Those who obtained leave to study Law would usually take a degree in Civil Law first, and then proceed to the study of Canon Law, that is to say the Decretum of Gratian and the Papal Decretals. There were always to be twenty Canonists and Civilians in the House.
Two scholars alone might take up Medicine, and two Astronomy or Astrology. Wykeham is the only College-founder who treats Astronomy as a recognized Faculty; but belief in Astrology was on the increase in fourteenth-century England, and reached its maximum amid the enlightenment of the sixteenth century.
It is time to allude to the curious “privilege” which exercised so disastrous an effect upon the New College of two generations ago, the privilege of taking degrees without examination. William of Wykeham is not responsible for this damnosa hereditas. Nothing is heard of it till the beginning of the seventeenth century; and then the University recognized it as having been enjoyed since the earliest days of the College.[155] But its origin seems to be as follows.—So far from wishing his scholars to be exempt from the ordinary tests, the Founder peremptorily forbids them to sue for “graces” or dispensations from the residence or other statutable conditions of taking a degree. The grace of congregation was then required only when some of these conditions had not been complied with; if they had been, the degree was a matter of right. Even in Wykeham’s time these graces were scandalously common. In course of time the full statutable conditions were so seldom complied with that the grace of congregation came to be asked for as a matter of course: Wykehamists alone, mindful of their founder’s injunction, sought no graces. Hence what had been intended as an exceptional disability came to be regarded as an exceptional privilege; and when regular examinations were at length introduced, it was understood that the mysterious privilege carried with it exemption from this requirement also. Since a fair level of scholarship was secured by the fact that the places in New College were competed for by the boys of a first-rate classical school (although corrupt elections were not unknown), the privilege was not particularly ruinous so long as the examinations continued on the basis of the Laudian statutes. It was only when the Honour Schools were instituted at the beginning of this century that the exclusion of New College men from the Examination-schools shut out the College from the rapid improvement in industry and intellectual vitality which that measure brought with it for the best Oxford Colleges.
The character of the College during the earlier part of its history was exactly of the kind which the founder designed. In Wykeham’s day the Scholastic Philosophy and Theology were already in their decadence. The history of mediæval thought, so far as Oxford is concerned, ends with that suppression of Wycliffism in 1411, which both Wykeham and his College (though not quite free from the prevalent Lollardism) had contributed to bring about. New College produced not schoolmen and theologians like Merton, but respectable and successful ecclesiastics in abundance—foremost among them, Henry Chicheley, Archbishop of Canterbury, the founder of All Souls. It is a characteristic circumstance that a New College man, John Wytenham, was at the head of the Delegacy for condemning Wycliffe’s books in 1411, all the other Doctors being monks or friars.
On the other hand, the one piece of reform which Wykeham did seek to introduce into Oxford bore fruit in due season. New College, the one College which was recruited exclusively from a great classical school, became the home of what may be called the first phase of the Renaissance movement which showed itself in Oxford. It is during the latter part of Thomas Chaundler’s Wardenship (1454-1475) that traces of this movement become apparent. Chaundler’s own style, as is shown by his published letters to Bishop Bekynton of Wells (himself a Wykehamist and benefactor of the College), was more correct than the ordinary “Oxford Latin” of his day; and some time before his death he brought into the College as “Prælector” the first Oxford teacher of Greek, the Italian scholar Vitelli, who remained till 1488 or 1489.[156] The movement made little progress for the next two decades; but it must have been Vitelli who imparted at least the rudiments of Greek and the desire for further knowledge to William Grocyn, the great Wykehamist with whose name the “Oxford Renaissance” is indissolubly associated. Stanbridge, the Head Master of Magdalen College School, and author of the reformed system of teaching grammar imitated by Lily at St. Paul’s and at other schools, and Archbishop Warham, the patron of Erasmus, deserve mention among New College Humanists. To Warham we owe the panelling which imparts to our Hall much of its peculiar charm.
But if New College welcomed and fanned the first faint breath of the Renaissance air in Oxford, wherever religion and politics were concerned, she retained that character of rigid and immobile Conservatism which the founder had sought to give it. John London (Warden 1526-1542) was foremost in the persecution of Protestant heretics in Oxford, though afterwards employed in the dirty work of collecting evidence against the Monasteries. One of his victims was Quinley, a Fellow of his own College, whom he starved to death in the College “Steeple.” When asked by a friend what he would like to eat, he pathetically exclaimed, “A Warden-pie.” His unnatural hunger might have been appeased could he have seen his persecutor doing public penance for adultery, and ending his days a prisoner in the Fleet. The stoutest and most learned opponents of the Reformation were bred in Wykeham’s Colleges—the men who were ejected or fled under Edward VI., rose to high preferment under Mary, and became victims again under Elizabeth—men like Harpesfield the ecclesiastical historian, Pits the bibliographer, and Nicholas Saunders, the Papal Legate, who organized the Irish Insurrection of 1579.
Ecclesiastically and politically the Great Rebellion found the College again on the Conservative side. In 1642 the then Warden, Dr. Robert Pincke, as Pro-Vice-Chancellor, took the lead in preparing Oxford to resist the Parliamentary forces. The University train-bands were wont to drill “under his eyes” in the front quadrangle. Dons and undergraduates alike joined the ranks; among them is especially mentioned the New College D.C.L., Dr. Thomas Read, who trailed a pike. The cloisters were converted into a magazine; and the New College school-boys, being thus turned out of their usual school, were removed “to the choristers’ chamber at the east end of the common hall of the said College: it was then a dark, nasty room, and very unfit for such a purpose, which made the scholars often complaine, but in vaine.” These are the words of Anthony à Wood, then a little boy of eleven, and a pupil in the school.
While the school-boys were with difficulty restrained from the novel excitement of watching the drills in the quadrangle, the Warden’s severer studies had been no less interrupted. He had been sent by the University to treat with the old New College-man, Lord Say, who was supposed to be in command of the Parliamentary forces at Aylesbury. Unfortunately for Pincke, Lord Say was not there, and the Parliamentary commander, being without Wykehamical sympathies, sent the Doctor a prisoner to the Gate-house at Westminster. Meanwhile Lord Say had entered Oxford, and immediately proceeded to New College “to search for plate and arms” (no doubt he knew where to look), and even overhauled the papers in the Warden’s study. “One of his men broke down the King’s picture of alabaster gilt, which stood there; at which his lordship seemed to be much displeased.” It is not very clear how Warden Pincke found his way back to Oxford; but soon after the Parliamentary triumph, he came to an untimely end by falling down the steps of his own lodgings.
Pincke was evidently a learned as well as an active man, and published a curious collection of Quaestiones in Logica, Ethica, Physica, et Metaphysica (Oxon. 1640); this is a list of problems with a formidable array of references to authorities, classical, patristic, and scholastic. He found time, even in the busy days of his Vice-Chancellorship, to write a narrative of his proceedings in that office, which was still extant in MS. after the Restoration. The only other Wardens who have left any considerable literary remains are Pincke’s predecessor, Lake, afterwards Bishop of Bath and Wells, and Shuttleworth (Warden 1822-1840), afterwards Bishop of Chichester, a sturdy opponent of the Tractarian movement.
While speaking of New College learning of the early seventeenth century, we must not pass over Dr. Thomas James, the first Bodley’s Librarian, who, besides being a really learned writer on theological subjects, catalogued the MSS. in the libraries of the Colleges of both Universities as well as those under his own charge.