CHAPTER VII.

THE RENAISSANCE, THE REFORMATION, AND THE TUDOR PERIOD.

[Sidenote: Revival of academical life at the end of the fifteenth century]

The reign of Edward IV. may be regarded as a singularly blank period in University annals. The Wars of the Roses, in which feudalism perished by its own hand, but which left so few traces on the national life, hardly disturbed the academical repose; and the obscurity which hangs over the next chapter in the history of the nation rests equally upon that of the University. But a gradual recovery was in progress, and soon yielded visible fruits. The close of the fifteenth century found the University of Oxford far more complete in its outward structure, if somewhat less vigorous in its inward life, than it had been two centuries earlier. It was no longer a loose aggregate of students under the paramount jurisdiction of a bishop resident at Lincoln, but an organised institution, with a government of its own, under the special protection of the Crown, and capable of being used as a powerful engine for effecting or resisting changes in Church or State. While the old order was yielding place to new, and the fountains of scholastic thought were running dry, there had been a marked decay in academical energy, and the declining number of students attested the decreased activity of teaching. But the revival of classical learning, promoted by the dispersion of Greek scholars after the fall of Constantinople, was accompanied or followed by that marvellous series of events which divides modern from mediæval history—the invention of printing, aided by the improvement of paper-making; the discovery of America; the consolidation of the European monarchies; and the Reformation itself. The first effect of the enthusiasm kindled by these new influences was to invigorate the University; it was not until their secondary effects were felt that a reaction manifested itself.

[Sidenote: Checked by the Reformation]

The great educational movement which sprang from the Reformation was essentially popular rather than academical, and by no means tended to increase the relative importance of the Universities. The cause of this is not difficult to discover. When the only books were manuscripts, the Universities and the very few other institutions which possessed large collections of manuscripts attracted the whole literary class from all parts of the country. When instruction in the sciences was only to be obtained from the lips of a living teacher, and when schools hardly existed elsewhere, except in connection with cathedrals or monasteries, the lecture rooms of Oxford were thronged with students of all ages, and represented almost the entire machinery of national education. When the Church ruled supreme over the wide realm of thought, and learning was the monopoly of ‘clerics,’ the great ecclesiastical stronghold of Oxford far surpassed the metropolis itself as an intellectual centre. When Latin was the one language of scholars, and English literature scarcely existed, the academical masters of Latinity, especially as they were carefully trained in disputation, maintained a peerless supremacy over their less favoured countrymen. In the larger and freer life which took its birth from the Reformation, the exclusive privileges of the Universities became inevitably depreciated, and their degeneracy in the early part of the sixteenth century presents a humiliating contrast with their ascendency in the fourteenth. The dissolution of monasteries, the high-handed visitations of the Tudor Sovereigns, and the diversion of the national energies into new careers, operated concurrently to empty Oxford of students, nor was it until near the end of the century that its tone was gradually restored by the wise policy of Queen Elizabeth.

[Sidenote: Pioneers of the new learning at Oxford]

During the reign of Henry VII. the University was strongly agitated by the struggle between the old scholastic philosophy and the new learning of the Renaissance. The credit of introducing classical studies, and especially that of Greek literature, has sometimes been claimed for the Reformation, but it is rather due to a liberal spirit then springing up in the Catholic world, and especially to Italian influences. It was from Italy that England caught the new impulse, and that Oxford imported numerous MSS. of classical authors, while printing was still almost a fine art. Perhaps the foundation of grammar schools at Winchester and Eton for the special instruction of boys in Latin may have contributed to pave the way for the classical revival at the Universities. At all events, it was in progress before the Reformation, and was promoted by several enlightened bishops and abbots of the old religion, and may not improperly be regarded as a legacy of Catholic to Protestant England. Writing in 1497, Erasmus, who is sometimes described as the father of classical studies in England, speaks of a ‘rich harvest of classical literature’ as already flourishing at Oxford on every side, and declares that he could well nigh forget Italy in the society of Colet, Grocyn, Lynacre, and More. Indeed, he places England, in respect of culture, above France or Germany, and second to Italy alone. In fact, we soon afterwards find Richard Croke, an Englishman, teaching Greek at Leipsic, whence he migrated, a few years later, to succeed Erasmus himself as Professor at Cambridge.

