Читать книгу Oxford and Its Story - Cecil Headlam - Страница 10

“About this time Samuel the servant of God was Judge in Judea, and King Magdan had two sons, that is to say Mempricius and Malun. The younger of the two having been treacherously slain by the elder, the fratricide inherited the kingdom. In the twentieth year of his reign, he was surrounded by a large pack of very savage wolves, and being torn and devoured by them, ended his existence in a horrible manner. Nothing good is related of him except that he begot an honest son and heir, Ebrancus by name, and built one noble city which he called from his own name Caer-Memre, but which afterwards in course of time was called Bellisitum, then Caerbossa, at length Ridohen, and last of all Oxonia, or by the Saxons Oxenfordia, from a certain egress out of a neighbouring ford. There arose here in after years an universal and noble seat of learning, derived from the renowned University of Grek-lade.

“It is situated between the rivers Thames and Cherwell which meet there. The city, just as Jerusalem, has to all appearance been changed; for as Mount Calvary, when Christ was crucified, was just outside the walls of the city, and now is contained within the circuit of the walls, so also there is now a large level space outside Oxford, contiguous to the walls of the town, which is called Belmount, which means beautiful mount, and this in a certain way agrees with one of the older names of the city before named and recited; that is to say Bellisitum; whence many are of opinion that the University from Greklade was transferred to this very Bellus Mons or Bellesitum before the coming of the Saxons and while the Britons ruled the island, and the Church of S. Giles, which was dedicated under the name of some other saint, was the place for the creation of graduates, as now is the Church of S. Mary, which is within the walls....”

The origin of the city is, of course, not the same thing as the origin of the University, and John Rous, it will be observed, has adopted the story according to which the University was said to have been transplanted to Oxford from “Grekelade.” This story is found in its earliest form in the Oxford Historiola, the account of the University prefixed to the official registers of the chancellor and proctors. It was probably written towards the end of the reign of Edward III., somewhere in the third quarter of the fourteenth century. The sound of Greek in the name Cricklade is quite

The Turret Quad Merton College

enough, in the minds of those who have studied mediæval chronicles—histories “farct with merry tales and frivolous poetry”—to account for the origin of the myth as to the Greek philosophers. Do you not find for instance, the name of Lechelade suggesting Latin schools (Latinelade) at that place by an analogous etymological conceit?

Saith the Historiola, then, after premising that the University is the most ancient, the most comprehensive, the most orthodox and the most richly endowed with privileges:—

“Very ancient British histories imply the priority of its foundation, for it is related that amongst the warlike Trojans, when with their leader Brutus they triumphantly seized the island, then called Albion, next Britain, and lastly England, certain philosophers came and chose a suitable place of habitation upon this island, on which the philosophers who had been Greek bestowed the name which they have left behind them as a record of their presence, and which exists to the present day, that is to say Grekelade....”

The grounds of the other statements quoted from John Rous are yet more fanciful. The assertion that the University was transferred from without to within the city walls is a vague echo of a worthless story, and the name given to the town Bellesitum is obviously a confusion arising from the latinised form of Beaumont, the palace which Henry I. built on the slope towards S. Giles. The names of Caer-bossa and Ridochen (Rhyd-y-chen) are equally unhistorical, and are based upon the fantastic Welsh equivalents of Oxenford, invented by the fertile genius of Geoffrey of Monmouth for the purposes of his romance (twelfth century).

It would scarcely have been worth while to mention even so briefly the ingenious myths of the early chroniclers if it had not been for the fact that they have swamped more scientific history and that they were used with immense gusto by the champions in that extraordinary controversy which broke out in the days of Elizabeth, and lasted, an inky warfare of wordy combatants, almost for centuries. It was a controversy in which innumerable authorities were quoted, and resort was had even to the desperate device of forgery.

It arose from the boast of the Cambridge orator, who on the occasion of a visit of Elizabeth to Cambridge, declared:

“To our great glory all histories with one voice testify that the Oxford University borrowed from Cambridge its most learned men, who in its schools provided the earliest cradle of the ingenuæ artes, and that Paris also and Cologne were derived from our University.”

With that assertion the fat was in the fire. Assertions were issued, and counter-assertions, commentaries and counter-commentaries.

It is impossible to follow the course of the controversy here. Suffice it to say that when the war had been waged for some years, it seemed evident that the victory would lie with the Oxonians, who claimed Alfred as their founder, if they could prove their claim. And the claim appeared to be proved by a passage attributed to Asser, the contemporary historian of Alfred’s deeds, and surreptitiously inserted into his edition of that author by the great Camden. But that passage occurs in none of the manuscripts of Asser, and certainly not in the one which Camden copied. It was probably adopted by him on the authority of an unscrupulous but interested partisan who, having invented it, attributed it to a “superior manuscript of Asser.”

