Oxford and Her Colleges Part 1

Oxford and Her Colleges.

by Goldwin Smith.

PREFACE.

The writer has seldom enjoyed himself more than in showing an American friend over Oxford. He has felt something of the same enjoyment in preparing, with the hope of interesting some American visitors, this outline of the history of the University and her Colleges. He would gladly believe that Oxford and Cambridge, having now, by emanc.i.p.ation and reform, been reunited to the nation, may also be reunited to the race; and that to them, not less than to the Universities of Germany, the eyes of Americans desirous of studying at a European as well as at an American University may henceforth be turned.

It was once the writer's duty, in the service of a Royal Commission of Inquiry, to make himself well acquainted with the archives of the University and its Colleges. But he has also availed himself of a number of recent publications, such as the series of the Oxford Historical Society, the history of the University by Mr. Maxwell Lyte, and the volume on the Colleges of Oxford and their traditions, edited by Mr.

Andrew Clark, as well as of the excellent little Guide published by Messrs. James Parker and Co.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

To gain a view of Oxford from a central point, we mount to the top of the Radcliffe Library. We will hope that it is a fine summer day, that, as we come out upon the roof, the old city, with all its academical buildings lying among their gardens and groves, presents itself to view in its beauty, and that the sound of its bells, awakening the memories of the ages, is in the air. The city is seen lying on the spit of gravel between the Isis, as the Thames is here called, which is the scene of boat races, and the Cherwell, famed for water-lilies. It is doubtful whether the name means the ford of the oxen, or the ford of the river (_oxen_ being a corruption of _ousen_). Flat, sometimes flooded, is the site. To ancient founders of cities, a river for water carriage and rich meads for kine were prime attractions. But beyond the flat we look to a lovely country, rolling and sylvan, from many points of which, Wytham, Hinksey, Bagley, Headington, Elsfield, Stowe Wood, are charming views, nearer or more distant, of the city. Turner's view is taken from Bagley, but it is rather a Turner poem than a simple picture of Oxford.

There is in Oxford much that is not as old as it looks. The buildings of the Bodleian Library, University College, Oriel, Exeter, and some others, mediaeval or half mediaeval in their style, are Stuart in date. In Oxford the Middle Ages lingered long. Yon cupola of Christ Church is the work of Wren, yon towers of All Souls' are the work of a still later hand. The Headington stone, quickly growing black and crumbling, gives the buildings a false hue of antiquity. An American visitor, misled by the blackness of University College, remarked to his host that the buildings must be immensely old. "No," replied his host, "their colour deceives you; their age is not more than two hundred years." It need not be said that Palladian edifices like Queen's, or the new buildings of Magdalen, are not the work of a Chaplain of Edward III., or a Chancellor of Henry VI. But of the University buildings, St. Mary's Church and the Divinity School, of the College buildings, the old quadrangles of Merton, New College, Magdalen, Brasenose, and detached pieces not a few are genuine Gothic of the Founders' age. Here are six centuries, if you choose to include the Norman castle, here are eight centuries, and, if you choose to include certain Saxon remnants in Christ Church Cathedral, here are ten centuries, chronicled in stone. Of the corporate lives of these Colleges, the threads have run unbroken through all the changes and revolutions, political, religious, and social, between the Barons' War and the present hour. The economist goes to their muniment rooms for the record of domestic management and expenditure during those ages. Till yesterday, the codes of statutes embodying their domestic law, though largely obsolete, remained unchanged. Nowhere else in England, at all events, unless it be at the sister University, can the eye and mind feed upon so much antiquity, certainly not upon so much antique beauty, as on the spot where we stand. That all does not belong to the same remote antiquity, adds to the interest and to the charm. This great home of learning, with its many architectures, has been handed from generation to generation, each generation making its own improvements, impressing its own tastes, embodying its own tendencies, down to the present hour. It is like a great family mansion, which owner after owner has enlarged or improved to meet his own needs or tastes, and which, thus chronicling successive phases of social and domestic life, is wanting in uniformity but not in living interest or beauty.

