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Chapter Ten Early Modern Oxford and Cambridge John Willinsky, The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). OPEN ACCESS FINAL DRAFT Chapter Ten Early Modern Oxford and Cambridge The “final draft” of this chapter has been made open access through a special arrangement with the University of Chicago Press, reflecting their interest in exploring the access themes raised in the book. Note that the final draft, which has benefited from rounds of peer review and revision before being accepted for publication by the press, differs at a great many points from the published text of the book. The book benefited from the press’ excellent copyediting, as well as my revisions and proofreading (with the help of colleagues) in that process. Those who are unable to obtain a copy of the published book from which to cite may wish to quote from and reference the final draft of this chapter as follows: John Willinsky, The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), open access final draft, chapter 10, available from https://intellectualproperties.stanford.edu. 1 Chapter 10 Early Modern Oxford and Cambridge The founding of Christ Church in 1525 was a revealing moment in the gradual, if not glacial, move of the University of Oxford from a medieval to an Early Modern institution. As colleges go, Christ Church is something of a Reformation bastard-child. It was born of the dissolution of a religious house that stood for centuries above the meadow where the River Cherwell meets the Thames in Oxford. The story begins in the seventh century, when Didan, King of Oxford, endowed a convent on the spot for his daughter Frideswide (or Frithuswith) and a dozen other devout daughters of the local nobility. The convent was also given “the estates and villages of St. Mary and a third part of the city of Oxford to provide the nun’s food,” as a twelfth-century hagiography of Frideswide records, and she did serve as its prioress until her death in 727.1 In 1002, during the St. Brice’s Day Massacre, a group of Danes took refuge in the priory church in which Frideswide was buried, only to have the English burn it to the ground. The church was gradually restored, and in the twelfth century the Priory of St. Frideswide was made a religious house for Augustinian canons regular, which is to say 1 Cited by John Blair, “St. Frideswide Reconsidered,” Oxoniensia 52 (1987), 75. Blair suggests that Frideswide may well have been abbess of a double house of nuns and monks; ibid., 92. In 2002, St. Frideswide’s shrine, among those destroyed during the Reformation, was restored from discovered fragments and placed in Christ Church Cathedral; the shrine includes an Edward Burne-Jones’ stained glass window from 1858 depicting the saint’s life, pane by pane, including her escape from King Algar’s matrimonial designs. His apparent proposal: “King Algar desires you as partner for his bed and kingdom… but if you refuse the king his honourable offer you will be dragged to a brothel and suffer great dishonor”; the king was struck blind on entering Oxford, in a forceful message about separation of state and monastery that deterred Henry II in 1180 and Edward I in 1275 from entering the city, which may have been reason enough for university officials to adopt her as patron saint; ibid., 76. 2 male clerics who shared all in common.2 As well, during this time, St. Frideswide was adopted by both town and university as patron saint, with an annual scholarly procession on October 19th in her honor, while the fair in her name attracted manuscript merchants from London.3 This chapter picks up the story of learning’s intellectual properties with the Reformation origins of Christ Church and follows it through Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries; Thomas Bodley’s restoration of the Reformation-ravaged university library in Oxford; and print’s introduction at Oxford, which largely falters until one of Christ Church’s most accomplished fellows and deans, John Fell, created a viable trade out of the university’s printing privileges (with the story continuing in the next chapter with John Locke, who was Christ Church's most distinguished student and expellee). A Cardinal Almost Founds a College In 1525, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII, decided that the Priory of St. Frideswide was an ideal location for the sort of college that might commemorate his contributions to the country.4 Such was his power that he was able to suppress (or dissolve) St. Frideswide Priory, with the king’s support and a bull from Pope Clement VII. The lands and possessions of St. Frideswide were insufficient, however, to fulfill the cardinal’s vision. To remedy that and then some, he saw to the suppression of a further twenty monasteries, declaring that “neither God was served, nor 2 George Henry Cook, Letters to Cromwell and Others on the Suppression of the Monasteries (London: John Barker, 1965), 14. 