Oxford and Its Story

by Cecil Headlam

A letter from John of Salisbury to Peter the Writer in 1167 contains this remark: “France, the most polite and civilised of all nations, has expelled the foreign students from her borders.”

This, as Dr Rashdall suggests, may possibly have been a measure of hostility aimed by the French King against the oppressor of Holy Church and against the English ecclesiastics, who as a body sided with their King against their not yet canonised primate.

Henry II., on the other hand, took the same measures to punish the partisans of Becket. All clerks were forbidden to go to or from the Continent without leave of the King, and all clerks who possessed revenues in England were summoned to return to England within three months, “as they love their revenues.” This would produce an exodus from Paris. A large number of English masters and scholars must have been compelled to return home. According to the usual procedure of mediæval students they were likely to collect in some one town and set up under their old masters something of their old organisation. These ordinances were promulgated between the years 1165 and 1169. The ports were strictly watched in order to enforce this edict.

The migrating scholars would land at Dover and lodge, perhaps, for a night or two at the Benedictine Priory there, before going on to Canterbury. Here, if they had been so minded, they might have stayed, and swelled the great literary circle, with its teachers and libraries, which had been formed there. But they left Gervase at Canterbury to write his history, and Nigel to compose his verses and polish his satires. Passing northwards, they might, had they come a little later, have been absorbed at Lambeth, and the scheme of Archbishop Baldwin for setting up a College there, which should be a centre of ecclesiastical learning, emancipated from monastic restrictions, might then have been realised. Or, if they had wished to attach themselves to any existing establishment, the monastic schools of St Alban’s might have welcomed them.

But they chose otherwise. It may be that their experience of Paris led them to choose a place which was neither a capital nor a See-town. At any rate the peculiar position of Oxford, which was neither of these and yet an important commercial and political centre, made it admirably suited for the free development of a University, unharassed by bishops and unmolested by lord mayors.

At Oxford, too, was the Palace of the King, and Henry II. was a champion of literary culture by his very descent. His grandfather had earned the title of Henry Beauclerk, the scholar King; and Fulk the Good, who had told King Lothar that an unlearned king is a crowned ass, was a lineal ancestor of his. And apart from his own hereditary tastes, the position of Henry as the most powerful king of the West, and the international correspondence which that position involved, tended to make the Court a centre of literary activity. Learning was sought not for itself only, but as a part of the equipment of a man of the world. For whatever reason, whether they were influenced by a desire, springing from experience of Paris, to establish themselves where they might be most independent, or by the physical advantages of Oxford, or the hope of favour from the King who had recalled them, and who at his Court and about his Palace of Beaumont had gathered round him all that was enlightened and refined in English and Norman society, or whether they were directed by mere chance, settling for a session and staying for centuries, it was to Oxford they came.

Here ready to receive them they would find a town which stood in the front rank of municipalities, commanding the river valley along which the commerce of Southern England mainly flowed. The mitred Abbey of Austin Canons, the Priory of S. Frideswide, the Castle of the D’Oiglis, and the Royal Palace without the Vallum marked the ecclesiastical and political importance of the place; the settlement of one of the wealthiest of the English Jewries in the very heart of the town indicated, as it promoted, the activity of its trade. It was still surrounded on all sides by a wild forest country. The moors of Cowley and Bullingdon fringed the course of the Thames; the great woods of Shotover and Bagley closed the horizon on south and east. But Oxford was easy of access, for there were the great roads that crossed at Carfax and there was the thoroughfare of the Thames. And facility of communication meant regularity of supplies, a matter of great importance to a floating population of poor students.

Here, then, the migrating masters and scholars set up their schools, and within a very short time the reputation of the University was established throughout the length and breadth of the land.

Giraldus Cambrensis, a Welshman, who had achieved fame as a lecturer at Paris, has given us an interesting account of his visit to Oxford in 1187. He came there with the purpose of reading aloud portions of his new work, as Herodotus read his history at the Panathenaic festival at Athens or at the National Games of Greece. Giraldus had written a book on Ireland—Topographia—and he chose this method of publishing and advertising it. He writes of himself in the third person, without any excessive modesty. You might almost think he was a modern author, asking his critics to dinner and writing his own “Press notices.”

“In course of time, when the work was finished and revised, not wishing to hide his candle under a bushel, but wishing to place it in a candlestick so that it might give light, he resolved to read it before a vast audience at Oxford, where the clergy in England chiefly flourished and excelled in clerkly lore. And as there were three distinctions or divisions in the work, and each division occupied a day, the readings lasted three successive days. On the first day he received and entertained at his lodgings all the poor people of the whole town; on the second all the doctors of the different faculties, and such of their pupils as were of fame and note; on the third the rest of the scholars with the milites of the town, and many burghers. It was a costly and noble act, for the authentic and ancient times of the poets were thus in some measure renewed; and neither present nor past time can furnish any record of such a solemnity having ever taken place in England.”