IX.

ALL SOULS COLLEGE.[192]

BY C. W. C. OMAN, M.A., FELLOW OF ALL SOULS.

Henry Chichele, the son of a merchant of Higham Ferrars, was one of the first roll of scholars whom William of Wykeham nominated at the opening of his great foundation of New College. He left Oxford with the degree of Doctor of Laws, and soon found both ecclesiastical preferment and a lucrative legal practice. He attached himself to the House of Lancaster, and served Henry IV. so well that he was made Bishop of St. Davids, and sent to represent England at the Council of Pisa. In such favour did he stand at Court, that when Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, died in the first year of Henry V., the young king appointed Chichele to succeed him.

For the long term of thirty years Henry Chichele held the Primacy of all England, and played no small part in the governance of the realm. The two main characteristics of his policy, whatever may be urged in his defence, were most unfortunate: he was a stout supporter of the unhappy war with France, and he was a weak defender of the liberties of the Church of England against Papal aggression. History remembers him as the ambassador who urged so hotly the preposterous claims of Henry V. on the French throne, and as the first Primate who refused to accept the Archbishopric from the King and the Chapter, till he had obtained a dispensation and a Bull of Provision from the Pope.

However great may have been his faults as a statesman, Chichele (like his successor Laud) was throughout his life a liberal and consistent patron of the University. He presented it with money and books, and, mindful of what he owed to his training at New College, resolved to copy his old master Wykeham in erecting one more well-ordered and well-endowed house of learning, among the obscure and ill-managed halls which still harboured the majority of the members of the University. He first began to build a small College in St. Giles’; but this institution--St. Bernard’s as it was called--he handed over unfinished to the Cistercian monks, in whose possession it remained till the Reformation, when it became the nucleus round which Sir Thomas White built up his new foundation of St. John’s.

Chichele’s later and more serious scheme for establishing a College was not taken up till 1437, when he had occupied the Archiepiscopal see for twenty-three years, and was already past the age of seventy. It was one of the darkest moments of the wretched French war; the great Duke of Bedford had died two years before, and Paris had been for twelve months in the hands of the French. The old Archbishop, all whose heart had been in the struggle, and who knew that he himself was more responsible for its commencement than any other subject of the Crown, must have spent his last years in unceasing regrets. Perhaps he may have felt some personal remorse when he reflected on his own

## part in the furthering of the war, but certainly--whether he felt his

responsibility or not--the waste of English lives during the last twenty years lay heavy on his soul. Hence it came that his new college became a chantry as well as a place of education--the inmates were to be devoted as well _ad orandum_ as _ad studendum_--hence also, we can hardly doubt, came its name. For, as its charter drawn by Henry VI. proceeds to recite--the prayers of the community were to be devoted, “not only for our welfare and that of our godfather the Archbishop, while alive, and for our souls when we shall have gone from this light, but also for the souls of the most illustrious Prince Henry, late King of England, of Thomas late Duke of Clarence our uncle, of the Dukes, Earls, Barons, Knights, Esquires, and other noble subjects of our father and ourself who fell in the wars for the Crown of France, as also for the souls of all the faithful departed.” Not unwisely therefore has the piety of the present generation filled the niches of Chichele’s magnificent reredos with the statues of Clarence and York, Salisbury and Talbot, Suffolk and Bedford, and others who struck their last stroke on the fatal plains of France. Nor can we doubt that the Archbishop’s meaning was well expressed in the name that he gave to his foundation, which, copying the last words in the above-cited foundation-charter, became known as the “Collegium Omnium Animarum Fidelium Defunctorum in Oxonia.”

To found his College, Chichele purchased a large block of small tenements, among them several halls, forming the angle between Catte Street and the High Street. The longer face was toward the former street, the frontage to “the High” being less than half that which lay along the narrower thoroughfare. The ground lay for the most part within the parish of St. Mary’s, with a small corner projecting into that of St. Peter in the East. The buildings which Chichele proceeded to erect were very simple in plan. They consisted of a single quadrangle with a cloister behind it, and did not occupy more than half the ground which had been purchased: the rest, where Hawkesmore’s twin towers and Codrington’s library now stand, formed, in the founder’s time, and for 250 years after, a small orchard and garden. Chichele’s main building, the present “front quadrangle,” remains more entirely as the founder left it than does any similar quadrangle in Oxford. Except that some seventeenth century hand has cut square the cusped tops of its windows, it still bears its original aspect unchanged. The north side is formed by the chapel; the south contains the gate-tower with its muniment-room above, and had the Warden’s lodgings in its eastern angle; the west side was devoted entirely to the Fellows’ rooms, as was also the whole of the east side, save the central part of its first floor, where the original library was situate. Into space which now furnishes seventeen small sets of rooms, the forty Fellows of the original foundation were packed, together with their two chaplains, their porter, and their small establishment of servants.

To the north of this quadrangle lay the cloister, a small square, two of whose sides were formed by an arcade with open perpendicular windows, much like New College cloister; the third by the chapel; while the fourth was occupied by the College hall, an unpretentious building standing exactly at right angles to the site of the modern hall. The cloister-quadrangle’s size may be judged from the fact that the chapel formed one entire side of it. It took up not more than a quarter of the present back-quadrangle, and was surrounded to north and east by the garden and orchard of which we have already spoken. For many generations it formed the burial-ground of the Fellows, and on several occasions of late years, when trenches have been dug across the turf of the new quadrangle, the bones of fifteenth and sixteenth century members of the College have been found lying there undisturbed. To conclude the account of Chichele’s buildings, it must be added that on the east side of the hall the kitchen and storehouses of the College made a small irregular excrescence into the garden; their situation is now occupied by that part of the present hall which lies nearest the door.

