it is of far wider scope even here than the work of the clergy. But,
fussy and dictatorial as she is, the District Visitor is as a rule more
popular than the clergyman. In the first place, the parson is only doing
a duty he is bound to do while the District Visitor is a volunteer. The
parson, as the poor roughly say, is paid for it. Again, however
simple-hearted and courteous he may be, he never gets very close home to
the poor. Their life is not his life, nor their ways his ways. They do
not understand his refinement, his delicacy about interference, his
gentlemanly reticence, his abhorrence of gossip and scandal. They are
accustomed to be ordered about, to rough words, to gossip over their
neighbours. And so the District Visitor is "more in their way," as they
tell her. She is profuse of questions, routing out a thousand little
details that no parson would ever know. She has little of the sensitive
pride that hinders the vicar from listening to scandal, or of the manly
objection to "telling tales" which hurries him out of the room when
neighbour brings charges against neighbour. She is entirely unaffected
by his scruples against interference with the conscience or religion of
the poor. "Where do you go to church?" and "Why don't you go to church?"
are her first stock questions in her cross-examination of every family.
Her exhortations at the sick-bed have a somewhat startling
peremptoriness about them. We can hardly wonder at the wish of a poor
patient that she were a rich one, because then she could "die in peace,
and have nobody to come in and pray over her." What irritates the
District Visitor in cases where she has bestowed special religious
attention is that people when so effectively prepared for death "won't
die." But hard, practical action such as this does not jostle against
the feelings of the poor as it would against our own. Women especially
forgive all because the District Visitor listens as well as talks. They
could no more pour out their little budget of domestic troubles to the
parson than to a being from another world. But the District Visitor is
the recipient of all. The washerwoman stops her mangle to talk about the
hard times and the rise of a halfpenny on the loaf. The matron next door
turns up her sleeve to show the bruise her husband bestowed on her on
his return from the 'Chequers.' She enters largely and minutely into the
merits and defects of her partner's character, and protests with a
subtle discrimination that "he's a good father when he ain't bothered
with the children, and a good husband when he's off the drink." The old
widow down the lane is waiting for "the lady" to write a letter for her
to her son in Australia, and to see the "pictur," the cheap photograph
of the grandchildren she has never seen or will see, that John has sent
home. A girl home from her "place" wants the District Visitor to
intercede with her mistress, and listens in all humility to a lecture on
her giddiness and love of finery.
The society in fact of the little alley is very much held together by
the District Visitor. In her love of goody gossip she fulfils the office
which in an Italian town is filled by the barber. She retails
tittle-tattle for the highest ends. She relates Mrs. A.'s misdemeanour
for the edification and correction of Mrs. B. She has the true version
of the quarrel between Smith and his employer. She is the one person to
whom the lane looks for accurate information as to the domestic
relations of the two Browns, whose quarrels are the scandal of the
neighbourhood. Her influence in fact over the poor is a strange mixture
of good and evil, of real benevolence with an interference that saps all
sense of self-respect, of real sympathy and womanly feeling with a good
deal of womanly meddling, curiosity, and babble.
But her influence on the parish at large is a far more delicate
question. To the outer world a parish seems a sheer despotism. The
parson prays, preaches, changes the order of service, distributes the
parochial charities at his simple discretion. One of the great cries of
the Church reformer is generally for the substitution of some
constitutional system, some congregational council, some lay
co-operation, for this clerical tyranny. But no one in fact feels the
narrow limits of his power more keenly than the parson himself. As the
old French monarchy was a despotism tempered by epigrams, so the rule of
a parish is a despotism tempered by parochial traditions, by the
observation of neighbouring clergymen, by the suggestions of the squire,
by the opposition of churchwardens, by the hints and regrets of
"Constant Attendants," by the state of the pew-letting or the ups and
downs of the offertory, by the influences of local opinion, by the
censorship of the District Visitor. What the assembly of his "elders" is
to a Scotch minister, the District Visitors' meeting is to the English
clergyman. He has to prove in the face of a standing jealousy that his
alms have been equally distributed between district and district. His
selection of tracts is freely criticised. Mrs. A. regrets that her poor
people have seen so little of their vicar lately. Mrs. B. is sorry to
report the failure of her attempts to get her sheep to church, in face
of the new Ritualistic developement, the processions, and the surplices.
