Chapter V: The Mediæval Student (2)

Among the students themselves, however, some form of initiation probably took place, comparable to that of the Bejaunus, or Yellow-bill, in Germany, or of the young soldier, the young Freemason, or the newcomer at an _atelier_ in Paris to-day. Horseplay at the expense of the raw youth, and much chaff and tomfoolery, would be followed in good time by a supper for which the freshman would obligingly pay. Initiation of this kind is a universal taste, and, if kept within bounds, is not a bad custom for testing the temper and grit of the new members of a community. At Oxford, then, freshmen were subject to certain customs at the hands of the senior scholars, or sophisters, on their first coming. So Wood tells us, but he cannot give details. He compares the ceremony, however, to the "salting" which obtained in his own day. Of this salting, as it was practised at Merton, he gives the following account:--

"On Feast days charcoal fires were lit in the Hall of Merton, and
between five and six in the afternoon the senior undergraduates
would bring in the Freshmen, and make them sit down on a form in
the middle of the Hall. Which done, everyone in order was to speak
some pretty apothegm or make a jest or bull or speak some eloquent
nonsense, to make the company laugh. But if any of the Freshmen
came off dull, or not cleverly, some of the forward or pragmatical
seniors would _tuck_ them, that is, set the nail of their thumb to
their chin just under the lower lip, and by the help of their other
fingers under the chin, would give him a mark which would sometimes
produce blood." On Shrove Tuesday a brass pot was set before the
fire filled with cawdle by the College Cook at the Freshmen's
expense. Then each of them had to pluck off his gown and band and
if possible make himself look like a scoundrel. 'Which done they
were conducted each after the other to the High Table, made to
stand upon a form and to deliver a speech.' Wood gives us the
speech he himself made on this occasion, a dreary piece of
facetiousness. As a 'kitten of the Muses and meer frog of Helicon
he croaked cataracts of plumbeous cerebrosity.'

"The reward for a good speech was a cup of cawdle and no salted
drink, for an indifferent one some cawdle and some salted drink,
and for a bad one, besides the tucks, nothing but College beer and
salt.

"When these ceremonies were over the senior cook administered an
oath over an old shoe to those about to be admitted into the
fraternity. The Freshman repeated the oath, kissed the shoe, put on
his gown and band and took his place among the seniors."

When the freshmen of the past year were solemnly made seniors, and probationers were admitted fellows, similar ceremonies took place. At All Souls', for instance, on 14th January, those who were to be admitted fellows were brought from their chambers in the middle of the night, sometimes in a bucket slung on a pole, and so led about the college and into the hall, whilst some of the junior fellows, disguised perhaps, would sing a song in praise of the mallard, some verses of which I give:

"The griffin, bustard, turkey and capon,
Let other hungry mortals gape on,
And on their bones with stomachs fall hard,
But let All Souls' men have the mallard.

Hough the blood of King Edward, by the blood of
King Edward,
It was a swapping, swapping mallard.

"The Romans once admired a gander
More than they did their best commander,
Because he saved, if some don't fool us,
The place that's named from the scull of Tolus.

Hough the blood of King Edward, by the blood of
King Edward,
It was a swapping, swapping mallard.

"Then let us drink and dance a galliard
In the remembrance of the mallard,
And as the mallard doth in the pool,
Let's dabble, dive and duck in bowle.[27]

Hough, etc."

In any attempt to appreciate the kind and character of the mediæval students and the life which they led, it is necessary first of all to realise that the keynote of the early student life was poverty. It was partly for the benefit of poor scholars and partly for the benefit of their founders' souls, for which these scholars should pray, that the early colleges and chantries were founded. Morals, learning and poverty were the qualifications for a fellowship on Durham's foundation. Poverty, "the stepmother of learning," it is which the University in its letters and petitions always and truly represents as the great hindrance to the student "seeking in the vineyard of the Lord the pearl of knowledge." Books these poor seekers could not afford to buy, fees they could scarce afford to pay, food itself was none too plentiful.

But the pearl for which the young student as he sat, pinched and blue, at the feet of his teacher in the schools, and the Masters of Arts,

"When, in forlorn and naked chambers cooped
And crowded, o'er the ponderous books they hung,"

alike were searching, was a pearl of great price. For learning spelt success. There was through learning a career open to the talents. The lowliest and neediest might rise, by means of a University education, to the highest dignity which the Church, and that was also the world, could offer.

For all great civilians were ecclesiastics. The Church embraced all the professions; and the professors of all arts, of medicine, statesmanship or architecture, of diplomacy and even of law, embraced the Church. And the reward of success in any of them was ecclesiastical promotion and a fat benefice. The University opened the door to the Church, with all its dazzling possibilities of preferment, and the University itself was thrown open to the poorest by the system of the monastic houses and charitable foundations.

Promising lads, too, of humble origin were often maintained at the schools by wealthy patrons. From a villein one might rise to be a clerk, from a clerk become a master of the University--a fellow, a bursar, a bishop and a chancellor, first of Oxford, then of England.

At the University, of course, the students were not treated with the same absolute equality that they are now, regardless of birth or wealth. Sons of noblemen did not study there, unless they had a strong bent in that direction. The days were not yet come when a University training was valuable as a social and moral as well as an intellectual education: when noblemen, therefore, did attend the schools, more was made of them. They wore hoods lined with rich fur, and enjoyed certain privileges with regard to the taking of degrees.

