AS you drive into Oxford from the railway station, you pass, as we have seen, monuments which may recall to mind the leading features of her history and the part which she took in the life of the country. The Castle Mound takes us back to the time when Saxon was struggling against Dane; the Castle itself is the sign manual of the Norman conquerors; the Cathedral spire marks the site upon which S. Frideswide and her “she-monastics” built their Saxon church upon the virgin banks of the river. Carfax, with the Church of S. Martin, was the centre

The Porch & Gate S. Mary the Virgins.
The Porch & Gate S. Mary the Virgins.

of the city’s life and represents the spirit of municipal liberty which animated her citizens, and the progress of their municipal freedom.

The bell which swung in Carfax Tower summoned the common assembly to discuss and to decide their own public affairs and to elect their own mayor. And this town-mote of burghers, freemen within the walls, who held their rights as burghers by virtue of their tenure of ground on which their tenement stood, met in Carfax Churchyard. Justice was administered by mayor and bailiff sitting beneath the low shed, the “penniless bench”[22] of later times, without its eastern wall. And around the church lay the trade guilds, ranged as in some vast encampment.

Carfax Church, with all its significance of municipal life, stands at the top of High Street, the most beautiful street in the world. Still, by virtue of the splendid sweep of its curve comparable only to the Grand Canal of Venice or the bend of Windermere, and by virtue of the noble grouping of its varied buildings, the most beautiful street in the world; in spite of modern tramways and the ludicrous dome of the Shelley Memorial, “a thing resembling a goose pye,” as Swift wrote of Sir John Vanburgh’s house in Whitehall; in spite of the disquieting ornamentation of Brasenose new buildings and the new schools; in spite even of the unspeakably vulgar and pretentious faÇade of Lloyd’s Bank, a gross, advertising abomination of unexampled ugliness and impertinence, which has done all that was possible to ruin the first view of this street of streets. Let us leave it behind us with a shudder and pass down the High till we find on our left, at what was once the end of “Schools Street,” the lovely twisted columns of the porch which forms the modern entrance to S. Mary’s Church.

What Carfax was to the municipal life of Oxford, S. Mary’s was to the University. It was the centre of the academical and ecclesiastical life of the place. And the bell which swung in S. Mary’s tower summoned the students of the University sometimes to take part in learned disputations among themselves, sometimes to fight the citizens of the town.

Here then, between the Churches of S. Martin and S. Mary, the life of this mediÆval University town ebbed and flowed. In the narrow, ill-paved, dirty streets, streets that were mere winding passages, from which the light of day was almost excluded by the overhanging tops of the irregular houses, crowded a motley throng. The country folks filled the centre of the streets with their carts and strings of pack-horses; at the sides, standing beneath the signs of their calling, which projected from their houses, citizens in varied garb plied their trades, chaffering with the manciples, but always keeping their bow-strings taut, ready to promote a riot by pelting a scholar with offal from the butchers’ stall, and prompt to draw their knives at a moment’s notice. To and fro among the stalls moved Jews in their yellow gaberdines; black Benedictines and white Cistercians; Friars black, white and grey; men-at-arms from the Castle, and flocks of lads who had entered some grammar school or religious house to pass the first stage of the University course. Here passed a group of ragged, gaunt, yellow-visaged sophisters, returning peacefully from lectures to their inns, but with their “bastards” or daggers, as well as their leather pouches, at their waists. Here a knot of students, fantastically attired in many-coloured garments, whose tonsure was the only sign of their clerkly character, wearing beards, long hair, furred cloaks, and shoes chequered with red and green, paraded the thoroughfare, heated with wine from the feast of some determining bachelor. Here a line of servants, carrying the books of scholars or doctors to the schools, or there a procession of colleagues escorting to the grave the body of some master, and bearing before the corpse a silver cross, threaded the throng. Here hurried a bachelor in his cape, a new master in

The High Street On the left University College. On the right All Saints’ Church, Brasenose College, Church of S. Mary the Virgin, All Souls’ & Queen’s Colleges.
The High Street
On the left University College. On the right All Saints’ Church, Brasenose College, Church of S. Mary the Virgin, All Souls’ & Queen’s Colleges.

his “pynsons” or heelless shoes, a scholar of Exeter in his black boots, a full-fledged master with his tunic closely fastened about the middle by a belt and wearing round his shoulders a black, sleeveless, close gown. Here gleamed a mantle of crimson cloth, or the budge-edged hood of a doctor of law or of theology. And in the hubbub of voices which proceeded from this miscellaneous, parti-coloured mob, might be distinguished every accent, every language, and every dialect.[23] For French, German and Spanish students jostled in these streets against English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh; Kentish students mingled with students from Somersetshire or Yorkshire, and the speech of each was quite unintelligible to the other.

S. Mary’s Church was the only formal meeting place of these students, thus drawn together in the pursuit of knowledge from various parts of Europe. It was here that all University business, secular and religious, was transacted, till the building of the Divinity school and the Sheldonian theatre allowed the church to be reserved for sacred purposes. Then at last it ceased to be the scene of violent altercations between Heads of Houses or the stage where the TerrÆ Filius of the year should utter his scurrilous banalities.[24]

But still every Sunday morning during term the great bell of S. Mary’s rings out and summons the University to assemble in formal session there to hear a sermon. The bedels of the four faculties with their silver staves lead the way; and the Vice-chancellor is conducted to his throne, the preacher to his pulpit; the doctors of the several faculties in their rich robes follow and range themselves on either side of their official head; below them the proctors, representatives of the Masters of Arts, wearing the white hoods of their office, take their seats. The masters and bachelors fill the body of the church, the undergraduates are crowded into the galleries.

We must not think of S. Mary’s as merely a meeting-house for University business or as merely a parish church. For centuries it has been the centre of Christian Oxford; where each successive movement in English theology has been expounded and discussed. From the old stone pulpit, of which a fragment is fixed over the southern archway of the tower, Peter Martyr delivered his testimony and Cole sent Cranmer to the stake; from its nineteenth century successor, John Keble began the Oxford movement; Dr Pusey preached a sermon for which he was suspended, and Newman (vicar 1831) entered on the path to Rome.

The church is mentioned in Domesday Book, and the north wall of the Lady Chapel, commonly known as Adam de Brome’s Chapel because the tomb of the founder of Oriel is therein, may have been part of the church as it stood at the time of the Domesday survey. The tower and the spire date from the early fourteenth century.

S. Mary’s as we have it now is very much a Tudor building. When William of Wykeham built New College Chapel he set a fashion which soon converted Oxford into a city of pinnacles.[25] In the perpendicular style pinnacles were erected on Merton tower and transept, on All Souls’ Chapel, on Magdalen Chapel, hall and tower; nearly a hundred pinnacles decorated the Schools and Library; the nave, aisles and chancel of S. Mary’s received the same ornaments, and pinnacles in the same style were added to the clusters of the fourteenth century tower and spire. These were not high but observed a true proportion.

It was the grave fault of the excessively lofty pinnacles (beautiful no doubt in themselves) which were added in 1848,[26] that they destroyed the true beauty of proportion and the effect of gradual transition which the fourteenth century builders had succeeded in giving to the tower and spire, and with which the ancient statues in

S. Mary’s Spire from Grove Lane
S. Mary’s Spire from Grove Lane

their canopied niches were in perfect harmony. For the massive tower-buttresses are crowned with turrets, showing canopied niches containing twelve over-life-size statues and decorated with ball-flower ornament. Two of the statues on the buttresses facing south are modern; nine others are copies (1895) of the old statues, stored now in the ancient Congregation House, which still exhibit the carefully calculated gestures and the studied designs of the original fourteenth century workers. They form a series which recalls that on the west front of Wells Cathedral, a rare example of English sculpture in a genre which is so plentifully and superbly illustrated by the French cathedrals.

On the face of the south buttress of the west front stood the statue, beautifully posed, of the Virgin with the Infant Christ, the Lady of the Church thus occupying the most important angle of the tower; on the left, S. John the Evangelist with the cup. Between the Evangelist and S. John the Baptist, patron saint of the Chapel of Merton, Walter of Merton looks out towards the College he founded. These three are from new designs by Mr Frampton.

On the N.W. angle of the tower is S. Cuthbert of Durham, facing northwards. He holds in his hand the head of S. Oswald, the Christian King slain by Penda, and looks towards his own north country and Durham, the great diocese so intimately connected through its bishops and monastery with the early collegiate foundations of the Universities. Northwards, too, towards his cathedral church of Lincoln, faces S. Hugh, with the wild swan of Stowe nestling to him as was his wont, with its neck buried in the folds of his sleeve. This statue is on the eastern buttress at the N.E. angle, and on the eastern face of the same buttress is an equally noble statue of Edward the Confessor. On the S.E. angle stands, it may be, the murdered Becket, and among the other figures Edmund Rich may perhaps be counted.

The chancel and nave are, it will be seen, splendid examples of late perpendicular. The chancel, in fact, began to be rebuilt in 1462 and the nave 1487-1498. For the church “was so ruinated in Henry VII. reign that it could scarce stand,” and though it was and is really a parish church, yet so closely was it bound up with the life and procedure of the University that the University at length took measures to collect money for its repair.

They begged, after the approved manner of the great church-builders of the Middle Ages, from the archbishop downwards, and their begging was so successful that they built the nave, as we now have it, and the chancel. In order to secure an appearance of uniformity, the architect unfortunately altered Adam de Brome’s chapel, encasing the outer walls in the new style, and inserting larger windows. Not content with this, he likewise converted the old House of Congregation by substituting a row of large for two rows of small windows, giving thereby a false impression from the outside, as if the upper and lower stories were one.

The University had no right to the use of S. Mary’s. The church was merely borrowed for sermons and meetings of Congregation, just as S. Peter’s in the East was borrowed for English sermons and S. Mildred’s for meetings of the Faculty of Arts. For the University in its infancy had little or no property of its own. It could not afford to erect buildings for its own use. The parish churches, therefore, were used by favour of the clergy, and lectures were delivered in hired schools.

The need for some University building was, however, severely felt. At last it was provided for in a small way. “That memorable fabric, the old Congregation House,” and the room above it were begun in 1320 by the above-mentioned Adam de Brome, at the expense of Thomas Cobham, Bishop of Worcester. The latter had undertaken to enlarge the old fabric of S. Mary’s Church by erecting a building two stories high immediately to the east of the tower, on the very site, that is, on which the University had previously endeavoured to found a chantry. He intended that the lower room should serve primarily as a meeting-place for the Congregations of regent-masters, and at other times for parochial purposes. The upper room was to be used partly as an oratory, and partly as a general library. But the good bishop’s books, which were to form the nucleus of this library, met with the same fate as Richard de Bury’s. His executors pawned them to defray the expenses of his funeral, and to pay his debts. Oriel College at their suggestion redeemed the books, and being also the impropriating rectors of the church, they claimed to treat both building and library as their own property. But the masters presently asserted their supposed rights by coming “with a great multitude” and forcibly carrying away the books from Oriel, “in autumn, when the fellows were mostly away.” They lodged the books in the upper chamber, and Oriel presently acknowledged the University’s proprietary rights.

The old University library, then, found its home in the upper room of the old Congregation House, and there remained until the books were moved to Duke Humphrey’s library (1480). From that time till the erection of Laud’s Convocation House, the upper room was used as a school of law, and also as another Congregation House, distinguished by the name of “Upper.” Meantime a salary was provided for a librarian, who, besides taking care of the books in the upper chamber, was to pray for the soul of the donors. Other books were acquired by the University, either by purchase, bequest, or as unredeemed pledges. Some of these were kept in chests, and loaned out on security like cash from the other chests, whilst others were books given or bequeathed to the University, which were kept chained in the chancel of the church, where the students might read them. Others, in the upper room, were secured to shelves by chains that ran on iron bars. These shelves, with desks alongside, would run out from the walls, between the seven windows, in a manner clearly shown by such survivals of mediÆval libraries as exist at the Bodleian, Merton and Corpus. The catalogue was in the form of a large board suspended in the room. At first these books were open for the use of all students at the specified times, but by later statutes (1412), made when the library had been increased by further donations and time had brought bitter experience, the use of them was stringently limited to graduates or religious of eight years’ standing in Philosophia. These regulations were intended to provide against the overcrowding of the small library, the disturbance of readers and the destruction of books by careless, idle and not over-clean boy students. With the object of preserving the books, a solemn oath was also exacted from all graduates on admission to their degree, that they would use them well and carefully. The lower room fulfilled its founder’s intention, and here the Congregation of regents met, whilst the Convocation, or Great Congregation of regents and non-regents, was held in the chancel of the church.

Here, then, we may imagine the Chancellor sitting, surrounded by doctors and masters of the Great Congregation as the scene was formerly depicted in the great west window of S. Mary’s, and is still represented on the University seal.

