university has no relation to the industrial life of the people--a
grave shortcoming in a nation which is not unwilling to be known as a
nation of shopkeepers. The wail of the British tradesman is not
unfamiliar. Wares "made in Germany" undersell English wares that used
to command the market; and being often made of a cheaper grade to suit
the demands of purchasers, the phrase "made in Germany" is clearly
indicative of fraudulent intention.
Certain instances are exceptionally galling. Aniline dyes were first
manufactured from the residuum of coal tar in Great Britain. But
enterprising Germany, which has coal-fields of its own, sent
apprentices to England who learned the manufacture, and then by means
of the chemistry taught in the German universities, revolutionized the
process, and discovered how to extract new colors from the coal tar,
so that now the bulk of aniline dyes are made in Germany. Obviously,
the German chemist is a perfidious person. The Yankee is shrewd and
well taught in the technical professions. He makes new and quite
unexampled tools, and machinery of all sorts. It takes the Briton some
years to be sure that these are not iniquitous--a Yankee trick; but in
the end he adopts them. Even then, to the Briton's surprise, the
Yankee competes successfully. A commission (no German spy) is sent to
America to find out why, and on its return gleefully reports that the
Yankee works his tools at a ruinous rate, driving them so hard that in
a decade it will be necessary to reequip his plant entire. At the end
of the decade, the conservative Englishman's tools are as good as if
they had been kept in cotton batting; but by this time the Yankee has
invented newer and more economical devices, and when he reequips his
plant with them he is able to undersell the English producer even more
signally. The honest British manufacturer sells his old tools to an
unsuspecting brother in trade and adopts the new ones. The Yankee
machinist is obviously as perfidious as the German chemist. The upper
middle classes in England realize that the destinies of Great Britain
and America run together, and they are very hospitable to Americans,
but the industrial population hate us scarcely less than they hate
the Germans.
All this is, of course, not directly chargeable to the English
universities: but the fact remains that in Germany and in America the
educational system is the most powerful ally of industry. Here again
the English radical is on his guard. From time to time, in letters to
the daily papers or political speeches before industrial audiences,
the case is very clearly stated. In a recent epistolary agitation in
"The Times" it was shown that whereas American and German business men
learn foreign languages, Englishmen attempt to sell their wares by
means of interpreters, and do not even have their pamphlets and
prospectuses translated. Admitting the facts, one gentleman gravely
urged that if only the English would stick out the fight, their
language would soon be the business language of the world. If it is
the conscious purpose of the nation to make it so, it might be of
advantage to spell the language as it has been pronounced in the
centuries since Chaucer; already with some such purpose the Germans
are adopting Roman characters. But at least it will be many decades
before English is the Volapuek of business, and meantime England is
losing ground. From the point of view of the mere outsider, it would
seem of little moment to England what language is used, if the
profits of the business transacted accrue to Russian, German, and
American corporations.
It has even been strongly urged that commercial and technical subjects
be taught in the universities. Cambridge and the University of Glasgow
have already a fund with this in view; and the new Midland University
at Birmingham, of which Mr. Joseph Chamberlain is chancellor, is to be
mainly devoted to commercial science and engineering. It cannot be
foretold that the ancient universities will hold their own against the
modern. In a speech at Birmingham (January 17, 1901), Mr. Chamberlain
said: "Finance is the crux of the situation. Upon our finance depends
entirely the extent to which we shall be able to develop this new
experiment. With us, in fact, money is the root of all good. I am very
glad to say that the promises of donations which, when I last
addressed you, amounted to L330,000, have risen since then to an
estimated amount of about L410,000.... Now L410,000 is a large sum. I
heard the other day that the University of Cambridge, which has for
some time past been appealing for further assistance, has only up to
the present time received L60,000. I most deeply regret that their
fund is not larger, and I regret also that ours is so small." Oxford
has apparently not entered the new competition even in a half-hearted
manner. For centuries it has been the resort of the nobility and
aristocracy, the "governing classes," and though the spirit of the age
has so far invaded it as to have been in Mr. Gladstone's eyes its
chief danger, the university has as yet only the slenderest connection
with the industrial life of the nation.
