THE EARLY STUDENTS—A DAY WITH A MEDIEVAL UNDERGRADUATE
OXFORD, some one says, ‘is bitterly historical.’ It is difficult to
escape the fanaticism of Antony Wood, and of ‘our antiquary,’ Bryan
Twyne, when one deals with the obscure past of the University. Indeed,
it is impossible to understand the strange blending of new and old at
Oxford—the old names with the new meanings—if we avert our eyes from what
is ‘bitterly historical.’ For example, there is in most, perhaps in all,
colleges a custom called ‘collections.’ On the last days of term
undergraduates are called into the Hall, where the Master and the Dean of
the Chapel sit in solemn state. Examination papers are set, but no one
heeds them very much. The real ordeal is the awful interview with the
Master and the Dean. The former regards you with the eyes of a judge,
while the Dean says, ‘Master, I am pleased to say that Mr. Brown’s
_papers_ are very fair, very fair. But in the matters of _chapels_ and
of _catechetics_, Mr. Brown sets—for a _scholar_—a very bad example to
the other undergraduates. He has only once attended divine service on
Sunday morning, and on that occasion, Master, his dress consisted
exclusively of a long great-coat and a pair of boots.’ After this
accusation the Master will turn to the culprit and observe, with emphasis
ill represented by italics, ‘Mr. Brown, the _College_ cannot hear with
pleasure of such behaviour on the part of a _scholar_. You are _gated_,
Mr. Brown, for the first fortnight of next term.’ Now why should this
tribunal of the Master and the Dean, and this dread examination, be
called collections? Because (_Munimenta Academica_, Oxon., i. 129) in
1331 a statute was passed to the effect that ‘every scholar shall pay at
least twelve pence a-year for lectures in logic, and for physics
eighteenpence a-year,’ and that ‘all Masters of Arts except persons of
royal or noble family, shall be obliged to _collect_ their salary from
the scholars.’ This _collection_ would be made at the end of term; and
the name survives, attached to the solemn day of doom we have described,
though the college dues are now collected by the bursar at the beginning
of each term.
By this trivial example the perversions of old customs at Oxford are
illustrated. To appreciate the life of the place, then, we must glance
for a moment at the growth of the University. As to its origin, we know
absolutely nothing. That Master Puleyn began to lecture there in 1133 we
have seen, and it is not likely that he would have chosen Oxford if
Oxford had possessed no schools. About these schools, however, we have
no information. They may have grown up out of the seminary which,
perhaps, was connected with St. Frideswyde’s, just as Paris University
may have had some connection with ‘the School of the Palace.’ Certainly
to Paris University the academic corporation of Oxford, the
_Universitas_, owed many of her regulations; while, again, the founder of
the college system, Walter de Merton (who visited Paris in company with
Henry III.), may have compared ideas with Robert de Sorbonne, the founder
of the college of that name. In the early Oxford, however, of the
twelfth and most of the thirteenth centuries, colleges with their
statutes were unknown. The University was the only corporation of the
learned, and she struggled into existence after hard fights with the
town, the Jews, the Friars, the Papal courts. The history of the
University begins with the thirteenth century. She may be said to have
come into being as soon as she possessed common funds and rents, as soon
as fines were assigned, or benefactions contributed to the maintenance of
scholars. Now the first recorded fine is the payment of fifty-two
shillings by the townsmen of Oxford as part of the compensation for the
hanging of certain clerks. In the year 1214 the Papal Legate, in a
letter to his ‘beloved sons in Christ, the burgesses of Oxford,’ bade
them excuse the ‘scholars studying in Oxford’ half the rent of their
halls, or hospitia, for the space of ten years. The burghers were also
to do penance, and to feast the poorer students once a year; but the
important point is, that they had to pay that large yearly fine ‘propter
suspendium clericorum’—all for the hanging of the clerks. Twenty-six
years after this decision of the Legate, Robert Grossteste, the great
Bishop of Lincoln, organised the payment and distribution of the fine,
and founded the first of the _chests_, the chest of St. Frideswyde.
