Читать книгу The Colleges of Oxford - Various - Страница 9

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By Reginald L. Poole, M.A., Balliol College.

The precedence of Balliol over Merton College depends upon the fact that John Balliol made certain payments not long after 1260 for the support of poor students at Oxford, while Walter of Merton’s foundation dates from 1264; but it was not until the example had been set by Merton that the House of Balliol assumed a corporate being and became governed by formal statutes. The “pious founder” too was at the outset an involuntary agent, for the obligation to make his endowment was part of a penance imposed on him together with a public scourging at the Abbey door by the Bishop of Durham.[8] 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.[9] 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 Dervorguilla—her husband had died in 1269—took steps to place the House of Balliol upon an established footing. By her charter deed[10] she appointed two representatives or “proctors” (one, it seems probable, being always a Franciscan friar, and the other a secular Master of Arts) as the governing body of the House. The Scholars were, it is true, to elect their own Principal, and obey him “according to the statutes and customs approved among them,” but he and they were alike subordinate to the Proctors or (as they came to be distinguished) the Extraneous Masters. The Scholars, whose number is not mentioned, were to attend the prescribed religious services and the exercises at the schools, and were also to engage in disputations among themselves once a fortnight. Three masses in the year were to be celebrated for the founders’ welfare, and mention of them was to be made in the blessing before and grace after meat. Rules were laid down for the distribution of the common funds; if they fell short it was ordered that the poorer Scholars were not to suffer. The use of the Latin language (apparently at the common table) was strictly enjoined upon the Scholars. Whoever broke the rule was to be admonished by the Principal, and if he offended twice or thrice was to be removed from the common table, to eat by himself, and be served last of all. If he remained incorrigible after a week, the Proctors were to expel him. One feature of the Balliol Statutes which deserves particular notice is that none of them, until we reach the endowments of the sixteenth century, placed any sort of local restriction upon those who were capable of being elected to the Foundation.

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. The “House of the Scholars of Balliol” was placed on a still more assured footing when its charter was confirmed by Bishop Sutton of Lincoln two years later,[11] in which year the Scholars removed to a house bought for them by the foundress in Horsemonger-street, a little to the eastward of their previous abode;[12] and soon afterwards the Bishop permitted them to hold divine service, though they still attended their parish Church of St. Mary Magdalen on all great festivals.[13] Before the middle of the fourteenth century the society had considerably enlarged its position. It had bought houses on both sides of its existing building, so that it now occupied very nearly the site of the present front-quadrangle.[14] It received from private benefactors endowment for two Chaplains; and in 1327, with help furnished through the Abbot of Reading,[15] the building of a Chapel dedicated to Saint Catherine—the special patron whom we find first associated with the College in the letter of Bishop Sutton—was carried into effect. But the College remained dependent upon its parish Church for the celebration of the Mass until the Chapel was expressly licensed for the purpose by Pope Urban the Fifth in April 1364. As early as 1310 the College had become possessed of a messuage containing four schools on the west side of School-street, which were, according to the usual practice, let out to those who had exercises to perform, and thus added to the resources of the College.[16] Some unused land on this property was afterwards conveyed to the University to form part of the site of the Divinity School, and the University still pays the College a quitrent for it.[17]

During this time there seems to have been an active dispute among the Scholars as to the studies which they were permitted to pursue. Bishop Sutton had expressly ordained that they should dwell in the House until they had completed their course in Arts. It seemed naturally 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 connection with the House. At length in 1325 this inference was formally ratified by the two Extraneous Masters in the presence of all the members as well as four graduates who had formerly been Fellows (a title which now first appears in our muniments as a synonym for Scholars) of the House.[18] One of the Extraneous Masters was Nicolas Tingewick, who is otherwise known to us as a benefactor of the Schools of Grammar in the University;[19] and one of the ex-Fellows was Richard FitzRalph, afterwards Vice-Chancellor of the University and Archbishop of Armagh, the man to whom above all others John Wycliffe, a later member of Balliol, owed the distinguishing elements of his teaching.[20] 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. From the Statutes which accompanied his gift[21] we learn that the existing number of Fellows was sixteen; this he increased to twenty-two (or more, if the funds would allow), with the provision that six of the Fellows should, after they had attained their regency in Arts, enter upon a course of theology, together with canon law if they pleased, extending in ordinary cases over not more than twelve or thirteen years from their Master’s degree in Arts. Such was the rigour of the demands made upon the theological student in the University system of the middle ages; with what results as to solidity and erudition it is not necessary here to say.

