college rules being visited by “gating” and expulsion. A man can be expelled for any cause which in the judgment of the university or the college warrants it. If a man thus expelled from the university society refuses “to go down”—to leave Cambridge—he cannot live in any licensed lodging house in the town.[349] A man may also be sent down for a term, which is called “rustication,” an epithet which suggests to him that he has forfeited the society of men of polite learning. If a man misbehaves himself he can be “gated,” i.e. the porter receives instructions not to let him out after a certain hour—and it may be any hour the authorities choose to fix and for any length of time.
The tutor.
The college tutor is the official who supervises the undergraduate’s academic career. He advises him what subject to read for, what examinations to take, what books to master. The career of a mediocre man is often made and that of a first-rate man heightened by an able tutor, and Cambridge has boasted some very great men in this capacity. The mathematical genius of Newton was quickened by having for his tutor Isaac Barrow; Whichcote of Emmanuel, Laughton of Clare, and Shilleto of Trinity were eminent as tutors and “coaches”; and “coaching” supplements, for a very backward or a very advanced student, the lectures of college and university.[350]
The cap and gown.
The academic appearance of a university owes much to the traditional cap and gown worn by all its members. A bonnet and gown are very ancient appanages of the learned professions of divinity law and medicine—they were the dignified apparel of doctors in the three faculties. Short hose had not become fashionable when universities sprang into existence, and the clerk or scholar even if he were not destined for major was very usually in minor orders: the gown is therefore a fitting distinction for those learned societies which have never ceased their corporate existence, and have carried into modern times, as a special dress, items of attire which like clerical vestments, the cassock, the monastic habit, and the friar’s tunic were proper to the age which saw their rise.
The distinctive features of academic dress are simply survivals of this ordinary dress of the period: the ceremonial hood is the hood which was worn in everyday life in the xiith the xiiith xivth and xvth centuries.[351] If we had looked in at the priory church of Barnwell on a day when the novices made their profession we should have seen each one enter dressed in the black habit or gown, a cloak of fur, and the “amess[352] over his head”: and when he walked out he was already vested with the capa nigra of the canon. Here, then, we have all the elements of early academic dress; the homely Gilbertine canons, so familiar in the Cambridge thoroughfares, wore it in white; for it was the dress of the more respectable, the decently clad, clergy and clerks as well as of those most respectable and regular clergy, the canons. The dress of the better looked-after scholars on the college foundations differed but little from this. No doubt the scholars of Peterhouse habitually wore the clerical vestis talaris[353]—the gown to the ankle—but the special item of academic attire adopted at Cambridge appears to have been the capa nigra.[354] The majority of scholars in the hostels and grammar schools observed no general rule as to costume,[355] but the scholars of any standing wore the black cappa of the canon; and the hood, lined with sheepskin or minever, was becoming—even in the xiv century—the habitual, and therefore distinctive, dress of foundation scholars when they “commenced” bachelor or master.[356] The hood indeed was probably restricted to an academic use before this century closed, for there is a statute of the year 1413 ordering hoods of kid or lambskin to be worn. The incepting Cambridge bachelor,[357] then, wore a cappa, a fine hood was gradually restricted to the master of arts.
The soft bonnets or caps—of doctors, bishops, jurists, canons—are derivatives of the hood, as is the stiff cap—the biretta, as is the mitre itself. The xviii century Cambridge student still wore a soft round cap, like that worn to-day by the Italian university student and quite recently adopted in France: but the Paduan doctors had adopted the stiff square cap in the xvi century, and our own students revolted against the round cap in 1769, and thereupon accomplished the feat which neither Archimedes “nor our Newton” had attempted:
For all her scholars square the circle now.[358]
The chancellor of the university wears a black and gold robe. Scarlet is the colour of the doctors’ gowns, as it still is of the papal doctors of divinity. The physician of Chaucer’s time wore his furred scarlet gown, and scarlet gowns and corner caps were worn by the Cambridge doctors when the Cromwells entertained James I. on his way from the north in 1603.
The master wears a full-sleeved gown of stuff or silk; the bachelor’s gown has two flowing bands hanging loose in front; the undergraduate’s gown is both scantier and shorter than these; but ‘Advanced Students’ wear the bachelor’s gown, without the loose bands. The academic gown of English universities is now black, but the earlier violet gown of Trinity is recorded in the present blue gown of its undergraduates, a blue gown being also worn by the neighbouring college of Gonville and Caius.[359] The gowns of certain colleges are distinguished by little pleats in the stuff or bars of velvet.