TOWN AND GOWN
The violence which marked medieval life as a whole was not likely to
be absent in towns where numbers of young clerks were members of a
corporation at variance with the authorities of the city. University
records are full of injuries done to masters and students by the
townsfolk, and of privileges and immunities obtained from Pope or King
or Bishop at the expense of the burgesses. When a new University was
founded, it was sometimes taken for granted that these conflicts must
arise, and that the townsmen were certain to be in the wrong. Thus,
when Duke Rudolf IV. founded the University of Vienna in 1365, he
provided beforehand for such contingencies by ordaining that an attack
on a student leading to the loss of a limb or other member of the body
was to be punished by the removal of the same member from the body of
the assailant, and that for a lesser injury the offender's hand was to
be wounded ("debet manus pugione transfigi"). The criminal might
redeem his person by a fine of a hundred silver marks for a serious
injury and of forty marks for slighter damages, the victim to (p. 125)
receive half of the fine. Assailants of students were not to have
benefit of sanctuary. Oxford history abounds in town and gown riots,
the most famous of which is the battle of St Scholastica's Day (10th
February) 1354. The riot originated in a tavern quarrel; some clerks
disapproved of the wine at an inn near Carfax, and (in Antony Wood's
words) "the vintner giving them stubborn and saucy language, they
threw the wine and vessel at his head." His friends urged the
inn-keeper "not to put up with the abuse," and rang the bell of St
Martin's Church. A mob at once assembled, armed with bows and arrows
and other weapons; they attacked every scholar who passed, and even
fired at the Chancellor when he attempted to allay the tumult. The
justly indignant Chancellor retorted by ringing St Mary's bell and a
mob of students assembled, also armed (in spite of many statutes to
the contrary). A battle royal raged till nightfall, at which time the
fray ceased, no one scholar or townsman being killed or mortally
wounded or maimed. If the matter had ended then, little would have
been heard of the story, but next day the townsmen stationed eighty
armed men in St Giles's Church, who sallied out upon "certain scholars
walking after dinner in Beaumont killed one of them, and wounded
others." A second battle followed, in which the citizens, aided by some
countrymen, defeated the scholars, and ravaged their halls, (p. 126)
slaying and wounding. Night interrupted their operations, but on the
following day, "with hideous noises and clamours they came and invaded
the scholars' houses ... and those that resisted them and stood upon
their defence (particularly some chaplains) they killed or else in a
grievous sort wounded.... The crowns of some chaplains, that is, all
the skin so far as the tonsure went, these diabolical imps flayed off
in scorn of their clergy."
The injured University was fully avenged. The King granted it
jurisdiction over the city, and, especially, control of the market,
and the Bishop of Lincoln placed the townsmen under an interdict which
was removed only on condition that the Mayor and Bailiffs, for the
time being, and "threescore of the chiefest Burghers, should
personally appear" every St Scholastica's Day in St. Mary's Church, to
attend a mass for the souls of the slain. The tradition that they were
to wear halters or silken cords has no authority, but they were each
"to offer at the altar one penny, of which oblation forty pence should
be distributed to forty poor scholars of the University." The custom,
with some modifications, survived the Reformation, and it was not till
the nineteenth century that the Mayor of Oxford ceased to have cause
to regret the battle of St Scholastica's Day.
The accounts of St Scholastica's Day and of most other riots which (p. 127)
have come down to us are written from the standpoint of the scholars,
but the records of the city of Oxford give less detailed but not less
credible instances of assaults by members of the University. On the
eve of St John Baptist's Day in 1306, for example, the tailors of
Oxford were celebrating Midsummer "cum Cytharis Viellis et aliis
diversis instrumentis." After midnight, they went out "de shoppis
suis" and danced and sang in the streets. A clerk, irritated by the
noise, attacked them with a drawn sword, wounded one of them, and was
himself mortally wounded in the skirmish. Of twenty-nine coroners'
inquests which have been preserved for the period 1297-1322, thirteen
are murders committed by scholars. Attacks on townsmen were not mere
undergraduate follies, but were countenanced and even led by officials
of the University, _e.g._ on a March night in 1526 one of the proctors
"sate uppon a blocke in the streete afore the shoppe of one Robert
Jermyns, a barber, havinge a pole axe in his hand, a black cloake on
his backe, and a hatt on his head," and organised a riot in which many
townsmen were "striken downe and sore beaten." Citizens' houses were
attacked and "the saide Proctour and his company ... called for fire,"
threatening to burn the houses, and insulting the inmates with
opprobrious names. When such an incident as this was possible, it (p. 128)
was of little use for the University to issue regulations or even to
punish less exalted sinners, and the town must have suffered much from
the outrages of scholars and of the "chamber-dekens" or pretended
scholars of the University, who were responsible for much of the
mischief. At Paris things became so bad that the Parlement had to
issue a series of police regulations to suppress the bands of
scholars, or pretended scholars, who wandered about the streets at
night, disguised and armed. They attacked passers-by, and if they were
wounded in the affray, their medical friends, we are told, dressed
their wounds, so that they eluded discovery in the morning. The
history of every University town provides instances of street
conflicts--the records of Orleans and Toulouse abound in them--but we
must be content with a tale from Leipsic.
