This latter ceremony consisted of a procession headed by a master in academic dress, followed by students in masquerading costume. Certain further operative procedures were then gone through with, the beast was finally dehorned and his nose held to the grindstone, while a little later his chin was adorned with a beard made of burnt cork, and his wounded sensibilities assuaged by a dose of salt and wine. All this constituted a peculiar German custom, although some means of extorting money or bothering those who were initiated was practically universal. In Germany this ceremony of depositio seems to have led later to the bullying and fagging of juniors by seniors, that gave rise to indignities while at the same time it more than exceeded in brutality anything of which we have read in the English grammar schools. These excesses reached their highest in the seventeenth century, and for a long time defied all efforts of both government and university authorities to suppress them.
In southern France this initiation assumed somewhat different form. Here the freshman was treated as a criminal, and had to be tried for and released by purgation from the consequences of his original sin. At Avignon this purgation of freshmen was made the primary purpose of a religious fraternity formed under ecclesiastical sanction, and with a chapel in the Dominican church. (Rashdall). The preamble of its constitution piously boasted that its object was to put a stop to enormities, drunkenness and immorality, but its practices were at extreme variance with its avowed purposes.
The matter of academical dress may interest for a moment. During the Middle Ages there was for the undergraduate nothing which could be properly called academic dress. In the Italian universities the students wore a long black garment known as a "cappa." In the Parisian universities every student was required by custom or statute to wear a tonsure and a clerical habit, such "indecent, dissolute, or secular" apparel as puffed sleeves, pointed shoes, colored boots, etc., being positively forbidden; and so the clothes of uniform color and material, like those worn in some of the English charitable schools, have been the result of the uniform dress of a particular color which mediæval students were supposed to wear, and which indicated that at the time they were supposed to be clerks. At one time the so-called Queen's Men in Oxford University were required to wear bright red garments, and differences of color and ornament still survive in the undergraduate gowns of Cambridge. While the students usually wore dark-hued material, the higher officials of the universities wore more and more elaborate garments, until the rector appeared in violet or purple, perhaps with fur trimmings. The hoods, which are still worn to-day, were at one time made of lamb's wool or rabbit's fur, silk, such as those which we wear, coming in as a summer alternative at the end of the fourteenth century. The birretta, or square cap, with a tuft on the top, in lieu of the modern tassel on top of the square cap, was a distinctive badge of membership, while doctors and superior officers were distinguished by the red or violet color of their birrettas.
This so-called "philosophy of clothes" throws much light upon the relation of the Church to the universities, as well as on the use and misuse of the term "clericus." That a man was a clericus in the Middle Ages did not necessarily imply that he had taken even the lowest grade of clerical orders. It simply implied that he was a clerk, i. e., a student. Even the wearing of a so-called clerical dress was rather in order that the wearer might enjoy exemption from secular courts and the privileges of the clerical order. The lowest of the people even took the clerical tonsure simply in order to get the benefit of clergy; and to become a clerk was at one time almost equivalent to taking out a license for the commission of murder or outrage with comparative immunity. Nevertheless, the relation between clerkship and minor orders is still quite obscure.
It is quite evident that students of those days were not worked as hard as those of the present day. Three lectures a day constituted a maximum of work of this kind, beside which there were disputations and "resumpciones," which seem to have corresponded very much to the quizzes of to-day, scholars being examined or catechised, sometimes even by the lecturer himself. Gradually supplementary lectures were introduced, but there was a period during which the university seemed to decline and decay rather than the reverse, when intellectual life was not nearly as active and studies not nearly as closely pursued. In the days of Thomas Aquinas intellectual vigor was at its highest, but in the fifteenth century there was a distinct falling off.
During these centuries, too, it was not unusual that students attended mass or religious services before going to lectures. This practice grew during the latter portion of the Middle Ages. Attendance was not, however, compulsory. Even at Oxford the statutes of the New College were the first which required daily attendance at mass. In those days lectures began at six in the morning in summer, and sometimes as late as seven in the winter mornings. There is every reason to think that often lectures were given in the darkness preceding dawn, and even without artificial light. It should be said that these lectures were sometimes three hours in duration, and hence it might appear that three such lectures a day were about all that could be expected of a student.
The standard of living for the mediæval student was not always so bad as has been sometimes represented. University students then, as now, were recruited from the highest as well as the poorest social classes, and the young sons of princely families often had about them quite an establishment. At the lower end of the university social ladder was the poor scholar who was reduced to begging for his living or becoming a servant in one of the colleges. In Vienna and elsewhere there were halls whose inmates were regularly sent out to beg, the proceeds of their mendicancy being placed in a common chest. Very poor scholars were often granted licenses to beg by the chancellor. This was not regarded as a particular degradation, however, because the example of the friars had made begging comparatively respectable. Those who would have been ashamed to work hard were not ashamed to beg.
This custom, for that matter, is by no means yet abandoned. When I was first studying in Vienna, in 1882, I remember a young German nobleman who was reduced to such an extent that he lived absolutely on the charity of others. He kept a little book in which he had it set down that on such a day such a person had promised to give him so much toward his support, and he called regularly on his list of supporters, and almost daily, in order that the gulden which they had promised him might be forthcoming.
There is the good old story you know, also, of the three students who were so poor that they had but one cappa or gown between them, in which they took turns to go to lectures. In the small university towns, where thousands of students gathered together during a part of the year—where means of carrying food were scanty, and food itself not abundant—it is not strange that student fare was often of the most meagre sort.
The matter of food was not the only hardship of student life in those days about which we are talking. At that time such a thing as a fire in a lecture-room was unknown, there being no source of warmth or comfort, save, perhaps, straw or rushes upon the floor. The winter in the northern university towns must have been severe, but it is not likely that either in the lecture-room or in his own apartments did the student have any comfort from heat. This was true to such an extent that they often sought the kitchens for comfort. In Germany it was even one of the duties of the head of the college to inspect the college-rooms lest the occupants should have supplied themselves with some source of heat. In some places, however, there was a common hall or combination room in which a fire was built in cold weather. You must remember, also, that glass windows were an exceptional luxury until toward the close of the period under discussion. In Padua the windows of the schools were made of linen. In 1643 a glass window was for the first time introduced into the Theological School at Prague. In 1600 the rooms inhabited by some of the junior fellows at Cambridge were still unprovided with glass windows. Add to these hardships the relative expense of lights, when the average price of candles was nearly two pence per pound, and you will see that the poorest student could not afford to study by artificial light. Some of the senior students may have had bedsteads, but the younger students slept mostly upon the floor. In some places there were cisterns or troughs of lead, or occasionally pitchers and bowls were provided, but usually the student had to resort to the public lavatory in the hall.