A history of the University of Oxford

by George C. Brodrick

The golden age of mediæval Oxford had culminated in the fourteenth century, and the fifteenth century ushered in a period of intellectual stagnation, which lasted for at least sixty years. Many causes, both external and internal, combined to produce this result. The nation itself, exhausted by the vain effort to conquer France, and roused from its long dream of Imperial ambition, was hopeless and disheartened until it was plunged into the most sanguinary of English Civil Wars. The ecclesiastical independence of the English Church, which had defied the most powerful of mediæval Popes, and had been fortified by the recent Statutes of Provisors and Præmunire, was seriously threatened by the growth of Ultramontane influences, while its revenues were assailed by democratic agitation. The revolutionary petition of the Commons, addressed to Henry IV., for the wholesale appropriation of Church property to secular and charitable uses, boded no good to Universities, which ranked as ecclesiastical bodies, and were taxed with the clergy, though anti-monastic in their corporate spirit and in the organisation of their colleges. Moreover, this petition had been speedily followed by the actual confiscation of property belonging to alien priories. Soon afterwards, the French Wars and Wars of the Roses attracted into camps many a student who might otherwise have frequented the University lecture rooms; the law no longer drew all its recruits from University clerks; and even the incumbents of English livings were sometimes chosen from the ranks of the regular clergy without University training. It is possible that the rise and spread of the Wycliffite movement at Oxford may have prejudiced it in the eyes of the English hierarchy, as it certainly did in those of the Popes. At all events, there is abundant evidence both of the fact that candidates for Holy Orders resorted to Oxford in diminished numbers, and of the construction which the University authorities put on that fact. In 1417, and again in 1438, the Archbishop and Bishops in Convocation issued an appeal to patrons of benefices, calling upon them to give a preference to University graduates. The memorial addressed to Convocation on behalf of the University in 1438 complains that her halls were deserted, and that not one thousand remained out of the many thousands reported to have attended the schools of Oxford in the last age—when, as we learn from a Royal charter (of 1355), ‘a multitude of nobles, gentry, strangers, and others continually flocked thither.’ It is stated that in 1450 only twenty out of two hundred schools which had once been filled continued to be used for purposes of education. A few years later we find a license granted to poor scholars, authorising them to beg for alms—a practice of which Sir Thomas More speaks as if it were not obsolete in his own time. It was to meet the necessities of these destitute students that Archbishop Chichele established a new University Chest; and it was for the relief of the pauperes et indigentes, no less than for the support of the secular clergy, whose decline at Oxford is amply attested by his charter, that he afterwards founded the great college of All Souls.

University delegates at the Councils of Constance and Basle

Notwithstanding this decline, and the undoubted decay of learning, we must not exaggerate either the actual degeneracy of the University or its loss of reputation in Europe. No doubt, the French Wars tended to weaken its ancient alliance with the great University of Paris, and the growth of a native English literature under the inspiration of Chaucer and Wyclif may well have contributed to its isolation, until it came under the spell of the Italian Renaissance. But it is an error to assert that Oxford was ‘nowhere to be found in the great Church Councils of the fifteenth century.’[9] On the contrary, it was very ably represented, both at Constance in 1414 and at Basle in 1431. At the former of these Councils, Henry de Abendon, afterwards Warden of Merton, defended with signal effect the claim of England to precedence over Spain, and of Oxford to precedence over Salamanca. In order to defray the expense of sending ‘orators’ to Basle, the University, in its poverty, solicited a contribution, ‘were it ever so small,’ from the Convocation of the Clergy. It found a worthy delegate, however, in John Kemp, also of Merton, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, who, at the subsequent Council of Florence, was made a Cardinal by the Pope.

Foundation of Lincoln and All Souls’ Colleges

Nor must we forget the great collegiate institutions which owe their origin to this obscure period. The first of these, Lincoln College, was founded in 1427, on a much humbler scale than New College, by Richard Flemmyng, Bishop of Lincoln, who, having been a zealous promoter, became a fanatical opponent of Wyclif’s doctrines, and distinguished himself at the Council of Siena by attacks against the Hussites. His main object was to extirpate the Wycliffite heresy, and he specially provided that any Fellow tainted with these heresies was ‘to be cast out, like a diseased sheep, from the fold of the college.’ All Souls, founded in 1438 by Archbishop Chichele, was a far grander monument of academical piety and was almost unique in its constitution. The college was specially designed to be a chantry, but it was also to be a place of study, and was to some extent modelled on New College, where Chichele himself was educated. There were to be forty scholars, being clerks, bound to study without intermission, twenty-four of whom were to cultivate Arts and philosophy or theology, and sixteen the canon or civil law. Magdalen College was founded in 1457 by William of Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, upon a plan borrowed from New College, but without the peculiar feature of organic connection with a public school, though its founder had been himself the head-master both of Eton and of Winchester. There are clear traces in the statutes of the coming Renaissance. Theology remains supreme, as at New College, but moral and natural philosophy take the place of civil and canon law. Grammar is preferred to logic, and even Latin verses are recognised. Moreover, the lecturers in divinity and the two philosophies are to instruct not only the college but the whole University.