[Sidenote: Erasmus, More, Colet, Grocyn, and Linacre]

During his first visit to Oxford, Erasmus lodged in a conventual house of Augustin Canons, known as St. Mary’s College, opposite New Inn Hall. Of the names thus commemorated by him, that of Sir Thomas More belongs to the political history of England, but he also deserves to be remembered as the young student of Canterbury College, among the most ardent disciples and most zealous promoters of classical teaching at Oxford. Colet, who had known More in the house of Cardinal Morton, and who became famous as the founder of St. Paul’s School, was educated at Magdalen College, but afterwards visited France and Italy, whence he returned in 1497, to lecture publicly but gratuitously on St. Paul’s Epistles, and to become a leading pioneer of Latin scholarship in the University. Grocyn had been elected Fellow of New College as far back as 1467, and was Divinity Reader at Magdalen College about 1483. It was not until some years later that he went to Italy for purposes of study, and devoted himself to Greek and Latin. On his return, he resided in Exeter College, and delivered the first public lectures on Greek, which seem to have been attended by Erasmus himself, who speaks of him with unfailing respect. Lynacre was elected Fellow of All Souls in 1484, but, like Colet and Grocyn, owed his erudition chiefly to his residence in Italy, where he became Professor of Medicine at Padua. But his range of studies was so wide that it was doubted of him whether he was ‘a better Latinist or Grecian, a better grammarian or physician.’ In modern times he is chiefly known as among the founders, and as the first President, of the College of Physicians; while his principal claim to gratitude at Oxford consists in his posthumous foundation of two Readerships in Physiology at Merton College, which have since been consolidated into a Professorship of Anatomy. The new studies, however, met with violent opposition, and several University dignitaries publicly lectured against Erasmus. Indeed, if we are to believe Anthony Wood, in spite of all the reformers’ efforts, academical learning was still in a deplorable state in 1508, the last year of Henry VII.’s reign. ‘The schools were much frequented with querks and sophistry. All things, whether taught or written, seemed to be trite or inane. No pleasant streams of humanity or mythology were gliding among us, and the Greek language, from whence the greater part of knowledge is derived, was at a very low ebb, or in a manner forgotten.’

[Sidenote: Foundation of Corpus Christi College by Bishop Fox]

The first endowed lectureship of the Greek language at Oxford was instituted by Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, in 1516, as part of his new foundation of Corpus Christi College. His original intention had been to found a monastery, and in founding a college instead, with twenty fellows and twenty scholars, he clearly showed his desire to encourage the classics by providing also for Professors of Greek and Latin, as well as of theology, whose lectures should be open to all the University. By virtue of this endowment, Bishop Fox has been regarded as the founder of the professorial system, though he must perhaps share that honour, not only with William of Waynflete, but with Margaret, Countess of Richmond, mother of Henry VII., who had already founded the Margaret Professorship of Divinity in 1502. But Fox’s liberal spirit and sympathy with the Renaissance was shown in provisions, hitherto unknown, for instruction in the classical authors, for the colloquial use of Greek as well as Latin, and for the election of lecturers from Greece and Southern Italy. It was upon these grounds that Erasmus predicted a great future for the college as a stronghold of the classical movement.

[Sidenote: Greeks and Trojans]

That movement had already provoked a strange outbreak of academical barbarism in the University of Oxford. The faction of ‘Trojans,’ as they called themselves, from their enmity to Greek letters, seems to have been partly animated by a popular aversion to change, and partly by a far-sighted appreciation of the anti-Catholic tendencies inherent in the Renaissance. It is said to have originated in hostility to Grocyn’s Greek lectures at Exeter College; but it reached its height in the early part of Henry VIII.’s reign, by which time, however, the classics had won powerful friends at Court, and the ‘Greeks’ were protected by a peremptory Royal order, issued in 1519. It is remarkable that no trace of these fierce controversies between Scholasticism and the New Learning, still less of the impending revolution in the national religion, is to be discerned in the statutes of Brasenose, the latest of the pre-Reformation colleges, issued in 1521, nine years after its foundation. Under these statutes the scholars were bound to study the old subjects of the scholastic curriculum, ‘Sophistry, Logic, and Philosophy, and afterwards Divinity ... for the advancement of Holy Church, and for the support and exaltation of the Christian faith.’ On the other hand, there are ample proofs that long before the Old Learning ceased to rule the University system of disputations and examinations, the Renaissance had already penetrated into the University and College Libraries.