The University cannot, then, claim Alfred the Great either as her founder or restorer. All the known facts and indications point the other way. It was not till 912, some years after Alfred’s death, that Edward the Elder obtained possession of Oxford, which was outside Alfred’s kingdom; Asser knew nothing of this foundation. It was not till the days of Edward III., that Ralph Higden’s Polychronicon apparently gave birth to the myth with the statement that Alfred—

“By the counsel of S. Neot the Abbot, was the first to establish schools for the various arts at Oxford; to which city he granted privileges of many kinds.”

And from that time the myth was repeated and grew.

But if King Alfred did not found the University who did? or how did it come into existence?

Briefly the case stands thus. Before the second half of the twelfth century—the age of Universities—there are no discoverable traces of such a thing at Oxford, but in the last twenty years of that century references to it are frequent and decided. The University was evidently established, and its reputation was widely spread.

There abounded there, contemporaries inform us, “men skilled in mystic eloquence, weighing the words of the law, bringing forth from their treasures things new and old.” And the University was dubbed by the proud title “The Second School of the Church.”

She was second, that is, to Paris, as a school of Theology, and to Paris, the researches of modern experts like Dr Rashdall lead us to believe, she owed her origin.

The Universities, the greatest and perhaps the most permanent of Mediæval Institutions, were a gradual and almost secret growth. For long centuries Europe had been sunk in the gloom of the Dark Ages. The light of learning shone in the cloister alone, and there burned with but a dim and flickering flame. In Spain not one priest in a thousand about the age of Charlemagne could address a common letter of salutation to another. Scarcely a single person could be found in Rome who knew the first elements of letters; in England, Alfred declared that he could not recollect one priest at the time of his accession who understood the ordinary prayers. Learning lay buried in the grave of Bede. At Court, emperors could not write, and in the country contracts were made verbally for lack of notaries who could draw up charters.

But towards the end of the eleventh century Europe began to recover from this state of poverty and degradation. Christendom had gained a new impulse from the Crusades. Trade revived and began to develop, some degree of tranquillity was restored, and the growing wealth of the world soon found expression in an increasing refinement of manners, in the sublime and beautiful buildings of the age of Cathedrals, and in a greater ardour for intellectual pursuits.

A new fervour of study arose in the West from its contact with the more cultured East. Everywhere throughout Europe great schools which bore the name of Universities were established.

The long mental inactivity of Europe broke up like ice before a summer’s sun. Wandering teachers, such as Lanfranc or Anselm, crossed sea and land to spread the new power of knowledge. The same spirit of restlessness, of inquiry, of impatience with the older traditions of mankind, either local or intellectual, that had hurried half Christendom to the tomb of its Lord, crowded the roads with thousands of young scholars, hurrying to the chosen seats where teachers were gathered together. A new power, says an eloquent historian, had sprung up in the midst of a world as yet under the rule of sheer brute force. Poor as they were, sometimes even of a servile race, the wandering scholars, who lectured in every cloister, were hailed as “Masters” by the crowds at their feet.

This title of “Master” suggests, of course, the nomenclature of the Guilds. A University, in fact, was a Guild of Study. The word implies[13] a community of individuals bound together for any purpose, in this case for the purpose of teaching. It was applied to the whole body of students frequenting the “studium,” and hence the term came to be used as synonymous with “studium” to denote the institution itself. The system of academical degrees dates from the second half of the twelfth century. After the manner of mediæval craftsmen in other trades, the profession of teaching was limited to those who had served an apprenticeship in a University or Guild of Study and were qualified as Masters of their Art. Nobody was allowed to teach without a licence from such a Guild, just as no butcher or tailor was allowed to ply his trade without having served his proper term and having been approved by the Masters of his Guild. A University degree, therefore, was originally simply a diploma of teaching, which afterwards came to be regarded as a title, when retained by men who had ceased to lecture or teach. “Bachelor” was the term applied to students who had ceased to be pupils but had not yet become teachers. The word was generally used to denote an apprentice or aspirant to Knighthood, but in the Universities came to have this technical signification. The degree of Bachelor was in fact an important step on the way to the higher degree of Master or Doctor.

