THE MONKS AND FRIARS AT OXFORD.
[Sidenote: Benedictines and Augustinians]
The history of the monastic settlements at Oxford, and of their
connection with the University, still remains to be written, but
enough is known to show how great a part they played in its earlier
life. For some time before, and for two generations after the Norman
Conquest, the Benedictine monks of St. Frideswide, having displaced
the secular canons, seem to have been the only body of regular clergy
in Oxford. In the monasteries of this Order had been sheltered most
of the scanty learning and culture which survived the night of the
Dark Ages. Having been well nigh crushed out and despoiled of their
few literary treasures in two Danish invasions, they had revived and
extended their influence in the eleventh century. In the reign of Henry
I., Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, is said to have established a convent
of Augustinian canons at St. Frideswide’s, under the care of Guimond,
chaplain to the King, and soon after 1129 they were reinforced by a
society of the same Order inhabiting the new abbey founded in that year
at Oseney. It does not clearly appear how far the Benedictines were
dislodged from Oxford by the new-comers, but they probably retained
houses there for their students until they obtained possession of
Gloucester Hall.
[Sidenote: Rise of mendicant Orders]
If the claustral schools of the Benedictines were the nursery of
the University, a still more powerful impulse was imparted to it
at a later period by the rise of the two great mendicant Orders,
both of which received munificent aid from Henry III. In 1221 the
Dominicans, or Black Friars, first appeared in Oxford, and located
themselves in the heart of the Jewry, from which they migrated forty
years afterwards into a new monastery by the water-gate in the parish
of St. Ebbe’s, near the modern Speedwell Street. Two or three years
later a little band of Franciscans, or Grey Friars, after a temporary
residence in Canterbury and London, found their way to Oxford, where
they were hospitably entertained by the Dominicans, and obtained the
loan of a house or hall in the parish of St. Ebbe’s. Notwithstanding
their exemplary self-denial and boundless charity, they succeeded in
accumulating funds sufficient to build a magnificent church on a site
near Paradise Gardens, and opened schools of their own. After the lapse
of another generation—in 1251 or 1252—a company of Augustinian Friars
were sent into England by Lanfranc, of Milan, and a detachment of
them settled on the southern part of the site now occupied by Wadham
College, purchased for them by Sir John Handlow, of Boarstall. Here
were instituted those famous disputations which, under the name of
‘Austins,’ became the chief school of academical grammar teaching in
the Middle Ages, and survived in a degenerate form until the end of the
last century. In 1254 the Carmelite, or White Friars, took up their
abode close by the Castle, whence they were transferred to Beaumont
Palace by Edward II. in 1313. In 1281 or 1291 Edmund, Earl of Cornwall,
founded, or refounded, the Cistercian Abbey of Rewley, and established
a brotherhood of Trinitarians without the East Gate. Meanwhile the
Benedictines had adopted Gloucester Hall (now Worcester College) as a
seminary for their younger members.
[Sidenote: Claustral schools]
Other smaller religious fraternities are known to have existed in
Oxford, and neighbouring abbeys, such as those of Oseney, Eynsham,
Littlemore, and Dorchester, kept houses in Oxford for the instruction
of boys and young men under their special charge. The systematic
teaching of theology was doubtless the main object of the lessons given
in the old claustral schools, and the curriculum of secular education
was as meagre in reality as it was imposing in profession. Yet even
in these a true spirit of scholarship was kept alive, and the great
teachers of the mendicant Orders were the leading exponents of the new
Aristotelian philosophy, which inspired the subtlest intellects of
the thirteenth century with the power of a revelation. These Orders
possessed a great advantage over the University itself, before colleges
were founded, in occupying handsome and spacious buildings, attractive
to poor students, while the University schools or lecture rooms were
apparently little better than sheds, and St. Mary’s Church was the one
edifice capable of being used for solemn academical functions.
[Sidenote: Migration from Paris and influence of Robert Grosteste]
Two causes favoured the rapid establishment of the mendicant Orders,
and especially of the Franciscans, in the schools of Oxford. In the
year 1228 a memorable conflict took place between the students and
citizens in Paris, in which the students were grossly maltreated.
Queen Blanche refused them redress, but Henry III. invited them to
settle in England, and Oxford, as well as Cambridge, benefited largely
by the migration which ensued.[7] These Paris students were mostly
the disciples of Dominican or Franciscan professors, some of whom
seem to have accompanied them, and when the Dominicans again became
paramount at Paris, the Franciscans retained a stronghold at Oxford.