These _chests_ were a kind of Mont de Piété, and to found them was at
first the favourite form of benefaction. Money was left in this or that
_chest_, from which students and masters would borrow, on the security of
pledges, which were generally books, cups, daggers, and so forth.
[Picture: Merton College from the Fields]
Now, in this affair of 1214 we have a strange passage of history, which
happily illustrates the growth of the University. The beginning of the
whole affair was the quarrel with the town, which, in 1209, had hanged
two clerks, ‘in contempt of clerical liberty.’ The matter was taken up
by the Legate—in those bad years of King John the Pope’s viceroy in
England—and out of the humiliation of the town the University gained
money, privileges, and halls at low rental. These were precisely the
things that the University wanted. About these matters there was a
constant strife, in which the Kings, as a rule, took part with the
University. The University possessed the legal knowledge, which the
monarchs liked to have on their side, and was therefore favoured by them.
Thus, in 1231 (Wood, _Annals_, i. 205), ‘the King sent out his Breve to
the Mayor and Burghers commanding them not to overrate their houses’; and
thus gradually the University got the command of the police, obtained
privileges which enslaved the city, and became masters where they had
once been despised, starveling scholars. The process was always the
same. On the feast of St. Scholastica, for example, in 1354, Walter de
Springheuse, Roger de Chesterfield, and other clerks, swaggered into the
Swyndlestock tavern in Carfax, began to speak ill of John de Croydon’s
wine, and ended by pitching the tankard at the head of that vintner. In
ten minutes the town bell at St. Martin’s was rung, and the most terrible
of all Town-and-Gown rows began. The Chancellor could do no less than
bid St. Mary’s bell reply to St. Martin’s, and shooting commenced. The
Gown held their own very well at first, and ‘defended themselves till
Vespertide,’ when the citizens called in their neighbours, the rustics of
Cowley, Headington, and Hincksey. The results have been precisely
described in anticipation by Homer:
τόφρα δ’ ἄρ οἰχόμενοι Κίκονες Κικόνεσσι γεγώνευν
οἴ σφῖν γείτονες ἦσαν ἅμα πλέονες καὶ ἀρείους
. . . . .
ἦμος δ’ Ηέλιος μετενίσσετο βουλυτόνδε
καὶ τότε δὴ Κίκονες κλῖναν δαμάσαντες ’Αχαιούς.
Which is as much as to say, ‘The townsfolk call for help to their
neighbours, the yokels, that were more numerous than they, and better men
in battle . . . so when the sun turned to the time of the loosing of oxen
the Town drave in the ranks of the Gown, and won the victory.’ They were
strong, the townsmen, but not merciful. ‘The crowns of some chaplains,
viz. all the skin so far as the tonsure went, these diabolical imps
flayed off in scorn of their clergy,’ and ‘some poor innocents these
confounded sons of Satan knocked down, beat, and most cruelly wounded.’
The result, in the long run, was that the University received from Edward
III. ‘a most large charter, containing many liberties, some that they had
before, and _others that he had taken away from the town_.’ Thus Edward
granted to the University ‘the custody of the assize of bread, wine, and
ale,’ the supervising of measures and weights, the sole power of clearing
the streets of the town and suburbs. Moreover, the Mayor and the chief
Burghers were condemned yearly to a sort of public penance and
humiliation on St. Scholastica’s Day. Thus, by the middle of the
fourteenth century, the strife of Town and Gown had ended in the complete
victory of the latter.