All Chichele’s work was on a small scale save his chapel, on which he lavished special care. His reredos, preserved for two centuries behind a coat of plaster, still remains to witness to his good taste; but its original aspect, blazing with scarlet, gold, and blue, must have been strangely different from that which the nineteenth century knows. Of the figures which adorned it a part only can be identified: at the top was the Last Judgment, of which a considerable fragment was found _in situ_ when the plaster was cleared away, with its inscription, “Surgite mortui, venite ad judicium” still plainly legible. Immediately above the altar was the Crucifixion; the cross and the wings of the small ministering angels of the modern reproduction being actually parts of the old sculpture. The carver, Richard Tillott, who executed the work, mentions, in his account of expenses sent in for payment to Chichele, “two great stone images over the altar”; these may very probably have been the founder and King Henry VI.; and the restorers of our own generation ventured to fill the two largest niches with their representations. How the central and side portions of the reredos were occupied is unknown; but it would seem that the founder did not leave every niche full, as fifty years after his death, Robert Este, a Fellow of the College, left £21 18_s._ 4_d._ for the completing of the images over the high altar.

In addition to the high altar, the chapel contained no less than seven side altars; where they were placed it is a little difficult to see, as the stalls bear every mark of being contemporary with the founder, and extend all along the sides of the chapel from the altar-steps to the screen. Probably then the smaller altars--of which we know that one was dedicated to the four Latin Fathers--must have been all, or nearly all, placed in the ante-chapel. The windows, both in the chapel and ante-chapel, were filled with excellent glass; all that of the chapel has disappeared, but in the ante-chapel there is much good work remaining. The most interesting window contains an admirable set of historical figures; the founder, his masters Henry V. and Henry VI., John of Gaunt, and several more being in excellent preservation; but this was not originally placed in the chapel, and seems to have belonged to the old library. The other windows are filled with saints.

The total cost of the foundation of the College to Chichele was about £10,000; that sum covered not only the erection and fitting up of the buildings, but the purchase of some of the lands for its endowment. The two largest pieces of property which the Archbishop devoted to his new institution were situated respectively in Middlesex and Kent. The first estate lay around Edgeware, of which the College became lord of the manor, and extended in the direction of Hendon and Willesden. It was mainly under wood in the founder’s day, and formed part of the tract of forest which covered so much of Middlesex down to the last century. The second property consisted of a large stretch of land in Romney Marsh, already noted as a great grazing district in the fifteenth century. Many lesser estates lay scattered about the Midlands; they consisted in no small part of land belonging to the alien priories, which Chichele had assisted Henry V. to abolish, and included at least one of the suppressed houses--Black Abbey in Shropshire. For these confiscated estates the Archbishop paid £1000 to the Crown.

The College as designed by Chichele contained forty Fellows; he nominated twenty himself, and these with their Warden, Richard Andrew, chose twenty more. By the Charter sixteen of the forty were to be jurists--the founder remembered that he himself had taken his degree in Laws--and twenty-four artists. As Wykeham had done before him, Chichele took pains to obtain a Bull from the Pope to sanction and confirm his new foundation: in this document, dated from Florence in 1439, Eugenius IV. grants numerous spiritual privileges to the _pauperes scholares_ of All Souls. They are excused certain fasts, freed from any parochial control of the Vicar of St. Mary’s, permitted to bury their dead in the precincts of the College, and even granted leave to celebrate the Mass in their chapel in time of interdict, “but with hushed bells and closed doors.” Chichele was such a confirmed Papalist that he took the unusual step of sending the first Warden to Italy in person, to receive the Bull from the Pope’s own hands.

Nor was it only his spiritual superior that Chichele resolved to interest in the College. When all was complete he went through the form of handing over the foundation to his young god-son Henry VI., and of receiving it back from the King’s hands as co-founder. Hence comes the constant juxtaposition of their names in the prayers of the College.

Chichele lived to see his College completely finished; in 1442 he presided at the solemn entry of the Fellows into their new abode, and formally delivered the statutes to Warden Andrew. Next year he died, at the end of his eightieth year, an age almost unparalleled among the short-lived men of the fifteenth century. His successor, Archbishop Stafford, on taking up the office of Visitor, was pleased to grant an indulgence of forty days to any Christian of the province of Canterbury who should visit the chapel and there say a _Pater_ and an _Ave_ for the souls of the faithful departed. This grant made the College a place of not unfrequent resort for pilgrims. If a passage cited by Professor Burrows[193] is correct, as many as 9000 wafers were consumed in the chapel on one day in 1557.

For the first century of the College’s existence the succession of Wardens and Fellows was very rapid. Richard Andrew, the first head of the foundation, resigned his post in the same year that the new buildings were opened, on receiving ecclesiastical preferment outside Oxford. He became Dean of York, and survived his resignation for many years. His successor, Warden Keyes, had been the architect of the College; he presided for three years only, and then gave place to William Kele. Altogether in the first century of its existence 1437-1537 the College knew no less than eleven Wardens, of whom seven resigned and only four died in harness. The Fellows were as rapid in their succession; not unfrequently seven or eight--a full fifth of the whole number--vacated their Fellowships in a single year; the average annual election was about five. The shortness of their tenure of office is easily explained; a Fellowship was not a very valuable possession, for beyond food and lodging it only supplied its holder with the “livery” decreed by the founder, an actual provision of cloth for his raiment. A Fellow’s commons were fixed on the modest scale of “one shilling a week when wheat is cheap, and sixteenpence when it is dear.” The annual surplus from the estates was not divided up, but placed in the College strong-box within the entrance-tower, against the day of need. Moreover, as the Fellows were lodged two, or even in some cases three, in each room, the accommodation can hardly have been such as to tempt to long residence. The acceptance of preferment outside Oxford, or even an absence of more than six months without the express leave of the College, sufficed to vacate the Fellowship; and since every member of the foundation was in orders, it naturally resulted that the “jurists” drifted up to London to practice, while the “artists” accepted country livings. Only those Fellows who were actually studying or teaching in the University held their places for any length of time.

