Life, both for graduates and undergraduates, was harder then than it is now. The Fellows were required to reside for forty-six weeks, the Scholars, and probably the Commoners, for forty-eight weeks in each year. All undergraduates had to attend lectures or disputations for twenty-four hours in every week. These tasks were arranged with careful malignity to begin at 6 A.M., and resumed at 2 P.M. and 6 P.M. Nor were examinations wanting. The Bible was to be read during dinner in Hall by a Bible Clerk or Scholar, and heard attentively and reverently. Latin was to be spoken in Hall, and English only when the presence of an unlearned person or of a member of another college justified its use. The Chapel Service was held between 5 and 6 A.M. and between 8 and 9 P.M.; and attendance twice a-day was required from bachelors and undergraduates, and rigidly enforced. Attendance at roll-call as a substitute for chapel was unheard of in those days, when all members of the colleges were, or were presumed to be, members also of the Church of England, nor would conscientious scruples have been treated with much courtesy. In other matters discipline was no less strict; clothes and boots were to be black, and gowns were to be long. No undergraduate was allowed to go out of College unaccompanied by a "discrete senior" of mature age as a witness to his good behaviour, unless to attend a lecture or a disputation: nor might he keep dogs, or guns, or ferrets, or any bird, within the precincts of the College, nor play any games with dice or cards or of any unseemly kind. Yet the Foundress showed a tenderness for human weakness by permitting the Fellows and Scholars to play cards in Hall on some of the Gaudy days for "moderate stakes and at timeous hours." Moreover, she ordained that £30 from the College revenues should be spent on College banquets to be held on Gaudy days, by which were meant the great Church festivals, the election days of Fellows and College officers, All Saints' Day, and, on what at first sight seems strange, the anniversary of her husband's death; but the strangeness disappears if it be remembered that October 20th comes close to All Saints' Day.
This seems, in some of its provisions, Draconian legislation, but it was made for the government of boys, many of them only fourteen or fifteen years of age: how far it was, even in early days, unflinchingly enforced, we cannot tell. It began to fall into abeyance after the Restoration, if we are to believe Antony Wood. His statements are always to be received with caution; but they are on this point confirmed by other testimonies, and by the antecedent probability of a strong reaction against the Puritan _régime_. Eighteen months after the King's Restoration, he writes of the decay of learning and discipline in the University. "Before the warr wee had scholars that made a thorough search in scholasticall and polemicall divinity, in humane authors, and naturall philosophy. But now scholars studie these things not more than what is just necessary to carry them through the exercises of their respective Colleges and the Universitie. Their aime is not to live as students ought to do--viz., temperat, abstemious, and plaine and grave in the apparel; but to live like gentlemen, to keep dogs and horses, to turne their studies and coleholes into places to receive bottles, to swash it in apparell, to wear long periwigs, &c., and the theologists to ride abroad in grey coats with swords by their sides: the masters have lost their respect by being themselves scandalous, and keeping company with undergraduates." We cannot believe that Wadham escaped the contagion, and remained what its Foundress meant it to be. It would be interesting--but lack of space forbids--to compare the discipline prescribed with that administered in Wadham now. Sufficient to say--what indeed might go without saying--that the lapse of three hundred years has made changes desirable and necessary.