This page has been validated.
126
CHICANE—CHICHELEY
  

Administration link the university closely with practical life. In extension work the university has been active from the beginning, instruction being given not only by lectures but by correspondence (a novel and unique feature among American universities); in the decade 1892–1902, 1715 persons were prepared by the latter method for matriculation in the university (11.6% of the total number of matriculants in the decade). Extension lectures were given in twenty-two states. At Chicago the work of the university is continuous throughout the year: the “summer quarter” is not as in other American schools a supplement to the teaching year, but an integral part; and it attracts the teachers of the middle western states and of the south. In the work of the first two years, known together as the Junior College, men and women are in the main given separate instruction; but in the Senior College years unrestricted co-education prevails. Students are mainly controlled by self-government in small groups (“the house system”). Relations with “affiliated” (private) colleges and academies and “co-operating” (public) high-schools also present interesting features.

The value of the property of the university in 1908 was about $25,578,000. Up to the 30th of June 1908 it had received from gifts actually paid $29,651,849, of which $22,712,631 were given by John D. Rockefeller.[1] The value of buildings in 1908 was $4,508,202, of grounds $4,406,191, and of productive funds $14,186,235. Upon the death of President Harper, Harry Pratt Judson (b. 1849), then head professor of political science and dean of the faculties of arts, became acting president, and on the 20th of January 1907 he was elected president.

See the Decennial Publications of the University (since 1903), especially vol. i. for details of history and administration.


CHICANE, the pettifogging subterfuge and delay of sharp law-practitioners, also any deliberate attempt to gain unfair advantage by petty tricks. A more common English form of the word is “chicanery.” “Chicane” is technically used also as a term in the game of bridge for the points a player may score if he holds no trumps. The word is French, derived either from chaugān, Persian for the stick used in the game of “polo,” still played on foot and called chicane in Languedoc (the military use of chicaner, to take advantage of slight variations in ground, suits this derivation), or from chic, meaning little or petty, from the Spanish chico, small, which appears in the phrase “chic à chic,” little by little.


CHICHELEY, HENRY (1364–1443), English archbishop, founder of All Souls College, Oxford, was born at Higham Ferrers, Northamptonshire, in 1363 or 1364. Chicheley told the pope in 1443, in asking leave to retire from the archbishopric, that he was in his eightieth year. He was the third and youngest son of Thomas Chicheley, who appears in 1368 in still extant town records of Higham Ferrers as a suitor in the mayor’s court, and in 1381–1382, and again in 1384–1385, was mayor: in fact, for a dozen years he and Henry Barton, school master of Higham Ferrers grammar school, and one Richard Brabazon, filled the mayoralty in turns. His occupation does not appear; but his eldest son, William, is on the earliest extant list (1373) of the Grocers’ Company, London. On the 9th of June 1405 Chicheley was admitted, in succession to his father, to a burgage in Higham Ferrers. His mother, Agnes Pincheon, is said to have been of gentle birth. There is therefore no foundation in fact for the silly story (copied into the Dict. Nat. Biog. from a local historian, J. Cole, Wellingborough, 1838) that Henry Chicheley was picked up by William of Wykeham when he was a poor ploughboy “eating his scanty meal off his mother’s lap,” whatever that means. The story was unknown to Arthur Duck, fellow of All Souls, who wrote Chicheley’s life in 1617. It is only the usual attempt, as in the cases of Whittington, Wolsey and Gresham, to exaggerate the rise of a successful man. The first recorded appearance of Henry Chicheley himself is at New College, Oxford, as Checheley, eighth among the undergraduate fellows, in July 1387, in the earliest extant hall-book, which contains weekly lists of those dining in Hall. It is clear from Chicheley’s position in the list, with eleven fellows and eight scholars, or probationer-fellows, below him, that this entry does not mark his first appearance in the college, which had been going on since 1375 at least, and was chartered in 1379. He must have come from Winchester College in one of the earliest batches of scholars from that college, the sole feeder of New College, not from St John Baptist College, Winchester, as guessed by Dr William Hunt in the Dict. Nat. Biog. (and repeated in Mr Grant Robertson’s History of All Souls College) to cover the mistaken supposition that St Mary’s College was not founded till 1393. St Mary’s College was in fact formally founded in 1382, and the school had been going on since 1373 (A. F. Leach, History of Winchester College), while no such college as St John’s College at Winchester ever existed.

