After the vice-chancellor no officers are so much in evidence as the proctors. Their duties are twofold: they conduct the congregations of the senate, and they maintain discipline among the undergraduates. There are 2 proctors elected annually, to whom are joined 2 pro-proctors, and 2 additional pro-proctors. The pro-proctors have not the standing of the proctors as university officials, but they exercise the same authority over the men.[326] Other executive officers are the public orator, who is “the voice of the senate”[327]; the university librarian, the registrary, the university marshal (appointed by the vice-chancellor) and the bedells.
Bedell.
If the proctor is the procurator of the academic society, the bedell is the executor of its mandates. The bedells attend the (chancellor or) vice-chancellor on all public occasions, bearing silver maces, and, like the beadles of all guilds and corporations, they summon members of the senate to the chancellor’s court.[328] For bedel or bedell is an obsolete form of beadle retained in the ancient corporations of Oxford and Cambridge. As a town or parish officer the beadle brought messages and executed the mandates of the town or parish authority. The apparitor of a trades guild was also called a “bedel,” and it is, no doubt, as a guild officer that he appears in our universities and has taken so firm a footing there.
The bedell was the servant of a faculty, and also of a “nation” in the continental universities: hence at Cambridge one was the bedell of theology and canon law, the other of arts. They arranged and announced the day and hour of lectures. For many centuries Cambridge had an esquire and a yeoman bedell; but the latter was abolished in 1858. Apparently the yeoman bedell was not a member of the university, and he may have been a townsman.[329] The two esquire bedells of the present day are nominated by the council of the senate, and elected by the latter body.[330]
The Master.
Distinct from the university authorities are the college authorities. The foremost of these is the Master of each college. This officer used to be primus inter pares, the senior among the fellows or teaching body of his house. The change to the later “splendid isolation” of the “Head” is expressed architecturally in the relative positions of the Master’s lodging, as we can see it to-day in the old court of Corpus—the simple room leading to the dining hall and the college garden with a garret bedroom above it—and the palatial dwellings which in one or two of the colleges no longer form part of the main buildings. It is one which has a curious chronological parallel with the change that took place in the relative positions of a cathedral dean and chapter after the Reformation. The old college Master, like the old university chancellor, and the cathedral dean, was, officially and residentially, part and parcel of the body he represented. After the Reformation all these positions were shifted. The college Master became in appearance, what the cathedral dean had become in fact, “a corporation sole,” while the university chancellor was translated to supra-academic spheres, and no longer resided even in the university city. “Sixty years since,” writes a present member of the university, “society at Cambridge was divided broadly into two classes—those who were Heads and those who were not.” Ludicrous stories are told of the pride which inflated “the Heads,” who at times resented being accosted not only by the inferior undergraduate but by the fellows of their own college. The provost of King’s of just a hundred years ago was referred to familiarly by his irreverent juniors as ‘Tetoighty.’[331]
Heads of colleges have not only the statutory powers conferred on them by their college, but as assessors to the vice-chancellor they join with him in the government of the university. Their powers were largely increased by the statutes of 1570 which Whitgift procured from Elizabeth; and in 1586-7 it was decided that the vice-chancellor should always be chosen from their number.[332] The modern “Head” emulates the old academic Master, is primus inter pares amongst his fellow collegians, and is no longer dreadful to his juniors.
There are only two exceptions to the title of Master held by all heads of colleges. The head of King’s College, like the head of Eton, is styled Provost, and the head of Queens’ College is styled President.[333]
The vice-master is called the president. His position is like that of a prior under an abbot, or a subprior in a priory: the one representing the college outside and ruling over the community, the other ruling in the house and having the authority in all which concerns its management.