There is little to tell about the first fifty years of the history of All Souls; but it is worthy of notice that its connection--merely nominal though it was--with its co-founder, Henry VI., brought on trouble when the House of York came to the throne. Edward IV. pretended to regard the endowments of the College as wrongly-alienated royal property, and had to be appeased, not only by the insertion of his name and that of his mother Cecily in the prayers of the College, but by payment of a considerable fine. However, the College might congratulate itself on an easy escape, and its pardon was ratified when, some years later, its head, Warden Poteman, was made envoy to Scotland, and afterwards promoted to be Archdeacon of Cleveland.

In the reign of Henry VII., when the Renaissance began to make itself felt in Oxford, All Souls had the good fortune to produce two of the first English Greek scholars, Linacre and Latimer. The name of the latter is forgotten--the present age remembers no Latimer save the martyr-bishop; but Linacre’s memory is yet green. With Grocyn and Colet he stands at the head of the roll of Oxford scholars, but in his medical fame he is unrivalled. His contemporaries “questioned whether he was a better Latinist or Grecian, a better grammarian or physician”; but it is in the last capacity that he is now remembered. He was elected to his Fellowship at All Souls in 1484, resided four or five years, and then went to Italy, where he tarried long, taught medicine at Padua, and then returned to England to found and preside over the College of Physicians. The two Linacre professorships were both endowed by him. The example of his career was not soon forgotten, and for two centuries All Souls continued to produce men of mark in the realm of medicine. To this day it excites the surprise of the visitor to the College library to see the large proportion of books on medical subjects contained in its shelves. Among the manuscripts there are many such, which Linacre’s own hands must have thumbed; while throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the purchases of medical books are only exceeded by those of works on theology. But with the incoming of the reign of the Founder’s-kin Fellows in the early eighteenth century the physicians ceased out of the land, and at last, “holding a physic place” became a convenient fiction by which lay members of the College succeeded in excusing themselves from taking orders, though they might be in reality anything rather than medical men.

The reign of Henry VII. saw the beginning of two sources of trouble to All Souls, which were not to cease for many generations. The first was the interference of the Archbishop as Visitor, to determine the conditions of the tenure of Fellowships. William of Warham is found writing to the College to denounce a growing practice of endeavouring to keep a Fellowship in conjunction with a benefice outside Oxford. He strictly forbade it, and his commands seem to have been more effectual than Visitor’s injunctions have usually proved. The other interference with the College from without, was an attempt made by Arthur Prince of Wales to influence the annual elections of Fellows. He writes from Sunninghill in 1500 to recommend the election of a young lawyer named Pickering to a Fellowship, “because that his father is in the right tender favour of our dearest mother the Queen.” Pickering’s name does not appear in the register of Fellows, so it is evident that the College found some excuse for evading compliance with the Prince’s request.

All Souls seems to have passed through the storms of the Reformation with singularly little friction from within or without. One single Warden, John Warner--the first Regius professor of Medicine in the University--continued to steer the course of the College from 1536 to 1556, complying with all the various commands of Henry VIII., making himself acceptable both to Somerset and Northumberland, and even holding on for two years into Mary’s reactionary time. It is true that he then resigned his post, but he was evidently no less complying under the Papalist Queen than under her Protestant predecessor, as no harm came to him though he continued to reside in Oxford. Warden Pope, his successor, having died in the first year of Elizabeth, Warner was immediately restored to his old post, and held it till he was made Dean of Winchester in 1565.

It was during Warner’s wardenship that we have the first mention of an evil custom in the College, which was to form for a hundred years a subject of dispute between the Fellows and their Visitor the Archbishop. This was the habit of “corrupt resignation.” A member of the College, when about to vacate his Fellowship, not unfrequently had some friend or relation whom he wished to succeed him. This candidate he naturally pushed and supported at the annual election on All Souls’ Day. It came to be the tacit custom of the College to elect candidates so supported; for each Fellow, when voting for an outgoing colleague’s nominee, remembered that he himself would some day wish to recommend a _protégé_ for election in a similar manner. This right of nomination being once grown customary, soon grew into a monstrous abuse, for unscrupulous Fellows, when about to vacate their places, began to hawk their nominations about Oxford. Actual payments in hard cash were made by equally unscrupulous Bachelors of Arts or Scholars of Civil Law, to secure one of these all-powerful recommendations. Hence there began to appear in the College not the poor but promising scholars for whom Chichele had designed the foundation, but men of some means, who had practically bought their places. Cranmer was the first Visitor who discovered and endeavoured to crush this noxious system. In 1541 we find him declaring that he will impose an oath on every Fellow to obey his injunction against the practice, and that every Fellowship obtained by a corrupt resignation shall be summarily forfeited. At the same time we find him touching on other minor offences in the place--misdoings which seem ludicrously small compared to the huge abuse with which he couples them. Fellows have been seen clad not in the plain livery which the pious founder devised, but in gowns gathered round the collar and arms and quilted with silk; they have been keeping dogs in College; some of them have hired private servants; others of them have engaged in “compotationibus, ingurgitationibus, crapulis et ebrietatibus.” All these customs are to cease at once. It is to be feared that the good Archbishop was as unsuccessful in suppressing these smaller sins and vanities, as he most certainly was in dealing with the evil of corrupt resignations.

