A HISTORY OF HAMPSHIRE 



For those reasons he founded the college, and directed that it should 

 consist of ' seventy poor and needy scholars, clerks, living college-wise in 

 the same, studying and becoming proficient in grammaticals, or the art 

 and science of grammar,' and gave them a ' common chest,' willing that 

 they ' should work together as collegial and collegiate persons in the 

 same college and there in college-wise remain and live ' under the rule 

 of the warden, and according to the statutes of the college to which 

 they were sworn. He granted them the site of the college ' to hold and 

 possess common-wise and in common.' 



But what was the founder's object in founding New College, 

 for which Winchester College was to be the nursery ? To find out this 

 we must read the statutes of his two colleges together ; the two being 

 parts of one whole. As Wykeham says, in Rubric iv., urging the two 

 colleges to help each other in all contests and difficulties : ' Our two 

 colleges aforesaid, though situate in different places, issue from one 

 stem, and flow from one spring, and differ not in substance, having 

 no diverse effect. They are next-of-kin, and are called by one name.' 

 For while Winchester was ' Seinte Marie College of Wynchester,' 

 New College was ' Seinte Marie College of Wynchester, in Oxenford.' 

 It is difficult or impossible to say which was the object Wykeham had 

 most at heart, to benefit Winchester School by sending its boys on to 

 become Oxford scholars, or to benefit Oxford University by sending it 

 Winchester schoolboys. On the whole the names seem to show that 

 Winchester was the object of his attachment. Still New College was the 

 first founded, it was the ' greater light,' and the larger world for which 

 Winchester was the nursery. It is to its statutes we must look first to 

 find the final cause of Winchester. 



The first clause of the New College statutes, after the usual pious 

 preamble, sets forth with great clearness the object of the foundations, 

 and shows that Wykeham's intention was to provide educated clergy, 

 not monks but seculars (for a scholar ' entering religion ' was instantly 

 to lose his scholarship), to fill up the gaps caused by the Black Death. 



The effects of the plagues at Winchester were marked. The monks 

 of St. Swithun's priory numbered sixty-four in I325. 1 We do not know 

 the numbers of those who died in the Black Death or subsequent plagues, 

 but in 1387" a generation afterwards there were still only forty-six. At 

 the Sustern Spital, 3 now ' Commoners,' the normal number of brethren 

 and sisters was twenty-one ; in 1352, three years after the Black Death, 

 there were only six, in 1353 ten, in 1387 they had only risen to sixteen. 

 On 1 8 February, 1374-5, Wykeham 4 certified the king that the parish 

 of St. Anastasius by Wyke had been depopulated by the first pestilence 

 and was still so poor as not to be able to support a rector, and therefore 

 asked that it should be exempted from the tenth lately granted. 



1 Obedientiary Rolls, Hants Record Soc., p. 12. 



8 Wykeham's Injunctions to S. Swithun's Priory, Harl. MS. 328, f. 3b ; cf. his Register, ii. 389. 



8 The Sisters' Hospital : Obedientary Rolls, pp. 408, 410, 413. 



* History of Parish Chunk of Wyke, by F. J. Baigent (Winchester, 1865), p. 6. 



264. 



