The Elizabethan statutes of Trinity College provided that the Master and the eight Senior Fellows should elect to fellowships after conducting an examination of the candidates extending over four days: “primo die in Dialectica et Mathematicis; secundo in Philosophia turn Naturali, turn Morali; tertio in linguarum cognitione, in Historiis, in Poetis, et in toto genere humanioris literaturae; quarto in scribendo de Themate aliquo, et in carminibus componendis; et quid etiam in cantando possint”. But by the eighteenth century these examination requirements had ceased to be rigidly enforced. Each of the electors separately examined the candidates in the manner he thought best, and in the subjects with which he was most conversant; and it is therefore extremely improbable that the examination covered all the branches of knowledge prescribed by the statutes. Moreover, during the latter part of the eighteenth century it was not unknown for a Senior to take part in the fellowship election without having examined any of the candidates.

The famous protest of the ten junior Fellows in 1786 against the practice of electors voting for candidates whom they had not examined, not only led to the cessation of this abuse, but to the institution by Dr Postlethwaite, who became Master in 1789, of a public fellowship examination, which, during the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, varied in length from four to five days. It was mainly a test of proficiency in classics and mathematics, though it included papers on metaphysics and on literary and historical subjects.