recognised as religious bodies in a curious ordinance of 1300, which enjoins that in academical processions the Preaching Friars shall walk first, the White Friars next, and the Black Friars last. It is scarcely less significant that, although in 1314 the church of St. Mary was made the one authorised arena of academic ceremonies, to the exclusion of the religious houses, the four Orders were represented jointly with the University on the Papal Commission which delivered this decision. In another statute, of 1326, every bachelor of arts is required to dispute once and respond once each year before the Augustins (apud Augustinenses), from which it must be inferred that this Order had already acquired almost a monopoly of grammar-teaching.

But the lay and secular element in the University always rebelled against the encroachments of the friars, and was destined to prevail. It is a suggestive fact that Walter de Merton rigorously excluded every 'religious' person or member of a monastic Order from the benefits of his foundation. Soon afterwards the University took alarm. In 1358' we have a trenchant statute against the abduction of boys under eighteen by the mendicant Orders, which shows how great a jealousy they had provoked among the secular clergy of the University, for whose special benefit Merton and other colleges were founded. This statute expressly recites that noblemen and commoners are afraid to send their sons to the University, lest they should be seduced by the mendicant friars into joining their Order before

'This is the date assigned to the statute by Mr. Anstey in his Munimenta Academica, on the authority of Anthony Wood, sup. ported by historical probability.

arriving at years of discretion; and that by these practices the peace of the University is often disturbed and its numbers diminished. It is therefore enacted that if any mendicant friar thus seduces or causes to be seduced any youth under eighteen years of age, or procures his removal from Oxford with intent that he may be received elsewhere into a religious Order, no graduate of the cloister or society to which the offender belongs shall be allowed to deliver or attend lectures in Oxford during the year next ensuing. Another statute of the same date is apparently aimed at the attempt of friars to lecture on logic before undergoing the regular yearly course of disputations. This is immediately followed by the public recantation extorted from a friar who had affirmed, among other startling propositions, that tithes belonged more properly to mendicants than to rectors of churches, and that the University was a school of heresy. Another friar who had disparaged the School of Arts was compelled to apologize with equal humility. Still the power of the monastic Orders continued to be formidable, and at Cambridge they seem to have ultimately carried their point in obtaining exemption from academical exercises in Arts for their theological students; while at Oxford there are many instances of college fellows joining their ranks.

Interven

In 1365 the Pope entered the lists against the University on behalf of the friars, and directed the Archbishop of Canterbury and bishops to intion of the sist upon the Chancellor's procuring the repeal of the obnoxious statutes. In the meantime, however, the intervention of the King and Parliament was invoked by memorials from both the Universities and

Pope and

the King

the four mendicant Orders. In consequence of this an ordinance was made, with the assent of Parliament, by which the statutes against the admission of scholars into these Orders were relaxed, but all bulls and processes to be procured by the friars against the Universities from the Court of Rome were prohibited and declared void. Still the feud continued. One main source of Wyclif's popularity in the University was his unsparing denunciation of the Mendicants, and their decline was among the most permanent results of the movement which he initiated. But other causes were at work to undermine their influence. The rise of the colleges was, in fact, the rise of the secular clergy, and in organising itself more completely, the University naturally outgrew its dependence on the missionary zeal for education which had been its life-blood in the thirteenth century.

numbers

CHAPTER VI.

THE UNIVERSITY IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

THE golden age of medieval Oxford had culminated in the fourteenth century, and the fifteenth century Decline in ushered in a period of intellectual stagnation, and studies which lasted for at least sixty years. Many causes, both external and internal, combined to produce this result. The nation itself, exhausted by the vain effort to conquer France, and roused from its long

dream of Imperial ambition, was hopeless and disheartened until it was plunged into the most sanguinary of English Civil Wars. The ecclesiastical independence of the English Church, which had defied the most powerful of medieval Popes, and had been fortified by the recent Statutes of Provisors and Præmunire, was seriously threatened by the growth of Ultramontane influences, while its revenues were assailed by democratic agitation. The revolutionary petition of the Commons, addressed to Henry IV., for the wholesale appropriation of Church property to secular and charitable uses, boded no good to Universities, which ranked as ecclesiastical bodies, and were taxed with the clergy, though antimonastic in their corporate spirit and in the organisation of their colleges. Moreover, this petition had been speedily followed by the actual confiscation of property belonging to alien priories. Soon afterwards, the French Wars and Wars of the Roses attracted into camps many a student who might otherwise have frequented the University lecture rooms; the law no longer drew all its recruits from University clerks; and even the incumbents of English livings were sometimes chosen from the ranks of the regular clergy without University training. It is possible that the rise and spread of the Wycliffite movement at Oxford may have prejudiced it in the eyes of the English hierarchy, as it certainly did in those of the Popes. At all events, there is abundant evidence both of the fact that candidates for Holy Orders resorted to Oxford in diminished numbers, and of the construction which the University authorities put on that fact. In 1417, and again in 1438, the Archbishop and Bishops in Convocation issued an appeal to patrons

of benefices, calling upon them to give a preference to University graduates. The memorial addressed to Convocation on behalf of the University in 1438 complains that her halls were deserted, and that not one thousand remained out of the many thousands reported to have attended the schools of Oxford in the last agewhen, as we learn from a Royal charter (of 1355), ‘a multitude of nobles, gentry, strangers, and others continually flocked thither.' It is stated that in 1450 only twenty out of two hundred schools which had once been filled continued to be used for purposes of education. A few years later we find a license granted to poor scholars, authorising them to beg for alms-a practice of which Sir Thomas More speaks as if it were not obsolete in his own time. It was to meet the necessities of these destitute students that Archbishop Chichele established a new University Chest; and it was for the relief of the pauperes et indigentes, no less than for the support of the secular clergy, whose decline at Oxford is amply attested by his charter, that he afterwards founded the great college of All Souls.

delegates at

of Constance

and Basle

Notwithstanding this decline, and the undoubted decay of learning, we must not exaggerate either the University actual degeneracy of the University or its the Councils loss of reputation in Europe. No doubt, the French Wars tended to weaken its ancient alliance with the great University of Paris, and the growth of a native English literature under the inspiration of Chaucer and Wyclif may well have contributed to its isolation, until it came under the spell of the Italian Renaissance. But it is an error to assert that Oxford was nowhere to be found in the great