It was in the reign of the same compliant Warden Warner, under whom Cranmer’s visitation took place, that All Souls was robbed of its greatest ornament--the decorations of its chapel. In 1549, by order of the Royal Commissioners appointed by Protector Somerset, havoc was made with the whole interior of the building. The organ was removed, the windows broken, the high-altar and seven side-altars taken down, and, worst of all, the whole reredos gutted; its fifty statues and eighty-five statuettes were destroyed, and so it remained, vacant but graceful, though much chipped about in the course of ages, till in the reign of Charles II. the Fellows in their wisdom concluded to plane down its projections, stuff its niches with plaster, and paint a sprawling fresco upon it! The church vestments of the College were probably destroyed at the same time that the chapel was made desolate, but its church plate was not defaced, but merely removed to the muniment-room and put in safe keeping. There it remained till 1554, when it came down again, and was again employed in Queen Mary’s time. In 1560 it was once more put into store in the strong-room, and there it remained till in 1570 Archbishop Parker had it brought forth and bade it be melted down, “except six silver basons together with their crewets, the gilt tabernacle, two silver bells, and a silver rod.” After a stout resistance lasting three years, the College was obliged to comply. Charles I. received nearly all that Parker spared, and of the old communion-plate of All Souls there now survives nought but two of the crewets preserved in 1573. They are splendid pieces of the work of about 1500, eighteen inches high, shaped like pilgrim’s bottles, and ornamented with swans’ heads. The founder’s silver-gilt and crystal salt-cellar, the only other piece of antique silver which All Souls now owns, was most fortunately not in the hands of the College in Charles’s time, or it would have shared the fate of the rest of its ancient plate.

One more incident of Warner’s tenure of office needs mention. He erected with subscriptions raised from all quarters as a residence for himself, the building which faces the High Street in continuation of the front quadrangle to the east. For the future, Wardens had six rooms instead of two to live in, and there is splendour as well as comfort in the magnificent panelled room on the first floor which forms the chief apartment in the new building. Here dwelt Warner’s successors, till in the reign of Anne the present Warden’s lodgings were erected still further eastward.

Warden Hoveden, whose long rule of forty-three years covered most of the reign of Elizabeth and half that of James I. (1571-1614) was a man of mark. He adorned the old library, now the “great lecture-room,” in the front quadrangle, with the beautiful barrel-roof and panelling which make it the best Elizabethan room in Oxford. He bought and added to the grounds of the College a large house and garden called “the Rose,” where the Warden’s lodgings now stand. He arranged and codified the College books and muniments. He caused to be constructed a splendid and elaborate set of maps of the College estates, ten years before any other College in the University thought of doing such a thing (1596). These maps are worked out on a most minute scale: every tree and house is inserted; and as a proof of how English common-fields were still worked in minutely subdivided slips, only a few yards broad, they are invaluable. One map gives a bird’s-eye view of All Souls, with its two quadrangles as then existing, and is the first good representation of the College that remains. But Hoveden’s greatest achievements were his two victories in struggles with Queen Elizabeth. The first contest concerned the parsonage and tithes of the parish of Stanton Harcourt; the Crown and the College litigated about them for just forty years, 1558-98; but Hoveden had his way, and in the latter year they came back into the hands of the College. In the regrant of the disputed property, the Queen’s reasons are stated to be the poverty of the College and the want of a convenient house near Oxford to which the Fellows might retire in times of pestilence in the University. Epidemical disorders had been very common at the date: in 1570-1 the plague carried off 600 persons, and in 1577 a fearful distemper in consequence of the “Black Assize” was no less fatal. Such a house as Stanton Harcourt parsonage was then of infinite utility, and for more than 200 years the College used to compel its tenants by a covenant in their lease, to “find four chambers in the house, furnished with bedding linen, and woollen for so many of the fellows as shall be sent to lodge there whenever any pestilence or other contagious disorder shall happen in the University.” The second struggle resulted from an attempt of Elizabeth to induce All Souls to grant a lease of all their woods to Lady Stafford, at the ridiculously small rent of twenty pounds per annum. Hoveden resisted stoutly, and his refusal drew down a most disgraceful letter of threats from Sir Walter Raleigh. Sir Walter intimates that the Queen is highly incensed that “subjects of your quality” should presume to chaffer with her, and hints at evils to come if compliance is still refused. The Warden replied that the terms offered were so bad that if they were taken the Fellows would be compelled to give up housekeeping and take to the fields. To this it was answered that “their state was so plentiful by her Majesty’s statute, that they seemed rather as fat monks in a rich abbey than students in a poor College.” Hoveden stood his ground and enlisted Whitgift, the Visitor, to work with Lord Burleigh in the defence of the College. Burleigh moved Elizabeth to relax her pressure, and Lady Stafford never obtained her cheap lease.

