After the colleges reached their full development, the extinction of the mediæval university as an institution for teaching was largely a matter of form. The quietus was given in 1569. The Earl of Leicester, then chancellor, ordered that the government should be in the hands of the chancellor, doctors, proctors, and the heads of the colleges and halls. In 1636 (the year of the founding of the first American college) the statutes of the university were revised and codified by Archbishop Laud; the sole authority was placed in the hands of an oligarchy composed of the leading dons of the colleges. The government was limited to the vice-chancellor, the proctors, and the heads of houses, and the vice-chancellor and the proctors were elected in sequence by each of the colleges from its own members. The teaching of the university was now legally as well as actually in the hands of the college tutors, and the examination was in the hands of a board chosen by the colleges. University lectures were still delivered in the schools by the regent masters, but they had ceased to play any important part in Oxford education. IV THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE MEDIÆVAL HALL Like the colleges, the halls meanwhile tended gradually towards an organized community life. The starting-point was a regulation that the principal should give the university security for the rent of the house. The logical result of this was that the principal became the representative of the university, and the hall one of its recognized institutions. The advantage of living in separate communities meantime had become so clearly evident that by the middle of the fifteenth century chamberdekyns were abolished. All students not living in a college were required to live in a hall. It was thus that the halls lost some of their democratic independence. At this period in their development they may be roughly compared to such modern American halls as Claverly at Harvard, where the residents govern their own affairs in the main, admitting newcomers only by vote, but are all alike subject to the authority of a resident university proctor. The analogy is by no means close, for the principal of the mediæval hall was not so much a resident policeman as the actual head of the community.