Transcribed from the 1922 Seeley, Service & Co. edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: Book cover]
[Picture: St. Mary’s Church from the corner of Oriel Street and Merton
Street, with Oriel College on the right]
OXFORD
BY
ANDREW LANG
SOMETIME FELLOW
OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD
* * * * *
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
BY
GEORGE F. CARLINE
R.B.A.
* * * * *
LONDON
SEELEY, SERVICE & CO LTD
38 GREET RUSSELL STREET
1922
* * * * *
TO
A. M. LEE
* * * * *
PREFACE
THESE papers do not profess even to sketch the outlines of a history of
Oxford. They are merely records of the impressions made by this or that
aspect of the life of the University as it has been in different ages.
Oxford is not an easy place to design in black and white, with the pen or
the etcher’s needle. On a wild winter or late autumn day (such as Father
Faber has made permanent in a beautiful poem) the sunshine fleets along
the plain, revealing towers, and floods, and trees, in a gleam of watery
light, and leaving them once more in shadow. The melancholy mist creeps
over the city, the damp soaks into the heart of everything, and such
suicidal weather ensues as has been described, once for all, by the
author of _John-a-Dreams_. How different Oxford looks when the road to
Cowley Marsh is dumb with dust, when the heat seems almost tropical, and
by the drowsy banks of the Cherwell you might almost expect some shy
southern water-beast to come crashing through the reeds! And such a day,
again, is unlike the bright weather of late September, when all the gold
and scarlet of Bagley Wood are concentrated in the leaves that cover the
walls of Magdalen with an imperial vesture.
Our memories of Oxford, if we have long made her a Castle of Indolence,
vary no less than do the shifting aspects of her scenery. Days of spring
and of mere pleasure in existence have alternated with days of gloom and
loneliness, of melancholy, of resignation. Our mental pictures of the
place are tinged by many moods, as the landscape is beheld in shower and
sunshine, in frost, and in the colourless drizzling weather. Oxford,
that once seemed a pleasant porch and entrance into life, may become a
dingy ante-room, where we kick our heels with other weary, waiting
people. At last, if men linger there too late, Oxford grows a prison,
and it is the final condition of the loiterer to take ‘this for a
hermitage.’ It is well to leave the enchantress betimes, and to carry
away few but kind recollections. If there be any who think and speak
ungently of their _Alma Mater_, it is because they have outstayed their
natural ‘welcome while,’ or because they have resisted her genial
influence in youth.
CONTENTS
CHAP. I. THE TOWN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY 19
,, II. THE EARLY STUDENTS—A DAY WITH A 43
MEDIEVAL UNDERGRADUATE
,, III. THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION 67
,, IV. JACOBEAN OXFORD 89
,, V. SOME SCHOLARS OF THE RESTORATION 111
,, VI. HIGH TORY OXFORD 133
,, VII. GEORGIAN OXFORD 153
,, VIII. POETS AT OXFORD: SHELLEY AND LANDOR 171
,, IX. A GENERAL VIEW 191
,, X. UNDERGRADUATE LIFE—CONCLUSION 209
CHAPTER I
THE TOWN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY
MOST old towns are like palimpsests, parchments which have been scrawled
over again and again by their successive owners. Oxford, though not one
of the most ancient of English cities, shows, more legibly than the rest,
the handwriting, as it were, of many generations. The convenient site
among the interlacing waters of the Isis and the Cherwell has commended
itself to men in one age after another. Each generation has used it for
its own purpose: for war, for trade, for learning, for religion; and war,
trade, religion, and learning have left on Oxford their peculiar marks.
No set of its occupants, before the last two centuries began, was very
eager to deface or destroy the buildings of its predecessors. Old things
were turned to new uses, or altered to suit new tastes; they were not
overthrown and carted away. Thus, in walking through Oxford, you see
everywhere, in colleges, chapels, and churches, doors and windows which
have been builded up; or again, openings which have been cut where none
originally existed. The upper part of the round Norman arches in the
Cathedral has been preserved, and converted into the circular bull’s-eye
lights which the last century liked. It is the same everywhere, except
where modern restorers have had their way. Thus the life of England, for
some eight centuries, may be traced in the buildings of Oxford. Nay, if
we are convinced by some antiquaries, the eastern end of the High Street
contains even earlier scratches on this palimpsest of Oxford; the rude
marks of savages who scooped out their damp nests, and raised their low
walls in the gravel, on the spot where the new schools are to stand.