By the end of Hoveden’s time a new subject of interest comes to the front in the management of the College. The rise in wealth and in prices which characterized the Tudor epoch resulted in the development of the annual surplus from the College estates into unexpected proportions. When all outgoings were paid there were often £500 or £600 left to be transferred to the strong-box in the gate-tower. It naturally occurred to the Fellows that some of this money might reasonably come their way. Archbishop Whitgift allowed them to augment their daily commons from it, and afterwards bade them commute their “livery” in cloth for a reasonable equivalent in cash. This was done, but still the annual surplus cash grew. Archbishop Bancroft directed it “to amendment of diet and other necessary uses of common charge.” He soon found that this merely led to luxurious living. “It is astonishing,” he wrote, “this kind of beer which heretofore you have had in your College, and I do strictly charge you, that from henceforth there be no other received into your buttery but small-and middle-beer, beer of higher rates being fitter for tippling-houses.” Yet the College strong ale still survives! Nor was it only in its drinking that the College offended: its eating corresponded: the gaudés, and the annual Bursar’s dinner became huge banquets, costing some £40; guests were invited in scores, and the festivities prolonged to the third day. Such things were only natural when the Fellows had the disposal of a large revenue, yet were not allowed to draw from it more than food and clothing. At last, Archbishop Abbott, in 1620 bethought him of a less demoralizing way of disposing of the surplus: he boldly doubled the livery-money. Then for the first time a Fellowship became worth some definite value in hard cash. The next step was easy enough; instead of a fixed double livery, there was distributed annually so many times the original livery as the surplus could safely furnish. The seniors drew more than the juniors, and the jurists more then the artists. This arrangement, after working in practice for many years, was sanctioned in theory also by Archbishop Sheldon in 1666.

It is in a letter of Archbishop Abbott’s, dealing with one of the riotous feasts to which the College had grown addicted, that we have our first mention of that celebrated bird, the All Souls Mallard. The Visitor writes--“The feast of Christmas drawing now to an end, doth put me in mind of the great outrage which, as I am informed, was the last year committed in your College, where although matters had formerly been conducted with some distemper, yet men did never before break forth into such intolerable liberty as to tear down doors and gates, and disquiet their neighbours as if it had been a camp or a town in war. Civil men should never so far forget themselves under pretence of a foolish mallard, as to do things barbarously unbecoming.” Evidently the gaudé had developed into one of those outbreaks, which a modern Oxford College knows well enough when its boat has gone head of the river. Furniture had been smashed, perhaps a bonfire lighted; certainly the noise had been long and loud. But what of the Mallard? Pamphlets have been written on him, and College tradition tells that when the first stone of the College was laid a mallard was started out of a drain on the spot. In commemoration of the event, the Fellows annually went round the College after the gaudé, pretending to search for the tutelary bird. The song concerning him was written to be sung by “Lord Mallard,” a Fellow chosen as the official songster of the College. It bears every appearance of being of Jacobean date--

“Griffin, Turkey, Bustard, Capon, Let other hungry mortals gape on, And on their bones with stomachs fall hard, But let All Souls’ men have their Mallard.

_Chorus_-- O by the blood of King Edward, It was a swapping, swapping Mallard!

“The Romans once admired a gander More than they did their chief Commander, Because he saved, if some don’t fool us, The place that’s named from the scull of Tolus.[194]

_Chorus, etc._

“The poets feign Jove turned a swan, But let them prove it if they can, As for our proof it’s not at all hard-- He was a swapping, swapping Mallard.

_Chorus, etc._

“Then let us drink and dance a Galliard Unto the memory of the Mallard, And as the Mallard dives in pool, Let’s dabble, duck, and dive in bowl.”

_Chorus, etc._

So for three hundred years, if not for four, has Lord Mallard annually chanted. But the last time that we have proof of a procession having gone round the College with torches, pursuing the mock search for the bird, is in 1801, when Bishop Heber, then a scholar of Brazenose, mentions in a letter home that he had witnessed the scene from his windows across the Radcliffe Square.

Professor Burrows in a most ingenious passage of his _Worthies_ makes a plausible suggestion as to the real origin of the Mallard. He found in Alderman Fletcher’s copy of Anthony à Wood, now in the Bodleian, the impression of a seal bearing a griffin, inscribed “_Sigillum Guilielmi Mallardi Clerici_.” This seal of one Mallard was actually dug up in making a drain on the site of All Souls, to the east of the Warden’s lodgings. Can the exhuming of Mallard’s seal have been turned by oral tradition into the finding of an actual mallard?

Down to the time of the great Civil War the College, though always more or less tainted with the evil of corrupt resignations, continued to produce a great number of able men. Since the Reformation laymen are found among them as well as clerics. We may name Lord Chancellor Weston, Mason and Petre, both Privy Councillors of note, and the Persian traveller Sir Anthony Sherley, under Elizabeth; while in the early seventeenth century we meet Archbishop Sheldon--long Warden of the College--Bishop Duppa, and Jeremy Taylor. The election of the last-named illustrates in the most striking way the manner in which corrupt resignations had come to be looked upon as matters of routine. Osborne, a Fellow about to vacate his place, instead of putting his nomination up for sale, made a present of it to Archbishop Laud. Laud, taking the procedure as the most natural thing in the world, bade him nominate Taylor, who was therefore elected, but with great murmurs from the College, for he was a Cambridge man, and of nine years standing since his degree.

