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illustrate every stage of its history, they throw little light on its academical origin. Nothing can be more obscure than the rise of the University. The first century of its existence has left little more than the name of a teacher, the visit of Gerald, and a squabble between the students and a cook. In the face of its claims to immemorial antiquity it is a little startling to have to date the first traces of university life at Oxford as late as the twelfth century. But venerable as it deems itself, the University is at least four hundred years younger than the town. No name of school or scholar can be found before the reign of Stephen; the lectures delivered by the Lombard teacher, Vacarius, under the patronage of Archbishop Theobald, are the first historic indications of any systematic instruction within its walls. But the supposition of an earlier date can only have sprung from an utter ignorance of the history of universities in the Middle Age. Their establishment was everywhere throughout Europe the special mark of the new impulse that Christendom had gained from the Crusades. A new fervour of study sprang up in the West from its contact with the more civilized East. Travellers like Adelard of Bath brought back the first rudiments of physical and mathematical science from the schools of Cordova or Bagdad. The earliest classical revival restored Cæsar and Virgil to the list of monastic studies, and left its stamp on the pedantic style, the profuse classical quotations, of writers like William of Malmesbury or John of Salisbury. The scholastic philosophy sprang up in the schools of Paris. The Roman law was revived by the Imperialist doctors of Bologna. The long mental inactivity of feudal Europe was broken up like ice before a summer's sun. Wandering teachers like 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, either local or intellectual, of mankind that had hurried half Christendom to the tomb of its Lord, had crowded the No. 145.-VOL. XXV.

roads with thousands of young scholars hurrying to the chosen seats where teachers were gathered together. A new power sprang up in the midst of a world as yet under the rule of sheer brute force. Poor as they were, sometimes even of servile race, the wandering scholars who lectured in every cloister were hailed as "masters" by the crowds at their feet. Abelard was a foe worthy of the menaces of Councils, of the thunders of the Church. The teaching of a single Lombard was of note enough in England to draw down the prohibition of a king. Vacarius, probably a guest in the court of Archbishop Theobald, where Beket and John of Salisbury were already busy with the study of the Canon Law -the new weapon by which the Papacy met the revival of the Roman jurisprudence-opened lectures on it at Oxford. He was at once silenced by Stephen, then at f and jealous of wreck of royal

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ower which the hority and the anarchy of the baronage under his rule had already thrown into the hands of the bishops; but it is probable that here, as elsewhere, the new teacher had quickened older educational foundations into a fresh life, and that the cloisters of Osney and St. Frides wide preserved the fire that the Lombard had kindled.1 As yet, however, the fortunes of the new school were obscured by the glories of Paris. English scholars gathered in thousands round the chairs of William of Champeaux or Abelard. The English took their place as one of the "nations" of the new university. John of Salisbury became famous as one of the Parisian teachers. Beket wandered to Paris from his school at Merton. But through the peaceful reign of Henry the Second Oxford was quietly increasing in numbers and repute. Forty years

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later than the visit of Vacarius, its educational position was fully established. When Gerald of Wales read his amusing Topography of Ireland to its students, the most learned and famous of the English clergy were, he tells us, to be found within its walls. At the opening of the thirteenth century Oxford was without a rival in its own country, while in European celebrity it took rank with the greatest schools of the Western world.

But to realize this Oxford of the past we must dismiss from our minds all recollections of the Oxford of the present. In the outer aspect of the new University there was nothing of the pomp that overawes the freshman as he first paces the "High" or looks down from the gallery of St. Mary's. In the stead of long fronts of venerable colleges, of stately walks beneath immemorial elms, history plunges us into the mean and filthy lanes of a mediæval town. Thousands of boys, huddled in bare lodging-houses, clustering round teachers as poor as themselves, in church porch and house porch, drinking, quarrelling, dicing, begging at the corners of the streets, take the place of the brightly-coloured train of doctors and Heads. Mayor and Chancellor struggle in vain to enforce order or peace on this seething mass of turbulent life. The retainers who follow their young lords to the University fight out the feuds of their houses in the streets. Scholars from Kent and scholars from Scotland wage the bitter struggle of North and South. At nightfall roysterer and reveller roam with torches through the narrow lanes, defying bailiffs, and cutting down burghers at their doors. Now a mob of clerks plunges into the Jewry, and wipes off the memory of bills and duns by sacking a Hebrew house or two. Now a tavern row between student and townsman widens into a murderous broil, and the bells of St. Martin's and St. Mary's are clanging to arms. Every phase of ecclesiastical controversy, of political strife, is preluded by some fierce outbreak in this turbulent, seething mob. While England is still only growling at Romish

