Her political importance is indicated by the many great assemblies that were held there. The great assembly under Cnut had closed the struggle between Englishman and Dane; that under Stephen ended the conquest of the Norman, whilst that under Henry III. begins the regular progress of constitutional liberty. In 1265, Simon de Montfort issued writs from Woodstock summoning the famous parliament to which towns sent members for the first time. Oxford no doubt was among the number, but the sheriff’s returns are lost and it is not till 1295 that the names of two burgesses elected to represent her in the national council are recorded. The University did not obtain members until the first Parliament of James I. (1609), although her advice had often been consulted by kings and parliaments before.[12] So far, then, we have followed the growth of a town of increasing political and commercial importance. We have now to trace the growth within its borders of a new and rival body, which was destined, after a century or more of faction and disorder, to humble her municipal freedom to the dust.
CHAPTER III
THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSITY
THE chroniclers of every mediæval town like to begin from Jove—or Genesis. The Oxford historians are no exception.
Famous antiquaries of ancient days carried back the date of the city to fabulous years. Wood gives the year 1009 B.C. as the authentic date, when Memphric, King of the Britons, built it and called it Caer Memphric. But these famous antiquaries, as we shall see, had an axe to grind.
Whatever the origin of Oxford may have been, a few bronze weapons and some pottery, preserved in the Museum, are the only remains of the British period that have been discovered. Great as were the natural advantages of the place, lying as it does on the banks of the chief river of the country at a point where a tributary opens up a district to the north, it would yet seem that there was no British settlement of importance at Oxford, for it was dangerous borderland between the provinces into which Britain was divided, liable to frequent hostile incursions, and therefore left uninhabited. And this would seem to be the reason why, when the road-making Romans were driving their great streets through the neighbourhood, they left this seductive ford severely alone.
The first chronicler to associate Oxford with the name of King Memphric was John Rous, an imaginative historian, no respecter of facts, who died, full of years and inventions, in 1491. Hear him discourse in his fluent, pleasantly circumstantial style:
“About this time Samuel the servant of God was Judge in Judea, and King Magdan had two sons, that is to say Mempricius and Malun. The younger of the two having been treacherously slain by the elder, the fratricide inherited the kingdom. In the twentieth year of his reign, he was surrounded by a large pack of very savage wolves, and being torn and devoured by them, ended his existence in a horrible manner. Nothing good is related of him except that he begot an honest son and heir, Ebrancus by name, and built one noble city which he called from his own name Caer-Memre, but which afterwards in course of time was called Bellisitum, then Caerbossa, at length Ridohen, and last of all Oxonia, or by the Saxons Oxenfordia, from a certain egress out of a neighbouring ford. There arose here in after years an universal and noble seat of learning, derived from the renowned University of Grek-lade.
“It is situated between the rivers Thames and Cherwell which meet there. The city, just as Jerusalem, has to all appearance been changed; for as Mount Calvary, when Christ was crucified, was just outside the walls of the city, and now is contained within the circuit of the walls, so also there is now a large level space outside Oxford, contiguous to the walls of the town, which is called Belmount, which means beautiful mount, and this in a certain way agrees with one of the older names of the city before named and recited; that is to say Bellisitum; whence many are of opinion that the University from Greklade was transferred to this very Bellus Mons or Bellesitum before the coming of the Saxons and while the Britons ruled the island, and the Church of S. Giles, which was dedicated under the name of some other saint, was the place for the creation of graduates, as now is the Church of S. Mary, which is within the walls....”
The origin of the city is, of course, not the same thing as the origin of the University, and John Rous, it will be observed, has adopted the story according to which the University was said to have been transplanted to Oxford from “Grekelade.” This story is found in its earliest form in the Oxford Historiola, the account of the University prefixed to the official registers of the chancellor and proctors. It was probably written towards the end of the reign of Edward III., somewhere in the third quarter of the fourteenth century. The sound of Greek in the name Cricklade is quite
enough, in the minds of those who have studied mediæval chronicles—histories “farct with merry tales and frivolous poetry”—to account for the origin of the myth as to the Greek philosophers. Do you not find for instance, the name of Lechelade suggesting Latin schools (Latinelade) at that place by an analogous etymological conceit?
Saith the Historiola, then, after premising that the University is the most ancient, the most comprehensive, the most orthodox and the most richly endowed with privileges:—
“Very ancient British histories imply the priority of its foundation, for it is related that amongst the warlike Trojans, when with their leader Brutus they triumphantly seized the island, then called Albion, next Britain, and lastly England, certain philosophers came and chose a suitable place of habitation upon this island, on which the philosophers who had been Greek bestowed the name which they have left behind them as a record of their presence, and which exists to the present day, that is to say Grekelade....”
The grounds of the other statements quoted from John Rous are yet more fanciful. The assertion that the University was transferred from without to within the city walls is a vague echo of a worthless story, and the name given to the town Bellesitum is obviously a confusion arising from the latinised form of Beaumont, the palace which Henry I. built on the slope towards S. Giles. The names of Caer-bossa and Ridochen (Rhyd-y-chen) are equally unhistorical, and are based upon the fantastic Welsh equivalents of Oxenford, invented by the fertile genius of Geoffrey of Monmouth for the purposes of his romance (twelfth century).
It would scarcely have been worth while to mention even so briefly the ingenious myths of the early chroniclers if it had not been for the fact that they have swamped more scientific history and that they were used with immense gusto by the champions in that extraordinary controversy which broke out in the days of Elizabeth, and lasted, an inky warfare of wordy combatants, almost for centuries. It was a controversy in which innumerable authorities were quoted, and resort was had even to the desperate device of forgery.
It arose from the boast of the Cambridge orator, who on the occasion of a visit of Elizabeth to Cambridge, declared:
“To our great glory all histories with one voice testify that the Oxford University borrowed from Cambridge its most learned men, who in its schools provided the earliest cradle of the ingenuæ artes, and that Paris also and Cologne were derived from our University.”
With that assertion the fat was in the fire. Assertions were issued, and counter-assertions, commentaries and counter-commentaries.
It is impossible to follow the course of the controversy here. Suffice it to say that when the war had been waged for some years, it seemed evident that the victory would lie with the Oxonians, who claimed Alfred as their founder, if they could prove their claim. And the claim appeared to be proved by a passage attributed to Asser, the contemporary historian of Alfred’s deeds, and surreptitiously inserted into his edition of that author by the great Camden. But that passage occurs in none of the manuscripts of Asser, and certainly not in the one which Camden copied. It was probably adopted by him on the authority of an unscrupulous but interested partisan who, having invented it, attributed it to a “superior manuscript of Asser.”
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