3 John Blair, “Frithuswith [St. Frithuswith, Frideswide] (d. 727), Abbess of Oxford” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 60. 4 On college founding at the time, R. W. Hoyle reports: “In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, no one had the money with which to establish a monastery on the classic high medieval lines. For those who wished a permanent memorial to themselves and their ancestors, there were cheaper options, including colleges and almshouses”; “The Origins of the Dissolution of the Monasteries,” Historical Journal 38, no. 2 (1995), 276-277. 3 religion kept” by these religious houses.56 Wolsey’s architectural plans for his Cardinal College, as he intended to name it, at Oxford included a sizeable cloistered quadrangle, as if to remind masters and students of their monastic indebtedness. The Cardinal employed, according to a nineteenth-century cathedral handbook, “many hundred workmen, including artists of all kinds” on this project.7 The Cardinal made it clear in the statutes for the new college that its scholars would go out into the world well equipped to reach the simpler souls of their parishes with their sermons.8 However, Wolsey did not get very far with his building plans before it was his turn to face the heavy hand of royal suppression. In 1529, the immoderate Henry VIII grew impatient with the Cardinal’s lack of influence with Rome, and placed him under arrest. The charges included his having overrun the papal bulls that he had been granted in his closing of the monasteries.9 By the medieval right of escheat, Henry then assumed ownership of Wolsey’s college lands and unfinished buildings.10 In 1532, Henry refounded Wolsey’s college as “King Henry the VIII’s College in Oxford,” dedicating it to St. Frideswide.11 5 Cited by David Knowles, Bare Ruined Choirs: The Dissolution of the English Monasteries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 59. Not everyone agreed with such a sweeping condemnation of the monasteries. The closing of the Tonbridge monastery had the townspeople petitioning, unsuccessfully, for its continuance. They were reassured that the monastic closures would result in, among other things, scholarships to the new Oxford college, intended for students from communities such as theirs; ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Richard John King, Handbook to the Cathedrals of England, Eastern Division (London: John Murray, 1881), 63. 8 Astrik L. Gabriel, “Motivation of the Founders at Medieval Colleges,” Miscellanea Mediaevalia 3 (1964), 71. 9 Knowles, Bare Ruined Choirs, 59; Hoyle, “Origins of the Dissolution,” 299. 10 Joseph Wells, Wadham College (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1898), 11. Escheat is a common- land doctrine, in which land to which the owner has lost legal right to – as Wolsey was arrested for delaying Henry’s divorce – reverts to the superior feudal lord, rather than standing ownerless. 11 Richard Rex and C. D. C. Armstrong, “Henry VIII’s Ecclesiastical and Collegiate Foundations,” Historical Research 75, no. 190 (2002), 394. 4 In 1535, Henry asserted the crown’s supremacy over ecclesiastical institutions by conducting royal visitations to the universities in Oxford and Cambridge.12 On the first Reformation visit to Oxford, Richard Layton arrived on the king’s behalf and proceeded to scour the university for books reflecting papal allegiance. Layton reported back to his majesty, with some color, that he had banished works of the “Dunce” (the thirteenth- century theologian Duns Scotus) from “Oxforde for ever.”13 “We found all the gret quadrant [of New College] court full of the leiffes of Dunce,” he wrote, “the wynde blowying them into evere corner.”14 Such visits purged the university libraries of seeming popery. They put an end to the teaching of Peter Lombard’s Sentences and other scholastic mainstays, which were perhaps due for retirement, and introduced free public lectures on the new theology.15 What Oxford and Cambridge lost in autonomy they gained in endowment, privileges, and increased presence in English life, as those who governed the land expressed a belief in learning’s virtues.16 In 1536, Parliament passed the Act for the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries. The ostensible aim was monastic reformation, beginning with the elimination of failed religious houses whose worth had slipped below £200: “That the possessions of such religious houses, now being spent, spoiled, and wasted for increase and maintenance of 12 F. Donald Logan judges the visit an “intrusion of the power of the state into the affairs of the English universities”; “The First Royal Visitation of the English Universities, 1535,” English Historical Review 106, no.
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