The Coming of the Friars Part 9

VI.

THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY.

. . . . "so famous, So excellent in art, and still so rising."

Some years ago I found myself in a Northern capital, and committed myself to the guidance of a native coachman, whose business and pride it was to drive me from place to place, and indicate to me the important buildings of his majestic city. He was a patriotic showman, and I am bound to say he showed us a great deal; but the most memorable moment of that instructive day was when he stopped before, what seemed to us, a respectable mansion in a respectable street, and announced to us that "you" was "the Free Kirk _Univairsity_." It was the first time in my life that I had heard four stone walls with a roof over them called a University. It was not long, however, before I discovered that I myself had been living with my head in a sack and, in more senses than one, had been of those

Who sweep the crossings, wet or dry, And all the world go by them.

Only so could it have come to pa.s.s that this new meaning for an old word had struck me as strange, not to say ludicrous.

Licuit semperque licebit Signatum praesente nota producere nomen.

_Allowable?_ Yes! and much more than merely allowable; it is inevitable that as the ages roll we should attach new meanings to old words. And if this is inevitable, not the less inevitable is it that, when we desire to trace the history of the thing signified, we should be compelled to recur to the original meaning of the name by which the thing is designated.

A word at starting upon the remarkable book [Footnote: "The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge, and of the Colleges of Cambridge and Eton." By the late Robert Willis, M.A., F.R.S. Edited, with large additions, and brought up to the present time, by John Willis Clark, M.A., late Fellow of Trin. Coll., Camb. 4 vols. super-royal 8vo Cambridge: The University Press.] which has suggested the following article. To say of it that it is quite the most sumptuous work that has ever proceeded from the Cambridge Press, is to say little. It is hardly too much to say that it is one of the most important contributions to the social and intellectual history of England which has ever been made by a Cambridge man. The t.i.tle of the work conveys but a very inadequate notion of its wide scope, of the encyclopaedic learning and originality of treatment which it displays, and, least of all, of the abundance of _human interest_ which characterizes it so markedly. It is because of this wealth of human interest that the book must needs exercise a powerful fascination upon those who have a craving to get some insight into the life of their forefathers; and it is because I believe the number of such students of history is in our times rapidly on the increase, that I am anxious to draw attention to some few of the many matters treated of so ably in these magnificent volumes.

The term _University_, in its original acceptation, was used to designate any aggregate of _persons_ a.s.sociated in a political, religious, or trading corporation, having common interests, common privileges, and common property. The inhabitants of a town, the members of a fraternity, the brethren of a guild, the monks or canons of a religious house, when addressed in formal instruments, were addressed as a _University_. Nay! when the whole body of the faithful is appealed to as Christian men, the ordinary phrase made use of by lay or ecclesiastical potentate, when signifying his wishes or intentions, is "Noverit _Universitas_ vestra." A University in this sense, regarded as an aggregate of persons, might be localized or it might not; its members might be scattered over the whole Christian world, or they might const.i.tute an inner circle of some larger community, of which they--though a _Universitas_- formed but a part. A University in its original signification meant no more than our modern term an a.s.sociation. When men a.s.sociated together for purposes of trade, they were a trading _Universitas_; when they a.s.sociated for religious objects, they were a religious _Universitas_; when they a.s.sociated for the promotion of learning, they were a learned _Universitas_. But the men came first, the bricks and mortar followed long after. The architectural history, in its merely technical and professional details, could only start at a point where the University, as an a.s.sociation of scholars and students, had already acquired power and influence, had been at work for long, and had got to make itself felt as a living force in the body politic and in the national life. It was because the antiquaries of a former age lost sight of this truth that they indulged in the extravagances they did. Starting from the a.s.sumption that stonewalls make an inst.i.tution, they professed to tell when the Universities came into existence and who were their earliest founders. The authors of this modern _Magnum Opus_ have set themselves to deal with a far more instructive problem. Their object has been to trace the growth of the University of to-day in its concrete form, down from the early times when it existed only in the germ; and to show us how "the glorious fellows.h.i.+p of living men,"

which const.i.tuted the _personal_ University of the eleventh or the twelfth century, developed by slow degrees into the brick-and- mortar Universities of the nineteenth--such Universities as are springing up all over the world; their teachers advertised for in _The Times_, and their students tempted to come and be taught in them by the bait of money rewards.

