Oxford and Its Story
by Cecil Headlam · English · Gutenberg #46274 · 737,552 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Oxford and Its Story
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Oxford and Its Story
Author: Cecil Headlam
Illustrator: Fanny Railton
Herbert Railton
Release date: July 13, 2014 [eBook #46274]
Most recently updated: November 28, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46274
Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OXFORD AND ITS STORY ***
Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
OXFORD
AND ITS STORY
[Illustration: OXFORD CASTLE (_Photogravure_)]
OXFORD
AND ITS STORY
BY
CECIL HEADLAM, M.A.
AUTHOR OF "NUREMBERG," "CHARTRES,"
ETC. ETC.
[Illustration]
WITH TWENTY-FOUR LITHOGRAPHS
AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS BY
HERBERT RAILTON
THE LITHOGRAPHS BEING
TINTED BY
FANNY RAILTON
1912
LONDON
J. M. DENT & SONS, LTD.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
_First Edition_, 1904
_Second and Cheaper Edition_, 1912
_All rights reserved_
ALMAE MATRI
FILIUS INDIGNUS HAUD INGRATUS
PREFACE
The Story of Oxford touches the History of England, social and
political, mental and architectural, at so many points, that it is
impossible to deal with it fully even in so large a volume as the
present.
Even as it is, I have been unavoidably compelled to save space by
omitting much that I had written and practically all my references and
acknowledgments. Yet, where one has gathered so much honey from other
men's flowers not to acknowledge the debt in detail appears discourteous
and ungrateful; and not to give chapter and verse jars also upon the
historical conscience. I can only say that, very gratefully, _J'ai pris
mon bien où je l'ai trouvé_, whether in the forty odd volumes of the
Oxford Historical Society, the twenty volumes of the College Histories,
the accurate and erudite monographs of Dr Rashdall ("Mediæval
Universities") and Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte ("History of the University of
Oxford to the year 1530") or innumerable other works. Where so much has
been so well done by others in the way of dealing with periods and
sections of my whole subject, my chief business has been to read, mark,
digest, and then to arrange my story. But to do that thoroughly has been
no light task. Whether it be well done or ill-done, the story now told
has the great merit of providing an occasion, excuse was never needed,
for the display of Mr Herbert Railton's art.
CONTENTS
.....PAGE
PREFACE.....vii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.....xi
CHAPTER I
ST FRIDESWIDE AND THE CATHEDRAL.....1
CHAPTER II
THE MOUND, THE CASTLE AND SOME CHURCHES.....22
CHAPTER III
THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSITY.....61
CHAPTER IV
THE COMING OF THE FRIARS.....93
CHAPTER V
THE MEDIÆVAL STUDENT.....148
CHAPTER VI
OXFORD AND THE REFORMATION.....240
CHAPTER VII
THE OXFORD MARTYRS.....276
CHAPTER VIII
ELIZABETH, BODLEY AND LAUD.....291
CHAPTER IX
THE ROYALIST CAPITAL.....312
CHAPTER X
JACOBITE OXFORD--AND AFTER.....349
INDEX.....357
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
OXFORD CASTLE (_Photogravure_)..... _Frontispiece_
_TINTED LITHOGRAPHS_
MAGDALEN TOWER FROM THE WATER WALKS....._Facing page...4_
CHRIST CHURCH....."...20
CORNMARKET STREET....."...26
ENTRANCE FRONT, PEMBROKE COLLEGE....."...46
ARCHWAY AND TURRET, MERTON COLLEGE....."...62
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE....."...78
GARDEN FRONT, S. JOHN'S COLLEGE....."...90
WADHAM COLLEGE, FROM THE GARDENS....."...104
ORIEL COLLEGE AND MERTON TOWER....."...122
BALLIOL COLLEGE....."...130
S. MARY'S PORCH....."...148