Extension of University buildings: the Divinity School and the Bodleian Library

While the collegiate system was thus expanding, and classical scholarship was beginning to germinate under its shelter, the resources of the University were enriched by two important accessions—the edifice of the Old Schools, and the Library presented by the ‘good’ Duke Humphry of Gloucester. In the early part of the fifteenth century, thirty-two ‘schools’ were ranged along School Street, between the west end of St. Mary’s and the city wall, near the present theatre. These schools had superseded the simple chambers which the University had a prescriptive right to hire in the houses of private citizens. Many of them belonged to Oseney Abbey, and in the year 1439 some fourteen of these, being ruinous, were taken down and rebuilt by the Abbot, Thomas Hokenorton. The fabric erected by him is described as a long pile of stone masonry, wholly destitute of architectural effect, consisting of two stories, and divided into ten schools, five above and five below, which, however, possessed no monopoly of University lectures or exercises, since these continued to be carried on in other public schools, if not in private lecture rooms, despite prohibitory statutes. One reason why School Street was selected as the privileged quarter for lecturing was doubtless that it immediately adjoined St. Mary’s Church, which contained the old Congregation-house, in which the University held all its solemn meetings, and which, in the Middle Ages, had served at once as the court-house, the legislative chamber, the examination-room, the public treasury, the hall of assembly, and the place of worship, for the whole University. In this church theological lectures had now been given for a century, since the Dominicans and Franciscans had been compelled to abandon their practice of teaching divinity to University students within their own walls, and the University could afford to despise the rivalry of other religious Orders lodged in the suburbs, at a distance from School Street. In 1426 or 1427 a vacant plot was purchased by the University from Balliol College, and in 1480 the present Divinity School was finally opened for the greatest of the faculties, by the aid of liberal contributions from the Benedictine monks, Archbishop Chichele, several cathedral bodies, Duke Humphry, and the executors of Cardinal Beaufort, Archbishop Kemp, and Edmund Duke of Somerset of 1447. In the meantime, Duke Humphry, acceding to a suggestion from the University, had initiated the erection of a Public Library over the Divinity School. The building was retarded by the withdrawal of the masons, under Royal mandate, for works at Windsor and Eton, nor was it completed till 1480, by the aid of Thomas Kemp, Bishop of London, who contributed 1,000 marks, and has been regarded as a second founder. The original collection of books presented by Duke Humphry to the University in 1439 consisted of 129 volumes only, but it was supplemented by a second gift in 1443. Still, the whole University Library, comprising the previous legacies of Angerville and Cobham, is said to have contained no more than 500 volumes when it was dispersed at the Reformation. Duke Humphry is also said to have instituted a professorial Chair for Arts and Philosophy, which, however, never came into operation, perhaps because the means were not forthcoming to endow it adequately. For it is certain that at this period the resources of the University were miserably small, and chiefly wasted in the enormous expense of suits at the Court of Rome, whose appellate jurisdiction it had always respected, and whose immediate intervention it often invoked.[10]

Final organisation of mediæval lectures and examinations

The mediæval system of academical studies and examinations may be considered to have reached its maturity in the middle of the fifteenth century. At this period the University enjoyed comparative repose, and its constitution was fully organised, though its vigour, as we have seen, was grievously impaired. Nine colleges had already been founded, and, by the statute passed in 1432 for the suppression of ‘chamber-dekyns,’ all members of the University were required to be inmates of some college or hall, except those who should be specially licensed by the Chancellor to live in lay houses. By another statute of the same year, the discipline of the University had been further secured by a peremptory rule that all principals of halls should be graduates, or qualified by learning and character to rule their respective households.[11] The proctorial authority was now firmly established under the ordinance of 1343. Courses of public lectures were constantly delivered on all the subjects recognised by the University in the official schools, and private instruction was supplied to their own inmates by the various colleges and halls.

University curriculum