Oxford is a federation of Colleges. It had been strictly so for two centuries, and every student had been required to be a member of a College when, in 1856, non-collegiate students, of whom there are now a good many, were admitted. The University is the federal government. The Chancellor, its nominal head, is a non-resident grandee, usually a political leader whom the University delights to honour and whose protection it desires. Only on great state occasions does he appear in his gown richly embroidered with gold. The acting chief is the Vice-Chancellor, one of the heads of Colleges, who marches with the Bedel carrying the mace before him, and has been sometimes taken by strangers for the attendant of the Bedel. With him are the two Proctors, denoted by their velvet sleeves, named by the Colleges in turn, the guardians of University discipline. The University Legislature consists of three houses,--an elective Council, made up equally of heads of Colleges, professors, and Masters of Arts; the Congregation of residents, mostly teachers of the University or Colleges; and the Convocation, which consists of all Masters of Arts, resident or non-resident, if they are present to vote. Congregation numbers four hundred, Convocation nearly six thousand. Legislation is initiated by the Council, and has to make its way through Convocation and Congregation, with some chance of being wrecked between the academical Congregation, which is progressive, and the rural Convocation, which is conservative. The University regulates the general studies, holds all the examinations, except that at entrance, which is held by the Colleges, confers all the degrees and honours, and furnishes the police of the academical city. Its professors form the general and superior staff of teachers.

Each College, at the same time, is a little polity in itself. It has its own governing body, consisting of a Head (President, Master, Princ.i.p.al, Provost, or Warden) and a body of Fellows. It holds its own estates; n.o.ble estates, some of them are. It has its private staff of teachers or tutors, usually taken from the Fellows, though the subjects of teaching are those recognised by the University examinations. The relation between the tutors teaching and that of the professor is rather unsettled and debatable, varying in some measure with the subjects, since physical science can be taught only in the professor's lecture-room, while cla.s.sics and mathematics can be taught in the cla.s.s-room of the tutor. Before 1856 the professorial system of teaching had long lain in abeyance, and the tutorial system had prevailed alone.

Each College administers its domestic discipline. The University Proctor, if he chases a student to the College gates, must there halt and apply to the College for extradition. To the College the student immediately belongs; it is responsible for his character and habits. The personal relations between him and his tutor are, or ought to be, close.

Oxford life hitherto has been a College life. To his College the Oxford man has mainly looked back. Here his early friends.h.i.+ps have been formed.

In these societies the ruling cla.s.s of England, the lay professions and landed gentry mingling with the clergy, has been bred. It is to the College, generally, that benefactions and bequests are given; with the College that the rich and munificent _alumnus_ desires to unite his name; in the College Hall that he hopes his portrait will hang, to be seen with grateful eyes. The University, however, shares the attachment of the _alumnus_. Go to yonder river on an evening of the College boat races, or to yonder cricket ground when a College match is being played, and you will see the strength of College feeling. At a University race or match in London the Oxford or Cambridge sentiment appears. In an American University there is nothing like the College bond, unless it be that of the Secret, or, to speak more reasonably, the Greek Letter societies, which form inner social circles with a sentiment of their own.

