Note 287 — Chapter III · THE UNIVERSITY AS A DEGREE-GIVING BODY

The ancient pronunciation of Latin (so far as it can be recovered) has been taught, as an alternative, at Cambridge for the last 25 years, and has of late been widely adopted there, as elsewhere. Perhaps at the bottom of the preference for English Latin there lies the notion that without it Latin would no longer be the English scholar’s second tongue. The simple retort is that with it Latin is no longer (has not been for centuries) a common medium, the second tongue, of European scholars. Anglicised Greek is due to Sir John Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith, though it was promptly abolished at the time by Stephen Gardiner then chancellor of the university, and opposed also by Caius. “Nor mattereth it if foreigners should dissent, seeing hereby we Englishmen shall understand one another,” so Fuller explains the position.