The Colleges of Oxford: Their History and Traditions: XXI Chapters Contributed by Members of the Colleges
History
The Colleges of Oxford: Their History and Traditions: XXI Chapters Contributed by Members of the Colleges
University of Oxford -- History
The other Balliol scholars who followed the instruction of Guarino at
Ferrara were a good deal younger than Grey; for Guarino lived on until
1460, when he died at the age of ninety. Tiptoft, who was created Earl
of Worcester in his twenty-second year, in 1449, was an enthusiastic
traveller. He set out first to Jerusalem; returned to Venice, and then
spent several years in study at Ferrara, Padua, and Rome.[44] During
this time he collected manuscripts wherever he could lay hands on
them, and formed a precious library, with which he afterwards endowed
the University of Oxford: its value was reckoned at no less than five
hundred marks.[45] His later career as Treasurer and High Constable
belongs to the public history of England. It is to be lamented that
he brought back from the Italian _renaissance_ a spirit of cruelty
and recklessness of giving pain, unknown to the humaner middle ages,
which made him one of the first victims of the revolution that restored
King Henry the Sixth to the throne. But in his death the cause of
letters received a blow such as we can only compare with that which
it suffered by the execution of the Earl of Surrey in the last days
of King Henry the Eighth. It is a strange coincidence that one of the
leaders of the restoration movement, one of those chiefly chargeable
with Tiptoft’s death, was his own Balliol contemporary, Archbishop
Nevill, the new Lord Chancellor.[46]
John Free, who graduated in 1450,[47] was a Fellow of Balliol College,
and was afterwards a Doctor of Medicine of Padua. During a life spent
in Italy he became famous as a poet and a Greek scholar, a civilist
and a physician.[48] Pope Paul the Second made him Bishop of Bath and
Wells, but he died almost immediately, in 1465.[49] Gunthorpe was his
companion in study at Ferrara, and he too became distinguished as a
scholar: but he was still more a collector of books, some of which he
gave to Jesus College, Cambridge--at one time he was Warden of the
King’s Hall in that University,--while others came to several libraries
at Oxford. Gunthorpe is best known as a man of affairs, a diplomatist
and minister of state. He became Dean of Wells, and is still remembered
in that city by the _guns_ with which he adorned the Deanery he
built.[50] He survived all his fellow-scholars we have named, and died
in 1498.[51]
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