Like those idyllic islanders who lived by taking in each other's washing, the masters supported themselves on the fees paid by the students who attended their lectures, whilst the poorest students earned a livelihood by waiting on the masters, or wealthier students. Servitors, who thus combined the careers of undergraduates with those of "scouts," continued in existence till the end of the eighteenth century. They were sent on the most menial errands or employed to transcribe manuscripts, and five shillings was deemed an ample allowance for their services. Whitfield was a servitor, and the father of the Wesleys also. Such students, lads of low extraction, drawn from the tap-room or the plough, but of promising parts, would be helped by the chests which we have described, and which were founded for their benefit. When Long Vacation came, they would turn again from intellectual to manual labour. For Long Vacation meant for them, not reading-parties, but the harvest, and in the harvest they could earn wages. But there was another method of obtaining the means to attend lectures at the University which was popularised in the Middle Ages by the Mendicants, by the theory of the poverty of Christ and by the insistence of the Church on the duty of charity. This was begging on the highway. "Pain por Dieu aus escoliers" was a well-known "street cry" in mediæval Paris, and in England during vacations the wandering scholar,

"Often, starting from some covert place,
Saluted the chance comer on the road,
Crying, 'An obolus, a penny give
To a poor scholar.'"

And as they made their way along the high-road a party of such begging scholars would come perhaps to a rich man's house, and ask for aid by prayer and song. Sometimes they would be put to the test as to their scholarship by being commanded to make a couplet of Latin verses on some topic. They would scratch their heads, look wistfully at one another and produce a passable verse or two. Then they would receive their reward and pass on. So popular, indeed, did this system become, that begging students had to be restricted. Only those licensed by the Chancellor and certified as deserving cases, like the scholars of Aristotle's Hall in 1461, were presently permitted to beg.

Where poverty was so prevalent, the standard of comfort was not likely to be high. The enormous advance in the general level of material comfort, and even luxury, which has taken place in this country during the last hundred years, makes it difficult to describe the comfortless lives of these early students without giving an exaggerated idea of the sacrifices they were making and the hardships they were enduring for the sake of setting their feet on the first rung of this great ladder of learning. But it should be remembered that, as far as the ordinary appliances of decency and comfort, as we understand them, are concerned, the labourer's cottage in these days is better supplied than was a palace in those when princes

"At matins froze and couched at curfew time,"

and when

"Lovers of truth, by penury constrained
Bucer, Erasmus or Melancthon, read
Before the doors or windows of their cells
By moonshine, through mere lack of taper light."

If we realise that this was the case, we shall not be surprised to find that the rooms in which these students and masters lived, so far from being spacious and luxurious, were small, dingy, overcrowded and excessively uncomfortable. It was rare for a student to have a room to himself--"alone, withouten any compagnie." The usual arrangement in halls and colleges would seem to have been that two or more scholars shared a room, and slept in that part of it which was not occupied by the "studies" of the inhabitants. For each scholar would have a "study" of his own adjoining the windows, where he might strain to catch the last ray of daylight. A "study" was a movable piece of furniture, a sort of combination of book-shelf and desk, which probably survives in the Winchester "toys." The students shared a room, and they frequently shared a bed too. The founder of Magdalen provided that in his college Demies under the age of fifteen should sleep two in a bed. And in addition to their beds and lodgings, the poorest students were obliged to share an academical gown also. Friends who had all things in common, might sleep at the same time, but could only attend lectures one by one, for lack of more than one gown amongst them. To these straits, it is said, S. Richard was reduced. But such deprivation accentuates rather than spoils the happiness of student life, as anyone who is acquainted with the Quartier Latin will agree. When the heart is young and generous, when the spirit is free and the blood is hot, what matters hardship when there are comrades bright and brave to share it; what matters poverty when the riches of art and love and learning are being outspread before your eyes; what matters the misery of circumstance, when daily the young traveller can wander forth, silent, amazed, into "the realms of gold?"

During the many centuries that the mansions of the wealthy and the palaces of princes were totally unprovided with the most indispensable appliances of domestic decency, it is not to be expected that the rooms of students should prove to be plentifully or luxuriously furnished. We know the stock-in-trade of Chaucer's poor student:

"His Almageste and bokes grete and smale
His astrelabie, longinge for his art,
His augrim-stones layen faire apart
On shelves couched at his beddes heed;
His presse y-covered with a falding reed.
And al above ther lay a gay sautrye
On which he made a nightes melodye
So swetely, that all the chambre rong;
And Angelus ad virginem he song."