As to the exact time when a band of scholars and teachers first made their home in Cambridge or Oxford, and began to attract to themselves from the four winds cla.s.ses of eager youths hungry for intellectual food and anxious to listen and learn, that we must be content to leave undetermined. They who like the flavour of the old antiquarianism may enjoy it in its spiciest form, if they choose to hunt up among certain forgotten volumes now grown scarce. They may read what John Caius (p.r.o.nounced Keys) wrote as the champion of Cambridge, and Thomas Caius wrote as champion of Oxford; they may rejoice their hearts over the Battle of the Keys, and come to what conclusion they prefer to arrive at. For most of us, however, this sort of old-world lore has lost its charm. A man lives through his taste for some questions. The student of history nowadays is inclined to say with St. Paul, "So fight I not as one that beateth the air,"

and to reject with some impatience the frivolous questions which help not a jot towards bringing us into closer relation with the life and personality of our ancestors.

"I am halt sick of shadows," said The Lady of Shalott;

and we, too, have grown weary of weaving our webs with our backs to the light. There is no making any way in Cloudland. We ask for firm ground on which to plant our footsteps, if we would move onwards.

It would have been very galling to the Oxford antiquaries of Queen Elizabeth's days to have to acknowledge that there was a Cambridge before there was an Oxford. Nevertheless the fact is so. Hide your diminished heads, ye rash ones who would fain have us believe that a thousand years before our era, King Mempric, the wicked king whom the wolves ate--as was right and fitting they should--built a n.o.ble city, which as time went on "was called _Oxonia_, or by the Saxons _Oxenfordia_." Alack! it turns out that we must make an enormous step along the course of time before we can find trace of any such city or anything like it. It turns out that "the year 912 saw Oxford made a fortified town, with a definite duty to perform and a definite district a.s.signed to it." What! Seven years after the great Alfred had closed his eyes in death, and left to others the work which he had showed them how to do? Yes! Even so. It may be very hard to have to confess the odious crime of youth; but it seems almost capable of demonstration that Cambridge, as a fortress and a a town existed a thousand years before Oxford was anything but a desolate swamp, or at most a trumpery village, where a handful of Britons speared eels, hunted for deer, and laboriously manufactured earthenware pots. What have we to do with thee, thou daughter of yesterday? Stand aside while thine elder sister--ay, old enough to be thy mother--takes her place of honour. She has waited long for her historian; he has come at last, and he was worth waiting for.

In times before the Roman legionaries planted their firm feet in Britain, there was a very formidable fortress at Cambridge. It contained about sixty acres; it was surmounted by one of those mighty earthworks which the hand of man in the old days raised by sheer brute force, or rather by enormous triumph of organized labour. The Romans drove out the Britons, and settled a garrison in the place.

Two of the great Roman roads intersected at this point, and the conquerors called it by a new name, as was their wont, retaining some portion of the old one. In their language it was known as _Caniboritum_. The primeval fortress stood on the left bank of the river, which some called the Granta and some called the Cam; and for reasons best known to themselves, the Romans did not think fit to span that river by a bridge, but they made their great Via Devana pa.s.s sheer through the river-as some Dutch or German Irrationalist has pretended that the children of Israel did when they found the Jordan barring their progress--that is, those Roman creatures constructed a solid pavement in the bed of the sluggish stream, over which less audacious engineers would have thrown an arch. Through the water they carried a kind of causeway, and the name of the place for centuries indicated that it was situated on the _ford_ of the Cam. But what the Roman did not choose to do, that the people that came after him found it needful to do. In the Saxon Chronicle we find that the old fortress which the Romans had held and strengthened, and then perforce abandoned, had got to be called Granta-brygge; and this name, or something very like it, it retained when the great survey was made as the Norman Conqueror's reign was drawing to its close. By this time the town had moved across to the right bank of the river, and had become a town surrounded by a ditch and defended by walls and gates. Already it contained at least four hundred houses, and on the site of the old mound the Norman raised a new castle, and in doing that he laid some twenty-nine houses low.

