“The choral ministers of this house,” says Wood, “do, according to an ancient custom, salute Flora every year on the First of May, at four in the morning, with vocal music of several parts. Which having been sometimes well performed, hath given great content to the neighbourhood, and auditors underneath.”
The substitution of a hymn from the college grace for the “merry concert of both vocal and instrumental music, consisting of several merry ketches, and lasting almost two hours,” which was the form the performance took in the middle of the eighteenth century, was made on one occasion when the weather was very inclement. Once made it was found easier and more suitable to continue it, and the observance came to be religious.[32]
Magdalen Tower is one of those rarely beautiful buildings, which strike you with a silent awe of admiration when first you behold them, and ever afterwards reveal to your admiring gaze new aspects and unsuspected charms. It is changeable as a woman, but its changes are all good and there is nothing else about it that is feminine. It conveys the impression that it is at once massive and slender, and its very slenderness is male.
The chaste simplicity of the lower stories carries the eye up unchecked to the ornamented belfry windows, the parapet and surmounting pinnacles, and thus enhances the impression of perfect and reposeful proportion.
The growth of the colleges had influenced the halls. Statutes imposed by the authority of the University, began to take the place of the private rule of custom and tradition approved and enforced by the authority of the self-governing scholars. The students quickly ceased to be autonomous scholars and became disciplined schoolboys. The division between don and undergraduate began to be formed and was rapidly accentuated. Thus, at the close of the mediæval period, a change had been wrought in the character of the University, which rendered it an institution very different from that which it had been in the beginning. The growth of Nationalism, the separation of languages and the establishment of the collegiate system—these and similar causes tended to give the Universities a local and aristocratic character. The order introduced by the colleges was accompanied by the introduction of rank, and of academical power and influence stored in the older, permanent members of the University. Learning, too, had ceased to be thought unworthy of a gentleman; it became a matter of custom for young men of rank to have a University education. Thus, in the charter of Edward III., we even read that “to the University a multitude of nobles, gentry, strangers and others continually flock”; and towards the end of the century we find Henry of Monmouth, afterwards Henry V., as a young man, a sojourner at Queen’s College. But it was in the next century that colleges were provided, not for the poor, but for the noble. Many colleges, too, which had been originally intended for the poor, opened their gates to the rich, not as fellows or foundation students, but as simple lodgers, such as monasteries might have received in a former age. This change has continued to be remarkably impressed upon Oxford and Cambridge even down to this day.
The influence of other political classes was now also introduced. Never, as Newman said, has a learned institution been more directly political and national than the University of Oxford. Some of its colleges came to represent the talent of the nation, others its rank and fashion, others its wealth; others have been the organs of the Government of the day; while others, and the majority, represented one or other division, chiefly local, of opinion in the country. The local limitation of the members of many colleges, the West Country character of Exeter, the North Country character of Queen’s or University, the South Country character of New College, the Welsh character of Jesus College, for instance, tended to accentuate this peculiarity. The whole nation was thus brought into the University by means of the colleges, which fortunately were sufficiently numerous, and no one of them overwhelmingly important. A vigour and a stability were thus imparted to the University such as the abundant influx of foreigners had not been able to secure. As in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, French, German and Italian students had flocked to Oxford, and made its name famous in distant lands; so in the fifteenth all ranks and classes of the land furnished it with pupils, and what was wanting in their number or variety, compared with the former era, was made up by their splendour or political importance. The sons of the nobles came up to the University, each accompanied by an ample retinue; the towns were kept in touch with the University by means of the numerous members of it who belonged to the clerical order. Town and country, high and low, north and south, had a common stake in the academical institutions, and took a personal interest in the academical proceedings. The degree possessed a sort of indelible character which all classes understood; and the people at large were more or less partakers of a cultivation which the aristocracy were beginning to appreciate. Oxford, in fact, became the centre of national and political thought. Not only in vacations and term time was there a stated ebbing and flowing of the academical youth, but messengers posted to and fro between Oxford and all parts of the country in all seasons of the year. So intimate was this connection, that Oxford became, as it were, the selected arena for the conflicts of the various interests of the nation.
CHAPTER VI
OXFORD AND THE REFORMATION
IN 1453 Christendom was shocked by the news that the Turks had taken Constantinople. The home of learning and the citadel of philosophy was no more. The wisdom of Hellas, so it seemed to contemporary scholars like Æneas Sylvius, was destined likewise to perish. In fact, it was but beginning to be diffused. Scholars fled with what MSS. they could save to the hospitable shores of Italy. And at the very time that these fugitives were hastening across the Adriatic, it is probable that the sheets of the Mazarin Bible were issuing from the press at Maintz. Thus whilst Italy was rescuing from destruction the most valuable thought of the ancient world, Germany was devising the means for its diffusion in lands of which Strabo never heard, and to an extent of which the Sosii never dreamed. The Italians acquired the Greek language with rapidity and ardour. The student flung aside his scholastic culture; cast away the study of an Aristotle that had been conformed to Christian Theology, and the Sentences in which that theology was enshrined, and tried to identify himself in feeling with the spirit of cultivated paganism. The cowl and the gown were discarded for the tunic and the toga.
But the New Learning did not make its way at once to England. And when at length the Englishmen who had travelled and studied in Italy brought back with them something of the generous enthusiasm with which they had been fired, their ideas were but coldly welcomed by the followers of Thomas or the disciples of Duns. At Oxford the New Movement took but a momentary hold of only a small part of the University, and then was shaken off by the massive inertness of the intellectual stagnation characteristic of the country. “They prefer their horses and their dogs to poets,” wrote Poggio; “and like their horses and their dogs they shall perish and be forgotten.”
The majority of Englishmen are always slow to accept new ideas. They move ponderously and protestingly in the wake of the Continent. The New Learning was as unwelcome at Oxford as if it had been a motor car. The schoolmen were still busily chopping their logic, when the Medicis were ransacking the world for a new play, when Poggio was writing his “Facetiæ” or editing Tacitus, and Pope Nicholas was founding the Vatican Library at Rome. And the Renaissance, when it did begin to work in England, took the form of a religious reformation; the religious genius of the nation led it to the worship, not of Beauty, but of Truth.