Mrs. C., whose forte is education, declines any longer to induce mothers
to send their children to "such" a master. The curates shudder as Mrs.
D. laments their frequent absence from the Penny Bank, not that they can
do any good there, but "we are always glad of the presence and sympathy
of our clergy." The curates promise amendment of life. The vicar engages
to look out for another schoolmaster, and be more diligent in his
attentions to Muck Lane. A surreptitious supply of extra tickets to the
ultra-Protestant appeases for the moment her wrath against the choir
surplices. But the occasional screw of the monthly meeting is as nothing
to the daily pressure applied by the individual District Visitor. At the
bottom of every alley the vicar runs up against a parochial censor. The
"five minutes' conversation" which the District Visitor expects as the
reward of her benevolence becomes a perpetual trickle of advice,
remonstrance, and even reproof. A strong-minded parson of course soon
makes himself master of his District Visitors, but the ordinary vicar
generally feels that his District Visitors are masters of him. The harm
that comes of this feminine despotism is the feminine impress it leaves
on the whole aspect of the parish. Manly preaching disappears before the
disappointed faces the preacher encounters on Monday. A policy of
expedients and evasions takes the place of any straightforward attempt
to meet or denounce local evils. The vicar's time and energy are
frittered away on a thousand little jealousies and envyings, his temper
is tried in humouring one person and conciliating another, he learns to
be cautious and reserved and diplomatic, to drop hints and suggestions,
to become in a word the first District Visitor of his parish. He flies
to his wife for protection, and finds in her the most effective buffer
against parochial collisions. Greek meets Greek when the vicar's wife
meets the District Visitor. But the vicar himself sinks into a parochial
nobody, a being as sacred and as powerless as the Lama of Thibet.
It was hardly to be expected that the progress of religion and
charitable feeling should fail to raise up formidable rivals to the
District Visitor. To the more ecclesiastical mind she is hardly
ecclesiastical enough for the prominent part she claims in the parochial
system. Her lace and Parisian bonnet are an abomination. She has a trick
of being terribly Protestant, and her Protestantism is somewhat
dictatorial. On the other hand, to the energetic organizer whose ideal
of a parish is a well-oiled machine turning out piety and charity
without hitches or friction she is simply a parochial impediment. She
has no system. Her visiting days are determined by somewhat eccentric
considerations. Her almsgiving is regulated by no principle whatever.
She carries silly likes and dislikes into her work among the poor. She
rustles into wrath at any attempt to introduce order into her efforts,
and regards it as a piece of ungrateful interference. She is always
ready with threats of resignation, with petty suspicions of
ill-treatment, with jealousies of her fellow-workers. We can hardly
wonder that in ecclesiastical quarters she is retreating before the
Sister of Mercy, while in the more organized parishes she is being
superseded by the Deaconess. The Deaconess has nothing but contempt for
the mere "volunteer" movement in charity. She has a strong sense of
order and discipline, and a hatred of "francs-tireurs." Above all she is
a woman of business. She is without home or child, and her time and
labour are arranged with military precision. She has her theory of the
poor and of what can be done for the poor, and she rides her hobby from
morning to night with an equal contempt for the sentimental almsgiving
of the District Visitor and for the warnings of the political economist.
No doubt an amazing deal of good is done, but it is done in a
methodical fashion that is a little trying to ordinary flesh and blood.
The parish is elaborately tabulated. The poor are grouped and ticketed.
The charitable agencies of the parish are put in connection with the
hospital and the workhouse. This case is referred to the dispensary,
that to the overseer. The Deaconess prides herself on not being "taken
in." The washerwoman finds that her "outdoor allowance" has been
ascertained and set off against her share in the distribution of alms.