The early history of Oxford is more or less connected with that of the obscure and insignificant monastery of St. Frideswide, though even at Oxford it is observable that the town and the University grew up in almost entire independence of any influence exercised by any of the older religious houses. At Cambridge this was much more the case.

There were no _monks_ at Cambridge at any time; there never were any nearer than at the Abbey of Ely, in the old times a long day's journey off, and accessible in the winter, if accessible at all, only by water. King Knut, we are told, greatly favoured the Abbey of Ely, visited it, was entertained there, in fact restored it. But at Cambridge there were no monks. No _real_ monks; a fact which ought to be a significant hint to "all educated men," but which, unhappily, is likely to be significant only to the few who have taken the trouble to learn what a real monk professed to be. If there were no monks at Cambridge, there was something else. Outside the walls of the town there rose up, in the twelfth century, the priory of Barnwell-a priory of Augustinian _canons_; and, moreover, a nunnery-the Benedictine nunnery of St. Rhadegunda. Within the walls there was another house of Augustinians, which was known as St.

John's Hospital; that is, a house where the canons made it part of their duty to provide a spurious kind of _hospitality_ to travellers, much in the same way that the Hospice of St. Bernard offers food and shelter now to the wayfarer, and with such food and shelter something more--to wit, the opportunity of wors.h.i.+pping the Most High in peace, up there among the eternal snows. At St. John's Hospital, as at St. Bernard's, the grateful wanderer who had found a refuge would leave behind him his thankoffering in recognition of the kindly treatment he had met with, and it might happen that these free gifts const.i.tuted no small portion of the income on which the canons-- for the most part a humble and unpretentious set of men-kept up their houses.

With the dawn of the thirteenth century came the great revivalists-- the friars. Wherever the friars established themselves they began not only to preach, but to teach. They were the awakeners of a new intellectual life; not only the stimulators of an emotional pietism always p.r.o.ne to run into religious intoxication and extravagance.

With the coming of the friars what may be called the modern history of Cambridge begins. Not that it can be allowed that there were no schools of repute on the banks of the Cam till the coming of the friars; it is certain that learning had her home at Cambridge long before this time.

As early as 1187 Giraldus Cambrensis came to Oxford and read his _Expugnatio Hiberniae_ in public lectures, and entertained the doctors of the diverse faculties and the most distinguished scholars.

[Footnote: Bishop Stubbs's "Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern History," p. 141, 8vo, 1886.] Oxford was doubtless at that time more renowned, but Cambridge followed not far behind. If the friars settled at Cambridge early in their career, it was because there was a suitable home for them there--an opening as we say--which the flouris.h.i.+ng condition of the University afforded. There were scholars to teach, there were masters to dispute with, there were doctors to criticize, oppose, or befriend. Doubtless, too, there were already strained relations between the townsmen and the gownsmen at Cambridge as at Oxford. The first great "town and gown row" which we hear of took place at Oxford in 1209, but when we do hear of it we find the other University mentioned by the historian in close connection with the event recorded. The townsmen under great provocation had seized three of the gownsmen _in hospitio suo_ and threw them into the gaol. King John came down to make inquiry, and he hung those three, guiltless though they were, as Matthew Paris a.s.sures us. Hereupon there was intense indignation, and the University dispersed. Three thousand of the gownsmen migrated elsewhere, some to Cambridge we learn. Oxford for a while was deserted. This was fifteen years before the Franciscans settled among us. It was the year in which King John was excommunicated. There were only three bishops left in England; the king had worried all the rest away. There was misery and anarchy everywhere. Yet, strange to say, in the midst of all the bitterness men _would_ have their sons educated, and the Universities did not despair of the republic. Shadowy and fragmentary as all the evidence is on which we have to rely for the history of the Universities during the twelfth century, it is enough to make us certain that the friars settled at Cambridge because there they found scope for their labours. There was undoubtedly a University there long before they arrived. Nevertheless, it is not till the middle of the reign of Henry the Third (A.D. 1216-1272) that we come upon any direct mention of a corporation which could be regarded as a chartered society of scholars at Cambridge, and it is difficult to resist the conviction that, whatever may have been its previous history, and however far back its infancy may date, the friars were to some extent nursing fathers of the University of Cambridge.