Though the University owed its success to its clerkly character, and
though the Legate backed it with all the power of Rome, yet the scholars
were Englishmen and Liberals first, Catholics next. Thus they had all
English sympathy with them when they quarrelled with the Legate in 1238,
and shot his cook (who, indeed, had thrown hot broth at them); and thus,
in later days, the undergraduates were with Simon de Montfort against
King Henry, and aided the barons with a useful body of archers. The
University, too, constantly withstood the Friars, who had settled in
Oxford on pretence of wishing to convert the Jews, and had attempted to
get education into their hands. ‘The Preaching Friars, who had lately
obtained from the Pope divers privileges, particularly an exemption, as
they pretended, from being subject to the jurisdiction of the University,
began to behave themselves very insolent against the Chancellors and
Masters.’ (Wood, _Annals_, i. 399.) The conduct of the Friars caused
endless appeals to Rome, and in this matter, too, Oxford was stoutly
national, and resisted the Pope, as it had, on occasions, defied the
King. The King’s Jews, too, the University kept in pretty good order,
and when, in 1268, a certain Hebrew snatched the crucifix from the hand
of the Chancellor and trod it under foot, his tribesmen were compelled to
raise ‘a fair and stately cross of marble, very curiously wrought,’ on
the scene of the sacrilege.
The growth in power and importance of academic corporations having now
been sketched, let us try to see what the outer aspect of the town was
like in these rude times, and what manner of life the undergraduates led.
For this purpose we may be allowed to draw a rude, but not unfaithful,
picture of a day in a student’s life. No incident will be introduced for
which there is not authority, in Wood, or in Mr. Anstey’s invaluable
documents, the _Munimenta Academica_, published in the collection of the
Master of the Rolls. Some latitude as to dates must be allowed, it is
true, and we are not of course to suppose that any one day of life was
ever so gloriously crowded as that of our undergraduate.
The time is the end of the fourteenth century. The forest and the moor
stretch to the east gate of the city. Magdalen bridge is not yet built,
nor of course the tower of Magdalen, which M. Brunet-Debaines has
sketched from Christ Church walks. Not till about 1473 was the tower
built, and years would pass after that before choristers saluted with
their fresh voices from its battlements the dawn of the first of May, or
sermons were preached from the beautiful stone pulpit in the open air.
When our undergraduate, Walter de Stoke, or, more briefly, Stoke, was at
Oxford, the spires of the city were few. Where Magdalen stands now, the
old Hospital of St. John then stood—a foundation of Henry III.—but the
Jews were no longer allowed to bury their dead in the close, which is now
the ‘Physic Garden.’ ‘In 1289,’ as Wood says, ‘the Jews were banished
from England for various enormities and crimes committed by them.’ The
Great and Little Jewries—those dim, populous streets behind the modern
Post Office—had been sacked and gutted. No clerk would ever again risk
his soul for a fair Jewess’s sake, nor lose his life for his love at the
hands of that eminent theologian, Fulke de Breauté. The beautiful tower
of Merton was still almost fresh, and the spires of St. Mary’s, of old
All Saints, of St. Frideswyde, and the strong tower of New College on the
city wall, were the most prominent features in a bird’s-eye view of the
town. But though part of Merton, certainly the chapel tower as we have
seen, the odd muniment-room with the steep stone roof, and, perhaps, the
Library, existed; though New was built; and though Balliol and University
owned some halls, on, or near, the site of the present colleges, Oxford
was still an university of poor scholars, who lived in town’s-people’s
dwellings.
Thus, in the great quarrel with the Legate in 1238, John Currey, of
Scotland, boarded with Will Maynard, while Hugh le Verner abode in the
house of Osmund the Miller, with Raynold the Irishman and seven of his
fellows. John Mortimer and Rob Norensis lodged with Augustine Gosse, and
Adam de Wolton lodged in Cat Street, where you can still see the curious
arched doorway of Catte’s, or St. Catherine’s Hall. By the time of my
hero, Walter Stoke, the King had not yet decreed that all scholars of
years of discretion should live in the house of some sufficient principal
(1421); so let him lodge at Catte Hall, at the corner of the street that
leads to New College out of the modern Broad Street, which was then the
City Ditch. It is six o’clock on a summer morning, and the bells waken
Stoke, who is sleeping on a flock bed, in his little _camera_. His room,
though he is not one of the luxurious clerks whom the University scolds
in various statutes, is pretty well furnished. His bed alone is worth
not less than fifteenpence; he has a ‘cofer’ valued at twopence (we have
plenty of those old valuations), and in his cofer are his black coat,
which no one would think dear at fourpence, his tunic, cheap at tenpence,
‘a roll of the seven Psalms,’ and twelve books only ‘at his beddes heed.’