S. ALBAN HALL, MERTON COLLEGE....."...174
QUADRANGLE, BRASENOSE COLLEGE....."...202
BELL TOWER AND CLOISTERS, NEW COLLEGE....."...220
THE FOUNDER'S TOWER, MAGDALEN COLLEGE....."...230
FRONT QUADRANGLE, CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE....."...250
CLOISTERS, CHRIST CHURCH....."...262
GRAMMAR HALL, MAGDALEN COLLEGE....."...274
PRESIDENT'S LODGE, TRINITY COLLEGE....."...286
QUADRANGLE, JESUS COLLEGE....."...294
THE GARDENS, EXETER COLLEGE....."...302
ORIEL WINDOW, S. JOHN'S COLLEGE....."...308
THE CLOISTERS, NEW COLLEGE....."...330
QUADRANGLE AND LIBRARY, ALL SOULS' COLLEGE....."...340
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS_
.....PAGE
OXFORD CATHEDRAL (INTERIOR)....._Facing 8_
OXFORD CATHEDRAL (EXTERIOR).....13
HALL STAIRWAY, CHRIST CHURCH.....17
ABINGDON ABBEY.....24
THE BASTION AND RAMPARTS IN NEW COLLEGE....._Facing 30_
CITY WALLS.....31
CHAPEL OF OUR LADY.....32
BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF OXFORD (1578)....._Facing 32_
OXFORD CASTLE.....35
S. PETER'S IN THE EAST....._Facing 42_
THE "BISHOP'S PALACE," S. ALDATE'S.....50
THE RADCLIFFE LIBRARY, FROM BRASENOSE COLLEGE.....85
GABLES IN WORCESTER COLLEGE.....103
GATEWAY, WORCESTER GARDENS.....106
ORIEL COLLEGE....._Facing 108_
DOORWAY, REWLEY ABBEY.....109
OLD GATEWAY, MERTON COLLEGE.....117
MONASTIC BUILDINGS, WORCESTER COLLEGE.....127
ORIEL WINDOW, LINCOLN COLLEGE.....147
THE HIGH STREET.....151
S. MARY'S SPIRE FROM GROVE LANE.....155
GABLES AND TOWER, MAGDALEN COLLEGE.....195
OPEN AIR PULPIT, MAGDALEN COLLEGE.....199
MAGDALEN COLLEGE....._Facing 210_
IN NEW COLLEGE.....223
KEMP HALL....._Facing 228_
MAGDALEN BRIDGE AND TOWER.....233
NICHE AND SUNDIAL, CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE.....248
SOUTH VIEW OF BOCARDO.....281
CHAPEL IN JESUS.....298
COOKS BUILDINGS, S. JOHN'S....._Facing 300_
FROM THE HIGH STREET.....314
COURTYARD TO PALACE....._Facing 320_
VIEW FROM THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE.....337
ORIEL WINDOW, QUEEN'S LANE.....342
OXFORD & ITS STORY
CHAPTER I
S. FRIDESWIDE AND THE CATHEDRAL
"He that hath Oxford seen, for beauty, grace
And healthiness, ne'er saw a better place.
If God Himself on earth abode would make
He Oxford, sure, would for His dwelling take."
DAN ROGERS,
_Clerk to the Council of Queen Elizabeth_.
"Vetera majestas quædam et (ut sic dixerim) religio commendat."
QUINTILIAN.
It is with cities as with men. The manner of our meeting some men, and
the moment, impress them upon our minds beyond the ordinary. And the
chance of our approach to a city is full also of significance. London
approached by the Thames on an ocean-going steamer is resonant of the
romance of commerce, and the smoke-haze from her factories hangs about
her like folds of the imperial purple. But approach her by rail and it
is a tale of mean streets that you read, a tale made yet more sad by the
sight of the pale, drawn faces of her street-bred people. Calcutta is
the London of the East, but Venice, whether you view her first from the
sea, enthroned on the Adriatic, or step at dawn from the train into the
silent gondola, is always different yet ever the same, the Enchanted
City, Queen of the Seas. And many other ports there are which live in
the memory by virtue of the beauty of the approach to them: Lisbon, with
the scar of her earthquake across her face, looking upon the full broad
tide of the Tagus, from the vantage ground of her seven hills; Cadiz,
lying in the sea like a silver cup embossed with a thousand watch
towers; Naples, the Siren City; Sidney and Constantinople; Hong-Kong
and, above all, Rio de Janeiro. But among inland towns I know none that
can surpass Oxford in the beauty of its approach.