The pious old woman who has played off the charity of the church against
the charity of the chapel is struck off the list. The miserable creature
who drags out existence on a bit of bread and a cup of tea is kindly but
firmly advised to try "the house." Nothing can be wiser, nothing more
really beneficial to the poor, than the work of the Deaconess, but it is
a little dry and mechanical. The ill-used wife of the drunkard sighs
after the garrulous sympathy of the District Visitor. The old gossip and
dawdle have disappeared from the parochial charity, but with them has
gone a good deal of the social contact, the sympathy of rich with poor,
in which its chief virtue lay. The very vicar sighs after a little
human imperfection and irregularity as he reads the list of sick cases
"to be visited this morning."
The one lingering touch of feminine weakness in the Deaconess comes out
in her relations with the clergy. The Deaconess is not a "Sister"--she
is most precise in enforcing the distinction--but she is a woman with a
difference. She has not retired from the world, but a faint flavour of
the nun hangs about her. She has left behind all thought of coquetry,
but she prefers to work with a married clergyman. Her delicacy can just
endure a celibate curate, but it shrinks aghast from a bachelor
incumbent. We know a case where a bishop, anxious to retain a Deaconess
in a poor parish, was privately informed that her stay would depend on
the appointment of a married clergyman to the vacant living. On the
other hand, a married clergyman is as great a trial to the Sister of
Mercy as an unmarried one to the Deaconess. The "Sister" idealizes the
priesthood as she idealizes the poor. Their poverty is a misfortune;
their improvidence an act of faith; their superstition the last ray of
poetic religion lingering in this world of scepticism and commonplace.
All the regularity and sense of order which exists in the Sister's mind
is concentrated on her own life in the sisterhood; she is punctilious
about her "hours," and lives in a perpetual tinkle of little bells. But
in her work among the poor she revolts from system or organization. She
hates the workhouse. She looks upon a guardian or an overseer as an
oppressor of the poor. She regards theories of pauperism as something
very wicked and irreligious, and lavishes her alms with a perfect faith
that good must come of it. In a word, she is absolutely unwise, but
there is a poetry in her unwisdom that contrasts strangely with the
sensible prose of the Deaconess. While the one enters in her book of
statistics the number of uneducated children, the other is trotting
along the street with little Tommy in one hand and little Polly in the
other on their way to the school. She has washed their faces and tidied
their hair, and believes she has done service to little angels. Tommy
and Polly are very far from being angels, but both sides are the happier
for the romantic hypothesis. There is a good deal of romance and
sentiment in the Sister's view of her work among the poor; but it is a
romance that nerves her to a certain grandeur of soul. A London
clergyman in whose district the black fever had broken out could get no
nurses among the panic-stricken neighbours. He telegraphed to a "Home,"
and next morning he found a ladylike girl on her knees on the floor of
the infected house, scrubbing, cleaning, putting the worn-out mother to
bed, hushing the children, nursing quietly and thoroughly as few nurses
could do. The fever was beaten, and the little heroine went off at the
call of another telegram to charge another battery of death. It is this
chivalrous poetic side that atones for the many follies of Sisterhoods;
for the pauperism they introduce among the poor, the cliqueism of their
inner life, the absurdities of their "holy obedience." Each of these
charitable agencies in fact has its work to do, and does it in its own
way. On paper there can be no doubt that the Sister of Mercy is the more
attractive figure of the three. The incumbent of a heavy parish will
probably turn with a smile to the more methodical labours of the
Deaconess. But those who shrink alike from the idealism of one and the
system of the other, who feel that the poor are neither angels nor
wheels in a machine, and that the chief work to be done among them is
the diffusion of kindly feeling and the drawing of class nearer to
class, will probably prefer to either the old-fashioned District
Visitor.
THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD.
To most Oxford men, indeed to the common visitor of Oxford, the town
seems a mere offshoot of the University. Its appearance is altogether
modern; it presents hardly any monument that can vie in antiquity with
the venerable fronts of colleges and halls. An isolated church here and
there tells a different tale; but the largest of its parish churches is
best known as the church of the University, and the church of St.
