Oxford and Her Colleges: A View from the Radcliffe Library

by Goldwin Smith

Oxford and Cambridge were not at first Universities of Colleges. The Colleges were after-growths which for a time absorbed the University. The University of Oxford was born in the twelfth century, fully a century before the foundation of the first College. To recall the Oxford of the thirteenth century, one must bid vanish all the buildings which now meet our eyes, except yonder grim castle to the west of the city, and the stern tower of St. Michael's Church, at once the bell tower of the Church and a defence of the city gate facing the dangerous north. The man-at-arms from the castle, the warder from the gate, looks down upon a city of five or six thousand inhabitants, huddled for protection under the castle, and within those walls of which a fine remnant is seen bounding the domain of New College. In this city there is a concourse of students brought together to hear a body of teachers who have been led, we know not how, to open their mart of knowledge here. Printing not having been invented, and books being scarce, the fountain of knowledge is the lecture-room of the professor. It is the age of an intellectual revival so remarkable as to be called the Mediæval Renaissance. After the migrations and convulsions, by which the world was cast in a new mould, ensues a reign of comparative peace and settled government, under which the desire of knowledge has been reawakened. Universities have been coming out all over Europe like stars in the night; Paris, famous for theology and philosophy, perhaps being the brightest of the constellation, while Bologna was famed for law and Salerno for medicine. It was probably in the reign of Henry I. that the company of teachers settled at Oxford, and before the end of the thirteenth century students had collected to a number which fable exaggerates to thirty thousand, but which was really large enough to crowd the little city and even the bastions of its walls. A light had shone on youths who sat in the shadow of feudal servitude. There is no more romantic period in the history of human intellect than the thirteenth century.

The teachers, after the fashion of that age, formed themselves into a guild, which guarded its monopoly. The undergraduate was the apprentice; the degree was a license to teach, and carried with it the duty of teaching, though in time it became a literary title, unconnected with teaching, and coveted for its own sake. The University obtained a charter, elected its Chancellor, formed its academical Legislature of graduates, obtained jurisdiction over its own members. In time it marshalled its teachers and students into regular Faculties of theology, law, and medicine, with arts, or general and liberal culture, if the name can be applied to anything so rudimentary as the literature and science of that day, forming the basis of all. At first the professors taught where they could; in the cloisters, perhaps, of St. Frydeswide's monastery, subsequently absorbed by Christ Church; in the porches of houses. A row of lecture-rooms, called the Schools, was afterwards provided in School Street, which ran north and south just under the Radcliffe. So little anchored was the University by buildings, that when maltreated at Oxford it was ready to pack up its literary wares and migrate to another city such as Northampton or Stamford. Many of the undergraduates at first were mere boys, to whom the University was a grammar school. For the real University students the dominant study was that of the School philosophy, logical and philosophical, with its strange metaphysical jargon; an immense attempt to extract knowledge from consciousness by syllogistic reasoning, instead of gathering it from observation, experience, and research, mocking by its barrenness of fruit the faith of the enthusiastic student, yet training the mind to preternatural acuteness, and perhaps forming a necessary stage in the mental education of the race. The great instrument of high education was disputation, often repeated, and conducted with the most elaborate forms in the tournaments of the Schools, which might beget readiness of wit and promptness of elocution, but could hardly beget habits of calm investigation or paramount love of truth. The great event in the academical life was Inception, when the student performed exercises which inaugurated his teachership; and this was commonly celebrated by a feast, the expenditure on which the University was called upon to restrain. Oxford produced some of the greatest schoolmen: Duns Scotus, the "subtle," who had written thirteen folio volumes of arid metaphysics before his early death; Bradwardine, the "profound," and Ockham, the "invincible and unmatched." The idol was Aristotle, viewed mainly as the metaphysician, and imperfectly understood through translations. To reconcile Aristotelian speculation with orthodox theology was a hard task, not always successfully performed. Theology was, of course, first in dignity of the Faculties, but the most lucrative was the civil and canon law practised in the ecclesiastical courts and, as Roman, misliked by the patriotic Parliament. Philosophy complained that it had to trudge afoot while the liegemen of Justinian rode high in the car of preferment. Of physical science the hour was not yet come, but before its hour came its wonderful and almost miraculous precursor, Roger Bacon, who anticipated the invention of gunpowder and the telescope, and whose fabled study stood over Folly Bridge, till, with Carfax's monument and Cranmer's prison, it was cleared away by an improving city corporation. Roger Bacon was, of course, taken for a dealer in black arts; an astrologer and an alchemist he was, and at the same time an illustrious example of the service indirectly rendered by astrology and alchemy in luring to an investigation of nature which led to real discoveries, just as Columbus, seeking a western passage to the golden cities of the East, discovered America.