And this brings us again to the point from which we started a page or two back, and gives me the opportunity of quoting a pa.s.sage from Professor Willis's introduction, which will serve at once as a continuation of and comment upon what has been said, while leading us on to what still lies before us.

The University of the Middle Ages was a corporation of learned men, a.s.sociated for the purposes of teaching, and possessing the privilege that no one should be allowed to teach within their dominion unless he had received their sanction, which could only be granted after trial of his ability. The test applied consisted of examinations and public disputations; the sanction a.s.sumed the form of a public ceremony, and the name of _a degree_; and the teachers or doctors so elected or created carried out their office of instruction by lecturing in the public schools to the students who, desirous of hearing them, took up their residence in the place wherein the University was located. The degree was in fact merely a license to teach; the teacher so licensed became a member of the ruling body.

We have arrived at this point--we find ourselves at the beginning of the thirteenth century face to face with a _University_ at Cambridge, a University which, existing originally in its inchoate condition of an a.s.sociation vaguely aiming at the improvement of the methods of education and the encouragement of scholars, had gradually grown into a recognized and powerful body, with direct influence and control over its members; a body, too, which had become so identified with the interests of culture and research that a change had already begun in the generally received acceptation of its name, and already the word "university" had begun to be restricted to such a _Universitas_ as was identified with the life and pursuits of learning and learned men. This means that, _pari pa.s.su_ with its increase in power, the University had grown too, in the number of its members--the teachers and the taught. The time had arrived when the demands of professors and students for adequate accommodation would become pressing. Lecturers with popular gifts would expect a hall capable of holding their audiences. Public disputations could not be held in a corner. Receptions of eminent scholars from a distance, and all those ceremonials which were so dear to gentle and simple in the middle ages, required s.p.a.ce, and were the more effective the grander the buildings in which they were displayed, Yet how little the Cantabs of the thirteenth century could have dreamt of what was coming! What a day of small things it was! Six hundred years ago the giant was in his cradle.

Meanwhile, another need than that of mere schools and lecture-halls had begun to be felt. The scholars who came for what they could get from the teachers--the regents and the doctors--flocked from various quarters; they were young, they were not all fired with the student's love of learning; they were sometimes noisy, sometimes frolicsome, sometimes vicious. As now is the case at Edinburgh and Heidelberg, so it was then at Cambridge, the bonds of discipline were very slight; the scholars had to take their chance; they lodged where they could, they lived anyhow, each according to his means; they were homeless.

It was inevitable that all sorts of grave evils should arise.