The buildings of the University lie mainly in the centre of the city close around us. There is the Convocation House, the hall of the University Legislature, where, in times of collision between theological parties, or between the party of the ancient system of education and that of the modern system, lively debates have been heard. In it, also, are conferred the ordinary degrees. They are still conferred in the religious form of words, handed down from the Middle Ages, the candidate kneeling down before the Vice-Chancellor in the posture of mediaeval homage. Oxford is the cla.s.sic ground of old forms and ceremonies. Before each degree is conferred, the Proctors march up and down the House to give any objector to the degree--an unsatisfied creditor, for example--the opportunity of entering a _caveat_ by "plucking" the Proctor's sleeve. Adjoining the Convocation House is the Divinity School, the only building of the University, saving St. Mary's Church, which dates from the Middle Ages. A very beautiful relic of the Middle Ages it is when seen from the gardens of Exeter College. Here are held the examinations for degrees in theology, styled, in the Oxford of old, queen of the sciences, and long their tyrant. Here, again, is the Sheldonian Theatre, the gift of Archbishop Sheldon, a Primate of the Restoration period, and as readers of Pepys's "Diary" know, of Restoration character, but a patron of learning. University exercises used, during the Middle Ages, to be performed in St. Mary's Church. In those days the church was the public building for all purposes, that of a theatre among the rest. But the Anglican was more scrupulous in his use of the sacred edifice than the Roman Catholic. In the Sheldonian Theatre is held the annual commemoration of Founders and benefactors, the grand academical festival, at which the Doctorate appears in its pomp of scarlet, filing in to the sound of the organ, the prize poems and essays are read, and the honorary degrees are conferred in the presence of a gala crowd of visitors drawn by the summer beauty of Oxford and the pleasures that close the studious year. In former days the ceremony used to be enlivened and sometimes disgraced by the jests of the _terrae filius_, a licensed or tolerated buffoon whose personalities provoked the indignation of Evelyn, and in one case, at least, were visited with expulsion. It is now enlivened, and, as visitors think, sometimes disgraced, by the uproarious joking of the undergraduates' gallery. This modern license the authorities of the University are believed to have brought on themselves by encouraging political demonstrations. The Sheldonian Theatre is also the scene of grand receptions, and of the inauguration of the Chancellor. That flaunting portrait of George IV. in his royal robes, by Lawrence, with the military portraits of the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia by which it is flanked and its gorgeousness is rebuked, mark the triumphs of the monarchs, whose cause had become that of European independence, over Napoleon. Perhaps the most singular ceremony witnessed by these walls was the inauguration of the Iron Duke as Chancellor of the University. This was the climax of Oxford devotion to the Tory party, and such was the gathering as to cause it to be said that if the roof of the Sheldonian Theatre had then fallen in, the party would have been extinguished. The Duke, as if to mark the incongruity, put on his academical cap with the wrong side in front, and in reading his Latin speech, lapsed into a thundering false quant.i.ty.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DIVINITY SCHOOL, FROM EXETER GARDENS.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: INTERIOR OF SHELDONIAN THEATRE.]

The Clarendon was built with the proceeds of the history written by the Minister of the early Restoration, who was Chancellor of the University, and whose touching letter of farewell to her, on his fall and flight from England, may be seen in the Bodleian Library. There, also, are preserved doc.u.ments which may help to explain his fall. They are the written dialogues which pa.s.sed between him and his master at the board of the Privy Council, and they show that Clarendon, having been the political tutor of Charles the exile, too much bore himself as the political tutor of Charles the king. In the Clarendon are the University Council Chamber and the Registry. Once it was the University press, but the press has now a far larger mansion yonder to the north-west, whence, besides works of learning and science, go forth Bibles and prayer-books in all languages to all quarters of the globe. Legally, as a printer of Bibles the University has a privilege, but its real privilege is that which it secures for itself by the most scrupulous accuracy and by infinitesimal profits.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BODLEIAN.]