All the Universities belonged not to one nation but to Latin Christendom, the educated population of which circulated among them. At one time there was a migration to Oxford from the University of Paris, which had got into trouble with the government. Of all the Universities alike, ecclesiastical Latin was the language. The scholars all ranked with the clerical order, so that at Oxford, scholar and clerk, townsman and layman, were convertible terms. In those days all intellectual callings, and even the higher mechanical arts, were clerical. The student was exempted by his tonsure from lay jurisdiction. The Papacy anxiously claimed the Universities as parts of its realm, and only degrees granted by the Pope's authority were current throughout Christendom. When, with Edward III., came the long war between England and France, and when the confederation of Latin Christendom was beginning to break up, the English Universities grew more national.

Incorporated with the buildings of Worcester College are some curious little tenements once occupied by a colony from different Benedictine Monasteries. These, with the Church of St. Frydeswide, now Christ Church Cathedral, and the small remains of Osney Abbey, are about the only relics of monastic Oxford which survived the Reformation. But in the Middle Ages there were Houses for novices of the great Orders, Benedictines, Cistercians, Carmelites, Augustinians, and most notable and powerful of all, the two great mendicant Orders of Dominicans and Franciscans. The Mendicants, who came into the country angels of humility as well as of asceticism, begging their bread, and staining the ground with the blood from their shoeless feet, soon changed their character, and began in the interest of Holy Church to grasp power and amass wealth. The Franciscans especially, like the Jesuits of an after day, strove to master the centres of intellectual influence. They strove to put the laws of the University under their feet. Struggles between them and the seculars, with appeals to the Crown, were the consequence. Attraction of callow youth to an angelic life seems to have been characteristic of the Brethren of St. Francis, and it is conjectured that in this way Bacon became a monk. Faintly patronised by a liberal and lettered Pope, he was arraigned for necromancy by his Order, and ended his days in gloom, if not in a monastic prison. The Church of the Middle Ages with one hand helped to open the door of knowledge, with the other she sought to close it. At last she sought to close it with both hands, and in her cruel panic established the Inquisition.

Tory in its later days, the University was liberal in its prime. It took the part of the Barons and De Montfort against Henry III., and a corps of its students fought against the King under their own banner at Northampton. Instead of being the stronghold of reaction, it was the focus of active, even of turbulent aspiration, and the saying ran, that when there was fighting at Oxford there was war in England. Oxford's hero in the thirteenth century was its Chancellor, Grosseteste, the friend of De Montfort and the great reformer of his day, "of prelates the rebuker, of monks the corrector, of scholars the instructor, of the people the preacher, of the incontinent the chastiser, of writings the industrious investigator, of the Romans the hammer and contemner." If Grosseteste patronised the Friars, it was in their first estate.

At first the students lodged as "Chamberdekyns" with citizens, but that system proving dangerous to order, they were gathered into hostels, or, to use the more dignified name, Halls (aulæ) under a Principal, or Master of the University, who boarded and governed them. Of these Halls there were a great number, with their several names and signs. Till lately a few of them remained, though these had lost their original character, and become merely small Colleges, without any foundation except a Principal. The students in those days were mostly poor. Their indigence was almost taken for granted. Some of them begged; chests were provided by the charitable for loans to them. A poor student's life was hard; if he was earnest in study, heroic. He shared a room with three or four chums, he slept under a rug, his fare was coarse and scanty, his garment was the gown which has now become merely an academical symbol, and thankful he was to be provided with a new one. He had no fire in his room, no glass in his window. As his exercises in the University Schools began at five in the morning, it is not likely that he read much at night, otherwise he would have to read by the light of a feeble lamp flickering with the wind. His manuscript was painful to read. The city was filthy, the water polluted with sewage; pestilence often swept through the crowded hive.

