Whatever might be their age or proficiency, scholar and teacher alike ranked as clerks, free from lay responsibilities or the control of civil tribunals, and amenable only to the rule of the Bishop and the sentence of his spiritual courts.

This ecclesiastical character of the University appeared in that of its head.
The Chancellor, as we have seen, was at first no officer of the University itself, but of the ecclesiastical body under whose shadow it had sprung into life.

At Oxford he was simply the local officer of the Bishop of Lincoln, within whose immense diocese the University was then situated.

But this identification in outer form with the Church only rendered more conspicuous the difference of spirit between them.

The sudden expansion of the field of education diminished the importance of those purely ecclesiastical and theological studies which had hitherto absorbed the whole intellectual energies of mankind.