ABSTRACT
In at any rate the first half of the nineteenth century the situation which I have described as applying in the eighteenth century still held good. Changes in university systems gradually took place more or less everywhere, however. In England, until University College London was instituted in 1827, in deliberate opposition to the policy of religious tests which restricted holders of fellowships and the like at Oxford and Cambridge to members of the Church of England, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge remained the only universities in England; and not much in the way of philosophy went on there. Religious tests continued in Oxford and Cambridge until the Test Act of 1871, but in 1850 the first of a series of Royal Commissions was appointed which led to reforms in those universities, including the abolition of the condition that fellows of colleges must not be married, and a gradual increase in the powers of the university in relation to the colleges.