Here half-naked men may have trapped the beaver in the Cherwell, and
hither they may have brought home the boars which they slew in the
trackless woods of Headington and Bagley. It is with the life of
historical Oxford, however, and not with these fancies, that we are
concerned, though these papers have no pretension to be a history of
Oxford. A series of pictures of men’s life here is all they try to
sketch.
It is hard, though not impossible, to form a picture in the mind of
Oxford as she was when she is first spoken of by history. What she may
have been when legend only knows her; when St. Frideswyde built a home
for religious maidens; when she fled from King Algar and hid among the
swine, and after a whole fairy tale of adventures died in great sanctity,
we cannot even guess. This legend of St. Frideswyde, and of her
foundation, the germ of the Cathedral and of Christ Church, is not,
indeed, without its value and significance for those who care for Oxford.
This home of religion and of learning was a home of religion from the
beginning, and her later life is but a return, after centuries of war and
trade, to her earliest purpose. What manner of village of wooden houses
may have surrounded the earliest rude chapels and places of prayer, we
cannot readily guess, but imagination may look back on Oxford as she was
when the _English Chronicle_ first mentions her. Even then it is not
unnatural to think Oxford might well have been a city of peace. She lies
in the very centre of England, and the Northmen, as they marched inland,
burning church and cloister, must have wandered long before they came to
Oxford. On the other hand, the military importance of the site must have
made it a town that would be eagerly contended for. Any places of
strength in Oxford would command the roads leading to the north and west,
and the secure, raised paths that ran through the flooded fens to the
ford or bridge, if bridge there then was, between Godstowe and the later
Norman _grand pont_, where Folly Bridge now spans the Isis. Somewhere
near Oxford, the roads that ran towards Banbury and the north, or towards
Bristol and the west, would be obliged to cross the river. The
water-way, too, and the paths by the Thames’ side, were commanded by
Oxford. The Danes, as they followed up the course of the Thames from
London, would be drawn thither, sooner or later, and would covet a place
which is surrounded by half a dozen deep natural moats. Lastly, Oxford
lay in the centre of England indeed, but on the very marches of Mercia
and Wessex. A border town of natural strength and of commanding
situation, she can have been no mean or poor collection of villages in
the days when she is first spoken of, when Eadward the Elder
‘incorporated with his own kingdom the whole Mercian lands on both sides
of Watling Street’ (Freeman’s _Norman Conquest_, vol. i. p. 57), and took
possession of London and of Oxford as the two most important parts of a
scientific frontier. If any man had stood, in the days of Eadward, on
the hill that was not yet ‘Shotover,’ and had looked along the plain to
the place where the grey spires of Oxford are clustered now, as it were
in a purple cup of the low hills, he would have seen little but ‘the
smoke floating up through the oakwood and the coppice,’
Καπνὸν δ’ ἐνὶ γέσσῃ
ἔδρακον ὀφθαλμοῖσι διὰ δρυμὰ πυκνὰ καὶ ὕλην
The low hills were not yet cleared, nor the fens and the wolds trimmed
and enclosed. Centuries later, when the early students came, they had to
ride ‘through the thick forest and across the moor, to the East Gate of
the city’ (_Munimenta Academica_, Oxon., vol. i. p. 60). In the midst of
a country still wild, Oxford was already no mean city; but the place
where the hostile races of the land met to settle their differences, to
feast together and forget their wrongs over the mead and ale, or to
devise treacherous murder, and close the banquet with fire and sword.
Again and again, after Eadward the Elder took Mercia, the Danes went
about burning and wasting England. The wooden towns were flaming through
the night, and sending up a thick smoke through the day, from Thamesmouth
to Cambridge. ‘And next was there no headman that force would gather,
and each fled as swift as he might, and soon was there no shire that
would help another.’ When the first fury of the plundering invaders was
over, when the Northmen had begun to wish to settle and till the land and
have some measure of peace, the early meetings between them and the
English rulers were held in the border-town, in Oxford. Thus Sigeferth
and Morkere, sons of Earngrim, came to see Eadric in Oxford, and there
were slain at a banquet, while their followers perished in the attempt to
avenge them. ‘Into the tower of St. Frideswyde they were driven, and as
men could not drive them thence, the tower was fired, and they perished
in the burning.’ So says William of Malmesbury, who, so many years
later, read the story, as he says, in the records of the Church of St.