One of the first symptoms of the twelfth century renaissance may be traced in the revival in Italy of the study of jurisprudence as derived from the laws of Justinian. For early in the twelfth century a professor named Irnerius opened a school of civil law at Bologna, and Lombardy was soon full of lawyers. Teachers of that profitable art soon spread from Bologna throughout Europe, and their University was the first to receive from Frederic Barbarossa the privileges of legal incorporation. It presently became known as the special University of young archdeacons, whose mode of life gave rise to the favourite subject of debate “Can an archdeacon be saved?” But it was the school of philosophy at Paris which chiefly attracted the newly-kindled enthusiasm of the studious. The tradition of the schools of Charlemagne may have lingered there, although no direct connection between them and the University which now sprang into being can be proved. As early as 1109 William of Champeaux opened a school of logic, and it was to his brilliant and combative pupil, Peter Abelard, that the University owed its rapid advancement in the estimation of mankind. The multitude of disciples who flocked to his lectures, and listened with delight to his bold theories and his assertion of the rights of reason against authority, showed that a new spirit of enquiry and speculation was abroad. The poets and orators of antiquity were, indeed, beginning to be studied with genuine admiration, and the introduction into Europe of some of the Arabian writings on geometry and physics was opening the door to the development of mathematical science. But the flower of intellectual and scientific enquiry was destined to be nipped in the bud by the blighting influence of scholasticism. Already among the pupils of Abelard was numbered Peter Lombard, the future author of “The Sentences,” a system of the doctrines of the Church, round which the dogmatic theology of the schoolmen, trammelled by a rigid network of dialectics, was to grow up.

It was the light before a dawn which never broke into day. But as yet the period was one of awakening and promise. Students from all parts crowded to Paris, and the Faculty[14] of Arts in the University was divided into four “nations”—those of France, Picardy, Normandy and England. John of Salisbury became famous as one of the Parisian teachers. Becket wandered to Paris from his school at Merton. After spending twelve years at Paris, John of Salisbury, the central figure of English learning in his time, finally returned to England. S. Bernard recommended him to Archbishop Theobald, and in the archbishop’s household at Canterbury he found in existence a very School of Literature, where scholars like Vacarius came to lecture on civil law, where lectures and disputations were regularly held, and men like Becket and John of Poictiers were trained.

“In the house of my Lord the Archbishop,” writes Peter of Blois, “are most scholarly men, with whom is found all the uprightness of justice, all the caution of providence, every form of learning. They after prayers and before meals, in reading, in disputing, in the decision of causes constantly exercise themselves. All the knotty questions of the realms are referred to us....”

This archiepiscopal school was in fact a substitute for the as yet undeveloped Universities. Besides this school there were, in England, schools in connection with all the great Cathedral establishments and with many of the monasteries as well as the houses of the nobles. There were, for instance, great schools at S. Alban’s and at Oxford. But these studia were not studia generalia; they were schools merely, not Universities. It was perhaps to the school which had sprung up in connection with S. Frideswide’s monastery that Vacarius lectured, if he lectured at Oxford at all.

It was in such a monastic school, in connection with S. Frideswide’s, Osney, or S. George’s in the Castle, that Robert Pullen of Paris lectured on the Bible for five years (1133), and Theobaldus Stampensis taught. Henry Beauclerc endeavoured to retain the services of the former by offering him a bishopric, but he refused it and left England; Stephen, on the other hand, bade Vacarius cease from lecturing, since the new system of law, which he taught and which had converted the Continent, was inconsistent with the old laws of the English realm. As to Theobaldus Stampensis, he styles himself Magister Oxenefordiæ, and letters from him exist which show that he, a Norman ecclesiastic who had taught at Caen, taught at Oxford before 1117. An anonymous reply to a tractate in which he attacked the monks, is responsible for the statement that this former Doctor of Caen had at Oxford “sixty or a hundred clerks, more or less.” But one school or one lecturer does not make a University.

It has, however, been held, that just as the University of Paris developed from the schools of Notre Dame, so the University of Oxford grew out of the monastic schools of S. Frideswide’s. Such a growth would have been natural. But if this had been the real origin of the University, it may be regarded as certain that the members of it would have been subjected to some such authority as that exercised by the Chancellor of Notre Dame over the masters and scholars of Paris. But at Oxford, the masters and scholars were never under the jurisdiction of the Prior or Abbot of S. Frideswide’s or Osney. If they had been, some trace or record of their struggle for emancipation must have survived. The Chancellor, moreover, when he is first mentioned, proves to be elected by the masters and scholars and to derive his authority, not from any capitular or monastic body in Oxford, but from the Bishop of Lincoln. And the University buildings themselves, in their primitive form, bear silent witness to the same fact, that the schools or studium in connection with which the University grew up were in no way connected with conventual churches and monasteries. For the schools were not near S. Frideswide’s but S. Mary’s.

The independence of the Oxford masters from any local ecclesiastical authority is a significant fact. Combined with another it seems to admit of but one explanation. That other fact is the suddenness with which the reputation of Oxford sprang up. Before 1167 there is, as we have shown, no evidence of the existence of a studium generale there, but there are indications enough that in the next few years students began to come, clerks from all parts of England.

