It is impossible to determine either the date of Wycliffe’s first admission to Oxford or the college in which he first studied. Of his early life at the university, as of his earlier life at home, we know nothing. According to the statements of some of his biographers, Wycliffe was born in the year 1324, in the hamlet of Spreswell, near old Richmond, in Yorkshire. In 1340, he went to Oxford, and was one of the first commoners received into Queen’s college—an institution opened that year for the first time. After a short attendance in Queen’s, he joined himself to Merton, and became a fellow of that famous College. The historian Fuller says that Wycliffe was a graduate of Merton, but he makes no mention of his having been at an earlier time connected with Queen’s College. “We can give no account,” he says, “of Wycliffe’s parentage, birthplace, or infancy; only we find an ancient family of the Wycliffes in the bishopric of Durham,[9] since by match united to the Brackenburies, persons of prime quality in those parts. As for this our Wycliffe, history at the very first meets with him a man, and full grown, yea, graduate of Merton College in Oxford.”[10] Of the six Oxford colleges of that time, Merton had acquired for itself a splendid and well-deserved reputation. “And, indeed, malice itself cannot deny that this college, or little university, rather, doth equal, if not exceed, any one foundation in Christendom, for the famous men bred therein.”[11] Roger Bacon (1280), _Doctor Mirabilis_; John Duns Scotus (1308), _Doctor Subtilis_; Walter Burley (1337), _Doctor Approbatus_; William of Ocham (1347), _Doctor Singularis_ or _Pater Nominalium_; and Thomas Bradwardine (1350), _Doctor Profundus_,—were all bred in Merton College. John Wycliffe seems to have early entertained and cherished the ambition to add his name to the number of those renowned doctors who as students had preceded him in Merton College. If this was his ambition, he attained to the object of his desire when, by his contemporaries, he was recognised as _Doctor Evangelicus_. It would appear that, at an early period in his life, he had, after much deliberation, made choice of the Bible or the Gospel as his great theme. To be a “Biblicist,” or Bible student and interpreter, was not considered a high or honorable distinction by the schoolmen—the men of “culture” of that age. But to think for himself and to choose for himself was a notable characteristic of the young Yorkshireman, John Wycliffe. In making his choice and in linking himself indissolubly to the Word and “cause of God,”[12] he seems to have been much influenced by the example and by the teaching of Bradwardine. But he made it his aim to be a proficient, and, if possible, a master in all attainable science and learning. That he had been a thorough student of the Trivium and Quadrivium is proved by his works, for they all bear the impress of the disciplined scholastic and the skilful dialectician. In all respects he was a