exactions, the students besiege a Legate in the Abbot's house at Osney. A murderous "town and gown" row precedes the opening of the Barons' War. "When Oxford draws knife, England's soon at strife," runs the popular rhyme.

But the stir, the turbulence, is a stir and turbulence of life. A keen thirst for knowledge, a passionate poetry of devotion, gather thousands round the poorest scholar, and welcome the barefoot friar. Edmund-Archbishop of Canterbury, and saint in later days-comes a boy of twelve years old from the little lane at Abingdon that still bears his name. He finds his school in an inn that belongs to the Abbey of Eynsham, where his father has taken refuge from the world. His mother is a pious woman of her day, too poor to give her boy much outfit besides the hair shirt that he promises to wear every Wednesday. But Edmund is no poorer than his neighbours. He plunges at once into the nobler life of the place, its ardour for knowledge, its mystical piety. "Secretly," at eventide, perhaps, when the shadows are gathering in the church of St. Mary's and the crowd of teachers and students have left its aisles, the boy stands before an image of the Virgin, and, placing a ring of gold upon its finger, takes Mary for his bride. Years of study, broken by the fever that raged among the crowded, noisome streets, brought the time for completing his education at Paris, and Edmund, hand in hand with a brother Robert of his, begged his way, as poor scholars were wont, to the great school of Western Christendom. Here a damsel, heedless of his tonsure, so pertinaciously wooed him, that Edmund consented at last to an assignation; but when he appeared it was in company of grave academical officials, whose scourging was so effectual, that, as the maiden declared in the hour of penitence which followed, "the offending Eve was straightway whipped out of her." Still true to his Virgin-bridal, Edmund, his return from Paris, became the most popular of Oxford teachers. We see him in the little room which he hired with the Virgin's chapel hard by, his grey gown

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reaching to his feet, ascetic in his devotion, falling asleep in lecture time after a sleepless night of prayer, with a grace and cheerfulness of manner which told of his French training, and a chivalrous love of knowledge that let his pupils what they would. "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," the young tutor would say, a touch of scholarly pride perhaps mingling with his contempt of worldly things, as he threw down the fee on the dusty window ledge, where a thievish student would sometimes run off with it. But even knowledge brought its troubles the Old Testament, which with a copy of the Decretals formed his sole library, frowned down upon a love of secular learning from which Edmund found it hard to wean himself. At last, in some hour of dream, the form of his dead mother floated into the room where the teacher stood among his mathematical diagrams. "What are these?" she seemed to say; and, seizing Edmund's right hand, she drew on the palm three circles interlaced, each of which bore the name of one of the Persons of the Christian Trinity. "Be these," she cried, as her figure faded away, "thy diagrams henceforth, my son."

The story admirably illustrates the real character of the new training, and the latent opposition between the spirit of the Universities and the spirit of the Church. The feudal and ecclesiastical order of the old medieval world were both alike threatened by the power that had so strangely sprung up in the midst of them. Feudalism rested on local isolation, on the severance of kingdom from kingdom and barony from barony, on the distinction of blood and race, on the supremacy of material or brute force, or an allegiance determined by accidents of place and social position. The University, on the other hand, was a protest against this isolation of man from man. The smallest school was European and not local N merely every province of France, but every people of Christendom had its place among the "nations" of Paris or Padua. A common language, Latin, superseded within academical bounds the warring tongues of Europe.

