Merton became Chancellor once more on the death of Henry. He was practically Regent of the Kingdom till the return of Edward from the Crusades. As soon as he resigned the seals of office in 1274, he set himself to revise the statutes of his college at Oxford, before taking up his duties as Bishop of Rochester.
The wardens, bailiffs and ministers of the altar were now transferred from Malden to Oxford, which was designated as the exclusive and permanent home of the scholars. The statutes now given remained in force till 1856, and are, to quote the verdict of the late warden,
“a marvellous repertory of minute and elaborate provisions governing every detail of college life. The number and allowances of the scholars; their studies, diet, costume, and discipline; the qualifications, election and functions of the warden; the distribution of powers among various college officers; the management of the college estates and the conduct of the college business are here regulated with remarkable sagacity. The policy which dictates and underlies them is easy to discern. Fully appreciating the intellectual movement of his age, and unwilling to see the paramount control of it in the hands of the religious Orders—the zealous apostles of papal supremacy—Walter de Merton resolved to establish within the precincts of the University a great seminary of secular clergy, which should educate a succession of men capable of doing good service in Church and State.
“The employment of his scholars was to be study—not the claustralis religio of the older religious Orders, nor the more practical and more popular self-devotion of the Dominicans and Franciscans. He forbade them ever to take vows; he enjoined them to maintain their corporate independence against foreign encroachments; he ordained that all should apply themselves to studying the liberal arts and philosophy before entering on a course of theology; and he provided special chaplains to relieve them of ritual and ceremonial duties. He contemplated and even encouraged their going forth into the great world. No ascetic obligations were laid on them, but residence and continual study were strictly prescribed, and if any scholar retired from the college with the intention of giving up study, or even ceased to study diligently, his salary was no longer to be paid. If the scale of these salaries and statutable allowances was humble, it was chiefly because the founder intended the number of scholars to be constantly increased as the revenues of the house might be enlarged.”
In this foundation Walter De Merton was the first to express the only true idea of a college. Once expressed, it was followed by every succeeding founder. The collegiate system revolutionised University life in England. Merton was never tired of insisting upon the one great claim which his community should have to the loyalty, affection and service of its members.
It was this idea which has produced all that is good in the system. To individual study in the University schools was added common life; to private aims the idea of a common good. “The individual is called to other activities besides those of his own sole gain. Diversities of thought and training, of taste, ability, strength and character, brought into daily contact, bound fast together by ties of common interest, give birth to sympathy, broaden thought, and force enquiry, that haply in the issue may be formed that reasoned conviction and knowledge, that power of independent thought, to produce which is the great primary aim of our English University education” (Henderson).
The founder, who had long been busy acquiring property in Oxford, had impropriated the Church of S. John the Baptist for the benefit of the college, and several houses in its immediate neighbourhood were made over to the scholars. The site thus acquired (1265-8) became their permanent home and was known henceforth as Merton Hall.
Of the buildings which were now erected and on which the eyes of the founder may have rested in pride and hope, little now remains. The antique stone carving over the college gate, the great north door of the vestibule of the Hall, with its fantastic tracery of iron, perhaps the Treasury and Outer Sacristy are relics of the earliest past. But Chapel, Hall, Library and Quadrangle are later than the Founder.
As if to emphasise the ecclesiastical character of the English college, he had begun at once to rebuild the parish church as a collegiate church. The high altar was dedicated in the year of his death, 1277; the rest of the chapel is of later dates.
The choir belongs to the end of the thirteenth century (1297), (Pure Decorated); the transepts (Early Decorated, with later Perpendicular windows and doors) were finished in 1424, but begun perhaps as early as the choir; and the massive tower, with its soaring pinnacles, a fine specimen of Perpendicular work, was completed in 1451.