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This article deals with the secular collegiate movement at Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the fifteenth century. There are many factors that generated the movement. After the eruption of Wycliffite heresy, the church hierarchy felt a need to reinforce the orthodoxy that led to establish colleges with a purpose to combat heresy. The movement was made possible to solve the lack of sufficient educated clerks and parish clergy. The shift in the balance of patronage from the pope to the king caused the collegiate movement by the crown and the prelates. The need for students who sought careers was another factor for the foundation, and finally the chantry function of colleges to pray for their founders and patrons could be considered a private motivation for the foundation.
For the founders, colleges were an ideal place to put their awareness into practice, and they did best to set up statutes which would be as specific as possible to ensure the continuity of the college in accordance with their founding purposes. It may be obvious that most founders intended the clergy, once educated, to assume a pastoral role in their parochial churches. Regardless of the realization of the founders' ideals in individual institutions, the desire, enthusiasm and contribution of the 'pious founders' for the church to be restored as a spiritual authority by well-trained clergy was something with real and significant consequences.
The secular collegiate movement had progressed and expanded its shape and range during the fifteenth century as the colleges gradually took over the role of the universities in training and supporting scholars by providing several new mechanisms; especially college lectureships and the administrative autonomy of colleges, both of which contributed to the transformation of Oxford and Cambridge into college-based universities. It is no exaggeration to say that in the fifteenth century Oxbridge played a crucial role in providing substantial reform ideas and played their part in an important gradual reform movement whose ultimate goal was to reform church and society in late medieval England through education.