We can supplement Chaucer's inventory of a poor student's furniture by an examination of old indentures. Therein we find specified among the goods of such an one just such a fithele or "gay sautrye" as Chaucer noted, an old cithara or a broken lute, a desk, a stool, a chair, a mattress, a coffer, a tripod table, a mortar and pestle, a sword and an old gown. Another student might boast the possession of a hatchet, a table "quinque pedum cum uno legge," some old wooden dishes, a pitcher and a bowl, an iron twister, a brass pot with a broken leg, a pair of knives, and, most prized of all, a bow and twenty arrows. Few could boast of so many "bokes at his beddes heed" as Chaucer's clerk of Oxenford. Manuscripts were of immense value in those days, and we need hardly be surprised if that worthy philosopher, seeing that he had invested his money in twenty volumes clad in black and red, had but little gold remaining in his coffer. The books that we find mentioned in such indentures, are those which formed the common stock of mediæval learning, volumes of homilies, the works of Boethius, Ovid's _De remedio amoris_ and a book of geometry. These and other books, as articles of the highest intrinsic value, were always mentioned in detail in the last will and testament of a dying scholar. But, as the modern artist, on his death-bed in the Quartier Latin, summoned his dearest friend to his side and exclaimed, "My friend, I leave you my wife and my pipe. Take care of my pipe"; so the mediæval student would often feel that though his books might be his most valuable legacy in some eyes, his bow and arrows, his cap and gown or his mantle, "blodii coloris," these were the truest pledges of affection that he could bequeath to the comrade of his heart. Only the wealthier students, or the higher officials of the University, rejoiced in such luxuries as a change of clothes, or could reckon among their furniture several forms or chairs, a pair of snuffers and bellows. For of what use to the ordinary student were candlesticks and snuffers, when candles cost the prohibitive price of twopence a pound; or what should he do with bellows and tongs when a stove or fire was out of the question, save in the case of a Principal? To run about in order not to go to bed with cold feet was the plan of the mediæval student, unless he anticipated the advice of Mr Jorrocks and thought of ginger.

From his slumbers on a flock bed, in such quarters as I have described, the mediæval student roused him with the dawn. For lectures began with the hour of prime, soon after daybreak. He was soon dressed, for men seldom changed their clothes in those days, and in the centuries when the manuals of gallantry recommended the nobleman to wash his hands once a day and his face almost as often, when a charming queen like Margaret of Navarre, could remark without shame that she had not washed her hands for eight days, it is not to be expected that the ablutions of a mere student should be frequent or extensive. Washing is a modern habit, and not widespread. To attend a "chapel" or a "roll-call" is the first duty of the modern undergraduate, but a daily attendance at mass was not required till the college system had taken shape; the statutes of New College, in fact, are the first to enforce it. All therefore that the yawning student had to do, before making his way to the lecture-room in the hall of his inn or college, or in the long low buildings of Schools Street, was to break his fast, if he could afford to do so, with a piece of bread and a pot o' the smallest ale from the "Buttery." As a lecture lasted, not the one hour of a "Stunde," but for two or three hours, some such support would be highly desirable, but not necessary. Our forefathers were one-meal men, like the Germans of to-day. Civilisation is an advance from breakfast to dinner, from one meal a day to several. Late dinner is the goal towards which all humanity presses. For dinner-time, as De Quincey observed, has little connection with the idea of dinner. It has travelled through every hour, like the hand of a clock, from nine or ten in the morning till ten at night. But at Oxford it travelled slowly. Hearne growls at the colleges which, in 1723, altered their dinner hour from eleven to twelve, "from people's lying in bed longer than they used to do." Happily for him he did not live to see the beginning of the nineteenth century, when those colleges which had dined at three advanced to four, and those that had dined at four to five; or the close of it, when the hour of seven became the accepted time.

The mediæval student took his one meal at ten or eleven in the morning. Soup thickened with oatmeal, baked meat and bread was his diet, varied by unwholesome salt fish in Lent. These viands were served in hall on wooden trenches and washed down by a tankard of college beer. During the meal a chapter of the Bible or of some improving work in Latin was read aloud, and at its conclusion the founder's prayer and a Latin grace would be said. Conversation, it was usually ordained, might only be carried on in Latin; the modern student, on the contrary, is "sconced" (fined a tankard of beer) if he speaks three words of "shop" in hall. After dinner perhaps some disputations or exercises, some repetition and discussion of the morning's lecture would be held in hall, or the students would take the air, walking out two and two, as the founders directed, if they were good; going off singly, or in parties to poach or hawk or spoil for a row, if they were not. Lectures or disputations were resumed about noon.

Seated on benches, or more usually and properly, according to the command of Urban V., sitting on the rush-strewn floors of the school-room, the young seekers after knowledge listened to the words of wisdom that flowed from the regent master, who sat above them at a raised desk, dressed in full academical costume. Literally, they sat at the feet of their Gamaliels.

In the schools they were enjoined to "sit as quiet as a girl," but they were far from observing this injunction. Old and young were only too ready to quarrel or to play during lectures, to shout and interrupt whilst the master was reading the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and bang the benches with their books to express their approval or disapproval of his comments thereon.

Supper came at five, and after that perhaps a visit to the playing fields of Beaumont or a tavern, where wine would be mingled with song, and across the oaken tables would thunder those rousing choruses that students ever love:

"Mihi est propositum in taberna mori
Vinum sit appositum morientis ori,
Ut dicant, quum venerint, angelorum chori,
'Deus sit propitius huic potatori.'"