Frideswyde. There is another version of the story in the _Codex
Diplomaticus_ (DCCIX.). Aethelred is made to say, in a deed of grant of
lands to St. Frideswyde’s Church (‘mine own minster’), that the Danes
were slain in the massacre of St. Brice. On that day Aethelred, ‘by the
advice of his satraps, determined to destroy the tares among the wheat,
the Danes in England.’ Certain of these fled into the minster, as into a
fortress, and therefore it was burned and the books and monuments
destroyed. For this cause Aethelred gives lands to the minster, ‘fro
Charwell brigge andlong the streame, fro Merewell to Rugslawe, fro the
lawe to the foule putte,’ and so forth. It is pleasant to see how old
are the familiar names ‘Cherwell,’ ‘Hedington,’ ‘Couelee’ or Cowley,
where the college cricket-grounds are. Three years passed, and the
headmen of the English and of the Danes met at Oxford again, and more
peacefully, and agreed to live together, obedient to the laws of Eadgar;
to the law, that is, as it was administered in older days, that seem
happier and better ruled to men looking back on them from an age of
confusion and bloodshed. At Oxford, too, met the peaceful gathering of
1035, when Danish and English claims were in some sort reconciled, and at
Oxford Harold Harefoot, the son of Cnut, died in March 1040. The place
indeed was fatal to kings, for St. Frideswyde, in her anger against King
Algar, left her curse on it. Just as the old Irish kings were forbidden
by their customs to do this or that, to cross a certain moor on May
morning, or to listen to the winnowing of the night-fowl’s wings in the
dusk above the lake of Tara; so the kings of England shunned to enter
Oxford, and to come within the walls of Frideswyde the maiden. Harold
died there, as we have seen, but there he was not buried. His body was
laid at Westminster, where it could not rest, for his enemies dug it up,
and cast it forth upon the fens, or threw it into the river. Many years
later, when Henry III. entered Oxford, not without fear, the curse of
Frideswyde lighted also upon him. He came in 1263, with Edward the
prince, and misfortune fell upon him, so that his barons defeated and
took him prisoner at the battle of Lewes. The chronicler of Oseney Abbey
mentions his contempt of superstitions, and how he alone of English kings
entered the city: ‘_Quod nullus rex attemptavit a tempore Regis Algari_,’
an error, for Harold _attemptavit_, and died. When Edward I. was king,
he was less audacious than his father, and in 1275 he rode up to the East
Gate and turned his horse’s head about, and sought a lodging outside the
town, _reflexis habenis equitans extra moenia aulam regiain in suburbio
positam introivit_. In 1280, however, he seems to have plucked up
courage and attended a Chapter of Dominicans in Oxford.
The last of the meetings between North and South was held at Oxford in
October 1065. ‘_In urle quæ famoso nomine Oxnaford nuncupatur_,’ to
quote a document of Cnut’s. (_Cod. Dipl._ DCCXLVI. in 1042.) There the
Northumbrian rebels met Harold in the last days of Edward the Confessor.
With this meeting we leave that Oxford before the Conquest, of which
possibly not one stone, or one rafter, remains. We look back through
eight hundred years on a city, rich enough, it seems, and powerful, and
we see the narrow streets full of armed bands of men—men that wear the
cognisance of the horse or of the raven, that carry short swords, and are
quick to draw them; men that dress in short kirtles of a bright colour,
scarlet or blue; that wear axes slung on their backs, and adorn their
bare necks and arms with collars and bracelets of gold. We see them
meeting to discuss laws and frontiers, and feasting late when business is
done, and chaffering for knives with ivory handles, for arrows, and
saddles, and wadmal, in the booths of the citizens. Through the mist of
time this picture of ancient Oxford may be distinguished. We are tempted
to think of a low, grey twilight above that wet land suddenly lit up with
fire; of the tall towers of St. Frideswyde’s Minster flaring like a torch
athwart the night; of poplars waving in the same wind that drives the
vapour and smoke of the holy place down on the Danes who have taken
refuge there, and there stand at bay against the English and the people
of the town. The material Oxford of our times is not more unlike the
Oxford of low wooden booths and houses, and of wooden spires and towers,
than the life led in its streets was unlike the academic life of to-day.
The Conquest brought no more quiet times, but the whole city was wrecked,
stormed, and devastated, before the second period of its history began,
before it was the seat of a Norman stronghold, and one of the links of
the chain by which England was bound. ‘Four hundred and seventy-eight
houses were so ruined as to be unable to pay taxes,’ while, ‘within the
town or without the wall, there were but two hundred and forty-three
houses which did yield tribute.’
