The buildings and chapel were, however, restored by the patrons, Oriel College. If you follow the Cowley Road towards Cowley Marsh, you will find on your left, opposite the College cricket grounds, and just short of the Military College and barracks, a ruined building which is the old chapel of S. Bartholomew, and contains the screen put up in the time of the Commonwealth. The letters O. C., 1651, mark it. They stand for Oriel College, not Oliver Cromwell, we must suppose.
There was a hospital in Stockwell Street, at the back of Beaumont Palace; there was a hospital of Bethlehem at the north end of S. Giles’ Church and Alms-house Place in Holywell. Of hermitages we may mention that known as S. Nicholas Chapel on the west side of South Bridge. The hermits who lived there successively were called the hermits of Grand Pont. They passed their lives, we are told, in continual prayer and bodily labour—“in prayer against the vanities of the world, for poor pilgrims and passengers that steered their course that way, receiving of them something of benevolence for that purpose; in bodily labour by digging their own graves and filling them up again, as also in delving and making highways and bridges.”
“Our Lady in the wall” was the name of another hermitage near S. Frideswide’s Grange, which was in great repute at one time for the entertainment of poor pilgrims who came to be cured by the waters of S. Edmund’s well (Cowley Place).
The hospital of S. John Baptist was founded some time before the end of the thirteenth century for the relief of poor scholars and other miserable persons. Among the property granted or confirmed to it by Henry III. in a very liberal charter, was the mill known as King’s Mill at the Headington end of the path now called Mesopotamia, because it runs between the two branches of the river.
As a site for rebuilding the hospital the brethren were given (1231) the Jews’ Garden, outside the East Gate of Oxford, but it was provided that a space should be reserved for a burial-ground for the Jews. This ground formed part of the present site of Magdalen College, and part of the site of the Physic Garden, which lies on the other side of the High Street, facing the modern entrance to that college. The latter site was that reserved for the Jews’ cemetery; the hospital buildings were erected on the other portion. When Waynflete began to enlarge and remodel his foundation of Magdalen Hall (1456), he obtained a grant from the king whereby the hospital (which had ceased to fulfil its purpose) and its possessions were assigned to the President and Fellows of the Hall.
Two years later a commission was appointed by the Pope, which confirmed the suppression of the hospital and its incorporation in the college which Waynflete had been licensed to found,
“whereby he proposed to change earthly things to heavenly, and things transitory to things eternal, by providing in place of the Hospital a College of a President, secular scholars and other ministers for the service of God and the study of theology and philosophy; of whom some are to teach these sciences without fee at the cost of the College.”
Of the buildings which were once part of the old hospital very little remains. In the line of the present college, facing the street, a blocked-up doorway to the west of the tower marks one of the entrances to the hospital. And Wood was probably correct in saying that the college kitchen was also part of the original fabric. There is a little statue of a saint over a doorway inside the kitchen which appears to bear out this statement.
The various religious Orders were, then, well represented at Oxford. Their influence on the University was considerable; their relations with it not always amicable. At first, doubtless, they did much to stimulate mental activity, whilst the friendship which Grossetete, who as Bishop of Lincoln exercised a sort of paternal authority over the University, manifested towards his “faithful counsellor,” Adam Marsh, and the Franciscans in general, helped to reconcile their claims with the interests of the University. But the University was always inclined to be jealous of them; to regard them bitterly, and not without reason, as grasping bodies, who were never tired of seeking for peculiar favours and privileges and always ready to appeal to the Pope on the least provocation. Before long, indeed, it became evident that their object was to gain control of the University altogether. And this endeavour was met by a very strenuous and bitter campaign against them. For, as at Paris, the friars soon outlived their welcome, and as at Paris, it was deemed advisable to set a limit to the number of friar doctors and to secure the control of the University to the regular graduates.[18]
The friars who were sent up to Oxford had usually completed their eight years’ study of Arts in the Friars’ schools, and were probably chosen for the promise they had shown in the course of their earlier studies. Their academic studies were confined to the Faculty of Theology, in its wide mediæval sense, and of Canon Law, the hand-maid of theology. But though the regulars were for the most part subject to the same regulations as the secular students in these faculties, yet the Orders were bound before long to find themselves in antagonism with the customs of the University. The rules of the Preaching Friars forbade them to take a degree in Arts; the University required that the student of theology should have graduated in Arts. The issue was definitely raised in 1253, and became the occasion of a statute, providing that for the future no one should incept in Theology unless he had previously ruled in Arts in some University and read one book of the Canon, or of the Sentences, and publicly preached in the University. This statute was challenged some fifty years later by the Dominicans, and gave rise to a bitter controversy which involved the Mendicant Orders in much odium. The Dominicans appealed first to the King and then to the Pope, but the award of the arbitrators appointed upheld the statute. The right of granting dispensations, however, or graces to incept in Theology, to those who had not ruled in Arts, was reserved to the Chancellor and Masters. A clause which prohibited the extortion of such “graces” by means of the letters of influential persons was inserted, but was not altogether effective. Certain friars who had used letters of this kind are named in a proclamation of the year 1358. “These are the names of the wax-doctors who seek to extort graces from the University by means of letters of lords sealed with wax, or because they run from hard study as wax runs from the face of fire. Be it known that such wax-doctors are always of the Mendicant Orders, the cause whereof we have found; for by apples and drink, as the people fables, they draw boys to their religion, and do not instruct them after their profession, as their age demands, but let them wander about begging, and waste the time when they could learn in currying favour with lords and ladies.”