Here they owed much to the powerful aid and patronage of Robert
Grosteste, the great scholastical and ecclesiastical reformer of the
thirteenth century. The fame of this remarkable man for scholarship,
as well as piety, rests upon the universal testimony of his own and
the succeeding age, including that of Roger Bacon, himself perhaps the
brightest luminary of mediæval Oxford. But it is only of late that his
influence upon the University has been fully understood. It was indeed
an extraordinary chance which elevated to the See of Lincoln, then
possessing a paramount jurisdiction over the University of Oxford, a
man who had been the foremost of Oxford teachers, the first theological
lecturer of the Franciscans. It was as a working professor and _Rector
scholarum_ that he infused new life into University studies by the
comprehensive vigour and originality of his teaching. When he commenced
his stormy episcopate in 1235, his attention was inevitably directed
to larger questions then disturbing the peace of Church and State,
but his spirit animated his staunch friend and successor, Adam Marsh
(or de Marisco), the great Franciscan college-tutor, as he may well
be called. It is the glory of the Franciscans to have produced in the
same age Adam Marsh and Roger Bacon, who is sometimes claimed as an
early Fellow of Merton College, but who really belongs to a period
immediately preceding the foundation of colleges. Though Roger Bacon
attests the premature degeneracy of the mendicant Orders in his own
lifetime, though his bold vindication of scientific truth is little
in harmony with the abject submission to Papal authority enjoined
upon the friars, and though he was actually persecuted by his own
community for persevering in his scientific researches, yet he was
essentially a Franciscan. It was in obedience to his patron, Clement
IV., that he compiled his three great treatises, embodying a knowledge
which no other scholar of his time possessed, advocating the claims
of mathematics and language against the frivolous dialectics of the
mediæval schools, and censuring without reserve the organised ignorance
which then usurped the place of science and philosophy.
[Sidenote: Position of the friars at Oxford, and University statutes
against them]
It is extremely difficult to ascertain the nature of the control which
the friars acquired over academical studies, or the place, if any,
which they occupied in the academical system. Of their proselytising
activity we have abundant evidence, and this was probably the motive of
their constant efforts to secure the privilege of reading and lecturing
in their own schools, instead of in those of the University; efforts
which at Paris seem to have been more or less successful. At Oxford
they are clearly recognised as religious bodies in a curious ordinance
of 1300, which enjoins that in academical processions the Preaching
Friars shall walk first, the White Friars next, and the Black Friars
last. It is scarcely less significant that, although in 1314 the church
of St. Mary was made the one authorised arena of academic ceremonies,
to the exclusion of the religious houses, the four Orders were
represented jointly with the University on the Papal Commission which
delivered this decision. In another statute, of 1326, every bachelor of
arts is required to dispute once and respond once each year before the
Augustins (_apud Augustinenses_), from which it must be inferred that
this Order had already acquired almost a monopoly of grammar-teaching.
But the lay and secular element in the University always rebelled
against the encroachments of the friars, and was destined to prevail.
It is a suggestive fact that Walter de Merton rigorously excluded every
‘religious’ person or member of a monastic Order from the benefits of
his foundation. Soon afterwards the University took alarm. In 1358[8]
we have a trenchant statute against the abduction of boys under
eighteen by the mendicant Orders, which shows how great a jealousy
they had provoked among the secular clergy of the University, for
whose special benefit Merton and other colleges were founded. This
statute expressly recites that noblemen and commoners are afraid to
send their sons to the University, lest they should be seduced by the
mendicant friars into joining their Order before arriving at years of
discretion; and that by these practices the peace of the University is
often disturbed and its numbers diminished. It is therefore enacted
that if any mendicant friar thus seduces or causes to be seduced any
youth under eighteen years of age, or procures his removal from Oxford
with intent that he may be received elsewhere into a religious Order,
no graduate of the cloister or society to which the offender belongs
shall be allowed to deliver or attend lectures in Oxford during the
year next ensuing. Another statute of the same date is apparently aimed
at the attempt of friars to lecture on logic before undergoing the
regular yearly course of disputations. This is immediately followed by
the public recantation extorted from a friar who had affirmed, among
other startling propositions, that tithes belonged more properly to
mendicants than to rectors of churches, and that the University was a
school of heresy. Another friar who had disparaged the School of Arts
was compelled to apologize with equal humility. Still the power of the
monastic Orders continued to be formidable, and at Cambridge they seem
to have ultimately carried their point in obtaining exemption from
academical exercises in Arts for their theological students; while at
Oxford there are many instances of college fellows joining their ranks.
[Sidenote: Intervention of the Pope and the King]
In 1365 the Pope entered the lists against the University on behalf
of the friars, and directed the Archbishop of Canterbury and bishops
to insist upon the Chancellor’s procuring the repeal of the obnoxious
statutes. In the meantime, however, the intervention of the King and
Parliament was invoked by memorials from both the Universities and
the four mendicant Orders. In consequence of this an ordinance was
made, with the assent of Parliament, by which the statutes against the
admission of scholars into these Orders were relaxed, but all bulls and
processes to be procured by the friars against the Universities from
the Court of Rome were prohibited and declared void. Still the feud
continued. One main source of Wyclif’s popularity in the University was
his unsparing denunciation of the Mendicants, and their decline was
among the most permanent results of the movement which he initiated.
But other causes were at work to undermine their influence. The rise
of the colleges was, in fact, the rise of the secular clergy, and in
organising itself more completely, the University naturally outgrew
its dependence on the missionary zeal for education which had been its
life-blood in the thirteenth century.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] See Chapter I. p. 9.
[8] This is the date assigned to the statute by Mr. Anstey in his
_Munimenta Academica_, on the authority of Anthony Wood, supported by
historical probability.