Somerville’s Statutes further made several important changes in the constitution of the Hall or House, as it is here called. The Principal still exists, holding precedence among the Fellows, much like that of the President in some of the Colleges at Cambridge; but he is subordinate to the Master, who is elected by the society subject to the approval of a whole series of Visitors. After election the Master was first to present himself and take oath before the lord of Sir Philip Somerville’s manor of Wichnor, and then to be presented by two of the Fellows and the two Extraneous Masters to the Chancellor of the University, or his Deputy, and to the Prior of the Monks of Durham at Oxford. By these his appointment was confirmed. There was thus established a complicated system of a threefold Visitatorial Board. The powers of the lords of Wichnor were indeed probably formal; but those of the Extraneous Masters subsisted side by side by, and to some extent independently of, the Chancellor and the Prior. The former retained their previous authority over the Fellows of the old foundation; they were only associated with the Chancellor and Prior with respect to the new theological Fellows. Finally, over all the Bishop of Durham was placed, as a sort of supreme Visitor, to compel the enforcement of the provisions affecting Somerville’s bequest. One wonders how this elaborate scheme worked, and particularly how the society of Balliol liked the supervision of the Prior of Durham College just beyond their garden-wall. But the curious thing is that the benefactor declares that in making these Statutes he intends not to destroy but to confirm the ancient rules and Statutes of the College, as though some part of his extraordinary arrangements had been already in force.[22]

It is easy to guess that the scheme was impracticable, and in fact so early as 1364 a new code had to be drawn up. This was given, under papal authority, by Simon Sudbury, Bishop of London, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury; but unfortunately it is not preserved. We can only gather from later references that it changed more than it left of the existing Statutes, and that it established Rectors (almost certainly the old Proctors or Extraneous Masters under a new name[23]) to control the Master and Fellows, and possibly a Visitor over all. But the one thing positive is that a right of ultimate appeal was now reserved to the Bishop of London, who thus came to exercise something more than the power which was in later times committed to the Visitor. It was by his authority that in the course of the fifteenth century the property-limitation affecting the Master was abolished, and he was empowered to hold a benefice of whatever value;[24] and that Chaplains were made eligible, equally with the Fellows, for the office of Master.[25] On the one hand the dignity of the Master was increased; on the other the ecclesiastical element was brought to the front.

The latter point becomes more than ever clear in the Statutes which were framed for the College in 1507, and which remained substantially in force until the Universities Commission of 1850. The cause of their promulgation is obscurely referred to the violent and high-handed action of a previous—possibly the existing—Visitor. The matter was laid before Pope Julius the Second, and he deputed the Bishops of Winchester and Carlisle, or one of them, to draw up an amended body of Statutes which should preclude the repetition of such misgovernment. The Statutes[26] themselves are the work of the Bishop of Winchester, the same Richard Fox who left so enduring a monument of his piety and zeal for learning in his foundation of Corpus Christi College. That foundation however was ten years later, and Fox had not yet, it should seem, formed in his mind the pattern according to which a College in the days of revived and expanded classical study should be modelled. In Balliol he saw nothing but a small foundation with scanty resources and without the making of an important home of learning. The eleemosynary character of its original Statutes he left as it was, only slightly increasing the commons of the Fellows.[27] The Master was to enjoy no greater allowance than Fellows who were Masters of Arts, but he retained the right to hold a benefice. He was no longer necessarily to be chosen from among the Fellows. The unique privilege of the College to elect its own Visitor—how the privilege arose we know not—is expressly declared. But the essential changes introduced in the Statutes of 1507 are those which gave the College a distinctively theological complexion, and those which established a class of students in the College subordinate to the Fellows.