I have referred to the “chests” which were kept in the upper chamber. This was in fact the treasure-house of the University, and here were stored in great chests doubly and trebly locked, like the “Bodley” chest in the Bodleian, the books and money with which the University had been endowed for the benefit of her scholars.

Mr Anstey (Munimenta Academica) has given a brilliant little sketch of the scene which the fancy may conjure up when the new guardians of the chests were appointed and the chests opened in their presence.

It is the eve of the Festival of S. John at the Latin Gate, in the year of Grace 1457. To-morrow is the commemoration day of W. de Seltone, founder of the chest known by his name. Master T. Parys, Principal of S. Mary Hall, and Master Lowson are the new guardians, the latter the north countryman of the two. High mass has just been sung with commemoration collects, and solemn prayers for the repose of the souls of W. de Seltone and all the faithful departed. It is not a reading (legible) day, so the church is full. But now all have left, except a few ragged-looking lads, who still kneel towards the altar, and seem to be saying their Pater Nosters and Ave Marias, according to their vow, for their benefactor. Master Parys and Master Lowson, however, have left earlier; they have passed out of the chancel and made their way into the old Congregation House for their first inspection of the Seltone Chest. Each of the guardians draws from beneath his cape a huge key, which he applies to the locks. At the top lies the register of the contents, in which is recorded particulars, dates, names and amounts of the loans granted. The money remaining in one corner of the chest is carefully counted and compared with the account in the register. Here and there among valuable MSS. lie other pledges of less peaceful sort but no less characteristic of a mediÆval student’s valuable possessions. Here perhaps are two or three daggers of more than ordinary workmanship, and there a silver cup or a hood lined with minever. That man in an ordinary civilian’s dress, who stands beside Master Parys, is John More, the University stationer, and it is his office to fix the value of the pledges offered, and to take care that none are sold at less than their real value. It is a motley group that stands around; there are several masters and bachelors, but more boys and young men in every variety of coloured dress, blue, red, medley or green. Many of these lads are but scantily clothed, and all have their attention riveted on the chest, each with curious eye watching for his pledge, his book or his cup, brought from some country village, perhaps an old treasure of his family, and now pledged in his extremity. For last term he could not pay the principal of his hall seven and sixpence due for the rent of his miserable garret, or the manciple for his battels, but now he is in funds again. The remittance, long delayed on the road, has arrived, or perhaps he has succeeded in earning or begging a sufficient sum to redeem his pledge. He pulls out the coin from the leathern money-pouch at his girdle. But among the group you may see one master, whose bearing and dress plainly denote superior comfort and position. He is wearing the academical costume of a master, cincture and biretta, gown and hood of minever. Can it be that he too has been in difficulties? He might easily have been, for the post was irregular, and rents were not always punctual in those days. But in this case it is Master Henry Sever, Warden of Merton, who has lately been making some repairs in the College, and he has borrowed from the Seltone Chest the extreme sum permitted by the ordinance, sixty shillings, for that purpose. The scholars plainly disapprove of his action. They are jealous of his using the funds of the chest which, they think, were not intended for the convenience of such as he. Master Sever, however, is filled with anxiety at the present moment. He has pledged an illuminated missal which far exceeds in value the sum he has borrowed, and this he omitted to redeem at the proper time. It is not in the chest. He inquires, and is told that it has been borrowed for inspection by an intending purchaser, who has left a silver cup in its place, of more intrinsic value by the stationer’s decision, but not in Mr Sever’s opinion. Satisfied that he will be able to effect an exchange, he departs with the cup in search of the owner. Other cases are now considered. Some redeem their pledges, some borrow more monies, some are new customers, and they sorrowfully deposit their treasures and slink sadly away, not without a titter from the more hardened bystanders. But before the iron lid closes again, and the bolts slide back, “Ye shall pray,” says Master Parys, addressing the borrowers, “for the soul of W. de Seltone and all the faithful departed.”

We may pass from this scene in the old Convocation House to another not less typical of the mediÆval University. The Chancellor’s court is being held, and the Chancellor himself is sitting there, or, in his absence, his commissary. The two proctors are present as assessors, and these three constitute the court. It is before this tribunal that every member of the “Privilege” must be tried. For it was only in a University court that they could be sued in the first instance. Here then, if we attend this court and glance through the records of ages, we shall find the Chancellor administering justice, exercising the extensive powers which he holds as a Justice of the Peace and as almost the supreme authority over members of the University. True, he had not the power of life and death, but he could fine or banish, imprison and excommunicate. And as to the townsmen, he exercised over them a joint jurisdiction with the mayor and civic authorities. The accused was entitled to have an advocate to defend him, and he could appeal to the Congregation of Masters, and thereafter to the Pope. No spiritual cause terminable within the University could be carried out of it. But in all temporal cases the ultimate appeal was to the King.

The truculent student, however, was often inclined to appeal to force. Master John Hodilbeston, it is recorded in the Acts of the Chancellor’s Court (1434), when accused of a certain offence, was observed to have brought a dagger into the very presence of the Chancellor, contrary to the statutes, “wherefore he lost his arms to the University and was put in Bocardo.” The next case on the list of this mediÆval police court is that of Thomas Skibbo. He is not a clerk, but he too finds his way to Bocardo, for he has committed many crimes of violence. Highway robbery and threats of murder were nothing to him, as a scholar of Bekis-Inn comes forward to depose, and, besides, he has stolen a serving boy. After the scholar and the ruffian, the Warden of Canterbury College steps forward. He has come to make his submission to the commissary, whom he had declared to be a partial judge, and whose summons he had refused to obey. Also, he has added injury to insult by encouraging his scholars to take beer by violence in the streets. The commissary graciously accepts his apology and his undertaking to keep the peace in future. The Master of the Great Hall of the University now comes forward. Evil rumours have been rife, and he wishes to clear his character of vile slanders that have connected his name with those of certain women. He brings no charge of slander, but claims the right of clearing himself by making an affidavit. This was the system of compurgation, by which a man swore that he was innocent of a crime, and twelve good friends of his swore that he was speaking the truth. In this case the Master was permitted to clear himself by oath before the commissary in Merton College Chapel, and Mistress Agnes Bablake and divers women appeared and swore with him that rumour was a lying jade. On another occasion the Principal of White Hall wished to prove his descent from true English stock. He insisted on being allowed to swear that he was not a Scotsman. A discreditable rumour to that effect had doubtless got abroad, without taking tangible form. But he was, he maintained, a loyal Englishman. “It was greatly to his credit” doubtless. Qui s’excuse, s’accuse, we are inclined to think in such cases. The appalling penalties which awaited the perjurer probably gave the ceremony some force at one time. But Dr Gascoigne enters his protest in the Chancellor’s book (1443) against the indiscriminate admission of parties to compurgation. National feeling and clan feeling ran high. Gascoigne says that he has known many cases in which people have privately admitted that they have perjured themselves in public. Moreover, he added, no townsman ventures to object to a person being admitted to compurgation, for fear of being murdered or at least maimed. No good end, therefore, can be answered by it.

But what is the cause of Robert Wright, Esquire-Bedel? He has some complaint against the master and fellows of Great University Hall (1456). The Chancellor listens for a moment, and then suggests, like a modern London police magistrate, that they should settle their quarrel out of court. They decide to appoint arbitrators, and bind themselves to abide by their award. The commissary is frequently appointed arbitrator himself, and his award is usually to the effect that one party shall humbly ask pardon of the other, pay a sum of money and swear to keep the peace. Other awards are more picturesque. Thus, when Broadgates and Pauline Halls decided to settle their quarrel in this way, the arbitrators ordered the principals mutually to beg reconciliation from each other for themselves and their parties, and to give either to the other the kiss of peace and swear upon the Bible to have brotherly love to each other, under a bond of a hundred shillings. David Phillipe, who struck John Olney, must kneel to him and ask and receive pardon.

As an earnest of their future good-will, it is often decreed that the two parties shall entertain their neighbours. Two gallons of ale are mentioned sometimes as suitable for this purpose; a feast is recommended at others, and the dishes are specified. As thus:—(1465) The arbiter decides that neither party in a quarrel which he has been appointed to settle, shall in future abuse, slander, threaten or make faces at the other. As a guarantee of their mutual forgiveness and reconciliation, they are commanded to provide at their joint charges an entertainment in S. Mary’s College. The arbiter orders the dinner; one party is to supply a goose and a measure of wine, the other bread and beer.

Many and minute are the affairs of the Chancellor. At one time he is concerned with the taverners. He summons them all before him, and makes them swear that in future they will brew wholesome beer, and that they will supply the students with enough of it; at another he imprisons a butcher who has been selling “putrid and fetid” meat, or a baker who has been using false weights; at another banishes a carpenter for shooting at the proctors, or sends a woman to the pillory for being an incorrigible prostitute or to Bocardo for the mediÆval fault of being a common and intolerable scold. Next he fines the vicar of S. Giles’ for breaking the peace, and confiscates his club. Then he dispatches the organist of All Souls’ to Bocardo, for Thomas Bentlee has committed adultery. But the poor man weeps so bitterly, that the Warden of that college is moved to have good hope of the said Thomas, and goes surety for him, and the “organ-player” is released after three hours of incarceration. The punishment of a friar who is charged with having uttered a gross libel in a sermon, and has refused to appear when cited before the Chancellor’s court, is more severe. He is degraded in congregation and banished.

The jurisdiction which we have seen the Chancellor wielding in this court had not been always his, and it was acquired not without dust and heat. At the beginning of the thirteenth century he was both in fact and in theory the delegate of the bishop of the diocese; not the presiding head, but an external authority who might be invoked to enforce the decrees of the Masters’ Guild.

Before that time the organisation of the University extended at least so far as to boast of a “Master of the Schools,” who was probably elected by the masters themselves, and whose office was very likely merged into that of the Chancellor.

As an ecclesiastical judge, deriving his authority from the Bishop of Lincoln, the Chancellor exercised jurisdiction over students by virtue of their being “clerks,” not members of the University. Over laymen he exercised jurisdiction only so far as they were subject to the authority of the ordinary ecclesiastical courts. At Oxford he had no prison or Cathedral dungeon to which he could commit delinquents. He was obliged to send them either to the King’s prison in the Castle, or to the town prison over the Bocardo Gate.

But from this time forward by a series of steps, prepared as a rule by conflicts between town and gown, the office of Chancellor was gradually raised. First it encroached on the liberties of the town, and then shook itself free of its dependence on the See of Lincoln.

The protection of the great, learned and powerful Bishop of Lincoln and the fact that, in the last resort, the masters were always ready to stop lecturing and withdraw with all the students to another town, for the University, as such, had not yet acquired any property to tie them to Oxford, were weapons which proved of overwhelming advantage to the University at this early stage of its existence. Again and again we find that, when a dispute as to police jurisdiction or authority arose between the University and the town, pressure was brought to bear in this way. The masters ceased to lecture; the students threatened to shake the dust of Oxford off their feet; the enthusiastic Grossetete, throwing aside the cares of State, the business of his bishopric, and the task of translating the Ethics of Aristotle, came forward to intervene on behalf of his darling University and to use his influence with the King. The Pope, Innocent IV. (1254), was also induced to take the University under his protection. He confirmed its “immunities and liberties and laudable, ancient and rational customs from whomsoever received,” and called upon the Bishops of London and Salisbury to guard it from evil. Against the combined forces of the Church, the Crown, and the evident interests of their own pockets, it was a foregone conclusion that the citizens would not be able to maintain the full exercise of their municipal liberty.

It was in 1244 that the first important extension of the Chancellor’s jurisdiction was made. Some students had made a raid upon Jewry and sacked the houses of their creditors. They were committed to prison by the civil authorities. Grossetete insisted on their being handed over to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction. As the outcome of this riot Henry III. presently issued a decree of great importance. By it all disputes concerning debts, rents and prices, and all other “contracts of moveables,” in which one party was an Oxford clerk, were referred to the Chancellor for trial. This new power raised him at once to a position very different from that which he had hitherto enjoyed as the mere representative of the Bishop of Lincoln. “He was invested henceforth with a jurisdiction which no Legate or Bishop could confer and no civil judge could annul.” A charter followed in 1248, which authorised the Chancellor and proctors to assist at the assaying of bread and beer by the mayor and bailiffs. On admission to office the latter were required to swear to respect the liberties and customs of the University, and the town, in its corporate capacity, was made responsible for injuries inflicted on scholars. The Chancellor’s jurisdiction was still further extended in 1255. To his spiritual power, which he held according to the ordinary ecclesiastical law and to the civil jurisdiction conferred upon him in 1244, a new charter now added the criminal jurisdiction even over laymen, for breach of the peace. By this charter Henry III. provided that,

A few years later a Royal Writ of Edward I. (1275) conferred on the Chancellor the cognizance of all personal actions whatever wherein either party was a scholar, be he prosecutor or defendant. And in 1290, by judgment of King and Parliament, after a conflict between the town and University, when a bailiff had resisted the authority of the Chancellor in the students’ playground, Beaumont Fields, which embraced the University Park and S. Giles’, the Chancellor obtained jurisdiction in case of all crimes committed in Oxford, where one of the parties was a scholar, except pleas of homicide and mayhem. His jurisdiction over the King’s bailiffs was affirmed, but leave was granted them to apply to the King’s court if aggrieved by the Chancellor’s proceedings.

