In addition to the high altar, the chapel contained no less than seven side altars; where they were placed it is a little difficult to see, as the stalls bear every mark of being contemporary with the founder, and extend all along the sides of the chapel from the altar-steps to the screen. Probably then the smaller altars—of which we know that one was dedicated to the four Latin Fathers—must have been all, or nearly all, placed in the ante-chapel. The windows, both in the chapel and ante-chapel, were filled with excellent glass; all that of the chapel has disappeared, but in the ante-chapel there is much good work remaining. The most interesting window contains an admirable set of historical figures; the founder, his masters Henry V. and Henry VI., John of Gaunt, and several more being in excellent preservation; but this was not originally placed in the chapel, and seems to have belonged to the old library. The other windows are filled with saints.
The total cost of the foundation of the College to Chichele was about £10,000; that sum covered not only the erection and fitting up of the buildings, but the purchase of some of the lands for its endowment. The two largest pieces of property which the Archbishop devoted to his new institution were situated respectively in Middlesex and Kent. The first estate lay around Edgeware, of which the College became lord of the manor, and extended in the direction of Hendon and Willesden. It was mainly under wood in the founder’s day, and formed part of the tract of forest which covered so much of Middlesex down to the last century. The second property consisted of a large stretch of land in Romney Marsh, already noted as a great grazing district in the fifteenth century. Many lesser estates lay scattered about the Midlands; they consisted in no small part of land belonging to the alien priories, which Chichele had assisted Henry V. to abolish, and included at least one of the suppressed houses—Black Abbey in Shropshire. For these confiscated estates the Archbishop paid £1000 to the Crown.
The College as designed by Chichele contained forty Fellows; he nominated twenty himself, and these with their Warden, Richard Andrew, chose twenty more. By the Charter sixteen of the forty were to be jurists—the founder remembered that he himself had taken his degree in Laws—and twenty-four artists. As Wykeham had done before him, Chichele took pains to obtain a Bull from the Pope to sanction and confirm his new foundation: in this document, dated from Florence in 1439, Eugenius IV. grants numerous spiritual privileges to the pauperes scholares of All Souls. They are excused certain fasts, freed from any parochial control of the Vicar of St. Mary’s, permitted to bury their dead in the precincts of the College, and even granted leave to celebrate the Mass in their chapel in time of interdict, “but with hushed bells and closed doors.” Chichele was such a confirmed Papalist that he took the unusual step of sending the first Warden to Italy in person, to receive the Bull from the Pope’s own hands.
Nor was it only his spiritual superior that Chichele resolved to interest in the College. When all was complete he went through the form of handing over the foundation to his young god-son Henry VI., and of receiving it back from the King’s hands as co-founder. Hence comes the constant juxtaposition of their names in the prayers of the College.
Chichele lived to see his College completely finished; in 1442 he presided at the solemn entry of the Fellows into their new abode, and formally delivered the statutes to Warden Andrew. Next year he died, at the end of his eightieth year, an age almost unparalleled among the short-lived men of the fifteenth century. His successor, Archbishop Stafford, on taking up the office of Visitor, was pleased to grant an indulgence of forty days to any Christian of the province of Canterbury who should visit the chapel and there say a Pater and an Ave for the souls of the faithful departed. This grant made the College a place of not unfrequent resort for pilgrims. If a passage cited by Professor Burrows[193] is correct, as many as 9000 wafers were consumed in the chapel on one day in 1557.
