An American At Oxford Part 8

IV

THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY AND THE COLLEGE

I

THE UNIVERSITY BEFORE THE COLLEGE

In the beginning was the university. The colleges were as unimportant as the university is now. If it be admitted that the university exists to-day, they were less important; for there were no colleges. The origin of the university was probably due to a migration of students in 1167 from the then world-famous University of Paris. The first definite mention of a _studium generale_ at Oxford, or a.s.sembly of masters of the different faculties, dates from 1185, when Giraldus Cambrensis, as he himself relates, read his new work, "Topographia Hibernia," before the citizens and scholars of the town, and entertained in his hostel "all the doctors of the different faculties."

At this time, and for many centuries afterward, Oxford, like other mediaeval universities, was a guild, and was not unlike the trade guilds of the time. Its object was to train and give t.i.tles to those who dealt in the arts and professions. The master tanner was trained by his guild to make leather, and he made it; the master of arts was trained by the university to teach, and he taught. He was required to rent rooms in the university schools, for a year and even two, and to show that he deserved his t.i.tle of master by lecturing in them, and conducting "disputations." The masters lived directly from the contributions of their hearers, their means varying with the popularity of their lectures; and the students were mainly poor clerks, who sought degrees for their money value.

The lectures were mere dictations from ma.n.u.script, necessitated by the lack of accessible texts. The students copied the lectures verbatim for future study. The instruction in arts covered the entire field of secular knowledge, the "seven arts," the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic or dialectic), and the quadrivium (music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy). The lectures were the main and often the only means of imparting knowledge. The disputations were scholastic arguments--debates--on some set question, and were conducted by the masters. They were the practical application of what the student had learned from the lectures, and were the chief means of intellectual training. Besides attending lectures and disputing, the candidate for the degree had to pa.s.s an examination; but the great test of his acquirement seems to have been the skill with which he used his knowledge in debate. Thus the formal disputations occupied very much the same place as the modern written examinations, and they must have required very much the same rare combination of knowledge, address, and pluck. All learning was in a pint-pot; but it was a very serviceable pint-pot.

The university education did not make a man above the work of the world: it made him an engine of so many horse power to perform it. It brought him benefices in that great sphere of activity, the mediaeval Church, and important posts in that other sphere of mediaeval statecraft, which was so often identified with the Church. If the clerk was above the carpenter, it was not because he came from a different station in life, for he often did not: it was because his work was more important. And he was far above the carpenter. It was a strenuous, glorious life, and the man of intelligence and training found his level, which is the highest. The kings and the n.o.bility were warriors, and may have affected to despise education; but they were far from despising educated men. The machinery of state was organized and controlled by clerks from the university. If the scientific and mechanical professions had existed then, there is no doubt that they would not have been despised as to-day, but would have had full recognition.

Socially, the university was chaos. In the absence of colleges, all the students lived with the townsmen in "chamberdekyns," which appear to be etymologically and historically the forbears of the "diggings"

to which the fourth year man now retreats when he has been routed from college by incoming freshmen and by the necessity of reading for his final examination. But such discipline as is now exerted over out-of-college students was undreamed of. In his interesting and profoundly scholarly history of the universities of the Middle Ages, the Rev. Hastings Rashdall gives a vivid picture of mediaeval student life, which was pretty much the same in all the universities of Europe. Boys went up to the university at as early an age as thirteen, and the average freshman could not have been older than fifteen; yet they were allowed almost absolute liberty. Drunkenness was rarely treated as a university offense; and for introducing suspicious women into his rooms, it was only on being repeatedly caught that an undergraduate was disciplined. At the University of Ingolstadt, a student who had killed another in a drunken quarrel had his scholastic effects and garments confiscated by the university. He may have been warned to be good in future, but he was not expelled. "It is satisfactory to add," Rashdall continues, "that at Prague, a Master of Arts, believed to have a.s.sisted in cutting the throat of a Friar Bishop, was actually expelled." The body of undergraduates was "an undisciplined student-horde." Hende Nicholas, in Chaucer's "Miller's Tale," is, it must be admitted, a lively and adventuring youth; but he might have been much livelier without being untrue to student life in chamberdekyns.

The townspeople seem to have been the not unnatural fathers of the tradesmen and landlords of modern Oxford; and the likeness is well borne out in the matter of charges. But where to-day a man sometimes tries amiably to beat down the landlord's prices, the way of the Middle Ages was to beat down the landlord. As the student was in many cases of the same station in life as the townsman, he naturally failed to command the servility with which the modern undergraduate is regarded. Both sides used to gird on their armor, and meet in battles that began in bloodshed and often ended in death. Pages of Rashdall's history are filled with accounts of savage encounters between town and gown, which are of importance historically as showing the steps by which the university achieved the anomalous legal dominance over the city which it still in some measure retains. For our present purpose, it is enough to note that mediaeval Oxford was unruly, very.