Those who know only the modern constitution of All Souls, will find it startling to learn that down to the Great Rebellion the College was not without its fair share of undergraduates. There was no provision for them in the statutes, but a number of “poor scholars” (_servientes_) were allowed to matriculate. In 1612 there were as many as thirty-one of them on the books at once. In going through a list of All Souls men who became Fellows of Wadham between 1615 and 1660, I found that about one in three were _servientes_, so their number must have been not inconsiderable. The College narrowly escaped having a regular provision of scholars, for Archbishop Parker had planned the endowment of a considerable number of scholarships from Canterbury Grammar School when he died. After the Restoration the _servientes_ are no more heard of, or at least the four Bible-clerks then appear as their sole successors.

Few Colleges suffered more from the Civil Wars than All Souls. Its head, Sheldon, was one of the King’s chaplains, and all, save a very small minority of the Fellows, were enthusiastic Royalists. One of them, William St. John, was slain in battle in the King’s cause, and others of them bore arms for him. It is most pitiful to read the account of the College plate which went to the melting-pot in New Inn Hall, to come forth as the ugly Oxford shillings of Charles I. All Souls contributed 253 lbs. 1 oz. 19 dwts. in all, more than any other house save Magdalen, besides a large sum in ready money. Its treasury was swept clean of the founder’s gifts, of Warden Keyes’ “great cupp double gilt with the image of St. Michael on its cover,” of all the church-plate that had escaped Parker, of tankards, flagons, and goblets innumerable. Worse was to follow: the bulk of the College estates lay in Kent and Middlesex, counties in the hands of the Parliament, and their rents could not be raised. At the end of the first year the tenants were £600 in arrears, and the evil went on growing, while at the same time the demands on the purse of the College were increasing. In June 1643 the College was directed by the King to maintain 102 soldiers for a month, at the rate of four shillings a week per man. It had to contribute towards the fortifications, towards stores for the siege, and towards the relief of the poor of the city. Altogether it would seem that the finances of the College went to pieces, and that the greater part of the Fellows dispersed. When the Parliamentary Visitors got to work on the University, as much as two years after the fall of Oxford, they found only eleven members of the College in residence. Warden Sheldon was summoned before them to ask whether he acknowledged their authority, and replied with frankness, “I cannot satisfy myself that I ought to submit to this visitation.” Next day a notice of ejectment was served upon him, and the day following the Chancellor Pembroke went with the Visitors to expel him. They found Sheldon walking in his little garden, read their decree to him, and then sent for the College buttery-book, out of which they struck his name, inserting instead of it that of Dr. Palmer, whom they had designated as his successor. Next they bade him give over his keys, and when he refused broke open his lodgings, installed Palmer in them, and sent the rightful owner away under a guard of musketeers, “followed as he went by a great company of scholars, and blessed by the people as he passed down the street.”

Of the Fellows, only five made their peace with the Visitors, and avoided expulsion; even five of the College servants were deprived of their places. The Commissioners proceeded for five years to nominate to the Fellowships, and intruded in all forty-three new members on to the foundation between 1648 and 1653. It is only fair to say that if some of them were abnormal personages--such as Jerome Sanchy, who combined the functions of Proctor and Colonel of Horse--others were men of conspicuous merit. The most noteworthy of them was Sydenham, the greatest medical name except Linacre that the College--perhaps that England--can boast.

In 1653, free elections recommenced, and as the first-fruits of their labours the new Fellows co-opted Christopher Wren. This greatest of all the Fellows of All Souls was in residence for eight years, working from the very first year of his election at architecture, though astronomy and mathematics were also taking up part of his time. Ere he had been many months a Fellow, he erected the large sundial, with the motto _pereunt et imputantur_, which now adorns the Library. In 1661 he resigned his Fellowship on becoming Professor of Astronomy, and shortly after departed for London. Almost the only note of his All Souls life that survives is the fact that he was a great frequenter of the newly-established coffee-house, next door to University College. His famous architectural drawings were left to the College, and are still preserved in the Library.

The troubles of the Restoration passed over with very little friction at All Souls. Palmer, the intruding Warden, died in the very month of King Charles’ return, and Sheldon peaceably took possession of his old place. But within two years he was called off, to become Archbishop of Canterbury, and John Meredith reigned in his stead. This Warden’s short tenure of office is marked by the horrible mutilation of the reredos to which we have already alluded. The College must needs have a “restoration” of its chapel, and in the true spirit of the “restorer,” broke away much of what was characteristic in it, plastered up the rest, and hired Streater, painter to the king, to daub a “Last Judgment” on the flat space thus obtained. Having accomplished this feat Meredith died.

Meredith’s successor, Jeames, prompted and supported by Archbishop Sancroft, succeeded in finally putting down the evil of corrupt resignations, which had survived the Parliamentary Visitation, and blossomed out into all its old luxuriance in the easy times of the Restoration. The fight came to a head in 1680-1, when Jeames, for two years running, used his veto to prevent the election of all candidates nominated by resigners. The veto frustrating any election, the Visitor was by the statutes allowed to fill up the vacant places, and did so. The threat that the same procedure should again be carried out in the next year brought the majority of the College to reason, though for the whole twelve months, Nov. 1680-Nov. 1681, twenty-four discontented Fellows, whom Jeames called “the Faction,” were moving heaven and earth to get the Warden’s right of veto rescinded. From 1682 onwards, the type of Fellow improved, and some of the most distinguished members of the College date from the years 1680-1700. It is in this period, however, that the complaint begins to be heard that All Souls looked to birth quite as much as to learning in choosing its candidates. “They generally,” says Hearne--a great enemy of the College--“pick out those that have no need of a Fellowship, persons of great fortunes and good birth, and often of no morals and less learning.” For the former part of this statement, the names in the College register give some justification: concerning the latter, we can only say that the average of men who came to great things in the list of Fellows is higher in Hearne’s time than at any other. To this period belong Dr. Clarke, Secretary of War under William III., Christopher Codrington--of whom more hereafter--Bishop Tanner the antiquary, Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, and many more.

