introduce, was modelled on that of the monastery.

The lectures which our undergraduate had to attend before his B.A. degree were as follows[152]:--

_In College_: (1) In Grammar, the _Barbarismus_ of Donatus; (2) in Arithmetic, the _Computus_, _i. e._ the method of finding Easter, with the _Tractatus de Sphaera_ of Joannes de Sacrobosco; (3) in Logic, the _Isagoge_ of Porphyry, and Aristotle’s _Sophistici Elenchi_.

_In the Public Schools_: The whole _Organon_ of Aristotle, the _Sex Principia_ of Gilbert de la Poirée, and the logical writings of Boethius (except _Topics_, Book IV.).

Thus during the first four years of his course our undergraduate was occupied mainly with Logic, at first in College, afterwards at the more formal lectures of the Regents in the public schools of the University. This programme would represent a very dry and severe course of study to the modern Honour-man, while it would be simply appalling to the modern Pass-man. The latter will, however, learn with relief that in Oxford (unlike other mediæval Universities) it would appear doubtful whether there was any actual examination for the B.A. degree. Then as now, indeed, the student had to “respond _de quaestione_”; but in the course of his fourth year he would be admitted, as a matter of course, “to lecture upon a book of Aristotle.”

After this he was commonly styled a Bachelor, though he did not become one in strictness till he had gone through a disputation called “Determination.” This ordeal had to be passed to the satisfaction of the other Bachelors. How glad would be the modern examinee to throw himself upon the mercy of his fellows! Before being admitted to determine, the student had indeed to appear before the examiners of Determinants, but it is not certain that these examiners did more than satisfy themselves by the oaths and certificates of the candidates that they had heard the required books: and it is quite clear that when once Determination was passed, no further examination stood between him and the M.A. degree.

The mediæval student was not, however, supposed to have completed his education when he had become a Bachelor. To the four years of residence required for a B.A., three more must be added for the Mastership. During this time he attended lectures in “the Seven Arts” and “the three Philosophies.” In the Arts his text-books were[153]:--In Grammar, Priscian; in Rhetoric, Aristotle or Boethius[154]; in Logic, Aristotle; in Arithmetic, Boethius; in Music, Boethius; in Geometry, Euclid; and in Astronomy, Ptolemy. Most of the Arts were however very quickly and perfunctorily disposed of. His real work as a Bachelor lay with the three philosophies, studied exclusively in the Latin translation of Aristotle, the following being the “necessary books”:--In Natural Philosophy, the _Physics_, or _De Anima_, or some other of the Physical treatises; in Moral Philosophy, the _Ethics_; and in Metaphysical Philosophy, the _Metaphysics_.

Time would fail me to tell of the various disputations in which our student had to figure at various stages of his career; but disputations, though to the nervous student their terrors must have exceeded those of modern _viva_, had this advantage, that there was no “plucking” or “ploughing” in the question. A candidate who had done very badly might fail to get the required number of Masters to testify to his competency when he applied for the degree; and very incapable students, if poor and humbly-born, were probably choked off in this way. It is certain that a large number never took even the B.A. degree. But there is no record of anybody having been formally refused a degree in Arts. And yet the Master’s degree in the Middle Ages was in reality what it still is in theory--a license to teach. For a year after admission to his degree, the new M.A. was _necessario regens_, and was obliged to give “ordinary lectures” in the public schools. After that he was free to enter upon the study of one of the higher Faculties.

Those who took Theology spent the rest of their academical career in the study of the Bible and “the Sentences” of Peter the Lombard--much more of the Sentences than of the Bible. It took eleven years’ study to become a D.D.; naturally most got livings and “went down” before that.

Those who obtained leave to study Law would usually take a degree in Civil Law first, and then proceed to the study of Canon Law, that is to say the _Decretum_ of Gratian and the Papal _Decretals_. There were always to be twenty Canonists and Civilians in the House.

Two scholars alone might take up Medicine, and two Astronomy or Astrology. Wykeham is the only College-founder who treats Astronomy as a recognized Faculty; but belief in Astrology was on the increase in fourteenth-century England, and reached its maximum amid the enlightenment of the sixteenth century.