From this time forward the authority of the Chancellor was gradually increased and extended. It was, indeed, not long before the office shook itself free from its historical subordination to the Bishop of Lincoln. After a considerable struggle over the point, the bishop was worsted by a Papal Bull (1368), which entirely abrogated his claim to confirm the Chancellor elect. Since that time the University has enjoyed the right of electing and admitting its highest officer without reference to any superior authority whatever (Maxwell Lyte).

The precinct of the University was defined in the reign of Henry IV. as extending to the Hospital of S. Bartholomew on the east, to Botley on the west, to Godstow on the north, and to Bagley Wood on the south.

These were the geographical limits of the University, and within them the following classes of people were held (1459) to be “of the privilege of the University”:—The Chancellor, all doctors, masters and other graduates, and all students, scholars and clerks of every order and degree. These constituted a formidable number in themselves when arrayed against the town, for there were probably at least 3000 of them at the most flourishing periods. The Archbishop of Armagh indeed stated confidently at Avignon (1357) that there had once been 30,000, but that must have been a rhetorical exaggeration. There can never have been more than 4000. But in addition to this army of scholars, all their “daily continual servants,” all “barbers, manciples, spencers, cokes, lavenders,” and all the numerous persons who were engaged in trades ancillary to study, such as the preparation, engrossing, illumination and binding of parchment, were “of the privilege” and directly controlled by the University. In what was afterwards known as Schools Street all these trades were represented as early as 1190. Over these classes, and within the limits defined, the jurisdiction of the Chancellor was by the end of the fifteenth century established supreme.

Citizens and scholars alike had now to be careful how they lived. The stocks, the pillory and the cucking stool awaited offenders among the townsmen, fines or banishment the students who transgressed. Local governments in the Middle Ages were excessively paternal. They inquired closely into the ways of their people and dealt firmly with their peccadilloes. Did a man brew or sell bad beer he was burnt alive at NÜrnberg; at Oxford he was condemned to the pillory; if a manciple was too fond of cards he was also punished by the Chancellor’s court. A regular tariff was framed of penalties for those breaches of the peace and street brawls, in which not freshmen only but heads of houses and vicars of parishes were so frequently involved.

Endeavours were made to promote a proper standard of life by holding “General Inquisitions” at regular intervals. The town was divided into sections, and a Doctor of Theology and two Masters of Arts were told off to inquire into the morals of the inhabitants of each division. Juries of citizens were summoned, and gave evidence on oath to these delegate judges who sat in the parish churches. The characters of their fellow-townsmen were critically discussed. Reports were made to the Chancellor, who corrected the offenders. Excommunication, penance or the cucking stool were meted out to “no common” scolds, notorious evil-livers and those who kept late hours.

It had formerly been enacted (1333) that since the absence of the Chancellor was the cause of many perils, his office should become vacant if he were to absent himself from the University for a month during full term. But in the course of the fifteenth century the Chancellor changed from a biennial and resident official to a permanent and non-resident one. He was chosen now for his power as a friend at court, and by the court, as it grew more despotic and ecclesiastically minded, he was used as an agent for coercing the University.

To-day the Chancellorship is a merely honorary office, usually bestowed on successful politicians. The Chancellor appoints a Vice-Chancellor, but usage compels him to appoint heads of houses in order of seniority. This right of appointment dates from the time when the Duke of Wellington, as Chancellor, dispensed with the formality of asking convocation for its assent to the appointment of his nominee.

Having sketched thus far the development of the office which represents the power and dignity of the University, we may now turn to consider the position of the young apprentices from their earliest initiation into this guild of learning.

The scholars of mediÆval Universities were your true cosmopolitans. They passed freely from the University of one country to that of another by virtue of the freemasonry of knowledge. Despising the dangers of the sea, the knight-errants of learning went from country to country, like the bee, to use the metaphor applied by S. Athanasius to S. Anthony, in order to obtain the best instruction in every school. They went without let or hindrance, with no passport but the desire to learn, to Paris, like John of Salisbury, Stephen Langton or Thomas Becket, if they were attracted by the reputation of that University in Theology; to Bologna, if they wished to sit at the feet of some famous lecturer in Civil Law. Emperors issued edicts for their safe conduct and protection when travelling in their dominions—even when warring against the Scots, Edward III. issued general letters of protection for all Scottish scholars who desired to repair to Oxford or Cambridge—and when they arrived at their destination, of whatever nationality they might be, they found there as a rule little colonies of their own countrymen already established and ready to receive them. Dante was as much at home in the straw-strewn Schools Street in Paris as he would have found himself at Padua or at Oxford, had he chanced to study there.

It has indeed been suggested that he did study there in the year 1313. Like Chaucer, he may have done so, but probably did not. There is certainly a reference to Westminster in the “Inferno” (xii. 119); but it is not necessary to go to Oxford in order to learn that London and Westminster are on the banks of the Thames.

In attending lectures at a strange University the mediÆval students had no difficulty in understanding the language of their teachers. For all the learned world spoke Latin. Latin was the Volapuk of the Middle Ages. MediÆval Latin, with all its faults and failing sense of style, is a language not dead, but living in a green old age, written by men who on literary matters talked and thought in a speech that is lively and free and fertile in vocabulary. The common use of it among all educated men gave authors like Erasmus a public which consisted of the whole civilised world, and it rendered scholars cosmopolitan in a sense almost inconceivable to the student of to-day. That was chiefly in the earlier days of Universities. Gradually, with the growth of national feeling and the more definite demarcation of nations and the ever-increasing sense of patriotism, that higher form of selfishness, cosmopolitanism went out of fashion. Nowadays only two classes of cosmopolitans survive—in theory, free traders, and in practice, thieves.

I have spoken of the dangers of the sea; they were very great in those days of open sailing boats, when the compass was unknown; but the dangers of land-travelling were hardly less. The roads through the forests that lay around Oxford were notoriously unsafe, not only in mediÆval days but even a hundred years ago. Armed therefore, and if possible in companies, the students would ride on their Oxford pilgrimage. If they could not afford to ride, the mediÆval pedagogue, the common carrier, would take them to their destination for a charge of fivepence a day. For there were carriers who took a regular route at the beginning of every University year for the purpose of bringing students up from the country. They would have a mixed company of all ages in their care. For though students went up to Oxford as a rule between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, many doubtless were younger and many older. It was indeed a common thing for ecclesiastics of all ages to obtain leave of absence from their benefices in order to go up to the University and study Canon Law or Theology there. You can fancy, then, this motley assembly of pack-horses and parish priests, of clever lads chosen from the monasteries or grammar schools, and ambitious lads from the plough, all very genuine philosophers, lovers of learning for its own sake or its advantages, working their way through the miry roads, passed occasionally by some nobleman’s son with his imposing train of followers, and passing others yet more lowly, who were just trudging it on foot, begging their way, their bundles on their shoulders.

You can fancy them at last coming over Shotover Hill, down the “horse path” past S. Clement’s, and so reaching safely their journey’s end. Once in Oxford, they would take up their abode in a monastery to which they had an introduction; in a college, if, thanks to the fortune of birth or education, they had been elected to share in the benefits of a foundation; as menials attached to the household of some wealthier student, if they were hard put to it; in a hall or house licensed to take in lodgers, if they were foreigners or independent youths. On taking up his residence in one of these halls, the mediÆval student would find that Alma Mater, in her struggles with the townsmen, had been fighting his battles. Lest he should fall among thieves, it had been provided that the rents charged should be fixed by a board of assessors; lest the sudden influx of this floating population should produce scarcity, and therefore starvation prices, the transactions of the retailers were carefully regulated. They were forbidden to buy up provisions from the farmers outside the city, and so establish a “corner”; they were forbidden even to buy in Oxford market till a certain hour in the morning. The prices of vendibles were fixed in the interests of the poor students. Thus in 1315 the King ordained that “a good living ox, stalled or corn-fed, should be sold for 16s., and no higher; if fatted with grass for 14s. A fat cow, 12s. A fat hog of two years old, 3s. 4d. A fat mutton, corn-fed or whose wool is not grown, 1s. 8d. A fat mutton shorn, 1s. 2d. A fat goose, 2d. A fat hen or two chickens, one penny. Four pigeons or twenty-four eggs, one penny.”

The halls were, at any rate originally, merely private houses adapted to the use of students. A common room for meals, a kitchen and a few bedrooms were all they had to boast. Many of them had once belonged to Jews, for they were large and built of stone. And the Jews, being wealthy, had introduced a higher standard of comfort into Oxford, and at the same time, being a common sort of prey, they probably found that stone houses were safer as well as more luxurious. Moysey’s Hall and Lombard’s Hall bore in their names evident traces of their origin. Other halls derived their names from other causes. After the great fire in 1190 the citizens, in imitation of the Londoners, and the Jews, had rebuilt their houses of stone.

S. Alban’s Hall Merton College
S. Alban’s Hall Merton College

Other halls were called after their owners (Peckwater’s Inn, Alban Hall, etc.), or from their position in the street or town, or the patron Saint of a neighbouring church (S. Edward’s Hall, S. Mary’s Entry); many from other physical peculiarities besides those we have mentioned. Angle Hall, Broadgates Hall, White Hall and Black Hall explain themselves easily enough, whilst Chimney Hall is a name which recalls the days when a large chimney was a rarity, a louvre above a charcoal fire in the middle of the room being sufficient to carry off the smoke. Other halls, again, were named after signs that hung outside them, or over their gateways, like ordinary inns or shops. The towering and barbaric inn-signs always struck foreigners, when first visiting England, with astonishment not unmingled with dismay. They were thus probably thrown into a proper state of mind to receive their bills.

The Eagle, the Lion, the Elephant, the Saracen’s Head, the Brazen Nose and the Swan were some of the signs in Oxford. There are a few survivals from this menagerie.

The Star Inn, now the Clarendon, was built on the site of one of these old Halls, and the richly-carved wooden gables were visible in the house next to it. The Roebuck was once Coventry Hall. The Mitre preserved traces of Burwaldscote Hall. The Angel had similar traces, but the Angel itself has now given place to the New Schools. Many students, however, lodged singly in private houses. Chaucer’s poor scholar lodged with a carpenter who worked for the Abbot of Osney.

Halls, it will have been observed, were known also by the name of entries and inns or (deriving from the French) hostels. And that in fact is what they were. The principal, who might originally have been the senior student of a party who had taken a house in which to study, or the owner of the house himself, derived a good income from keeping a boarding-house of this kind. He was responsible to the University for the good conduct of his men, and to his men, one must suppose, for their comfort. The position of principal was soon much sought after, and the ownership of a good hostel, with a good connection, would fetch a price like a public-house to-day.

It was found necessary, however, to decree that the principal of a hall should be a master, and should not cater for the other inmates. Payments for food were therefore made by the students to an upper servant, known as a manciple, whose duty it was to go to market in the morning and there buy provisions for the day, before the admission of the retail-dealers at nine o’clock. The amount which each student contributed to the common purse for the purchase of provisions was known as “Commons.” It varied from eight to eighteen pence a week. Extra food obtained from the manciple to be eaten in private was called “Battels.”

The principal could only maintain his position and fill his hall if he satisfied the students. The government of these halls was therefore highly democratic. A new principal could only succeed if he was accepted by the general opinion of the inmates and received their voluntary allegiance.

On coming up to Oxford the student, however little he might intend to devote his life to the Church, adopted, if he had not done so before, clerical tonsure and clerical garb. By so doing he became entitled to all the immunities and privileges of the clerical order. He was, now, so long as he did not marry, exempt from the secular courts, and his person was inviolable.

No examination or ceremony of any kind seems to have been required in order to become a member of the University. Attendance at lectures, after a declaration made to a resident master to the effect that the student purposed to attend them, was enough to entitle him to the privileges of that corporation.

The germ of the modern system of matriculation may perhaps be traced in the statute (1420), which required that all scholars and scholars’ servants, who had attained years of discretion, should swear before the Chancellor that they would observe the statutes for the repression of riots and disorders.