The account of the visit of Giraldus Cambrensis (1184-5) reveals the existence of a Studium on a large scale, with a number of Masters and Faculties. It is a Studium Generale by that time without a doubt. And in 1192 Richard of Devizes speaks of the clerks of Oxford as so numerous that the city could hardly feed them.

What, then, is the explanation of this so sudden development? Probably it lies in a migration of scholars to Oxford at this time. The migratory habits of mediæval masters and scholars are familiar to everyone who has the smallest acquaintance with the history of the Universities. The Universities of Leipzig, Reggio, Vicenza, Vercelli, and Padua, for instance, were founded by migrations from one University or another. The story of Oxford itself will furnish instances in plenty of the readiness of the University to threaten to migrate and, when hard pressed, to fulfil their threat. Migrations to Cambridge, Stamford, and Northampton are among the undoubted facts of our history. Such a migration then would be in the natural course of things, though it would not satisfy the pride of the inventors of the Alfred myth. But a migration of this kind did not take place without a cause. A cause however is not to seek. At this very period the quarrel of Henry II. with Thomas a Becket was the occasion for a migration from Paris, the ordinary seat of higher education for English ecclesiastics.

A letter from John of Salisbury to Peter the Writer in 1167 contains this remark: “France, the most polite and civilised of all nations, has expelled the foreign students from her borders.”

This, as Dr Rashdall suggests, may possibly have been a measure of hostility aimed by the French King against the oppressor of Holy Church and against the English ecclesiastics, who as a body sided with their King against their not yet canonised primate.

Henry II., on the other hand, took the same measures to punish the partisans of Becket. All clerks were forbidden to go to or from the Continent without leave of the King, and all clerks who possessed revenues in England were summoned to return to England within three months, “as they love their revenues.” This would produce an exodus from Paris. A large number of English masters and scholars must have been compelled to return home. According to the usual procedure of mediæval students they were likely to collect in some one town and set up under their old masters something of their old organisation. These ordinances were promulgated between the years 1165 and 1169. The ports were strictly watched in order to enforce this edict.

The migrating scholars would land at Dover and lodge, perhaps, for a night or two at the Benedictine Priory there, before going on to Canterbury. Here, if they had been so minded, they might have stayed, and swelled the great literary circle, with its teachers and libraries, which had been formed there. But they left Gervase at Canterbury to write his history, and Nigel to compose his verses and polish his satires. Passing northwards, they might, had they come a little later, have been absorbed at Lambeth, and the scheme of Archbishop Baldwin for setting up a College there, which should be a centre of ecclesiastical learning, emancipated from monastic restrictions, might then have been realised. Or, if they had wished to attach themselves to any existing establishment, the monastic schools of St Alban’s might have welcomed them.

But they chose otherwise. It may be that their experience of Paris led them to choose a place which was neither a capital nor a See-town. At any rate the peculiar position of Oxford, which was neither of these and yet an important commercial and political centre, made it admirably suited for the free development of a University, unharassed by bishops and unmolested by lord mayors.

At Oxford, too, was the Palace of the King, and Henry II. was a champion of literary culture by his very descent. His grandfather had earned the title of Henry Beauclerk, the scholar King; and Fulk the Good, who had told King Lothar that an unlearned king is a crowned ass, was a lineal ancestor of his. And apart from his own hereditary tastes, the position of Henry as the most powerful king of the West, and the international correspondence which that position involved, tended to make the Court a centre of literary activity. Learning was sought not for itself only, but as a part of the equipment of a man of the world. For whatever reason, whether they were influenced by a desire, springing from experience of Paris, to establish themselves where they might be most independent, or by the physical advantages of Oxford, or the hope of favour from the King who had recalled them, and who at his Court and about his Palace of Beaumont had gathered round him all that was enlightened and refined in English and Norman society, or whether they were directed by mere chance, settling for a session and staying for centuries, it was to Oxford they came.

Here ready to receive them they would find a town which stood in the front rank of municipalities, commanding the river valley along which the commerce of Southern England mainly flowed. The mitred Abbey of Austin Canons, the Priory of S. Frideswide, the Castle of the D’Oiglis, and the Royal Palace without the Vallum marked the ecclesiastical and political importance of the place; the settlement of one of the wealthiest of the English Jewries in the very heart of the town indicated, as it promoted, the activity of its trade. It was still surrounded on all sides by a wild forest country. The moors of Cowley and Bullingdon fringed the course of the Thames; the great woods of Shotover and Bagley closed the horizon on south and east. But Oxford was easy of access, for there were the great roads that crossed at Carfax and there was the thoroughfare of the Thames. And facility of communication meant regularity of supplies, a matter of great importance to a floating population of poor students.