Frideswide, which might suggest even to a careless observer some idea of
the town's greatness before University life began, is known to most
visitors simply as Christchurch Chapel. In all outer seeming Oxford
appears a mere assemblage of indifferent streets that have grown out of
the needs of the University, and this impression is heightened by its
commercial unimportance. The town has no manufacture or trade. It is not
even, like Cambridge, a great agricultural centre. Whatever importance
it derived from its position on the Thames has been done away with by
the almost total cessation of river navigation. Its very soil is in
large measure in academical hands. As a municipality it seems to exist
only by grace or usurpation of prior University privileges. It is not
long since Oxford gained control over its own markets or its own police.
The peace of the town is still but partially in the hands of its
magistrates, and the riotous student is amenable only to university
jurisdiction. Within the memory of living men the chief magistrate of
the city on his entrance into office was bound to swear in a humiliating
ceremony not to violate the privileges of the great academical body
which reigned supreme within its walls.
Historically the very reverse of all this is really the case. So far is
the University from being older than the city that Oxford had already
seen five centuries of borough life before a student appeared within its
streets. Instead of its prosperity being derived from its connection
with the University, that connection has probably been its commercial
ruin. The gradual subjection both of markets and trade to the arbitrary
control of an ecclesiastical corporation was inevitably followed by
their extinction. The University found Oxford a busy, prosperous
borough, and reduced it to a cluster of lodging-houses. It found it
among the first of English municipalities, and it so utterly crushed its
freedom that the recovery of some of the commonest rights of
self-government has only been brought about by recent legislation.
Instead of the Mayor being a dependent on Chancellor or Vice-Chancellor,
Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor have simply usurped the far older
authority of the Mayor.
The story of the struggle which ended in this usurpation is one of the
most interesting in our municipal annals, and it is one which has left
its mark not on the town only but on the very constitution and character
of the conquering University. But to understand the struggle, we must
first know something of the town itself. At the earliest moment, then,
when its academic history can be said to open, at the arrival of the
legist Vacarius in the reign of Stephen, Oxford stood in the first rank
of English municipalities. In spite of antiquarian fancies, it is
certain that no town had arisen on its site for centuries after the
departure of the Roman legions from the isle of Britain. The little
monastery of St. Frideswide rises in the turmoil of the eighth century
only to fade out of sight again without giving us a glimpse of the
borough which gathered probably beneath its walls. The first definite
evidence for its existence lies in a brief entry of the English
Chronicle which records its seizure by the successor of AElfred. But
though the form of this entry shows the town to have been already
considerable, we hear nothing more of it till the last terrible wrestle
of England with the Dane, when its position on the borders of the
Mercian and West-Saxon realms seems for the moment to have given it a
political importance under AEthelred and Cnut strikingly analogous to
that which it acquired in the Great Rebellion. Of the life of its
burgesses in this earlier period of Oxford life we know little or
nothing. The names of its parishes, St. Aldate, St. Ebbe, St. Mildred,
and St. Edmund, show how early church after church gathered round the
earlier church of St. Martin. The minster of St. Frideswide, in becoming
the later cathedral, has brought down to our own times the memory of the
ecclesiastical origins to which the little borough owed its existence.
But the men themselves are dim to us. Their town-meeting, their
Portmannimote, still lives in shadowy fashion as the Freeman's Common
Hall; their town-mead is still Port-meadow. But it is only by later
charters or the record of Domesday that we see them going on pilgrimage
to the shrines of Winchester, or chaffering in their market-place, or
judging and law-making in their busting, their merchant guild regulating
trade, their reeve gathering his king's dues of tax or honey or
marshalling his troop of burghers for the king's wars, their boats
floating down the Thames towards London and paying the toll of a hundred
herrings in Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon by the way.
Of the conquest of Oxford by William the Norman we know nothing, though
the number of its houses marked "waste" in the Survey seems to point to
a desperate resistance. But the ruin was soon repaired. No city better
illustrates the transformation of the land in the hands of its new
masters, the sudden outburst of industrial effort, the sudden expansion
of commerce and accumulation of wealth which followed the Conquest. The
architectural glory of the town in fact dates from the settlement of the
Norman within its walls. To the west of the town rose one of the
stateliest of English castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly
less stately Abbey of Osney. In the fields to the north the last of the
Norman kings raised his palace of Beaumont. The canons of St. Frideswide
reared the church which still exists as the diocesan cathedral: the
piety of the Norman earls rebuilt almost all the parish churches of the
city and founded within their new castle walls the church of the canons
of St. George.