The virtues of the Oxford educational system, like those of the social
and athletic life, are pretty clearly traceable in the main to the
division of the university into colleges; at least, it is hard to see
how anything other than this could have suggested the idea of having
one body to teach the student and another to examine him. And they
have a strong family likeness one to another, the concrete result
being a highly sturdy and effective character. But the educational
system differs from the social and athletic system in that the defects
of its qualities are the more vigorous. As far as these defects result
from the educational system, they are chargeable not so much to the
preponderance of the colleges as to the torpor of the university; and
they are powerfully abetted by the Oxford tradition as to the nature
and function of a liberal education. This has not always been the case
at Oxford. To understand the situation more clearly, it is necessary
to review in brief the origin and the growth of the colleges, and the
extinction of the mediaeval university. This will throw further light
on Oxford's social history. We shall thus be better able to judge how
and to what extent the college system offers a solution for the
correction of our American instruction.
IV
THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY AND THE COLLEGE
I
THE UNIVERSITY BEFORE THE COLLEGE
In the beginning was the university. The colleges were as unimportant
as the university is now. If it be admitted that the university exists
to-day, they were less important; for there were no colleges. The
origin of the university was probably due to a migration of students
in 1167 from the then world-famous University of Paris. The first
definite mention of a _studium generale_ at Oxford, or assembly of
masters of the different faculties, dates from 1185, when Giraldus
Cambrensis, as he himself relates, read his new work, "Topographia
Hibernia," before the citizens and scholars of the town, and
entertained in his hostel "all the doctors of the different
faculties."
At this time, and for many centuries afterward, Oxford, like other
mediaeval universities, was a guild, and was not unlike the trade
guilds of the time. Its object was to train and give titles to those
who dealt in the arts and professions. The master tanner was trained
by his guild to make leather, and he made it; the master of arts was
trained by the university to teach, and he taught. He was required to
rent rooms in the university schools, for a year and even two, and to
show that he deserved his title of master by lecturing in them, and
conducting "disputations." The masters lived directly from the
contributions of their hearers, their means varying with the
popularity of their lectures; and the students were mainly poor
clerks, who sought degrees for their money value.
The lectures were mere dictations from manuscript, necessitated by the
lack of accessible texts. The students copied the lectures verbatim
for future study. The instruction in arts covered the entire field of
secular knowledge, the "seven arts," the trivium (grammar, rhetoric,
and logic or dialectic), and the quadrivium (music, arithmetic,
geometry, and astronomy). The lectures were the main and often the
only means of imparting knowledge. The disputations were scholastic
arguments--debates--on some set question, and were conducted by the
masters. They were the practical application of what the student had
learned from the lectures, and were the chief means of intellectual
training. Besides attending lectures and disputing, the candidate for
the degree had to pass an examination; but the great test of his
acquirement seems to have been the skill with which he used his
knowledge in debate. Thus the formal disputations occupied very much
the same place as the modern written examinations, and they must have
required very much the same rare combination of knowledge, address,
and pluck. All learning was in a pint-pot; but it was a very
serviceable pint-pot.
The university education did not make a man above the work of the
world: it made him an engine of so many horse power to perform it. It
brought him benefices in that great sphere of activity, the mediaeval
Church, and important posts in that other sphere of mediaeval
statecraft, which was so often identified with the Church. If the
clerk was above the carpenter, it was not because he came from a
different station in life, for he often did not: it was because his
work was more important. And he was far above the carpenter. It was a
strenuous, glorious life, and the man of intelligence and training
found his level, which is the highest. The kings and the nobility were
warriors, and may have affected to despise education; but they were
far from despising educated men. The machinery of state was organized
and controlled by clerks from the university. If the scientific and
mechanical professions had existed then, there is no doubt that they
would not have been despised as to-day, but would have had full
recognition.
