Cecil Headlam

“ But such deprivation accentuates rather than spoils the happiness of student life, as anyone who is acquainted with the Quartier Latin will agree. When the heart is young and generous, when the spirit is free and the blood is hot, what matters hardship when there are comrades bright and brave to share it; what matters poverty when the riches of art and love and learning are being outspread before your eyes ”

“ The Old Learning was threatened with destruction. It rose in arms against Greek and heresy. Bishops fulminated. The clergy cried Antichrist, and clamoured for sword and faggot. The Universities forbade the sale of Erasmus’s writings, and, seeing what came of the study of Greek, declared that they would have no more of it. Oxford divided itself into two bodies, who called themselves Greeks and Trojans, the Trojans enormously preponderating. The “Greeks,” the adherents of the New Learning, were assailed with every kind of ridicule. ”

“ It was against these degenerate dullards that the human mind at last rebelled, when intellect was born again in the New Birth of letters. What wonder then if, suddenly freed from the dead weight of their demoralising stupidities, men broke out in the exuberance of their spirits into childish excesses, confused the master with his foolish and depressing pupils, strewed the quadrangle of New College with the leaves of Dunce, and put them to the least noble of uses, as though they had been the Chronicles of Volusius. ”

“ Oxford is a city of towers, and domes, and steeples, all of which possess their own peculiar character and beauty. As different as possible from the perfect proportions of Magdalen Tower or the ornate magnificence of the elaborate spire of the University Church, this spire is low and simple—squat almost in appearance. Its lowliness is easily explained. It was perhaps the very first spire built in England. The masons were cautious, afraid of their own daring in attempting to erect so lofty a construction, octagonal, upon the solid base of the Norman lower story. ”

“ The University opened the door to the Church, with all its dazzling possibilities of preferment, and the University itself was thrown open to the poorest by the system of the monastic houses and charitable foundations.
Promising lads, too, of humble origin were often maintained at the schools by wealthy patrons. From a villein one might rise to be a clerk, from a clerk become a master of the University—a fellow, a bursar, a bishop and a chancellor, first of Oxford, then of England. ”

“ The world of letters was divided for generations into the rival camps of Scotists and Thomists. But the two doctors have fared very differently at the hands of posterity. Thomas was made a Saint, judged to be a “candlestick,” and awarded by Dante a place high in the realms of Paradise. Duns Scotus, on the other hand, whose learning and industry were as great and his merit probably not much inferior, survives chiefly in the English language as a “dunce.” The name of the great Oxford scholar stands to the world chiefly as a synonym for a fool and a blockhead. ”

“ And what sedged brooks are Thames’s tributaries.”
Whichever way you choose you will turn now and again to look back upon the spires and towers of Oxford and Radcliffe’s dome, clustering together among rich gardens and noble trees, watered by the winding, willow-fringed Cherwell and the silver stream of Isis, “rivulets,” as Wood quaintly phrases it, “which seem to the prying spectator as so many snakes sporting themselves therein.” And so gazing you will let your fancy roam and think of her past history and her future influence on thought and the affairs of State. ”

“ The Edwardine commissioners, as we have seen, appointed to reform the University, visited the libraries in the spirit of John Knox. All the books were destroyed or sold. In Convocation (1556) “venerable men” were chosen to sell the empty shelves and stalls, and to make a timber-yard of Duke Humphrey’s treasure-house!
But the room remained; and it was destined, in its very emptiness and desolation, to work upon the imagination of one Thomas Bodley, an accomplished scholar, linguist and diplomatist, who believed with Bury that a “library of wisdom is more precious than all wealth.” ”

“ Magdalen Tower is one of those rarely beautiful buildings, which strike you with a silent awe of admiration when first you behold them, and ever afterwards reveal to your admiring gaze new aspects and unsuspected charms. It is changeable as a woman, but its changes are all good and there is nothing else about it that is feminine. ”

“ For this purpose he built a chapel to the Virgin in the parish where he then lived. His example was followed by his pupils. “So study,” such was the maxim he loved to impress upon them, “as if you were to live for ever; so live as if you were to die to-morrow.” How little the young scholar, to whom Oxford owes her first introduction to the Logic of Aristotle, cared for the things of this world is shown by his contemptuous treatment of the fees which the students paid to the most popular of their teachers. ”

