Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century, “great progress is made towards the wished-for honour of a bachelor’s degree”; the goal might be reached, if the undergraduate knew a few “jolly young Masters of Arts,” by answering questions concerning the pedigree of a race-horse. Such was the lack of interest in the disputations that they were called “wall” lectures, after the name of their principal auditor.
A little poaching gave a very attractive substitute for cross-country running. But increasing college discipline and the heightening average of wealth and birth among students cut off the more violent sports of the Middle Ages. The unattached, poor Welsh and Irish students, who kept up the University name for rough and adventurous relaxations, disappeared before the Reformation; and after the Poor Law Act of 1531 had condemned begging scholars, who were not authorised under the seal of a university, to be treated as able-bodied beggars, there can have been few to poach at Shotover and Abingdon. The masked Mohock revels and Jacobite struttings of the Augustan age were a poor alternative. The blithe and fearless spirit of trespassing, so common among undergraduates, is the sole survival to-day, if we exclude the pious uprooting[Pg 466] of stakes and fences on fields supposed (by reference to Doomsday Book) to be common land. Before and after the Puritans, who preferred music in their rooms, there was free access to the acting of dramas in Latin and English, and earlier still, to the miracle plays of Herod and Noah and the like. Even during the Commonwealth private theatricals were popular; and Wood speaks of one John Glendall, a fellow of Brasenose, who was the witty terræ filius in 1658, when the Acts were kept in St. Mary’s Church, as “a great mimick, and acted well in several plays which the scholars acted by stealth in Kettle Hall, the refectory at Gloster Hall,” etc.
For centuries the ale-houses were full of university life. At one time there were three hundred in Oxford. They had excellent uses before a common room perfected the homeliness of the college; and even afterwards, in the eighteenth century, a poetical club met at “The Tuns” to display their wit. There the undergraduates freshened and shared their wit, before each had an ample sitting-room, and before the junior common room,—where now the newspaper rustles, and the debate roars or chirps, and the senior scholar, on rare occasions, speaks to a not wholly reverent college meeting from the time-honoured elevation of the mantelpiece. The men of Balliol continued the old-fashioned devotion to the “Split Crow” in Broad Street long after the coffee-house had become fashionable. The vice-chancellor, being president of the rival and neighbouring society of Trinity, scoffed at the Maste[Pg 468][Pg 467]r’s
BROAD STREET, LOOKING WEST
On the left of the picture is the enclosing wall of the Sheldonian Theatre, with its startlingly picturesque thermes. A flight of semicircular steps leads to an entrance between two of them.
In the first bay of the wall, seen through the palisade fence, is the old Ashmolean Museum, and farther on is a glimpse of Exeter College. The spire is that of the College Chapel.
By the large tree standing near the Church of St. Mary Magdalen are the buildings of Balliol College, and nearer to the spectator is the entrance to Trinity College and Kettle Hall.
Some of the houses to the right of the picture are fair specimens of eighteenth-century domestic architecture.