William of Wykeham was an ecclesiastic; but in the Middle Ages that meant something very different from what it means now. “The Church” was a synonym for “the professions.” In Northern Europe the Church supplied almost the only opportunity of a civil career to the cadet of a noble house, the sole opportunity of rising to the ambitious plebeian. The servants of the Crown, the diplomatists, the secretaries, advisers, or “clerks” of great nobles, the host of ecclesiastical judges and lawyers, many even of the secular lawyers, the physicians, the architects, sometimes even the astrologers, were ecclesiastics. William of Wykeham rose to eminence as a civil servant of the Crown, and was rewarded in the usual way by ecclesiastical preferment, culminating in a bishopric. Such men had usually taken a degree in Canon or Civil Law at the Universities. William of Wykeham is not known to have been a University man; he rose to eminence in the King’s Office of Works, and became surveyor at Windsor Castle, which was half rebuilt under his direction. He was the greatest architect of his day. Afterwards he held a series of political appointments—eventually the Chancellorship. As a politician, he was the champion of the old order of things rudely shaken by the Wycliffite heresy and the political movements with which it was associated; the leader of the Church, or Conservative, party; a moderate and far-sighted man withal, but still a sturdy opponent of reform; a pious man in the conventional fourteenth-century way, but still a devoted supporter of all the abuses against which Wyclif had declaimed, as became one who was himself the greatest pluralist of his day.
New College was intended to be another stronghold of the old system in Church and State. It was to increase the supply of clergy, which the statutes declare to have been thinned by “pestilences, wars, and the other miseries of the world.” Some have seen in these words a special allusion to the Black Death of 1348; but it was more probably a mere flourish of mediæval rhetoric, or possibly a fashion which had survived from 1348. The general idea of the College was not fundamentally different from that of its predecessors. William of Wykeham, once raised to the splendid See of Winchester, was anxious to do something for the Church; and the general opinion of the day was that monks were out of date, that the Church herself was rich enough, and that to send capable men to the Universities was the best way to fight heresy, to strengthen the Church system, and to save the donor’s soul.
Wykeham’s ultimate purpose in founding his College was conventional enough; in the manner of carrying it out there was much that was original. It was, however, rather the greater scale of the whole design than any one original feature that gives an historical appropriateness to the name “New” which has accidentally cleaved to “St. Marie Colledge of Wynchester” in Oxford. In the number of the scholars, in the liberality of their allowances, in the architectural splendour of the buildings of his College, Wykeham eclipsed all previous Oxford College-founders. In many respects the founder of Queen’s had, indeed, aimed as high as Wykeham; but he had begun to build and was not able to finish; his Provost and apostolic twelve never grew to the seventy which he contemplated. What Eglesfield designed, Wykeham accomplished.
The most original feature of Wykeham’s design was the connection of his College at Oxford with a grammar-school at a distance. The fundamental vice of mediæval education was the prevalent neglect of grammatical discipline and the absurdly early age at which boys were plunged into the subtleties of Logic and the mysteries of the Latin Aristotle, the very language of which, unclassical as it was, they could hardly understand. Wykeham had no thought of a Renaissance, or of any fundamental change in the educational system of the day; he was only anxious to remedy a defect which all practical men acknowledged. Boys were still to be taught Latin chiefly that they might read Aristotle, and Peter the Lombard or the Corpus Juris; but they were to learn to walk before they were encouraged to run.
Hard by his own cathedral, the Bishop erected a College for a Warden, Sub-Warden, ten Fellows, a Head Master, Usher, and seventy scholars, with a proper staff of chaplains and choristers. From this College exclusively were to be selected the seventy scholars of St. Marie Colledge of Wynchester in Oxford; and no one could be elected before fifteen or after nineteen, except in the case of “Founder’s-kin” scholars, who were eligible up to thirty. This implies that the usual age of Wykehamists upon entering the University would be much above the average, since it was quite common for boys to begin their course in Arts at fourteen or earlier. By the erection of his College at Winchester, Wykeham became the founder of the English public-school system.
The Oxford College consisted of a Warden and seventy “poor clerical scholars,” together with ten “stipendiary priests” or chaplains, three stipendiary clerks, and sixteen boy-choristers for the service of the chapel. It entered on a definite existence not later than 1375, the scholars being temporarily lodged in Hart Hall (now Hertford College) and other adjoining houses while the buildings were being completed. The foundation charters were granted in 1379; the foundation-stone laid at 8 a.m. on March 5th, 1379-80; on April 14th, 1387, at 9 a.m. the society, “with cross erect, and singing a solemn litany,” marched processionally into the splendid habitation which their Founder had been preparing for them in an unoccupied corner within the walls of the town.