“ The multiplication of books decentralised learning. With the monopoly of manuscripts and the universality of Latin were taken almost at a moment’s notice two of the chief assets of mediæval Universities. A man might now read what he liked, and where he liked, instead of being obliged to listen to a master in the schools teaching set subjects that did not interest him. And no “test” was required of the independent reader. No wonder that, as one preacher dismally exclaimed, the Wells of Learning, Oxford and Cambridge, were dried up. ”

“ It was partly for the benefit of poor scholars and partly for the benefit of their founders’ souls, for which these scholars should pray, that the early colleges and chantries were founded. Morals, learning and poverty were the qualifications for a fellowship on Durham’s foundation. Poverty, “the stepmother of learning,” it is which the University in its letters and petitions always and truly represents as the great hindrance to the student “seeking in the vineyard of the Lord the pearl of knowledge.” ”

“ John Davenant, father of the poet and landlord of the Inn, was Mayor of Oxford. His wife was a very beautiful woman. Scandal reported that Shakespeare was more than godfather to Sir William. But if the tower be all that remains of the original structure, “S. Martin’s at Carfax” still commands the High Street, and, serene amidst the din of trams, of skurrying marketers and jostling undergraduates, recalls the days when the town was yet in the infancy of its eventful life. ”

“ But still every Sunday morning during term the great bell of S. Mary’s rings out and summons the University to assemble in formal session there to hear a sermon. The bedels of the four faculties with their silver staves lead the way; and the Vice-chancellor is conducted to his throne, the preacher to his pulpit; the doctors of the several faculties in their rich robes follow and range themselves on either side of their official head; below them the proctors, representatives of the Masters of Arts, wearing the white hoods of their office, take their seats. ”

“ The majority of Englishmen are always slow to accept new ideas. They move ponderously and protestingly in the wake of the Continent. The New Learning was as unwelcome at Oxford as if it had been a motor car. The schoolmen were still busily chopping their logic, when the Medicis were ransacking the world for a new play, when Poggio was writing his “Facetiæ” or editing Tacitus, and Pope Nicholas was founding the Vatican Library at Rome. And the Renaissance, when it did begin to work in England, took the form of a religious reformation ”

“ You can fancy, then, this motley assembly of pack-horses and parish priests, of clever lads chosen from the monasteries or grammar schools, and ambitious lads from the plough, all very genuine philosophers, lovers of learning for its own sake or its advantages, working their way through the miry roads, passed occasionally by some nobleman’s son with his imposing train of followers, and passing others yet more lowly, who were just trudging it on foot, begging their way, their bundles on their shoulders. ”

“ Learning and discipline were never popular; long sermons, compulsory attendance at innumerable religious exercises, and catechisms in the tutors’ rooms were not more so. As the sands of the Commonwealth ran out the approaching Restoration found a welcome at Oxford. It was a sign of the times that, when Richard Cromwell was proclaimed Protector, the mayor and the troopers were pelted with turnip-tops by the scholars in front of S. Mary’s. Without waiting for a formal proclamation of the new order, men reverted to it by a kind of spontaneous instinct. ”

“ Oxford owes much of her beauty to the humidity of the atmosphere, for the Thames Valley is generally humid, and when the floods are out, and that is not seldom, Oxford rises from the flooded meadows like some superb Venice of the North, centred in a vast lagoon. ”

“ The halls and hostels stood empty; very few degrees were taken. Religious controversy usurped the place of education. The University became a centre of politics and ecclesiasticism. The schools were deserted or occupied by laundresses; and, whilst commissioners were busy applying tests, expelling honest fellows, destroying MSS. and smashing organs, men began to discover that, through the invention of printing, it had become possible for them to educate themselves. They no longer needed to go to a monastery or college library to obtain a book; teaching needed no longer to be merely oral. ”

“ A bailiff would hustle a student; a tradesman would “forestall” and retail provisions at a higher price than the regulations allowed; a rowdy student would compel a common bedesman to pray for the souls of certain unpopular living townsmen on the score that they would soon be dead. The bailiffs would arrest a clerk and refuse to give him up at the request of the Chancellor; the Chancellor, when appealed to by the townsmen to punish some offending students, would unsoothingly retort: “Chastise your laymen and we will chastise our clerks.” ”

“ And just as at Paris in order to save the class of secular theologians from extinction, Robert de Sorbonne established his college (1257) for secular clerks, so now at Oxford, Walter de Merton took the most momentous step in the history of our national education by founding a college for twenty students of Theology or Canon Law, who not only were not friars or monks, but who forfeited their claims to his bounty if they entered any of the regular Orders. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I tell you, sirs, that I judge no land in England better bestowed than that which is given to our Universities; for by their maintenance our realm shall be well governed when we be dead and rotten.... I love not learning so ill that I will impair the revenues of any one house by a penny, wherby it may be upholden.”
Henry, in fact, may be credited with a genuine desire for the promotion of learning. He had, besides, no reason to quarrel with the University. It had proved subservient to his will; the colleges were nurseries of the secular clergy, who adopted the new order{271} of things. ”