[Sidenote: Cardinal Wolsey and the foundation of Christ Church]

The great minister of Henry VIII., Cardinal Wolsey, must always be remembered as the most discerning as well as the most generous patron of liberal culture, which he admired for its own sake, though he naturally regarded it as the handmaid of the Church. It was in 1518 that Wolsey came to Oxford, in company with Catharine of Aragon, while the King remained behind at Abingdon. The University, doubtless perceiving the danger of impending spoliation, ‘made a solemn and ample decree, not only of giving up their statutes into the Cardinal’s hands, to be reformed, corrected, renewed, and the like, but also their liberties, indulgences, privileges, nay the whole University (the colleges excepted), to be by him disposed and framed into good order.’ Wolsey did not disappoint their confidence, and some five years later (in 1523) returned the charters, with a new and still more beneficial one procured from the King. At this period he is believed to have contemplated the foundation of more than one University professorship and the erection of University lecture-rooms, but if he ever entertained such an idea, it was abandoned. In the meantime, however, he was projecting the foundation of a college for secular clergy on a scale of grandeur hitherto unknown, for the purpose (as Huber well says) of ‘cultivating the new literature in the service of the old Church.’ In order to endow ‘Cardinal College,’ as it was to be called, twenty-two priories and convents were suppressed, under Papal and Royal authority, and their revenues, amounting to 2,000_l._, were diverted to the maintenance of ten professorships, as well as of sixty canonists and forty priests. The students were to be trained in a great school founded at Ipswich, as those of New College were trained at Winchester. The first stone of the building was laid in 1525; scholars had been engaged from Cambridge and the Continent to serve on the professorial staff; the abbey church of St. Frideswide’s had been appropriated as the college chapel; and the splendid kitchen, still preserved, was already completed, when the fall of Wolsey in 1529 arrested the execution of this grand design.

[Sidenote: Action of the University on the questions of the Divorce and the Royal Supremacy]

The King, engrossed with the question of obtaining a divorce from Catharine of Aragon, was in no mood to indulge the sympathy which he really felt towards learned institutions, and was rather bent on obtaining a favourable award from Oxford and the other great Universities of Europe on the legality of his marriage. The compliance of the Oxford Convocation was not extorted without grievous pressure. The younger Masters of Arts, as Wood informs us, stood firm in refusing to sanction the divorce, and, notwithstanding a threatening letter from the King himself, the desired vote was only secured, after repeated failures, by the exclusion of the graduates in Arts from the Convocation. Soon after this memorable but somewhat disgraceful vote, in April 1530, the King again visited Oxford, and took back into his own hands the charters both of the University and of the city, which had again begun to challenge academical privileges. They were not restored until 1543, and during the interval the University was again invited to pronounce a solemn verdict—no longer upon a question of private right, but on the gravest issue of national policy ever submitted to its judgment. For by this time the preliminary events which ushered in the English Reformation were following each other in rapid succession. In July 1530, the replies of several Universities in favour of the divorce had been forwarded to the Pope by the hand of Cranmer, and in the following March they were laid before Parliament. In November 1530, Cardinal Wolsey, charged with treason, died at Leicester on his way to the Tower. At the beginning of 1531, the clergy, having bought off the penalties of _præmunire_, were induced, under strong pressure, to acknowledge Henry as ‘Head of the Church and Clergy, so far as the law of Christ will allow.’ In 1532, an Act was passed for restraining all appeals to Rome, Sir Thomas More resigned the Chancellorship, and Henry married Ann Boleyn. In 1533, Cranmer, having succeeded Warham as Archbishop of Canterbury, not only pronounced the King’s marriage with Catharine to be null and void, but that with Anne Boleyn to be good and lawful. In 1534, the clergy in Convocation were forbidden to make constitutions except by the royal assent, and the Act was passed forbidding the payment of _annates_ to Rome. In the same year the formal separation of the English Church from Rome was consummated by the great Act 25 Hen. VIII. cap. 21, which left doctrine untouched, it is true, but abolished the authority of the Pope in England, while it also rendered the monasteries liable to visitation by commission under the Great Seal. In 1535, under the Act of Supremacy (26 Hen. VIII. cap. 1), the King assumed the title of ‘Supreme Head of the Church of England’; Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More were executed for denying the Royal supremacy, and Thomas Cromwell was appointed Vicar-General of England.