Close by is the University Library, the Bodleian, one of those great libraries of the world in which you can ring up at a few minutes' notice almost any author of any age or country. This Library is one of those ent.i.tled by law to a copy of every book printed in the United Kingdom, and it is bound to preserve all that it receives, a duty which might in the end burst any building, were it not that the paper of many modern books is happily perishable. A foundation was laid for a University Library in the days of Henry VI., by the good Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, who gave a collection of books. But in the rough times which followed, the Duke's donation perished, only two or three precious relics being saved from the wreck. Sir Thomas Bodley, a wealthy knight and diplomatist of the time of James I., it was who reared this pile, severely square and bare, though a skilful variation of the string course in the different stories somewhat relieves its heaviness. In the antique reading-room, breathing study, and not overthronged with readers, the bookworm finds a paradise. Over the Library is the University Gallery, the visitor to which is entreated to avert his eyes from the fict.i.tious portraits of founders of early Colleges, and to fix them, if he will, on the royal portraits which painfully attest the loyalty of the University, or, as a relief from these, on Guy Fawkes's lantern. Beneath the Library used to be the Schools or examination-rooms of the University, scenes of youthful hopes and fears; perhaps, as the aspirants to honours were a minority, of more fears than hopes; and at those doors formerly gathered the eager crowd of candidates and their friends to read the cla.s.s lists which were posted there. But the examination system has outgrown its ancient tenement and migrated to yonder new-built pile in High Street, more fitted, perhaps, by its elaborate ornamentation for the gala and the dance, than for the torture of undergraduates. In the quadrangle of the Bodleian sits aloft, on the face of a tower displaying all the orders of cla.s.sical architecture, the learned King and royal theologian. The Bible held in his hand is believed to have fallen down on the day that Mr. Gladstone lost his election as Member for the University of Oxford and set forth on a career of liberalism which has since led him to the disestablishment of the Church. We stand on the Radcliffe, formerly the medical and physical library, now a supplement and an additional reading-room of the Bodleian, the gift of Dr. Radcliffe, Court Physician and despot of the profession in the times of William and Anne, of whose rough sayings, and sayings more than rough, some are preserved in his "Life." He it was who told William III. that he would not have His Majesty's two legs for his three kingdoms, and who is said to have punished the giver of a n.i.g.g.ardly fee by a prediction of death, which was fulfilled by the terrors of the patient. Close at hand is the Ashmolean, the old University Museum, now only a museum of antiquities, the most precious of which is King Alfred's gem. Museum and Medical Library have together migrated to the new edifice on the north side of the city.

But of all the University buildings the most beautiful is St. Mary's Church, where the University sermons are preached, and from the pulpit of which, in the course of successive generations and successive controversies, a changeful and often heady current of theology has flowed. There preached Newman, Pusey, and Manning; there preached Hampden, Stanley, and the authors of "Essays and Reviews."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE HIGH STREET.

University College.

St. Mary's Church.

Queen's College.]

Oxford and Cambridge were not at first Universities of Colleges. The Colleges were after-growths which for a time absorbed the University.

The University of Oxford was born in the twelfth century, fully a century before the foundation of the first College. To recall the Oxford of the thirteenth century, one must bid vanish all the buildings which now meet our eyes, except yonder grim castle to the west of the city, and the stern tower of St. Michael's Church, at once the bell tower of the Church and a defence of the city gate facing the dangerous north.

The man-at-arms from the castle, the warder from the gate, looks down upon a city of five or six thousand inhabitants, huddled for protection under the castle, and within those walls of which a fine remnant is seen bounding the domain of New College. In this city there is a concourse of students brought together to hear a body of teachers who have been led, we know not how, to open their mart of knowledge here. Printing not having been invented, and books being scarce, the fountain of knowledge is the lecture-room of the professor. It is the age of an intellectual revival so remarkable as to be called the Mediaeval Renaissance. After the migrations and convulsions, by which the world was cast in a new mould, ensues a reign of comparative peace and settled government, under which the desire of knowledge has been reawakened. Universities have been coming out all over Europe like stars in the night; Paris, famous for theology and philosophy, perhaps being the brightest of the constellation, while Bologna was famed for law and Salerno for medicine.

It was probably in the reign of Henry I. that the company of teachers settled at Oxford, and before the end of the thirteenth century students had collected to a number which fable exaggerates to thirty thousand, but which was really large enough to crowd the little city and even the bastions of its walls. A light had shone on youths who sat in the shadow of feudal servitude. There is no more romantic period in the history of human intellect than the thirteenth century.

