Gradually the University came to full corporate existence. From about 1210, written statutes exist, passed by the Society of Masters; at the same date a Bull of Innocent III. recognizes the Society as a Corporation. Then began a long struggle for supremacy, between the Masters and the Chancellor: it was the Chancellor’s function to grant the licence to become a Master; but it was the privilege of the Society to admit the licentiate to membership. The action of both being thus requisite, time alone could tell with whom the control eventually should rest. Was the self-governing University to prevail, or the Chancellor of the Cathedral? The former won the victory.
The Masters in Arts constituted par excellence the University, because they far outnumbered the Masters in the upper Faculties of Theology, Law, and Medicine. They were the dominant body; what they decided on, the other Faculties acquiesced in. These Masters in Arts, besides being numerous, were young, not older than the law students at Bologna. With their still younger students,[525] they made the bulk of the entire University, and were the persons who most needed protection in their lawful or unlawful conduct. At some indeterminate period they divided themselves into the four Nationes, French, Normans, Picards, and English. They voted by Nationes in their meetings; but from a period apparently as early as their organization, a Rector was elected for all four Nationes, and not one Rector for each. There were, however, occasional schisms or failures to agree. It was to be the fortune of the Rector thus elected to supplant the Chancellor of the Cathedral as the real head of the University.
The vastly greater number of the Masters in Arts were actually students in the higher Faculties of Theology, Law,[526] or Medicine, for which graduation in the Arts was the ordinary prerequisite. The Masters or Doctors of these three higher Faculties, at least from the year 1213, determined the qualifications of candidates in their departments. Nevertheless the Rector of the Faculty of Arts continued his advance toward the headship of the whole University. The oath taken by the Bachelors in the Arts, of obedience to that Faculty and its Rector, was strengthened in 1256, so as to bind the oath-taker so long as he should continue a member of the University.
The University had not obtained its privileges without insistence, nor without the protest of action as well as word. Its first charter of privileges from the king was granted in 1200, upon its protests against the conduct of the Provost of Paris in attacking riotous students. Next, in combating the jurisdiction of the Chancellor, it obtained privileges from the Pope; and in 1229, upon failure to obtain redress for an attack from the Provost’s soldiers, ordered by the queen, Blanche of Castile, the University dispersed. Thus it resorted to the weapon by which the University of Bologna had won the confirmation of its rights. In the year 1231 the great Papal Bull, Parens scientiarum, finally confirmed the Paris University in its contentions and demands: the right to suspend lectures was sanctioned, whenever satisfaction for outrage had been refused for fifteen days; likewise the authority of the University to make statutes, and expel members for a breach of them. The Chancellor of Notre Dame and the Bishop of Paris were both constrained by the same Bull.
A different struggle still awaited the University, in which it was its good fortune not to be altogether successful; for it was contending against instruments of intellectual and spiritual renovation, to wit, the Mendicant Orders. The details are difficult to unravel at this distance of time. But the Dominicans and Franciscans, in the lifetime of their founders, established themselves in Paris, and opened schools of theology. Their Professors were licensed by the Chancellor, and yet seem to have been unwilling to fall in with the customs of the University, and, for example, cease from teaching and disperse, when it saw fit to do so. The doctors of the theological Faculty became suspicious, and opposed the admission of Mendicants to the theological Faculty. The struggle lasted thirty years, until the Dominicans obtained two chairs in that Faculty, and the Franciscans perhaps the same number, on terms which looked like a victory for the Orders, but in fact represented a compromise; for the Mendicant doctors in the end apparently submitted to the statutes of the University.[527]
The origin of Oxford University was different, and one may say more adventitious than that of Paris or Bologna. For Oxford was not the capital of a kingdom, nor is it known to have been an ancient seat of learning. The city was not even a bishop’s seat, a fact which had a marked effect upon the constitution of the University. The old town lay at the edge of Essex and Mercia, and its position early gave it importance politically, or rather strategically, and as a place of trade. How or whence came the nucleus of Masters and students that should grow into a University is unknown. An interesting hypothesis[528] is that it was a colony from Paris, shaken off by some academic or political disturbance. This surmise has been connected with the year 1167. Some evidence exists of a school having existed there before. Next comes a distinct statement from the year 1185, of the reading of a book before the Masters and students.[529] After this date the references multiply. In 1209, one has a veritable “dispersion,” in protest against the hanging of some scholars. A charter from the papal legate in 1214 accords certain privileges, among others that a clerk arrested by the town should be surrendered on demand of the Bishop of Lincoln[530] or the Archdeacon, or the Chancellor, whom the Bishop shall set over the scholars. This document points to the beginning of the chancellorship. The title probably was copied from Paris; but in Oxford the office was to be totally different. The Paris Chancellor was primarily a functionary of a great cathedral, who naturally maintained its prerogatives against the encroachments of university privilege. But at Oxford there was no cathedral; the Chancellor was the head of the University, probably chosen from its Masters, and had chiefly its interests at heart.
