3 - Mobility and Mortality: How Place of Origin Affected the Life Chances of Late Medieval Scholars at Winchester College and New College Oxford

Summary

Detailed examination of factors affecting mortality patterns among the medieval population of England has long presented a challenge to the historian. In the period preceding the commencement of parish records in 1538, life events were not systematically recorded so as to provide adequate data from which the demographic regime of medieval England can be accurately reconstructed. However, a range of sources has survived which enable analysis of certain demographic characteristics among particular communities or groups. The payments of customary fines recorded in manorial court rolls, for example, have enabled the examination of marriage patterns, illegitimacy and mortality within particular communities, albeit within the constraints of available data.

Medieval mortality in particular has also been investigated through the examination of closed communities, such as monasteries. Case studies have focused upon institutions with good surviving records, which allow the individuals resident within them to be followed, usually from the point of their recruitment until their deaths. This has enabled detailed examination and analysis of mortality rates and levels of life expectancy among the communities of monks at Christ Church Canterbury, Westminster Abbey and Durham Cathedral Priory across the period c.1390 to c.1540. The advantage of such studies is that the size of the populations within which deaths are identified, and the approximate ages of the individuals within these groups, are more easily determined, making analyses of mortality and life expectancy for such samples more secure.

This chapter presents another such study of an institutional community, in this instance following medieval scholars through their educational careers at Winchester College and New College Oxford, and beyond into their post-university employment. William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, founded ‘St Mary’s College of Winchester in Oxford’ (known as New College) in 1379 and its sister institution ‘St Mary’s College of Winchester near Winchester’ (Winchester College) three years later. The two colleges had multiple purposes, acting as chantry foundations to provide prayers and masses for the benefit of Wykeham’s soul after death, as well as being charitable foundations to provide education and training to seventy ‘poor scholars’. He intended that young boys between the ages of eight and eighteen would receive an education in grammar at Winchester College before continuing to New College to pursue their university education.