It is time to allude to the curious “privilege” which exercised so disastrous an effect upon the New College of two generations ago, the privilege of taking degrees without examination. William of Wykeham is not responsible for this _damnosa hereditas_. Nothing is heard of it till the beginning of the seventeenth century; and then the University recognized it as having been enjoyed since the earliest days of the College.[155] But its origin seems to be as follows.--So far from wishing his scholars to be exempt from the ordinary tests, the Founder peremptorily forbids them to sue for “graces” or dispensations from the residence or other statutable conditions of taking a degree. The grace of congregation was then required only when some of these conditions had not been complied with; if they had been, the degree was a matter of right. Even in Wykeham’s time these graces were scandalously common. In course of time the full statutable conditions were so seldom complied with that the grace of congregation came to be asked for as a matter of course: Wykehamists alone, mindful of their founder’s injunction, sought no graces. Hence what had been intended as an exceptional disability came to be regarded as an exceptional privilege; and when regular examinations were at length introduced, it was understood that the mysterious privilege carried with it exemption from this requirement also. Since a fair level of scholarship was secured by the fact that the places in New College were competed for by the boys of a first-rate classical school (although corrupt elections were not unknown), the privilege was not particularly ruinous so long as the examinations continued on the basis of the Laudian statutes. It was only when the Honour Schools were instituted at the beginning of this century that the exclusion of New College men from the Examination-schools shut out the College from the rapid improvement in industry and intellectual vitality which that measure brought with it for the best Oxford Colleges.

The character of the College during the earlier part of its history was exactly of the kind which the founder designed. In Wykeham’s day the Scholastic Philosophy and Theology were already in their decadence. The history of mediæval thought, so far as Oxford is concerned, ends with that suppression of Wycliffism in 1411, which both Wykeham and his College (though not quite free from the prevalent Lollardism) had contributed to bring about. New College produced not schoolmen and theologians like Merton, but respectable and successful ecclesiastics in abundance--foremost among them, Henry Chicheley, Archbishop of Canterbury, the founder of All Souls. It is a characteristic circumstance that a New College man, John Wytenham, was at the head of the Delegacy for condemning Wycliffe’s books in 1411, all the other Doctors being monks or friars.

On the other hand, the one piece of reform which Wykeham did seek to introduce into Oxford bore fruit in due season. New College, the one College which was recruited exclusively from a great classical school, became the home of what may be called the first phase of the Renaissance movement which showed itself in Oxford. It is during the latter part of Thomas Chaundler’s Wardenship (1454-1475) that traces of this movement become apparent. Chaundler’s own style, as is shown by his published letters to Bishop Bekynton of Wells (himself a Wykehamist and benefactor of the College), was more correct than the ordinary “Oxford Latin” of his day; and some time before his death he brought into the College as “Prælector” the first Oxford teacher of Greek, the Italian scholar Vitelli, who remained till 1488 or 1489.[156] The movement made little progress for the next two decades; but it must have been Vitelli who imparted at least the rudiments of Greek and the desire for further knowledge to William Grocyn, the great Wykehamist with whose name the “Oxford Renaissance” is indissolubly associated. Stanbridge, the Head Master of Magdalen College School, and author of the reformed system of teaching grammar imitated by Lily at St. Paul’s and at other schools, and Archbishop Warham, the patron of Erasmus, deserve mention among New College Humanists. To Warham we owe the panelling which imparts to our Hall much of its peculiar charm.

But if New College welcomed and fanned the first faint breath of the Renaissance air in Oxford, wherever religion and politics were concerned, she retained that character of rigid and immobile Conservatism which the founder had sought to give it. John London (Warden 1526-1542) was foremost in the persecution of Protestant heretics in Oxford, though afterwards employed in the dirty work of collecting evidence against the Monasteries. One of his victims was Quinley, a Fellow of his own College, whom he starved to death in the College “Steeple.” When asked by a friend what he would like to eat, he pathetically exclaimed, “A Warden-pie.” His unnatural hunger might have been appeased could he have seen his persecutor doing public penance for adultery, and ending his days a prisoner in the Fleet. The stoutest and most learned opponents of the Reformation were bred in Wykeham’s Colleges--the men who were ejected or fled under Edward VI., rose to high preferment under Mary, and became victims again under Elizabeth--men like Harpesfield the ecclesiastical historian, Pits the bibliographer, and Nicholas Saunders, the Papal Legate, who organized the Irish Insurrection of 1579.

Ecclesiastically and politically the Great Rebellion found the College again on the Conservative side. In 1642 the then Warden, Dr. Robert Pincke, as Pro-Vice-Chancellor, took the lead in preparing Oxford to resist the Parliamentary forces. The University train-bands were wont to drill “under his eyes” in the front quadrangle. Dons and undergraduates alike joined the ranks; among them is especially mentioned the New College D.C.L., Dr. Thomas Read, who trailed a pike. The cloisters were converted into a magazine; and the New College school-boys, being thus turned out of their usual school, were removed “to the choristers’ chamber at the east end of the common hall of the said College: it was then a dark, nasty room, and very unfit for such a purpose, which made the scholars often complaine, but in vaine.” These are the words of Anthony à Wood, then a little boy of eleven, and a pupil in the school.

