II.— BALLIOL COLLEGE.
By Reginald L. Poole, M.A.
HE origin of Balliol College is traced to certain payments made by John Balliol not long after 1260 for the support of poor students at Oxford. The founder, in expiation of some ecclesiastical offence, was con- demned to be publicly scourged by the Bishop of Durham at his Abbey door and also to make this academic endowment. ' John Balliol, lord of Galloway, was the father of that John to whom King Edward the First of England adjudged the Scottish crown in 1292. His wife, the heiress, was Dervorguilla, grandniece to King William the Lion. It is to her far more than to her husband that the real foundation of the College bearing his name is due, and husband and wife are rightly coupled together as joint-founders, the lion of Scotland being associated with the orle of Balliol on the College shield. A house was first hired beyond the city ditch on the north side of Oxford, hard by the church of St. Mary Magdalen, and here certain poor scholars were lodged and paid eightpence a day for their commons. It was in the beginning a simple almshouse, founded on the model already existing at Paris, it depended for its maintenance upon the good pleasure of the founder, and possessed (so far as we know) no sort of organization, though customs and rules were certain to shape themselves before long without any positive enactment.'
This state of things lasted until 1282, when Devorguilla — her husband had died in 1269— took steps to place the House of Balliol upon an established footing. In her charter she showed that the example set by the founder of Merton College, to whose statutes the entire college system of Oxford and Cambridge owes its type, was already bearing fruit. But unlike Merton, which was designed specially as a training school for the secular clergy, Balliol was at first set under the joint governorship of two Proctors, one of whom was regularly a Franciscan friar. Under them stood the Principal, or acting governor, who was elected by the Scholars of the House. • This charter was plainly but the giving of a constitution to a society which had already formed for itself rules and usages with respect to discipline and other matters not referred to in it. ' In a couple of years the Scholars moved to a house bought for them a little eastward of their previous abode, and before the middle of the following century they had so enlarged their buildings that they occupied nearly the site of the present outer-quadrangle, and a chapel dedicated to St. Catherine — the special patron of the College— had been built. The College also possessed a house containing four Schools intended for the performance of academic exercises, which stood on part of the site of the existing Divinity School.
Early in the fourteenth century there seems to have been an active dispute among the Scholars as to the studies which they were permitted to pursue. It had been expressly ordained that they should dwell in the House until they had completed their course in Arts. It seemed therefore to follow, that it was not lawful for them to go on to a further course of study, for instance, in Divinity, without ceasing their connexion with the House. At length in 1325 this inference was formally ratified by the two Extraneous Masters, the successors of the original Proctors of the house, possessed of quasi-visitatorial powers, in the presence of all the members as well as four graduates who had formerly been Fellmus (a title which now first appears in the College muniments as a synonym for Scholars) of the House. ' It was thus decided that Balliol should be a home exclusively of secular learning ; and it reads as a curious presage, that thus early in the history of the college the field should be marked out for it in which, in the fifteenth century and again in our own day, it was peculiarly to excel.'
But the Theologians soon had some compensation, for in 1340 a new endowment was given to the College by Sir Philip Somerville for their special benefit. His statutes, however, established so complicated a system that it
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