The lads--they were mere boys--got into mischief, they got into debt with the Jews; for there were Jews at Cambridge, not a few; they were preyed upon by sharpers, were fleeced on the right hand and on the left; many of them learned more harm than good. The elder men, and they who had consciences and hearts, shook their heads, and asked what could be done? For a long time the principle of _laissez faire_ prevailed: the young fellows were left to the tender mercies of the townsfolk. There was no grandmotherly legislation in those days. Gradually a kind of joint-stock arrangement came into vogue. Worthy people seemed to have hired a house which they called a _hostel_ or hall, and sub-let the rooms to the young fellows; the arrangement appears to have been clumsily managed, and led to dissensions between town and gown; the townsmen soon discovered that the gownsmen were gainers by the new plan, and they themselves were losers. They grumbled, protested, quarrelled. But it was a move in the right direction, and a beginning of some moral discipline was made, and that could not but be well. These _hostels_ were set up at Cambridge certainly at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and how long before we cannot tell; but it was at Oxford that the first _college_, as we understand the term, rose into being. It was Walter de Merton, Chancellor of England, who was the father of the collegiate system in England. So far from embarking upon a new experiment without careful deliberation, he spent twelve years of his life in working out his ideas and in elaborating the famous _Rule of Merton_, of which it is not at all too much to say that its publication const.i.tuted an era in the history of education and learning in England. Merton died in 1277. Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely, who survived him nine years, appears to have been moved with a desire to do for Cambridge what Merton had done for Oxford. Balsham is spoken of as the founder of St. Peter's College, and in one sense he was so. The bishops of Ely were the patrons of Cambridge. Bishop Balsham asked himself what could be done, and set himself to deal with the problems which presented themselves for solution in the condition of his own University. He was not a great man, that seems clear enough: his schemes were crude; he bungled. The truth seems to me to be that the feeling at Cambridge was one of suspicion, and there are indications that the bishops of Ely in an awkward fas.h.i.+on were opposed to anything like _secular education_. We hear of money being left to support _priests_ studying theology, and of an experiment for introducing scholars as residents in the Hospital of St. John. The canons were to take in the young scholars as _boarders_ into their house, and look after their conduct and morals. The plan did not answer. It was an attempt to put new wine into old bottles. There came an explosion. Cambridge in the thirteenth century had not the _men_ that Oxford had, so Oxford kept the lead. Perhaps there was some soreness. Did ecclesiastics shake their heads as they saw the walls of Balliol College rise, and learnt that there was just a little too much importance given to mere scholars.h.i.+p, and no prominence given to theology in those early statutes of 1282? Did they, without knowing why, antic.i.p.ate with anxiety the awakening of a spirit of free thought and free inquiry among those scholars of the Merton, Rule? Did the orthodox party resort to prophecy, which is seldom very complimentary or cheerful in its utterances?

This is certain, that while Balliol College was building there was a stir among the Benedictines, and an effort made to a.s.sert themselves and take their place among the learned. John Giffard started his great college for the reception of student monks at Oxford. It became, and for centuries continued to be, the resort of the Benedictine order, and was supported by levies from a large number of the old monasteries. The inference is forced upon us that the English monasteries no longer stood in the front rank as seats of learning.

Students and scholars would no longer go to the monks; the monks must go to the scholars. But the establishment of a seminary for the reception of young monks at Oxford tended to the strengthening of the ecclesiastical influence in that University. Cambridge lost in the same proportion that Oxford gained. Even the great Priory of Norwich sent its promising young monks to Qxford, pa.s.sing by the nearer and more conveniently situated University. As early as 1288 we find entries in the Norwich Priory Rolls of payments for the support of the schools and scholars at Oxford. It was long after this that Cambridge offered any similar attraction to the "religious."

Be it noted that until Merton's day people had never heard of what we now understand by a _college_. It was a novelty in English inst.i.tutions. Men and women had lived commonly enough in societies that were essentially religious in their character. Some of those societies, and only some, had drifted into becoming the quiet homes of learning as well as of devotion; but the main business-the _raison d'etre_ of monks and nuns and canons-was the practice of asceticism, the keeping up of unceasing wors.h.i.+p in the church of the monastery--the endeavour to be holier than men of the world need be, or the endeavour to make the men of the world holier than they cared to be. The religious orders were religious or they were nothing. Each new rule for the reformation of those orders aimed at restoring the primitive idea of self-immolation at the altar--a severer ritual, harder living, longer praying. Nay! the new rules, in not a few instances, were actually aimed against learning and culture. The Merton Rule was a bringer in of new things. Merton would not call his society of scholars a _convent_, as the old monkish corporations had been designated. That sounded too much as though the mere promotion of pietism was his aim; he revived the old cla.s.sical word _collegium_. There had been _collegia_ at Rome before the imperial times; though some of them had been religious bodies, some were decidedly not so. They were societies which held property, pursued certain avocations, and acted in a corporate capacity for very mundane objects. Why should not there be a _collegium_ of scholars? Why should students and men of learning be expected to be holier than other people? When Merton started his college at Oxford, he made it plain by his statutes that he did not intend to found a society after the old conventual type, but to enter upon a new departure.