A common intellectual kinship and rivalry superseded the petty strifes of country with country or realm with realm. What the Church and Empire had both aimed at and both failed in accomplishing, the knitting of Christian nations together into a vast commonwealth, the Universities for a time actually did. Dante was as little a stranger in the "Latin" quarter around Mont St. Genevieve as under the arches of Bologna. Wandering Oxford scholars carried the writings of Wiclif to the libraries of Prague. In England the work of provincial fusion was less difficult or important than elsewhere, but even in England work had to be done. The feuds of Northerner and Southerner which so long disturbed the discipline of Oxford witnessed at any rate to the fact that Northerner and Southerner had at last been brought face to face in its streets. And here as elsewhere the spirit of natural isolation was held in check by the larger comprehensiveness of the University. After the dissensions that threatened the prosperity of Paris in the thirteenth century, Norman and Gascon mingled with Englishmen in its lecture halls. The rebellion of Owen Glyndwyr found hundreds of Welsh scholars gathered round its teachers. And within this strangely mingled mass society and government rested on a purely democratic basis. The son of the noble stood on precisely the same footing with the poorest mendicant among Oxford scholars. Wealth, physical strength, skill in arms, pride of ancestry and blood, the very basis on which feudal society rested, went for nothing in Oxford lecture-rooms. The University was a state absolutely self-governed, whose citizens were admitted by a purely intellectual franchise. Knowledge made the "master." To know more than one's fellows was a man's sole claim to be a "ruler" in the schools: and within this intellectual aristocracy all were equal. The free commonwealth of the masters gathered in the aisles of St. Mary's as the free commonwealth of Florence gathered in Santa Maria Novella. All had an equal right to

counsel, all had an equal vote in the final decision. Treasury and library were at the complete disposal of the body of Masters. It was their voice that named every officer, that proposed and sanctioned every statute. Even the Chancellor, their head, who had at first been an officer of the Bishop, became an elected officer of their own.

If the democratic spirit of the Universities threatened feudalism, their spirit of intellectual inquiry threatened the Church. The sudden expansion of the field of education diminished the importance of those purely ecclesiastical and theological studies which had hitherto absorbed the whole intellectual

energies of mankind. The revival of classical literature, the rediscovery as it were of an older and a greater world, the contact with a larger, freer life, whether in mind, in society, or in politics, introduced a spirit of scepticism, of doubt, of denial, into the realms of unquestioning belief. Abelard claimed for reason the supremacy over faith. The Florentine poets discussed with a smile the immortality of the soul. Even to Dante, while he censures them, Virgil is as sacred as Jeremiah. The imperial ruler in whom the new culture took its most notable form, Frederick the Second, the "World's Wonder" of his time, was regarded by half Europe as no better than an infidel. The faint revival of physical science, so long crushed as magic by the dominant ecclesiasticism, brought Christians into perilous contact with the Moslem and the Jew. The books of the Rabbis were no longer a mere accursed thing to Roger Bacon. The scholars of Cordova were no mere "Paynim swine" to Adelard of Bath. And while its exclusive possession of truth was thus doubted from without, and its possession of truth at all faintly denied from within, the secular pre-eminence of the Church was menaced by the universities of Italy. The legist of Bologna with the Code of Justinian in his hand saw the descendant of the Cæsars in Barbarossa, and degraded the Pope into a dependant of the Emperor. Against this tide of opposition the Church

fought fiercely and unscrupulously. It met the claims of the Civil Law by a rival code of the Canon Law, founded on the gigantic imposture of the False Decretals. It crushed the spirit of heresy by the sword of De Montfort and the Inquisition of St. Dominic. It availed itself of the patriotism of the Spaniard and the bigotry of the burgher to drive Jew and Mussulman, and physical science with them, out of the limits of Christendom. 1 But its chief field of action lay within the Universities themselves. The Friars wrested back the intellectual energy of their scholars to the barren fields of scholastic theology. In Oxford the spirit of independent thought was crushed out by the suppression of the Lollards. The secular freedom of the University disappeared as it died into a group of ecclesiastical colleges in whose government or training the clergy were supreme. Its popularity waned, its numbers decreased with the advent of persecution and the contraction of its studies, till the fifteenth century found it a mere theological seminary, a mere feeder to the religious benefices of the land. All danger to the Church was over, and the University was dead.