When curfew rang at length, all the students would assemble in hall and have a "drinking" or "collation." Then, before going to bed, they would sing the Antiphon of the Virgin (Salve Regina), and so the day was finished. A dull, monotonous day it seems to us, varied only by sermons--and there was no lack of them--at S. Mary's or S. Peter's in the East, with the chance excitement of hearing a friar recant the unorthodox views he had expressed the previous Sunday; but it was a day that was bright and social compared with the ordinary conditions of the time.

In this daily round, so far as one has been able to reconstruct it, the absence of any provision for physical recreation is a noticeable thing to us, who have exchanged the mediæval enthusiasm for learning for an enthusiasm for athletics. Both are excellent things in their way, but as the governor of an American State remarked when defending the practice of smoking over wine, both together are better than either separate. And nowadays in some cases the combination is happily attained. But in an age which inherited the monkish tradition of the vileness of the body and the need of mortifying it, games of all sorts were regarded as a weakness of the flesh. So far were founders from making any provision for recreation, that they usually went out of their way to prohibit it. Games with bat and ball, and tennis, that is, or fives, were strictly forbidden as indecent, though in some cases students were permitted to play with a soft ball in the college courts. But "deambulation in the College Grove" was the monastic ideal. Nor did the founders frown only on exercise; amusements of the most harmless sort were also under their ban. On the long, cold, dark winter evenings the students were naturally tempted to linger in the hall after supper, to gather round the fire, if there was one, in the middle of the room, beneath the louvre, to tell tales there and sing carols, to read poems, chronicles of the realm or wonders of the world. But it was only on the eve of a festival that William of Wykeham would allow this relaxation in his foundation. The members of Trinity College were allowed to play cards in hall on holidays only, "but on no account for money." Mummers, the chief source of amusement among the mediævals, were only permitted to enter New College once a year, on Twelfth Night. It was not till the dawn of the Renaissance that plays began to be acted in the colleges and halls, and to bring the academic intellect into touch with the views and literature of the people.

Not only was it forbidden to play marbles on the college steps, but even the hard exercise of chess was prohibited as a "noxious, inordinate and unhonest game." And the keeping of dogs and hawks was anathema.

By a survival of this mediæval view, the undergraduate is still solemnly warned by the statute book against playing any game which may cause injury to others; he is urged to refrain from hunting wild beasts with ferrets, nets or hounds, from hawking, "necnon ab omni apparatu et gestatione bombardarum et arcubalistarum." In the same way he is forbidden still to carry arms of any sort by day or night, unless it be bows and arrows for purposes of honest amusement. But to these injunctions, I fear, as to the accompanying threat of punishment at the discretion of the Vice-Chancellor, he does not pay over much attention. He does not consider them very seriously when he plays football or hunts with the "Bicester," takes a day's shooting or runs with the Christ Church beagles.

The restrictions which I have quoted above were mostly introduced by the founders of colleges. So far as the University was concerned, the private life of the student was hardly interfered with at all.

The offence of night-walking, indeed, was repressed by the proctor who patrolled the streets with a pole-axe and bulldogs (armed attendants), but the student might frequent the taverns and drink as he pleased. His liberty was almost completely unrestricted, except as to the wearing of academic dress, the attendance of lectures and the observance of the curfew bell. Offences against morality and order were treated as a rule, when they were dealt with at all, with amazing leniency. Murder was regarded as a very venial crime; drunkenness and loose-living as hardly matters for University police. A student who committed murder was usually banished, and banishment after all meant to him little more than changing his seat of learning. The punishment, though it might cause inconvenience, did not amount to more than being compelled to go to Cambridge. Fines, excommunication and imprisonment were the other punishments inflicted for offences; corporal punishment was but seldom imposed by the University. But with the growth of the college system the bonds of discipline were tightened. Not only did the statutes provide in the greatest detail for the punishment of undergraduate offences, stating the amount of the fine to be exacted for throwing a missile at a master and missing, and the larger amount for aiming true, but also the endowment of the scholar made it easy to collect the fine. The wardens and fellows, too, were in a stronger position than the principal of a hall, who owed his place to his popularity with the students, who, if he ceased to please them, might leave his hall and remove to another house where the principal was more lenient and could be relied upon to wink at their follies and their vices, even if he did not share them. Thus the founders of the early colleges were enabled to enforce upon the recipients of their bounty something of the rigour and decency of monastic discipline. As the system grew the authority entrusted to the heads of colleges was increased, and the position of the undergraduate was reduced to that of the earlier grammar-school boy. The statutes of B.N.C. (1509) rendered the undergraduate liable to be birched at the discretion of the college lecturer. He might now be flogged if he had not prepared his lessons; if he played, laughed or talked in lecture; if he made odious comparisons, or spoke English; if he were unpunctual, disobedient or did not attend chapel. Wolsey allowed the students of Cardinal College to be flogged up to the age of twenty.

Impositions by a dean were apparently a sixteenth-century invention. Then we find offending fellows who had played inordinately at hazard or cards, or earned a reputation for being notorious fighters or great frequenters of taverns, being ordered to read in their college libraries for a fortnight from 6 to 7 A.M. And the loss of a month's commons occasionally rewarded the insolence of undergraduates who did not duly cap and give way to their seniors, or who, yielding to that desire to adorn their persons which the mediæval student shared with his gaudy-waistcoated successors, wore "long undecent[28] hair," and cloth of no clerical hue, slashed doublets and boots and spurs beneath their gowns.

