Rowlandson's Oxford

by A. Hamilton Gibbs

The eighteenth-century lad became an Undergraduate on condition of subscribing to a lie, and was sent down as a not undistinguished man after seven years by pronouncing another in the ear of the Vice-Chancellor.

“As university degrees are supposed to be badges of learning and merit, there ought to be some qualifications requisite to wear them, besides perjury, and treason, and paying a multitude of fees, which seem to be the three principal things insisted upon in our universities,” said Terrae Filius—and the persistent joker spoke never a truer word. While discussing the same question with some bitterness he asserted that a schoolboy has done more learned things for his breaking-up task than were required of an Oxford man after seven years’ residence. He more than bore out Knox’s words as to the custom of making one’s examiner drunk and so avoiding the irksome necessity of being asked awkward questions by him. “It is also well known,” he wrote, “to be the custom for the candidates either to present their examiners with a piece of gold, or to give them an handsome entertainment, and make them drunk; which they commonly do the night before examination, and sometimes keep them till morning, and so adjourn, cheek by joul, from their drinking-room to the school where they are to be examined. Quaere, whether it would not be very ungrateful of the examiner to refuse any candidate a testimonium who has treated him so splendidly over night? and whether he is not, in this case, prevail’d upon by bribes?”

So that in addition to making him drunk and incapable, but not disorderly—necessarily—the astute candidate, realising that the degree’s the thing, paid him a metaphorical thirty pieces of silver for his betrayal. Moreover, the collectors, that is to say the Dons who were in control of the determining, decided the days upon which the candidates were to present themselves. On certain days called “gracious” days, the examiners were only required to stay in the schools for half the usual time. The consequence was, explained Terrae, “The collectors having it in their power to dispose of all the schools and days in what manner they please, are very considerable persons, and great application is made to them for gracious days and good schools; but especially to avoid being posted or dogg’d, which commonly happens to be their lot who have no money in their pockets.”

The statues of course forbade collectors to receive presents, but a wink is as good as a nod, and it was customary for every determiner upon presenting himself to give the collector a “broad or half a broad.” In return for this douceur “Mr Collector,” said Amhurst, “entertains his benefactors with a good supper and as much wine as they can drink, besides gracious days and commodious schools. I have heard that some collectors have made four score or an hundred guineas of this place.”

The conclusion which is inevitably arrived at is that the examinations for, and in fact the whole question of obtaining a degree, were a farce and a sham, and that the authorities cared little who got one so long as they received their fees and were left in peace to smoke and tope in the common rooms.

The attendance at college exercises seems to have been equally dilatory. Gibbon said that the Magdalen College exercises were futile and a waste of time. He was tacitly allowed to stay away from them. The vindicator of Magdalen, thinking to nail Gibbon down, went to the trouble of enumerating term by term the exercises which the Undergraduates were supposed to perform. As interesting reading it is worthy of quotation, but as a coup de grace to Gibbon it is absurd. If all Magdalen men were bound to attend, why was Gibbon allowed to absent himself, or, if not allowed, why was he not hauled over the coals?—and it is ridiculous to suppose that Gibbon’s example was not followed by scores of fellow collegians. The present-day “colleckers,” held terminally, are, more or less, in the nature of a joke, but in those days, in spite of Hurdis’s burning loyalty to Magdalen, the following exercises which correspond to them are fearsome-sounding enough, but were more often than not unattended. “At the end of every term, from his admission till he takes his first degree, every individual Undergraduate of this college must appear at a public examination before the President, Vice-President, Deans, and whatever Fellows may please to attend; and cannot obtain leave to return to his friends in any vacation, till he has properly acquitted himself according to the following scheme.

“In his first year he must make himself a proficient—

“In the first term, in Sallust and the Characters of Theophrastus.

“In the second Term, in the first six books of Virgil’s Aeneis and the first three books of Xenophon’s Anabasis.