Beautiful as youth and venerable as age, she lies in a purple cup of the
low hills, and the water-meads of Isis and the gentle slopes beyond are
besprent with her grey "steeple towers, and spires whose silent finger
points to heaven." And all around her the country is a harmony in
green--the deep, cool greens of the lush grass, the green of famous
woods, the soft, juicy landscapes of the Thames Valley.
You may approach Oxford in summer by road, or rail, or river. Most wise
and most fortunate perhaps is he who can obtain his first view of Oxford
from Headington Hill, her Fiesole. From Headington has been quarried
much of the stone of which the buildings of Oxford, and especially her
colleges, have been constructed.
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. And just as the
beauty of Venice is the beauty of coloured marbles blending with the
ever-changing colour of water and water-laden air, so, to a large
extent, the beauty of Oxford is due to this soft stone of Headington,
which blends with the soft humid atmosphere in ever fresh and tender
harmonies, in ever-changing tones of purple and grey. By virtue of its
fortunate softness this stone ages with remarkable rapidity, flakes off
and grows discoloured, and soon lends to quite new buildings a deceptive
but charming appearance of antiquity.
Arriving, then, at the top of Headington Hill, let the traveller turn
aside, and, pausing awhile by "Joe Pullen's" tree, gaze down at the
beautiful city which lies at his feet. Her sombre domes, her dreaming
spires rise above the tinted haze, which hangs about her like a delicate
drapery and hides from the traveller's gaze the grey walls and purple
shadows, the groves and cloisters of Academe. For a moment he will
summon up remembrance of things past; he will fancy that so, and from
this spot, many a mediæval student, hurrying to learn from the lips of
some famous scholar, first beheld the scene of his future studies; this,
he will remember, is the Oxford of the Reformation, where, as has been
said,[1] the old world and the new lingered longest in each other's
arms, like mother and child, so much alike and yet so different; the
Oxford also of the Catholic reaction, where the young Elizabethan
Revivalists wandered by the Isis and Cherwell framing schemes for the
restoration of religion and the deliverance of the fair Mary; the loyal
and chivalrous Oxford of the Caroline period, the nursery of knights and
gentlemen, when camp and court and cloister were combined within her
walls; the Oxford of the eighteenth century, still mindful of the King
over the water, and still keeping alive in an age of materialism and
infidelity some sparks of that loftier and more generous sentiment which
ever clings to a falling cause.
It is the Oxford, again, of the Tory and High Churchman of the old
school; the home of the scholar and the gentleman, the Wellesleys, the
Cannings, the Grenvilles and the Stanleys. But the Wesleys call her Alma
Mater also, and, not less, Newman. Methodism equally with the High
Church movement originated here. Old as the nation, yet ever new, with
all the vitality of each generation's youth reacting on the sober wisdom
of its predecessor, Oxford has passed through all these and many other
stages of history, and the phases of her past existence have left their
marks upon her, in thought, in architecture and in tradition. To connect
events with the traces they have left, to illustrate the buildings of
Oxford by her history, and her history by her buildings, has been the
ideal which I have set before myself in this book. Let our traveller
then at length descend the hill and passing over Magdalen Bridge,
beneath the grey tower of ever-changing beauty, the bell-tower of
Magdalen, enter upon the "stream-like windings of that glorious street,"
the High.
So, over Shotover, down a horse path through the thick forest the bands
of mediæval scholars used to come at the beginning of each term, and
wend their way across the moor to the east gate of the city. There is no
gate to stop you now, no ford, no challenge of sentinels on the walls.
The bell-towers of S. Frideswide and Osney have long been levelled to
the dust, but the bells of Christ Church and Magdalen greet you.
