In the thirteenth or fourteenth century some Oxford citizen would build a pair of cottages, where a carpenter and an innkeeper came to live. At the inrush of students to welcome a famous lecturer, the spare rooms of those cottages received their share. Some of the lodgers stayed on, liked the carpenter and his wife and family, with whom they lived on terms of social equality; and in a generation the tradition of entertaining scholars was established. A few years saw the formation of a colony of students from one countryside or great estate. As the custom was, they chose a superior from among their number. In those days, if an American had run upstairs to the head, he might have had a more satisfactory answer than he had yesterday to his command: “I’ve come to take rooms in your college!” for the hostel was, roughly speaking, an hotel. The members fought side by side in the battles of the nations (viz. Northerners, Southerners, etc.), and of town and gown. They bent over the same books. They sang the same songs. And together they came to love the place, the two cottages and those adjacent into which they had overflowed. Such a group fled from the ancient Brasenose Hall to Stamford, in one of the University migrations, in 1334; carried with them the knocker of their lodgings in the shape of a brazen nose, and fixed it to the door of their “Brasenose Hall in Stamford.” If they forgot to take it back on their return, it nevertheless “got perched upon the top of the pineal gland” of[Pg 439] the college brain; and with characteristic spirited piety the descendants of the old hall-men found it out in 1890, and hung it in a place of honour and safety.
In later life one of the carpenter’s tenants became a bishop, or a royal almoner. Either at the height of his fame and wealth, or on his deathbed, he would remember his old retreat, and its associations with law and Aristotle and
Breed and chese and good ale in a jubbe.
There his old friends or their successors still dwelt, and learned and taught and fought. So he gave money for the purchase of the cottages; a neighbouring garden plot, perhaps a strip of woodland outside the walls, and the rents of some home farms for the revenue; together with the advowson of a church—if possible the one which he remembered best in Oxford, or if not, then one within his diocese or influence. He sketched the statutes, which fixed the number of the scholars and the rules for electing new ones and a head. He himself chose the first head. The scholars were to remain unmarried and in residence; to study the Arts, or Theology, or Canon and Civil Law; and to pray for his soul.
The carpenter’s and innkeeper’s tenants found themselves suddenly powerful and rich. They had their own seal, and a new and more settled enthusiasm, and a diapason of duties and ceremonies, added to their life. They had their aisle in the church whose shadow reached them on summer evenings. If their estates were[Pg 440] large and well managed,—if the country was prosperous, and the head obeyed the statutes and the fellows the head,—their progress was swift. Perhaps a legal difficulty interposed delay, or their rents disappeared. Perhaps the fellows quarrelled with the head, or the discipline was such that the fellows climbed into college at late unstatutable hours and became a scandal in the University. But a descendant or neighbour of the founder, or a parishioner of the college living, came to their help. One gave a present, in order that he might be remembered in the college prayers: another sent books: a former fellow who was grateful or pitiful made a rich benefaction when he went to court. Already the little original tenements were tottering or too small. They must build and rebuild. Then a “second founder” adopted as his children that and all succeeding generations of scholars, who should praise him for a benefaction larger than the first.
They pull down the old buildings, all save a flanking wall with a gateway to their taste, and begin to build. The benefactor sends teams of oxen to carry wood and stone. They are quarrying at Eynsham and Headington, and in the benefactor’s own distant county. They are felling oaks at Cumnor or Nuneham, actually before the bronzed foliage has crisped to brown. All day the oxen come and go: on the river, the boats are carrying stone, slates, and wood, unless the frost binds the barges among the reeds and the foundation soil breaks the spade. The master mason has already roughly hewn a statue of the patron saint or the founder, or his[Pg 442][Pg 441]
THE LIBRARY, ORIEL COLLEGE
Across the picture, opposite the spectator, appears the Library, a dignified building of the Ionic order of architecture, designed by James Wyatt about 1788. It occupies the northern side of the inner quadrangle.