A HISTORY OF HAMPSHIRE 



took the offices of Church and State by storm. The career of 

 Henry Chicheley, Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry V.'s prime minis- 

 ter, is too well known to need special mention. As a founder he 

 followed Wykeham, though longo intervallo, in the foundation of All 

 Souls' College and Higham Ferrars School. To his place in the State 

 succeeded Thomas Beckington (Bekenton in the College Register on his 

 admission in I4O3), 1 first queen's, then king's secretary, and Bishop of 

 Bath and Wells, where the bishop's palace and his chantry in the 

 cathedral testify to his being a builder (in the sense of an employer of 

 builders) not inferior to Wykeham himself. Owing to his having taken 

 pains to keep copies of his correspondence, his letters and those of his 

 younger correspondent, Thomas Chandler (scholar 1430), Warden of 

 Winchester and of New College, and himself a Secretary of State, remain 

 in evidence 2 to entirely disprove the ridiculous allegations of the absence 

 or the decay of learning and Latin in the fifteenth century. Chandler, 

 indeed, who has left behind at New College a panegyric on Wykeham, 

 usually credited to him but which he himself says in a preface dedi- 

 cated to Beckington, who had given him a canonry and the chancellor- 

 ship of Wells Cathedral, was composed by one of his pupils, is an absolute 

 bore with his perpetual quotations of Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and 

 Seneca, Horace and Ovid. He tells us how 3 Beckington had been sent 

 to Winchester in tender years to learn grammar, and there being noticed 

 by Wykeham was placed on the foundation of the college a curious 

 piece of testimony to the continuance of a grammar school, no doubt the 

 High School, after the foundation of the college, and serving as a kind of 

 preparatory school to it. Chandler, when Warden of Winchester, 4 invoked 

 the munificence of Beckington to the college, which he described as being 

 in such a state that 'its very walls seem to shed tears and bewail their 

 approaching ruin.' He held out to him as an attraction that any new 

 endowments would rank with the old, in giving the boys of the places 

 where they lay a preference for election as scholars. Beckington re- 

 sponded with large gifts of plate, vestments and money ; and later left 

 lands at Week, near Winchester, and Vale Barn, as endowment for an 

 obit in the college. Chandler himself also founded an obit, for 

 presence at which the headmaster received a shilling if a priest, and 

 8d. if a layman. The panegyric of Wykeham, written about 1460, 

 contains some extremely curious water-colour drawings, which give a 

 vivid picture of the twin foundations. Two of them ' depict the two 

 colleges with their inmates the 'two hundred clerks' of whom Wyke- 

 ham was the father. Another a shows the famous Wykehamists of the 

 day surrounding a seated figure of Wykeham. 



1 History, p. 291. 



9 Official Correspondence of Thomas Bekynton, Rolls series, No. 56 (1872). See also some of his 

 letters in Letters of Margaret of Anjou, Camden Society, C.S., No. 86. 



3 Some extracts were printed in Bekynton's Correspondence, ii. 315, 26. 



4 Ibid. i. 268. 



6 Frontispiece to History, taken from a photograph made for the Warden of New College. See 

 also Arch*ologia, liii. pt. I, p. 229. History, p. zi6. 



292 