Stoke has not
‘Twenty bookes, clothed in blak and reed,
Of Aristotil and of his philosophie,’
like Chaucer’s Undergraduate, who must have been a bibliophile. There
are not many records of ‘as many as twenty bookes’ in the old valuations.
The great ornament of the room is a neat trophy of buckler, bow, arrows,
and two daggers, all hanging conveniently on the wall. Stoke opens his
eyes, yawns, looks round for his clothes, and sees, with no surprise,
that his laundress has not sent home his clean linen. No; Christina, of
the parish of St. Martin, who used to be Stoke’s _lotrix_, has been
detected at last. ‘Under pretence of washing for scholars, _multa mala
perpetrata fuerunt_,’ she has committed all manner of crimes, and is now
in the Spinning House, _carcerata fuit_. Stoke wastes a malediction on
the laundress, and, dressing as well as he may, runs down to Parson’s
Pleasure, I hope, and has a swim, for I find no tub in his room, or,
indeed, in the _camera_ of any other scholar. It is now time to go, not
to chapel—for Catte’s has no chapel—but to parish Church, and Stoke goes
very devoutly to St. Peter’s, where we shall find him again, later in the
day, in another mood. About eight o’clock he ‘commonises’ with a Paris
man, Henricus de Bourges, who has an admirable mode of cooking omelettes,
which makes his company much sought after at breakfast-time. The
University, in old times, was full of French students, as Paris was
thronged by Englishmen. Lectures begin at nine, and first there is
lecture in the hall by the principal of Catte’s. That scholar receives
his pupils in a bare room, where it is very doubtful whether the students
are allowed to sit down. From the curious old seal of the University of
St. Andrews, however, it appears that the luxury of forms was permitted,
in Scotland, to all but the servitors, who held the lecturer’s candles.
The principal of Catte’s is in academic dress, and wears a black cape,
boots, and a hood. The undergraduates have no distinguishing costume.
After an hour or two of _vivâ voce_ exercises in the grammar of Priscian,
preparatory lecture is over, and a reading man will hurry off to the
‘schools,’ a set of low-roofed buildings between St. Mary’s and
Brasenose. There he will find the Divinity ‘school’ or lecture-room in
the place of honour, with Medicine on one hand and Law on the other; the
lecture-rooms for grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geometry,
and astronomy, for metaphysics, ethics, and ‘the tongues,’ stretching
down School Street on either side. Here the Prælectors are holding
forth, and all newly made Masters of Arts are bound to teach their
subject _regere scholas_, whether they like it or not. Our friend,
Master Stoke, however, is on pleasure bent, and means to pay his fine of
twopence for omitting lecture, and go off to the festival of his _nation_
(he is of the Southern nation, and hates Scotch, Welsh, and Irish) in the
parish Church. He stops in the Flower Market and at a barber’s shop on
his way to St. Peter’s, and comes forth a wonderful pagan figure with a
Bacchic mask covering his honest countenance, with horns protruding
through a wig of tow, with vine-leaves twisted in and out of the horns,
and roses stuck wherever there is room for roses. Henricus de Bourges,
and half a dozen Picardy men, with some merry souls from the Southern
side of the Thames, are jigging down the High, playing bag-pipes and
guitars. To these Stoke joins himself, and they waltz joyously into the
church, and in and out of the gateways of the different halls, singing,—
‘Mihi est propositum in taberna mori,
Vinum sit appositum morientis ori,
Ut dicant, quum venerint, angelorum chori
Deus sit propitius huic potatori.’
The students of the Northern nations mock, of course, at these revellers,
thumbs are bitten, threats exchanged, and we shall see what comes of the
quarrel. But the hall bells chime half-past noon; it is dinner-time in
Oxford, and Stoke, as he throws off his mask (_larva_) and vine-leaves,
mutters to himself the equivalent for ‘there _will_ be a row about this.’