"Fighting," says Rashdall, "was perpetually going on in the streets of Oxford.... There is probably not a single yard of ground in any part of the cla.s.sic High Street that lies between St. Martin's and St.

Mary's [almost a quarter of a mile] which has not at one time or other been stained with human blood. There are historic battlefields on which less has been spilt."

As if this were not enough, there were civil feuds. In the Middle Ages, sectional differences were more obvious and more important than now; and the first subdivision of the universities, both in England and on the Continent, was by "nations." At Oxford there were two nations; and if, when the north countryman rubbed elbows with the south countryman, he was offended by his silken gown and soft vowels, he rapped him across the pate. Hence more strife and bloodshed. Amid all this disorder there was a full measure of mediaeval want and misery. At best, the student of moderate means led a precarious life; and poor students, s.h.i.+vering, homeless, and starved, lived by the still reputable art of the beggar. Something had to be done.

II

THE MEDIaeVAL HALL

The mediaeval spirit of organization, which resulted in so many n.o.ble and deathless inst.i.tutions, was not slow in exerting itself against the social chaos of the university. Out of chaos grew the halls, and out of the halls the colleges. The first permanent organizations of student life were small, and had their origin in the immediate wants of the individual. To gain the economy of cooperation and the safety of numbers, the students at Oxford, as at Paris and elsewhere, began to live in separate small colonies under one roof. These were called aulae or halls. They were no less interesting in themselves than for the fact that they were the germ out of which the Oxford college system grew.

At first the halls appear to have been mere chance a.s.sociations. Each had a princ.i.p.al who managed its affairs; but the princ.i.p.al had no official status, and might even be an undergraduate. The halls correspond roughly to the fraternities of American college life. Their internal rule was absolutely democratic. The students lived together by mutual consent under laws of their own framing, and under a princ.i.p.al of their own electing. They were quite without fear or favor of the university. The princ.i.p.al's duties were to lease the hall, to be a sort of over-steward of it, and to lead in enforcing the self-imposed rules of the community. His term of office, like his election, depended on the good-will of his fellows; if he made himself disliked, they were quite at liberty to take up residence elsewhere.

In the thirteenth century there was really no such thing as university discipline. The men who lived in the halls came and went as they pleased, and were as free as their contemporary in chamberdekyns to loiter, quarrel, and carouse. Chaucer's "Reeve's Tale" gives us a glimpse into "Soler Halle at Cantebregge," from which it would appear that the members were quite as loose and free as Hende Nicholas, their Oxford contemporary. But the liberty was an organized liberty. In contrast with the chaos of the life of the students in chamberdekyns, the early halls must have been brave places to work and to play in, and one might wish that a fuller record had been left of the life in them. It was their fate to be obscured by the greater splendor and permanence of the colleges to which they paved the way.

III

THE COLLEGE SYSTEM

The English college, roughly speaking, is a mediaeval hall supported by a permanent fund which the socii or fellows administer. The first fund for the support of scholars was bequeathed in 1243, but it can scarcely be regarded as marking the first college, for it provided for two scholars only, and these lived where they pleased. In 1249 William of Durham bequeathed a fund for the support of ten or more masters of arts. At first these also lived apart; it was only in 1280, after the type of the English college had been fixed, that they were formed into the body now known as University College. The first organized community at Oxford was founded by Sir John de Balliol some little time before 1266; but the allowances to the scholars, as was the case in colleges of the University of Paris, after which it was doubtless modeled, were not from a permanent fund, being paid annually by the founder. Balliol cannot therefore be regarded as the first characteristic English college. It was not until 1282 that Sir John's widow, Dervorguilla, adopted the new English idea by making the endowment of the "House of Balliol" permanent, and placing it under the management of the fellows.

The real founder of the English college was Walter de Merton. In 1264 Walter provided by endowment for the permanent maintenance of twenty scholars, who were to live together in a hall as a community; and in 1274 he drew up the statutes which fix the type of the earliest English college. The princ.i.p.al of Merton was not, like the princ.i.p.al of a mediaeval hall, the temporary head of a chance community, but a permanent head with established power; and he had to manage, not the periodic contributions of free a.s.sociates, but a landed estate held in permanent trust. He was called "warden," a t.i.tle which the head of Merton retains to this day. This idea of a body supported in a permanent residence by a permanent fund is perhaps of monastic origin, and was accompanied by certain features of brotherhood rule. The scholars lived a life of order and seclusion which was in striking contrast to the life of the students in chamberdekyns, and even of those in the halls. But with the monastic order they had also the monastic democracy, so that in one way the government of the college was strikingly similar to that of the halls. Vacancies in the community were filled by cooptation, and the warden was elected by the thirteen senior fellows from their own number. Though partly monastic in const.i.tution, the Hall of Merton was not properly a religious body.