With the buildings of Robert D’Oily, a follower of the Conqueror’s, and
the husband of an English wife, the heiress of Wigod of Wallingford, the
new Oxford begins. Robert’s work may be divided roughly into two
classes. First, there are the strong places he erected to secure his
possessions, and, second, the sacred places he erected to secure the
pardon of Heaven for his robberies. Of the castle, and its ‘shining
coronal of towers,’ only one tower remains. From the vast strength of
this picturesque edifice, with the natural moat flowing at its feet, we
may guess what the castle must have been in the early days of the
Conquest, and during the wars of Stephen and Matilda. We may guess, too,
that the burghers of Oxford, and the rustics of the neighbourhood, had no
easy life in those days, when, as we have seen, the town was ruined, and
when, as the extraordinary thickness of the walls of its remaining tower
demonstrates, the castle was built by new lords who did not spare the
forced labour of the vanquished. The strength of the position of the
castle is best estimated after viewing the surrounding country from the
top of the tower. Through the more modern embrasures, or over the low
wall round the summit, you look up and down the valley of the Thames, and
gaze deep into the folds of the hills. The prospect is pleasant enough,
on an autumn morning, with the domes and spires of modern Oxford
breaking, like islands, through the sea of mist that sweeps above the
roofs of the good town. In the old times, no movement of the people who
had their fastnesses in the fens, no approach of an army from any
direction could have evaded the watchman. The towers guarded the fords
and the bridge and were themselves almost impregnable, except when a hard
winter made the Thames, the Cherwell, and the many deep and treacherous
streams passable, as happened when Matilda was beleaguered in Oxford.
This natural strength of the site is demonstrated by the vast mound
within the castle walls, which tradition calls the Jews’ Mound, but which
is probably earlier than the Norman buildings. Some other race had
chosen the castle site for its fortress in times of which we know
nothing. Meanwhile, some of the practical citizens of Oxford wish to
level the Jews’ Mound, and to ‘utilise’ the gravel of which it is largely
composed. There is nothing to be said against this economic project
which could interest or affect the persons who entertain it. M.
Brunet-Debaines’ illustration shows the mill on a site which must be as
old as the tower. Did the citizens bring their corn to be tolled and
ground at the lord’s mill?
Though Robert was bent on works of war, he had a nature inclined to
piety, and, his piety beginning at home, he founded the church of St.
George within the castle. The crypt of the church still remains, and is
not without interest for persons who like to trace the changing fortunes
of old buildings. The site of Robert’s Castle is at present occupied by
the County Gaol. When you have inspected the tower (which does not do
service as a dungeon) you are taken, by the courtesy of the Governor, to
the crypt, and satisfy your archæological curiosity. The place is much
lower, and worse lighted, than the contemporary crypt of St.
Peter’s-in-the-East, but not, perhaps, less interesting. The
square-headed capitals have not been touched, like some of those in St.
Peter’s, by a later chisel. The place is dank and earthy, but otherwise
much as Robert D’Oily left it. There is an odd-looking arrangement of
planks on the floor. It is _the new drop_, which is found to work very
well, and gives satisfaction to the persons who have to employ it.
Sinister the Norman castle was in its beginning, ‘it was from the castle
that men did wrong to the poor around them; it was from the castle that
they bade defiance to the king, who, stranger and tyrant as he might be,
was still a protector against smaller tyrants.’ Sinister the castle
remains; you enter it through ironed and bolted doors, you note the
prisoners at their dreary exercises, and, when you have seen the engines
of the law lying in the old crypt you pass out into the place of
execution. Here, in a corner made by Robert’s tower and by the wall of
the prison, is a dank little quadrangle. The ground is of the yellow
clay and gravel which floors most Oxford quadrangles. A few letters are
scratched on the soft stone of the wall—the letters ‘H. R.’ are the
freshest. These are the initials of the last man who suffered death in
this corner—a young rustic who had murdered his sweetheart. ‘H. R.’ on
the prison wall is all his record, and his body lies under your feet, and
the feet of the men who are to die here in after days pass over his tomb.
It is thus that malefactors are buried, ‘within the walls of the gaol.’