Among the students themselves, however, some form of initiation probably took place, comparable to that of the Bejaunus, or Yellow-bill, in Germany, or of the young soldier, the young Freemason, or the newcomer at an atelier in Paris to-day. Horseplay at the expense of the raw youth, and much chaff and tomfoolery, would be followed in good time by a supper for which the freshman would obligingly pay. Initiation of this kind is a universal taste, and, if kept within bounds, is not a bad custom for testing the temper and grit of the new members of a community. At Oxford, then, freshmen were subject to certain customs at the hands of the senior scholars, or sophisters, on their first coming. So Wood tells us, but he cannot give details. He compares the ceremony, however, to the “salting” which obtained in his own day. Of this salting, as it was practised at Merton, he gives the following account:—

When the freshmen of the past year were solemnly made seniors, and probationers were admitted fellows, similar ceremonies took place. At All Souls’, for instance, on 14th January, those who were to be admitted fellows were brought from their chambers in the middle of the night, sometimes in a bucket slung on a pole, and so led about the college and into the hall, whilst some of the junior fellows, disguised perhaps, would sing a song in praise of the mallard, some verses of which I give:

In any attempt to appreciate the kind and character of the mediÆval students and the life which they led, it is necessary first of all to realise that the keynote of the early student life was poverty. It was partly for the benefit of poor scholars and partly for the benefit of their founders’ souls, for which these scholars should pray, that the early colleges and chantries were founded. Morals, learning and poverty were the qualifications for a fellowship on Durham’s foundation. Poverty, “the stepmother of learning,” it is which the University in its letters and petitions always and truly represents as the great hindrance to the student “seeking in the vineyard of the Lord the pearl of knowledge.” Books these poor seekers could not afford to buy, fees they could scarce afford to pay, food itself was none too plentiful.

But the pearl for which the young student as he sat, pinched and blue, at the feet of his teacher in the schools, and the Masters of Arts,

alike were searching, was a pearl of great price. For learning spelt success. There was through learning a career open to the talents. The lowliest and neediest might rise, by means of a University education, to the highest dignity which the Church, and that was also the world, could offer.

For all great civilians were ecclesiastics. The Church embraced all the professions; and the professors of all arts, of medicine, statesmanship or architecture, of diplomacy and even of law, embraced the Church. And the reward of success in any of them was ecclesiastical promotion and a fat benefice. The University opened the door to the Church, with all its dazzling possibilities of preferment, and the University itself was thrown open to the poorest by the system of the monastic houses and charitable foundations.

Promising lads, too, of humble origin were often maintained at the schools by wealthy patrons. From a villein one might rise to be a clerk, from a clerk become a master of the University—a fellow, a bursar, a bishop and a chancellor, first of Oxford, then of England.

At the University, of course, the students were not treated with the same absolute equality that they are now, regardless of birth or wealth. Sons of noblemen did not study there, unless they had a strong bent in that direction. The days were not yet come when a University training was valuable as a social and moral as well as an intellectual education: when noblemen, therefore, did attend the schools, more was made of them. They wore hoods lined with rich fur, and enjoyed certain privileges with regard to the taking of degrees.

Like those idyllic islanders who lived by taking in each other’s washing, the masters supported themselves on the fees paid by the students who attended their lectures, whilst the poorest students earned a livelihood by waiting on the masters, or wealthier students. Servitors, who thus combined the careers of undergraduates with those of “scouts,” continued in existence till the end of the eighteenth century. They were sent on the most menial errands or employed to transcribe manuscripts, and five shillings was deemed an ample allowance for their services. Whitfield was a servitor, and the father of the Wesleys also. Such students, lads of low extraction, drawn from the tap-room or the plough, but of promising parts, would be helped by the chests which we have described, and which were founded for their benefit. When Long Vacation came, they would turn again from intellectual to manual labour. For Long Vacation meant for them, not reading-parties, but the harvest, and in the harvest they could earn wages. But there was another method of obtaining the means to attend lectures at the University which was popularised in the Middle Ages by the Mendicants, by the theory of the poverty of Christ and by the insistence of the Church on the duty of charity. This was begging on the highway. “Pain por Dieu aus escoliers” was a well-known “street cry” in mediÆval Paris, and in England during vacations the wandering scholar,

And as they made their way along the high-road a party of such begging scholars would come perhaps to a rich man’s house, and ask for aid by prayer and song. Sometimes they would be put to the test as to their scholarship by being commanded to make a couplet of Latin verses on some topic. They would scratch their heads, look wistfully at one another and produce a passable verse or two. Then they would receive their reward and pass on. So popular, indeed, did this system become, that begging students had to be restricted. Only those licensed by the Chancellor and certified as deserving cases, like the scholars of Aristotle’s Hall in 1461, were presently permitted to beg.

Where poverty was so prevalent, the standard of comfort was not likely to be high. The enormous advance in the general level of material comfort, and even luxury, which has taken place in this country during the last hundred years, makes it difficult to describe the comfortless lives of these early students without giving an exaggerated idea of the sacrifices they were making and the hardships they were enduring for the sake of setting their feet on the first rung of this great ladder of learning. But it should be remembered that, as far as the ordinary appliances of decency and comfort, as we understand them, are concerned, the labourer’s cottage in these days is better supplied than was a palace in those when princes

and when

If we realise that this was the case, we shall not be surprised to find that the rooms in which these students and masters lived, so far from being spacious and luxurious, were small, dingy, overcrowded and excessively uncomfortable. It was rare for a student to have a room to himself—“alone, withouten any compagnie.” The usual arrangement in halls and colleges would seem to have been that two or more scholars shared a room, and slept in that part of it which was not occupied by the “studies” of the inhabitants. For each scholar would have a “study” of his own adjoining the windows, where he might strain to catch the last ray of daylight. A “study” was a movable piece of furniture, a sort of combination of book-shelf and desk, which probably survives in the Winchester “toys.” The students shared a room, and they frequently shared a bed too. The founder of Magdalen provided that in his college Demies under the age of fifteen should sleep two in a bed. And in addition to their beds and lodgings, the poorest students were obliged to share an academical gown also. Friends who had all things in common, might sleep at the same time, but could only attend lectures one by one, for lack of more than one gown amongst them. To these straits, it is said, S. Richard was reduced. But such deprivation accentuates rather than spoils the happiness of student life, as anyone who is acquainted with the Quartier Latin will agree. When the heart is young and generous, when the spirit is free and the blood is hot, what matters hardship when there are comrades bright and brave to share it; what matters poverty when the riches of art and love and learning are being outspread before your eyes; what matters the misery of circumstance, when daily the young traveller can wander forth, silent, amazed, into “the realms of gold?”

During the many centuries that the mansions of the wealthy and the palaces of princes were totally unprovided with the most indispensable appliances of domestic decency, it is not to be expected that the rooms of students should prove to be plentifully or luxuriously furnished. We know the stock-in-trade of Chaucer’s poor student:

We can supplement Chaucer’s inventory of a poor student’s furniture by an examination of old indentures. Therein we find specified among the goods of such an one just such a fithele or “gay sautrye” as Chaucer noted, an old cithara or a broken lute, a desk, a stool, a chair, a mattress, a coffer, a tripod table, a mortar and pestle, a sword and an old gown. Another student might boast the possession of a hatchet, a table “quinque pedum cum uno legge,” some old wooden dishes, a pitcher and a bowl, an iron twister, a brass pot with a broken leg, a pair of knives, and, most prized of all, a bow and twenty arrows. Few could boast of so many “bokes at his beddes heed” as Chaucer’s clerk of Oxenford. Manuscripts were of immense value in those days, and we need hardly be surprised if that worthy philosopher, seeing that he had invested his money in twenty volumes clad in black and red, had but little gold remaining in his coffer. The books that we find mentioned in such indentures, are those which formed the common stock of mediÆval learning, volumes of homilies, the works of Boethius, Ovid’s De remedio amoris and a book of geometry. These and other books, as articles of the highest intrinsic value, were always mentioned in detail in the last will and testament of a dying scholar. But, as the modern artist, on his death-bed in the Quartier Latin, summoned his dearest friend to his side and exclaimed, “My friend, I leave you my wife and my pipe. Take care of my pipe”; so the mediÆval student would often feel that though his books might be his most valuable legacy in some eyes, his bow and arrows, his cap and gown or his mantle, “blodii coloris,” these were the truest pledges of affection that he could bequeath to the comrade of his heart. Only the wealthier students, or the higher officials of the University, rejoiced in such luxuries as a change of clothes, or could reckon among their furniture several forms or chairs, a pair of snuffers and bellows. For of what use to the ordinary student were candlesticks and snuffers, when candles cost the prohibitive price of twopence a pound; or what should he do with bellows and tongs when a stove or fire was out of the question, save in the case of a Principal? To run about in order not to go to bed with cold feet was the plan of the mediÆval student, unless he anticipated the advice of Mr Jorrocks and thought of ginger.

From his slumbers on a flock bed, in such quarters as I have described, the mediÆval student roused him with the dawn. For lectures began with the hour of prime, soon after daybreak. He was soon dressed, for men seldom changed their clothes in those days, and in the centuries when the manuals of gallantry recommended the nobleman to wash his hands once a day and his face almost as often, when a charming queen like Margaret of Navarre, could remark without shame that she had not washed her hands for eight days, it is not to be expected that the ablutions of a mere student should be frequent or extensive. Washing is a modern habit, and not widespread. To attend a “chapel” or a “roll-call” is the first duty of the modern undergraduate, but a daily attendance at mass was not required till the college system had taken shape; the statutes of New College, in fact, are the first to enforce it. All therefore that the yawning student had to do, before making his way to the lecture-room in the hall of his inn or college, or in the long low buildings of Schools Street, was to break his fast, if he could afford to do so, with a piece of bread and a pot o’ the smallest ale from the “Buttery.” As a lecture lasted, not the one hour of a “Stunde,” but for two or three hours, some such support would be highly desirable, but not necessary. Our forefathers were one-meal men, like the Germans of to-day. Civilisation is an advance from breakfast to dinner, from one meal a day to several. Late dinner is the goal towards which all humanity presses. For dinner-time, as De Quincey observed, has little connection with the idea of dinner. It has travelled through every hour, like the hand of a clock, from nine or ten in the morning till ten at night. But at Oxford it travelled slowly. Hearne growls at the colleges which, in 1723, altered their dinner hour from eleven to twelve, “from people’s lying in bed longer than they used to do.” Happily for him he did not live to see the beginning of the nineteenth century, when those colleges which had dined at three advanced to four, and those that had dined at four to five; or the close of it, when the hour of seven became the accepted time.

The mediÆval student took his one meal at ten or eleven in the morning. Soup thickened with oatmeal, baked meat and bread was his diet, varied by unwholesome salt fish in Lent. These viands were served in hall on wooden trenches and washed down by a tankard of college beer. During the meal a chapter of the Bible or of some improving work in Latin was read aloud, and at its conclusion the founder’s prayer and a Latin grace would be said. Conversation, it was usually ordained, might only be carried on in Latin; the modern student, on the contrary, is “sconced” (fined a tankard of beer) if he speaks three words of “shop” in hall. After dinner perhaps some disputations or exercises, some repetition and discussion of the morning’s lecture would be held in hall, or the students would take the air, walking out two and two, as the founders directed, if they were good; going off singly, or in parties to poach or hawk or spoil for a row, if they were not. Lectures or disputations were resumed about noon.

Seated on benches, or more usually and properly, according to the command of Urban V., sitting on the rush-strewn floors of the school-room, the young seekers after knowledge listened to the words of wisdom that flowed from the regent master, who sat above them at a raised desk, dressed in full academical costume. Literally, they sat at the feet of their Gamaliels.

In the schools they were enjoined to “sit as quiet as a girl,” but they were far from observing this injunction. Old and young were only too ready to quarrel or to play during lectures, to shout and interrupt whilst the master was reading the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and bang the benches with their books to express their approval or disapproval of his comments thereon.

Supper came at five, and after that perhaps a visit to the playing fields of Beaumont or a tavern, where wine would be mingled with song, and across the oaken tables would thunder those rousing choruses that students ever love:

When curfew rang at length, all the students would assemble in hall and have a “drinking” or “collation.” Then, before going to bed, they would sing the Antiphon of the Virgin (Salve Regina), and so the day was finished. A dull, monotonous day it seems to us, varied only by sermons—and there was no lack of them—at S. Mary’s or S. Peter’s in the East, with the chance excitement of hearing a friar recant the unorthodox views he had expressed the previous Sunday; but it was a day that was bright and social compared with the ordinary conditions of the time.