“ The growth of Nationalism, the separation of languages and the establishment of the collegiate system—these and similar causes tended to give the Universities a local and aristocratic character. The order introduced by the colleges was accompanied by the introduction of rank, and of academical power and influence stored in the older, permanent members of the University. Learning, too, had ceased to be thought unworthy of a gentleman; it became a matter of custom for young men of rank to have a University education. ”

“ Citizens and scholars alike had now to be careful how they lived. The stocks, the pillory and the cucking stool awaited offenders among the townsmen, fines or banishment the students who transgressed. Local governments in the Middle Ages were excessively paternal. They inquired closely into the ways of their people and dealt firmly with their peccadilloes. Did a man brew or sell bad beer he was burnt alive at Nürnberg; at Oxford he was condemned to the pillory; if a manciple was too fond of cards he was also punished by the Chancellor’s court. ”

“ But it was only on the eve of a festival that William of Wykeham would allow this relaxation in his foundation. The members of Trinity College were allowed to play cards in hall on holidays only, “but on no account for money.” Mummers, the chief source of amusement among the mediævals, were only permitted to enter New College once a year, on Twelfth Night. It was not till the dawn of the Renaissance that plays began to be acted in the colleges and halls, and to bring the academic intellect into touch with the views and literature of the people. ”

“ For Scholasticism began now to come in contact with practical life. The disputants were led on to deal with the burning questions of the day, the questions, that is, as to the foundations of property, the respective rights of king and pope, of king and subject, of priest and people.
The day was now at hand when the trend of political events, stimulated by the influence of the daring philosophical speculations of the Oxford schoolmen, was to issue in a crisis. ”

“ The chapel, which contains much very beautiful glass and the lovely if inappropriate window-pictures of Sir Joshua Reynolds, must have been in Wykeham’s day, when it was adorned with a magnificent reredos and “works of many colours,” a thing of even greater beauty than it now is. The chapels of Magdalen, All Souls’ and Wadham were directly imitated from it. But, with the hall, it suffered much at the hands of Wyatt and Sir Gilbert Scott. ”

“ AS you drive into Oxford from the railway station, you pass, as we have seen, monuments which may recall to mind the leading features of her history and the part which she took in the life of the country. The Castle Mound takes us back to the time when Saxon was struggling against Dane; the Castle itself is the sign manual of the Norman conquerors; the Cathedral spire marks the site upon which S. Frideswide and her “she-monastics” built their Saxon church upon the virgin banks of the river. ”

“ The chronic antipathy of the secular scholars to the friars, of the realists to the nominalists, of the artists to the higher faculties, and the academic pride of the loyal Oxonians—these were all motives which fought for Wycliffe and his doctrines. Least tangible but not least powerful among them was the last, for when civil or ecclesiastical authority endeavoured to assert itself over corporate privileges in the Middle Ages, a very hornet’s nest of local patriotism and personal resentment was quickly roused. ”

“ Small wonder if golden scholars became sometimes silver bachelors and leaden masters!
A fellow’s allowance was a shilling a week for commons and an annual “livery.” But it was provided that each young scholar should study for his first three years under the supervision of one of the fellows, who was to receive for each pupil five shillings. This was a new step in the development of the college system. Though designed merely to supplement the lectures of the regents in the schools, the new provision of tutors was destined to supplant them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here perhaps are two or three daggers of more than ordinary workmanship, and there a silver cup or a hood lined with minever. That man in an ordinary civilian’s dress, who stands beside Master Parys, is John More, the University stationer, and it is his office to fix the value of the pledges offered, and to take care that none are sold at less than their real value. It is a motley group that stands around; there are several masters and bachelors, but more boys and young men in every variety of coloured dress, blue, red, medley or green. ”

“ For every man was a politician in those days, and the scholars of Oxford not least. Their quarrels and riotings were therefore not without political significance. Thus when the Mad Parliament met in the “new house of the Black Friars at Oxford,” the behaviour of the barons was reflected by that of students. The “nations” pitched their field in “Beaumont,” and after a fierce fight in battle array, divers on both sides were slain and pitifully wounded. ”