We have seen how the Chaplains had been long rising in dignity, as shown by the fact that, though not Fellows, they had since 1477[28] been equally eligible with the Fellows for the office of Master. By the new Statutes two of the Fellowships were to be filled up by persons already in Priest’s orders to act as Chaplains. This was in part a measure of economy, since Fellows could be found to act as Chaplains, but the increased importance of the latter is the more significant since these same Statutes reduced the number of Fellows from at least twenty-two to not less than ten. Besides this, every Fellow of the College was henceforth required to receive Priest’s orders within four years after his Master’s degree. Doubtless from the beginning all the members of the foundation had been—as indeed all University students were—clerici; but this did not necessarily imply more than the simple taking of the tonsure. The obligation of Priest’s orders was something very different. The Fellows were as a rule to be Bachelors of Arts at the time of election. Their studies were limited to logic, philosophy, and divinity; but they were free to pursue a course of canon law in the long vacation. The Master’s degree was to be taken four years after they had fulfilled the requirements for that of Bachelor. It may be noticed that, instead of their having, according to the modern practice, to pay fees to the College on taking degrees, they received from it on each occasion a gratuity varying according to the dignity of the degree.

The reduction in the number of Fellowships was evidently made in order to provide for the lower rank of what we should now-a-days call Scholars. In the Statutes indeed this name is not found, for it was not forgotten that Fellow and Scholar meant the same thing: and so the old word scholasticus, which was often used in the general sense of a “student,” was now applied to designate those junior members of the College for whom Scholar was too dignified a title. They were to be “scholastics or servitors,” not above eighteen years of age, sufficiently skilled in plain song and grammar. One was assigned to the Master and one to each graduate Fellow, and was nominated by him; he was his private servant. The Scholastics were to live of the remnants of the Fellows’ table, to apply themselves to the study of logic, and to attend Chapel in surplices. They had also the preference, in case of equality, in election to Fellowships. We may add that, although the position of these Scholars (as they came to be called) unquestionably improved greatly in the course of time, the Statute affecting them was not revised until 1834.[29]

The Statutes throw a good deal of light on the internal administration of the College at the close of the middle ages. Of the two Deans, the senior had charge of the Library, the junior of the Chapel; they were also to assist the Master generally in matters of discipline. The Master, Fellows, and Scholastics were bound on Sundays and Feast-days to attend matins, with lauds, mass, vespers, and compline; and any Fellow who absented himself was liable to a fine of twopence, while Scholastics were punished with a flogging or otherwise at the discretion of the Master and Dean. The senior Dean presided at the disputations in Logic, which were held on Saturdays weekly throughout the term, except in Lent, and attended by the Bachelors, Scholastics, and junior Masters. The more important disputations in philosophy were held on Wednesdays, and were not intermitted in Lent. They were even held during the long vacation until the 7th September. At these all the Fellows were to be present, and the Master or senior Fellow to preside. Theological disputations were also to be held weekly or fortnightly in term so long as there were three Fellows who were theologians to make a quorum. The College was empowered to receive boarders not on the foundation—what we now call commoners or persons who pay for their commons—on the condition of their following the prescribed course of study (or in special cases reading civil or canon law); and the fact of their paying seems to have given them a choice of rooms.

