[172] The first of these sermons was assigned to the Rector by statute, the second by custom.
[173] The earliest College duty assigned to John Wesley, after his election to a Fellowship at Lincoln, was to preach the St. Michael’s sermon on Michaelmas Day 1726.
[174] B.A. Fellows might not have theological works, but only works in philosophy and logic.
[175] Rectors, suffering under the despotism of too efficient Subrectors, have accused this officer of mis-spelling his alternative title and regarding himself as Co-rector.
[176] The barber’s duties were at first to supply the clean shave, the tonsure, and the close crop which became “clerks.” In later ages more extravagant fashions in hair added to his labour. At the close of the eighteenth century he had to dress for dinner the heads of all the College in the pomp of powder and the vanity of queue. Beginning about noon with the junior Commoner, he concluded with the senior Fellow on the stroke of three, when the bell rang for dinner. The higher, therefore, you were in College standing, the longer was the time available for your morning walk, and the ampler the gossip of the day with which you were entertained.
[177] If any one wishes a modern parallel, he may note how Oxford became filled with Jacobites ejected from their country cures within two or three years of the imposition of the Oath of Allegiance to William and Mary.
[178] Their Catholic sympathies are evident from the Colleges to which they made their benefactions. Neither in Lincoln College under John Bridgwater, nor in Caius College under John Caius, was a young Romanist in any danger of being converted to Protestantism.
[179] Several entries show that their position was inferior to that of a Commoner, and involved menial service in College. In 1661 we have an entry—“Whereas Henry Rose, a scholar, did lately officiate as porter, and had no allowance for his pains,” he is to be excused the College fee for taking B.A. In Feb. 1661-2 these Traps’ exhibitioners were exempted from some College charges on consideration of their waiting at the Fellows’ table.
[180] As “Commissary,” i. e. Vice-chancellor, of the University from 1527 to 1532, Cottisford had been set to several painful pieces of duty, in the discovery and arrest of Lutheran members of the University. Thus in 1527 Thomas Garret was arrested by the Proctors and imprisoned in Cottisford’s rooms: but his friends stole into College when Cottisford, with the rest of the College, was in chapel at Evening Prayers, and enabled him to effect his escape. This “Lollard’s” ghost, oddly enough, was at one time supposed to haunt the gateway-tower.
[181] On only two other occasions is this silence broken; the next is in 1633, when the register notes that the King was at Woodstock, and that the Rector had forbidden undergraduates to go there; the latest is a notice of the grief of the nation on the death of the Princess Charlotte, and of the services in the College chapel on the day of her funeral.