Oxford. Lang Andrew
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