The teachers, after the fas.h.i.+on of that age, formed themselves into a guild, which guarded its monopoly. The undergraduate was the apprentice; the degree was a license to teach, and carried with it the duty of teaching, though in time it became a literary t.i.tle, unconnected with teaching, and coveted for its own sake. The University obtained a charter, elected its Chancellor, formed its academical Legislature of graduates, obtained jurisdiction over its own members. In time it marshalled its teachers and students into regular Faculties of theology, law, and medicine, with arts, or general and liberal culture, if the name can be applied to anything so rudimentary as the literature and science of that day, forming the basis of all. At first the professors taught where they could; in the cloisters, perhaps, of St. Frydeswide's monastery, subsequently absorbed by Christ Church; in the porches of houses. A row of lecture-rooms, called the Schools, was afterwards provided in School Street, which ran north and south just under the Radcliffe. So little anch.o.r.ed was the University by buildings, that when maltreated at Oxford it was ready to pack up its literary wares and migrate to another city such as Northampton or Stamford. Many of the undergraduates at first were mere boys, to whom the University was a grammar school. For the real University students the dominant study was that of the School philosophy, logical and philosophical, with its strange metaphysical jargon; an immense attempt to extract knowledge from consciousness by syllogistic reasoning, instead of gathering it from observation, experience, and research, mocking by its barrenness of fruit the faith of the enthusiastic student, yet training the mind to preternatural acuteness, and perhaps forming a necessary stage in the mental education of the race. The great instrument of high education was disputation, often repeated, and conducted with the most elaborate forms in the tournaments of the Schools, which might beget readiness of wit and promptness of elocution, but could hardly beget habits of calm investigation or paramount love of truth. The great event in the academical life was Inception, when the student performed exercises which inaugurated his teachers.h.i.+p; and this was commonly celebrated by a feast, the expenditure on which the University was called upon to restrain. Oxford produced some of the greatest schoolmen: Duns Scotus, the "subtle," who had written thirteen folio volumes of arid metaphysics before his early death; Bradwardine, the "profound," and Ockham, the "invincible and unmatched." The idol was Aristotle, viewed mainly as the metaphysician, and imperfectly understood through translations. To reconcile Aristotelian speculation with orthodox theology was a hard task, not always successfully performed. Theology was, of course, first in dignity of the Faculties, but the most lucrative was the civil and canon law practised in the ecclesiastical courts and, as Roman, misliked by the patriotic Parliament. Philosophy complained that it had to trudge afoot while the liegemen of Justinian rode high in the car of preferment. Of physical science the hour was not yet come, but before its hour came its wonderful and almost miraculous precursor, Roger Bacon, who antic.i.p.ated the invention of gunpowder and the telescope, and whose fabled study stood over Folly Bridge, till, with Carfax's monument and Cranmer's prison, it was cleared away by an improving city corporation. Roger Bacon was, of course, taken for a dealer in black arts; an astrologer and an alchemist he was, and at the same time an ill.u.s.trious example of the service indirectly rendered by astrology and alchemy in luring to an investigation of nature which led to real discoveries, just as Columbus, seeking a western pa.s.sage to the golden cities of the East, discovered America.

All the Universities belonged not to one nation but to Latin Christendom, the educated population of which circulated among them. At one time there was a migration to Oxford from the University of Paris, which had got into trouble with the government. Of all the Universities alike, ecclesiastical Latin was the language. The scholars all ranked with the clerical order, so that at Oxford, scholar and clerk, townsman and layman, were convertible terms. In those days all intellectual callings, and even the higher mechanical arts, were clerical. The student was exempted by his tonsure from lay jurisdiction. The Papacy anxiously claimed the Universities as parts of its realm, and only degrees granted by the Pope's authority were current throughout Christendom. When, with Edward III., came the long war between England and France, and when the confederation of Latin Christendom was beginning to break up, the English Universities grew more national.

