Book Description

Using archival material and many unpublished sources, this work traces the origins of Oxford and Cambridge University colleges as places of learning, founded from the thirteenth century, for unmarried men who were required to take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, the majority of whom trained for the priesthood. The process reveals how the isolated monk-like existence was gradually transformed from the idea of married Fellows at University Colleges being considered absurd into considering it absurd not to allow Fellows to marry and keep their fellowships and therefore their income. This book shows how the Church was accepted as an essential element in society with university trained Churchmen becoming influential in Crown, government, and State. As part of the cataclysmic change from Catholic to Protestant religion, Edward VI and his Council permitted priests to marry, partly to declare their allegiance to the new Protestant religion and their rejection of the old. However, within the university colleges the rule that Fellows would lose their fellowships immediately on marriage was insisted upon. Why a group of individuals were instructed to remain set in a medieval monastic way of life within a nineteenth-century institution is traced in conjunction with how anomalies arose, were absorbed, accepted or challenged by a few courageous individuals prior to bringing about the ultimate change to the statutes in 1882.