The Bible or one of the Fathers was to be read in hall during dinner, and all conversation to be in Latin, unless addressed to one—presumably a guest or a servant—ignorant of the language. French was not permitted, as it was at Queen’s,[30] but the Master might give leave to speak English on state occasions—evidently on such a feast as that of Saint Catherine’s day, when guests were invited and an extraordinary allowance of 3s. 4d. was made. The condition of residence was strictly enforced; nevertheless in order that when, as ofttimes comes to pass, a season of pestilence rages, the Muses be not silent nor study and teaching of none effect by reason of the strength of fear and peril, it was permitted that the members of the College should withdraw into the country, to a more salubrious place not distant more than twelve miles from Oxford, and there dwell together and carry on their life of study and their accustomed disputations so long as the plague should last.[31] The gates of the College were closed at nine in summer and eight in winter, and the keys deposited with the Master until the morning. Whoever spent the night out of College or entered except by the gate, was punished, a Fellow by a fine of twelve pence, a Scholastic by a flogging.

Having now sketched the constitutional history of the College to the end of the middle ages, we have now to mention a few facts of interest during that time. These group themselves first round the name of John Wycliffe the reformer of religion, and then round the band of learned men and patrons of learning, the reformers of classical study, in the century after him.

In 1360 and 1361 John Wycliffe is mentioned in the College muniments as Master of Balliol. That this was the famous teacher and preacher is not disputed, but there has been much controversy as to his earlier history. That he began his University life at Queen’s is indeed known to be a mistake; but the entry of the name in the bursar’s rolls at Merton under the date June 1356 has led many to believe that he was a Fellow of that College. It seems nearly certain that there were two John Wycliffes at Oxford at the time; and since the Master of Balliol could only be elected from among the Fellows, the inference seems clear that the Wycliffe who was Master of Balliol cannot have been Fellow of Merton. Besides, it has been pointed out that Wycliffe the reformer’s descent from a family settled hard by Barnard Castle, the home of the Balliols, would naturally lead him to enter the Balliol foundation at Oxford; there was another Wycliffe also at Balliol, and three members of the College—one himself Master—were given the benefice of Wycliffe-upon-Tees between 1363 and 1369. Fellowships were obtained by personal influence, and ties of this kind would easily help his admission. Moreover, it was not common for a northerner to enter a College like Merton, which appears in fact to have formed the head-quarters of the southern party at Oxford.[32]

Whatever be the truth in this matter, Wycliffe’s connection with Balliol is scarcely a matter of high importance. Men did not in those days receive their education within the College walls. The College was the boarding-house where they dwelt, where they were maintained, and where they attended divine service. It is true that disputations were required to take place within the House; but this was only to ensure their regularity. It was an affair of discipline, not of tuition, for the College tutor was an officer undreamt of in those days; the duty of the Principal on these occasions was only to announce the subject, to preside over the discussion, and to keep order. Nor again was Wycliffe Master for more than a short time. He was elected after 1356, and he resigned his post shortly after accepting the College living of Fillingham in 1361. When in later years he lived in Oxford he took up his abode elsewhere than in Balliol; perhaps at Queen’s, then, according to many, at Canterbury Hall, finally at Black Hall: Balliol, it should seem, at that time had room only for members of the foundation. The chief interest residing in his connection with the College lies in the fact, to which we have alluded, that his great exemplar, Richard FitzRalph, had been a Fellow of it about the time of Wycliffe’s birth, and was probably still resident in Oxford when Wycliffe came up as a freshman.

The age succeeding Wycliffe’s death is the most barren time in the history of the University. Scholastic philosophy had lost its vitality and become over-elaborated into a trivial formalism. Logic had ceased to act as a stimulus to the intellectual powers, and had rather become a clog upon their exercise; and men no longer framed syllogisms to develop their thoughts, but argued first and thought, if at all, afterwards. When, however, towards the middle of the fifteenth century, the revival of learning which we associate with the name of humanism began to influence English students, it was not those who stayed in England who caught its spirit, but those who were able to pursue a second student’s course in Italy, and there devote their zeal to the half-forgotten stores of classical Latin literature and the unknown treasure-house of Greek. It was only the ebb of the humanistic movement which in England, as in Germany, turned to refresh and invigorate the study of theology. In the earlier phase, so far as it affected England, Balliol College took a foremost position, though indeed there is less evidence of this activity among the resident members of the House than among those who had passed from it to become the patrons and pioneers of a younger generation of scholars. They were almost all travelled men, who collected manuscripts and had them copied for them, founded libraries and sowed the seed for others to reap the fruit.

