A HISTORY OF HAMPSHIRE 



immediate predecessors and successors as headmasters were laymen also. 

 Nor would it be surprising that they should be so, as they were for the 

 most part very young men. White was twenty-eight on his accession ; 

 his predecessor Richard Twychener, only twenty-five ; and his brother 

 and predecessor, John, only twenty-four. Erlisman was thirty-four, but 

 then he had been headmaster of Eton first for some six or seven years. 

 The usher, Richard Sedgrove, a scholar in 1518, was older than either 

 the headmaster or his predecessor, but he was only thirty. We know 

 that the great Elizabethan headmaster, Christopher Johnson, was a lay- 

 man, for he retired to practise as a physician in London. 



The college, in Mr. John White's first year of office, had to under- 

 go three distinct and different visitations. The first was by Master Dr. 

 Cox, as commissary of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in virtue of his 

 provincial supremacy as primate of all England. This cost 5 4-f- 8</. 

 The next, the ordinary visitation by the warden and posers of New 

 College, with Dr. London as warden, cost f^j js. qd. The third, that 

 of Dr. Lee, ' Commissioner of Master Thomas Cromwell, coming with 

 the same Master Thomas Cromwell, General Visitor of the Lord the 

 King' was the least expensive, costing only 3. This is a valuable his- 

 torical entry. It has been represented 1 that the visitation was directed only 

 against the monasteries or the universities, which Gasquet represents as 

 ' regarded as monastic institutions,' and as mainly for the purpose of 

 laying on them excessive contributions. It was, in fact, simply a visita- 

 tion to assert the king's supremacy, modelled on the visitations made by 

 Archbishop Warham and others as papal legates. The only present given 

 even to so great a man as Cromwell, the ' King's Vicar-General in 

 Spirituals ' was an old silver salt-cellar, mended up at the cost of 5*. i od. ; 

 a gift of no greater value than was habitually given to judges of assize 

 and other ' great ones.' The king himself came to Wolvesey at the 

 same time, and was presented with ' two oxen, ten sheep, and twelve 

 capons for his favour in matters concerning the College,' at a cost of 

 6 7-c. \d. Was this favour, one wonders, anything to do with the act 

 of parliament passed in 1536, which exempted the universities and their 

 colleges, and Winchester and Eton, from the payment of the tenths to 

 ascertain which the Valor was made ? This Act (27 Henry VIII. c. 42) 

 was entitled ' An Acte concernyng the exoneracyon of Oxford and Cam- 

 bryg from payment of there fyrst frutes and tenths.' The reason for it 

 is stated to be that Henry, ' With the fervent zeal his Majestic hath con- 

 ceyvid and bearith ... to th'increase of the knowledge in the 7 liberall 

 sciences and the 3 tonges of Laten, Greeke, and Hebrewe to be by his 

 people applied and larned, Consideryd that if his Highes shulde use his 

 right in the Universities of Oxforde and Cambridge, or in the College of 

 our Ladye of Eton besydes Wyndesore, or Saynt Marie College of 

 Wynchestre besides Wynchestre, where youth and good wytts be educate 

 and nourysyhed in vertue and larnyng . . . the same should percaas 



1 Gasquet, Suppression of the Monasteries. 

 302 