Mediæval students were a rough set; not less rough than enthusiastic; rougher than the students of the Quartier Latin or Heidelberg, their nearest counterparts in recent times. They wore arms, or kept them in their chambers, and they needed them not only in going to and from the University over roads beset with robbers, but in conflicts with the townspeople, with whom the University was at war. With the townspeople the students had desperate affrays, ancient precursors of the comparatively mild town and gown rows of this century. The defiant horns of the town were answered by the bells of the University. Arrows flew; blood was shed on both sides; Halls were stormed and defended; till Royalty from Abingdon or Woodstock interfered with its men-at-arms, seconded by the Bishop with bell, book, and candle. A Papal Legate, an Italian on whom national feeling looks with jealousy, comes to Oxford. Scholars crowd to see him. There is a quarrel between them and his train. His cook flings a cauldron of boiling broth over an Irish student. The scholars fly to arms. The Legate is ignominiously chased from Oxford. Excommunications, royal thunders, and penitential performances follow. Jews settle in Oxford, ply their trade among the scholars, and form a quarter with invidiously wealthy mansions. There is a royal edict, forbidding them to exact more than forty-three per cent interest from the student. Wealth makes them insolent; they assault a religious procession, and with them also the students have affrays. Provincial feeling is strong, for the students are divided into two nations, the Northern and the Southern, which are always wrangling, and sometimes fight pitched battles with bows and arrows. The two Proctors, now the heads of University police, were appointed as tribunes of the two nations to settle elections and other matters between them without battle. Amusements as well as everything else were rude. Football and other rough games were played at Beaumont, a piece of ground to the north of the city; but there was nothing like that cricket field in the parks, nor like the sensation now created by the appearance of a renowned cricketer in his paddings before an admiring crowd, to display the fruit of his many years of assiduous practice in guarding his stumps. The Crown and local lords had to complain of a good deal of poaching in Bagley, Woodstock, Shotover, and Stowe Wood.

To this Oxford, with its crowd of youth thirsting for knowledge, its turbulence, its vice, its danger from monkish encroachment, came Walter de Merton, one of the same historic group as Grosseteste and Grosseteste's friend, Adam de Marisco, the man of the hour, with the right device in his mind. Merton had been Chancellor of Henry III. amidst the political storms of the time, from which he would gladly turn aside to a work of peaceful improvement. It was thus that violence in those ages paid with its left hand a tribute to civilisation. Merton's foundation is the first College, though University and Balliol come before it in the Calendar in deference to the priority of the benefactions out of which those Colleges grew. Yonder noble chapel in the Decorated style, with its tower and the old quadrangle beneath it, called, nobody knows why, Mob Quad, are the cradle of College life. Merton's plan was an academical brotherhood, which combined monastic order, discipline, and piety with the pursuit of knowledge. No monk or friar was ever to be admitted to his House. The members of the House are called in his statutes by the common name of Scholars, that of Fellows (Socii), which afterwards prevailed here and in all the other Colleges, denoting their union as an academical household. They were to live like monks in common; they were to take their meals together in the Refectory, and to study together in the common library, which may still be seen, dark and austere, with the chain by which a precious volume was attached to the desk. They had not a common dormitory, but they must have slept two or three in a room. Probably they were confined to their quadrangle, except when they were attending the Schools of the University, or allowed to leave it only with a companion as a safeguard. They were to elect their own Warden, and fill up by election vacancies in their own number. The Warden whom they had elected, they were to obey. They were to watch over each other's lives, and hold annual scrutinies into conduct. The Archbishop of Canterbury was to visit the College and see that the rule was kept. But the rule was moral and academical, not cloistral or ascetic. The mediæval round of religious services was to be duly performed, and prayers were to be said for the Founder's soul. But the main object was not prayer, contemplation, or masses for souls; it was study. Monks were permanently devoted to their Order, shut up for life in their monastery, and secluded from the world. The Scholars of Merton were destined to serve the world, into which they were to go forth when they had completed the course of preparation in their College. They were destined to serve the world as their Founder had served it. In fact, we find Wardens and Fellows of Merton employed by the State and the Church in important missions. A Scholar of Merton, though he was to obey the College authorities, took no monastic vow of obedience. He took no monastic vow of poverty; on the contrary, it was anticipated that he would gain wealth, of which he was exhorted to bestow a portion on his College. He took no monastic vow of celibacy, though, as one of the clerical order, he would of course not be permitted to marry. He was clerical as all Scholars in those days were clerical, not in the modern and professional sense of the term. The allowances of the Fellow were only his Commons, or food, and his Livery, or raiment, and there were to be as many Fellows as the estate could provide with these. Instruction was received not in College, but in the Schools of the University, to which the Scholars of Merton, like the other Scholars, were to resort. A sort of grammar school, for boys of the Founder's kin, was attached to the College. But otherwise the work of the College was study, not tuition, nor did the statutes contemplate the admission of any members except those on the foundation.

MERTON COLLEGE, FROM FIELDS.