Rivers of Great Britain. The Thames, from Source to Sea. / Descriptive, Historical, Pictorial

by Various

But the most speaking memorial of this lost University is that side of Worcester that still remains of old Gloucester Hall. Benedictine novices, from the many houses of the order scattered over England, were numerous among the early students of Oxford. The Benedictines were rich, and there were few University endowments. Gloucester Hall was the house founded in 1283 for those of the novices who came from Gloucester Abbey. Then other Benedictine abbeys had houses built alongside the first for their own students, till twenty-five abbeys were represented. Others in the same way sent their men to Buckingham College, Cambridge. Over the doorways of the halls still standing at Worcester may be seen the escutcheons of their several abbeys; the griffin of Malmesbury, the cross of Norwich.

The house of the fourth great mendicant order, the Austin Friars, has disappeared as completely as the other three. On its site, in the reign of James I., Wadham College was built, but the phrase “doing Austins” long survived as a memory of the University exercises that took place in the Austin Schools.

The friars of the Order of the Redemption of Captives have left as little sign. Their property is part of the garden of New College.

But some of the houses of the Regular Orders, besides Gloucester Hall, remain in a translation. The College of the Novices from the Convent of Durham is the old part of Trinity. St. Mary’s College of the Regular Canons has left a gateway opposite New Inn Hall, and the latest-founded of the religious houses, that of St. Bernard for the Cistercians, still shows in the street with some changes as the front of St. John’s.

NEW COLLEGE, FROM THE GARDENS.

We have to think, then, of the Oxford of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as chiefly made up of the schools of the Regular and Mendicant Orders, afterwards suppressed. The Colleges of the third class, the Secular Clergy, were only beginning; the prevailing influence was that of the Dominican and Franciscan teachers, particularly the latter, with their Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus and Occam, to set off against the Aquinas and Albertus of the Parisian Dominicans. At the time of the Dissolution the numbers and spirit of the various religious houses had run very low. However, they made a push to extend their buildings, hoping so to ensure their wealth against the Royal Commission, just as the Colleges did in our own time. But Henry VIII. seems, in most cases, to have made for the lead from the roofs of the buildings as his own share of the spoil, and the later additions with their flat lead roofing would just meet his taste. The walls he sold or gave to others, who used them chiefly as quarries. A letter quoted by Mr. Fletcher, written to Thomas Cromwell by one of his agents, gives a good notion of the look of things at the time, and of the spirit of the reformers:-“The Black Fryers bathe in ther backsyde lykwise dyvers Ilonds well woddyd and conteyneth in lengith a great ground. There quere wasse lately new byldede and covered with ledde. It ys lykewisse a bigge Howse, and all coveryd with slatt, saving the queere. They have prety store of plate and juellys, and specially there ys a gudd chales of golde sett with stonys, and ys better than a C marks: and there ys also a gudd crosse with other things conteynyd in the bill. Ther ornaments be olde and of small valor. They have a very fayer Cundytt and ronnyth fresshelye. Ther be butt X. Fryers, being Prests besid the Anker, which is a well-disposyd man, and have 1. marks yerly of the King’s cofers.”

Now we turn to the reaction against all this; to the quarter of the University that remains, the quarter of the old town parishes in which the Halls and Colleges of the secular clergy grew.

And first we feel the Gothic pattern of the streets. We have left the water behind, but the streams had to do in determining the flow of the “stream-like” streets. They kept the forms they were pressed into by the castle and city walls; St. Giles’s bursting out wide from the point where the old north gate cramped it by St. Michael’s; Broad Street broad because just outside the circuit; the rest winding and twisting with the happiest effects for the jostling buildings.