The romance of the Oxford colleges

The founder of All Souls was Archbishop Chichele, who had been educated on the foundations of William of Wykeham at Winchester and New College. The souls which the name commemorates are those of the soldiers who fell in Henry V.’s French wars—wars for which the Archbishop’s pugnacious patriotism was very largely responsible. The distinctive feature of the College is that it neither supports scholars nor harbours commoners, its only undergraduate members being a sprinkling of Bible clerks. The purpose of the founder, that is to say, was to endow study—not to endow teaching; and the fact that the College was small prevented undergraduates from creeping into it. There was no provision for their instruction, and there was no room for them. A few commoners did, at one time, obtain admission, but they were soon eliminated.

Various consequences have followed from this state of things—some of them good, and others not so good. The All Souls fellowships did not, in practice, in the early days at all events, become the rewards of studious virtue. They were regarded, on the contrary, as sinecures to be scrambled for, to be jobbed into, to be bought and sold. No definite obligations, unless it were of residence, attached to them; they were merely positions in which a man might draw a living wage for doing nothing. Royal favourites were pushed into fellowships, in the Stuart times, as a cheap proof of royal favour, and fellowships could be purchased in the open market, just like commissions in the Army—an abuse which was brought about in this way:

When a resignation created a vacancy, the College co-opted a successor to it; but the retiring Fellow shared with the other Fellows the right to nominate a candidate. On the principle of “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours,” the tacit understanding was established that the retiring Fellow’s candidate should always be elected. This was an opportunity for any Fellow to offer to retire in favour of a particular candidate in consideration of a money payment; and many Fellows availed themselves of the opportunity. Hence the scandal of “corrupt resignations,” not unknown, indeed, at other colleges, but specially gross and glaring at All Souls, where it flourished long, and was not suppressed without great difficulty.

Jobbery and corrupt resignations, in fact, combined to fill All Souls with Fellows of a different stamp from the Fellows of the other colleges; and the difference was, in some respects, for the better, and in other respects for the worse. The Fellows, having no academic duties, were idle; and Satan provided mischief for their idle hands. The Punishment Book, and other official records, show them comporting themselves more like junior than senior members of the University. We hear of several of them being dropped upon for “noctivagation.” We find the Visitor calling upon the Warden to “punish such of your Society as do spend their time in taverns and ale-houses to the scandal of the House.” We discover a representation that the College ale is too strong for students, and that only small beer ought to be brewed there. We read that one of the Fellows was reprimanded for “beating the Under-Butler.” Proof is abundant, in short, that the College was by no means such a quiet resort of industrious men as the founder had intended it to be.

Such were the drawbacks of the system; but it also, incidentally, produced advantages. While many of the Fellows were worthless and indolent persons, the loose mode of election and the total absence of academic duties resulted in the introduction of a type of Fellow who served as a link, just as we have noted that some of the Merton Fellows did, between the University and the external world—the type of Fellow whom the College porter appears to have had in mind when he replied to the visitor who inquired whether the Fellows read the books in the College library: “Lord bless you, sir! They don’t need to read books. They’re gentlemen!”

“Well-born, well-dressed, and moderately educated,” is the hackneyed description of a Fellow of All Souls. The candidates for fellowships, it used to be said, instead of being put through an examination were invited to dinner and given cherry-tart to eat; their fate depending upon the manner in which they disposed of the cherry-stones. The story is told of a Fellow who was elected as a reward for his delicacy in swallowing the cherry-stones. It is not to be supposed that the story is literally true; but no doubt a certain symbolical truth is enshrined in it. The unmannerly bookworm has never been wanted at All Souls. The scholar who is also a gentleman has always been preferred to him; and from the time of Sir Christopher Wren to the time of Lord Curzon of Kedleston, the College has generally been able to boast of some Fellow of wide fame, not of a rigidly academic character.

Those great physicians Linacre and Sydenham were Fellows of All Souls; and Linacre, in an age in which men could afford to specialise in more than one subject, excelled in Greek as well as medicine. Sir Christopher Wren has just been mentioned. The College owes to him its famous sun-dial, with the motto: Pereunt et imputantur. It cost him £32 11s. 6d.; and its exactitude was such that Oxford watchmakers used to set their clocks by it. General Codrington, to whom the College owes the Codrington Library, went from All Souls to be Governor of Barbadoes, at the time when Admiral Benbow was beating the French there; and other Fellows whose names are known to all the world were Blackstone, of the Commentaries, Edward Young, the author of “Night Thoughts,” and Bishop Heber.

Blackstone was Bursar of All Souls. The Vinerian professorship was expressly founded for him. His “Commentaries on the Laws of England” were first delivered as a course of professorial lectures. He took his position so seriously that he declined to read his lectures to the Prince of Wales on the ground that he could not quit his duties at Oxford. Campbell says of him that he was, after Bacon, “the first practising lawyer at the English bar who, in writing, paid the slightest attention to the selection or collocation of words.” He served his College by compelling the executors of the Duke of Wharton to pay over to it a donation promised by him at the instance of Edward Young.

Wharton was a rake; and Young, in his youth, was fond of consorting with rakes. In later life, however, he repented and cancelled the dedications of poems which he had addressed to his more disreputable associates. The College books describe him as poeta celeberrimus; and he certainly had for a time a vogue as great as that of Tennyson, or even Martin Farquhar Tupper, though nowadays he is only remembered for the single sentiment: “Procrastination is the thief of time.” A passage in Johnson shows that, though he combined worldliness with his other-worldliness, he could be effective as a Christian controversialist.

“The other boys,” said the atheist, “I can always answer, because I always know whence they have their arguments, which I have read a hundred times; but that fellow Young is continually pestering me with something of his own.”

Heber remains; but what there is to be said about Heber may be better said when we come to Brasenose. Here he is mentioned principally because, in one of his letters home, he describes how, looking out from Brasenose, he saw the All Souls Fellows searching for the All Souls mallard, and so introduces us to the interesting legend of that bird.

The story is that, when the foundations of the College was being dug, a mallard flew out of a drain. Thereupon, or it may be at a later date, a College poet wrote a song about the mallard, of which the first and last verses and the chorus may be given here:

The song is still sung at College gaudies. In the old days the Fellows, after singing it, used to make a solemn pilgrimage round the College to look for the mallard; but though the pilgrimage began solemnly, it was apt to end uproariously. Bonfires were lighted; furniture was smashed; the oaks of the unpopular were forced—all on pretence of discovering the undiscoverable bird. The Fellows, in short, made their rounds “not on the viewless wings of poesy, but charioted by Bacchus and his pards”; and their proceedings attracted the attention of their Visitor, Archbishop Abbot, who wrote to them:

“The feast of Christmas drawing now to an end both put me in mind of the great outrage which, as I am informed, was the last year committed in your College, where, although matters had formerly been conducted with some distemper, yet men did never before break forth into such intolerable liberty as to tear down doors and gates, and disquiet their neighbours, as if it had been a camp or a town in war. Civil men should never so far forget themselves under pretence of a foolish mallard as to do things barbarously unbecoming.”