Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/127

 At some date which cannot be determined, John Wyclif came up to Oxford; and here he prepared himself for the secular priesthood, probably as a scholar of Balliol College, which had recently been founded by John Balliol of Barnard Castle. This Barnard Castle, about ten miles from Richmond, stands on the northern side of the Durham border, and looks up the splendid vista of Teesdale. It was the same Barnard Castle at which, on the morrow of the fight of Marston Moor, a degenerate Wycliffe paid the penalty of his treachery, and furnished a theme for the author of Rokeby.

The foundation and enlargement of the earlier colleges at Oxford were stimulated at times by other reasons than the desire of benevolent persons to establish homes for poor students at what was now recognised as the "second school of the Church." There were already scores of halls at Oxford, as well as the houses of the various Orders; and it was not even necessary that the boys and young men who attended the lectures of the professors should reside in dwellings licensed for their reception, though doubtless many of them did so. Poverty was no bar in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries against an education at Oxford. Many a penniless lad begged his way to the famous home of learning, and, once there, begged his sustenance from day to day, content if he could keep body and soul together—which, it may be feared, was by no means always possible. For the vast majority of Oxford students, life was hard and precarious at the best, and surrounded by conditions of violence which often flared