While the school-boys were with difficulty restrained from the novel excitement of watching the drills in the quadrangle, the Warden’s severer studies had been no less interrupted. He had been sent by the University to treat with the old New College-man, Lord Say, who was supposed to be in command of the Parliamentary forces at Aylesbury. Unfortunately for Pincke, Lord Say was not there, and the Parliamentary commander, being without Wykehamical sympathies, sent the Doctor a prisoner to the Gate-house at Westminster. Meanwhile Lord Say had entered Oxford, and immediately proceeded to New College “to search for plate and arms” (no doubt he knew where to look), and even overhauled the papers in the Warden’s study. “One of his men broke down the King’s picture of alabaster gilt, which stood there; at which his lordship seemed to be much displeased.” It is not very clear how Warden Pincke found his way back to Oxford; but soon after the Parliamentary triumph, he came to an untimely end by falling down the steps of his own lodgings.

Pincke was evidently a learned as well as an active man, and published a curious collection of _Quaestiones in Logica, Ethica, Physica, et Metaphysica_ (Oxon. 1640); this is a list of problems with a formidable array of references to authorities, classical, patristic, and scholastic. He found time, even in the busy days of his Vice-Chancellorship, to write a narrative of his proceedings in that office, which was still extant in MS. after the Restoration. The only other Wardens who have left any considerable literary remains are Pincke’s predecessor, Lake, afterwards Bishop of Bath and Wells, and Shuttleworth (Warden 1822-1840), afterwards Bishop of Chichester, a sturdy opponent of the Tractarian movement.

While speaking of New College learning of the early seventeenth century, we must not pass over Dr. Thomas James, the first Bodley’s Librarian, who, besides being a really learned writer on theological subjects, catalogued the MSS. in the libraries of the Colleges of both Universities as well as those under his own charge.

On the arrival of the Puritan Visitors in 1647, no College gave so much trouble as New College. All but unanimously the members of the foundation declared that it was contrary to their oaths to submit to any Visitor who was an actual (_i. e._ resident) member of the University, which was the case with the most active Visitors. Only two unconditional, and one qualified submission, are recorded. Forty-nine out of the fifty-three members of the foundation (choir included) then in residence were sentenced to expulsion on March 15th, 1647-8. But it was not till June 6th that four of the worst offenders were ordered to move; on July 7th the order was extended to seventeen more. On August 1st, 1648, Dr. Stringer, the Warden whom the Fellows had elected in defiance of the Visitors, was removed by Parliament, and in 1649 nineteen more foundationers were “outed.”

It must not be assumed that the Fellows left by the Visitors, or even those put in the place of the ejected Fellows, conformed heartily to the Puritan _régime_. The bursars appointed by the Commission found the buttery and muniment-room shut against them. George Marshall, the Parliamentarian Warden appointed in 1649, had to complain to the Visitors that the College persisted in remitting the “sconces” imposed by him upon Fellows for absence from the no doubt lengthy Puritan prayers. Moreover, the Visitors, with scrupulous desire to minimize the breach of continuity, elected only Wykehamists into the vacant places, with, indeed, the notable exception of the intruded Warden; and these new Fellows were most of them no doubt either Royalists and Churchmen, or at least men whose Puritan republicanism was of no very bigoted type. Hence we find that Woodward, the Warden freely elected by the College on Marshall’s death in 1658, retained his place after the Restoration. Even in 1654 Evelyn found the chapel “in its ancient garb, notwithstanding the scrupulosity of the times.” After the Restoration we are not surprised to find that the Royalist majority was strong enough to turn out many of the “godly” minority before the King’s Commissioners arrived in Oxford, and to reinstate “the Common Prayer before it was read in other churches.”

Two of “the Seven Bishops” were New College men, the saintly Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells, and Turner, Bishop of Ely. One of their Judges, Richard Holloway, the only one who charged boldly in their favour, had been Fellow of the College till ejected by the Parliamentary Visitors.