The reign of James II. was fraught with as much danger to All Souls as to the other Colleges of the University. Warden Jeames died in 1686, and every one expected and dreaded an attempt to force a Papist head on the College. What happened was almost as bad. There was in the foundation a very junior Fellow--only elected in 1682--named Leopold Finch, son of the Earl of Winchelsea, whose riotous outbreaks and habitual fits of inebriety had done much to embitter Jeames’ last years of rule. Finch was a hot Tory, and when, on the outbreak of Monmouth’s rebellion, the University proposed to raise a regiment of trained-bands for the King, was one of the leaders in the movement. He enlisted a company of musketeers from members of All Souls and Merton, and this company was the only part of the University battalion that actually took the field. Its not very glorious record of service consisted in occupying Islip for ten days, to secure the London road, and stop all transit of suspicious persons. When the news of Sedgmoor came, Lord Abingdon bade the company dine with him at Rycot, and they came home “well fuzzed with his ale,” insomuch that their very drum was stove in, and remains so to this day, stored, with one of the muskets borne by the volunteers, in All Souls Bursary.

Finch had nothing to recommend him save this military exploit, his good birth, and his notorious looseness of life and conscience. He was thought by the King capable of anything in the way of submission--perhaps even of conversion to Papacy--and on the death of Jeames the College, to its horror, learned that Finch had been nominated as Warden. Less courageous than the Fellows of Magdalen, the All Souls men, though they refused to elect Finch in due form, refrained from choosing any other head, and allowed the intruder to take possession of the Warden’s house and prerogatives. Finch, though a man of some learning, made as disreputable a head of the College as might have been expected: he jobbed, he drank, he ran into debt, and finally he was found to have embezzled College money. But when William of Orange landed, his Toryism disappeared, and he saved his place by suddenly becoming a hot Whig. All the punishment that he ever got for his usurpation, was that he was compelled to acknowledge himself as only “pseudo-custos,” and to submit to be re-appointed to his Wardenship in a more legal way. He presided for sixteen years over the College with much disrepute, and died in 1702--with the bailiffs in his house.

Finch was succeeded by Bernard Gardiner, a very different character. Gardiner was a good scholar and a good man, but decidedly testy and choleric; in politics he was that somewhat abnormal creature, a Hanoverian Tory, and succeeded in earning the dislike of both parties. He was the Vice-Chancellor who deprived Hearne of his place in the Bodleian for Jacobitism, yet he also fought a furious battle with Wake, the Whig Archbishop, who was his Visitor. With a large faction of the Fellows he had equally numerous passages of arms, yet still the College flourished under him. It was in his time that the great back quadrangle, the new Hall, and the new Warden’s lodgings, were built.

These spacious buildings were erected not with College money, but by generous and long-continued benefactions from the Fellows. Dr. Clarke, the Secretary of War, was the chief donor: “God send us many such ample benefactors” wrote his grateful Warden in the College book. He built the Warden’s lodgings out of his own pocket, besides paying for the “restoration” of the east end of the chapel. This consisted in painting over Streater’s bad fresco[195] a much better production by Sir James Thornhill--the somewhat heathenish but spirited Apotheosis of Chichele--which was taken down in our own generation. Below the fresco were placed two marble pillars, supporting an entablature, which framed Raphael Mengs’ pleasing “_Noli me tangere_,” the picture which now adorns the ante-chapel. After Clarke the most generous donors were Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, who gave £1350 in all; Mr. Greville, who built the new cloister; and General Stuart. Hawkesmoor, Wren’s favourite pupil, was their architect; it is to him that we owe the strange but not ineffective twin-towers, the classic cloister, the vaulted buttery, and the lofty hall with its bare mullionless windows.

But there was one Fellow in the reign of Anne who was even a greater benefactor than Clarke and Lloyd. It was to Christopher Codrington that the College owes the magnificent library, which so far surpasses all its rivals in the University, save the Bodleian alone. Codrington was a kind of Admirable Creighton, poet and soldier, bibliophile and statesman. In the same year he gained military promotion for his gallantry at the siege of Namur, welcomed William III. to Oxford in a speech whose elegant Latinity softened even Jacobite critics, and undertook the government of the English West India Islands. He died at Barbadoes in 1710, and left to his well-loved College 12,000 books, valued at £6000, with a legacy of £10,000 to build a fit edifice to hold them, and a fund to maintain it. The Codrington Library, commenced in 1716, took many years to build, but at last stood completed, a far more successful work than the hall which faces it across the quadrangle. It is 200 feet long, and holds with ease the 70,000 books to which the College library has now swollen. A public reading-room was added to it in 1867, and it is for students of law and history as much of an institution as the Bodleian itself.

The eighteenth century gave All Souls many brilliant Fellows, but it destroyed the original purpose of the foundation, and ended by making it an abuse and a byword. It is only necessary to mention the names of a few of its members, to show how large a share of the great men of the time passed through the College. It claims the great Blackstone--for many years an indefatigable bursar--the second name to Wren among the list of Fellows. Two Lord Chancellors came from it, Lord Talbot of Hensoll, and Lord Northington; Young the poet was a resident for many years; one Archbishop, Vernon Harcourt of York, and eight Bishops had been Fellows. With them, though elected in the opening years of the present century, must be mentioned Reginald Heber, the first and greatest of our missionary prelates.