The fellows took no vows, and seem rather to have been expected to enter lay callings. This College of Merton was the result of a gradual development of the hall along monastic lines--a lay brotherhood of students. It was destined to work a revolution in English university life and in English university teaching. The const.i.tutions of University and Balliol were, as I have indicated, remodeled on the lines of Merton; and other colleges were founded as follows: Exeter, 1314; Oriel, 1324; Queens, 1341; and Canterbury, now extinct, 1362, most of which were profoundly influenced by the const.i.tution of Merton.

[Ill.u.s.tration: NEW COLLEGE CLOISTERS, BELL TOWER, AND CHAPEL]

It was at first no part of the duty of the elders (socii, or, as Chaucer calls them, felawes) to teach the younger. The scholars of the college received the regular mediaeval education in the university. But even in Merton the germ of tutorial instruction was present. Twelve "parvuli" who were not old enough, or sufficiently used to the Latin tongue, to profit by the lectures and disputations of the university, lived in or near the colleges and were taught by a grammar master; and it appears that even the older scholars might, "without blus.h.i.+ng,"

consult this grammar master on matters that "pertained to his faculty." In his relation to these older students the grammar master may be regarded as the precursor of the system of tutorial instruction.

The first college to develop regular undergraduate instruction within its walls was "S. Marie College of Winchester in Oxford," founded in 1379, by William of Wykeham. "S. Marie's" brought in so many innovations that it came to be called "New College," a t.i.tle which, incongruously enough, it has retained for more than five hundred years. Wykeham's first innovation was to place the grammar master, for the greater good of his pupils, at the head of a "college" of seventy boys at Winchester, thus outlining the English system of public schools. New College was accordingly able to exclude all who had not attained the ripe age of fifteen. The effect of this innovation on the college was peculiar. When the boys came up from Winchester, they appear to have been farther advanced than most of the undergraduates attending lectures and disputes in the university schools; in any case, Wykeham arranged that the older fellows should supplement the university teaching by private tuition within the college. Little by little the New College type succeeded that of Merton. Magdalen College, founded in 1448, carried the tutorial system to its logical end by endowing lectures.h.i.+ps in theology, metaphysics, and natural philosophy. The older colleges--those of the Merton type--little by little followed this new example, so that by the end of the Middle Ages it was possible for a student to receive his entire instruction within the walls of his college. In Wolsey's splendid foundation, Cardinal College (1522), now styled Christ Church, there was a still more ample endowment for professors.h.i.+ps. At first the college instruction was regarded as supplementary to the university teaching, though it soon became far more important. The masters of the university continued to read lectures on the recognized subjects, living as of old on fees from those who chose to listen; but they were clearly unable to compete with the endowed tutors and professors of the colleges. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the mediaeval teaching master was disappearing. The only real teaching in arts--by all odds the most popular branch of study at Oxford--was given within the colleges and halls.

The discipline of the earlier colleges was much severer than that of to-day, but the difference is one of degree rather than of kind. The lectures in schools began at six, instead of nine; and at any hour it was forbidden to leave the college except on a studious errand. When attending out-of-college lectures, all scholars were required to go and come in a body; and in one set of statutes even a chaplain was forbidden to leave the gates, except to go to lectures or to the library, without taking at least one companion, who, in the antique phrase of the statute, was to be a "witness of his honest conversation." There were only two meals a day, dinner at ten and supper at five. Breakfast, now the great rallying-point of Oxford hospitality, was the invention of a more luxurious age. Of athletics there was none, or next to none. The only licensed hilarities were certain so-called "honest jokes," with which the tutors were in at least one case required to regale their pupils after dinner, and a "potation" which was permitted after supper, perhaps as an offset to the "honest jokes."

[Ill.u.s.tration: NEW COLLEGE GARDENS Showing the mediaeval wall of Oxford]

The severity of these regulations is mainly explainable in the fact that the inmates of the colleges were fed, clothed, and housed out of the endowment, and might thus be reasonably expected to give a good account of themselves. Furthermore, they were most of them mere boys.

