VII.— NEW COLLEGE.
RIMARILY New College was intended to be a stronghold of the old
mediaeval system in Church and State, and a bulwark against the
Lollardism by which it had recently been shaken. It was to increase
the supply of clergy, which the Statutes declare to have been thinned
by "pestilences, wars, and the other miseries of the world." .
In the number of the scholars, in the liberality of their allowances, in
the architectural splendour of the buildings of his College, Wykeham
eclipsed all previous Oxford College-founders In many respects the
founder of Queen's had, indeed, aimed as high as Wykeham ; but
he had begun to build and was not able to finish ; he never succeeded
in providing for the seventy scholars whom he contemplated. What
Eglesfield designed, Wykeham accomplished.
The most original feature of Wykeham's design was the connection of his College at Oxford with a grammar school at a distance.
Hard by his own cathedral, William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, erected a College for a Warden, Sub-warden, ten Fellows, a Head Master, Usher, and seventy scholars, with a proper staff of chaplains and choristers. From this College exclusively were to be selected the seventy scholars of " St. Marie Colledge of Wynchester in Oxford " ; and no one could be elected before fifteen or after nineteen, except in the case of " Founders-kin " scholars, who were eligible up to thirty. This implies that the usual age of Wykehamists upon entering the University would be much above the average, since it was quite common for boys to begin their course in Arts at fourteen or earlier
The Oxford College consisted of a Warden and seventy " poor clerical scholars," together with ten " stipen- diary priests " or chaplains, three stipendiary clerks, and sixteen boy-choristers for the service of the chapel. It entered on a definite existence not later than 1375, the scholars being temporarily lodged in Hart Hall (now Hertford College), and other adjoining houses while the buildings were being completed. The foundation charters were granted in 1379; the foundation stone laid at 8 a.m., on March 5th, 1379-80; on April 14th, 1387, at 9 a.m., the Society, "with cross erect and singing a solemn litany," marched processionally into the splendid habitation which their Founder had been preparing for them in an unoccupied corner within the walls of the town. New College is the first, and still almost the only College whose extant building substantially represent a complete and harmonious design as it presented itself to the founder's eye. . . .
. . Not only was the chapel a choir of cathedral magnitude, with transepts, though without a nave — henceforth the typical form of the College chapel ; there was outside the wall (nowhere else could it have stood so conveniently) the great Bell-tower. There was an ample hall or refectory, the oldest now remaining in Oxford. There were Cloisters, round which every Sunday the whole College, in copes and surplices, were to go in procession, " according to the use of Sarum," and within which members of the College might be buried, by special papal bull, without leave of parish-priest or bishop. There was a tower specially provided over the hall staircase with massive doors of many locks to serve as a muniment room and treasury. There was a library, stored with books by the founder ; and an audit-room on the north side of the east gate. Just outside the main entrance were the brewery and the bake-house. A spacious garden supplied the College with vegetables, and perhaps the scholars with room for such exercise as was permitted by the high standard of " clerical " behaviour demanded of Wykeham's tonsured undergraduates. And all remains now substantially as the founder designed it, marred only by the addition (in 1675) of a third story to the front quadrangle, and by the modernization of the windows.
. . . In William of Wykeham's College the ecclesiastical character is at its maximum : Wykeham aimed in fact at erecting a great Collegiate Church and an Academical College in one. The ecclesiastical
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