12 INTRODUCTORY. 



in Oxford, from the estate which he inherited as the eldest son 

 of a Lincolnshire gentleman. But his opportunities were con- 

 siderable, and he employed them for the benefit of his founda- 

 tion. He contrived to add to his first gifts certain considerable 

 estates in the rape of Bramber, to procure the suppression of 

 the priory of Selborne in Hampshire, an opulent monastery 

 whose character was not very good, and the Hospital of S. John 

 in Oxford, the latter on the understanding that his college 

 should perpetually satisfy the charitable duties of the institution 

 which it absorbed and superseded. Appointed one of the 

 executors of Sir John Fastolfe, who had acquired great wealth, 

 partly as a partisan leader in the French war, partly as a suc- 

 cessful trader in agricultural produce with Holland and Northern 

 Germany, who was also anxious to devote a part of his wealth 

 to an educational establishment in his native county of Norfolk, 

 Waynflete contrived to divert Fastolfe's benefaction to his own 

 college, and to enrich Oxford at the expense of the place for 

 which the gift was intended. It was in this way that Waynflete 

 built up an institution which was begun in 1448, and settled 

 thirty years later. So another prelate in the same century, and 

 at about the same time, became the founder of a Cambridge 

 college, by suppressing a nunnery on the plea of the dissolute 

 manners of its inmates, and by the transfer of their estates to 

 his new foundation. These and similar acts led the way for 

 that wholesale extinction of the monastic houses which was 

 commenced by Wolsey, and consummated, after the Cardinal's 

 fall, by Wolsey's master, Henry the Eighth, and his servant, 

 Cromwell, the vicar-general, and Earl of Essex. The destruction 

 of the older monasteries was long foreseen, and the way to it 

 made by several emphatic precedents. 



During the fifteenth century too, there grew up in England 

 that temper which, while it was willing to accept and maintain 

 the tenets of the Roman Church, was determined to restrain 

 the encroachments of the Roman court by a vigorous and final 

 effort. Pious churchmen, like Gascoigne, traced the bad morals 

 of their age and the hopeless outlook in the future to the all- 