The first stage in this career of academical degradation was the result of the contest with the Town. In the long struggle with mayor and bailiff the University was forced to assume more and more an ecclesiastical position. The immunity of clerks from civil jurisdiction was its one claim to the long list of privileges and exemptions which it built up into a perfect supremacy over the burghers. The thunders and excommunications of the Church were the weapons with which it beat down civic resistance. We have already seen the prosperity and freedom of the town into which this turbulent mass of boyish life poured itself in the reigns of Stephen or Henry. At first sight the boy-scholar, poor, without

1 Of course Hebrew settlements remained in Germany and Poland, and indeed in Rome itself. But all intellectual contact between them and the Christian world had been broken off by the fiery persecution which had fallen on their race.

corporate organization, unbacked as yet by royal charters or the sanctions of antiquity, seemed no match for the townsman proud of his municipal freedom, of his alliance with London, of the stately order of his trade guilds, of the power of his mayor. The burgher must have felt himself fronted by a mere mob of schoolboys, but behind the mob of schoolboys lay the power of the Church. The wide extension which mediæval usage gave to the word "orders " gathered the whole educated world within its pale. Whatever might be his age or proficiency, scholar and and teacher were alike clerks, free from lay responsibilities or the control of civil tribunals, and amenable only to the rule of the Bishop and the sentence of his spiritual courts. This ecclesiastical character of the University revealed itself in that of its head. The Chancellor was at first no officer of the University itself, but of the ecclesiastical corporation under whose shadow it had sprung into life. At Oxford, where no great abbey afforded its shelter to the student as in the case of Paris, he was simply the local officer of the Bishop of Lincoln, within whose immense diocese the University was at that time situated. It was this identification in outer form with the Church, widely as the spirit of the University might part from it, that gave to the mob of boy-students a power with which the Oxford burgesses had no means of coping. The humblest and poorest clerk in these streets could bring on them the thunders of excommunication. Charters and privileges were wastepaper against closed churches and silenced bells. The secular touch of a town bailiff transformed a disorderly student into a vindicator of the liberties of the Church, and a mere street row became part of the great struggle which had driven Anselm into exile and brought Thomas to death.

The danger was all the more deadly that the new University entertained no deliberate purpose of destroying the franchises of the town. Against the violence of the baron beneath whose castle walls a little group of hovels had gathered, or the silent encroachments of

the lord abbot whose tenants had become freemen, the medieval burgher stood jealously on his guard. But the encroachments of the University were purely involuntary results of social embarrassments which could hardly fail to arise from its mere presence within the walls of Oxford. The conflict of jurisdictions brought about the first encounter at a time which promised ill for the interests of the Church. The Papal Interdict had just fallen upon England, and John had replied by the confiscation of Church property and by the outlawry of the clergy. It was at this moment that the Mayor found a woman dying in the street of a blow inflicted by a student. He at once tracked the murderer to his lodgings, and on his flight arrested two clerks who shared the inn with him. John, who was at Woodstock, gave judgment a few days after in the cause, and by his order the two clerks were hung outside the town. Daring as was the violation of ecclesiastical privilege, it was without redress; the royal courts were closed against the clergy, the episcopal sentence of excommunication fell unheeded at a time when the mightier Interdict of the Papacy was already held in contempt. The great bulk of the three thousand scholars who had gathered there hurried indeed from the town, but many remained, and the secession produced no effect on the spirits of the townsmen. It was only when the submission of John to the Papacy left them without defence against the thunders of the Church that the burgesses flung themselves at the feet of the Legate Nicholas, as John had flung himself at the feet of the Legate Pandulf. Like the King, they had to expiate by an outward humiliation their defiance of Rome. Hard as the terms were, there was no room for resistance. The Mayor with fifty burgesses of the town swore to surrender all students, if arrested, to the Bishop, Chancellors or Archdeacon. The bodies of the two clerks were disinterred and transported by those of the townsmen who had borne a share in their condemnation, to hallowed ground. Once every ten years the

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