John Giffard started his
great college for the reception of student monks at Oxford. It
became, and for centuries continued to be, the resort of the
Benedictine order, and was supported by levies from a large number of
the old monasteries. The inference is forced upon us that the English
monasteries no longer stood in the front rank as seats of learning.
Students and scholars would no longer go to the monks; the monks must
go to the scholars. But the establishment of a seminary for the
reception of young monks at Oxford tended to the strengthening of the
ecclesiastical influence in that University. Cambridge lost in the
same proportion that Oxford gained. Even the great Priory of Norwich
sent its promising young monks to Qxford, passing by the nearer and
more conveniently situated University. As early as 1288 we find
entries in the Norwich Priory Rolls of payments for the support of
the schools and scholars at Oxford. It was long after this that
Cambridge offered any similar attraction to the "religious."
Be it noted that until Merton's day people had never heard of what we
now understand by a _college_. It was a novelty in English
institutions. Men and women had lived commonly enough in societies
that were essentially religious in their character. Some of those
societies, and only some, had drifted into becoming the quiet homes
of learning as well as of devotion; but the main business-the
_raison d'?tre_ of monks and nuns and canons-was the practice of
asceticism, the keeping up of unceasing worship in the church of the
monastery--the endeavour to be holier than men of the world need be,
or the endeavour to make the men of the world holier than they cared
to be.
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