First among these in time and in dignity was Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, the Good Duke Humphrey, by whose munificence the University Library grew from a small number of volumes chained on desks in the upper chamber of the Congregation House at Saint Mary’s,[33] into a collection of some six hundred manuscripts, of unique value, because, unlike the existing cathedral and monastic libraries, it was formed at the time when attention was being again devoted to classical learning and with the help of the foreign scholars, whose work the Duke loved to encourage, and whom he employed to transcribe and collect for him. His library contained little theology; it was rich in classical Latin literature, in Arabic science (in translations), and in the new literature of Italy, counting at least five volumes of Boccaccio, seven of Petrarch, and two of Dante.[34] Unhappily the whole library was wrecked and brought to nothing in the violence of the reign of King Edward the Sixth, and the three volumes which are now preserved in the re-founded University Library of Sir Thomas Bodley were recovered piecemeal from those who had obtained possession of them in the great days of plunder.[35] That Duke Humphrey was a member of Balliol College is attested by Leland[36] and Bale,[37] but further evidence is wanting.

Almost at the same time as the University Library was thus enriched, five Englishmen are mentioned as students at Ferrara under the illustrious teacher Guarino:[38] four of the five are claimed by our College, William Grey, John Tiptoft, John Free, and John Gunthorpe. Of these, two were men of letters and munificent patrons of learning, the third was himself a scholar of high repute, and the last combined, perhaps in a lesser degree, the characteristics of both classes. William Grey stands in a peculiarly close relation with the College. A member of the noble house of Codnor, he resided for a long time at Cologne in princely style, and maintained a magnificent household. Here he studied logic, philosophy, and theology. He was Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1440 to 1442, and then went forth again for a more prolonged course of study in Italy, at Florence, Padua, and Ferrara. Removing in 1449 to Rome, as proctor for King Henry the Sixth, he lived there an honoured member of the learned society in the papal city, and continued to collect manuscripts and to have them transcribed and illuminated under his eyes, until he was recalled in 1454 to the Bishopric of Ely. It was his devotion to humanism and his patronage of learned men that naturally found favour with Pope Nicolas the Fifth, and his elevation to the see of Ely was the Pope’s act. After his return to England he was not regardless of the affairs of State—indeed for a time in 1469 and 1470 he was Lord Treasurer—but his paramount interest still lay in his books and his circle of scholars, himself credited with a knowledge not only of Greek but of Hebrew. It was his desire that his library should be preserved within the walls of his old College. One of its members, Robert Abdy, heartily coöperated with him, and the books—some two hundred in number, and including a printed copy of Josephus—were safely housed in a new building erected for the purpose, probably just before the Bishop’s death in 1478. Many of the codices were unhappily destroyed during the reign of King Edward the Sixth, and by Wood’s time few of the miniatures in the remaining volumes had escaped mutilation.[39] But it is a good testimony to the loyal spirit in which the College kept the trust committed to them, that no less than a hundred and fifty-two of Grey’s manuscripts are still in its possession.[40]

Part of the building in which the library was to find a home was already in existence. The ground-floor, and perhaps the dining-hall (now the library reading-room) adjoining, are attributed to Thomas Chase, who had been Master from 1412 to 1423, and was Chancellor of the University from 1426 to 1430. It was the upper part of the library which was expressly built for the purpose of receiving Bishop Grey’s books, and it was the work of Abdy, who as Fellow and then, from 1477 to 1494, as Master devoted himself to the enlargement and adornment of the College buildings, Grey helping him liberally with money. On more than one of the library windows their joint bounty was commemorated:—

Hos Deus adiecit, Deus his det gaudia celi:

Abdy perfecit opus hoc Gray presul et Ely.