The annals of our University in the eighteenth century are of an inglorious order; and New College exhibits in an intensified form the characteristic tendencies of Oxford at large. The building of the “new common chamber” (one of the first in Oxford) and of the garden quadrangle, at the end of the seventeenth century (finished 1684), seem to herald the age in which the increase of ease, comfort, and luxury kept pace with the decay of study, education, and learning. The _Vimen Quadrifidum_ of Winchester still indeed kept alive a tradition of classical scholarship which even the possession of an Academic sinecure at eighteen, with total exemption from University examinations and exercises, could not quite extinguish; but there was a significant proverb about New College men which ran, “golden Scholars, silver Bachelors, leaden Masters.” One of the last men of learning whom New College produced was John Ayliffe, D.C.L., the author of the _Past and Present State of the University of Oxford_ (1714), who was expelled the University, deprived of his degree, and compelled to resign his Fellowship for certain “bold and necessary truths” contained in that book, partly of a personal, partly of a political (_i. e._ Whiggish) character. Perhaps the most respectable and yet characteristic product of New College during the _ferrea aetas_ which succeeded were Robert Lowth, the scholarly antagonist of the slipshod Warburton, and author of the famous lectures _On the Poetry of the Hebrews_, successively Bishop of St. David’s, Oxford and London.

Towards the close of the century New College harboured a staunch defender of the Church (including some of its abuses), but a staunch assailant of much else in that old _régime_ to which it belonged. Sydney Smith came up from Winchester in 1789, having been Prefect of Hall and third on the roll; but though in the College, he was little of it. It is curious that the most brilliant talker of the century does not seem to have left much reputation behind him in College society. Perhaps his extreme poverty may have something to do with it.

The other most notable Fellow of New College in the first half of the nineteenth century, Augustus Hare (joint-author of _Guesses at Truth_), was also an assailant of the abuses among which he was brought up. When

## acting as “Poser” in the Winchester election of 1829, he had the spirit

to resist the claims of certain candidates to be admitted to one or other of the two Colleges without examination, as “Founder’s-kin.” At the time there were already twenty-four “Founders” at New College, and fourteen or fifteen at Winchester. His appeal was heard by the Bishop of Winchester as Visitor, with Mr. Justice Patteson and Dr. Lushington as Assessors; a New College man, Mr. Erle (afterwards Lord Chief Justice), was one of the petitioner’s counsel. The case was argued not upon the ground that the claimants’ demand was based on fictitious pedigrees (which was probably the fact), but upon the precarious contention that by the Civil and Canon Law the term “consanguineus” applies at most only to persons within the tenth generation of descent from a common ancestor, and the appeal was naturally dismissed.

The era of reform may be said to begin with the voluntary renunciation by New College, in 1834, of its exemption from University examinations. The College still retains, indeed, the right to obtain for its Fellows degrees without “supplication” in congregation; and when a Fellow of New College takes his M.A., the Proctor still says, “Postulat A.B., e Collegio Novo,” instead of the ordinary “Supplicat, etc.,” or (more correctly) omits the name altogether. In spite of the vehement opposition of the College, a more extensive reform was carried out on truly Conservative lines by an Ordinance of the University Commissioners in 1857. The Fellowships were reduced to forty (in 1870 to thirty); but the mystic seventy of the original foundation is maintained by the addition in 1866 of ten open scholarships to the thirty which were still reserved for Winchester men. Further, commoners[157] were made eligible for Fellowships as well as scholars. Half the Fellowships are still reserved for Wykehamists, that is, men educated either at Winchester or at New College. The chaplaincies are now reduced to three, and the number of lay choir-men increased.

Since that beneficent reform, ever since loyally accepted and vigorously carried forward by the Warden and Fellows, the history of the College has been one of continuous material expansion, numerical growth, and academic progress. In 1854 the society voluntarily opened its doors to non-Wykehamist commoners, whose increasing numbers soon called for the new buildings, the first block of which was opened in 1873.

We take our leave of the College with a glance at one or two of the quaint customs which have unfortunately, if inevitably, disappeared in the course of the process of modernization.

Down to 1830, or a little later, the College was summoned to dinner by two choir-boys[158] who, at a stated minute, started from the College gateway, shouting in unison and in lengthened syllables--“Tem-pus est vo-can-di à-manger, O Seigneurs.” It was their business to make this sentence _last out_ till they reached with their final note the College kitchen.

On Ascension Day the College and choir used to go in procession to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (the remains of which may still be seen on the Cowley road a little beyond the new church) where a short service was held, after which they proceeded to the adjoining well (Strowell), heard an Epistle and Gospel, and sang certain songs.

At the beginning of the present century the College was still waked by the porter striking the door at the bottom of each staircase with a “wakening mallet.” Fellows are still summoned to the quarterly College-meetings in this antique fashion.