But in spite of these great names, the College--like the whole University--was in a bad way. Two abuses destroyed its usefulness. The first was the introduction of non-residence. Down to the reign of Anne, a Fellow who left Oxford without the _animus revertendi_, forfeited his Fellowship. Every one quitting the College, even for a few months, had to obtain a temporary leave of absence, and to state his intention to return. Gradually Fellows began to devise ingenious excuses for prolonged non-residence; the favourite ones were that they were about to study physic, and must therefore travel; or that they were in the service of the Crown, and must be excused on public grounds. The test case on which the battle was finally fought out was that of Blencowe, a Fellow who had become “Decypherer to the Queen” (interpreter of the cyphers so much used in despatches at that time). Warden Gardiner strove to make him resign, but Blencowe moved Sunderland, the Secretary of State, to interfere in his behalf with the Visitor, and it was formally ruled that his service with the Crown excused him from residence, as well as from his obligation under the statutes to take orders. For the future the Fellows all found some excuse--taking out a commission in the militia was the favourite one--for saying that they were in the royal service, and thereby excused from residence. From about 1720 the number of residents goes down gradually from twenty or thirty to six or seven. The remainder of the Fellows, like Gibbon’s enemies at Magdalen, remembered to draw their emoluments, but forgot their statutory obligations.

Almost as injurious as the exemption from residence was the introduction of a new theory that Founder’s-kin candidates had an absolute preference over all others. Archbishop Wake is responsible for its recognition: a certain Robert Wood, in 1718, claimed to be elected simply on account of his birth, and the Visitor ruled that he must be admitted, in spite of the custom of the College, which had never before taken account of such a right. At first the Founder’s-kin appeared in small numbers--there are only twelve between 1700 and 1750--but about the middle of the century they appear to have suddenly woken up to the advantages of obtaining a Fellowship without condition or examination. Between 1757 and 1777 thirty-nine Fellows out of fifty-eight elected are set down as _cons. fund._ in the College books. Archbishop Cornwallis in 1777 ruled that it was not obligatory upon the College that more than ten of the Fellows should be of Founder’s kin, and from this time forth the claim of Founder’s kin had no direct influence upon the elections. But the doctrine had done its work. It brought the Fellowships within a charmed circle of county families, outside of which the College rarely looked when the morrow of All Souls Day came round.

The effect of this was to create a society of an abnormal sort in the midst of a group of Colleges which, whatever their shortcomings may have been, continued to make a profession of study and teaching. The Fellows were men of good birth, and usually of good private means. Hence came the well-known joke that they were required to be “bene nati, bene vestiti, et moderate docti,” a saying formed, as Professor Burrows has pointed out, by ingeniously twisting the three clauses in the statutes which bade them be “de legitimo matrimonio nati,” “vestiti sicut eorum honestati convenit clericali,” and “in plano cantu competenter docti.”

The Fellows had no educational duties or emoluments, and consequently no inducement to reside except for purposes of study: and for the most part they were not studious, nor resident. The Fellowships were poor, and so were only attractive to men of means. Hence the management of the College property was a matter of indifference, and it was neglected. Other Colleges no doubt neglected their duties and mismanaged their properties, but All Souls men took a pride in having no duties and in being indifferent to the income arising from their estates. Gradually the College drew more and more apart from its neighbours, until the Fellows made it a point to know nothing and to care nothing about the teaching, the study, or the business that was going on just outside their walls.

Yet a period during which Blackstone, Heber, and the present Prime Minister were numbered among the Fellows, cannot be said to be undistinguished in the history of the College; and this system, indefensible in itself, has handed down some things which the present generation would not be willing to lose. This College, which had become somewhat of a family party, was animated by a peculiarly strong feeling of corporate loyalty. And throughout the change and stir of the last forty years, and in the new and many-sided development of the College, the close tie which binds the Fellow, wherever he may be, to the College has never been weakened. And as the College has come back to an intimate connection with the life of the University, its non-resident element is not without value. The lawyer, the member of Parliament, the diplomatist, and the civil servant, no longer disregarding the University and its pursuits, are an element of great value in a society which is too apt to be engrossed in the details of teaching and of examinations.

The University Commission of 1854 swept away the rights of Founder’s kin together with many other provisions of the Statutes of Chichele, appropriated ten Fellowships to the endowment of Chairs of Modern History and International Law, and threw open the rest to competition in the subjects of Law and Modern History. The Commission of 1877 threatened graver changes, and for a while it was doubtful whether All Souls might not become an undergraduate College of the ordinary type. But in the end the College was allowed to retain, by means of non-resident Fellowships, its old connection with the world outside, while in other ways its endowments were utilized for study and teaching. On the whole it cannot be said to have suffered more than others from the want of constructive genius in the Commissioners. It is and will be a College of many Fellows and several Professors, with liabilities to contribute annual sums to Bodley’s Library and to undergraduate education. The Fellowships are terminable in seven years, but may be renewed in limited numbers and on a reduced emolument.

Under these new conditions All Souls--though still somewhat scantily inhabited--is no longer given over during a great part of each year to the bats and owls. It now plays a useful and important part in the University. Its Hall and lecture-rooms are crowded with undergraduates, its reading-room is full of students of law and history, and its Warden and Fellows have produced in the last ten years about twice as many books as any two other Colleges in the University put together. Last, but not least, it has continued most loyally to fulfil its obligation of providing prize Fellowships; no other foundation can say, though several are far richer than All Souls, that it has regularly offered Fellowships for competition for twenty consecutive years.