civil law, upon every resident religious, whether like the CHAPT Benedictines and the canons recognised owners of wor wealth, or like the Mendicants avowedly sworn to poverty: on the wealthier clergy, and on the higher dignitaries of the Church, though in the last case assistance was b rather than authoritatively enforced. By efforts like te the university began to attain to a real as well as by independence of the friars; and it was probably amit t... time that a statute was formed making it obligatory on all who lectured on the canon or the civil law, to hire the rooms and deliver their lectures there'. Slowly, but surely and inevitably, the tide of learn's was rolling on away from the friary and the monastery. From an attempted combination of the secular and religi vas elements like that represented in the Hospital of St. John and Pembroke College, and a vigorous effort at independence on the part of the university like that illustrated in the foregoing details, we pass to a fresh stage in the same movement, -the direct diversion of property from the religious orders to the universities. It is evident that with the fifteenth century a new feeling began to possess the minds of many with respect to the monastic foundations,-the feeling of despair. There appears to have been as yet no distinct sentiment of aversion to monasticism as a theory, but even the lover of the monastery began to despair of the monk; and it is among the most significant proofs of the corruption of the different religious orders at this period, that the foundations that began to rise at both universities are to be referred not to any dislike of the system which those onders represented, but to the conviction that the rule they had received was habitually and wilfully violated. In the foundation, at Oxford, of New College by William of Wykeham we have a signal proof of this state of feeling. The collegeS itself, though built up as it were out of the ruins of monastic 1 Hence the frequent entries in the Grace Books, of payments proscholis in jure civili, Sce tirare lik A tib; Grace Hook B p. 112. For a detailed account of the architectural history of the schools see Cooper, PART II. Foundation of Nxw Col LEGE, 1350. CHAP. IL foundations, retained more than any similar society, the discipline of the monastic life. It was, in fact, half as a substitute for the monastery that the college appears to have been designed. Long before it was constituted, William of Wykeham had sought among monks and mendicants to find a less glaring discrepancy between theory and practice, and he had sought in vain. 'He had been obliged,' says one of his biographers, with grief to declare, that he could not anywhere find that the ordinances of their founders, according to their true design and intention, were at present observed by any of them". The college endowed with The extension given by this eminent prelate to the condad from ception of Walter de Merton is represented by the fact that lands pur he endowed his college with lands purchased from religious houses, and though there was nothing in such an act which the most strenuous supporters of monastic institutions could directly impugn, inasmuch as the new foundation was designed for the secular clergy, we may be quite sure that the alienation of the property from the communities to which it originally belonged, was a measure regarded by many with distrust and suspicion. It needed the stainless reputation, the noble descent, and the high position of the founder to sanction such an innovation, and the precedent probably had weight in those more decisive acts in the same direction which belong to the two succeeding centuries. But there was nothing of an arbitrary character in William of Wykeham's procedure; the lands which he purchased from Oseney Abbey, the priory of St. Frideswide, and St. John's Hospital, were bought with the full consent of the proprietaries; the significance of the proceeding consisted in the fact that such large estates should be appropriated by one, whose example was so potent among his countrymen, to such a purpose. The scheme of his noble foundation threw into the shade every existing college whether at Oxford or Cambridge, and was the first in our own country which could compare with 1 Lowth, Life of William of Wyke ham, p. 21. To exactly similar effect is the language of Colet's biographer: -Not that he hated any one of their several orders; but because he found that few or none of them lived up to their vows and professions.' Knight, Life of Colet, p. 72. tion of the practices of the Mendicants, whose 'Cain's Castles' CHAP IL: find in him an ingenious and elaborate apologist. As for the claims of the uncultured Lollards to interpret for themselves at the meaning of the Scriptures, he declared that such and w attempt, for an intellect untrained by Aristotle, was a work of the greatest peril. There is no book,' he says, 'written in the world by which a man shall rather take ocasion to err.' While therefore his agreement with the followers of Wyclif was sufficient to alienate him from the Romish party, his divergences from them were such as totally to preclude the possibility of his gaining their moral support; and on the single point where they and the Mendicants were at one, he again was at issue with both. Evangelism, or the popular exposition of Scripture, was a cardinal point with both the Lollards and the friars; with the latter it had been the weapon which had given them the victory over their earlier antagonists and contributed so materially to their widespread success; and a noticeable illustra tion of the estimation in which the preacher's art was held by their party, is afforded us shortly before the