New College is the first, and still almost the only, College whose extant buildings substantially represent a complete and harmonious design as it presented itself to the founder’s eye. The quadrangle of New College may indeed have been the first completed quadrangle in Oxford. In that case we might attribute to the architect Bishop the origination of the type to which later English Colleges have so tenaciously adhered. At any rate completeness is the characteristic feature of Wykeham’s buildings; every want of his scholars was provided for from their academical birth, if need be to the grave.
Previous Colleges had for the most part occupied the choir of some existing parish church for the solemn services of Sunday and Holy-day; at most they had a little “oratory” in which a priest or two said mass. With Wykeham the chapel formed an integral part of the original design. In spite of the ravages of Puritan iconoclasm, the chapel has always retained the perfect proportion which it received from its founder’s hands. It is now regaining, under the touch of modern restoration, so much of its ancient beauty as the cold taste of the present day will tolerate; but we shall never see again the blaze of colour on windows and walls, on groined roof and on sculptured image which it presented to its founder’s eye. Wykeham’s design provided not merely for things needful, but for ornament. Not only was the chapel a choir of cathedral magnitude, with transepts, though without a nave—henceforth the typical form of the College chapel; there was outside the wall (nowhere else could it have stood so conveniently), the great Bell-tower. There was an ample hall or refectory, the oldest now remaining in Oxford. There were cloisters, round which every Sunday the whole College, in copes and surplices, were to go in procession, “according to the use of Sarum,” and within which members of the College might be buried, by special papal bull, without leave of parish-priest or bishop. There was a tower specially provided over the hall staircase with massive doors of many locks to serve as a muniment-room and treasury. There was a library, stored with books by the founder; and an audit-room on the north side of the east gate. Just outside the main entrance were the brewery and the bake-house. A spacious garden supplied the College with vegetables, and perhaps the scholars with room for such exercise as was permitted by the high standard of “clerical” behaviour demanded of Wykeham’s tonsured undergraduates. And all remains now substantially as the founder designed it, marred only by the addition (in 1675) of a third story to the front quadrangle, and by the modernization of the windows.
The religious aim of College-founders is often exaggerated, or at least misapprehended. It is true that all Oxford Colleges, like the University itself, were intended for ecclesiastics. But in the earlier Colleges not even the Head is required to be in Holy, or even in minor, Orders; nor are students of any rank required to go to church or chapel except on Sundays and holy-days. As time went on, the ecclesiastical character of Colleges is more and more emphasized; but even then, more is thought of providing for the repose of the founder’s soul than of the moral or religious training of his scholars, or the spiritual wants of those to whom they were to minister. Colleges, like monasteries, were largely endowed out of the “impropriated” tithes properly belonging to the parochial churches. But if College Fellows are required to become priests at a certain stage of their career, it is that they may say masses for the founder. If the chapels are provided with a staff of chaplains, it is with the same object. In William of Wykeham’s College the ecclesiastical character is at its maximum: Wykeham aimed in fact at erecting a great Collegiate Church and an Academical College in one. The ecclesiastical duties—the masses and canonical hours—were chiefly performed by the hired chaplains. But even the studious part of the community was required to make some return for the founder’s liberality by saying certain prayers for him and his royal “benefactors” immediately after rising and before going to bed. They are further required to go to mass daily—it is the first Oxford College where daily chapel is required—and while there (or at some other time) every scholar is to say sixty Paters and fifty Aves in honour of the Virgin.
Wykeham was indeed the first College-founder, at Oxford at all events, who conceived the idea of making his College not a mere eleemosynary institution, but a great ecclesiastical corporation, which should vie both in the splendour of its architecture and the dignity of its corporate life with the Cathedral chapters and the monastic houses. The earlier Heads had been raised above the scholars or Fellows by the luxury of a single private room: they dined in the common hall with the rest. The Warden of New College was to live, like an abbot, in a house of his own, within the College walls, but with a separate hall, kitchen, and establishment. His salary of £40 was princely by comparison with the 40s., with commons, assigned to the Master of Balliol, or even the forty marks allotted to the Warden of Merton. Instead of the jealous provisions against burdening the College with the entertainment of guests which we meet with in the Paris College-statutes, ample provision is made for the hospitable reception of important strangers by the Warden in his own Hall, or (in his absence) by the Sub-Warden and Fellows in the Great Hall, as they would have been entertained in a Benedictine abbey by the abbot or the prior (the Sub-Warden being evidently intended to hold a position analogous to the latter). The Master of Peterhouse in Cambridge was allowed to have a single horse, on the ground that it would be “indecent for him to go afoot, nor could he, without scandal to the College, hire a hack” (conducere hakenys): the Warden of New College is to have six horses at his disposal, for himself and the “discreet, apt, and circumspect Fellow,” with four servants, who attended upon the annual “progress” over the College estates—more than some provincial canons allowed to a cathedral dean. In chapel the Warden was placed on a level with cathedral canons by the permission to wear an amice de grisio (vair or ermine).