Oxford and Its Story

by Cecil Headlam

The warden of this new foundation was to be a person of no small importance. Wykeham intended him to live in a separate house, with a separate establishment and an income (£40) far more splendid than the pittance assigned to the Master of Balliol or even the Warden of Merton. The buildings of Merton had been kept separate; only by degrees, and as if by accident, had they assumed the familiar and charming form of a quadrangle. The genius of Wykeham adopted and adapted the fortuitous plan of Merton. At New College we have for the first time a group of collegiate buildings, tower-gateway (the tower assuredly of one “wise of building castles!”) chapel, hall, library, treasury, warden’s lodgings, chambers, cloister-cemetery, kitchen and domestics offices, designed and comprised in one self-sufficing quadrangle (1380-1400). Just as the statutes of New College are the rule of Merton enormously elaborated, so the plan of the buildings is that of Merton modified and systematised. The type of New College served as a model for all subsequent foundations. The most noticeable features in this arrangement are that the hall and chapel are under one roof, and that the chapel consists of a choir, suitable to the needs of a small congregation, and of a nave of two bays, stopping short at the transepts, and forming an ante-chapel which might serve both as a vestibule and as a room for lectures and disputations. The chapel, which contains much very beautiful glass and the lovely if inappropriate window-pictures of Sir Joshua Reynolds, must have been in Wykeham’s day, when it was adorned with a magnificent reredos and “works of many colours,” a thing of even greater beauty than it now is. The chapels of Magdalen, All Souls’ and Wadham were directly imitated from it. But, with the hall, it suffered much at the hands of Wyatt and Sir Gilbert Scott. The latter was also responsible for the atrocious New Buildings. The proportions of the front quadrangle were spoilt by the addition of a third story and the insertion of square windows in the seventeenth century.

The importance of the chapel architecturally, dominating the quadrangle as it does and absorbing the admiration of the visitor or the dweller in those courts, is indicative of the ecclesiastical aspect of the new foundation, which the great opponent of Wycliffe intended to revivify the Church by training secular priests of ability. This ecclesiastical aspect is still more prominent in the case of All Souls’, which, like Magdalen, may fitly be described as a daughter of New College, so much do they both owe, as regards their rule and their architectural design, to the great foundation of Wykeham. The deterioration and ignorance of the parochial clergy were amongst the most serious symptoms of the decadence of the fifteenth century. Himself a Wykehamist and a successful ecclesiastical lawyer, the great Archbishop Chichele therefore followed Wykeham’s example and founded a college which might help to educate and to increase the secular clergy. Out of the revenues of the suppressed alien priories he endowed a society consisting of a warden and forty fellows, of doctors and masters who were to study Philosophy, Theology and Law. His college was not, therefore, and happily is not (though now it takes its full share of educational work), a mere body of teachers, but of graduate students. The prominence given to the study of Law and Divinity resulted in a close connection with the public services which has always been maintained. But “All Souls’” was a chantry as well as a college. As head of the English Church and a responsible administrator of the Crown, Chichele had devoted all his powers to the prosecution of that war with France, for which Shakespeare, following Hall, has represented him as being responsible. The college is said to have been the Archbishop’s expiation for the blood so shed. Whatever his motive, his object is stated clearly enough. It was to found a

“College of poor and indigent clerks bounden with all devotion to pray for the Souls of the glorious memory of Henry V., lately King of England and France, the Duke of Clarence and the other lords and lieges of the realm of England, whom the havoc of that warfare between the two realms hath drenched with the bowl of bitter death, and also for the souls of all the faithful departed.”

Chichele had already undertaken the foundation of S. Bernard’s College. He now (September 1437) purchased Bedford Hall, or Charleton’s Inn, at the corner of Cat Street,[30] directly opposite the eastern end of S. Mary’s Church. On this site, in the following February, was laid the foundation stone of the college afterwards incorporated under the title of “The Warden and All Soulen College,” or “The Warden and College of All Faithful Souls deceased at Oxford.” As Adam de Brome had persuaded Edward II. to be the foster-founder of Oriel, so Chichele asked Henry VI. to be the nominal founder of his college. The royal patronage proved advantageous in neither case.

The front quadrangle of All Souls’ remains very much as the founder left it; the hall and the noble Codrington Library in the Italian style, the cloister of the great quadrangle and the odd twin towers belong to the first half of the eighteenth century. The latter are curious specimens of that mixture of the Gothic and Renaissance styles (Nicholas Hawksmoor), of which the best that can be said is that “the architect has blundered into a picturesque scenery not devoid of grandeur” (Walpole).

The political and social troubles of the fifteenth century brought about a period of darkness and stagnation in the University. The spirit of independence and reform had been crushed by the ecclesiastics. Oxford had learnt her lesson. She took little part in politics, but played the time-server, and was always loyal—to one party or the other. She neglected her duties; she neither taught nor thought, but devoted all her energies and resources to adorning herself with beautiful colleges and buildings. And for us the result of this meretricious policy is the possession of those glorious buildings which mark the interval between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. For the University now built herself schools that were worthy of her dower of knowledge.

There was a vacant spot at the end of Schools Street belonging to Balliol College, lying between the town wall on the north and Exeter College on the west. On this site it was determined to erect a School of Divinity (1424). Donations flowed in from the bishops and monasteries.

But in spite of all economy funds ran short. The building had to be discontinued for a while (1444). The gift of 500 marks from the executors of Cardinal Beaufort, a former Chancellor, enabled the graduates to proceed with their work. They made strenuous efforts to raise money. They put a tax on all non-resident masters and bachelors; they offered “graces” for sale; they applied to the Pope and bishops for saleable indulgences. In return for a contribution of one hundred pounds from the old religious orders, they agreed to modify the ancient statutes concerning the admission of monks to academical degrees. Some of these methods of raising the necessary monies are doubtless open to criticism, but we cannot cavil when we look upon the noble building which the graduates were thus enabled to raise. The Divinity School, to which, Casaubon declared, nothing in Europe was comparable, was, with its “vaulting of peculiar skill,” used, though not completed, in 1466.

It remained to construct an upper story where the books belonging to the University might be kept and used. For generous gifts of books (1439-1446) by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, uncle of Henry VI., had greatly increased the University Library. The fashion of large and gorgeous libraries was borrowed by the English from the French princes. The duke had taken his opportunity during his campaigns in France. He seized the valuable collection of books at the Louvre, and many of them had now found their way to Oxford. They were stored at first in the Cobham Library, but more room was needed. Accordingly, in 1444, the University addressed a letter to the duke in which they informed him of their intention to erect a new building suitable to contain his magnificent gift, and on a site far removed from the hum of men. Of this building, with that gratitude which is in part at least a lively sense of favours to come, they asked permission of the very learned and accomplished duke to inscribe his name as founder. The Duke Humphrey Library forms now the central portion of the great Reading Room of the Bodleian Library. It still answers, by virtue of its position and the arrangement of its cubicles, to the description and intention of the promotors—to build a room where scholars might study far removed a strepitu sæculari, from the noise of the world.