And again:—

Conditor ecce novi structus huius fuit Abdy:

Presul et huic Hely Gray libros contulit edi.

The bishop’s coat of arms may still be seen on the panels below the great window of the old solar, now the Master’s dining-hall; and elsewhere in the new buildings might be seen the arms of George Nevill, Archbishop of York, the brother of the King-Maker, who was also a member, and would thus appear to have been a benefactor, of the College.[41] The future Archbishop was made Chancellor of the University in 1453 when he was barely twenty-two years of age.[42] His installation banquet, the particulars of which may be read in Savage’s Balliofergus,[43] was of a prodigality to which it would be hard to find a parallel: it consisted of nine hundred messes of meat, with twelve hundred hogsheads of beer and four hundred and sixteen of wine; and if, as it appears, it was held within the College, the resources of the house must have been severely taxed to make provision for the entertainment of the company, which included twenty-two noblemen, seventeen bishops and abbots, a number of noble ladies, and a multitude of other guests, not to speak of more than two thousand servants.

The other Balliol scholars who followed the instruction of Guarino at Ferrara were a good deal younger than Grey; for Guarino lived on until 1460, when he died at the age of ninety. Tiptoft, who was created Earl of Worcester in his twenty-second year, in 1449, was an enthusiastic traveller. He set out first to Jerusalem; returned to Venice, and then spent several years in study at Ferrara, Padua, and Rome.[44] During this time he collected manuscripts wherever he could lay hands on them, and formed a precious library, with which he afterwards endowed the University of Oxford: its value was reckoned at no less than five hundred marks.[45] His later career as Treasurer and High Constable belongs to the public history of England. It is to be lamented that he brought back from the Italian renaissance a spirit of cruelty and recklessness of giving pain, unknown to the humaner middle ages, which made him one of the first victims of the revolution that restored King Henry the Sixth to the throne. But in his death the cause of letters received a blow such as we can only compare with that which it suffered by the execution of the Earl of Surrey in the last days of King Henry the Eighth. It is a strange coincidence that one of the leaders of the restoration movement, one of those chiefly chargeable with Tiptoft’s death, was his own Balliol contemporary, Archbishop Nevill, the new Lord Chancellor.[46]

John Free, who graduated in 1450,[47] was a Fellow of Balliol College, and was afterwards a Doctor of Medicine of Padua. During a life spent in Italy he became famous as a poet and a Greek scholar, a civilist and a physician.[48] Pope Paul the Second made him Bishop of Bath and Wells, but he died almost immediately, in 1465.[49] Gunthorpe was his companion in study at Ferrara, and he too became distinguished as a scholar: but he was still more a collector of books, some of which he gave to Jesus College, Cambridge—at one time he was Warden of the King’s Hall in that University—while others came to several libraries at Oxford. Gunthorpe is best known as a man of affairs, a diplomatist and minister of state. He became Dean of Wells, and is still remembered in that city by the guns with which he adorned the Deanery he built.[50] He survived all his fellow-scholars we have named, and died in 1498.[51]