The scholars of the new college were to take no vows; they were not to be worried with everlasting ritual observances. Special chaplains, who were presumably not expected to be scholars and students, were appointed for the ministration of the ceremonial in the church.

Luxury was guarded against; poverty was not enjoined. As long as a scholar was pursuing his studies _bona fide_, he might remain a member of the college; if he was tired of books and bookish people, he might go.

When a man strikes out a new idea, he is not allowed to keep it to himself very long. The new idea soon gets taken up; sometimes it gets improved upon; sometimes very much the reverse. For a wise man acts upon a hint, and it germinates; a fool only half apprehends the meaning of a hint, and he displays his folly in producing a caricature. Hugh de Balsham seems to have aimed at improving upon Merton's original idea. He meant well, doubtless; but his college of Peterhouse, the first college in Cambridge, was a very poor copy of the Oxford foundation. Merton was a man of genius, a man of ideas; Balsham was a man of the cloister. Moreover, he was by no means so rich as his predecessor, and he did not live to carry out his scheme.

The funds were insufficient. The first college at Cambridge was long in building. Cambridge, in fact, was very unfortunate. Somehow there was none of the dash and enthusiasm, none of the pa.s.sion for progress, which characterized Oxford. Cambridge had no moral genius like Grosseteste to impress his strong personality upon the movement which the friars stirred, no commanding intellect like that of Roger Bacon to attract and dazzle and lead into quite new regions of thought the ardent and eager spirits who felt that a new era had begun; no Occam or Duns Scotus or Bradwardine; no John Wielif to kindle a new flame--say, rather, to take up the torch which had dropped from Bradwardine's hand, and continue the race which the others had run so well. What a grand succession of men it was!

Five colleges had been founded at Oxford before a second arose at Cambridge. After that they followed in rapid succession, and the reign of Edward the Third had not come to an end when no fewer than seven colleges had been opened at Cambridge. Five of them have survived to our own days, and two were eventually absorbed by the larger foundation which Henry the Seventh was ambitious of raising, and which now stands forth in its grandeur, the most magnificent educational corporation in the world.

Where did all the money come from, not only to raise the original buildings in which the _University_, as a teaching body, pursued its work, but which also provided the _houses_ in which the _colleges_ of scholars lived and laboured?

Unhappily, we know very little of the University buildings during this early period. All the industry of Mr. Clark has not availed to penetrate the thick obscurity; but this at least is pretty certain, namely, that the earliest University buildings at Cambridge were very humble structures cl.u.s.tering round about the area now covered by the University schools and library, that it was not till the middle of the fourteenth century that any attempt was made to erect a building of any pretension, and that the "Schools Quadrangle was not completed till 130 years after the first stone was laid." The University of Cambridge was for ages a very poor corporation; it had no funds out of which to build halls or schools or library. The ceremonies at _commencement_ and on other great occasions took place in the churches, sometimes of the Augustinian, sometimes of the Franciscan friars. In these early times the gownsmen dared not contemplate the erection of a senate-house wherein to hold their meetings. When the fourteenth-century schools were planned their erection was doubtless regarded as a very bold and ambitious experiment. The money came in very slowly, the work stopped more than once, and when it proceeded it was only by public subscription that the funds were gathered. In 1466, William Wilflete, Master of Clare Hall and Chancellor of the University, actually made a journey to London to gather funds from whatever quarters he could, and he dunned his friends, and those on whom the University had any claim, so successfully that on June 25 of that year a contract for proceeding with the work was drawn up and signed, but it was nearly nine years after this before the schools were finally completed, together with a new library over them, by the special munificence of Archbishop Rotherham, who had further enriched the library with numerous volumes of great value.