Socially, the university was chaos. In the absence of colleges, all
the students lived with the townsmen in "chamberdekyns," which appear
to be etymologically and historically the forbears of the "diggings"
to which the fourth year man now retreats when he has been routed from
college by incoming freshmen and by the necessity of reading for his
final examination. But such discipline as is now exerted over
out-of-college students was undreamed of. In his interesting and
profoundly scholarly history of the universities of the Middle Ages,
the Rev. Hastings Rashdall gives a vivid picture of mediaeval student
life, which was pretty much the same in all the universities of
Europe. Boys went up to the university at as early an age as thirteen,
and the average freshman could not have been older than fifteen; yet
they were allowed almost absolute liberty. Drunkenness was rarely
treated as a university offense; and for introducing suspicious women
into his rooms, it was only on being repeatedly caught that an
undergraduate was disciplined. At the University of Ingolstadt, a
student who had killed another in a drunken quarrel had his scholastic
effects and garments confiscated by the university. He may have been
warned to be good in future, but he was not expelled. "It is
satisfactory to add," Rashdall continues, "that at Prague, a Master of
Arts, believed to have assisted in cutting the throat of a Friar
Bishop, was actually expelled." The body of undergraduates was "an
undisciplined student-horde." Hende Nicholas, in Chaucer's "Miller's
Tale," is, it must be admitted, a lively and adventuring youth; but he
might have been much livelier without being untrue to student life in
chamberdekyns.
The townspeople seem to have been the not unnatural fathers of the
tradesmen and landlords of modern Oxford; and the likeness is well
borne out in the matter of charges. But where to-day a man sometimes
tries amiably to beat down the landlord's prices, the way of the
Middle Ages was to beat down the landlord. As the student was in many
cases of the same station in life as the townsman, he naturally failed
to command the servility with which the modern undergraduate is
regarded. Both sides used to gird on their armor, and meet in battles
that began in bloodshed and often ended in death. Pages of Rashdall's
history are filled with accounts of savage encounters between town and
gown, which are of importance historically as showing the steps by
which the university achieved the anomalous legal dominance over the
city which it still in some measure retains. For our present purpose,
it is enough to note that mediaeval Oxford was unruly, very.
"Fighting," says Rashdall, "was perpetually going on in the streets of
Oxford.... There is probably not a single yard of ground in any part
of the classic High Street that lies between St. Martin's and St.
Mary's [almost a quarter of a mile] which has not at one time or other
been stained with human blood. There are historic battlefields on
which less has been spilt."
As if this were not enough, there were civil feuds. In the Middle
Ages, sectional differences were more obvious and more important than
now; and the first subdivision of the universities, both in England
and on the Continent, was by "nations." At Oxford there were two
nations; and if, when the north countryman rubbed elbows with the
south countryman, he was offended by his silken gown and soft vowels,
he rapped him across the pate. Hence more strife and bloodshed. Amid
all this disorder there was a full measure of mediaeval want and
misery. At best, the student of moderate means led a precarious life;
and poor students, shivering, homeless, and starved, lived by the
still reputable art of the beggar. Something had to be done.
II
THE MEDIAEVAL HALL
The mediaeval spirit of organization, which resulted in so many noble
and deathless institutions, was not slow in exerting itself against
the social chaos of the university. Out of chaos grew the halls, and
out of the halls the colleges. The first permanent organizations of
student life were small, and had their origin in the immediate wants
of the individual. To gain the economy of cooperation and the safety
of numbers, the students at Oxford, as at Paris and elsewhere, began
to live in separate small colonies under one roof. These were called
aulae or halls. They were no less interesting in themselves than for
the fact that they were the germ out of which the Oxford college
system grew.