[Sidenote: Compliance of the University rewarded by Royal favour]

It was in 1534 that the University was invited to concur in the foregone conclusion in favour of separation from Rome, dictated by canonists and theologians in the King’s interest. It did so with little hesitation, and it is probable that an honest zeal for the independence of the National Church mingled with less worthy motives in eliciting the required consent. Moreover, Protestant doctrines, propagated by some of the scholars imported from Cambridge and the Continent, had already taken root in Oxford soil, and several members of Cardinal College had already undergone persecution. In the following year a visitation of the University was instituted, for the double purpose of establishing ecclesiastical conformity and supplanting the old scholastic culture by a large infusion of classical learning. The study of the Canon Law was suppressed, and Leighton, one of the visitors, joyfully reported that ‘Dunce’ (Duns Scotus) was ‘set in Bocardo,’ or relegated to an academical limbo, while the leaves of scholastic manuscripts, torn up by wholesale, might be seen fluttering about New College quadrangle. On the other hand, the study of Aristotle was enjoined, together with that of the Holy Scriptures, and an important concession was made to reward the loyalty of the University, which had cheerfully surrendered its rights and property into the King’s hands. It was now exempted from the payment of tenths, or first fruits, granted by statute to the Crown, on condition of such classical lectureships being founded there ‘as the Kynge’s majestie shall assigne or appoynte.’ The support of these lectureships was charged upon the five colleges supposed to be the richest, including Corpus, where classical lectureships already existed, and the students of the other seven colleges were directed to attend some of the courses daily. At the same time, following the example of his grandmother, the Countess Margaret of Richmond, the King founded and endowed with a yearly stipend of 40_l._ each five Regius Professorships of Divinity, Hebrew, Greek, Medicine, and Civil Law. The endowment was, of course, derived from the spoils of the Church, but Henry VIII. deserves credit for a sincere desire to promote learning. In 1532, three years after Wolsey’s fall, he took up his great minister’s design and refounded Cardinal College, though on a reduced scale, under the name of King Henry the Eighth’s College. In 1545 he dissolved it, and finally reconstituted it under the name of Christ Church, and in the following year transferred his new episcopal see of Oxford from Oseney Abbey to St. Frideswide’s, blending the collegiate with the cathedral establishment by placing it under the control of a dean and eight canons. We owe to Holinshed the memorable reply made by the King to some of his courtiers who fondly hoped that he would have dealt with University endowments, and especially with this infant college, as he had dealt with the monasteries. ‘Whereas wee had a regard onlie to pull down sin by defacing the monasteries, you have a desire also to overthrow all goodness by subversion of colleges. I tell you, sirs, that I judge no land in England better bestowed than that which is given to our Universities. For by their maintenance our realme shall be well governed when we be dead and rotten. I love not learning so ill that I will impair the revenewes of anie one House by a penie, whereby it may be upholden.’

[Sidenote: The first effects of the Reformation injurious to the University]

The reason why college revenues were spared while monastic revenues were confiscated is not difficult to divine, without supposing that Henry VIII. was pacified by the mediation of Catherine Parr. The occupants of monasteries were regarded as mercenaries of a foreign power which had become the enemy of the monarchy; the colleges were nurseries of the secular clergy, who had never been obnoxious to the State, who shared to a great extent the national spirit, and most of whom adopted the new ecclesiastical order. The wise foresight of the founders had excluded monks and friars as aliens from collegiate societies; the constitution of these was mainly secular, and their dissolution was not demanded by popular opinion. Nevertheless, the general sense of insecurity and habit of servility which prevailed under the despotic rule of Henry could not but have a blighting effect on University life. Such acts as the execution of Sir Thomas More, one of the brightest stars of the English Renaissance, and the arbitrary restrictions imposed on Protestantism by the Six Articles, struck at the root of intellectual liberty, and the early stages of the Reformation went far to depress the academical enthusiasm kindled by the Catholic Renaissance.

[Sidenote: Iconoclastic visitation under Edward VI.]