As to the academic career of the mediæval student; the course of his studies and "disputations" in the schools; the steps by which the "general sophister" became a "determining bachelor" and the bachelor, if he wished to teach, took a master's degree, first obtaining the Chancellor's licence to lecture, and then, on the occasion of his "inception," when he "commenced master" and first undertook his duty of teaching in the schools, being received into the fraternity of teaching masters by the presiding master of his faculty--of these ceremonies and their significance and the traces of them which survive in modern academic life, as of the high feastings and banquetings with which, as in the trade guilds, the new apprentices and masters entertained their faculties, I have no space here to treat.

The inceptor besides undertaking not to lecture at Stamford, recognise any University but Oxford and Cambridge, or maintain Lollard opinions, was also required to swear to wear a habit suitable to his degree. As an undergraduate he had had no academical dress, except that, as every member of the University was supposed to be a clerk, he was expected to wear the tonsure and clerical habit. The characteristic of this was that the outer garment must be of a certain length and closed in front. It was the cut and not the colour of the "cloth" which was at first considered important. But later regulations restricted the colour to black, and insisted that this garment must reach to the knees. In the colleges, however, it was only parti-coloured garments that were regarded as secular, and the "liveries" mentioned by the founders were usually clothes of the clerical cut but of uniform colour. The fellows of Queen's, for instance, were required to wear blood-red. The colour of the liveries was not usually prescribed by statute, but differences of colour and ornament still survive at Cambridge as badges of different colleges.

The masters at first wore the cappa, which was the ordinary out-door full-dress of the secular clergy. And this "cope," with a border and hood of minever, came to be the official academical costume. The shape of the masters' cappa soon became stereotyped and distinctive; then a cappa with sleeves was adopted as the uniform of bachelors. As to the hood, it was the material of which it was made--minever--which distinguished the master, not the hood itself; for a hood was part of the ordinary clerical attire. Bachelors of all faculties wore hoods of lamb's-wool or rabbit's-fur, but undergraduates were deprived of the right of wearing a hood in 1489--nisi liripipium consuetum ... et non contextum--the little black stuff hood, worn by sophisters in the schools till within living memory.

The cappa went out of use amongst the Oxford M.A.'s during the sixteenth century. The regents granted themselves wholesale dispensations from its use. Stripped of this formal, outer robe, the toga was revealed, the unofficial cassock or under-garment, which now gradually usurped the place of the cappa and became the distinctively academical dress of the Masters of Arts. But it was not at first the dull prosaic robe that we know. The mediæval master was clad in bright colours, red or green or blue, and rejoiced in them until the rising flood of prejudice in favour of all that is dull and sombre and austere washed away these together with almost all other touches of colour from the landscape of our grey island.

The distinctive badge of mastership handed to the inceptor by the father of his faculty, was the biretta, a square cap with a tuft on the top, from which is descended our cap with its tassel. Doctors of the superior faculties differentiated themselves by wearing a biretta (square cap) or pilea (round) as well as cappas, of bright hues, red, purple or violet. Gascoigne, indeed, in his theological dictionary, declares that this head-dress was bestowed by God himself on the Doctors of the Mosaic Law. Whatever its origin, the round velvet cap with coloured silk ribbon, came to be, and still is, the peculiar property of the Doctors of Law and Medicine.

The Oxford gowns of the present day have little resemblance to their mediæval prototypes. For the ordinary undergraduate or "commoner" to-day, academical dress, which must be worn at lectures, in chapel, in the streets at night, and on all official occasions, consists of his cap, a tattered "mortar-board," and a gown which seems a very poor relation of the original clerical garb. The sleeves have gone, and the length; only two bands survive, and a little gathering on the shoulders, and this apology for a gown is worn as often as not round the throat as a scarf, or carried under the arm.

Some years ago it was a point of honour with every undergraduate to wear a cap which was as battered and disreputable as possible. Every freshman seized the first opportunity to break the corners of his "mortar-board" and to cut and unravel the tassel. Yet once the tufted biretta, when it was the badge of mastership, was much coveted by undergraduates. First, they obtained the right of wearing a square cap without a tassel, like those still worn by the choristers of Oxford colleges, and then they were granted the use of a tassel. The tuft in the case of the gentlemen commoners took the form of a golden tassel. Snobs who cultivated the society of these gilded youths for the sake of their titles or their cash, or tutors,

"Rough to common men,
But honeying at the whisper of a Lord,"

gained from this fact the nick-name of tuft-hunters.

The commoner, it should be explained, is one who pays for his commons, a student not on the foundation. The colleges were, in most cases, intended originally only for the fellows and scholars on the foundation. The admission of other students as commoners or boarders was a subsequent development, and various ranks of students came to be recognised--noblemen, gentlemen commoners, commoners, fellow-commoners, battelers, or servitors. These grades are now practically obsolete, the only distinction drawn among the undergraduates being between the scholars or students on the foundation and commoners, the ordinary undergraduates, who do not enjoy any scholarship or exhibition.

The scholar, who must wear a larger gown with wide sleeves, is known by various names at various colleges. At Merton he is a post-master, at Magdalen a demy, so-called because he was entitled to half the commons of a fellow.