In this daily round, so far as one has been able to reconstruct it, the absence of any provision for physical recreation is a noticeable thing to us, who have exchanged the mediÆval enthusiasm for learning for an enthusiasm for athletics. Both are excellent things in their way, but as the governor of an American State remarked when defending the practice of smoking over wine, both together are better than either separate. And nowadays in some cases the combination is happily attained. But in an age which inherited the monkish tradition of the vileness of the body and the need of mortifying it, games of all sorts were regarded as a weakness of the flesh. So far were founders from making any provision for recreation, that they usually went out of their way to prohibit it. Games with bat and ball, and tennis, that is, or fives, were strictly forbidden as indecent, though in some cases students were permitted to play with a soft ball in the college courts. But “deambulation in the College Grove” was the monastic ideal. Nor did the founders frown only on exercise; amusements of the most harmless sort were also under their ban. On the long, cold, dark winter evenings the students were naturally tempted to linger in the hall after supper, to gather round the fire, if there was one, in the middle of the room, beneath the louvre, to tell tales there and sing carols, to read poems, chronicles of the realm or wonders of the world. But it was only on the eve of a festival that William of Wykeham would allow this relaxation in his foundation. The members of Trinity College were allowed to play cards in hall on holidays only, “but on no account for money.” Mummers, the chief source of amusement among the mediÆvals, were only permitted to enter New College once a year, on Twelfth Night. It was not till the dawn of the Renaissance that plays began to be acted in the colleges and halls, and to bring the academic intellect into touch with the views and literature of the people.

Not only was it forbidden to play marbles on the college steps, but even the hard exercise of chess was prohibited as a “noxious, inordinate and unhonest game.” And the keeping of dogs and hawks was anathema.

By a survival of this mediÆval view, the undergraduate is still solemnly warned by the statute book against playing any game which may cause injury to others; he is urged to refrain from hunting wild beasts with ferrets, nets or hounds, from hawking, “necnon ab omni apparatu et gestatione bombardarum et arcubalistarum.” In the same way he is forbidden still to carry arms of any sort by day or night, unless it be bows and arrows for purposes of honest amusement. But to these injunctions, I fear, as to the accompanying threat of punishment at the discretion of the Vice-Chancellor, he does not pay over much attention. He does not consider them very seriously when he plays football or hunts with the “Bicester,” takes a day’s shooting or runs with the Christ Church beagles.

The restrictions which I have quoted above were mostly introduced by the founders of colleges. So far as the University was concerned, the private life of the student was hardly interfered with at all.

The offence of night-walking, indeed, was repressed by the proctor who patrolled the streets with a pole-axe and bulldogs (armed attendants), but the student might frequent the taverns and drink as he pleased. His liberty was almost completely unrestricted, except as to the wearing of academic dress, the attendance of lectures and the observance of the curfew bell. Offences against morality and order were treated as a rule, when they were dealt with at all, with amazing leniency. Murder was regarded as a very venial crime; drunkenness and loose-living as hardly matters for University police. A student who committed murder was usually banished, and banishment after all meant to him little more than changing his seat of learning. The punishment, though it might cause inconvenience, did not amount to more than being compelled to go to Cambridge. Fines, excommunication and imprisonment were the other punishments inflicted for offences; corporal punishment was but seldom imposed by the University. But with the growth of the college system the bonds of discipline were tightened. Not only did the statutes provide in the greatest detail for the punishment of undergraduate offences, stating the amount of the fine to be exacted for throwing a missile at a master and missing, and the larger amount for aiming true, but also the endowment of the scholar made it easy to collect the fine. The wardens and fellows, too, were in a stronger position than the principal of a hall, who owed his place to his popularity with the students, who, if he ceased to please them, might leave his hall and remove to another house where the principal was more lenient and could be relied upon to wink at their follies and their vices, even if he did not share them. Thus the founders of the early colleges were enabled to enforce upon the recipients of their bounty something of the rigour and decency of monastic discipline. As the system grew the authority entrusted to the heads of colleges was increased, and the position of the undergraduate was reduced to that of the earlier grammar-school boy. The statutes of B.N.C. (1509) rendered the undergraduate liable to be birched at the discretion of the college lecturer. He might now be flogged if he had not prepared his lessons; if he played, laughed or talked in lecture; if he made odious comparisons, or spoke English; if he were unpunctual, disobedient or did not attend chapel. Wolsey allowed the students of Cardinal College to be flogged up to the age of twenty.

Impositions by a dean were apparently a sixteenth-century invention. Then we find offending fellows who had played inordinately at hazard or cards, or earned a reputation for being notorious fighters or great frequenters of taverns, being ordered to read in their college libraries for a fortnight from 6 to 7 A.M. And the loss of a month’s commons occasionally rewarded the insolence of undergraduates who did not duly cap and give way to their seniors, or who, yielding to that desire to adorn their persons which the mediÆval student shared with his gaudy-waistcoated successors, wore “long undecent[28] hair,” and cloth of no clerical hue, slashed doublets and boots and spurs beneath their gowns.

As to the academic career of the mediÆval student; the course of his studies and “disputations” in the schools; the steps by which the “general sophister” became a “determining bachelor” and the bachelor, if he wished to teach, took a master’s degree, first obtaining the Chancellor’s licence to lecture, and then, on the occasion of his “inception,” when he “commenced master” and first undertook his duty of teaching in the schools, being received into the fraternity of teaching masters by the presiding master of his faculty—of these ceremonies and their significance and the traces of them which survive in modern academic life, as of the high feastings and banquetings with which, as in the trade guilds, the new apprentices and masters entertained their faculties, I have no space here to treat.The inceptor besides undertaking not to lecture at Stamford, recognise any University but Oxford and Cambridge, or maintain Lollard opinions, was also required to swear to wear a habit suitable to his degree. As an undergraduate he had had no academical dress, except that, as every member of the University was supposed to be a clerk, he was expected to wear the tonsure and clerical habit. The characteristic of this was that the outer garment must be of a certain length and closed in front. It was the cut and not the colour of the “cloth” which was at first considered important. But later regulations restricted the colour to black, and insisted that this garment must reach to the knees. In the colleges, however, it was only parti-coloured garments that were regarded as secular, and the “liveries” mentioned by the founders were usually clothes of the clerical cut but of uniform colour. The fellows of Queen’s, for instance, were required to wear blood-red. The colour of the liveries was not usually prescribed by statute, but differences of colour and ornament still survive at Cambridge as badges of different colleges.

The masters at first wore the cappa, which was the ordinary out-door full-dress of the secular clergy. And this “cope,” with a border and hood of minever, came to be the official academical costume. The shape of the masters’ cappa soon became stereotyped and distinctive; then a cappa with sleeves was adopted as the uniform of bachelors. As to the hood, it was the material of which it was made—minever—which distinguished the master, not the hood itself; for a hood was part of the ordinary clerical attire. Bachelors of all faculties wore hoods of lamb’s-wool or rabbit’s-fur, but undergraduates were deprived of the right of wearing a hood in 1489—nisi liripipium consuetum ... et non contextum—the little black stuff hood, worn by sophisters in the schools till within living memory.

The cappa went out of use amongst the Oxford M.A.’s during the sixteenth century. The regents granted themselves wholesale dispensations from its use. Stripped of this formal, outer robe, the toga was revealed, the unofficial cassock or under-garment, which now gradually usurped the place of the cappa and became the distinctively academical dress of the Masters of Arts. But it was not at first the dull prosaic robe that we know. The mediÆval master was clad in bright colours, red or green or blue, and rejoiced in them until the rising flood of prejudice in favour of all that is dull and sombre and austere washed away these together with almost all other touches of colour from the landscape of our grey island.

The distinctive badge of mastership handed to the inceptor by the father of his faculty, was the biretta, a square cap with a tuft on the top, from which is descended our cap with its tassel. Doctors of the superior faculties differentiated themselves by wearing a biretta (square cap) or pilea (round) as well as cappas, of bright hues, red, purple or violet. Gascoigne, indeed, in his theological dictionary, declares that this head-dress was bestowed by God himself on the Doctors of the Mosaic Law. Whatever its origin, the round velvet cap with coloured silk ribbon, came to be, and still is, the peculiar property of the Doctors of Law and Medicine.

The Oxford gowns of the present day have little resemblance to their mediÆval prototypes. For the ordinary undergraduate or “commoner” to-day, academical dress, which must be worn at lectures, in chapel, in the streets at night, and on all official occasions, consists of his cap, a tattered “mortar-board,” and a gown which seems a very poor relation of the original clerical garb. The sleeves have gone, and the length; only two bands survive, and a little gathering on the shoulders, and this apology for a gown is worn as often as not round the throat as a scarf, or carried under the arm.

Some years ago it was a point of honour with every undergraduate to wear a cap which was as battered and disreputable as possible. Every freshman seized the first opportunity to break the corners of his “mortar-board” and to cut and unravel the tassel. Yet once the tufted biretta, when it was the badge of mastership, was much coveted by undergraduates. First, they obtained the right of wearing a square cap without a tassel, like those still worn by the choristers of Oxford colleges, and then they were granted the use of a tassel. The tuft in the case of the gentlemen commoners took the form of a golden tassel. Snobs who cultivated the society of these gilded youths for the sake of their titles or their cash, or tutors,

gained from this fact the nick-name of tuft-hunters.

The commoner, it should be explained, is one who pays for his commons, a student not on the foundation. The colleges were, in most cases, intended originally only for the fellows and scholars on the foundation. The admission of other students as commoners or boarders was a subsequent development, and various ranks of students came to be recognised—noblemen, gentlemen commoners, commoners, fellow-commoners, battelers, or servitors. These grades are now practically obsolete, the only distinction drawn among the undergraduates being between the scholars or students on the foundation and commoners, the ordinary undergraduates, who do not enjoy any scholarship or exhibition.

The scholar, who must wear a larger gown with wide sleeves, is known by various names at various colleges. At Merton he is a post-master, at Magdalen a demy, so-called because he was entitled to half the commons of a fellow.

The history of the commoner, the growth of an accretion that now forms the greater part of a college, may be illustrated by the records of the latter foundation.

The statutes of New College had not made any provision for the admission of commensales, but William of Waynflete, in drawing up the statutes of Magdalen, was the first definitely to recognise the system that had grown up by which men who were not on the foundation lived as members of the college. Waynflete limited the number of non-foundationers to twenty. They were to live at the charges of their own kindred; they were to be vouched for by “creancers”; and the privilege of admission was to be reserved for the sons of noble and powerful friends of the college.

But within a hundred years the number of the commoners or battelers increased far beyond that allowed by the statutes. The position of these commoners was anomalous and led to “disorder and confusion,” as certain fellows did most bitterly complain to the Visitor. No provision, it appears, was made either for the instruction or the discipline of these supernumeraries. They were, in fact, regarded as the private pupils of the President or of one of the fellows. In attendance upon the wealthier of them or upon other members of the college came numerous “poore scholars,” acting as their servants and profiting in their turn from such free teaching as the Grammar School and the college lecturers might afford.

The system, however, was already justified to some extent by the fact that among the pupils of the President were numbered Bodley, Camden, Lyly and Florio. The Visitor, therefore, contented himself with enforcing the observation of the limits imposed by the statutes. The poor scholars were in future not to be more than thirteen in number, and were to be attached to the thirteen senior fellows. Before long, however, the matriculations of non-foundationers began to increase very rapidly. A new block of buildings even was erected near the Cherwell for their accommodation by 1636. This is that picturesque group of gables which nestles under the great tower and forms so distinct a feature of the view from Magdalen Bridge. The number of “poore scholars” had also increased—servitors whose office forestalled that of the college “scout.” They bridged the days when the junior members of a foundation “did” for themselves and the modern days of an

Gables and Tower Magdalen College.
Gables and Tower Magdalen College.

organised college service. It was decided, and this is where the scout has the advantage of his forerunners, that they should be required to attend the Grammar School, and afterwards to perform all disputations and exercises required of members of the foundation. All commoners, also, “the sonnes of Noblemen and such as are of great quality only excepted” were to be “tyed to the same rules.”

Little more than a hundred years later Edward Gibbon matriculated at Magdalen (1752) as a “gentleman commoner,” and as a youth of fifteen commenced those fourteen months which he has told us were the most idle and unprofitable of his whole life. There are prigs of all ages. Gibbon must have been intolerable in a common room. One can forgive the “Monks of Magdalen” for not discussing the Early Fathers with him after dinner, but one has no inclination on the other hand to revere the men who had already (1733), in their enthusiasm for the Italian style, begun the “New Buildings,” and were still threatening to pull down the cloisters and to complete a large quadrangle in the same style, of which the New Buildings were to form one end. The damage done by the succeeding generation was directed chiefly against the chapel and the hall, where under the guidance of the outrageous James Wyatt, plaster ceilings were substituted for the old woodwork. The generosity of a late fellow has enabled Mr Bodley, with the aid of Professor Case, to repair this error by an extraordinarily interesting and successful restoration (1903). Magdalen Hall is now worthy of its pictures, its “linen-fold” panelling and splendid screen. Bitter as is the account which Gibbon has left us, it cannot be denied that there was much reason in his quarrel with the Oxford of his day. I say Oxford, for the state of Magdalen was better rather than worse than that of the University at large. It should, however, in fairness be pointed out that as a gentleman commoner in those days he was one of a class which was very small and far from anxious to avail itself of the intellectual advantages of a University training. The commoners at Magdalen were now very few in number. The founder’s limitation was now so interpreted as to restrict them to the particular class of gentlemen commoners, sons of wealthy men, at liberty to study, but expected to prefer, and as a matter of fact usually preferring, to enjoy themselves.