From the end of the middle ages down to the present century Balliol College presents none of those characteristics of distinction which we have remarked in the fifteenth century. During this time, indeed, although in the nature of things a large number of men of note continued to receive their education at Oxford, there was no College or Colleges which could be said to occupy anything like a position of peculiar eminence or dignity. In the general decline of learning, education, and manners, Balliol College appears even to have sunk below most of its rivals, and its annals show little more than a dreary record of lazy torpor and bad living.[52] The Statutes of the College received no alterations of importance. Its power to choose its own Visitor was indeed for a time overridden by the Bishop of Lincoln, who was considered ex officio Visitor until Bishop Barlow’s death in 1691;[53] and the Scholastici became distinguished as Scholares from an inferior rank of Servitores with which the Statutes of 1507 had identified them. Another lower class of students, called Batellers, also came into existence. Every Commoner was required by a rule of 1574 to be under the Master or one of the Fellows as his Tutor;[54] Scholars being apparently ipso facto subject to the Fellows who nominated them. In 1610 it was ordered, with the Visitor’s consent, that Fellow Commoners might be admitted to the College and be free from “public correction,” except in the case of scandalous offences; they were not bound to exhibit reverence to the Fellows in the quadrangle unless they encountered them face to face—reverentiam Sociis in quadrangulo consuetam non nisi in occursu praestent. Every such Commoner was bound to pay at least five pounds on admission for the purchase of plate or books for the College.[55] The sum was in 1691 raised to ten pounds.[56] As the disputations in hall tended to become less and less of a reality, and the lectures in the schools became a pure matter of routine for the younger Masters, provision had to be made for something in the way of regular lectures, but fixed tuition-fees were not yet invented, and so the richest living in the gift of the College—that of Fillingham in Lincolnshire, which had been usually held by the Master and was now attached to his office—was in 1571 charged with the payment of £8 13s..4d. to three Prelectors chosen by the College who should lecture in hall on Greek, dialectic, and rhetoric.[57] The lectures, it was soon after decided, were to be held at least thrice a week during term, except on Feast Days or when the lecturer was ill. Any one who failed to fulfil his duty—either in person or by a deputy—was to pay twopence to be consumed by the other Fellows at dinner or supper on the Sunday next following.[58] In 1695 the famous Dr. Busby, who had before shown himself a friend to the College,[59] established a Catechetical Lecture to be given on thirty prescribed subjects through the year, at which all members of the College were bound to be present.[60] This Lecture was maintained until recent years.

During the two centuries following the reign of King Edward the Third the College had received little or no addition to its corporate endowments, though, as we have seen, it had been largely helped by donations towards its buildings, and above all by the foundation of its precious library.[61] Between the date of the accession of Queen Elizabeth and the year 1677, in the renewed zeal for academical foundations which marked that period, the College received a number of new benefactions; and these introduced a new element into its composition. Hitherto all the Fellowships had been open without restriction of place of birth or education; and although it is likely that the College in its earlier days drew its recruits mainly from the north of England, yet there was nothing in the Statutes to authorize the connection. The College, it is true, was a very close corporation, for Fellow nominated Scholar, and out of the Scholars the Fellows were generally elected. Still, in contradistinction to the majority of Colleges, there were no local limitations upon eligibility to Scholarships. The new endowments, on the other hand, with the exception of those of the Lady Periam, were all so limited. First, by a bequest of Dr. John Bell, formerly Bishop of Worcester, two Scholarships confined to natives of his diocese were founded in 1559,[62] and in 1605 Sir William Dunch established another for the benefit of Abingdon School.[63] A little later Balliol nearly became possessed of the much larger endowment, of seven Fellowships and six Scholarships, attached to the same school by William Tisdale. Indeed part of the money was paid over, six Scholars were appointed, and Cesar’s lodgings—of which more hereafter—were bought for their reception.[64] But a subsequent arrangement diverted the endowment, which in 1624 helped to change the ancient Broadgates Hall into Pembroke College.[65] In the meanwhile a more considerable benefaction, also connected with a local school, accrued to Balliol between 1601 and 1615, when in execution of the will of Peter Blundell one Fellowship and one Scholarship were founded to be held by persons educated at Blundell’s Grammar School at Tiverton, and nominated by the Trustees of the School.[66] The next endowment in order of time was that of Elizabeth, widow of Chief Baron Periam and sister of Francis Bacon. The nomination to the Fellowship and two Scholarships which she founded in 1620, she reserved to herself for her lifetime; afterwards they were to be filled up in the same manner as the other Fellowships of the College.[67]

