The founder of C.C.C., Richard Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, was a prelate, statesman, architect, soldier, herald and diplomatist, who, in the very encyclopædic nature of his talents, was a typical product of the Renaissance. He had been Bishop of Exeter, of Bath and Wells and of Durham before he was translated to Winchester; he had been Keeper of the Privy Seal and Secretary of State, and had played an important part in the history of his country; he had been Chancellor of Cambridge and Master of Pembroke College there; but it was chiefly upon Oxford that he lavished the wealth he had acquired.
Having bought some land between Merton and S. Frideswide’s, he proposed at first to establish a college, after the manner of Durham College, directly in connection with the Monastery of S. Swithun at Winchester. But before the building was completed, he determined to make it a college for secular students. Holinshed gives us the words in which Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, who was intimately associated with him in the work—his arms are to be seen in various places in the existing buildings—persuaded him to this course.
“What, my Lord, shall we build houses and provide livelihood for a company of bussing monks, whose end and fall we ourselves may live to see? No, no. It is more meet a great deal that we should have care to provide for the increase of learning, and for such as by their learning shall do good in the Church and Commonwealth.”
The broad-minded founder accepted this view. He drew up statutes, by means of which he hoped to train men who should help the Church to recognise, to lead and to control the New Movement. The verdict of his contemporaries with regard to his work and intentions is expressed by Erasmus, who wrote that “Just as Rhodes was once famous for the Colossus, and Caria for the tomb of Mausolus, so the new College at Oxford dedicated to the most profitable literature would be recognised throughout the civilised world as one of the chief ornaments of Britain.”
The influence of the Renaissance is writ large over Foxe’s statutes. What is remarkable in them is the provision he made for the teaching of the New Learning. As he furnished his students with a library, rich in classical MSS. and books in Greek, Latin and Hebrew, a “Bibliotheca trilinguis” which Erasmus declared would attract more students than Rome had done hitherto; so also, in addition to the twenty fellows and twenty scholars of his college, he endowed three Readers, in Greek, in Latin, and in Theology. Natives of Greece and Italy were to be specially eligible for these offices; Greek as well as Latin might be spoken in hall, and some acquaintance with the works of Roman poets, orators and historians, no less than with Logic and Philosophy, was to be required of candidates for scholarships, who must also prove their fitness by ability to compose verses and write letters in Latin.
Cicero, Sallust, Valerius Maximus, Suetonius, Pliny, Livy and Quintilian are enumerated in the statutes as the prose writers, and Vergil, Ovid, Lucan, Juvenal, Terence and Plautus as the poets to be expounded by the Professor of Humanity. The works of Lorenzo Valla, Aulus Gellius and Politian are recommended as suitable subjects of study during the three vacations. The Professor of Greek, an officer unknown in any earlier college, was required to lecture, and to lecture to the whole University, not only on Grammar, but also on the works of Isocrates, Lucian, Philostratus, Aristophanes, Theocritus, Euripides, Sophocles, Pindar, Hesiod, Demosthenes, Thucydides, Aristotle and Plutarch.