The Lollards were put down in Oxford; "the tares were weeded out" by
the House of Lancaster, and in the process the germs of free thought,
of originality, and of a rational education, were destroyed.
"Wyclevism did domineer among us," says Wood; and, in fact, the
intellect of the University was absorbed, like the intellect of
France during the heat of the Jansenist controversy, in defending or
assailing "267 damned conclusions," drawn from the books of Wyclif.
The University "lost many of her children through the profession of
Wyclevism." Those who remained were often "beneficed clerks." The
Friars lifted up their heads again, and Oxford was becoming a large
ecclesiastical school. As the University declared to Archbishop
Chichele (1438), "Our noble mother, that was blessed in so goodly an
offspring, is all but utterly destroyed and desolate." Presently the
foreign wars and the wars of the Roses drained the University of the
youth of England. The country was overrun with hostile forces, or
infested by disbanded soldiers. Plague and war, war and plague, and
confusion, alternate in the annals. Sickly as Oxford is to-day by
climate and situation, she is a city of health compared to what she
was in the middle ages. In 1448 "a pestilence broke out, occasioned
by the overflowing of waters, . . . also by the lying of many
scholars in one room or dormitory in almost every Hall, which
occasioned nasty air and smells, and consequently diseases.
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