The tie which bound the members of the _University_ together was much weaker than that which united the members of the same _college_. The colleges were, in almost every case, founded by private munificence, and in most cases were commenced during the lifetime of the several founders; but when we come to look into the sources of the college revenues we find that the actual gifts of money, or indeed of lands, was less than at first sight appears. A very large proportion of the endowments of these early colleges came from the _spoliation of the parochial clergy_. Popular writers in our own time declaim against the horrible sin of buying and selling church preferment, as if it were a modern abomination. Let a man only spend half an hour in examining the _fines_ or records of transfers of property in England during the fourteenth century and he will be somewhat surprised to discover what a part the buying and selling of advowsons played in the business transactions of our forefathers five centuries ago. Advowsons were always in the market, and always good investments in those days, But not only so. A pious founder could do a great deal in the way of making perpetual provision for the mention of his name by posterity at a small cost if he took care to manipulate ecclesiastical property with prudence.

There was a crafty device whereby the owner of the advowson could _appropriate_ the t.i.thes of a benefice to the support of any corporation which might be considered a _religious_ foundation.

The old monasteries had benefited to some extent from this disendowment of the secular clergy, the Augustinian canons, during the twelfth century, being the chief gainers by the pillage. When the rage for founding colleges came in, and the awful ravages of the Black Death had depopulated whole districts, the fas.h.i.+on of alienating the revenues of the country parsons and diverting them into the new channel grew to be quite a rage. The colleges of secular priests living together in common, or what it is now the fas.h.i.+on to call a clergy house, might be and were strictly _religious_ foundations; and could the colleges of scholars, of teachers and learners who presumably were all priests, or intended for the priesthood, be regarded as less _religious_ than the others? So it came to pa.s.s that the t.i.thes of parish after parish were diverted into a new channel, and these very colleges at Cambridge which were professedly meant to raise the standard of education among the seculars were endowed at the expense of those same secular clergy. In order that the country parsons might be better educated, it was arranged that the country parsons should be impoverished!

Seven new colleges opened in less than thirty years at Cambridge alone! Think what this must have meant. I suspect that Oxford had attracted the reading men, and Cambridge possessed charms for the fast ones. How else are we to explain Archbishop Stratford's stringent order in 1342 for the repression of the dandyism that prevailed among the young scholars? These young Cantabs of the fourteenth century were exquisites of the first water. Their fur- trimmed cloaks and their tippets; their shoes of all the colours of the rainbow; their dainty girdles, bejewelled and gilt, were a sight to see. And then their hair! positively curled and powdered, and growing over their shoulders, too; and when they pa.s.sed their fingers through the curls, look you, there were rings on their fingers! Call you these scholars? Chaucer's "Clerk of Oxenforde" was of a very different type:--

For all that he might of his frendes hentc On books and in learning he it spente.

Nevertheless it can hardly have been but that the foundation of so many colleges at Cambridge brought in a stricter discipline; the new collegiate life of the scholars began. Perhaps for the majority of readers no part of Mr. dark's great work will prove so attractive as the last four hundred pages, with their delightful essays on "The Component Parts of a College." Here we have traced out for us in the most elaborate manner, the gradual development of the collegiate idea, from the time when it expressed itself in a building that had no particular plan, down to our own days, when colleges vie with one another in architectural splendour and in the lavish completeness of their arrangements.

At the outset the uninitiated must prepare to have some of their favourite theories rudely shattered. We are in the habit of a.s.suming that a quadrangle is one of the essential features of a college. It is almost amazing to learn that the quadrangular arrangement was adopted very gradually.

Again, we are often a.s.sured that the colleges at the two older universities are the only relics of the monastic system, and are themselves monastic in their origin. A greater fallacy could hardly be propounded. It would be nearer the truth to say that the founding of the colleges was at once a protest against the monasteries and an attempt to supersede them.