Wolsey had contemplated establishing a hundred canons; but Henry reduced the number at a stroke to twelve, and then to eight; later they were further reduced to six, which is the present number. Besides the canons, dean, and bishop, Henry's foundation included eight petty canons or chaplains, a gospeller and a postiller or bible-clerk, eight singing clerks, eight choristers and their master, a schoolmaster and an usher, an organist, sixty scholars or students, and forty "children," corresponding no doubt to the scholars of later days. Soon after, however, the whole scholastic part of the establishment was replaced by one hundred students, who (with the one "outcomer" of the Thurston foundation) are still nightly tolled by the hundred and one strokes of great Tom, this being the signal for college-gates to be closed all over Oxford. Such was the arrangement of the new establishment, which, as the name of _Ecclesia Christi_ was replaced by _Ædes Christi_, came to be called, according to the double use of the word _æedes_, both Christ _Church_ and the _House_. The history of the see of Oxford, which was first set up at Oseney in 1542, will be found in another chapter. Curiously enough, the suppression of the monasteries, and the new vigorous religious movement, did not benefit the University, in spite of the addition of Wolsey's great college; on the contrary, the Reformation nearly emptied the University, which had already lost much of its old activity during the intellectual stagnation of the fifteenth century, so that, in Edward VI.'s reign, washerwomen took to hanging out their clothes in the schools. Most of the halls disappeared for ever, and from that time Oxford passed out of the hands of the poor man, Christ Church as the royal college becoming the special home of the gilded youth. The first functions of the House seem indeed to have been mainly ornamental: Henry VIII. was entertained there, public declamations were given before the University under Edward VI., Cranmer was unfrocked in the cloister under Mary. In Queen Elizabeth's reign, as well as in the seventeenth century, Christ Church Hall was used for the performance of plays, as when in 1583 _Dido_ was acted, and "there was a pleasant sight of hunters, with a full cry of a kennel of hounds, and Mercury and his descending and ascending from and to a high place. The tempest also, wherein it rained small comfits, rose-water, and snew artificial snow, was very strange to the beholders."