A statute dating as late as 1527 requires that "scholars" shall be at least twelve years old. At fourteen or fifteen a scholar might become a fellow. The average age of "determining" as bachelor of arts was little if at all over seventeen. At nineteen, the age at which the modern Oxonian comes up from the public schools, the mediaeval student might, if he were clever, be a master of arts, lecturing and disputing in schools for the benefit of the bachelors and scholars of the university.

The modern Oxonian delights to tell visiting friends that he is forbidden by statute to play marbles on the steps of the Bodleian, and to roll hoop in the High; but if a mediaeval master of arts were to "come up" to-day, he would be amused, not that so many rules framed for his boyish pupils of old should be applied to grown men, but that the men so obviously require a check to juvenile exuberance. Yet this much has been gained, that the outgrown restrictions of college life have kept Oxford wholesomely young. The survivals of the monastic system meanwhile have kept it wholesomely democratic.

After the colleges reached their full development, the extinction of the mediaeval university as an inst.i.tution for teaching was largely a matter of form. The quietus was given in 1569. The Earl of Leicester, then chancellor, ordered that the government should be in the hands of the chancellor, doctors, proctors, and the heads of the colleges and halls. In 1636 (the year of the founding of the first American college) the statutes of the university were revised and codified by Archbishop Laud; the sole authority was placed in the hands of an oligarchy composed of the leading dons of the colleges. The government was limited to the vice-chancellor, the proctors, and the heads of houses, and the vice-chancellor and the proctors were elected in sequence by each of the colleges from its own members. The teaching of the university was now legally as well as actually in the hands of the college tutors, and the examination was in the hands of a board chosen by the colleges. University lectures were still delivered in the schools by the regent masters, but they had ceased to play any important part in Oxford education.

IV

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE MEDIaeVAL HALL

Like the colleges, the halls meanwhile tended gradually towards an organized community life. The starting-point was a regulation that the princ.i.p.al should give the university security for the rent of the house. The logical result of this was that the princ.i.p.al became the representative of the university, and the hall one of its recognized inst.i.tutions. The advantage of living in separate communities meantime had become so clearly evident that by the middle of the fifteenth century chamberdekyns were abolished. All students not living in a college were required to live in a hall. It was thus that the halls lost some of their democratic independence. At this period in their development they may be roughly compared to such modern American halls as Claverly at Harvard, where the residents govern their own affairs in the main, admitting newcomers only by vote, but are all alike subject to the authority of a resident university proctor. The a.n.a.logy is by no means close, for the princ.i.p.al of the mediaeval hall was not so much a resident policeman as the actual head of the community.

As the colleges developed tutorial instruction, the halls followed suit; the local administrator became responsible not only for the social regime, but for the tuition of the undergraduates. The halls thus differed from the college mainly in that they had no corporate existence such as is necessary to an endowed inst.i.tution. The mediaeval hall was now in its golden age; it was a well-conceived instrument for all the purposes of residence and of education. It is especially to be noted that the regime of the community was still in the main democratic. Though the head was appointed by the university, he had to be accepted by vote of the undergraduates, a provision that was still observed, at least in one instance, until the close of the nineteenth century.

The discipline of the halls of the fifteenth century, severe though it was by comparison with that of the earliest halls, was far less severe than the discipline in the colleges. It was quite as much as the university could accomplish, according to Rashdall, "to prevent students expelled from one hall being welcomed at another, to prevent the masters themselves condoning or sharing the worst excesses of their pupils, to compel fairly regular attendance at lectures and other university or college exercises, to require all students to return home by curfew at 8 or 9 P.M., to get the outer doors of the pedagogy locked till morning, and to insist on the presence of a regent throughout the night." When the early habits of the community generally are remembered, it will be evident that these regulations still allowed a vast deal of liberty, or rather of license. Boys of fifteen or sixteen living in the very centre of large and densely populated towns were in general perfectly free to roam about the streets up to the hour at which all respectable citizens were accustomed, if not actually compelled by town statutes, to retire to bed.

The halls were reduced in number by the wars of the Roses and by a period of intellectual stagnation that followed, but they still numbered seventy-one, as against eighteen colleges (including those maintained by monasteries, which disappeared with the Reformation); and the number of their students is estimated at seven hundred, as against three hundred in the colleges. In the light of subsequent development it seems probable that it would have been far better for the university if the halls had remained the characteristic subdivision. Their fate was decided not by any inherent superiority on the part of the colleges, but by the force of corporate wealth.

Even in the fifteenth century, the halls were tending to pa.s.s into the possession of the colleges, and later events made the tendency a fact.

