It is to be hoped, no doubt, that they were preceded and supplemented by sound private tuition; but upon this, unhappily, the Merton records throw no light. It seems to be assumed in the original Statutes that Scholars of Merton, though bound to study within the House, will receive their instruction outside it. The only exception was the statutable institution of a grammar-master, who was to have charge of the students in grammar, and to whom “the more advanced might have recourse without a blush, when doubts should arise in their faculty.” This institution was treated by Archbishop Peckham as of primary importance; and he specially censures the College for practically excluding boys who had still to learn the rudiments of grammar. There is good reason to believe that John of Cornwall, who is mentioned as the first to introduce the study of English in schools, and to abandon the practice of construing Latin into French, actually held the office of grammar-master in Merton College. These Merton grammar-masters (who continued to be appointed in the sixteenth century) were probably the earliest type of College tutors—an order which inevitably developed itself at a later period, but of which the history remains to be evolved from very scanty materials. The medical lectures founded by Linacre, and the Divinity lectures founded by Bickley, in the sixteenth century, as well as the lectures delivered by Thomas Bodley on Greek, were essentially College lectures, but seem to have been professorial rather than tutorial. A College order of June 9th, 1586, the first year of Savile’s wardenship, requires the Regent-Masters to deliver twenty public lectures to the Postmasters on the Sphere or on Arithmetic, as the Warden should think fit. Probably this rule was soon neglected; and it is not until a much later period that we find the modern relation of tutor and pupil a living reality in Colleges.
We may pass lightly over some other strange, though not unique, customs of Merton which fill a large space in the Register and the pages of Anthony Wood. One of these was the annual election of a Rex Fabarum, or “Christmas King,” on the vigil of St. Edmund (Nov. 19th), under the authority of sealed letters, which “pretended to have been brought from some place beyond sea.” This absurd farce, reminding us of the rough burlesques formerly practised on board ship in crossing the Equator, was solemnly enacted year after year, and recorded in the Register with as much gravity as the succession of a Warden. The person chosen was the senior Fellow who had not yet borne the office; and, according to Wood, his duty was “to punish all misdemeanours done in the time of Christmas, either by imposing exercises on the juniors, or putting into the stocks at the end of the Hall any of the servants, with other punishments that were sometimes very ridiculous.” This went on until Candlemas (Feb. 2nd), “or much about the time that the Ignis Regentium was celebrated.” The Ignis Regentium seems to have been nothing more than a great College wine-party round the Hall fire, attended with various traditional festivities, and provided at the cost of all the Regent-Masters, or only of the Senior Regent, whose munificent hospitality is sometimes expressly commended. Of a similar nature were the practical jokes and rude horse-play described by Anthony Wood as carried on, by way of initiating freshmen, on All Saints Eve and other Eves and Saints’ Days up to Christmas, as well as on Shrove Tuesday, when the poor novices were compelled to declaim in undress from a form placed on the High Table, and rewarded, or punished with some brutality, for their performances. It is significant that, under the Commonwealth, these old-world jovialities were disused, and soon afterwards died out. The old custom of singing Catholic hymns in the College Hall, on the Eves and Vigils of Saints’ Days between All Saints and Candlemas Day, had been modified at the Reformation by the substitution of Sternhold and Hopkins’ Psalms, which continued to be sung in Anthony Wood’s times. Not less curious, and more important, are the detailed regulations made for the health of the College during frequent outbreaks of the plague, when the majority of Fellows and students migrated to Cuxham, Stow Wood, Islip, Eynsham, or elsewhere, and communication between the College and the town was strictly limited.
Were it possible for a Merton Fellow of the Plantagenet, Tudor, or Stuart period to revisit his College in our own day, he would find but few survivals of the quaint usages once peculiar to it. The recitation of a thanksgiving prayer for benefits inherited from the Founder at the end of each chapel-service, the time-honoured practice of striking the Hall table with a wooden trencher as a signal for grace, and the ceremonies observed on the induction of a new Warden, are perhaps the only outward and visible relics of its ancient customary which the spirit of innovation has left alive. But he would feel himself at home in the noble choir of the Chapel, with its stonework and painted glass almost untouched by the lapse of six centuries; in the Library, retaining every structural feature of Bishop Rede’s original work down to its minutest detail; in the Treasury, with its massive high-pitched roof, under which the College archives have been preserved entire since the reign of Edward I., together with a coeval inventory of the documents then deposited there; in the College Garden, surrounded on two sides by the town-wall of Henry III., extended eastward since the close of the Middle Ages by purchases from the City, but curtailed westward by sales of land for the site of Corpus. Perhaps, on reviewing the unbroken continuity of College history through more than twenty generations, crowded with vicissitudes in Church and State, with transformations of ancient institutions, and with revolutions in human thought, he would cease to repine over changes which the Founder himself foresaw as inevitable, and would rather marvel at the vitality of a collegiate society, which can still maintain its corporate identity, with so much of its original structure, in an age beyond that which mediæval seers had assigned for the end of the world.
IV.
EXETER COLLEGE.
By the Rev. Charles W. Boase, M.A., Fellow of Exeter College.
In 1314 Walter de Stapeldon, Bishop of Exeter, founded Stapeldon Hall, soon better known as Exeter College, for “Scholars” (i.e. Fellows), born or resident in Devon and Cornwall, eight from the former and four from the latter county; and he also founded a grammar-school at Exeter, to prepare boys for Oxford. He had, at first, bought ground in and near Hart Hall (now Hertford College); but this site not proving large enough, he removed the students to St. Stephen’s Hall in St. Mildred’s parish, and gave them Hart Hall, that by its rent their rooms might be kept in repair and be rent-free.
The object of the early founders of Colleges was to pass as many men as possible through a course of training that would fit them for the service of Church or State: and so Stapeldon fixed fourteen years as the outside period of holding his scholarships; he had no idea of giving fellowships for life. The twelve scholars were to study Philosophy; and a thirteenth scholar was to be a priest studying Scripture or Canon Law. Aptness to learn, good character, and poverty were the qualifications required of them; and they were to be chosen without regard to favour, fear, relationship, or love. They were kept in order by punishments, increasing from a stoppage of commons to expulsion, at the discretion of the Rector, who was chosen annually after the audit in October. The Rector also looked after the money, and rooms, and servants; but, if two Fellows demanded the expulsion of a servant he was to appoint another. The Rector must have been always under thirty; it was the younger Masters of Arts that then directed education in the University. Disputations were held twice a week, and of three disputations, two were in Logic, one in Natural Science. Tenpence a week was allowed for commons, and each scholar received in addition the sum of ten shillings a year, the Rector and the Priest twenty shillings each. If any scholar was away for more than four weeks his commons were stopped; and by an absence of five months he forfeited his scholarship.
Stapeldon endowed his Hall with the great tithes of Gwinear in Cornwall, and of Long Wittenham in Berks; and any surplus or legacy was to go to public purposes, such as increasing the number of scholars or buying books. There was a common chest with three keys, kept by the Rector, the senior Scholar, and the Priest; and the audit-rolls (computi) are extant from 1324, though with gaps, as for instance during the Black Death (1349). There is something touching in the number of legacies which Stapeldon
