A history of the University of Oxford

by George C. Brodrick

FOOTNOTES:

[6] In the meantime, in deference to complaints made by the Chancellor, the King, Edward II., in the year 1315, regulated the price of provisions in the Oxford market, as well as in the markets of other towns.

CHAPTER V.
THE MONKS AND FRIARS AT OXFORD.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.