At first the halls appear to have been mere chance associations. Each
had a principal who managed its affairs; but the principal had no
official status, and might even be an undergraduate. The halls
correspond roughly to the fraternities of American college life. Their
internal rule was absolutely democratic. The students lived together
by mutual consent under laws of their own framing, and under a
principal of their own electing. They were quite without fear or favor
of the university. The principal's duties were to lease the hall, to
be a sort of over-steward of it, and to lead in enforcing the
self-imposed rules of the community. His term of office, like his
election, depended on the good-will of his fellows; if he made himself
disliked, they were quite at liberty to take up residence elsewhere.
In the thirteenth century there was really no such thing as university
discipline. The men who lived in the halls came and went as they
pleased, and were as free as their contemporary in chamberdekyns to
loiter, quarrel, and carouse. Chaucer's "Reeve's Tale" gives us a
glimpse into "Soler Halle at Cantebregge," from which it would appear
that the members were quite as loose and free as Hende Nicholas, their
Oxford contemporary. But the liberty was an organized liberty. In
contrast with the chaos of the life of the students in chamberdekyns,
the early halls must have been brave places to work and to play in,
and one might wish that a fuller record had been left of the life in
them. It was their fate to be obscured by the greater splendor and
permanence of the colleges to which they paved the way.
III
THE COLLEGE SYSTEM
The English college, roughly speaking, is a mediaeval hall supported by
a permanent fund which the socii or fellows administer. The first fund
for the support of scholars was bequeathed in 1243, but it can
scarcely be regarded as marking the first college, for it provided for
two scholars only, and these lived where they pleased. In 1249 William
of Durham bequeathed a fund for the support of ten or more masters of
arts. At first these also lived apart; it was only in 1280, after the
type of the English college had been fixed, that they were formed into
the body now known as University College. The first organized
community at Oxford was founded by Sir John de Balliol some little
time before 1266; but the allowances to the scholars, as was the case
in colleges of the University of Paris, after which it was doubtless
modeled, were not from a permanent fund, being paid annually by the
founder. Balliol cannot therefore be regarded as the first
characteristic English college. It was not until 1282 that Sir John's
widow, Dervorguilla, adopted the new English idea by making the
endowment of the "House of Balliol" permanent, and placing it under
the management of the fellows.
The real founder of the English college was Walter de Merton. In 1264
Walter provided by endowment for the permanent maintenance of twenty
scholars, who were to live together in a hall as a community; and in
1274 he drew up the statutes which fix the type of the earliest
English college. The principal of Merton was not, like the principal
of a mediaeval hall, the temporary head of a chance community, but a
permanent head with established power; and he had to manage, not the
periodic contributions of free associates, but a landed estate held in
permanent trust. He was called "warden," a title which the head of
Merton retains to this day. This idea of a body supported in a
permanent residence by a permanent fund is perhaps of monastic origin,
and was accompanied by certain features of brotherhood rule. The
scholars lived a life of order and seclusion which was in striking
contrast to the life of the students in chamberdekyns, and even of
those in the halls. But with the monastic order they had also the
monastic democracy, so that in one way the government of the college
was strikingly similar to that of the halls. Vacancies in the
community were filled by cooptation, and the warden was elected by the
thirteen senior fellows from their own number. Though partly monastic
in constitution, the Hall of Merton was not properly a religious body.
The fellows took no vows, and seem rather to have been expected to
enter lay callings. This College of Merton was the result of a gradual
development of the hall along monastic lines--a lay brotherhood of
students. It was destined to work a revolution in English university
life and in English university teaching. The constitutions of
University and Balliol were, as I have indicated, remodeled on the
lines of Merton; and other colleges were founded as follows: Exeter,
1314; Oriel, 1324; Queens, 1341; and Canterbury, now extinct, 1362,
most of which were profoundly influenced by the constitution of
Merton.
