Oxford and Its Story

by Cecil Headlam

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.