nd 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 L30 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 _regime_. E