For the first century of the College’s existence the succession of Wardens and Fellows was very rapid. Richard Andrew, the first head of the foundation, resigned his post in the same year that the new buildings were opened, on receiving ecclesiastical preferment outside Oxford. He became Dean of York, and survived his resignation for many years. His successor, Warden Keyes, had been the architect of the College; he presided for three years only, and then gave place to William Kele. Altogether in the first century of its existence 1437-1537 the College knew no less than eleven Wardens, of whom seven resigned and only four died in harness. The Fellows were as rapid in their succession; not unfrequently seven or eight—a full fifth of the whole number—vacated their Fellowships in a single year; the average annual election was about five. The shortness of their tenure of office is easily explained; a Fellowship was not a very valuable possession, for beyond food and lodging it only supplied its holder with the “livery” decreed by the founder, an actual provision of cloth for his raiment. A Fellow’s commons were fixed on the modest scale of “one shilling a week when wheat is cheap, and sixteenpence when it is dear.” The annual surplus from the estates was not divided up, but placed in the College strong-box within the entrance-tower, against the day of need. Moreover, as the Fellows were lodged two, or even in some cases three, in each room, the accommodation can hardly have been such as to tempt to long residence. The acceptance of preferment outside Oxford, or even an absence of more than six months without the express leave of the College, sufficed to vacate the Fellowship; and since every member of the foundation was in orders, it naturally resulted that the “jurists” drifted up to London to practice, while the “artists” accepted country livings. Only those Fellows who were actually studying or teaching in the University held their places for any length of time.
There is little to tell about the first fifty years of the history of All Souls; but it is worthy of notice that its connection—merely nominal though it was—with its co-founder, Henry VI., brought on trouble when the House of York came to the throne. Edward IV. pretended to regard the endowments of the College as wrongly-alienated royal property, and had to be appeased, not only by the insertion of his name and that of his mother Cecily in the prayers of the College, but by payment of a considerable fine. However, the College might congratulate itself on an easy escape, and its pardon was ratified when, some years later, its head, Warden Poteman, was made envoy to Scotland, and afterwards promoted to be Archdeacon of Cleveland.
In the reign of Henry VII., when the Renaissance began to make itself felt in Oxford, All Souls had the good fortune to produce two of the first English Greek scholars, Linacre and Latimer. The name of the latter is forgotten—the present age remembers no Latimer save the martyr-bishop; but Linacre’s memory is yet green. With Grocyn and Colet he stands at the head of the roll of Oxford scholars, but in his medical fame he is unrivalled. His contemporaries “questioned whether he was a better Latinist or Grecian, a better grammarian or physician”; but it is in the last capacity that he is now remembered. He was elected to his Fellowship at All Souls in 1484, resided four or five years, and then went to Italy, where he tarried long, taught medicine at Padua, and then returned to England to found and preside over the College of Physicians. The two Linacre professorships were both endowed by him. The example of his career was not soon forgotten, and for two centuries All Souls continued to produce men of mark in the realm of medicine. To this day it excites the surprise of the visitor to the College library to see the large proportion of books on medical subjects contained in its shelves. Among the manuscripts there are many such, which Linacre’s own hands must have thumbed; while throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the purchases of medical books are only exceeded by those of works on theology. But with the incoming of the reign of the Founder’s-kin Fellows in the early eighteenth century the physicians ceased out of the land, and at last, “holding a physic place” became a convenient fiction by which lay members of the College succeeded in excusing themselves from taking orders, though they might be in reality anything rather than medical men.
The reign of Henry VII. saw the beginning of two sources of trouble to All Souls, which were not to cease for many generations. The first was the interference of the Archbishop as Visitor, to determine the conditions of the tenure of Fellowships. William of Warham is found writing to the College to denounce a growing practice of endeavouring to keep a Fellowship in conjunction with a benefice outside Oxford. He strictly forbade it, and his commands seem to have been more effectual than Visitor’s injunctions have usually proved. The other interference with the College from without, was an attempt made by Arthur Prince of Wales to influence the annual elections of Fellows. He writes from Sunninghill in 1500 to recommend the election of a young lawyer named Pickering to a Fellowship, “because that his father is in the right tender favour of our dearest mother the Queen.” Pickering’s name does not appear in the register of Fellows, so it is evident that the College found some excuse for evading compliance with the Prince’s request.