Incorporated with the buildings of Worcester College are some curious little tenements once occupied by a colony from different Benedictine Monasteries. These, with the Church of St. Frydeswide, now Christ Church Cathedral, and the small remains of Osney Abbey, are about the only relics of monastic Oxford which survived the Reformation. But in the Middle Ages there were Houses for novices of the great Orders, Benedictines, Cistercians, Carmelites, Augustinians, and most notable and powerful of all, the two great mendicant Orders of Dominicans and Franciscans. The Mendicants, who came into the country angels of humility as well as of asceticism, begging their bread, and staining the ground with the blood from their shoeless feet, soon changed their character, and began in the interest of Holy Church to grasp power and ama.s.s wealth. The Franciscans especially, like the Jesuits of an after day, strove to master the centres of intellectual influence. They strove to put the laws of the University under their feet. Struggles between them and the seculars, with appeals to the Crown, were the consequence.

Attraction of callow youth to an angelic life seems to have been characteristic of the Brethren of St. Francis, and it is conjectured that in this way Bacon became a monk. Faintly patronised by a liberal and lettered Pope, he was arraigned for necromancy by his Order, and ended his days in gloom, if not in a monastic prison. The Church of the Middle Ages with one hand helped to open the door of knowledge, with the other she sought to close it. At last she sought to close it with both hands, and in her cruel panic established the Inquisition.

Tory in its later days, the University was liberal in its prime. It took the part of the Barons and De Montfort against Henry III., and a corps of its students fought against the King under their own banner at Northampton. Instead of being the stronghold of reaction, it was the focus of active, even of turbulent aspiration, and the saying ran, that when there was fighting at Oxford there was war in England. Oxford's hero in the thirteenth century was its Chancellor, Grosseteste, the friend of De Montfort and the great reformer of his day, "of prelates the rebuker, of monks the corrector, of scholars the instructor, of the people the preacher, of the incontinent the chastiser, of writings the industrious investigator, of the Romans the hammer and contemner." If Grosseteste patronised the Friars, it was in their first estate.

At first the students lodged as "Chamberdekyns" with citizens, but that system proving dangerous to order, they were gathered into hostels, or, to use the more dignified name, Halls (_aulae_) under a Princ.i.p.al, or Master of the University, who boarded and governed them. Of these Halls there were a great number, with their several names and signs. Till lately a few of them remained, though these had lost their original character, and become merely small Colleges, without any foundation except a Princ.i.p.al. The students in those days were mostly poor. Their indigence was almost taken for granted. Some of them begged; chests were provided by the charitable for loans to them. A poor student's life was hard; if he was earnest in study, heroic. He shared a room with three or four chums, he slept under a rug, his fare was coa.r.s.e and scanty, his garment was the gown which has now become merely an academical symbol, and thankful he was to be provided with a new one. He had no fire in his room, no gla.s.s in his window. As his exercises in the University Schools began at five in the morning, it is not likely that he read much at night, otherwise he would have to read by the light of a feeble lamp flickering with the wind. His ma.n.u.script was painful to read. The city was filthy, the water polluted with sewage; pestilence often swept through the crowded hive.

Mediaeval students were a rough set; not less rough than enthusiastic; rougher than the students of the Quartier Latin or Heidelberg, their nearest counterparts in recent times. They wore arms, or kept them in their chambers, and they needed them not only in going to and from the University over roads beset with robbers, but in conflicts with the townspeople, with whom the University was at war. With the townspeople the students had desperate affrays, ancient precursors of the comparatively mild town and gown rows of this century. The defiant horns of the town were answered by the bells of the University. Arrows flew; blood was shed on both sides; Halls were stormed and defended; till Royalty from Abingdon or Woodstock interfered with its men-at-arms, seconded by the Bishop with bell, book, and candle. A Papal Legate, an Italian on whom national feeling looks with jealousy, comes to Oxford.

Scholars crowd to see him. There is a quarrel between them and his train. His cook flings a cauldron of boiling broth over an Irish student. The scholars fly to arms. The Legate is ignominiously chased from Oxford. Excommunications, royal thunders, and penitential performances follow. Jews settle in Oxford, ply their trade among the scholars, and form a quarter with invidiously wealthy mansions. There is a royal edict, forbidding them to exact more than forty-three per cent interest from the student. Wealth makes them insolent; they a.s.sault a religious procession, and with them also the students have affrays.