But not altogether unfortunate, though perhaps with less time to
ruminate, will he be who first approaches Oxford by means of the
railway. If he is wise, he will choose at Paddington a seat on the off
side of the carriage, facing the engine. After leaving Radley the train
runs past low-lying water-meadows, willow-laden, yellow with buttercups,
purple with clover and the exquisite fritillary, and passing the
reservoir ere it runs into the station, which occupies the site of Osney
Abbey, it gives the observant traveller a splendid view of the town; of
Tom Tower, close at hand, and Merton Tower; of the spires of the
Cathedral and S. Aldate's; of S. Mary's and All Saints'; of Radcliffe's
Dome and the dainty Tower of Magdalen further away; of Lincoln Spire and
S. Michael's Tower, and of S. Martin's at Carfax. And at last, very near
at hand, the old fragment of the Castle:
"There, watching high the least alarms,
The rough, rude fortress gleams afar
Like some bold veteran, grey in arms
And marked with many a seamy scar."
Of the approaches to Oxford so much may be said; and as to the time when
it is most fit to visit her, all times are good. But best of all are the
summer months. In the spring or early summer, when the nightingales are
singing in Magdalen walks and the wild flowers
[Illustration: Magdalen Tower from Addison's Walk]
spring in Bagley Woods, when the meadows are carpeted with purple and
gold:
"The frail, white-leaved anemony,
Dark blue-bells drenched with dews of summer eves,
And purple orchises with spotted leaves;"
in June, in Eights' Week, when the University is bravely ploughing its
way through a storm of gaiety and athleticism into the inevitable
maelstrom of examinations, when the streets are crowded with cricketers,
oarsmen, and their sisters, when the Schools and College quads are
transformed into ball-rooms and many a boat lingers onward dreamily in
the golden light of the setting sun beneath the willows that fringe the
Cherwell--at these times Oxford seems an enchanted city, a land where it
is always afternoon. But you will come to know her best, and to love her
perhaps more dearly, if you choose the later summer months, the Long
Vacation. Then all the rich meadow-lands that surround her are most
tranquil, green and mellow, and seem to reflect the peace of the ancient
city, freed for a while from the turmoil of University life. Then
perhaps you will best realise the two-sided character of this
Janus-City. For there are two Oxfords in one, as our story will show,
upon the banks of the Isis--a great county town besides a great
University. And as to the mood in which you shall visit her, who shall
dictate a mood in a place so various? Something of the emotion that
Wordsworth felt may be yours:
"I could not print
Ground where the grass had yielded to the steps
Of generations of illustrious men
Unmoved. I could not always pass
Through the same gateways, sleep where they had slept,
Wake where they waked, range that inclosure old,
That garden of great intellects, undisturbed;"
or something of the charming fancifulness of Charles Lamb which may lead
you to play the student, or fetch up past opportunities, and so "pass
for nothing short of a Seraphic Doctor." Or it may please you best to
spend not all your time among the bricks and stone and mortar,
ever-changing as they are in hue and aspect, or amid the College groves
and gardens, rich as is their beauty, perfect as is their repose. The
glories of the surrounding country may tempt you most. You may wander
many happy miles through cool green country, full of dark-leaved elms
and furzy dingles, with the calm, bright river ever peeping at you
through gaps in woods and hedges, to Godstow, where Rosamund Clifford
lived and died; to Cumnor, the warm green-muffled Cumnor Hills, and
those oaks that grow thereby, on which the eyes of Amy Robsart may have
rested. You may choose to track the shy Thames shore
"through the Wytham flats,
Red loosestrife and blond meadow-sweet among,
And darting swallows and light water-gnats--"
and, with the poet, learn to know the Fyfield tree, the wood which hides
the daffodil:
"What white, what purple fritillaries
The grassy harvest of the river-fields,
Above by Ensham, down by Sandford, yields,
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.
* * * * *
Within fifty years of their first landing the Northern hordes had
conquered the greater part of Britain. Mercia, the border kingdom of the
marches, had been formed, embracing the site of Oxford; its heathen
King Penda had lived and died, the Mercians had embraced Christianity,
and Dorchester had become the seat of a Christian bishop. But it was not
till the eighth century A.D. that the vill of Oxford, an unfortified
border town on the confines of the kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex, came
into existence; it was not till the year 727, one hundred and thirty
years after S. Augustine's mission to England, that a religious
community settled there. The history of that settlement is bound up with
the story of S. Frideswide--Fritheswithe, "the Bond of Peace." For
although the details of the legend are evidently in part due to the
imagination of the monastic chroniclers, yet there is no reason to doubt
the main facts of time and place.