Here, then, the migrating masters and scholars set up their schools, and within a very short time the reputation of the University was established throughout the length and breadth of the land.

Giraldus Cambrensis, a Welshman, who had achieved fame as a lecturer at Paris, has given us an interesting account of his visit to Oxford in 1187. He came there with the purpose of reading aloud portions of his new work, as Herodotus read his history at the Panathenaic festival at Athens or at the National Games of Greece. Giraldus had written a book on Ireland—Topographia—and he chose this method of publishing and advertising it. He writes of himself in the third person, without any excessive modesty. You might almost think he was a modern author, asking his critics to dinner and writing his own “Press notices.”

“In course of time, when the work was finished and revised, not wishing to hide his candle under a bushel, but wishing to place it in a candlestick so that it might give light, he resolved to read it before a vast audience at Oxford, where the clergy in England chiefly flourished and excelled in clerkly lore. And as there were three distinctions or divisions in the work, and each division occupied a day, the readings lasted three successive days. On the first day he received and entertained at his lodgings all the poor people of the whole town; on the second all the doctors of the different faculties, and such of their pupils as were of fame and note; on the third the rest of the scholars with the milites of the town, and many burghers. It was a costly and noble act, for the authentic and ancient times of the poets were thus in some measure renewed; and neither present nor past time can furnish any record of such a solemnity having ever taken place in England.”

It is evident from this passage that the Schools at Oxford were by this time of considerable note and size. There was a University here now in fact if not in name or by charter. A few years later the records reveal to us the first known student in it. He was a clerk from Hungary named Nicholas, to whom Richard I. who had been born in the Palace of Beaumont, made an allowance of half a mark weekly for his support during his stay at Oxford for the purpose of study.

Thus, then, by the beginning of the reign of King John, we may be sure that there was established at Oxford a University, or place of general study, and this University had attracted to itself an academic population, which was estimated by contemporaries at no less than three thousand souls. And now, just as the country won its Great Charter of Liberties from that oppressive and intolerable Angevin monarch, so documentary evidence of the independent powers of the University was first obtained, as the result of a series of events, in which the citizens of Oxford had been encouraged to commit an act of unjust revenge by their reliance on John’s quarrel with the pope and the clergy. The pope had laid the whole country under an interdict; the people were forbidden to worship their God and the priests to administer the sacraments; the church-bells were silent and the dead lay unburied on the ground. The King retaliated by confiscating the land of the clergy who observed the interdict, by subjecting them in spite of their privileges to the Royal Courts, and often by leaving outrages on them unpunished. “Let him go,” he said, when a Welshman was brought before him for the murder of a priest, “he has killed my enemy.” Such were the political conditions, when at Oxford a woman of the town was found murdered in circumstances which pointed to the guilt of a student. The citizens were eager for vengeance, and they took the matter into their own hands (1209).

The offender had fled, but the mayor and burgesses invading his hostel arrested two innocent students who lodged in the same house. They hurried them outside the walls of Oxford, and, with the ready assent of John, who was then at Woodstock, hung them forthwith. This was a defiance of ecclesiastical liberty. For it was a chief principle of the Church that all clerks and scholars, as well as all higher officials in the hierarchy, should be subject to ecclesiastical jurisdiction alone. For this principle Becket had died, and in defence of this principle a quarrel now arose between the University and the town which bade fair to end in the withdrawal of the former altogether from Oxford. In protest the masters and scholars migrated from the town, and transferred their schools to Paris, to Reading and to Cambridge. It is, indeed, to this migration that the Studium Generale on the banks of the Cam may owe its existence.

The halls of Oxford were now deserted, the schools were empty. So they remained as long as John’s quarrel with the pope endured. But when the King had knelt before the Papal Legate, Pandulf (1213), and sworn fealty to the pope, the Church succeeded in bringing the citizens, who had no doubt found their pockets severely affected in the meantime, to their senses. A Legatine ordinance of the following year is the University’s first charter of privilege. The citizens performed public penance; stripped and barefooted they went daily to the churches, carrying scourges in their hands and chaunting penitential psalms. When they had thus obtained absolution, and the University had returned, the Legate issued a decree by which the townsmen were bound in future, if they arrested a clerk, to deliver him up on demand to the Bishop of Lincoln, the Archdeacon of Oxford or his official, to the Chancellor set over the scholars by the bishop, or some other authorised representative of the episcopal power. And thus was established that immunity from lay jurisdiction which, under slightly different conditions, is still enjoyed by every resident member of the University.

This is the first allusion in any authentic document to the existence of the chancellorship.

