William of Wykeham was an ecclesiastic; but in the Middle Ages that meant something very different from what it means now. “The Church” was a synonym for “the professions.” In Northern Europe the Church supplied almost the only opportunity of a civil career to the cadet of a noble house, the sole opportunity of rising to the ambitious plebeian. The servants of the Crown, the diplomatists, the secretaries, advisers, or “clerks” of great nobles, the host of ecclesiastical judges and lawyers, many even of the secular lawyers, the physicians, the architects, sometimes even the astrologers, were ecclesiastics. William of Wykeham rose to eminence as a civil servant of the Crown, and was rewarded in the usual way by ecclesiastical preferment, culminating in a bishopric. Such men had usually taken a degree in Canon or Civil Law at the Universities. William of Wykeham is not known to have been a University man; he rose to eminence in the King’s Office of Works, and became surveyor at Windsor Castle, which was half rebuilt under his direction. He was the greatest architect of his day. Afterwards he held a series of political appointments--eventually the Chancellorship. As a politician, he was the champion of the old order of things rudely shaken by the Wycliffite heresy and the political movements with which it was associated; the leader of the Church, or Conservative, party; a moderate and far-sighted man withal, but still a sturdy opponent of reform; a pious man in the conventional fourteenth-century way, but still a devoted supporter of all the abuses against which Wyclif had declaimed, as became one who was himself the greatest pluralist of his day. New College was intended to be another stronghold of the old system in Church and State. It was to increase the supply of clergy, which the statutes declare to have been thinned by “pestilences, wars, and the other miseries of the world.” Some have seen in these words a special allusion to the Black Death of 1348; but it was more probably a mere flourish of mediæval rhetoric, or possibly a fashion which had survived from 1348. The general idea of the College was not fundamentally different from that of its predecessors. William of Wykeham, once raised to the splendid See of Winchester, was anxious to do something for the Church; and the general opinion of the day was that monks were out of date, that the Church herself was rich enough, and that to send capable men to the Universities was the best way to fight heresy, to strengthen the Church system, and to save the donor’s soul.