A HISTORY OF HAMPSHIRE 



years old, but might be admitted up to sixteen years old if they were 

 sufficiently advanced to be able to be perfect in grammar by eighteen. 

 Preference was to be given first to inhabitants of the places where the 

 estates of the college and of New College lay ; next to natives of Win- 

 chester diocese ; then to inhabitants of the counties of Oxford, Berks, 

 Wilts, Somerset, Essex, Middlesex, Dorset, Kent, Sussex and Cambridge, 

 in the order named ; and lastly to inhabitants of the kingdom of England. 

 Choristers of the college were to be eligible and to be examined 

 with the other candidates. No conditions were laid down as to selec- 

 tion if there were more candidates than one, each equally qualified by 

 residence and ' able and fit,' the examiners not being bound to elect ' the 

 fittest.' Either it was not contemplated that there would be more than 

 enough candidates of equal qualifications to fill the vacancies, or it was 

 intended that the electors should have a power of patronage. Certain it is 

 that the omission of the little word magi's resulted in a system of absolute 

 patronage of the electors, tempered only by corruption and founder's 

 kinship, and up to the eighteenth century by patronage of the Crown 

 and the bishop of Winchester. 



The scholars were to be ' poor and needy.' This has sometimes 

 been interpreted to mean the poor in the sense of the poor law, the 

 destitute poor, or at least the poor labouring classes. There is no 

 justification for any such interpretation. The test of poverty to qualify 

 for admission as a scholar is to be found in the oath which every scholar 

 had to take on reaching fifteen years of age : ' I, N., admitted to the 

 college of St. Mary, near Winchester, swear that I have nothing whereby 

 I know I can spend beyond five marks a year.' The limit of value for 

 the exemption of church livings from taxation for the tenths payable to 

 the pope was fixed at five marks a year. There were sixty-seven livings 

 below that value in the diocese of Winchester. 1 Many of them were 

 only worth i a year ; many more only 2 a year. The test was 

 therefore only provided for the exclusion of the really wealthy. 



It may indeed be doubted whether the use of the phrase pauperes et 

 indigentes was much more than a necessary common form, arising from 

 the ' constitutions ' of the legates Otto and Ottobon in the thirteenth 

 century, which had forbidden the appropriation of churches unless the 

 inmates of the houses to which they were to be appropriated were in 

 such stress of poverty that they could not otherwise be supported. It 

 was necessary for Wykeham to protest the poverty of the scholars for 

 whom he was appropriating churches and priories. 



That the choristers were eligible to become scholars* is shown by 

 the Hall Books. In the first Hall Book, beginning Michaelmas 1395, 

 four choristers, in the fourth week eleven choristers dined in Hall, and 



1 Pope Nicholat Taxation, 1291 (Rec. Com.). 



8 In History I wrote : ' The choristers were, it is true, eligible only for scholarships, but whether 

 they were elected is another matter.' I had not then, but have since, examined some of the Hall Books 

 on that point. The evidence stated in the text conclusively shows that not only were the choristers 

 elected, but that it was the rule to elect them ; and that more than half the choristers in any given year 

 became scholars. 



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