The history of the commoner, the growth of an accretion that now forms the greater part of a college, may be illustrated by the records of the latter foundation.

The statutes of New College had not made any provision for the admission of _commensales_, but William of Waynflete, in drawing up the statutes of Magdalen, was the first definitely to recognise the system that had grown up by which men who were not on the foundation lived as members of the college. Waynflete limited the number of non-foundationers to twenty. They were to live at the charges of their own kindred; they were to be vouched for by "creancers"; and the privilege of admission was to be reserved for the sons of noble and powerful friends of the college.

But within a hundred years the number of the commoners or battelers increased far beyond that allowed by the statutes. The position of these commoners was anomalous and led to "disorder and confusion," as certain fellows did most bitterly complain to the Visitor. No provision, it appears, was made either for the instruction or the discipline of these supernumeraries. They were, in fact, regarded as the private pupils of the President or of one of the fellows. In attendance upon the wealthier of them or upon other members of the college came numerous "poore scholars," acting as their servants and profiting in their turn from such free teaching as the Grammar School and the college lecturers might afford.

The system, however, was already justified to some extent by the fact that among the pupils of the President were numbered Bodley, Camden, Lyly and Florio. The Visitor, therefore, contented himself with enforcing the observation of the limits imposed by the statutes. The poor scholars were in future not to be more than thirteen in number, and were to be attached to the thirteen senior fellows. Before long, however, the matriculations of non-foundationers began to increase very rapidly. A new block of buildings even was erected near the Cherwell for their accommodation by 1636. This is that picturesque group of gables which nestles under the great tower and forms so distinct a feature of the view from Magdalen Bridge. The number of "poore scholars" had also increased--servitors whose office forestalled that of the college "scout." They bridged the days when the junior members of a foundation "did" for themselves and the modern days of an

organised college service. It was decided, and this is where the scout has the advantage of his forerunners, that they should be required to attend the Grammar School, and afterwards to perform all disputations and exercises required of members of the foundation. All commoners, also, "the sonnes of Noblemen and such as are of great quality only excepted" were to be "tyed to the same rules."

Little more than a hundred years later Edward Gibbon matriculated at Magdalen (1752) as a "gentleman commoner," and as a youth of fifteen commenced those fourteen months which he has told us were the most idle and unprofitable of his whole life. There are prigs of all ages. Gibbon must have been intolerable in a common room. One can forgive the "Monks of Magdalen" for not discussing the Early Fathers with him after dinner, but one has no inclination on the other hand to revere the men who had already (1733), in their enthusiasm for the Italian style, begun the "New Buildings," and were still threatening to pull down the cloisters and to complete a large quadrangle in the same style, of which the New Buildings were to form one end. The damage done by the succeeding generation was directed chiefly against the chapel and the hall, where under the guidance of the outrageous James Wyatt, plaster ceilings were substituted for the old woodwork. The generosity of a late fellow has enabled Mr Bodley, with the aid of Professor Case, to repair this error by an extraordinarily interesting and successful restoration (1903). Magdalen Hall is now worthy of its pictures, its "linen-fold" panelling and splendid screen. Bitter as is the account which Gibbon has left us, it cannot be denied that there was much reason in his quarrel with the Oxford of his day. I say Oxford, for the state of Magdalen was better rather than worse than that of the University at large. It should, however, in fairness be pointed out that as a gentleman commoner in those days he was one of a class which was very small and far from anxious to avail itself of the intellectual advantages of a University training. The commoners at Magdalen were now very few in number. The founder's limitation was now so interpreted as to restrict them to the particular class of gentlemen commoners, sons of wealthy men, at liberty to study, but expected to prefer, and as a matter of fact usually preferring, to enjoy themselves.

But the efforts of the more liberal-minded fellows were at length crowned with success. By the first University Commission the college was allowed to admit as many non-foundationers as it could provide with rooms. The last gentleman commoner had ceased to figure in the _Calendar_ by 1860. The system of licensed lodgings introduced by the University soon caused the numbers of the ordinary commoners to increase, so that in 1875 one-third of the resident undergraduates were living in lodgings outside the college. It was clearly time for the college to provide accommodation for as many of these as possible within its own walls. The change which took place in Magdalen during the last century, a change "from a small society, made up almost wholly of foundation-members and to a great extent of graduates, to a society of considerable numbers, made up of the same elements, in about the same proportion as most of the other Colleges," is recorded therefore in the architecture of Oxford. For it was to lodge the commoners that the buildings which are known as S. Swithun's (so-called from the statue in a niche on the west side of the tower which is placed at the entrance of these buildings, and which reminds one that S. Swithun was buried in Winchester Cathedral close to the beautiful shrine of William of Waynflete) were designed by Messrs Bodley & Garner and completed in 1884. They face the High Street, and you will pass them on your left as you come down to the new entrance gateway, which is in the line of the outer wall, parallel to the High. The old gateway, which was designed by Inigo Jones, stood almost at right angles to the site of the present gateway and lodge, looking west. It was removed in 1844, and a new one designed by A. W. Pugin erected in its stead. The present gateway (1885) follows the lines of the old design of Pugin, and the niches are filled with statues of S. John the Baptist, S. Mary Magdalen and of the founder, William of Waynflete. S. John the Baptist was the patron Saint of the old hospital, and after S. John the quadrangle into which you now enter is called. Opposite to you are the President's lodgings, built by Messrs Bodley & Garner in 1887 on the site of the old President's lodgings. With the exquisite architecture of the chapel and cloisters on the right to guide them, these famous architects have not failed to build here something that harmonises in style and treatment with the rest. One might wish that S. Swithun's were a little quieter. There is a slight yielding to the clamorous desire for fussy ornamentation which is so typical of this noisy age. But the President's lodgings are perfect in their kind. As you stand, then, in S. John's Quadrangle you have, in the chapel and founder's tower, and the cloisters on your right, and in the picturesque old fragment of the Grammar School, known as the Grammar Hall, facing you on your left, an epitome, as it were, of the old college foundations of Oxford; and in those buildings of S. Swithun and the gateway, which faces in a new direction, an epitome of the new Oxford that has been grafted on the old. On the extreme right you see a curious open-air pulpit of stone, from which the University sermon used to be preached on S. John the Baptist's Day. On that occasion the pulpit, as well as the surrounding buildings, was strewn with rushes and boughs in token of S. John's preaching in the wilderness.