The pages of the "Acta Rectorum" at Leipsic are full of illustrations
of the wilder side of student life, from which we extract the story of
one unhappy year. The year 1545 opened very badly, says the "Rector's
Chronicle," with three homicides. On Holy Innocents' Day, a bachelor
was murdered by a skinner in a street riot, and the murderer, though
he was seen by some respectable citizens, was allowed to escape. A
student who killed a man on the night of the Sunday after the (p. 129)
Epiphany was punished by the University in accordance with its
statutes (_i.e._ by imprisonment for life in the bishop's prison). The
third murder was that of a young bachelor who was walking outside the
city, when two sons of rustics in the neighbourhood fell on him and
killed him. Their names were known, but the city authorities refused
to take action, and the populace, believing that they would not be
punished, pursued the members of the University with continued insults
and threats. After an unusually serious attack _cum bombardis_, (in
which, "by the divine clemency," a young mechanic was wounded), the
University, failing to obtain redress, appealed to Prince Maurice of
Saxony, who promised to protect the University. A conference between
the University and the city authorities took place, and edicts against
carrying arms were published, but the skinners immediately indulged in
another outrage. One of them, Hans von Buntzell on Whitsunday,
attacked, with a drawn sword, the son of a doctor of medicine, "a
youth (as all agree) most guiltless," and wounded him in the arm, and
if another student had not unexpectedly appeared, "would without doubt
have killed this excellent boy." The criminal was pursued to the house
of a skinner called Meysen, where he took refuge. The city authorities,
inspired by the Prince's intervention, offered to impose three (p. 130)
alternative sentences, and the University was asked to say whether
Hans von Buntzell should lose one of his hands, or be publicly whipped
and banished for ten years, or should have a certain stigma ("quod
esset manus amittendae signum") burned in his hand and be banished.
The University replied that it was for the city to carry out the
commands of the Prince, and declined to select the penalty. On the
following Monday a scaffold was erected in the market-place, on which
were placed rods and a knife for cutting off the hand, "which
apparatus was thought by the skinners to be much too fierce and cruel,
and a concourse began from all parts, composed not of skinners alone,
but of mechanics of every kind, interceding with the Council for the
criminal." The pleadings of the multitude gained the day, and all the
preparations were removed from the market-place amid the murmurs of
the students. After supper, three senior members of the skinners came
to the Rector, begging for a commutation of the punishment, and offering
to beat Hans themselves in presence of representatives of the
University and the Town Council, with greater ferocity than the public
executioner could do if he were to whip him three times in public. The
Rector replied that he must consult the University, and the proposal
was thrown out in Congregation. On the Saturday after the Feast of (p. 131)
Trinity, the stigma was burned on the criminal's hand, and as a
necessary consequence he was banished.
Town riots do not complete the tale of violence. There were struggles
with Jews, and a Jewish row at Oxford in 1268 resulted in the erection
of a cross, with the following inscription:--
Quis meus auctor erat? Judaei. Quomodo? Sumptu Quis jussit?
Regnans. Quo procurante? Magistri. Cur? Cruce pro fracta ligni.
Quo tempore? Festo Ascensus Domini. Quis est locus? Hic ubi
sisto.
Clerks' enemies were not always beyond their own household. The
history of Paris, the earlier history of Oxford, and the record of
many another University give us instances of mortal combats between
the Nations. The scholars of Paris, in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, had to face the mortal enmity of the monks of the Abbey of
St Germain, the meadow in front of which was claimed by the Faculty of
Arts. The sight of Paris students walking or playing on the
Pré-aux-clercs had much the same effect upon the Abbot and monks as
the famous donkeys had upon the strong-minded aunt of David
Copperfield, but the measures they took for suppressing the nuisance
were less exactly proportioned to the offence. One summer day in 1278,
masters and scholars went for recreation to the meadow, when the (p. 132)
Abbot sent out armed servants and retainers of the monastery to attack
them. They came shouting "Ad mortem clericorum," death to the clerks,
"verbis crudelibus, _ad mortem ad mortem_, inhumaniter pluries
repetitis." A "famous Bachelor of Arts" and other clerks were seriously
wounded and thrown into horrible dungeons; another victim lost an eye.
The retreat into the city was cut off, and fugitives were pursued far
into the country. Blood flowed freely, and the scholars who escaped
returned to their halls with broken heads and limbs and their clothes
torn to fragments. Some of the victims died of their wounds, and the
monks were punished by King and Pope, the Abbot being pensioned off
and the Abbey compelled to endow two chaplains to say masses for
scholars. Forty years later the University had again to appeal to the
Pope to avenge assaults by retainers of the Abbey upon scholars who
were fishing in the moat outside the Abbey walls. The monks, of
course, may have given a different version of the incidents.