But the efforts of the more liberal-minded fellows were at length crowned with success. By the first University Commission the college was allowed to admit as many non-foundationers as it could provide with rooms. The last gentleman commoner had ceased to figure in the Calendar by 1860. The system of licensed lodgings introduced by the University soon caused the numbers of the ordinary commoners to increase, so that in 1875 one-third of the resident undergraduates were living in lodgings outside the college. It was clearly time for the college to provide accommodation for as many of these as possible within its own walls. The change which took place in Magdalen during the last century, a change “from a small society, made up almost wholly of foundation-members and to a great extent of graduates, to a society of considerable numbers, made up of the same elements, in about the same proportion as most of the other Colleges,” is recorded therefore in the architecture of Oxford. For it was to lodge the commoners that the buildings which are known as S. Swithun’s (so-called from the statue in a niche on the west side of the tower which is placed at the entrance of these buildings, and which reminds one that S. Swithun was buried in Winchester Cathedral close to the beautiful shrine of William of Waynflete) were designed by Messrs Bodley & Garner and completed in 1884. They face the High Street, and you will pass them on your left as you come down to the new entrance gateway, which is in the line of the outer wall, parallel to the High. The old gateway, which was designed by Inigo Jones, stood almost at right angles to the site of the present gateway and lodge, looking west. It was removed in 1844, and a new one designed by A. W. Pugin erected in its stead. The present gateway (1885) follows the lines of the old design of Pugin, and the niches are filled with statues of S. John the Baptist, S. Mary Magdalen and of the founder, William of Waynflete. S. John the Baptist was the patron Saint of the old hospital, and after S. John the quadrangle into which you now enter is called. Opposite to you are the President’s lodgings, built by Messrs Bodley & Garner in 1887 on the site of the old President’s lodgings. With the exquisite architecture of the chapel and cloisters on the right to guide them, these famous architects have not failed to build here something that harmonises in style and treatment with the rest. One might wish that S. Swithun’s were a little quieter. There is a slight yielding to the clamorous desire for fussy ornamentation which is so typical of this noisy age. But the President’s lodgings are perfect in their kind. As you stand, then, in S. John’s Quadrangle you have, in the chapel and founder’s tower, and the cloisters on your right, and in the picturesque old fragment of the Grammar School, known as the Grammar Hall, facing you on your left, an epitome, as it were, of the old college foundations of Oxford; and in those buildings of S. Swithun and the gateway, which faces in a new direction, an epitome of the new Oxford that has been grafted on the old. On the extreme right you see a curious open-air pulpit of stone, from which the University sermon used to be preached on S. John the Baptist’s Day. On that occasion the pulpit, as well as the surrounding buildings, was strewn with rushes and boughs in token of S. John’s preaching in the wilderness.

In the Middle Ages the chief executive officers of the University were the Proctors, who are first mentioned in 1248. The origin of their office is obscure. They were responsible for the collection and expenditure of the common funds of the University, and as a record of this function they still retain in their robes a purse, a rudimentary organ, as it were, atrophied by disuse, but traceable in a triangular bunch of stuff at the back of the shoulder. Apart from this duty and that of regulating the system of lectures and disputations, their chief business was to keep order. One can imagine that a Proctor’s life was not a happy one. He had to endeavour not only to keep the peace between the students and the townsmen, but also between the numerous factions among the scholars themselves. The Friars and the secular clergy, the Artists and the Jurists, the Nominalists and the Realists, and, above all, the Northerners and Southerners were always ready to quarrel, and quarrels quickly led to blows, and blows to a general riot. For the rivalry of the nations was a peculiar feature of mediÆval Universities. At Bologna and Paris the Masters of Arts divided themselves into “Four Nations,” with elective officers at their head. At Oxford the main division was between Northerners and Southerners, between students, that is, who came from the north or the south of the Trent. Welshmen and Irishmen were included among the Southerners. And over the northern and southern Masters of Arts presided northern and southern Proctors respectively, chosen by a process of indirect election, like the rectors of Bologna and Paris. Contests and continual riots arising out of the rivalry of these factions took the place of modern football matches or struggles on the river.

In 1273, for instance, we read of an encounter between the Northerners and the Irish, which resulted in the death of several Irishmen. So alarming, apparently, was this outbreak that many of the leading members of the University departed in fear, and only returned at the stern command of the King. The bishops, too, issued a notice, in which they earnestly exhorted the clerks in their dioceses to “repair to the schools, not armed for the fight, but rather prepared for study.” But the episcopal exhortation had about as much effect as a meeting of the Peace League in Exeter Hall would have now. Quarrel after quarrel broke out between the rival nations. They plundered each others’ goods and broke each others’ heads with a zest worthy of an Irish wake.

In spite of their reputation for riotousness, however, the Irish students were specially exempted by royal writ from the operation of the statute passed by Parliament in 1413, which ordered that all Irishmen and Irish clerks, beggars called Chamberdekens, should quit the realm. Graduates in the schools had been exempted in the statute. This exemption does not appear to have conduced to the state of law and order painfully toiled after by the mere Saxon. For a few years later, in the first Parliament of Henry VI., the Commons sent up a petition complaining of the numerous outrages committed near Oxford by “Wylde Irishmen.” These turbulent persons, it was alleged, living under the jurisdiction of the Chancellor, set the King’s officers at defiance, and used such threatening language, that the bailiffs of the town did not dare to stir out of their houses for fear of death. The Commons therefore prayed that all Irishmen, except graduates in the schools, beneficed clergy, professed monks, landowners, merchants and members of civic corporations, should be compelled to quit the realm. It was also demanded that graduates of Irish extraction should be required to find security for their good behaviour, and that they should not be allowed to act as principals of halls. This petition received the royal assent. But it was stipulated that Irish clerks might freely resort to Oxford and Cambridge, if they could show that they were subjects of the English king.

It was in vain that students were compelled to swear that they would not carry arms; in vain were seditious gatherings and leagues for the espousal of private quarrels forbidden.

In vain, after one great outbreak in 1252, were formal articles of peace drawn up; in vain were the combatants bound over to keep the peace, and to give secret information to the Chancellor if they heard of others who were preparing to break it. In vain was the celebration of the national festivals forbidden, and the masters and scholars prohibited, under pain of the greater excommunication, from “going about dancing in the churches or open places, wearing masks or wreathed and garlanded with flowers” (1250). In vain was it decreed that the two nations should become one and cease, officially, to have a separate existence (1274). Though the Faculty of Arts might vote from this time forward as a single body, yet one Proctor was always a Borealis and the other an Australis; and when, in 1320, it was decreed that one of the three guardians of the Rothbury Chest should always be a Southerner and another a Northerner, the University admitted the existence of the two rival nations within its borders once more. Only a few years after this, in fact (1334), its very existence was threatened by the violence of the factions. The Northerners gave battle to the Southerners, and so many rioters were arrested that the Castle was filled to overflowing. Many of the more studious clerks resolved to quit this riotous University for ever, and betook themselves to Stamford, where there were already some flourishing schools.

They were compelled at last to disperse or to return by the King, who refused to listen to their plea, that their right to study in peace at Stamford was as good as that of any other person whatever who chose to live there. So serious was this secession, and so much was the rivalry of Stamford feared, that all candidates for a degree were henceforth (till 1827) required to swear that they would not give or attend lectures there “as in a University.”

It was on the occasion of this migration that the members of Brasenose Hall, which adjoined S. Mary’s Entry, Salesbury Hall, Little University Hall and Jussel’s Tenement, carried with them, as a symbol of their continuity, the famous Brazen Nose Knocker to Stamford. There the little society settled; an archway of the hall they occupied there still exists, and now belongs to Brasenose College. The knocker itself was brought back in 1890 to a place

Quadrangle Brasenose
Quadrangle Brasenose

of honour in the college hall. For in the meantime the old hall, after a career of over two hundred years, had been converted into a college, founded by William Smyth, Bishop of Lincoln, and Master Sotton, very much as a protest against the new learning which was then being encouraged at Corpus Christi. The continuity of the society is indicated by the fact that the first Principal of the college was the last Principal of the old “Aula Regia de Brasinnose.” The foundation stone was laid in 1509, as the inscription in the old quadrangle, to which a story was added in the time of James I., records.

They were a turbulent crew, these Oxonian forbears of ours. Dearly they loved a fight, and they rose in rebellion against the masters when they were bringing in new statutes for the preservation of the peace. Several were slain on both sides. Nor was it easy to punish the unruly students. Sometimes, after a brawl in which they were clearly in the wrong, the delinquents would flee to Shotover, and there maintain themselves in the forest. At other times, when they had gone too far, and the thunder of the Chancellor’s sentence of excommunication had fallen on their heads as a punishment for attempting to sack the Abbey of Abingdon, or defiling the Church of S. Mary with bloodshed, for sleeping in a tavern, or fighting with the King’s foresters, they would simply leave the University altogether and get away scathless. For the Chancellor’s jurisdiction did not extend beyond Oxford.

A joust or tourney was a certain cause of riot. The passions are easily roused after any athletic contest, whether it be a football match or a bull-fight. Remembering this, we shall best be able to understand why the King found it necessary to forbid any joust or tournament to be held in the vicinity of Oxford or Cambridge (1305).

Any excuse, indeed, was good enough to set the whole town in an uproar. A bailiff would hustle a student; a tradesman would “forestall” and retail provisions at a higher price than the regulations allowed; a rowdy student would compel a common bedesman to pray for the souls of certain unpopular living townsmen on the score that they would soon be dead. The bailiffs would arrest a clerk and refuse to give him up at the request of the Chancellor; the Chancellor, when appealed to by the townsmen to punish some offending students, would unsoothingly retort: “Chastise your laymen and we will chastise our clerks.” The records of town and University are full of the riots which arose from such ebullitions of the ever-present ill-feeling; of the appeals made by either party; and of the awards given by the King, who might be some English Justinian, like Edward I., or might not.

The answer of the townsmen (1298) to the Chancellor’s retort quoted above was distinctly vigorous. They seized and imprisoned all scholars on whom they could lay hands, invaded their inns, made havoc of their goods and trampled their books under foot. In the face of such provocation the Proctors sent their bedels about the town, forbidding the students to leave their inns. But all commands and exhortations were in vain. By nine o’clock next morning, bands of scholars were parading the streets in martial array. If the Proctors failed to restrain them, the mayor was equally powerless to restrain his townsmen. The great bell of S. Martin’s rang out an alarm; ox-horns were sounded in the streets; messengers were sent into the country to collect rustic allies. The clerks, who numbered three thousand in all, began their attack simultaneously in various quarters. They broke open warehouses in the Spicery, the Cutlery and elsewhere. Armed with bows and arrows, swords and bucklers, slings and stones, they fell upon their opponents. Three they slew, and wounded fifty or more. One band, led by Fulk de Neyrmit, Rector of Piglesthorne, and his brother, took up a position in High Street between the Churches of S. Mary and All Saints, and attacked the house of a certain Edward Hales. This Hales was a long-standing enemy of the clerks. There were no half measures with him. He seized his crossbow, and from an upper chamber sent an unerring shaft into the eye of the pugnacious rector. The death of their valiant leader caused the clerks to lose heart. They fled, closely pursued by the townsmen and country-folk. Some were struck down in the streets, and others who had taken refuge in the churches were dragged out and driven mercilessly to prison, lashed with thongs and goaded with iron spikes.

Complaints of murder, violence and robbery were lodged straightway with the King by both parties. The townsmen claimed three thousand pounds’ damage. The commissioners, however, appointed to decide the matter, condemned them to pay two hundred marks, removed the bailiffs, and banished twelve of the most turbulent citizens from Oxford. Then the terms of peace were formally ratified.

