On Ascension Day the College and choir used to go in procession to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (the remains of which may still be seen on the Cowley road a little beyond the new church) where a short service was held, after which they proceeded to the adjoining well (Strowell), heard an Epistle and Gospel, and sang certain songs.
At the beginning of the present century the College was still waked by the porter striking the door at the bottom of each staircase with a “wakening mallet.” Fellows are still summoned to the quarterly College-meetings in this antique fashion.
VIII.
LINCOLN COLLEGE.
By the Rev. Andrew Clark, M.A., Fellow of Lincoln College.
Lincoln College, or, in its full and official title, “The College of the Blessed Mary and All Saints, Lincoln, in the University of Oxford,” was founded by Richard Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, in the year 1429, in the eleventh year of his episcopate and one year and one month before his death.
The founder, a native of Yorkshire, was educated in Oxford, and held the office of Northern (or Junior) Proctor in 1407. He was promoted to a prebendship in York Cathedral in 1415; and was raised to the see of Lincoln in 1419. In 1424 Pope Martin V., who held him in great esteem, advanced him to the Archbishopric of York; but the king (Henry VI.) refused to sanction the nomination; and Fleming, ejected from York, had some difficulty in getting “translated” back to Lincoln.
Richard Fleming, as a graduate resident in Oxford, had been noted for his sympathy with the tenets of the Wycliffists; but in his later years he had come to regard the movement with alarm, foreboding (as his preface to the statutes for his college says) that it was one of those troubles of the latter days which were to vex the Church towards the end of the world. The Wycliffists professed to accept the authority of the Scriptures and to find in them the warrant for their attacks on accepted Church doctrines and institutions. In these same Scriptures, rightly understood and expounded, Fleming believed that the authority of the Church was laid down beyond contradiction. And so, in the bitterness of his repulse from York, which he perhaps attributed to the growing spirit of rebelliousness against the Church, he determined to found (to use his own words) “collegiolum quoddam theologorum”—“a little college of true students in theology who would defend the mysteries of the sacred page against those ignorant laics who profaned with swinish snouts its most holy pearls.”
It is instructive to note the means by which he carried out his purpose. There is a common impression that these pre-Reformation prelates were possessed of great wealth. In some few instances, this was the case, namely, where the prelate had held in plurality several wealthy benefices, or had occupied a rich see for a great number of years, or had inherited a large private fortune; but in the majority of cases, the bishops were not wealthy men, and from year to year spent the revenues of their sees in works of public munificence or private charity. Every bishop, however, had partially under his control several of the Church endowments of his diocese, and could divert them, even in perpetuity, to the use of any institution he favoured, so long as they were not alienated from the Church. Accordingly, Fleming proposed, as it seems, to build the College out of his own moneys; but to provide for its endowment by attaching to it existing ecclesiastical revenues. He therefore obtained the sanction of the king (Henry VI.’s charter is dated 13th Oct., 1427) and Parliament, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the mother-church of Lincoln, the Archdeacon of Oxford, the parishioners of all three parishes, and the Mayor and Corporation of Oxford, to dissolve the three contiguous parish churches of All Saints, St. Mildred, and St. Michael,—all three being in the patronage of the Bishop of Lincoln,—as also the chantry of St. Anne in the church of All Saints, which was in the patronage of the city of Oxford; and to unite them into a collegiate church or college, which was to be “Lincoln College.”