Among the minor penalities to which the townsmen were now subjected was the provision that for ten years one-half the rent of existing hostels and schools was to be altogether remitted, and for ten years more rents were to remain as already taxed before the secession by the joint authority of the town and the masters. Further, the town was forever to pay an annual sum of fifty-two shillings to be distributed among poor scholars on the feast of S. Nicholas, the patron of scholars, and at the same time to feast a hundred poor scholars on bread and beer, pottage and flesh or fish. Victuals were to be sold at a reasonable rate, and an oath to the observance of these provisions was to be taken by fifty of the chief burgesses, and to be annually renewed at the discretion of the bishop. The payment of the fine was transferred by an agreement with the town to the Abbey of Eynsham in 1219, and by an ordinance of Bishop Grossetete the money was applied to the foundation of a “chest.”

The size and importance of the University was shortly afterwards increased by a somewhat similar disturbance which took place in Paris (1229). A brawl developed into a serious riot, in which several scholars, innocent or otherwise, were killed by the Provost of Paris and his archers. The masters and students failing to obtain redress departed from Paris in anger. Henry seized this opportunity of humiliating the French Monarchy by fomenting the quarrel and at the same time inviting “the masters and the University of scholars at Paris” to come to study in England, where they should receive ample liberty and privileges. A migration to Oxford was the result of this royal invitation, which was highly appreciated not only by the English students at Paris but also by many foreigners. Two years later the King was able to boast that Oxford was frequented by a vast number of students, coming from various places over the sea, as well as from all parts of Britain.

The University remained till well towards the end of the thirteenth century a customary rather than a legal or statutory corporation. And in its customs it was a reproduction of the Society of Masters at Paris.

The privileges and customs of Paris were, in fact, the type from which the customs and privileges of all the Universities which were now being founded in Europe were reproduced, and according to which they were confirmed by bulls and charters. Thus in 1246 Innocent V. enjoined Grossetete to see that in Oxford nobody exercised the office of teaching except after he had qualified according to the custom of the Parisians. Whilst then the idea of a University was undoubtedly borrowed from the Continent, and Oxford, so far as her organisation was concerned, was framed on the Continental models, yet the establishment of a University in England was an event of no small importance. Teaching was thereby centralised, competition promoted, and intellectual speculation stimulated. At a University there was more chance of intellectual freedom than in a monastic school.

If such was the origin of the University, Alfred did not found it, still less did he found University College.

University College, “the Hall of the University,” may undoubtedly claim with justice to be the earliest University endowment. But it was at one time convenient to that College, in the course of a lawsuit in which their case was a losing one, to claim, when forgeries failed them, to be a royal foundation. The Alfred myth was to hand, and they used it with unblushing effrontery and a confident disregard of historical facts and dates. Their impudence for the time being fulfilled its purpose, and it also left its mark on the minds of men. The tradition still lingers. The College Chapel was dedicated at the end of the fourteenth century to S. Cuthbert, Durham’s Saint, but the seventeenth-century Bidding Prayer still perpetuates the venerable fiction, and first among the benefactors of the “College of the great Hall of the University,” the name of King Alfred is cited. In 1872 the College even celebrated, by the English method of a dinner, the supposed thousandth anniversary of its existence. At that dinner the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Robert Lowe (Lord Sherbrooke), wittily upheld the tradition of his College. For, he argued, if Oxford was in the hands of the Danes at the time when Alfred founded the University, that fact only strengthened their case. For King Alfred was a man so much in advance of his age that it is not surprising to find that he had anticipated the modern political doctrine, which teaches us that the surest way to earn popularity, is to give away the property of our opponents.

University College

The story of the lawsuit will be found to be instructive if discreditable.

In 1363 the College by two purchases obtained possession of considerable property in land and houses which had been the estate of Philip Gonwardy and Joan his wife. After the College had been in possession some fourteen years, however, a certain Edmund Francis and Idonea his wife came forward to dispute the right to it. They maintained that Philip Gonwardy and his wife had had no true title to the estate, for it, or part of it, had been bequeathed to them by one John Goldsmith in 1307. And he, they asserted, had by a later document settled the same property upon them. The case was tried at Westminster; transferred to Oxford, where the College obtained a verdict in their favour, and then taken back on appeal to Westminster.

It was at this point that the document known as the French petition—it is written in the Court French of the day—was filed. Finding, apparently, that the case was going against them, the College determined to use the myth about Alfred, claim to be a royal foundation and thus throw the matter, and their liberties along with it, into the King’s hands, leaving the case to be decided by the Privy Council.