There will, indeed, for the penalty is not ‘crossing at the buttery,’ nor
‘gating,’ but—excommunication! (_Munim. Academ._, i. 18.) Dinner is not
a very quiet affair, for the Catte’s men have had to fight for their beer
in the public streets with some Canterbury College fellows who were set
on by their Warden, of all people, to commit this violence (_ut vi et
violentia raperent cerevisiam aliorum scholarum in vico_): however,
Catte’s has had the best of it, and there is beer in plenty. It is
possible, however, that fish is scarce, for certain ‘forestallers’
(_regratarii_) have been buying up salmon and soles, and refusing to sell
them at less than double the proper price. On the whole, however, there
a rude abundance of meat and bread; indeed, Stoke may have fared better
in Catte’s than the modern undergraduate does in the hall of the college
protected by St. Catherine. After dinner there would be lecture in Lent,
but we are not in Lent. A young man’s fancy lightly turns to the
Beaumont, north of the modern Beaumont Street, where there are wide
playing-fields, and space for archery, foot-ball, stool-ball, and other
sports. Stoke rushes out of hall, and runs upstairs into the _camera_ of
Roger de Freshfield, a reading man, but a good fellow. He knocks and
enters, and finds Freshfield over his favourite work, the _Posterior
Analytics_, and a pottle of strawberries. ‘Come down to the Beaumont,
old man,’ he says, ‘and play pyked staffe.’ Roger is disinclined to
move, he _must_ finish the _Posterior Analytics_. Stoke lounges about,
in the eternal fashion of undergraduates after luncheon, and picking up
the _Philobiblon_ of Richard de Bury (then quite a new book), clinches
his argument in favour of pyke and staffe with a quotation: ‘You will
perhaps see a stiff-necked youth lounging sluggishly in his study . . .
He is not ashamed to eat fruit and cheese over an open book, and to
transfer his cup from side to side upon it.’ Thus addressed, Roger lays
aside his _Analytics_, and the pair walk down by Balliol, to the
Beaumont, where pyked staffe, or sword and buckler, is played. At the
Beaumont they find two men who say that ‘sword and buckler can be played
sofft and ffayre,’ that is, without hard hitting, and with one of these
Stoke begins to fence. Alas! a dispute arose about a stroke, the
by-standers interfered, and Stoke’s opponent drew his hanger (_extraxit
cultellum vocatum hangere_), and hit one John Felerd over the sconce. On
this the Proctors come up, and the assailant is put in Bocardo, while
Stoke goes off to a ‘pass-supper’ given by an _inceptor_, who has just
taken his degree. These suppers were not voluntary entertainments, but
enforced by law. At supper the talk ranges over University gossip, they
tell of the scholar who lately tried to raise the devil in Grope Lane,
and was pleased by the gentlemanly manner of the foul fiend. They speak
of the Queen’s man, who has just been plucked for maintaining that _Ego
currit_, or _ego est currens_, is as good Latin as _ego curro_. Then the
party breaks up, and Stoke goes towards Merton, with some undergraduates
of that college, Bridlington, Alderberk, and Lymby. At the corner of
Grope Lane, out come many men of the Northern nations, armed with
shields, and bows and arrows. Stoke and his friends run into Merton for
weapons, and ‘standing in a window of that hall, shot divers arrows, and
one that Bridlington shot hit Henry de l’Isle, and David Kirkby
unmercifully perished, for after John de Benton had given him a dangerous
wound in the head with his faulchion, came Will de la Hyde and wounded
him in the knee with his sword.’
These were rough times, and it is not improbable that Stoke had a brush
with the Town before he got safely back to Catte’s Hall. The old
rudeness gave way gradually, as the colleges swallowed up the irregular
halls, and as the scholars unattached, _infando nomine Chamber-Dekyns_,
ceased to exist. Learning, however, dwindled, as colleges increased,
under the clerical and reactionary rule of the House of Lancaster.