Provincial feeling is strong, for the students are divided into two nations, the Northern and the Southern, which are always wrangling, and sometimes fight pitched battles with bows and arrows. The two Proctors, now the heads of University police, were appointed as tribunes of the two nations to settle elections and other matters between them without battle. Amus.e.m.e.nts as well as everything else were rude. Football and other rough games were played at Beaumont, a piece of ground to the north of the city; but there was nothing like that cricket field in the parks, nor like the sensation now created by the appearance of a renowned cricketer in his paddings before an admiring crowd, to display the fruit of his many years of a.s.siduous practice in guarding his stumps. The Crown and local lords had to complain of a good deal of poaching in Bagley, Woodstock, Shotover, and Stowe Wood.

To this Oxford, with its crowd of youth thirsting for knowledge, its turbulence, its vice, its danger from monkish encroachment, came Walter de Merton, one of the same historic group as Grosseteste and Grosseteste's friend, Adam de Marisco, the man of the hour, with the right device in his mind. Merton had been Chancellor of Henry III.

amidst the political storms of the time, from which he would gladly turn aside to a work of peaceful improvement. It was thus that violence in those ages paid with its left hand a tribute to civilisation. Merton's foundation is the first College, though University and Balliol come before it in the Calendar in deference to the priority of the benefactions out of which those Colleges grew. Yonder n.o.ble chapel in the Decorated style, with its tower and the old quadrangle beneath it, called, n.o.body knows why, Mob Quad, are the cradle of College life.

Merton's plan was an academical brotherhood, which combined monastic order, discipline, and piety with the pursuit of knowledge. No monk or friar was ever to be admitted to his House. The members of the House are called in his statutes by the common name of Scholars, that of Fellows (_Socii_), which afterwards prevailed here and in all the other Colleges, denoting their union as an academical household. They were to live like monks in common; they were to take their meals together in the Refectory, and to study together in the common library, which may still be seen, dark and austere, with the chain by which a precious volume was attached to the desk. They had not a common dormitory, but they must have slept two or three in a room. Probably they were confined to their quadrangle, except when they were attending the Schools of the University, or allowed to leave it only with a companion as a safeguard.

They were to elect their own Warden, and fill up by election vacancies in their own number. The Warden whom they had elected, they were to obey. They were to watch over each other's lives, and hold annual scrutinies into conduct. The Archbishop of Canterbury was to visit the College and see that the rule was kept. But the rule was moral and academical, not cloistral or ascetic. The mediaeval round of religious services was to be duly performed, and prayers were to be said for the Founder's soul. But the main object was not prayer, contemplation, or ma.s.ses for souls; it was study. Monks were permanently devoted to their Order, shut up for life in their monastery, and secluded from the world.

The Scholars of Merton were destined to serve the world, into which they were to go forth when they had completed the course of preparation in their College. They were destined to serve the world as their Founder had served it. In fact, we find Wardens and Fellows of Merton employed by the State and the Church in important missions. A Scholar of Merton, though he was to obey the College authorities, took no monastic vow of obedience. He took no monastic vow of poverty; on the contrary, it was antic.i.p.ated that he would gain wealth, of which he was exhorted to bestow a portion on his College. He took no monastic vow of celibacy, though, as one of the clerical order, he would of course not be permitted to marry. He was clerical as all Scholars in those days were clerical, not in the modern and professional sense of the term. The allowances of the Fellow were only his Commons, or food, and his Livery, or raiment, and there were to be as many Fellows as the estate could provide with these. Instruction was received not in College, but in the Schools of the University, to which the Scholars of Merton, like the other Scholars, were to resort. A sort of grammar school, for boys of the Founder's kin, was attached to the College. But otherwise the work of the College was study, not tuition, nor did the statutes contemplate the admission of any members except those on the foundation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MERTON COLLEGE, FROM FIELDS.]