That Frideswide, the daughter of an under-king named Didan, founded a
nunnery at a spot where a bank of gravel ran up from what is now Christ
Church Meadow, and offered a dry site, raised above the wandering,
unbarred streams, set amid lush meadows untainted as yet by human
dwellings, and fringed by the virgin forests that clad the surrounding
hills, we need not hesitate to believe, or that here Didan presently
built a little church, some traces of which yet remain in Christ Church
Cathedral. For the rest, how Frideswide escaped by a miracle to Binsey
and lived there in the woods, in dread of the hot courtship of a young
and spritely prince; how that prince was miraculously deprived of his
sight when about to assault the city in revenge for his disappointment,
and how from that time forward disaster dogged the footsteps of any king
who entered Oxford; how the virgin Frideswide returned at last to
Oxford, and, after performing many miracles there, died and was buried
in her church--are not all these things told at length in the charming
prose of Anthony Wood? The Lady Chapel of the Cathedral, on the north
side of the choir aisle, is the architectural illustration of this story
in Oxford. It was enlarged in the thirteenth century, and has the early
English pillars and vaulting of that period, but the eastern wall
carries us back to S. Frideswide's day. And on the floor is a recent
brass which marks the spot where the bones of the virgin Saint are now
supposed to rest. Here too is the Shrine of S. Frideswide--that shrine
which used to be visited twice a year by the Vice-Chancellor and the
principal members of the University in solemn procession "to pray,
preach and offer oblations at her shrine in the Mother Church of
University and town." This is the site of S. Frideswide's first church.
The Lady Chapel is in a line with what was the ancient nave, the central
apse of that church, and there, at the east end of it and of the
adjoining aisle, are the rough rag-stone arches which were built for
her, and which led, according to the ancient Eastern plan, into three
apses. And inseparably connected with S. Frideswide too is the adjacent
Latin Chapel, by virtue of that window designed by Sir E. Burne-Jones,
one of the earliest and one of the most beautiful of the artist's
designs, so lovely in its conception that, if you take each picture
separately, it seems like some perfect poem by Rossetti translated into
colour by a mediæval craftsman. But take it as a whole and the effect is
quite other than this. It is so full of subjects and dabs of bright
colour that it is dazzling and almost unintelligible.
Burne-Jones had not grasped, even if he had studied the glazier's art.
Apart from the fact that the great predominance of fiery reds offends
the eye, the design is essentially one that has been made on paper and
not in glass, drawn with pencil and brush and not in lead. Worked out on
a flat, opaque surface the fussy effect of the window would not be
foreseen; but the overcrowded and broken character of the design is
painfully obvious when set up as a window. The scenes here depicted form
an illustrated history of the story of S. Frideswide.
The splendid fourteenth-century glass of the Latin Chapel contains also,
besides figures of S. Catherine, the patroness of students in divinity,
two representations of S. Frideswide. This chapel was built on to the
rest at two periods; the first bay from
[Illustration: Oxford Cathedral (Interior)]
the west is part of the transept aisle, the second bay belongs to the
thirteenth century, the third and fourth were added in the fourteenth,
from which period the decorated vaulting, with its bosses of roses and
water-lilies, dates. The chapel was used till recently as a lecture-room
by the Regius Professor of Divinity. The carved wood-work of the stalls
and desks should be noticed.
Didan's or S. Frideswide's Church was burnt on S. Brice's Day, 1002,
when the general massacre of Danes, which Æthelred the Unready, in a fit
of misguided energy, had ordered to take place on that day throughout
the country, was carried out at Oxford. The Danes in their extremity
rushed to S. Frideswide's Church, burst open the doors, and held the
tower as a fortress against their assailants. The citizens failed to
drive them out. As a last resource they set fire to the wooden roof and
burned the church, "together with the ornaments and books thereof." The
Danes perished in the burning.
Nothing now remains, save the parts that I have mentioned, of the church
which was then gutted. But after the massacre the King made a vow that
he would rebuild S. Frideswide's, and the church he then began to erect
forms the main part of the Cathedral as we see it to-day.