“To their most excellent and most dread and most sovereign Lord the King,” so ran the petition, “and to his most sage council, shew his poor orators, the master and scholars of his College, called Mickle University Hall in Oxenford, which College was first founded by your noble progenitor, King Alfred, whom may God assoil, for the maintenance of twenty-six divines for ever; that whereas one Edmund Francis, citizen of London, hath in virtue of his great power commenced a suit in the King’s Bench, against some of the tenants of the said masters and scholars, for certain lands and tenements, with which the College was endowed ... and from time to time doth endeavour to destroy and utterly disinherit your said College of the rest of its endowment.... That it may please your most sovereign and gracious Lord King, since you are our true founder and advocate, to make the aforesaid parties appear before your very sage council, to show in evidences upon the rights of the aforesaid matter, so that upon account of the poverty of your said orators your said College be not disinherited, having regard, most gracious Lord, that the noble saints, John of Beverley, Bede, and Richard Armacan (Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh), and many other famous doctors and clerks, were formerly scholars in your said College, and commenced divines therein, and this for God’s sake, and as a deed of charity.”

This deed, then, and others, these mere children in litigation did deliberately forge, attaching the Chancellor’s seal thereto, in order to substantiate their absurd, but profitable, pretension.

The device was successful for a time, although the very petition contains within itself glaring historical contradictions, which either show supreme ignorance on the part of the masters and scholars or a cynical assumption of the historical ignorance of lawyers. If the College was founded by King Alfred who came to the throne in 872, it would seem a little unwise to instance as famous scholars of that foundation “noble Saints” like John of Beverley, who was Archbishop of York in 705, and the venerable Bede who died in 735.

As to the real founder of University College all the evidence points to William, Archdeacon of Durham, who is mentioned as one of the five distinguished English scholars who left Paris in 1229, in consequence of the riots between the townsfolk and the University. Henry’s invitation to the Paris masters to come and settle at Oxford was immediately accepted by the other four. Their example was probably soon followed by William, after a sojourn at Angers. He was appointed Rector of Wearmouth, and is said to have “abounded in great revenues, but was gaping after greater.” Some litigation with the Bishop of Durham led him to appeal to the Papal Court. His appeal was successful, but it availed him little, for on his journey home he died at Rouen (1249). His bones are said by Skelton to lie in the Chapel of the Virgin in the Cathedral there. He left 310 marks in trust to the University to invest for the benefit and support of a certain number of masters. It was actually the first endowment of its kind, but it is to Alan Basset, who died about 1243, that the credit of providing the first permanent endowment for an Oxford scholar is due. For he conceived the idea of combining a scholarship with a Chantry. He left instructions in his will in accordance with which his executors arranged with the Convent of Bicester for the payment of eight marks a year to two chaplains, who should say mass daily for the souls of the founder and his wife, and at the same time study in the schools of Oxford or elsewhere.

This was a step in the direction of founding a College, and indeed the original plan of William was hardly more imposing.

The University placed Durham’s money in a “Chest,” and used it partly on their own business and partly in loans to others, barons in the Barons’ War for instance. Such loans were seldom repaid, and only 210 marks remained. This sum was expended in purchasing houses. The first house bought (1253) by the University was at the corner of School Street and St Mildred’s Lane (tenementum angulare in vico scholarum).

The site of this the first property held by the University for educational purposes[15] is now included in the front, the noisy, over-decorated front, of Brasenose College. It was called, naturally enough, first the Hall of the University and afterwards the little Hall of the University. A second purchase was made in 1255, when a tenement called Drogheda Hall, the then first house in the High Street on the north side, was bought. It stands almost opposite to the present Western Gate of the College. Brasenose Hall was the next purchase under William’s bequest (1262), and (1270) a quit rent of fifteen shillings, charged on two houses in S. Peter’s parish, was the last. William of Durham had not founded a College. There is nothing to show that the purchase of houses by the University was originally made with any other object than that of securing a sound investment of the trust money. There is nothing to show, that is, either that the houses were bought originally and specifically as habitations for the pensioned masters (though they may have lodged there), or that it was originally intended, either by the University or the founder, that they should form a community.

Statutes were not granted to the masters admitted to the benefits of this foundation until the year 1280, and by that time a precedent had been created. From the year 1280, then, may be dated the incorporation of what is now known as University College. A very small society of poor masters were, according to the revised plan, to live together on the bounty of William of Durham and devote themselves to the study of theology. And this idea of association was evidently adopted from the rule for Merton Hall laid down by Merton six years before. The revenue from the fund increased rapidly, so that by 1292, the society was increased from “four poor masters” to one consisting of two classes of scholars, the seniors receiving six and eightpence a year more than the juniors, and having authority over them. Other clerks of good character, not on the foundation, were permitted to hire lodgings in the Hall, prototypes of the modern commoner. Funds and benefactions accrued to the Hall. A library was built, and the society gradually enlarged. Members of it were enjoined to live like Saints and to speak Latin. In the election of new Fellows a preference was given to those “born nearest to the parts of Durham.” And a graduated fine was imposed, according to which a scholar who insulted another in private was to pay a shilling, before his fellows two shillings, and if in the street, in church or recreation ground, six and eightpence. For the administration of the College funds a bursar was annually appointed, whose accounts were subsequently approved and signed by the Chancellor. This practice of University supervision was maintained till 1722.