time of Pecock, about the commencement of the century, in connexion with the university of Can.bridge. Among those who taught at the university at that period was John Bromyard, the Jo author or compiler of the Summa Prædicantium. He was a " Dominican, was both Doctor Utriusque Juris and master of theology, and a strenuous opposer of Wyclif's teaching; his estimate of the importance of the preacher's function however is clearly attested by the massive volume which he put forth as a professed aid to those who were called upon to expound the Scriptures to the people. The work represents a series of skeleton sermons, arranged not under texts, but under single words expressive of abstract qualities, such as Abstinentia, Adulatio, Avaritia, Conscientia, Fides, Patientia, Paupertas, Trinitas, Vocatio, etc., each being followed by a brief exposition, illustrated by frequent quotations from the Fathers, and occasionally by an apposite anecdote'. 1 Summa Prædicantium Omnibus Dr. minick Gregia Pastoribus, Diviu Verbi Præteorikur, Animamon Files PART IL Bromyard contrasted one. CHAP. L exegesis is cold, formal, and systematic, not without that amount of the logical element which finds expression in conclusions derived from a series of observations each commanding the moral assent, but rarely deducing any novel aspect of truth, and taking its stand, for the most part, entirely super antiquas vias. In the contrast presented by this laborious, careful, and learned production to the speculative tendencies Peek and that belong to the doctrinal expositions of Pecock, we may perhaps discern the earliest instance of that antithesis which, The contrast with occasional exceptions, has generally characterised the theological activity of the two universities; that however with which we are here more directly concerned is, the widely different implied estimate of the value of preaching when compared with Pecock's views on the same subject. Neither Wyclif's 'simple priest,' nor the eloquence of the Dominican appears to have found much favour in the bishop of ChichesProck dis ter's sight. He seems to have been of opinion that there was a great deal too much preaching already; and in an age when the great majority of men were compelled to learn by oral instruction or not at all, and at a time when the indifference manifested by the superior clergy to the instruction of the lower orders, and the numbers of non-residents and pluralists were exciting widespread indignation, this eccentric ecclesiastic thought it a favourable juncture for compiling an elaborate defence, half-defiant, half apologetic, of the conduct of his episcopal brethren. It can hardly be said that in the pages of the 'Repressor' the author shews much confidence in the resources of his logic to produce con Broves of 2uch preaching. defence of his order. is eccentric viction; rhetoric plays a much more conspicuous part. At one time he seeks to shroud the episcopal functions in a veil of mystery, the bishop has duties to perform which the vulgar wot not of; at another, he makes appeals ad misericordiam,-bishops, after all, 'ben men and not pure aungels;' again, only those who enter upor. the office are aware with how many difficulties it is beset; no man, to use his own somewhat too familiar simile, knows how hard it is to climb a tree Cultoribus longe utilissima ac perne. times printed; the edition I have used is that printed at Antwerp, in 1614. PA or to descend a tree, save the man that himself essayeth it'. mar To the Lollards, who held that it was the first duty of a bishop to provide for and participate in the spiritual instruction of his diocese, such arguments could only have appeared an audacious piece of special pleading in defence of some of the worst abuses of the Church, and its author, much as he appears to dean Hook, an Ultramontanist of the deepest dye. It is easy to see that Reginald Pecock was both something more and something less than this; but his self-confidence led him to sever himself from both parties, at a time when such isolation was unsafe if not impossible. He alienated a powerful section at home, who still adhered to the theory of the great councils, by his assertion of the absolute authority of the pope. The universities, if conciliated by his support of the theory represented by the Barnwell Process and his opposition to the statute of Provisors, were scandalised by his attacks on two of the fathers, St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, whose teaching was enshrined in their universal text-book, the Sentences. While the bishops, far from being won by his fantastic defence of their order, descried heresy in the manner in which he had called in question such doctrines as the Third Person in the Trinity, and the descent of Christ into Hades. At Cambridge he encountered powerful enemies. Among them were William Millington, the first provost of King's, a man of honorable spirit, and considerable attainments, but of violent and unscrupulous temper; Hugh Damlet, master of Pembroke, who offered to prove from Pecock's writings that he was guilty of the worst heresy, and who formed one of the commission before which he was arraigned; 1 See The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, edited for the Rolls Series, by Prof. Churchill Babington, B.D. 1 102–110, Perhaps it would not be greatly wrong to assert that Perock stau 14 half way between the Church of Rome and the Church of England, as they now exist, the type of las mini however being rather Anglean than Roman. Of Puritanism, in all its phases, he is the decided opponent. There were many others more or less like him. Ibid. p. xxvi. * Capgrave says of him, 'in seto- • Corem unications of the Cami |