The Renaissance in England, and chiefly in Oxford, was like a bitter
and changeful spring. There was an hour of genial warmth, there
breathed a wind from the south, in the lifetime of Chaucer; then came
frosts and storms; again the brief sunshine of court favour shone on
literature for a while, when Henry VIII. encouraged study, and Wolsey
and Fox founded Christ Church and Corpus Christi College; once more
the bad days of religious strife returned, and the promise of
learning was destroyed. Thus the chief result of the awakening
thought of the fourteenth century in England was not a lively delight
in literature, but the appearance of the Lollards. The intensely
practical genius of our race turned not to letters, but to questions
about the soul and its future, about property and its distribution.
The Lollards were put down in Oxford; "the tares were weeded out" by
the House of Lancaster, and in the process the germs of free thought,
of originality, and of a rational education, were destroyed.
"Wyclevism did domineer among us," says Wood; and, in fact, the
intellect of the University was absorbed, like the intellect of
France during the heat of the Jansenist controversy, in defending or
assailing "267 damned conclusions," drawn from the books of Wyclif.
The University "lost many of her children through the profession of
Wyclevism." Those who remained were often "beneficed clerks." The
Friars lifted up their heads again, and Oxford was becoming a large
ecclesiastical school. As the University declared to Archbishop
Chichele (1438), "Our noble mother, that was blessed in so goodly an
offspring, is all but utterly destroyed and desolate." Presently the
foreign wars and the wars of the Roses drained the University of the
youth of England. The country was overrun with hostile forces, or
infested by disbanded soldiers. Plague and war, war and plague, and
confusion, alternate in the annals. Sickly as Oxford is to-day by
climate and situation, she is a city of health compared to what she