Following the example of their Chancellor, who was gradually asserting his authority more and more in secular matters, and thought little of excommunicating a mayor for removing a pillory without his leave (1325), the clerks became continually more aggressive. Quarrels with the townsmen were succeeded by quarrels with the Bishop of Lincoln, when the latter, in his turn, tried to encroach upon the jurisdiction of the Chancellor. Peace, perfect peace, it will be seen, had not yet descended upon the University. The triumph of Dulness had not arrived, when the enraptured monarch should behold:

Certainly the elders gave their pupils sport enough after their kind, but the intellectual quarrels of the schoolmen, the furious controversies of the Dominicans and the Franciscans, the Scotists and the Thomists, the Nominalists and the Realists, were a part of it. When the excitement of local riots, theological disputes and political dissension failed, there were the exactions of a Papal representative to be resisted. And when such resistance led to the citation of the Chancellor and Proctors and certain masters to appear within sixty days before the Cardinal appointed by the Pope to hear the case at Avignon, there was the whole principle that no Englishman should be dragged across the seas to judgment to be fought for (circa 1330). For every man was a politician in those days, and the scholars of Oxford not least. Their quarrels and riotings were therefore not without political significance. Thus when the Mad Parliament met in the “new house of the Black Friars at Oxford,” the behaviour of the barons was reflected by that of students. The “nations” pitched their field in “Beaumont,” and after a fierce fight in battle array, divers on both sides were slain and pitifully wounded. The Northerners and Welshmen were at last acknowledged to be conquerors.

The position of the students with regard to the country, is indicated by the old rhyme:

It was Oxford, the centre of English ecclesiasticism, which, by the riot that hounded the Papal Legate out of the city, gave the signal for a widespread outbreak of resistance to the wholesale pillage of excessive Papal taxation.

Regardless of the gathering storm, the Legate Cardinal Otho had arrived at Oxford with his retinue of Italians, and taken up his abode at Osney.

Some members of the University, having sent him some delicacies for his table, went to pay their respects in person, and to ask of him a favour in return. The doorkeeper, however, a suspicious Italian, absolutely refused to admit them to the guests’ hall. Irritated by this unexpected rebuff, they collected a great number of their comrades, and made a determined attack on the foreigners, who defended themselves with sticks, swords and flaming brands plucked from the fire. The fury of the clerks reached its height when the Legate’s chief cook took up a cauldron full of boiling broth, and threw its contents in the face of a poor Irish chaplain, who had been begging for food at the kitchen door. A student thereupon drew his bow, and shot the cook dead on the spot, whilst others tried to set fire to the massive gates which had been closed against them. The terrified Legate, hastily putting on a canonical cope, fled for refuge to the belfry of the abbey, and there lay hid for several hours, while the clerks assailed the building with bows and catapults.

News of the fray soon reached Henry III., who happened to be staying at Abingdon, and he lost no time in despatching some soldiers to the rescue. Under their powerful escort the Legate managed to ford the river by night, accompanied by the members of his suite. Still as he galloped away, he seemed to hear the shouts of his adversaries ringing in his ears, “Where is that usurer, that simoniac, that spoiler of revenues, and thirster after money, who perverts the King, overthrows the realm, and enriches strangers with plunder taken from us?”

It was not long before the Papal Legate was forbidden the English shores, and his bulls of excommunication were flung into the sea.

Simon de Montfort was the friend of Adam Marsh, and the confidant of Grossetete, and it was appropriately enough at Oxford that the great champion of English freedom secured the appointment of a council of twenty-four to draw up terms for the reform of the State. Parliament met at Oxford; the barons presented a long petition of grievances, the council was elected, and a body of preliminary articles known as the Provisions of Oxford was agreed upon. In the following year Henry repudiated the Provisions; civil war ensued, and ended by placing the country in the hands of Simon de Montfort.

The struggle between Henry and the barons then did not leave Oxford unaffected. For any disturbance without was sure to be reflected in a conflict between clerks and laymen, in a town and gown row, of some magnitude. In the present case the appearance of Prince Edward with an armed force—he took up his quarters at the King’s Hall—in the northern suburb gave occasion for an outbreak. The municipal authorities closed the gates against him, and he resumed his march towards Wales.

The scholars now thought it was time that they should be allowed to go out of the city, and finding themselves prevented by the closed wooden doors of Smith Gate, they hewed these down and carried them away, like Samson, into the fields, chanting over them the office of the dead:

The mayor retorted by throwing some of them into prison, in spite of the Chancellor’s protest. Further arrests were about to be made by the irate townsmen, but a clerk saw them advancing in a body down the High Street, and gave the alarm by ringing the bell of S. Mary’s. The clerks were at dinner, but hearing the well-known summons they sprang to arms and rushed out into the street to give battle. Many of the foe were wounded; the rest were put to flight. Their banners were torn to pieces, and several shops were sacked by the victorious students, who, flushed with victory, marched to the houses of the bailiffs and set them on fire.

The mayor, they then remembered, was a vintner. Accordingly a rush was made for the vintnery; all the taps were drawn, and the wine flowed out like water into the streets.

Their success for a moment was complete, but retribution awaited them. The King was appealed to, and refused to countenance so uproarious a vindication of their rights. When they saw how the wind blew, they determined to leave Oxford. It was a question whither they should go and where pitch their scholastic tents. Now it happened that at Cambridge, a town which had ceased to be famous only for eels and could boast a flourishing University of its own, similar disturbances had recently occurred with similar results. Many masters and scholars had removed to Northampton, and to Northampton accordingly, to aid them in their avowed intention of founding a third University, the disconsolate Oxford scholars departed. The situation was evidently serious. But the King induced the Oxonians to return by promising that they should not be molested if they would only keep the peace.

They returned, but almost immediately all scholars were commanded by a writ from the King to quit the town and stay at home until he should recall them after the session of Parliament then about to be held at Oxford. The King, it was officially explained, could not be responsible for the conduct of the fierce and untamed lords who would be assembled together there and would be sure to come into conflict with the students. Perhaps the more urgent motive was fear lest the students should openly and actively side with the barons, with whom, it was known, the majority of them were in sympathy.

The fact was that in the great struggle against the Crown in which England was now involved, the clergy and the Universities ranged themselves with the towns on the side of Simon de Montfort. Ejected from Oxford, many of the students openly joined his cause and repaired at once to Northampton.

For a time all went well with the King. As if to demonstrate his faith in the justice of his cause, he braved popular superstition and passing within the walls of Oxford paid his devotions at the shrine of S. Frideswide. The meeting of Parliament failed to bring about any reconciliation. Reinforced by a detachment of Scottish allies—“untamed and fierce” enough, no doubt—Henry left Oxford and marched on Northampton. Foremost in its defence was a band of Oxford students, who so enraged the King by the effective use they made of their bows and slings and catapults, that he swore to hang them all when he had taken the town. Take the town he did, and he would have kept his oath had he not been deterred by the reminder that he would by such an act lose the support of all those nobles and followers whose sons and kinsmen were students. But the victorious career of the King was almost at an end. The vengeance of S. Frideswide was wrought at the battle of Lewes. Simon de Montfort found himself head of the State, and one of his first acts was to order the scholars to return to their University.

Such keen, occasionally violent, interest in politics seems, in these days, characteristic of the German or Russian rather than the English University student. Nowadays the political enthusiasm of the undergraduate is mild, and his discussion of politics is academic. In the debating hall of the Union, or in the more retired meeting-places of the smaller political clubs, like the Canning, the Chatham, the Palmerston or the Russell, he discusses the questions of the day. But his discussions lack as a rule the sense of reality, and they suffer accordingly. Occasionally, when a Cabinet Minister has been persuaded to dine and talk with one or other of these clubs, or when the speaker is one who is deliberately practising for the part he means to take in after-life, the debates are neither uninteresting nor entirely valueless. And at the worst they give those who take part in them a facility of speech and some knowledge of political questions. But it is not so that the University exercises any influence on current events. Nor, except in so far as they warn practical men to vote the other way, are those

Magdalen College.
Magdalen College.

occasional manifestoes, which a few professors sign and publish, of any great importance. But it is through the press and through Parliament that the voice of young Oxford is heard. It is through the minds and the examples of those statesmen and administrators, who have imbibed their principles of life and action within her precincts, and have been trained in her schools and on her river or playing-fields, that the influence of the University is reflected on the outer world. Nor is it only the men like Lord Salisbury, Lord Rosebery and Mr Gladstone, who guide the country at home, or like Lord Milner and Lord Curzon, who give their best work to Greater Britain, that are the true sons of the University; it is the plain, hard-working clergymen and civilians, also, who, by their lives of honest and unselfish toil, hand on the torch of good conduct and high ideals which has been entrusted to them.

Oxford had some share in the events which led to the deposition of Edward II. The King wrote to the Chancellor, masters and scholars calling upon them to resist his enemies. On the approach of Roger de Mortimer, a supporter of the Queen, he wrote again enjoining them not to allow him to enter the city, but to keep Smith Gate shut, lest he should enter by that way. But when the King was a refugee in Wales, the Queen came to Islip. She would not come to Oxford till “she saw it secure.” But when the burghers came to her with presents she was satisfied. She took up her residence at the White Friars, and the Mortimers theirs at Osney. And a sermon was preached by the Bishop of Hereford, who demonstrated from his text, “My head grieveth me,” that an evil head, meaning the King, not otherwise to be cured, must be taken away. The majority of scholars apparently agreed with him.

The terrible scourge of the Black Death, which carried off half the population of England, fell hardly on Oxford. Those who had places in the country fled to them; those who remained behind were almost totally swept away. The schools were shut, the colleges and halls closed, and there were scarcely men enough to bury the dead. The effect upon learning was disastrous. There were not enough students forthcoming to fill the benefices, and the scarcity of students affected the citizens severely.

The disorder of the time, which was to issue in Wat Tyler’s Rebellion, was shadowed forth at Oxford by the extraordinary riot of S. Scholastica’s Day (1355). The story of this riot, which was to bear fruit in further privileges being vouchsafed to the University at the expense of the town, has been recorded with infinite spirit by Wood.

The casualty list was heavy. Six members of the University were killed outright in the fray; twenty-one others, chiefly Irishmen, were dangerously wounded, and a large number was missing. The Bishop of Lincoln immediately placed the town under an interdict. The King sent a commission to inquire into the cause of the riot. The sheriff was summarily dismissed from his office, two hundred of the townsmen were arrested, and the mayor and bailiffs committed to the Tower. With a view to settling the deep-rooted differences, which, it was perceived, were the origin of this bloody combat, the University and the city were advised to surrender their privileges into the King’s hands. Edward III. restored those of the University in a few days. The town was kept some time in suspense, whilst the King and the Archbishop were striving to induce the scholars to return to Oxford. In the end all their ancient rights were restored to the citizens, with the exception of those which had been transferred to the University. For by the new charter the King granted to the latter some of the old liberties of the town.

This charter (27th June 1355) granted a free pardon to all masters and scholars and their servants who had taken part in the great riot. The University, the King declared, was the main source and channel of learning in all England, more precious to him than gold or topaz. To the Chancellor, then, or his deputy, was granted the assay of bread and ale, the supervision of weights and measures, the sole cognisance of forestallers, retailers and sellers of putrid meat and fish; the power of excommunicating any person who polluted or obstructed the streets, and of assessing the tax to be paid by scholars’ servants. It was also decreed that the sheriff and under-sheriff of the county should henceforth swear, on taking office, to uphold the privileges of the University. In compensation for the damage done in the recent riot, the city had to restore the goods and books of all scholars wherever found, and to pay down £250 in cash. Such was the price, in money and rights, that the commonalty had to pay before they could satisfy the civil authorities. From that time forth the University practically governed the town. The wrath of the Church was not so soon appeased. It was not till 1357 that the interdict was removed, nor were the offences of the citizens against the Holy Church forgiven even then, except at the price of further humiliation. The mayor and bailiffs, and sixty of the chiefest burghers, such were the conditions, were to appear personally, and defray the expenses of a mass to be celebrated every year in S. Mary’s on S. Scholastica’s Day, when prayers should be said for the souls of the clerks and others slain in that conflict. The mayor and these sixty substantial burghers were also to offer on that occasion one penny each at the great altar. Forty pence out of this offering were to be given by the proctors to forty poor scholars, and the remainder to the curate.

So humiliating did this condition appear, that it gave rise to the popular saying and, perhaps, belief that the mayor was obliged, on the anniversary of the riot, to wear round his neck a halter or, at best, a silken cord. It may well be imagined that the procession, as it took its way to S. Mary’s, did not escape the taunts and jeers of the jubilant clerks. Under Elizabeth, when prayer for the dead had been forbidden, this function was changed for a sermon, with the old offering of a penny. The service was retained in a modified form down to the time of Charles II.