After the Restoration two separate benefactions set up that close connection between the College and Scotland which saved Balliol from sinking into utter obscurity in the century following, and which has since contributed to it a large share of its later fame. Bishop Warner of Rochester, who died in 1666, bequeathed to the College the annual sum of eighty pounds for the support of four scholars from Scotland to be chosen by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Rochester; and about ten years later certain Exhibitions were founded by Mr. John Snell for persons nominated by Glasgow University. The latter varied in number according to the proceeds of Mr. Snell’s estate; at one time they were as many as ten and of the yearly value of £116, but their number and value have since been reduced. Both of these foundations were expressly designed to promote the interests of the Episcopal Church in Scotland.[68] Their importance in the history of the College cannot be overestimated, and it is to them that it owes such names among its members as Adam Smith, Sir William Hamilton, and Archbishop Tait, to say nothing of a great company of distinguished Scotsmen now living. The Exhibitioners have also as a rule offered an admirable example of frugal habits and hard work; and perhaps it was in consideration of their national thriftiness that the rooms assigned them are noticed in 1791 as mean and incommodious.[69]

Among more recent benefactions to the College the most important is that of Miss Hannah Brakenbury who, besides the questionable service of contributing towards the rebuilding of the front quadrangle, endowed eight Scholarships for the encouragement of the studies of Law and Modern History. Nor should we omit to mention the two Exhibitions of £100 a-year each, founded under the will of Richard Jenkyns, formerly Master, which are awarded by examination to members of the College, and the list of holders of which is of exceptional brilliancy. But in recent years the number of Scholarships and Exhibitions has been most of all increased not by means of any specific endowment but by savings from the annual internal income of the College. In pursuance of the ordinances of the Universities’ Commission of 1877, Balliol became the owner of New Inn Hall on the death of its late Principal; and the proceeds of the sale of the Hall, when effected, are to be applied to the establishment of Exhibitions for poor students.

We now resume the history of the College buildings. We have seen that the Chapel was built early in the reign of King Edward the Third, and that the hall and library buildings were added in the following century.[70] A new Chapel was built between 1521 and 1529,[71] which lasted until the present century. It contained a muniment-room or treasury, “which,” says Anthony Wood, “is a kind of vestry, joyning on the S. side of the E. end of the chappel;”[72] and there was a window opening into it, as at Corpus, from the library.[73] With the present Chapel in one’s mind it is hard to estimate the loss which from a picturesque point of view the College has suffered by the destruction of its predecessor. In modern times Oxford has ever been a prey to architects. The rebuilding of Queen’s is an example of what happily was not carried into effect at Magdalen and Brasenose in the last century; but in the present, Balliol is almost peculiar in the extent to which these depredations have run, and those who remember the line of buildings of the Chapel and library as they looked from the Fellows’ garden say that for harmony and quiet charm they were of their kind unsurpassed in Oxford. Among the special features of the old Chapel were the painted windows, particularly the great east window given by Lawrence Stubbs in 1529. The fragments of this are distributed among the side windows of the modern Chapel, and even in their scattered state are highly regarded by lovers of glass-painting.[74] Of the later buildings of the College, “Cesar’s lodgings” must not pass without notice. It had its name from Henry Caesar, afterwards Dean of Carlisle—the brother of Sir Julius Caesar, Master of the Rolls (1614–1636)—and stood opposite to where the “Martyrs’ Memorial” now is. Being currently known as Cesar, an opposite stack of buildings to the south of it was naturally called Pompey. The two were pulled down, not before it was necessary, in the second quarter of the present century.[75] Hammond’s lodgings, which came to the College in Queen Elizabeth’s time, and stood on the site of the old Master’s little garden and the present Master’s house, were occupied by the Blundell and Periam Fellows.[76]

Before the front of the College was a close, planted with trees like that in front of St. John’s.