The Colleges of Oxford. Various

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Название The Colleges of Oxford
Автор произведения Various
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greasy, whereas, in the reign of Henry III. parchment was not so, but fine and clear.” There never were such persons as Chapyrnay and Caldwell, and William of Durham did not die till 1249, and then left only three hundred and ten marks. Mr. Twine, the author of the Apology for the Antiquity of Oxford, said of this deed, “mentiri nescit, it cannot lie.” “But,” says quaintly Mr. William Smith, “if ever there was a lie in the world, that which we find in that Charter is as great a one as ever the Devil told since he deceived our first Parents in Paradise.”

      It would oppress the reader to detail all the other fictions which followed on this early one. One lie makes many, and as time went on outward embellishments were added to the College commemorative of its mythical founder. Thus a picture of King Alfred was bought in the year 1662 for £3—perhaps the same which one now sees in the College library. There was—so Mr. Smith relates—an older picture of him in the Masters’ lodgings.

      A statue of Alfred also stood over the chapel door, and was removed by Mr. Obadiah Walker, Master in 1676, to a niche over the hall door to make place for a statue of St. Cuthbert, the patron saint of Durham, on whose day the gaudy used to be celebrated until 1662, at which date it was changed to the day of Saints Simon and Jude, out of respect to the memory of Sir Simon Benet, who had lately bequeathed four Fellowships, four scholarships, and various other benefits. This was the real cause of the 28th of October being chosen for the gaudy, although afterwards the Aluredians absurdly pretended that it was the day of King Alfred’s obit. The statue of Alfred above-mentioned was given by Dr. Robert Plot, the well-known author of The Natural History of Oxfordshire, who was a Fellow-commoner of the College, and it cost £3 1s. 5d. to remove it, as related, in the year 1686. A hundred years later a marble image of Alfred was given to the College by Viscount Folkestone, which is now set up over the fireplace in the oak common-room. A relief of him is also set over the fireplace in the college-hall, and was given by Sir Roger Newdigate, a member of the College, and founder of the University annual prize for an English poem.

      A picture of St. John of Beverley, mentioned in the French petition to Richard II., was, we learn from Gutch’s edition of Antony Wood’s Colleges and Halls (ed. 1786, p. 57), set in the east window of the old chapel in the beginning of the seventeenth century. The same authority assures us that until Dr. Clayton’s time (Master, 1605) there were in a window on the west side of the little old quadrangle pictures of King Alfred kneeling and St. Cuthbert sitting, … the king thus bespeaking the saint in a pentameter, holding the picture of the College in his hand, “Hic in honore tui collegium statui,” to whom the saint made answer, in a scroll coming from his mouth—“Quæ statuisti in eo pervertentes maledico.”

      In a window of the outer chapel were also the arms of William of Durham, which were, “Or, a Fleur de lis azure, each leaf charged with a mullet gules.” Round these arms was written on a scroll: “Magistri Willielmi de Dunelm … huius collegii”; the missing word, so Wood had been informed, was “Fundatoris,” erased, no doubt, by an Aluredian. The arms of the College to-day are those of Edward the Confessor, to wit—“Azure, a cross patonce between five martlets Or.” We would do well to resign our sham royalty, and return to the arms of William of Durham, our true founder.

      The crowning fiction was the celebration in the year 1872 of the millennium of the College, during the mastership of the Rev. G. G. Bradley, afterwards Dean of Westminster. It is said that a distinguished modern historian ironically sent him a number of burned cakes, purporting to have been dug up at Athelney, to entertain King Alfred’s scholars withal. It is not recorded if they were served up or no to the guests, among whom were Dean Stanley and Mr. Robert Lowe, both past tutors of the College. At the dinner which graced this festal occasion, the late Dean of Westminster is said to have ridiculed the idea of King Alfred having bestowed lands and tenements on scholars in Oxford, which place was in A.D. 872 in possession of Alfred’s enemies the Danes; whereupon Mr. Lowe made the happy answer, that this latter fact was itself a confirmation of the legend, for King Alfred was a man much before his time, who in the spirit of some modern leaders of the democracy took care to bestow on his followers, not his own lands, but those of his political opponents.

      Between the years 1307 and 1360 as many as sixteen halls in the parishes of St. Mary, St. Peter, St. Mildred, and All Hallows were bought for the College. They were no doubt let out as lodgings to University students, and were in those days, as now, a remunerative form of investment; some of them standing on sites which have since come to be occupied by colleges.

      It was not till the fifteenth century that the College acquired property outside Oxford, and then not by purchase, but by bequest. In those days locomotion was too difficult for a small group of scholars to venture on far-off purchases. But in 1403 Walter Skirlaw, Bishop of Durham, left to our College the Manor of Mark’s Hall, or Margaret Ruthing, in Essex. The proceeds were to sustain three Fellows “chosen out of students at Oxford or Cambridge, and if possible born in the dioceses of York and Durham.” It has already been remarked how closely connected was the College with the North of England. No other conditions were attached to the benefaction save this, that “all the Fellows shall every year, for ever, celebrate solemn obsequies in their chapel upon the day of the Bishop’s death, with a Placebo and Dirige, and a Mass for the dead the day after.” Is it altogether for good that we have outgrown those customs of pious gratitude to the past? Bishop Skirlaw’s Fellowships, it may be added, figure in the Calendar as of the foundation of Henry IV., because the lands were passed as a matter of legal form through the sovereign’s lands in order to avoid certain difficulties connected with mortmains.

      The next great benefactor of the College after Bishop Skirlaw was Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, who in 1442 left property and the advowson of Arncliffe in Craven in Yorkshire. Three Fellows drawn from the dioceses of Durham, Carlisle, and York were to be sustained out of his benefaction. The next chief benefaction was that of John Freyston or Frieston, who in 1592 bequeathed property in Pontefract for the support of a Fellow or Exhibitioner, who should be a Yorkshire man, and also by his will made the College trustee to pay certain