"As stars lose their light when the sun ariseth," says an ancient Cambridge worthy, "so all these hostels decayed by degrees when endowed colleges began to appear." The Reformation, and a recurrent pestilence, "the sweating sickness," a kind of inflammatory rheumatism due apparently to the unwholesome situation of the university, resulted in a sharp falling off in the number of students. The colleges lived on, however thinned their ranks, by virtue of the endowments; but the halls disappeared with the students who had frequented them. In 1526 it was recorded that sixteen had lately been abandoned. When the numbers of the university swelled again under Elizabeth, the increase found place partly in the few halls that were left, but mainly in the colleges. In 1602 there were only eight halls, and these were all mere dependencies of separate colleges. "_Singulae singulis a colegiis pendent_," as a contemporary expresses it. Only one of these, St. Edmund Hall, now retains even a show of the old democratic independence, and this has lately been brought into closer subjection to Queen's College. Socially as well as educationally, the mediaeval university faded before the organization and endowment of the colleges. The life of Oxford was concentrated in a dozen or more separate inst.i.tutions, and so thoroughly concentrated that there was little a.s.sociation, intellectual or social, between any two of them.

V

THE ORIGIN OF THE MODERN UNDERGRADUATE

If the tutors of New College were epoch-making, the amplitude and splendor of its social life were no less so. Its original buildings are in such perfect preservation that it is hard to believe that they are almost the oldest in Oxford, and that the New College quadrangle is the father of all quads. The establishment of the "head" was of similar dignity. The master of Balliol received forty s.h.i.+llings yearly; the warden of New College, forty pounds. In the statutes of an old Cambridge college we find it required that since it would be "indecent" for the master to go afoot, and "scandalous" to the college for him to "conducere hackeneye," he might be allowed one horse. The warden of New College had a coach and six. As century followed century the value of the endowments increased, and the scale of living was proportionately raised. The colleges in general became the home of comfort, and sometimes of a very positive luxury.

In the colleges of the Middle Ages the students were the _socii_, and were maintained by the endowment. These are the dons and foundationers, or scholars.h.i.+p men, of to-day. But the comfort and order of the life in the colleges were very attractive, and the sons of the rich were early welcomed as "gentlemen commoners," precursors of the modern "commoners." The statutes of Magdalen make the first clear provision for receiving and teaching such "non-foundation"

students. They permit the admission of twenty _filii n.o.bilium_ as _commensales_, or commoners, in the vernacular. At first these were few and unimportant; in the centuries during which the numbers of the university were at an ebb, they could easily be accommodated within the depleted colleges. When the university increased under Elizabeth, the idea of living in halls in the mediaeval fas.h.i.+on, as we have seen, was obsolescent, so that the result of the increase was to enlarge the colleges. Thus, largely as a matter of chance, the commoners of to-day, the characteristic and by far the larger part of the undergraduate body, live under a regime invented for the endowed scholars of the Middle Ages, and the democratic license of the mediaeval undergraduate at large has given way to a democratic rule of commoners in colleges. Though the commoner is no longer called a gentleman commoner, he is more than likely to come from a family of position and means, for the comfort of life in the colleges is expensive. All this has transformed Oxford from a mediaeval guild of masters and apprenticed students, a free mart of available knowledge, into a closely organized anteroom to social and professional life.

VI

THE INSIGNIFICANCE OF THE MODERN UNIVERSITY

Though the university as a teaching body pined before the rising colleges, and for centuries lay in a swoon, it was not dead. It was kept alive by certain endowments for lecturers. But so thoroughly did the college tutors supply all undergraduate needs that, unless walls indeed have ears, the lectures were never heard. The professors gradually abandoned the university schools and gave the unattended lectures in their own houses. Such lectures were known as "study lectures." Even these gave way to silence. An odd situation was caused by the fact that there were also salaries paid to university proctors, a part of whose duty it was to see that the professorial lectures were properly given. When a proctor appeared, the learned professor would s.n.a.t.c.h up his ma.n.u.script and read until his auditor got tired and left. This was one case in which a thief was not the person to catch a thief; such energy on the part of the proctor was unusual, and was regarded as in extremely bad form. The abuse proceeded so far that in some cases, when hearers appeared at the appointed hour, the professors refused point blank to read their lectures. The climax of the farce was that at graduation students were fined for having cut these lectures that had never been given. When Samuel Johnson was fined for neglecting a college lecture to go "sliding on Christ Church Meadow," he exclaimed, "Sir, you have fined me twopence for missing a lecture that was not worth a penny!" His untimely departure from Oxford has lamentably left us to conjecture what he would have said upon paying the university fines at graduation for cutting lectures that had never been given.