Chicheley appears in the Hall-books of New College up to the year 1392/93, when he was a B.A. and was absent for ten weeks from about the 6th of December to the 6th of March, presumably for the purpose of his ordination as a sub-deacon, which was performed by the bishop of Derry, acting as suffragan to the bishop of London. He was then already beneficed, receiving a royal ratification of his estate as parson of Llanvarchell in the diocese of St Asaph on the 20th of March 1391/92 (Cal. Pat. Rolls). In the Hall-book, marked 1393/94, but really for 1394/95, Chicheley’s name does not appear. He had then left Oxford and gone up to London to practise as an advocate in the principal ecclesiastical court, the court of arches. His rise was rapid. Already on the 8th of February 1395/96 he was on a commission with several knights and clerks to hear an appeal in a case of John Molton, Esquire v. John Shawe, citizen of London, from Sir John Cheyne, kt., sitting for the constable of England in a court of chivalry. Like other ecclesiastical lawyers and civil servants of the day; he was paid with ecclesiastical preferments. On the 13th of April 1396 he obtained ratification of the parsonage of St Stephen’s, Walbrook, presented on the 30th of March by the abbot of Colchester, no doubt through his brother Robert, who restored the church and increased its endowment. In 1397 he was made archdeacon of Dorset by Richard Mitford, bishop of Salisbury, but litigation was still going on about it in the papal court till the 27th of June 1399, when the pope extinguished the suit, imposing perpetual silence on Nicholas Bubwith, master of the rolls, his opponent. In the first year of Henry IV. Chicheley was parson of Sherston, Wiltshire, and prebendary of Nantgwyly in the college of Abergwilly, North Wales; on the 23rd of February 1401/2, now called doctor of laws, he was pardoned for bringing in, and allowed to use, a bull of the pope “providing” him to the chancellorship of Salisbury cathedral, and canonries in the nuns’ churches of Shaftesbury and Wilton in that diocese; and on the 9th of January 1402/3 he was archdeacon of Salisbury. This year his brother Robert was senior sheriff of London. On the 7th of May 1404, Pope Boniface IX. provided him to a prebend at Lincoln, notwithstanding he already held prebends at Salisbury, Lichfield, St Martin’s-le-Grand and Abergwyly, and the living of Brington. On the 9th of January 1405 he found time to attend a court at Higham Ferrers and be admitted to a burgage there. In July 1405 Chicheley began a diplomatic career by a mission to the new Roman pope Innocent VII., who was professing his desire to end the schism in the papacy by resignation, if his French rival at Avignon would do likewise. Next year, on the 5th of October 1406, he was sent with Sir John Cheyne to Paris to arrange a lasting peace and the marriage of Prince Henry with the French princess Marie, which was frustrated by her becoming a nun at Poissy next year.

  1. The words “founded by John D. Rockefeller” follow the title of the university on all its letterheads and official documents. Mr Rockefeller would not allow his name to be a part of the title, nor has he permitted the designation of any building by his name. President Harper was selected by him to organize the university, and it was his will that the president and two-thirds of the trustees should be “always” Baptists. President Harper more than once stated most categorically that contrary to prevalent beliefs no donor of funds to the university “has ever (1902) by a single word or act indicated his dissatisfaction with the instruction given to students in the university, or with the public expression of opinion made by any officer of the university”; and certainly so far as the public press reveals, no other university of the country has had so many professors who have in various lines, including economics, expressed radical views in public.