One is glad enough to leave the remains of Robert’s place of arms—as glad
as Matilda may have been when ‘they let her down at night from the tower
with ropes, and she stole out, and went on foot to Wallingford.’ Robert
seems at first to have made the natural use of his strength. ‘Rich he
was, and spared not rich or poor, to take their livelihood away, and to
lay up treasures for himself.’ He stole the lands of the monks of
Abingdon, but of what service were moats, and walls, and dungeons, and
instruments of torture, against the powers that side with monks?
The _Chronicle of Abingdon_ has a very diverting account of Robert’s
punishment and conversion. ‘He filched a certain field without the walls
of Oxford that of right belonged to the monastery, and gave it over to
the soldiers in the castle. For which loss the brethren were greatly
grieved—the brethren of Abingdon. Therefore, they gathered in a body
before the altar of St. Michael—the very altar that St. Dunstan the
archbishop dedicated—and cast themselves weeping on the ground, accusing
Robert D’Oily, and praying that his robbery of the monastery might be
avenged, or that he might be led to make atonement.’ So, in a dream,
Robert saw himself taken before Our Lady by two brethren of Abingdon, and
thence carried into the very meadow he had coveted, where ‘most nasty
little boys,’ _turpissimi pueri_, worked their will on him. Thereon
Robert was terrified and cried out, and wakened his wife, who took
advantage of his fears, and compelled him to make restitution to the
brethren.
After this vision, Robert gave himself up to pampering the monastery and
performing other good works. He it was who built a bridge over the Isis,
and he restored the many ruined parish churches in Oxford—churches which,
perhaps, he and his men had helped to ruin. The tower of St. Michael’s,
in ‘the Corn,’ is said to be of his building; perhaps he only ‘restored’
it, for it is in the true primitive style—gaunt, unadorned, with
round-headed windows, good for shooting from with the bow. St. Michael’s
was not only a church, but a watchtower of the city wall; and here the
old northgate, called Bocardo, spanned the street. The rooms above the
gate were used till within quite recent times, and the poor inmates used
to let down a greasy old hat from the window in front of the passers-by,
and cry, ‘Pity the Bocardo birds’:
‘Pigons qui sont en l’essoine,
Enserrez soubz trappe volière,’
as a famous Paris student, François Villon, would have called them. Of
Bocardo no trace remains, but St. Michael’s is likely to last as long as
any edifice in Oxford. Our illustrations represent it as it was in the
last century. The houses huddle up to the church, and hide the lines of
the tower. Now it stands out clear, less picturesque than it was in the
time of Bocardo prison. Within the last two years the windows have been
cleared, and the curious and most archaic pillars, shaped like
balustrades, may be examined. It is worth while to climb the tower and
remember the times when arrows were sent like hail from the narrow
windows on the foes who approached Oxford from the north, while prayers
for their confusion were read in the church below.
That old Oxford of war was also a trading town. Nothing more than the
fact that it was a favourite seat of the Jews is needed to prove its
commercial prosperity. The Jews, however, demand a longer notice in
connection with the still unborn University. Meanwhile, it may be
remarked that Oxford trade made good use of the river. The _Abingdon
Chronicle_ (ii. 129) tells us that ‘from each barque of Oxford city,
which makes the passage by the river Thames past Abingdon, a hundred
herrings must yearly be paid to the cellarer. The citizens had much
litigation about land and houses with the abbey, and one Roger Maledoctus
(perhaps a very early sample of the pass-man) gave Abingdon tenements
within the city.’ Thus we leave the pre-Academic Oxford a flourishing
town, with merchants and moneylenders. As for the religious, the
brethren of St. Frideswyde had lived but loosely (_pro libito viverunt_),
says William of Malmesbury, and were to be superseded by regular canons,
under the headship of one Guimond, and the patronage of the Bishop of
Salisbury. Whoever goes into Christ Church new buildings from the
river-side, will see, in the old edifice facing him, a certain bulging in
the wall. That is the mark of the pulpit, whence a brother used to read
aloud to the brethren in the refectory of St. Frideswyde. The new leaven
of learning was soon to ferment in an easy Oxford, where men lived _pro
libito_, under good lords, the D’Oilys, who loved the English, and built,
not churches and bridges only, but the great and famous Oseney Abbey,
beyond the church of St. Thomas, and not very far from the modern station
of the Great Western Railway. Yet even after public teaching in Oxford
certainly began, after Master Robert Puleyn lectured in divinity there
(1133; cf. _Oseney Chronicle_), the tower was burned down by Stephen’s
soldiery in 1141 (_Oseney Chronicle_, p. 24).