Those arches, so plain and massive, over the western bays of the north
choir aisle and Lady Chapel, were part of Æthelred's transept aisle; the
south transept aisle, now S. Lucy's Chapel; the walls of the south choir
aisle; the pillars of the choir and the open triforium of the south
transept--these are the chief portions of the Cathedral which are
thought to be unrestored parts of Æthelred's work.
It is now generally admitted that the Saxons, at the date of the
Conquest, were more advanced than the Normans in the fine arts. Their
sculpture was more highly finished and their masonry more finely
jointed. We need not therefore be surprised at the excellence and
ornamentation of the work in Oxford Cathedral, which is attributed to
this date, nor, when we remember that Æthelred was the brother-in-law of
Richard-le-bon, the great church-builder of Normandy, need we wonder at
the unwonted magnificence of Æthelred's plans for this church.
The Danes soon took ample revenge for that treacherous massacre. They
ravaged Berkshire and burned Oxford (1009). The climax came when Sweyn
arrived. The town immediately submitted to him, and "he compelled the
men of Oxford and Winchester to obey his laws" (Saxon Chronicle).
Æthelred's work was interrupted by the coming of Sweyn, and the King's
flight to Richard's court in Normandy. In the south-east pier of the
Cathedral tower there is a noticeable break in the masonry, which marks,
it is supposed, the cessation of building that coincided with the close
of Anglo-Saxon rule.
When Sweyn died Æthelred returned, and for three years held Cnut in
check. The work at S. Frideswide's was probably resumed then. The richly
carved, weather-beaten capitals of the choir, with their thick abaci and
remarkable ornamentation, partly Saxon and partly Oriental in character,
are eloquent of the exile of Æthelred and of the influence of the
Eastern monks whom he met at the court of his brother in Normandy. And
they speak not only of Byzantine influence, passing through Normandy
into England, but also, through the existing traces of exposure to rain
and wind, of the ruinous state into which the church had fallen when
"whether by the negligence of the Seculars or the continuall
disturbance of the expelled Regulars, it was almost utterly
forsaken and relinqueshed, and the more especially because of that
troublesome warre betweene King Harold and William the Conqueror."
For the nunnery which S. Frideswide founded had soon ceased to be a
nunnery. By the irony of fate, soon after her death, the nuns were
removed, and the priory was handed over to a chapter of married men, the
Secular Canons, whom S. Dunstan, in his turn, succeeded in suppressing.
But the nuns never came back, for, after many vicissitudes, the priory
was finally restored, under Henry I. (1111), as a house of the Canons
Regular of S. Augustine. Some have thought that Guimond, the first prior
(1122), was responsible for the building of the whole church, but he
more probably found enough to do in re-establishing order and restoring
the monastic buildings. His successor, Robert of Cricklade, perhaps it
was who restored Æthelred's church on the old plan and inserted most of
the later Norman work, especially the clerestory and presbytery.
The triforium and clerestory in the nave (roofed in with
sixteenth-century wood-work) give us an interesting example of the
latest Norman or Transitional style. The clerestory consists of a
pointed arch enriched with shafts at the angles, and supported on either
side by low circular arches which form the openings of a wall passage.
The arrangement of the triforium is remarkable. The massive pillars of
the nave are alternately circular and octagonal. From their capitals,
which are large, with square abaci, spring circular arches with
well-defined mouldings. These are, in fact, the arches of the triforium,
which is here represented by a blind arcade of two arches set in the
tympanum of the main arch. The true arches of the nave spring from half
capitals, set against the pillars, and are plain, with a circular
moulding towards the nave. The crown of these arches is considerably
below the main capitals of the pillars, from which the upper or
triforium arches spring. The half capitals assist in carrying the
vaulting of the aisles.
The whole arrangement, rare on the Continent, is extremely unusual in
England, but occurs, for instance, in the transept of Romsey Abbey. The
pillars of the choir date, as has been said, from Æthelred's day; the
rest is twelfth-century restoration, save the rich and graceful pendent
roof, which accords so strangely well with the robust Norman work it
crowns. The clerestory was converted into Perpendicular, and remodelled
to carry this elaborate vaulting, which should be compared with that of
the old Divinity School, or Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster, and
attributed, not in accordance with tradition to the time of Wolsey, but
to the close of the fifteenth century.
