Time would fail me to tell of the various disputations in which our student had to figure at various stages of his career; but disputations, though to the nervous student their terrors must have exceeded those of modern _viva_, had this advantage, that there was no “plucking” or “ploughing” in the question. A candidate who had done very badly might fail to get the required number of Masters to testify to his competency when he applied for the degree; and very incapable students, if poor and humbly-born, were probably choked off in this way. It is certain that a large number never took even the B.A. degree. But there is no record of anybody having been formally refused a degree in Arts. And yet the Master’s degree in the Middle Ages was in reality what it still is in theory--a license to teach. For a year after admission to his degree, the new M.A. was _necessario regens_, and was obliged to give “ordinary lectures” in the public schools. After that he was free to enter upon the study of one of the higher Faculties.
Those who took Theology spent the rest of their academical career in the study of the Bible and “the Sentences” of Peter the Lombard--much more of the Sentences than of the Bible. It took eleven years’ study to become a D.D.; naturally most got livings and “went down” before that.
Those who obtained leave to study Law would usually take a degree in Civil Law first, and then proceed to the study of Canon Law, that is to say the _Decretum_ of Gratian and the Papal _Decretals_. There were always to be twenty Canonists and Civilians in the House.
Two scholars alone might take up Medicine, and two Astronomy or Astrology. Wykeham is the only College-founder who treats Astronomy as a recognized Faculty; but belief in Astrology was on the increase in fourteenth-century England, and reached its maximum amid the enlightenment of the sixteenth century.
It is time to allude to the curious “privilege” which exercised so disastrous an effect upon the New College of two generations ago, the privilege of taking degrees without examination. William of Wykeham is not responsible for this _damnosa hereditas_. Nothing is heard of it till the beginning of the seventeenth century; and then the University recognized it as having been enjoyed since the earliest days of the College.[155] But its origin seems to be as follows.--So far from wishing his scholars to be exempt from the ordinary tests, the Founder peremptorily forbids them to sue for “graces” or dispensations from the residence or other statutable conditions of taking a degree. The grace of congregation was then required only when some of these conditions had not been complied with; if they had been, the degree was a matter of right. Even in Wykeham’s time these graces were scandalously common. In course of time the full statutable conditions were so seldom complied with that the grace of congregation came to be asked for as a matter of course: Wykehamists alone, mindful of their founder’s injunction, sought no graces. Hence what had been intended as an exceptional disability came to be regarded as an exceptional privilege; and when regular examinations were at length introduced, it was understood that the mysterious privilege carried with it exemption from this requirement also. Since a fair level of scholarship was secured by the fact that the places in New College were competed for by the boys of a first-rate classical school (although corrupt elections were not unknown), the privilege was not particularly ruinous so long as the examinations continued on the basis of the Laudian statutes. It was only when the Honour Schools were instituted at the beginning of this century that the exclusion of New College men from the Examination-schools shut out the College from the rapid improvement in industry and intellectual vitality which that measure brought with it for the best Oxford Colleges.