The dissolution of the monasteries, instead of aggrandising the University, contributed to depopulate it, since many of the poorer students, formerly harboured in monastic houses or lodgings, or supported by monastic exhibitions, were now cast adrift. The Colleges and Chantries Act, though never strictly executed, shook public confidence in academical endowments, and at the beginning of Edward VI.’s reign the University was far less prosperous than it had been under Wolsey. The number of degrees continued to fall off, and the number of halls to dwindle, as religious controversy usurped the place of education, and the University was used as an instrument to advance the political or ecclesiastical aims of the Sovereign. Henry VIII. had obtained its sanction to his divorce and to his revolt against Rome; the Protector Somerset and Cranmer determined to reform it in the interests of the new Anglican Church. Several years before, Cranmer had appointed commissions to regulate internal discipline in two colleges of which he was Visitor, but the Injunctions which he issued upon their recommendation involved no change of religious faith or ordinances. Another royal commission or Visitation, with sweeping powers, was issued for this purpose in 1549. A like commission was appointed for the University of Cambridge, and the new statutes drawn up for both Universities were framed on like principles, ‘in order that each eye of the nation might be set in motion by similar muscles.’ The ‘Edwardine’ code, as it was afterwards called, was of course so framed as to eliminate everything which favoured Popery from the constitution of the University, but it was not otherwise revolutionary, and, though it soon fell into disuse, it remained nominally in force until it was abrogated by the ‘Caroline’ statutes under the chancellorship of Laud. But the commissioners were not equally forbearing in their treatment of individuals, for they proceeded to expel all academical dignitaries found guilty of upholding the old faith. In dealing with colleges, the spirit in which they acted was ruthlessly iconoclastic, and not only were the old services abolished, but altars, images, statues, ‘the things called organs,’ and everything else which seemed to savour of ‘superstition,’ were defaced or swept away. The demolition of the magnificent reredos in the chapel of All Souls’ was assuredly no isolated specimen of their handiwork, though we have no equally striking record of Vandalism in other colleges. The amount of destruction wrought by their orders among the libraries and chapels of colleges cannot now be estimated, but it was certainly enormous, and ‘cartloads’ of classical and scientific manuscripts were consigned to the flames, together with many an illuminated masterpiece of scholastic literature.

[Sidenote: Leniency towards colleges]

At the same time, while the study of canon law was virtually suppressed, that of civil law, ancient philosophy, Hebrew, mathematics, logic, rhetoric, and medicine was expressly encouraged by the Visitors. Eminent theologians were invited from the continent, and the lectures of Peter Martyr and others who accepted the invitation were crowded with eager students. It was even designed to reconstitute All Souls’ as a college for the special cultivation of civil law, while New College should be devoted exclusively to ‘artists.’ Many exhibitions for poor boys were suppressed, the Magdalen Grammar School was saved only by earnest remonstrances from the citizens, and some new dispositions were made of college revenues with little regard to founders’ intentions. But the spoliation does not seem to have been so indiscriminate as Anthony Wood represents it. The Protector Somerset, being pressed, like Henry VIII., to sanction the general disendowment of colleges, repelled the proposal with equal indignation; and indeed there is some reason to believe that colleges were now regarded with peculiar favour as seminaries of classical learning, and comparatively free from the scholastic and mediæval spirit which still animated the University system. Perhaps for this reason the Visitors forbore to exercise their power of consolidating several colleges into one, though they did not scruple to remove obnoxious Heads and fellows. Some of their injunctions exhibit much good sense, and even anticipate modern reforms, such as those which make fellowships terminable and tenable only on condition of six months’ residence, which insist on a matriculation-examination in grammar and Latin, and which require that lectures shall be followed by examinations. It is remarkable that at Magdalen and All Souls’ one fellowship was to be reserved for Irishmen. Others of their injunctions were purely disciplinary, such as those which prohibit undue expenditure on banquets after disputations, the practice of gambling, and the use of cards in term-time. Such regulations point to an increase of luxury consequent on the development of colleges, originally designed for the poor but now frequented by a wealthier class. Polemical divinity, stimulated by Peter Martyr’s discourses on the Eucharist, continued to flourish; but, with this exception, University studies were languishing, and while foreign divines were being imported into England, Oxford professors of civil law were emigrating to Louvain. The non-collegiate students became fewer and fewer; the most experienced teachers gradually disappeared; the impulse of the Renaissance died away; the new spirit of inquiry failed to supply the place of the old ecclesiastical order; the attractions of trade began to compete with those of learning, and the Universities no longer monopolised the most promising youths in the country who declined the profession of arms.

