Mr Waterhouse is responsible for the present front of the College, the east side of the first quadrangle, the north side of the Garden Quadrangle and the new Hall therein (1867-1877).
Not content with fighting the University, the Oxford Friars soon began to fight each other. Rivalries sprang up between the Orders; enormous scandals of discord, as Matthew Paris phrases it. Jealousy found its natural vent in politics as in the schools. Politically, the Oxford Franciscans supported Simon de Montfort; the Dominicans sided with the King. The Mad Parliament met in the Convent of the Black Friars. In philosophy the Franciscans attacked the doctrine of the Dominican, S. Thomas Aquinas, who had made an elaborate attempt to show that natural and revealed truth were complementary the one of the other. In order to establish this thesis and to reconcile human philosophy and the Christian faith, the Angelic Doctor, for so he was commonly termed, had written an encyclopædia of philosophy and theology, in which he advanced arguments on both sides of every question and decided judicially on each in strict accordance with the tenets of the Church.
The light of this “sparkling jewel of the clergy, this very clear mirror of the University of Paris, this noble and illuminating candlestick,” was somewhat dimmed, however, when the great Franciscan hero, the “subtle doctor,” Duns Scotus, took up the argument, and clearly proved that the reasoning of this champion of orthodoxy was itself unorthodox. The world of letters was divided for generations into the rival camps of Scotists and Thomists. But the two doctors have fared very differently at the hands of posterity. Thomas was made a Saint, judged to be a “candlestick,” and awarded by Dante a place high in the realms of Paradise. Duns Scotus, on the other hand, whose learning and industry were as great and his merit probably not much inferior, survives chiefly in the English language as a “dunce.” The name of the great Oxford scholar stands to the world chiefly as a synonym for a fool and a blockhead. For when the Humanists, and afterwards the Reformers, attacked his system as a farrago of needless entities and useless distinctions, the Duns men, or Dunses, on their side railed against the new learning. The name of Dunce, therefore, already synonymous with cavilling sophist or hair-splitter, soon passed into the sense of dull, obstinate person, impervious to the new learning, and of blockhead, incapable of learning or scholarship. Such is the justice of history.
Duns Scotus had carried the day and the Church rallied to the side of the Franciscans. But such a successful attack involved the Orders in extreme bitterness. The Dominicans retorted that these Franciscans, who claimed and received such credit throughout Europe for humility and Christlike poverty, were really accumulating wealth by alms or bequests. The charge was true enough.
The pride and luxury of the Friars, their splendid buildings, their laxity in the Confessional, their artifices for securing proselytes, their continual strife with the University and their endeavours to obtain peculiar privileges therein had long undermined their popularity. They were regarded as “locusts” who had settled on the land and stripped the trees of learning and of life.
Duns Scotus held almost undisputed sway for a while. His works on logic, theology and philosophy were text-books in the University. But presently there arose a new light, a pupil of his own, to supplant him.
William of Ockham, the “singular” or “invincible” doctor, revived the doctrine of Nominalism. At once the glory and reproach of his Order, he used the weapons of Scholasticism to destroy it.