But Oxford does more than illustrate this outburst of industrial effort;
it does something towards explaining its cause. The most characteristic
result of the Conquest was planted in the very heart of the town in the
settlement of the Jew. Here as elsewhere the Jewry was a town within a
town, with its own language, its own religion and law, its peculiar
commerce, its peculiar dress. The policy of our foreign kings secured
each Hebrew settlement from the common taxation, the common justice, the
common obligations of Englishmen. No city bailiff could penetrate into
the square of little streets which lay behind the present Town-hall; the
Church itself was powerless against the synagogue that rose in haughty
rivalry beside the cloister of St. Frideswide. The picture which Scott
has given us in 'Ivanhoe' of Aaron of York, timid, silent, crouching
under oppression, accurately as it represents our modern notions of the
position of his race during the Middle Ages, is far from being borne out
by historical fact. In England at least the attitude of the Jew is
almost to the end an attitude of proud and even insolent defiance. His
extortion was sheltered from the common law. His bonds were kept under
the royal seal. A royal commission visited with heavy penalties any
outbreak of violence against these "chattels" of the king. The thunders
of the Church broke vainly on the yellow gaberdine of the Jew. In a
well-known story of Eadmer's the Red King actually forbids the
conversion of a Jew to the Christian faith: it was a poor exchange which
would have robbed him of a valuable property and given him only a
subject.
At Oxford the attitude of the Jewry towards the national religion showed
a marked consciousness of this royal protection. Prior Philip of St.
Frideswide complains bitterly of a certain Hebrew with the odd name of
"Deus-cum-crescat," who stood at his door as the procession of the
saint passed by, mocking at the miracles wrought at her shrine. Halting
and then walking firmly on his feet, showing his hands clenched as if
with palsy and then flinging open his fingers, the mocking Jew claimed
gifts and oblations from the crowd who flocked to St. Frideswide's on
the ground that such recoveries of limb and strength were quite as real
as any Frideswide had wrought. But though sickness and death, in the
prior's story, avenge the insult to his shrine, no earthly power,
ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have ventured to meddle with
"Deus-cum-crescat." The feud between the priory and the Jewry went on
unchecked for a century more to culminate in a daring act of fanaticism
on the Ascension-day of 1268. As the usual procession of scholars and
citizens returned from St. Frideswide's, a Jew suddenly burst from the
group of his comrades in front of the synagogue, and snatching the
crucifix from its bearer trod it under foot. But even in presence of
such an outrage as this the terror of the Crown shielded the Jewry from
any burst of popular indignation. The sentence of the king condemned the
Jews of Oxford to erect a cross of marble on the spot where the crime
was committed; but even this was remitted in part, and a less offensive
place was allotted for the cross in an open plot by Merton College.
With the Jewish settlement began the cultivation of physical science in
Oxford. The Hebrew instruction, the Hebrew books which he found among
its rabbis, were the means by which Roger Bacon penetrated to the older
world of material research. A medical school which we find established
there and in high repute during the twelfth century can hardly have been
other than Jewish: in the operation for the stone, which one of the
stories in the 'Miracles of St. Frideswide' preserves for us, we trace
the traditional surgery which is still common in the East. But it is
perhaps in a more purely material way that the Jewry at Oxford most
directly influenced our academical history. There as elsewhere the Jew
brought with him something more than the art or science which he had
gathered at Cordova or Bagdad; he brought with him the new power of
wealth. The erection of stately castles, of yet statelier abbeys, which
followed the Conquest, the rebuilding of almost every cathedral or
conventual church, marks the advent of the Jewish capitalist. No one can
study the earlier history of our great monastic houses without finding
the secret of that sudden outburst of industrial activity to which we
owe the noblest of our minsters in the loans of the Jew. The bonds of
many a great baron, the relics of many an abbey, lay pledged for
security in the "Star-chamber" of the Jew.