R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

Oxford in the 'Seventies 215ball rolling. It initiated the emancipation of the Universityfrom the College dominium. It taxed the Colleges forthe benefit of the Professoriate; it provided a cheaperadit to University education by establishing non-collegiatestudents. It destroyed the old local liens onCollege endowments, and substituted—in accordancewith nuling ideas of the day—Open Examinations andCompetition for patronage and privilege in the award ofScholarships and Fellowships. In short, it enlarged theUniversity to the classes which had been enfranchised bythe Act of 1832, subject to certain reservations. Inespecial, it left the resident University still predominantlya clerical and celibate society; and Oxford, with its endowments,was still to be restricted to members of theChurch of England, except that Matriculation and theBaccalaureate were relieved of Tests by the Act of 1854.But, before the 'sixties were over, these survivals ofLaudian Oxford had become intolerable. Changes effectedby the first Commission, which had seemed revolutionaryat the time, left resident Oxford unsatisfiedand conspiring for more radical measures. The newlyinvented 'Prize-Fellow', a non-resident who applied hisstipend to better his start in life outside Oxford, wasbracketed with the ' Idle Fellow', as an abuse of Collegeendowments. The lack of permanent provision for layteachers, competent and willing to undertake HigherEducation as their life's work, was pronounced anomalousand absurd. The endowment of Research, in lieu of cramand competition, became the mot cTordre of the advancedreformers. Already in 1870 the Queen's Speech at theopening of the Session commended to Parliament alegislative settlement of religious tests in the Universitiesand Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge: and althoughLord Salisbury contrived the postponement of the Bill,a measure to that effect was enacted in the session of 1871.