In the Middle Ages the chief executive officers of the University were the Proctors, who are first mentioned in 1248. The origin of their office is obscure. They were responsible for the collection and expenditure of the common funds of the University, and as a record of this function they still retain in their robes a purse, a rudimentary organ, as it were, atrophied by disuse, but traceable in a triangular bunch of stuff at the back of the shoulder. Apart from this duty and that of regulating the system of lectures and disputations, their chief business was to keep order. One can imagine that a Proctor's life was not a happy one. He had to endeavour not only to keep the peace between the students and the townsmen, but also between the numerous factions among the scholars themselves. The Friars and the secular clergy, the Artists and the Jurists, the Nominalists and the Realists, and, above all, the Northerners and Southerners were always ready to quarrel, and quarrels quickly led to blows, and blows to a general riot. For the rivalry of the nations was a peculiar feature of mediæval Universities. At Bologna and Paris the Masters of Arts divided themselves into "Four Nations," with elective officers at their head. At Oxford the main division was between Northerners and Southerners, between students, that is, who came from the north or the south of the Trent. Welshmen and Irishmen were included among the Southerners. And over the northern and southern Masters of Arts presided northern and southern Proctors respectively, chosen by a process of indirect election, like the rectors of Bologna and Paris. Contests and continual riots arising out of the rivalry of these factions took the place of modern football matches or struggles on the river.

In 1273, for instance, we read of an encounter between the Northerners and the Irish, which resulted in the death of several Irishmen. So alarming, apparently, was this outbreak that many of the leading members of the University departed in fear, and only returned at the stern command of the King. The bishops, too, issued a notice, in which they earnestly exhorted the clerks in their dioceses to "repair to the schools, not armed for the fight, but rather prepared for study." But the episcopal exhortation had about as much effect as a meeting of the Peace League in Exeter Hall would have now. Quarrel after quarrel broke out between the rival nations. They plundered each others' goods and broke each others' heads with a zest worthy of an Irish wake.

In spite of their reputation for riotousness, however, the Irish students were specially exempted by royal writ from the operation of the statute passed by Parliament in 1413, which ordered that all Irishmen and Irish clerks, beggars called Chamberdekens, should quit the realm. Graduates in the schools had been exempted in the statute. This exemption does not appear to have conduced to the state of law and order painfully toiled after by the mere Saxon. For a few years later, in the first Parliament of Henry VI., the Commons sent up a petition complaining of the numerous outrages committed near Oxford by "Wylde Irishmen." These turbulent persons, it was alleged, living under the jurisdiction of the Chancellor, set the King's officers at defiance, and used such threatening language, that the bailiffs of the town did not dare to stir out of their houses for fear of death. The Commons therefore prayed that all Irishmen, except graduates in the schools, beneficed clergy, professed monks, landowners, merchants and members of civic corporations, should be compelled to quit the realm. It was also demanded that graduates of Irish extraction should be required to find security for their good behaviour, and that they should not be allowed to act as principals of halls. This petition received the royal assent. But it was stipulated that Irish clerks might freely resort to Oxford and Cambridge, if they could show that they were subjects of the English king.

It was in vain that students were compelled to swear that they would not carry arms; in vain were seditious gatherings and leagues for the espousal of private quarrels forbidden.

In vain, after one great outbreak in 1252, were formal articles of peace drawn up; in vain were the combatants bound over to keep the peace, and to give secret information to the Chancellor if they heard of others who were preparing to break it. In vain was the celebration of the national festivals forbidden, and the masters and scholars prohibited, under pain of the greater excommunication, from "going about dancing in the churches or open places, wearing masks or wreathed and garlanded with flowers" (1250). In vain was it decreed that the two nations should become one and cease, officially, to have a separate existence (1274). Though the Faculty of Arts might vote from this time forward as a single body, yet one Proctor was always a Borealis and the other an Australis; and when, in 1320, it was decreed that one of the three guardians of the Rothbury Chest should always be a Southerner and another a Northerner, the University admitted the existence of the two rival nations within its borders once more. Only a few years after this, in fact (1334), its very existence was threatened by the violence of the factions. The Northerners gave battle to the Southerners, and so many rioters were arrested that the Castle was filled to overflowing. Many of the more studious clerks resolved to quit this riotous University for ever, and betook themselves to Stamford, where there were already some flourishing schools.