[Illustration: NEW COLLEGE CLOISTERS, BELL TOWER, AND CHAPEL]
It was at first no part of the duty of the elders (socii, or, as
Chaucer calls them, felawes) to teach the younger. The scholars of the
college received the regular mediaeval education in the university. But
even in Merton the germ of tutorial instruction was present. Twelve
"parvuli" who were not old enough, or sufficiently used to the Latin
tongue, to profit by the lectures and disputations of the university,
lived in or near the colleges and were taught by a grammar master;
and it appears that even the older scholars might, "without blushing,"
consult this grammar master on matters that "pertained to his
faculty." In his relation to these older students the grammar master
may be regarded as the precursor of the system of tutorial
instruction.
The first college to develop regular undergraduate instruction within
its walls was "S. Marie College of Winchester in Oxford," founded in
1379, by William of Wykeham. "S. Marie's" brought in so many
innovations that it came to be called "New College," a title which,
incongruously enough, it has retained for more than five hundred
years. Wykeham's first innovation was to place the grammar master, for
the greater good of his pupils, at the head of a "college" of seventy
boys at Winchester, thus outlining the English system of public
schools. New College was accordingly able to exclude all who had not
attained the ripe age of fifteen. The effect of this innovation on the
college was peculiar. When the boys came up from Winchester, they
appear to have been farther advanced than most of the undergraduates
attending lectures and disputes in the university schools; in any
case, Wykeham arranged that the older fellows should supplement the
university teaching by private tuition within the college. Little by
little the New College type succeeded that of Merton. Magdalen
College, founded in 1448, carried the tutorial system to its logical
end by endowing lectureships in theology, metaphysics, and natural
philosophy. The older colleges--those of the Merton type--little by
little followed this new example, so that by the end of the Middle
Ages it was possible for a student to receive his entire instruction
within the walls of his college. In Wolsey's splendid foundation,
Cardinal College (1522), now styled Christ Church, there was a still
more ample endowment for professorships. At first the college
instruction was regarded as supplementary to the university teaching,
though it soon became far more important. The masters of the
university continued to read lectures on the recognized subjects,
living as of old on fees from those who chose to listen; but they were
clearly unable to compete with the endowed tutors and professors of
the colleges. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the mediaeval
teaching master was disappearing. The only real teaching in arts--by
all odds the most popular branch of study at Oxford--was given within
the colleges and halls.
The discipline of the earlier colleges was much severer than that of
to-day, but the difference is one of degree rather than of kind. The
lectures in schools began at six, instead of nine; and at any hour it
was forbidden to leave the college except on a studious errand. When
attending out-of-college lectures, all scholars were required to go
and come in a body; and in one set of statutes even a chaplain was
forbidden to leave the gates, except to go to lectures or to the
library, without taking at least one companion, who, in the antique
phrase of the statute, was to be a "witness of his honest
conversation." There were only two meals a day, dinner at ten and
supper at five. Breakfast, now the great rallying-point of Oxford
hospitality, was the invention of a more luxurious age. Of athletics
there was none, or next to none. The only licensed hilarities were
certain so-called "honest jokes," with which the tutors were in at
least one case required to regale their pupils after dinner, and a
"potation" which was permitted after supper, perhaps as an offset to
the "honest jokes."
[Illustration: NEW COLLEGE GARDENS Showing the mediaeval wall of
Oxford]
The severity of these regulations is mainly explainable in the fact
that the inmates of the colleges were fed, clothed, and housed out of
the endowment, and might thus be reasonably expected to give a good
account of themselves. Furthermore, they were most of them mere boys.
A statute dating as late as 1527 requires that "scholars" shall be
at least twelve years old. At fourteen or fifteen a scholar might
become a fellow. The average age of "determining" as bachelor of arts
was little if at all over seventeen. At nineteen, the age at which the
modern Oxonian comes up from the public schools, the mediaeval student
might, if he were clever, be a master of arts, lecturing and disputing
in schools for the benefit of the bachelors and scholars of the
university.