Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 4.djvu/298

 244 NOTES AND QUERIES. do* s. iv. SEPT. 23.1905. MAGDALEN COLLEGE SCHOOL AND THE •D.N.B.' (See ante, pp. 21, 101, 182.) A LETTEE to Cranmer, after mentioning an otherwise unrecorded riotous attack in 1549 upon the College—which lay outside the city •walls—protests against certain ordinances brought to the society from the Council in February, 1549/50. These forbade, among other things, the application of any College endowments to the teaching of grammar; And ordered that all endowments intended for chaplains, clerks, and choristers should be diverted to "the most necessary uses of .good letters.'1 These injunctions the College unanimously resolved to oppose as destruc- tive of the foundation. The Grammar School, they maintain, was an essential part of Wayn- flete's design, which had been of the greatest benefit not only to the College, but to the University and city of Oxford. The School, indeed, is to Magdalen College as Eton School is to King's College at Cambridge, And the school at Winchester is to New College at Oxford, and they call it " their nursery." The members of the choir are not occupied in music alone, but also in academical study. If they have to dismiss All the members of the College who are endowed as members of the choir, and all who are studying grammar, the society will lose about sixty of its number. The delegates to the Council were supported in their plea by a petition from the Mayor and citizens •of Oxford, who represent that the system by which their sons, entering various_ colleges as scholars or "quiristers," obtain their grammar training at M.C.S. without charge to their families, has been of great advantage to the •city in the past, and specially plead for " the •continuance of this only school of all the shire." Happily this appeal was in the end successful (Wilson, pp. 91-3). Gardiner, who had been restored to the see of Winchester soon after Mary's acces- sion, cited the College to attend a visitation on 26 October, 1553. The commissaries •(according to Laurence Humfrey), upon their arrival in College, finding no priest to say Mass, no Fellow who would hear it, no boy to respond, and no vestments, were obliged to say Mass themselves without the presence of any spectators. The juniors who refused to attend "popish prayers" were whipped ; but Bentham, the Dean of Arts, who himself refused to say Mass, refused also to punish others for absence from "popish prayers." About fourteen members of the College were ejected, among whom were two Fellows who had been Demies in 1534, the Thomas Bentham in question (afterwards Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield) and John Mullins (in the next reign Archdeacon of London and Canon of St. Paul's). A Demy of 1555 and sometime chorister, Owen Ragsdale by name, endowed in 1582 the Free School of Roth well, Northants, and founded in the same parish a hospital for twelve old men and a warden. In 1558 (too late to take effect) Queen Mary recommended, among others, Thomas Marshall, Archdeacon of Lincoln and sometime Demy and Fellow, to be elected President. He had been unsuccessfully recommended twenty-three years earlier for the same office by Cromwell. On 3 September, 1566, Queen Elizabeth went on foot to St. Mary's Church, during her visit to Oxford, to hear disputations in natural and moral philosophy. Before her coming there were divers copies of verses in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew set upon the doors and walls, one copy being written by Robert Temple, then Demy, and afterwards Prebendary of Bristol. Thomas Harriot, the mathematician and astronomer who, according to Marlowe, could "juggle better than Moses," was born at Oxford in 1560, probably in the parish of St. Mary. He graduated B.A. of St. Mary Hall twenty years later. George Chapman, in sending his translation of the ' Iliad' to him "for censure," addresses Harriot as " master of all essential and true knowledge." Born in 1565, John Guillim, the celebrated Herald, went from Hereford Cathedral School to a grammar School at Oxford before matriculating at Brasenose. Can these two have been at M.C.S. ? About the year 1580 we begin to find cases of Demies entering College at a more ad- vanced age than formerly had been the custom. As they gradually approximate to the ordinary undergraduate elsewhere, their connexion with the School would, no doubt, become proportionately weaker. In 1&85, Humfrey being President, some light is thrown upon the condition of junior mem- bers of the College by statements drawn up by four of the Fellows and by injunctions delivered by Bishop Cooper in his subsequent visitation. The grammar teaching, on which the founder had so much insisted, is ineffi- cient ; the Master performs his work—so far as it is performed—by deputies, being himself non-resident. One complainant remarks con- cerning the choir : " Jam presbiterorum null], clericorum 4, chorus tar um . perpauci, cum cantu et nota celebrare posaunt divina." Poor scholars are admitted in large numbers.