[Sidenote: Reaction under Mary. Martyrdom of Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer]

The accession of Mary, in 1553, ushered in a short-lived reaction. As the leading Romanist divines had quitted Oxford on the proclamation of Edward VI., so now the leading Protestants, headed by Peter Martyr, were fain to make their escape, though not till after Jewell had been employed to draw up a congratulatory epistle to the Queen, whose policy was not fully revealed at the outset of her reign. Heads and fellows of colleges were released from their obligation to renounce the authority of the Pope, the Mass superseded the Common Prayer-book, and Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, instituted a Visitation of the three colleges under his own personal jurisdiction. After the execution of Lady Jane Grey and the Queen’s marriage with Philip II. the spirit of persecution rapidly developed itself, all statutes passed against the Papacy since the twentieth year of Henry VIII. were repealed, the statutes passed against heretics in the reigns of Henry IV. and Henry V. were revived, and Oxford became the scene of those Protestant martyrdoms which have left an indelible impression of horror and sympathy in the English mind. Several victims of Catholic intolerance had already perished at the stake, when Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer were brought to Oxford for the purpose of undergoing the solemn farce of an academical trial, and thus implicating the University in the guilt of their intended condemnation. At a convocation held in St. Mary’s Church a body of Oxford doctors was commissioned to dispute against the Protestant bishops on the Eucharist, in concert with a body of Cambridge doctors similarly commissioned. The so-called ‘disputation’ took place in the Divinity School. A day was assigned to each prisoner, the academical judgment was of course given against them, the judicial sentence soon followed, and on October 15, 1555, Ridley and Latimer were led out to be burned in Canditch, opposite Balliol College, where a sermon was preached before the stake by Dr. Richard Smyth on the text, ‘Though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.’ Cranmer’s execution was delayed for months, since it required the sanction of Rome, and his courage, as is well known, gave way under the fear of death. His recantation came too late to save his life, yet he was called upon to repeat it in St. Mary’s Church on his way to his doom. Instead of doing so, he publicly retracted it before the assembled University, with earnest professions of remorse. He was not allowed to conclude his address, but hurried off with brutal eagerness, to give at the stake that marvellous example of heroic constancy which has atoned for all his past errors in the eyes of Protestants, and crowned the martyrdoms of the English Reformation. From that moment the cause of the Catholic reaction was desperate in the University, no less than in the nation. Queen Mary conferred upon it many benefits and favours, and won the servile homage of its official representatives, but she never won the hearts of the students, and the news of her death was received with no less rejoicing in Oxford than in other parts of England.

[Sidenote: Visitation and reforms of Cardinal Pole]

In the meantime, however, a fresh Visitation of the University was set on foot, in 1556, by Cardinal Pole, who, having succeeded Gardiner as chancellor of Cambridge in the previous year, now succeeded Sir John Mason, the first lay chancellor of Oxford. He was the last in that line of cardinals, beginning with Beaufort, who, armed with the title of _Legatus à latere_, assumed to govern the English Church, as it had never been governed before, under the direct orders of the Pope. The Visitors deputed by him proceeded to hunt out certain obnoxious persons who had not withdrawn from Oxford, to burn all the English Bibles which they could find in the common market-place, and to purge the libraries of Protestant books. The Cardinal soon afterwards caused the University and college statutes to be revised, chiefly for the purpose of correcting recent innovations. For instance, while Edward VI.’s commissioners had authorised the use of English in college halls, Cardinal Pole restored the old rule against speaking any language but Latin. It was also an avowed object of the revision to restore the supremacy of Aristotle and the study of scholastic philosophy. These changes, having scarcely been effected before they were reversed, fill less space in University annals than an incident of comparatively trivial importance, which must have outraged the Protestant sympathies of the Oxford townspeople. The wife of Peter Martyr had been interred in Christchurch Cathedral, near the relics of St. Frideswide. Pole now directed the dean, no unwilling agent, to exhume the body and cast it into unconsecrated ground. The Dean improved upon his instructions by having it buried under a dunghill, whence it was again disinterred, mingled with the relics of St. Frideswide, and finally committed to the grave in the year 1561. No wonder that Queen Mary’s patronage proved a poor substitute for academical freedom, that learning continued to decline, that even sermons were rare and ill-attended, that lectures were almost suspended, that few ‘proceeded’ in any of the faculties, and that it was thought necessary to reduce the qualification of standing for the M.A. degree in order to reinforce the University with Masters.

[Sidenote: Foundation of Trinity and St. John’s Colleges]

Two colleges, it is true, Trinity and St. John’s, owe their origin to Mary’s reign, and both were founded by Roman Catholics, but upon the ruins of monastic institutions, and before the Marian persecutions had borne fruit in the University. These colleges, as semi-Catholic foundations of the Reformation era, may fitly be regarded as forming landmarks between mediæval and modern Oxford.