The very effective east end is a conjectural restoration of the old
Norman design, and was the work of Sir Gilbert Scott, who also opened
the lantern-story and made many other sweeping changes and restorations,
necessitated by the previous restorations of seventeenth-century Dean
Duppa, and the neglect of his successors.
When Cricklade's restoration was finished, or nearly so, it was decided,
in order to revive the once so famous memory of S. Frideswide, to
translate her relics from their obscure resting-place (probably the
southernmost of the three Saxon apses) to some notable place in the
church. The King, the Archbishop, many bishops, and many of the nobility
and clergy gathered together to take part in this great ceremony. The
bones of the Saint were taken up, set in a rich gilt coffin and placed
on the north side of the choir. Miracles were wrought at the new shrine,
and pilgrims crowded thither.
The money brought in by these means was badly needed, both for the
purpose of the restoration which had been in process, and which was
further necessitated by the great fire which destroyed a large part of
Oxford in 1190, and, whilst damaging the church, much injured the
monastic buildings. The fine old Norman doorway of the Chapter house,
which is attributed to Prior Guimond (1122), still bears the red marks
of that fire. The Chapter house itself is a very perfect chamber of the
early English period. The rich and graceful carving of the capitals, the
bosses of the roof, and the curious corbels, the superb glass in the
side windows, the beautiful arcade of five arches, pierced for light,
which fills the entire east end, complete and confirm, so pure are they
in style, so excellent in detail, the just proportions of this noble
room.
Early in the thirteenth century was built also the upper portion of the
tower, and that lowly spire was added, which appears scarce
[Illustration: Oxford Cathedral]
peeping above the College buildings, modestly calling attention to the
half-concealed site of the smallest cathedral in England. 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.
In this first effort they did not dream of the tapering elegance of the
soaring spire of Salisbury, any more than of the rich ornamentation, the
profusion of exuberant pinnacles, the statues and buttresses, gargoyles,
crockets and arabesques, with which their successors bedecked S. Mary's
or the Clocher Neuf of Chartres. Strength and security was their chief
aim here, though the small turrets, terminating in pyramidal octagons,
which surmount the angles of the tower, are the forerunners of that
exuberant ornamentation.
In 1289 the bones of S. Frideswide were again translated. They were put
in a new and more precious shrine, placed near where the old one stood.
Fragments of the marble base of this shrine have been found, pieced
together and set up in the easternmost arch between the Lady Chapel and
the north choir aisle. These fragments of a beautiful work are
themselves beautiful; they are adorned with finely carved foliage,
intended to symbolise S. Frideswide's life when she took refuge in the
woods.
The story of the destruction of the shrine is a strange one. Before the
Reformation the Church of S. Frideswide and her shrine had enjoyed a
high reputation as a place of sanctity. Privileges were conceded to it
by royal authority. Miracles were believed to be wrought by a virtue
attaching to it; pilgrims from all parts resorted to it--among them
Queen Catherine of Aragon.
Such practices and privileges seemed to the zealous Reformers to call
for summary interference. The famous shrine was doomed to destruction,
and was actually destroyed. The fragments were used either at the time,
or not long afterwards, to form part of the walls of a common well. The
reliques of the Saint, however, were rescued by some zealous votaries,
and carefully preserved in hope of better times. Meantime Catherine (the
wife of Peter Martyr, a foreign Protestant theologian of high repute,
who had been appointed Regius Professor of Theology) died, and was
buried near the place lately occupied by the shrine. Over her grave
sermons were preached, contrasting the pious zeal of the German
Protestant with the superstitious practices that had tarnished the
simplicity of the Saxon Saint. Then came another change. The Roman
Church, under Mary Tudor, recovered a brief supremacy. The body of Peter
Martyr's wife was, by order of Cardinal Pole, contemptuously cast out of
the church, and the remains of S. Frideswide were restored to their
former resting-place. But it does not appear that any attempt was made
to restore the shrine. Party zeal still prevailed. Angry contests
continued between the adherents of the two parties even after the
accession of Elizabeth.
