CHAPTER IV
THE OFFICERS OF THE UNIVERSITY
The Origin of the Chancellor's Authority.
The beginning of the organized authority of the University, as has been already said (p. [22]), is the mention of the Chancellor in the charter of 1214. In the earliest period this officer was the centre of the constitutional life of Oxford. Although the bishop's representative, and as such endowed with an authority external to the University, he was, perhaps from the first, elected by the Doctors and Masters there. Hence by a truly English anomaly, the representative of outside authority becomes identified with the representative of the democratic principle, and the Oxford Chancellor combined in himself the position of the elected Rector of a foreign university, and that of the Chancellor appointed by an external power. The reason for this anomaly is partly the remote position of the episcopal see; Lincoln, the bishop's seat, was more than 100 miles from the University town, which lay on the very borders of his great diocese. The combination too was surely made easy by the influence of the great scholar-saint, Bishop Grosseteste, who had himself filled the position of Chancellor (though he may not have borne the title) before he passed to the see of Lincoln, which he held for eighteen years (1235-1253) during the critical period of the growth of the academic constitution.
During the first two centuries of the University's existence, the Chancellor was a resident official; but in the fifteenth century it became customary to elect some great ecclesiastic, who was able by his influence and wealth to promote the interests of Oxford and Oxford scholars; such an one was George Neville, the brother of the King-Maker Earl of Warwick, who became Chancellor in 1453 at the age of twenty. He no doubt owed his early elevation to the magnificence with which he had entertained the whole of Oxford when he had proceeded to his M.A. from Balliol College in the preceding year.
The Vice-Chancellor.
From the fifteenth century onwards the Vice-Chancellor takes the place of the Chancellor as the centre of University life; as the Chancellor's representative, he is nominated every year by letters from him, though the appointment is in theory approved by the vote of Convocation.