The “commons,” or weekly allowance of a Fellow, was to be a shilling in times of plenty, which might rise in times of scarcity to 16d., or when the bushel of corn should be at 2s., to 18d. But though the College allowances were equal, the money was expended by the officers for the Fellows, and not by the Fellows themselves; and it was expressly provided that the quality of the victuals supplied should vary with “degree, merit and labour.” The Sub-Warden and Doctors of superior Faculties sat at the High Table, to which also might be admitted Bachelors of Theology in defect of sufficient Doctors; their plates or courses (fercula) might not exceed four. But when the Warden dined in Hall (which he was only privileged to do on certain great festivals), he was to sit in the middle of the table and to be “served alone,” i. e. to have luxuries provided for him in which his neighbours were not to participate. At the side-tables sat the Graduate-Fellows and chaplains; in the middle of the Hall, the probationers and other juniors. During meals the Bible was read, and silence required. As to the hours of meals it may be observed (though the statutes are silent on this head) that the usual hour for dinner was 10 a.m., and supper was at 5 p.m. There is no trace of breakfast in any mediæval College till near the beginning of the sixteenth century, when it became usual for men to go to the buttery for a hunk of bread and a pot of beer, which were either consumed at the buttery or taken away—the first meal taken in rooms, and the origin of that tradition of breakfast-parties which is still characteristic of University life. But when it is remembered that the day began at five or six, it were a pious opinion that some kind of “hasty snack” at an early hour (such as the jentaculum of a later day) was winked at in the case of weaker brethren.
Besides the commons every Fellow received an annual “livery,” or suit of clothes, suitable to his University rank, but also of uniform cut and colour; and the rooms were no doubt rudely furnished at the expense of the College.
A Fellow received no other allowance, unless he was of Founder’s-kin and poor, or a priest, or an officer, or a tutor, the latter receiving 5s. a year for each pupil. A Fellow in need of such assistance might also have the heavy expenses of graduation, especially of banqueting the Regents, defrayed by the College.
In the lower rooms, each of which had four windows and four studies (studiorum loca), four scholars were quartered; in the upper rooms, three. The chaplains and clerks slept in rooms under the Hall, which are now appropriated to the College stores. A senior was placed in each room who was responsible for the diligence and good conduct of the juniors, and was bound to report irregularities to the Warden, Sub-Warden, or Dean, “so that such manner of Fellows and scholars suffering defect in their morals, negligent, or slothful in their studies, may receive competent castigation, correction, and punition.” Whether the last terrors of scholastic law are contemplated under the head of “castigation” is not quite clear; but Fellows of all ranks were liable to “subtraction of commons”; and were in that case, perhaps, not able to live upon their neighbours in the convenient manner practised by modern New College men “crossed at the buttery.”
Only a Doctor might have a separate servant; but all were required to have separate beds, a luxury not altogether a matter of course in the Middle Ages. At Magdalen, for instance, the younger Demies slept two in a bed.
All kinds of service were to be performed by males; though a washerwoman might be tolerated (“in defect of a male washer”), provided she were of such “age and condition” as to be above “sinister suspicions.” One of the servants was to be specially entrusted with the task of carrying the scholars’ books to the public schools.
The statutes of New College are extraordinarily minute and detailed in their disciplinary regulations, being more than three times as long as those of Merton. In their ample prohibitory code we may probably see a fair picture of undergraduate life in the Middle Ages, as it was outside the Colleges. It was the Colleges which gradually broke down the ancient liberty of the boy-undergraduate; and at last, by the sixteenth century, succeeded in making him a mere school-boy sub virga et ferula.
One piece of rough mediæval horse-play which incurs the founder’s especial wrath is that “most vile and horrid sport of shaving beards, which is wont to take place on the night preceding the inception of Masters of Arts.” Among the more ordinary pastimes forbidden by the founder are the haunting of taverns and “spectacles,” the keeping of dogs, hawks, or ferrets; the games of chess, hazard, or ball; and other “noxious, inordinate, or illicit” games, “especially those played for money”; shooting with “arrows, stones, earth, or other missiles” to the danger of windows and buildings; the “effusion of wine, beer, or other liquor” (some unpleasant details are added under this head) upon the floor of upper chambers; “dancing or wrestling or other incautious or inordinate games” in the hall or “perchance in the chapel itself,” the reason alleged for this last prohibition being that danger might be done to the sculptured “image of the Holy and Undivided Trinity,” and other ornaments on the wall between the chapel and the hall. After this comprehensive list of unlawful amusements, the reader may be inclined to ask, “What recreations did the good bishop allow his scholars?” Only one seems contemplated by the statutes: the founder’s experience of human nature told him that “after bodily refection by the taking of meat and drink, men are made more inclined to scurrilities, base talk, and (what is worse) detraction and strife”; he accordingly provides that on ordinary days after the loving cup has gone round, there is to be no lingering in hall after dinner or supper (except for the usual “potation” at curfew), but on festivals and other winter-nights, “on which, in honour of God and his Mother, or some other saint,” there is a fire in the hall, the Fellows are allowed to indulge in singing or reading “poems, chronicles of the realm, and wonders of the world.”
Such were the modest amusements of the first Wykehamists. How was the bulk of their time passed or meant to be passed? It must be remembered that Colleges were, in the first instance, not intended for teaching-institutions at all; their members resorted for lectures to the public schools. Wykeham is the first Oxford founder who contemplates any instruction being given to his scholars in College.[151] By his provisions on this head he became the founder of the Oxford tutorial system. Both at Paris and in Oxford, College teaching was destined, in process of time, practically to destroy University teaching in the Faculty of Arts. But the process took place in totally different ways. The form which College-teaching has assumed in Oxford was inaugurated by Wykeham. He, or his academical advisers, saw the unsuitableness of formal lectures in the public schools as a means of teaching mere boys. Hence he provides that for the first three years of residence, the scholar was to be placed under the instruction of a tutor (“Informator”), selected from the senior Fellows. By about 1408 the system had so far spread, that the lectures of the public schools were attended mainly by Bachelors.
Let us briefly trace the career of a young Wykehamist newly arrived from Winchester.