Yet another body of statutes was promulgated in 1311. The study of theology and the preference given to those who hailed from Durham were emphasised in accordance with the founder’s wishes. The Senior Fellow was required to be ordained, but any Fellow who was appointed to a benefice of five marks a year now forfeited his election. This latter regulation, which occurs in substance in most of the fourteenth century foundations—by the Statutes of Queens, indeed, a Fellow who refused a benefice forfeited his fellowship—shows that fellowships were intended not as mere endowments of learning but as stepping-stones to preferment. It does not, on the other hand, show that the founders did not contemplate the existence of life-fellows. I think that it is tolerably clear Walter de Merton did. The office of Master of the College grew out of the position of the Senior Fellow; his authority was asserted by new statutes given in 1476.

It was in 1332 that the scholars of William of Durham moved from the corner house on the north side of the High Street, if that was where they abode, to the site of their present College, bounded by Logic Lane and Grove Street, and forming in the southern curve of the High Street, one of the most effective and noble features in that splendid sweep which embraces, on the other side, Queen’s, All Souls’, St Mary’s, Brasenose, and All Saints’.

The society had received large benefactions from a generous donor, Philip Ingleberd of Beverley, and they now purchased Spicer’s (formerly Durham’s) Hall, the first house in St Mary’s parish, which stood near the present western gateway of University College. Further benefactions made further purchases possible. White Hall and Rose Hall in Kybald Street were bought, and Lodelowe Hall, on the east of Spicer’s Hall (1336). Spicer’s Hall soon came to be known as the University Hall; the hall next to it, when acquired, was distinguished as Great University Hall. The reversion to the remainder of the High Street frontage, between Lodelowe Hall and the present Logic Lane, was not secured till 1402, when the munificence of Walter Skirlaw, Bishop of Durham, enabled the society to extend their property and their numbers. The tenements thus acquired were called Little University Hall and the Cock on the Hoop. The next purchase of the College involved them in that lawsuit which has had so curious a result upon the imaginations of its subsequent members.

Thus, then, the foundation of William had become a College, “the first daughter of Alma Mater.” Being the first “Hall” acquired by the University it came to be spoken of as “The Hall of the University,” and the members of the foundation, as “Scholars of University Hall.” Their proper title, “Scholars of the Hall of William of Durham,” gradually fell out of use. Strangers to the University system usually find themselves confused by the relations of the University and the Colleges. The University, then, let it be said, is a corporation existing apart from the Colleges; the Colleges are separate incorporated foundations, independent though practically subordinate to it.

The old thatched halls of wood and clay were used till it became necessary to rebuild in 1632. A smaller version of the seventeenth century quadrangle then constructed was finished in 1719.

For in 1714 had died Dr John Radcliffe, a famous and witty doctor, whose skill had secured him the post of court physician and whose wit had deprived him of it. For he offended William III. by remarking to that dropsical monarch, that he would not have his two legs for his two kingdoms. It had long been known that the worthy doctor intended to make his College and his University his heirs. His munificence was rewarded by a public funeral of unexampled splendour and a grave in the nave of St Mary’s. The bulk of his fortune he devoted to specific purposes benefiting the University, but he left a large sum to University College “for the

Radcliffe Library from Brasenose Quad.

building of the front down to Logic Lane, answerable to the front already built, and for building the master’s lodging therein, and chambers for his two travelling Fellows,” whom he endowed. The Radcliffe Quadrangle commemorates his benefaction to his College; the Radcliffe Infirmary (Woodstock Road, 1770), the Radcliffe Observatory, built 1772-1795, on a site given by George, Duke of Marlborough; and last, but not least the Radcliffe Library, or as it is more usually termed the Camera Bodleiana (James Gibbs, architect, 1737-1749) stand forth in the city as the noble monuments of his intelligent munificence.

The magnificent dome of the latter forms one of the most striking features among Oxford buildings.[16]

Neither the University of Oxford nor University College can justly claim to be connected with the name of Alfred the Great. But there are relics of Alfred and Alfred’s time preserved at Oxford which should be of interest to the visitor. In the Bodleian may be seen certain coins which have led historians to assume that Alfred set up a mint at Oxford, and to argue from this supposed fact that his rule was firmly established over Mercia. The coins in question, which were all found in Lancashire, are variations of the type bearing these letters;—