To the right of the drawing is the picturesque group of the Warden’s Lodgings.
The area of the Cloisters was consecrated as a private burial-place for the College, 19th October 1400.
freshmen’s charge; which, after the hall was free from the fellows, was brought up and set before the fire in the said hall. Afterwards every freshman, according to seniority, was to pluck off his gown and band, and if possible make himself look like a scoundrel. This done, they were conducted each after the other to the high table, and there made to stand on a form placed thereon: from whence they were to speak their speech with an audible voice to the company; which if well done, the person that spoke it was to have a cup of caudle and no salted drink; if indifferently, some caudle and some salted drink; but if dull, nothing was given to him but salted drink, or salt put in college beer, with tucks to boot. Afterwards when they were to be admitted into the fraternity, the senior cook was to administer to them an oath over an old shoe. After which, spoken with gravity, the freshman kissed the shoe, put on his gown and band, and took his place among the seniors.”
Wood himself not only earned pure caudle, but sack as well, with an oration in this vein:—
“Most reverend Seniors,—May it please your Gravities to admit into your presence a kitten of the Muses, and a meer frog of Helicon to croak the cataracts of his plumbeous cerebrosity before your sagacious ingenuities. I am none of the University blood-hounds that seek for preferment, and whose noses are as acute as their ears, that lie perdue for places, and who, good saints! do groan till the Visitation comes. These are they that esteem a tavern as[Pg 462] bad as purgatory, and wine more superstitious than holy water; and therefore I hope this honourable convocation will not suffer one of that tribe to taste of the sack, lest they should be troubled with a vertigo and their heads turn round.”
Except at such a special season as that, the old Oxford day bore more resemblance than our own to the life elsewhere. The fashions in cards and dress were the same as in London; the outdoor amusements were those of other town or country gentlemen. There was horse-racing at Spurton Hill and Brackley, cock-fighting at Holywell. Edgeworth’s contemporaries attended the assizes, and interfered on behalf of justice, in spite of sheriff and judge. Anthony à Wood went to fish at Wheatley Bridge, and “nutted at Shotover by the way.” And early rising was a tradition in every college until last century. The undergraduate, who to-day lives on historical principles, is often later than his sixteenth-century original was to dine, when he sits at his breakfast of steak and XX in a fine old room. Chapel at six o’clock and a lecture at seven was a common doom. Shelley and Hogg, after their days spent in shooting at a mark, and making ducks and drakes and paper boats at a Shotover pond, sat up, indeed, until two, over their conversations on literature and chemistry, but rose at seven, because it was customary. While dinner was at ten or eleven, breakfast was an informal meal. Some attempted to do without it: hence a morning preacher swooned on the altar steps. Wood speaks of the juniors “at breakfast in hall” in[Pg 463] 1661. The majority took beer and bread from the buttery, and probably taking it in one another’s rooms, started the genial custom of breakfast parties, which was perfected early in the nineteenth century. “Let the tender swain,” says the well-spiced Oxford Sausage, a mid-eighteenth-century product of Oxford (and Cambridge) wits,—
Let the tender Swain
Each Morn regale on nerve-relaxing Tea,
Companion meet of languor-loving Nymph:
Be mine each Morn with eager appetite
And Hunger undissembled, to repair
To friendly Buttery; there on smoaking Crust
And foaming Ale to banquet unrestrained,
Material Breakfast! Thus in ancient Days
Our ancestors robust with liberal cups
Usher’d the Morn, unlike the squeamish Sons
Of modern Times: Nor ever had the Might
Of Britons brave decay’d, had thus they fed,
With British Ale improving British worth.
The institution of breakfast, whatever happened to British worth, was certainly helped forward by the tea, rolls, and toast which slowly ousted ale. Lectures and disputations in private or in the Schools followed breakfast. The latter possibly encouraged inter-collegiate sports, since Exeter and Christ Church on one occasion resolved their disputation into a fight which attracted Masters of Arts. And well it might; for otherwise they were in danger of dining like fighting cocks and amusing themselves like doves: the sixteenth-century fellows of Corpus, for example, were permitted no games but ball in the college garden. Examinations are still a select and expensive form of amusement.[Pg 464] The stories told of celebrated men and their viva voce conflicts with examiners, and the like, have inspired more than one to go into the Schools in a mood of smiling irreverence. The fame resulting, it is true, has to be propagated by much anecdote from the lips of the hero himself. In the Middle Ages the humour was of a lustier kind. The parsley crown went, or should have gone, to the most brazen giver and taker of learned wit. In Anthony à Wood’s day, one William George, “cynical and hirsute in his behaviour,” was a noted sophister and disputant, and improved his purse by preparing the exercises of the dull or lazy for public recitation. The nature of these examinations, in their dull old age, has been recorded by one who took part:—
“Two boys, or men, as they call themselves, agree to do generals together. The first stage in this mighty work is to produce arguments. These are always handed down from generation to generation, on long slips of paper, and consist of foolish syllogisms on foolish subjects. The next step is to go for a liceat to one of the petty officers, called the Regent Master of the Schools, who subscribes his name to the questions, and receives sixpence as his fee. When the important day arrives, the two doubty disputants go into a large dusty room, full of dirt and cobwebs, with walls and wainscot decorated with the names of former disputants, who, to divert the tedious hours, cut out their names with their penknives or wrote verses with a pencil. Here they sit in mean desks, opposite to each other, from one till three. Not once in a hundred times does[Pg 465] any officer enter; and if he does, he hears one syllogism or two, and then makes a bow, and departs, as he came and remained, in solemn silence. The disputants then return to the amusement of cutting the desks, carving their names, or reading Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, or some other edifying novel.”