“Press notices.”
“In course of time, when the work was finished and revised, not wishing to hide his candle under a bushel, but wishing to place it in a candlestick so that it might give light, he resolved to read it before a vast audience at Oxford, where the clergy in England chiefly flourished and excelled in clerkly lore. And as there were three distinctions or divisions in the work, and each division occupied a day, the readings lasted three successive days. On the first day he received and entertained at his lodgings all the poor people of the whole town; on the second all the doctors of the different faculties, and such of their pupils as were of fame and note; on the third the rest of the scholars with the milites of the town, and many burghers. It was a costly and noble act, for the authentic and ancient times of the poets were thus in some measure renewed; and neither present nor past time can furnish any record of such a solemnity having ever taken place in England.”
It is evident from this passage that the Schools at Oxford were by this time of considerable note and size. There was a University here now in fact if not in name or by charter. A few years later the records reveal to us the first known student in it. He was a clerk from Hungary named Nicholas, to whom Richard I. who had been born in the Palace of Beaumont, made an allowance of half a mark weekly for his support during his stay at Oxford for the purpose of study.
Thus, then, by the beginning of the reign of King John, we may be sure that there was established at Oxford a University, or place of general study, and this University had attracted to itself an academic population, which was estimated by contemporaries at no less than three thousand souls. And now, just as the country won its Great Charter of Liberties from that oppressive and intolerable Angevin monarch, so documentary evidence of the independent powers of the University was first obtained, as the result of a series of events, in which the citizens of Oxford had been encouraged to commit an act of unjust revenge by their reliance on John’s quarrel with the pope and the clergy. The pope had laid the whole country under an interdict; the people were forbidden to worship their God and the priests to administer the sacraments; the church-bells were silent and the dead lay unburied on the ground. The King retaliated by confiscating the land of the clergy who observed the interdict, by subjecting them in spite of their privileges to the Royal Courts, and often by leaving outrages on them unpunished. “Let him go,” he said, when a Welshman was brought before him for the murder of a priest, “he has killed my enemy.” Such were the political conditions, when at Oxford a woman of the town was found murdered in circumstances which pointed to the guilt of a student. The citizens were eager for vengeance, and they took the matter into their own hands (1209).
The offender had fled, but the mayor and burgesses invading his hostel arrested two innocent students who lodged in the same house. They hurried them outside the walls of Oxford, and, with the ready assent of John, who was then at Woodstock, hung them forthwith. This was a defiance of ecclesiastical liberty. For it was a chief principle of the Church that all clerks and scholars, as well as all higher officials in the hierarchy, should be subject to ecclesiastical jurisdiction alone. For this principle Becket had died, and in defence of this principle a quarrel now arose between the University and the town which bade fair to end in the withdrawal of the former altogether from Oxford. In protest the masters and scholars migrated from the town, and transferred their schools to Paris, to Reading and to Cambridge. It is, indeed, to this migration that the Studium Generale on the banks of the Cam may owe its existence.
The halls of Oxford were now deserted, the schools were empty. So they remained as long as John’s quarrel with the pope endured. But when the King had knelt before the Papal Legate, Pandulf (1213), and sworn fealty to the pope, the Church succeeded in bringing the citizens, who had no doubt found their pockets severely affected in the meantime, to their senses. A Legatine ordinance of the following year is the University’s first charter of privilege. The citizens performed public penance; stripped and barefooted they went daily to the churches, carrying scourges in their hands and chaunting penitential psalms. When they had thus obtained absolution, and the University had returned, the Legate issued a decree by which the townsmen were bound in future, if they arrested a clerk, to deliver him up on demand to the Bishop of Lincoln, the Archdeacon of Oxford or his official, to the Chancellor set over the scholars by the bishop, or some other authorised representative of the episcopal power. And thus was established that immunity from lay jurisdiction which, under slightly different conditions, is still enjoyed by every resident member of the University.
This is the first allusion in any authentic document to the existence of the chancellorship.
Among the minor penalities to which the townsmen were now subjected was the provision that for ten years one-half the rent of existing hostels and schools was to be altogether remitted, and for ten years more rents were to remain as already taxed before the secession by the joint authority of the town and the masters. Further, the town was forever to pay an annual sum of fifty-two shillings to be distributed among poor scholars on the feast of S. Nicholas, the patron of scholars, and at the same time to feast a hundred poor scholars on bread and beer, pottage and flesh or fish. Victuals were to be sold at a reasonable rate, and an oath to the observance of these provisions was to be taken by fifty of the chief burgesses, and to be annually renewed at the discretion of the bishop. The payment of the fine was transferred by an agreement with the town to the Abbey of Eynsham in 1219, and by an ordinance of Bishop Grossetete the money was applied to the foundation of a “chest.”
The size and importance of the University was shortly afterwards increased by a somewhat similar disturbance which took place in Paris (1229). A brawl developed into a serious riot, in which several scholars, innocent or otherwise, were killed by the Provost of Paris and his archers. The masters and students failing to obtain redress departed from Paris in anger. Henry seized this opportunity of humiliating the French Monarchy by fomenting the quarrel and at the same time inviting “the masters and the University of scholars at Paris” to come to study in England, where they should receive ample liberty and privileges. A migration to Oxford was the result of this royal invitation, which was highly appreciated not only by the English students at Paris but also by many foreigners. Two years later the King was able to boast that Oxford was frequented by a vast number of students, coming from various places over the sea, as well as from all parts of Britain.
The University remained till well towards the end of the thirteenth century a customary rather than a legal or statutory corporation. And in its customs it was a reproduction of the Society of Masters at Paris.
The privileges and customs of Paris were, in fact, the type from which the customs and privileges of all the Universities which were now being founded in Europe were reproduced, and according to which they were confirmed by bulls and charters. Thus in 1246 Innocent V. enjoined Grossetete to see that in Oxford nobody exercised the office of teaching except after he had qualified according to the custom of the Parisians. Whilst then the idea of a University was undoubtedly borrowed from the Continent, and Oxford, so far as her organisation was concerned, was framed on the Continental models, yet the establishment of a University in England was an event of no small importance. Teaching was thereby centralised, competition promoted, and intellectual speculation stimulated. At a University there was more chance of intellectual freedom than in a monastic school.
If such was the origin of the University, Alfred did not found it, still less did he found University College.
University College, “the Hall of the University,” may undoubtedly claim with justice to be the earliest University endowment. But it was at one time convenient to that College, in the course of a lawsuit in which their case was a losing one, to claim, when forgeries failed them, to be a royal foundation. 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. In 1872 the College even celebrated, by the English method of a dinner, the supposed thousandth anniversary of its existence. At that dinner the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Robert Lowe (Lord Sherbrooke), wittily