since decayed; training in law had been monopolized for centuries by the Inns
of Court in London, in medicine by independent medical colleges and teaching
hospitals. Oxford and Cambridge were dominated by the residential colleges,
some of which held extensive property endowments, and whose fellowships
were valuable sinecures. University professorships existed, but in many cases
their pay was minimal, and there was little demand for their teaching; often
their incumbents did not lecture at all, but held them as absentee prebends.
Even theology, the only vocational subject for those students for whom the
university was more than an upper-class social club, was generally taught in a
perfunctory manner. Intellectual standards were low; after 1800 a few colleges
gradually instituted honors examinations, but these were optional and confined
to a few classical subjects.^42
Pressure for reform was bound up with external political movements for
widening the franchise and attacking aristocratic privilege. The universities
were criticized by the advocates of modern science, of Utilitarian practicality,
and of the superior scholarship of the German university model. The issue
which brought concrete reforms, however, was not intellectual, it was the
restriction of university matriculation and of teaching positions to members of
the Anglican Church, excluding both Protestant Dissenters and Catholics. The
turning point came as the Anglicans broke ranks internally, in heated contro-
versy during 1830–1860 among warring factions of puritanical Evangelicals,
Broad Church liberals, and ritualistic High Church tendencies. The first round
of intellectual fireworks in university philosophy was the result.
In 1833, in response to concessions made by the reforming Whig govern-
ment to the Catholic majority in Ireland by redistributing church properties,
a movement of Oxford dons arose to defend the autonomous rights of the
Anglican Church (Chadwick, 1966; Green, 1969: 59). These so-called Trac-
tarian discussions of the propertied-cum-spiritual superiority of the church
soon took on a life of their own. In 1841 John Henry Newman, a defender of
church ritualism as an expression of higher spiritual realities within the mate-
rial world, went so far as to provide his own solution to the issue of Anglican
exclusivity by interpreting Anglican tenets as congruent with those of Roman
Catholicism. In the ensuing furor Newman was deprived of his fellowship, and
in 1845 joined the Catholic Church. The Tractarians were the first lively
evidence of intellectual creativity at Oxford in many generations, presaging the
Idealism that was to emerge in the 1870s. In both cases struggle over church
property—above all the prebends which materially supported church intellec-
tuals—generated intellectual energy.
Although the Tractarians (including those who remained within the Angli-
can Church) were bitter enemies of university reform, they were members of
the Oxford college—Oriel—which had gone furthest in throwing open its
664 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths