IX.
ALL SOULS COLLEGE.[192]
By C. W. C. Oman, M.A., Fellow of All Souls.
Henry Chichele, the son of a merchant of Higham Ferrars, was one of the first roll of scholars whom William of Wykeham nominated at the opening of his great foundation of New College. He left Oxford with the degree of Doctor of Laws, and soon found both ecclesiastical preferment and a lucrative legal practice. He attached himself to the House of Lancaster, and served Henry IV. so well that he was made Bishop of St. Davids, and sent to represent England at the Council of Pisa. In such favour did he stand at Court, that when Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, died in the first year of Henry V., the young king appointed Chichele to succeed him.
For the long term of thirty years Henry Chichele held the Primacy of all England, and played no small part in the governance of the realm. The two main characteristics of his policy, whatever may be urged in his defence, were most unfortunate: he was a stout supporter of the unhappy war with France, and he was a weak defender of the liberties of the Church of England against Papal aggression. History remembers him as the ambassador who urged so hotly the preposterous claims of Henry V. on the French throne, and as the first Primate who refused to accept the Archbishopric from the King and the Chapter, till he had obtained a dispensation and a Bull of Provision from the Pope.
However great may have been his faults as a statesman, Chichele (like his successor Laud) was throughout his life a liberal and consistent patron of the University. He presented it with money and books, and, mindful of what he owed to his training at New College, resolved to copy his old master Wykeham in erecting one more well-ordered and well-endowed house of learning, among the obscure and ill-managed halls which still harboured the majority of the members of the University. He first began to build a small College in St. Giles’; but this institution—St. Bernard’s as it was called—he handed over unfinished to the Cistercian monks, in whose possession it remained till the Reformation, when it became the nucleus round which Sir Thomas White built up his new foundation of St. John’s.
Chichele’s later and more serious scheme for establishing a College was not taken up till 1437, when he had occupied the Archiepiscopal see for twenty-three years, and was already past the age of seventy. It was one of the darkest moments of the wretched French war; the great Duke of Bedford had died two years before, and Paris had been for twelve months in the hands of the French. The old Archbishop, all whose heart had been in the struggle, and who knew that he himself was more responsible for its commencement than any other subject of the Crown, must have spent his last years in unceasing regrets. Perhaps he may have felt some personal remorse when he reflected on his own part in the furthering of the war, but certainly—whether he felt his responsibility or not—the waste of English lives during the last twenty years lay heavy on his soul. Hence it came that his new college became a chantry as well as a place of education—the inmates were to be devoted as well ad orandum as ad studendum—hence also, we can hardly doubt, came its name. For, as its charter drawn by Henry VI. proceeds to recite—the prayers of the community were to be devoted, “not only for our welfare and that of our godfather the Archbishop, while alive, and for our souls when we shall have gone from this light, but also for the souls of the most illustrious Prince Henry, late King of England, of Thomas late Duke of Clarence our uncle, of the Dukes, Earls, Barons, Knights, Esquires, and other noble subjects of our father and ourself who fell in the wars for the Crown of France, as also for the souls of all the faithful departed.” Not unwisely therefore has the piety of the present generation filled the niches of Chichele’s magnificent reredos with the statues of Clarence and York, Salisbury and Talbot, Suffolk and Bedford, and others who struck their last stroke on the fatal plains of France. Nor can we doubt that the Archbishop’s meaning was well expressed in the name that he gave to his foundation, which, copying the last words in the above-cited foundation-charter, became known as the “Collegium Omnium Animarum Fidelium Defunctorum in Oxonia.”
To found his College, Chichele purchased a large block of small tenements, among them several halls, forming the angle between Catte Street and the High Street. The longer face was toward the former street, the frontage to “the High” being less than half that which lay along the narrower thoroughfare. The ground lay for the most part within the parish of St. Mary’s, with a small corner projecting into that of St. Peter in the East. The buildings which Chichele proceeded to erect were very simple in plan. They consisted of a single quadrangle with a cloister behind it, and did not occupy more than half the ground which had been purchased: the rest, where Hawkesmore’s twin towers and Codrington’s library now stand, formed, in the founder’s time, and for 250 years after, a small orchard and garden. Chichele’s main building, the present “front quadrangle,” remains more entirely as the founder left it than does any similar quadrangle in Oxford. Except that some seventeenth century hand has cut square the cusped tops of its windows, it still bears its original aspect unchanged. The north side is formed by the chapel; the south contains the gate-tower with its muniment-room above, and had the Warden’s lodgings in its eastern angle; the west side was devoted entirely to the Fellows’ rooms, as was also the whole of the east side, save the central part of its first floor, where the original library was situate. Into space which now furnishes seventeen small sets of rooms, the forty Fellows of the original foundation were packed, together with their two chaplains, their porter, and their small establishment of servants.
To the north of this quadrangle lay the cloister, a small square, two of whose sides were formed by an arcade with open perpendicular windows, much like New College cloister; the third by the chapel; while the fourth was occupied by the College hall, an unpretentious building standing exactly at right angles to the site of the modern hall. The cloister-quadrangle’s size may be judged from the fact that the chapel formed one entire side of it. It took up not more than a quarter of the present back-quadrangle, and was surrounded to north and east by the garden and orchard of which we have already spoken. For many generations it formed the burial-ground of the Fellows, and on several occasions of late years, when trenches have been dug across the turf of the new quadrangle, the bones of fifteenth and sixteenth century members of the College have been found lying there undisturbed. To conclude the account of Chichele’s buildings, it must be added that on the east side of the hall the kitchen and storehouses of the College made a small irregular excrescence into the garden; their situation is now occupied by that part of the present hall which lies nearest the door.
All Chichele’s work was on a small scale save his chapel, on which he lavished special care. His reredos, preserved for two centuries behind a coat of plaster, still remains to witness to his good taste; but its original aspect, blazing with scarlet, gold, and blue, must have been strangely different from that which the nineteenth century knows. Of the figures which adorned it a part only can be identified: at the top was the Last Judgment, of which a considerable fragment was found in situ when the plaster was cleared away, with its inscription, “Surgite mortui, venite ad judicium” still plainly legible. Immediately above the altar was the Crucifixion; the cross and the wings of the small ministering angels of the modern reproduction being actually parts of the old sculpture. The carver, Richard Tillott, who executed the work, mentions, in his account of expenses sent in for payment to Chichele, “two great stone images over the altar”; these may very probably have been the founder and King Henry VI.; and the restorers of our own generation ventured to fill the two largest niches with their representations. How the central and side portions of the reredos were occupied is unknown; but it would seem that the founder did not leave every niche full, as fifty years after his death, Robert Este, a Fellow of the College, left £21 18s. 4d. for the completing of the images over the high altar.