Yet there were not wanting “greedy wretches to gape after the lands belonging to the Colleges.” They urged Henry to treat them as he had treated the monasteries. But the King refused.
“Ah, sirrah,” he replied to one, “I perceive the Abbey lands have fleshed you, and set your teeth on edge, to ask also those Colleges. And wheras we had a regard only 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 realm shall be well governed when we be dead and rotten.... I love not learning so ill that I will impair the revenues of any one house by a penny, wherby it may be upholden.”
Henry, in fact, may be credited with a genuine desire for the promotion of learning. He had, besides, no reason to quarrel with the University. It had proved subservient to his will; the colleges were nurseries of the secular clergy, who adopted the new order of things. They could not be regarded like the monks, as mercenaries of a foreign and hostile power.
But academic enthusiasm was not to be promoted by the despotic methods of Henry. The arbitrary restrictions of the Six Articles, “that sure touchstone of a man’s conscience,” struck at the root of intellectual liberty. The revival of academic life which had resulted from the stimulus of the Catholic Renaissance, was suddenly and severely checked by the early developments of the Reformation. The monasteries had been dissolved, and the poor students whom they had supported trudged a-begging. Another outbreak of plague helped to increase the depopulation of the University. The town suffered severely from both causes. The halls and hostels stood empty; very few degrees were taken. Religious controversy usurped the place of education. The University became a centre of politics and ecclesiasticism. The schools were deserted or occupied by laundresses; and, whilst commissioners were busy applying tests, expelling honest fellows, destroying MSS. and smashing organs, men began to discover that, through the invention of printing, it had become possible for them to educate themselves. They no longer needed to go to a monastery or college library to obtain a book; teaching needed no longer to be merely oral. The multiplication of books decentralised learning. With the monopoly of manuscripts and the universality of Latin were taken almost at a moment’s notice two of the chief assets of mediæval Universities. A man might now read what he liked, and where he liked, instead of being obliged to listen to a master in the schools teaching set subjects that did not interest him. And no “test” was required of the independent reader. No wonder that, as one preacher dismally exclaimed, the Wells of Learning, Oxford and Cambridge, were dried up.
The King had taken the charters of both University and town into his own hands in 1530. He did not restore them till 1543. Two years later Parliament made over all colleges and chantries to the King, “who gave them very good counsel.” Meanwhile, in 1535, a Visitation of the University had been held. Dr London and Richard Layton were the chief Visitors. Their object was to establish ecclesiastical conformity, to supplant the old scholastic teaching and to promote classical learning. They confirmed the public lectures in Greek and Latin which they found, and established others, at Magdalen, New College, and C.C.C., and they settled other lectures of the kind at Merton and Queen’s. The other colleges, they found, could not afford to have such lectures, and accordingly they directed the students of these to attend the courses at the others daily. The study of Aristotle and the Holy Scriptures was enjoined, and the King founded Regius Professorships in Divinity, Hebrew, Greek, Medicine and Civil Law. The University meantime was rewarded for its compliance by being exempted from the payment of tithes. At the same time the professors of the Old Learning were ousted from the academic chairs. Duns Scotus was dragged from his pedestal with an ignominy which recalled the fate of Sejanus.
“We have set Duns in Bocardo,” wrote Layton, “and have utterly banished him Oxford for ever with all his blind glosses.... The second time we came to New College, after we had declared your injunctions we found all the great Quadrant Court full of the leaves of Dunse, the wind blowing them into every corner. And there we found one Mr. Greenfield, a gentleman of Buckinghamshire gathering up part of the same book leaves, as he said, to make him sewells or blawnshers to keep the deer within his wood, therby to have the better cry with his hounds.”
That day the downfall of scholasticism in England was at last complete.
During the minority of Edward VI. “there was great expectation in the University what religion would be professed.” It was soon evident which way the wind was to blow. Young men began to “protest” in Magdalen Chapel. In 1548 the Protector Somerset and Cranmer determined to reform the University in the interests of the new Anglican Church. Theologians were invited from the Continent, and in default of Melancthon, Peter Martyr arrived and lectured in the Divinity Schools on the Epistles of S. Paul and the Eucharist. His teaching roused protest from the Roman Catholics, and polemical divinity, if no other study, flourished for a while in Oxford. But a commission was now appointed with large powers, which proceeded to draw up a code of statutes calculated to eliminate all popery from the constitution of the University. These “Edwardine statutes,” as they were called, remained nominally in force till the “Laudian” statutes replaced them.
The commissioners dealt severely with the colleges. Many of the fellows who had opposed the Reformation fled forthwith; others they ejected and replaced by rigid Calvinists. “All things,” the Roman Catholics thought, “were turned topsy turvy.” The disciplinary injunctions and acts of the commissioners were wholly admirable. Unfortunately their fanaticism in other directions was of the deplorably iconoclastic sort.
The ancient libraries were rifled; many MSS., guilty of no other superstition than red letters in their titles, were condemned to the fire. “Treatises on scholastical divinity were let loose from their chains and given away or sold to mechanics for servile uses, whilst those wherein angles or mathematical diagrams appeared were destroyed because accounted Popish or diabolical or both.” The works of the schoolmen were carried about the city “by certain rude young men” on biers and finally burnt in the market-place, a proceeding which they styled the funeral of Scotus and Scotists. Some of the books from monasteries were sold at this time to grocers and soapsellers, and some by shiploads to bookbinders abroad, “to the wondering of foreign nations,” says Bale.