The political and religious divisions introduced by the Lollard doctrines found their expression, of course, in students’ riots. For the Northerners sided with Wycliffe, himself a Yorkshireman, and the Southerners, supported by the Welsh, professed themselves loyal children of the Church. A general encounter took place in 1388; several persons were killed, and many Northerners left Oxford. The Chancellor was deposed by Parliament for failing to do his duty in the matter. The strife was renewed at the beginning of Lent next year. A pitched battle was arranged to be fought between the contending parties in the open country. This was only prevented by the active interference of the Duke of Gloucester. Some turbulent Welshmen were expelled. But this banishment only gave rise to a fresh outbreak. For as the Welshmen knelt down to kiss the gates of the town, they were subjected to gross indignities by their exultant adversaries. And a party of Northerners, headed by a chaplain named Speeke, paraded the streets in military array, threatening to kill anyone who looked out of the window, and shouting, “War, war. Slay the Welsh dogs and their whelps.” Halls were broken open, and the goods of Welsh scholars who lodged there were plundered. The Welshmen retaliated, and the University only obtained peace, when, on the outbreak of Owen Glendower’s rebellion, the Welsh scholars returned to Wales.

The effect of the lawlessness of these mediÆval students upon the history of the University was considerable. It is reflected in the statute book. It came to be recognised that their riotous behaviour was not only scandalous but also a veritable danger, which threatened the very existence of Oxford as a seat of learning. Politically, too, their behaviour was intolerable. Each outbreak, therefore, and each revelation of the licence of unattached students, who were credited with the chief share in these brawls, were arguments in favour of the college system inaugurated by the founder of Merton College.

As early as 1250 it had been found necessary to provide that every scholar should have his own master, on whose roll his name should be entered, and from whom he should hear at least one lecture daily. And in 1420 Henry V. issued some ordinances for academical reform, with the object of tightening the bonds of discipline. They were reduced to a statute of the University immediately. Fines were imposed for threats of personal violence, carrying weapons, pushing with the shoulder or striking with the fist, striking with a stone or club, striking with a knife, dagger, sword-axe or other warlike weapon, carrying bows and arrows, gathering armed men, and resisting the execution of justice, especially by night.

All scholars and scholars’ servants, it was enacted, were, on first coming to Oxford, to take the oath for keeping the peace, which had hitherto been taken by graduates only; they were no longer to lodge in the houses of laymen, but must place themselves under the government of some discreet principal, approved by the Chancellor and regents. Chamberdekens were to lodge at a hall where some common table was kept. Thus the “unattached student,” who has been recently revived, was legislated out of existence.

It is not, then, surprising to find that, whilst the thirteenth century saw the beginning of the college system, the fourteenth was the era which saw its great development. Already, sixteen years after the foundation of Oriel, a North Country priest, Robert Eglesfield, chaplain of Queen Philippa, had anticipated in conception the achievement of William of Wykeham by proposing to establish a college which should be a Merton on a larger scale. But the ideas of the founder of Queen’s were greater than his resources. In the hope of assistance, therefore, and not in vain, he commended his foundation to the Queen and all future Queens-consort of England. He himself devoted his closing years and all his fortune to the infant society, for whose guidance he drew up statutes of an original character. His aim seems to have been to endow a number of students of Theology or Canon Law; to provide for the elementary education of many poor boys, and for the distribution of alms to the poor of the city. The ecclesiastical character of the college was marked by the endowment of several chaplains, and by precise directions for the celebration of masses, at which the “poor boys” were to assist as choristers, besides being trained in Grammar and afterwards in Logic or Philosophy. The bent of Eglesfield’s mind is further indicated by the symbolism which pervades his ordinances. The fellowships, which were tenable for life and intended to be well endowed, were practically restricted to natives of the North Country. And as there had been twelve apostles, so it was ordained that there should be twelve fellows, who should sit in hall on one side of the High Table, with the provost in their centre, even as Christ and His apostles, according to tradition, sat at the Last Supper. And, as a symbol of the Saviour’s blood, they were required to wear mantles of crimson cloth. The “poor boys,” who were to sit at a side-table clad in a distinctive dress, from which they derived their name of tabarders, and who were to be “opposed” or examined by one of the fellows at the beginning of every meal, symbolised the Seventy Disciples.

Some traces of the symbolism which pleased the founder still survive at Queen’s. The students are still summoned to hall, as the founder directs, by the blasts of a trumpet; still on Christmas Day the college celebrates the “Boar’s Head” dinner (see p. 23); still on 1st January the bursar presents to each guest at the Gaudy a needle and thread (aiguille et fil = Eglesfield), saying, “Take this and be thrifty.” And the magnificent wassail cup given to the college by the founder is still in use. But of the original buildings scarcely anything remains. The old entrance in Queen’s Lane has been supplanted by the front quadrangle opening on the High (1710-1730), in which Hawksmoor, Wren’s pupil, achieved a fine example of the Italian style. Wren himself designed the chapel. The magnificent library in the back quadrangle (late seventeenth century) is housed in a room, which, with its rich plaster ceiling and carving by Grinling Gibbons, is a remarkable specimen of the ornate classical style.

Eglesfield had attempted a task beyond his means. Forty years later William of Wykeham adopted his ideas, developed them and carried them out. It is the scale on which he founded S. Mary College, or New College, as it has been called for five hundred years to distinguish it from Oriel, the other S. Mary College, and the completeness of its arrangements that mark an era in the history of college foundations. Son of a carpenter at Wickham, William had picked up the rudiments of education at a grammar school and in a notary’s office. Presently he entered the King’s service. He was promoted to be Supervisor of the Works at Windsor; and made the most of his opportunity. Hoc fecit Wykeham were the words he inscribed, according to the legend, on the walls of the castle at Windsor; and it is equally true that he made it and that it made him, for so, to stop the mouths of his calumniators, he chose to translate the phrase. The King marked the admirable man of affairs; and rewarded him, according to custom, with innumerable benefices. Wykeham became the greatest pluralist of his age. He grew in favour at court, until soon “everything was done by him and nothing was done without him.” He was “so wise of building castles,” as Wycliffe sarcastically hinted, that he was appointed Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor of England. Yet in the midst of the cares of these offices he found time (1370) to set about establishing his college. His great genius as an architect, and his astonishing powers of administration under two kings, point him out as one of the greatest Englishmen of the Middle Ages. He has left his mark on his country, not only in such architectural achievements as Windsor and Queenborough Castles, the reconstruction of the nave of Winchester Cathedral (where is his altar tomb) or the

The Bell Tower & Cloisters New College.
The Bell Tower & Cloisters New College.

original plan of his Collegiate Buildings, but also as the founder of the public school system and the new type of college.

It was as a lawyer-ecclesiastic that he had succeeded. But it was against the administration of ecclesiastical statesmen that the discontent of the time was being directed by the Wycliffites and John of Gaunt. Himself a staunch supporter of the old rÉgime in Church and State, Wykeham set himself to remedy its defects and to provide for its maintenance as well as for his own soul’s health after death.

Oxford had reached the height of its prosperity in the fourteenth century. Then the Black Death, the decadence of the Friars, the French Wars, the withdrawal of foreign students and the severance of the ties between English and foreign Universities, commenced a decay which was accelerated by the decline of the ecclesiastical monopoly of learning, by the Wycliffite movement and, later, by the Wars of the Roses.

Wykeham marked some of these causes and their effect. He believed in himself, and therefore in the Canon Law and lawyer-ecclesiastics; he noted the falling off in the number of the students, and therefore of the clergy, caused by the Black Death; he knew the poverty of those who wished to study, and the weak points in the system of elementary education. He wished to encourage a secular clergy who should fight the Wycliffites and reform the Church. Therefore he determined to found a system by which they might be trained, and by which the road to success might be opened to the humblest youths—a system which should pay him in return the duty of perpetual prayers for his soul.[29]

As early as 1370, then, he began to buy land about the north-eastern corner of the city wall; and ten years later, having obtained licence from Richard II., he enclosed a filthy lane that ran alongside the north wall and began to build a home for the warden, seventy scholars, ten stipendiary priests or chaplains, three stipendiary clerks and sixteen chorister boys of whom his college was to be composed. Eglesfield had proposed to establish seventy-two young scholars on his foundation. Wykeham borrowed and improved upon the idea. He provided a separate college for them at Winchester, and in so doing he took a step which has proved to be of quite incalculable consequence in the history of the moral and intellectual development of this country. For he founded the first English public school.

From the scholars of Winchester, when they had reached at least the age of fifteen years, and from them only the seventy scholars of “S. Marie College” were to be chosen by examination. A preference was given to the founder’s kin and the natives of certain dioceses. These young scholars, if they were not disqualified by an income of over five marks or by bodily deformity, entered at once upon the course in Arts, and, after two years of probation and if approved by examination, might be admitted true and perpetual fellows. Small wonder if golden scholars became sometimes silver bachelors and leaden masters!

A fellow’s allowance was a shilling a week for commons and an annual “livery.” But it was provided that each young scholar should study for his first three years under the supervision of one of the fellows, who was to receive for each pupil five shillings. This was a new step in the development of the college system. Though designed merely to supplement the lectures of the regents in the schools, the new provision of tutors was destined to supplant them. Another step of far-reaching consequence taken by Wykeham was the acquisition of benefices in the country, college livings to which a fellow could retire when he had resided long enough or failed to obtain other preferment.

The government of the college was not entrusted to the young fellows, but to the warden, sub-warden, five deans, three bursars and a few senior fellows. But even the youngest of the fellows was entitled to vote on the election of a warden.

In New College
In New College

The warden of this new foundation was to be a person of no small importance. Wykeham intended him to live in a separate house, with a separate establishment and an income (£40) far more splendid than the pittance assigned to the Master of Balliol or even the Warden of Merton. The buildings of Merton had been kept separate; only by degrees, and as if by accident, had they assumed the familiar and charming form of a quadrangle. The genius of Wykeham adopted and adapted the fortuitous plan of Merton. At New College we have for the first time a group of collegiate buildings, tower-gateway (the tower assuredly of one “wise of building castles!”) chapel, hall, library, treasury, warden’s lodgings, chambers, cloister-cemetery, kitchen and domestics offices, designed and comprised in one self-sufficing quadrangle (1380-1400). Just as the statutes of New College are the rule of Merton enormously elaborated, so the plan of the buildings is that of Merton modified and systematised. The type of New College served as a model for all subsequent foundations. The most noticeable features in this arrangement are that the hall and chapel are under one roof, and that the chapel consists of a choir, suitable to the needs of a small congregation, and of a nave of two bays, stopping short at the transepts, and forming an ante-chapel which might serve both as a vestibule and as a room for lectures and disputations. The chapel, which contains much very beautiful glass and the lovely if inappropriate window-pictures of Sir Joshua Reynolds, must have been in Wykeham’s day, when it was adorned with a magnificent reredos and “works of many colours,” a thing of even greater beauty than it now is. The chapels of Magdalen, All Souls’ and Wadham were directly imitated from it. But, with the hall, it suffered much at the hands of Wyatt and Sir Gilbert Scott. The latter was also responsible for the atrocious New Buildings. The proportions of the front quadrangle were spoilt by the addition of a third story and the insertion of square windows in the seventeenth century.

The importance of the chapel architecturally, dominating the quadrangle as it does and absorbing the admiration of the visitor or the dweller in those courts, is indicative of the ecclesiastical aspect of the new foundation, which the great opponent of Wycliffe intended to revivify the Church by training secular priests of ability. This ecclesiastical aspect is still more prominent in the case of All Souls’, which, like Magdalen, may fitly be described as a daughter of New College, so much do they both owe, as regards their rule and their architectural design, to the great foundation of Wykeham. The deterioration and ignorance of the parochial clergy were amongst the most serious symptoms of the decadence of the fifteenth century. Himself a Wykehamist and a successful ecclesiastical lawyer, the great Archbishop Chichele therefore followed Wykeham’s example and founded a college which might help to educate and to increase the secular clergy. Out of the revenues of the suppressed alien priories he endowed a society consisting of a warden and forty fellows, of doctors and masters who were to study Philosophy, Theology and Law. His college was not, therefore, and happily is not (though now it takes its full share of educational work), a mere body of teachers, but of graduate students. The prominence given to the study of Law and Divinity resulted in a close connection with the public services which has always been maintained. But “All Souls’” was a chantry as well as a college. As head of the English Church and a responsible administrator of the Crown, Chichele had devoted all his powers to the prosecution of that war with France, for which Shakespeare, following Hall, has represented him as being responsible. The college is said to have been the Archbishop’s expiation for the blood so shed. Whatever his motive, his object is stated clearly enough. It was to found a

“College of poor and indigent clerks bounden with all devotion to pray for the Souls of the glorious memory of Henry V., lately King of England and France, the Duke of Clarence and the other lords and lieges of the realm of England, whom the havoc of that warfare between the two realms hath drenched with the bowl of bitter death, and also for the souls of all the faithful departed.”