Making allowance for this important difference in the Chancellor’s office, the development of the University closely resembled that of Paris. Its first extant statute, of the year 1252, prescribes that no one shall be licensed in Theology who has not previously graduated in the Arts. To the same year belongs a settlement of disputes between the Irish and northern scholars. The former were included in the Australes or southerners, one of the two Nationes composing the Faculty of Arts. The Australes included the natives of Ireland, Wales, and England south of the Trent; the other Natio, the Boreales, embraced the English and Scotch coming from north of that river. But the division into Nationes was less important than in the cosmopolitan University of Paris, and soon ceased to exist. The Faculty of Arts, however, continued even more dominant than at Paris. There was no serious quarrel with the Mendicant Orders, who established themselves at Oxford—the Dominicans in 1221, and the Franciscans three years later.
The curriculum of studies appears much the same at both Universities, and, as followed in the middle of the thirteenth century, may be thus summarized. For the lower degree of Bachelor of Arts, four or five years were required; and three or four years more for the Master’s privileges. The course of study embraced grammar (Priscian), also rhetoric, and in logic the entire Organon of Aristotle, preceded by Porphyry’s Isagoge, and with the Sex principia of Gilbert de la Porrée added to the course. The mathematical branches of the Quadrivium also were required: arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. And finally a goodly part of the substantial philosophy of Aristotle was studied, with considerable choice permitted to the student in his selection from the works of the philosopher. At Oxford he might choose between the Physics or the De coelo et mundo, or the De anima or the De animalibus. The Metaphysics and Ethics or Politics were also required before the Bachelor could be licensed as a Master.
In Theology the course of study was extremely lengthy, especially at Paris, where eight years made the minimum, and the degree of Doctor was not given before the candidate had reached the age of thirty-five. The chief subjects were Scripture and the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Besides which, the candidate had to approve himself in sermons and disputations. The latter might amount to a trial of nerve and endurance, as well as proficiency in learning, since the candidate was expected to militare in scholis, against a succession of opponents from six in the morning till six in the evening, with but an hour’s refreshment at noon.[531]
In spite of the many resemblances of Oxford to Paris in organization and curriculum, the intellectual tendencies of the two Universities were not altogether similar. At Paris, speculative theology, with metaphysics and other branches of “philosophy,” regarded as its adjuncts, were of absorbing interest. At Oxford, while the same matters were perhaps supreme, a closer scholarship in language or philology was cultivated by Grosseteste, and his pupils, Adam of Marsh and Roger Bacon. The genius of observation was stirring there; and a natural science was coming into being, which was not to repose solely upon the authority of ancient books, but was to proceed by the way of observation and experiment. Yet Roger Bacon imposed upon both his philology and his natural science a certain ultimate purpose: that they should subserve the surer ascertainment of divine and saving truth, and thus still remain handmaids of theology, at least in theory.