The committee desired by Arundel was eventually constituted. Two hundred and sixty-seven propositions were condemned and the obnoxious books solemnly burnt at Carfax. Not long after, a copy of the list of condemned articles was ordered to be preserved in the public libraries, and oaths against their maintenance were enjoined upon all members of the University on graduation. The methods of the Archbishop met with the success which usually attends a well-conducted persecution. History notices the few martyrs who from time to time have laid down their lives for their principles, but it often fails to notice the millions of men who have discarded their principles rather than lay down their lives. So the Wycliffite heresy was at length dead and buried. But the ecclesiastical repression which succeeded in bringing this about succeeded also in destroying all vigour and life in the thought of the University. Henceforth the Schoolmen refrained from touching on the practical questions of their day. They struck out no new paths of thought, but revolved on curves of subtle and profitless speculation, reproducing and exaggerating in their logical hair-splitting all the faults without any of the intellectual virtues of the great thinkers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It was against these degenerate dullards that the human mind at last rebelled, when intellect was born again in the New Birth of letters. What wonder then if, suddenly freed from the dead weight of their demoralising stupidities, men broke out in the exuberance of their spirits into childish excesses, confused the master with his foolish and depressing pupils, strewed the quadrangle of New College with the leaves of Dunce, and put them to the least noble of uses, as though they had been the Chronicles of Volusius. The Archbishop's right of Visitation was confirmed in Parliament and with it the suppression of Lollardy, of free speech and thought, in the schools and pulpits of Oxford. The issue of the struggle practically closes the history of Lollardism as a recognised force in English politics, and with it the intellectual history of mediæval Oxford.