Fox’s Choice: Founding a Secular College in Oxford

Abstract

This chapter discusses the powerful impact of education on the service of the British state and empire. It had been reasonably clear, in 1390, what skills an education in the Oxford and Cambridge schools could bring to the service of the crown and the high nobility—the ability to see the weak points of an argument and to put the case against it persuasively, and for those with a training in the learned laws, to deploy an accepted code of practice in a way favourable to the Crown’s or another patron’s cause. As a result, England had been represented by intelligent graduates, canonists, and theologians with a broad outlook and forensic skills, both at the Council of Constance and in the diplomacy of the Lancastrian kings. The chapter then looks at Dr. Thomas Chaundler’s pedagogy and its influence on graduates in the service of the crown.