They were compelled at last to disperse or to return by the King, who refused to listen to their plea, that their right to study in peace at Stamford was as good as that of any other person whatever who chose to live there. So serious was this secession, and so much was the rivalry of Stamford feared, that all candidates for a degree were henceforth (till 1827) required to swear that they would not give or attend lectures there "as in a University."

It was on the occasion of this migration that the members of Brasenose Hall, which adjoined S. Mary's Entry, Salesbury Hall, Little University Hall and Jussel's Tenement, carried with them, as a symbol of their continuity, the famous Brazen Nose Knocker to Stamford. There the little society settled; an archway of the hall they occupied there still exists, and now belongs to Brasenose College. The knocker itself was brought back in 1890 to a place

of honour in the college hall. For in the meantime the old hall, after a career of over two hundred years, had been converted into a college, founded by William Smyth, Bishop of Lincoln, and Master Sotton, very much as a protest against the new learning which was then being encouraged at Corpus Christi. The continuity of the society is indicated by the fact that the first Principal of the college was the last Principal of the old "Aula Regia de Brasinnose." The foundation stone was laid in 1509, as the inscription in the old quadrangle, to which a story was added in the time of James I., records.

They were a turbulent crew, these Oxonian forbears of ours. Dearly they loved a fight, and they rose in rebellion against the masters when they were bringing in new statutes for the preservation of the peace. Several were slain on both sides. Nor was it easy to punish the unruly students. Sometimes, after a brawl in which they were clearly in the wrong, the delinquents would flee to Shotover, and there maintain themselves in the forest. At other times, when they had gone too far, and the thunder of the Chancellor's sentence of excommunication had fallen on their heads as a punishment for attempting to sack the Abbey of Abingdon, or defiling the Church of S. Mary with bloodshed, for sleeping in a tavern, or fighting with the King's foresters, they would simply leave the University altogether and get away scathless. For the Chancellor's jurisdiction did not extend beyond Oxford.

A joust or tourney was a certain cause of riot. The passions are easily roused after any athletic contest, whether it be a football match or a bull-fight. Remembering this, we shall best be able to understand why the King found it necessary to forbid any joust or tournament to be held in the vicinity of Oxford or Cambridge (1305).

"Yea, such was the clashing of swords," says Fuller, "the rattling
of arms, the sounding of trumpets, the neighing of horses, the
shouting of men all day time with the roaring of riotous revellers
all the night, that the scholars' studies were disturbed, safety
endangered, lodging straitened, charges enlarged. In a word, so
many war-horses were brought thither that Pegasus was himself
likely to be shut out; for where Mars keeps his terms, there the
Muses may even make their vacation."

Any excuse, indeed, was good enough to set the whole town in an uproar. A bailiff would hustle a student; a tradesman would "forestall" and retail provisions at a higher price than the regulations allowed; a rowdy student would compel a common bedesman to pray for the souls of certain unpopular living townsmen on the score that they would soon be dead. The bailiffs would arrest a clerk and refuse to give him up at the request of the Chancellor; the Chancellor, when appealed to by the townsmen to punish some offending students, would unsoothingly retort: "Chastise your laymen and we will chastise our clerks." The records of town and University are full of the riots which arose from such ebullitions of the ever-present ill-feeling; of the appeals made by either party; and of the awards given by the King, who might be some English Justinian, like Edward I., or might not.

The answer of the townsmen (1298) to the Chancellor's retort quoted above was distinctly vigorous. They seized and imprisoned all scholars on whom they could lay hands, invaded their inns, made havoc of their goods and trampled their books under foot. In the face of such provocation the Proctors sent their bedels about the town, forbidding the students to leave their inns. But all commands and exhortations were in vain. By nine o'clock next morning, bands of scholars were parading the streets in martial array. If the Proctors failed to restrain them, the mayor was equally powerless to restrain his townsmen. The great bell of S. Martin's rang out an alarm; ox-horns were sounded in the streets; messengers were sent into the country to collect rustic allies. The clerks, who numbered three thousand in all, began their attack simultaneously in various quarters. They broke open warehouses in the Spicery, the Cutlery and elsewhere. Armed with bows and arrows, swords and bucklers, slings and stones, they fell upon their opponents. Three they slew, and wounded fifty or more. One band, led by Fulk de Neyrmit, Rector of Piglesthorne, and his brother, took up a position in High Street between the Churches of S. Mary and All Saints, and attacked the house of a certain Edward Hales. This Hales was a long-standing enemy of the clerks. There were no half measures with him. He seized his crossbow, and from an upper chamber sent an unerring shaft into the eye of the pugnacious rector. The death of their valiant leader caused the clerks to lose heart. They fled, closely pursued by the townsmen and country-folk. Some were struck down in the streets, and others who had taken refuge in the churches were dragged out and driven mercilessly to prison, lashed with thongs and goaded with iron spikes.