<P> The university was a centre of the Royalist party during the English Civil War (1642--1649), while the town favoured the opposing Parliamentarian cause . From the mid-18th century onwards, however, the University of Oxford took little part in political conflicts . </P> <P> Wadham College, founded in 1610, was the undergraduate college of Sir Christopher Wren . Wren was part of a brilliant group of experimental scientists at Oxford in the 1650s, the Oxford Philosophical Club, which included Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke . This group held regular meetings at Wadham under the guidance of the College's Warden, John Wilkins, and the group formed the nucleus which went on to found the Royal Society . </P> <P> The curriculum at Oxford before the reforms was notoriously narrow and impractical . Sir Spencer Walpole, a historian of contemporary Britain and a senior government official, had not attended any university . He says, "few medical men, few solicitors, few persons intended for commerce or trade, ever dreamed of passing through a university career ." He quotes the Oxford University Commissioners in 1852 stating: "The education imparted at Oxford was not such as to conduce to the advancement in life of many persons, except those intended for the ministry ." Nevertheless, Walpole argued: </P> <P> Among the many deficiencies attending a university education there was, however, one good thing about it, and that was the education which the undergraduates gave themselves . It was impossible to collect some thousand or twelve hundred of the best young man in England, to give them the opportunity of making acquaintance with one another, and full liberty to live their lives in their own way, without evolving in the best among them, some admirable qualities of loyalty, independence, and self - control . If the average undergraduate carried from University little or no learning, which was of any service to him, he carried from it a knowledge of men and respect for his fellows and himself, a reverence for the past, a code of honour for the present, which could not but be serviceable . He had enjoyed opportunities...of intercourse with men, some of whom were certain to rise to the highest places in the Senate, in the Church, or at the Bar . He might have mixed with them in his sports, in his studies, and perhaps in his debating society; and any associations which he had this formed had been useful to him at the time, and might be a source of satisfaction to him in after life . </P>

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