At length the authorities of Christ Church were commissioned to remove
the scandal that had been caused by the inhuman treatment of Catherine
Martyr's body. On January 11th, 1562, the bones of the Protestant
Catherine and the Catholic S. Frideswide were put together, so
intermingled that they could not be distinguished, and then placed
together in the same tomb: "Iam coeunt pietas atque superstitio."
Under the easternmost arch, between the Lady Chapel and the Latin
Chapel, is the fine chantry tomb, an elaborately wrought and very
beautiful example of Perpendicular workmanship, which is supposed to
have been the third and more splendid shrine of S. Frideswide, or else
to have served as a "Watching Chamber," as it is
[Illustration: Hall Stairway Christchurch
Herbert Railton Oxford]
commonly called, to protect the gold and jewels which hung about the
earlier shrine.
Under the Prior Guimond there was certainly a school connected with the
convent. Whatever the origin of the University may have been--and there
are those who maintain that it sprang from the schools of S. Frideswide
as naturally as that of Paris from the schools of Notre Dame--it is
pleasant to remember, when you stand in the middle of Tom Quad, that you
are on the site of this, the first educational institution of Oxford,
just as when you stand in the Lady Chapel of the Cathedral you are on
the site of the old priory, the mother church of the University and
town.
Another faint echo of the priory days may be traced in the annual
Cakestall in S. Olds, which is a survival of the Fair of S. Frideswide
that used to last seven days. During that time the keys of the city
passed from mayor to prior, and the town courts were closed in favour of
the Pie-Powder Court,[2] held by the steward of the priory for the
redress of all disorders committed during the fair.
The entrance to the Cathedral is through the two arches in the
cloisters, directly opposite to you as you pass into Tom Quad beneath
Tom Tower. This curious entrance reminds you at once of the peculiar
position of the Cathedral as three parts College chapel. Tom Quad is the
largest quadrangle in Oxford (264 by 261 feet), and was begun by Wolsey
on a scale which is sufficient evidence of the extreme magnificence of
his plans for "Cardinal's College." It was begun, but has never been
finished. The shafts and marks of the arches, from which the vaults of
the intended cloister were to spring, are, however, plainly visible. Of
the old cloister of the monastery no trace remains save the windows and
door of the chapter house; the fifteenth-century cloisters that do exist
are not to be compared with those of New College or Magdalen. One side
of them was destroyed by Wolsey to make room for the College Hall. On
the south side of the cloister is the old library, which was formerly
the refectory of the monastery. With the chapter house doorway it
survives as a relic of the old conventual buildings, in quiet contrast
to the splendour of the superb kitchen, and the still more magnificent
hall, with its valuable collection of portraits. The vaulted chamber,
which contains the staircase by which this hall is approached, is one of
the most beautiful things in Oxford. The lovely fan-tracery of the vault
and the central pillar were the work of "one Smith, an artificer from
London," and were built as late as 1640, in the reign of Charles II. It
affords a striking instance of the fact in architectural history, that
good Gothic persisted in Oxford long after the influence of Italian work
had destroyed it elsewhere.
To make room for this magnificent quadrangle of his the Cardinal also
destroyed the three western bays of the Church of S. Frideswide. He had
intended to build a new chapel along the north side of Tom Quad which
should rival the chapel of King's College at Cambridge. But this work
was interrupted by his fall. The foundations of the chapel have been
traced, and they show that the west end ran in a line with the octagonal
turrets in S. Aldate's Street, and the walls reached nearly to Fell's
passage into Peckwater.
For its massive walls Wolsey used some of the stones from the demolished
Osney Abbey. The building at the time of his fall had risen some feet
above the ground. Dean Fell, it is supposed, used it as a quarry for the
construction of his own quadrangle. Now, there had been constructed a
new straight walk in the Meadows, and Fell, anxious to improve it,
carted the chippings from his own work to lay on it. The chippings were
white, so the walk got the name of White. This was corrupted at the end
of the eighteenth century to Wide Walk, and hence to Broad
[Illustration: Christ's Church]
Walk--its present name--which really describes it now better than the
original phrase.
The destruction of the western bays of the church by Wolsey accounts for
the shortened aspect of the nave, slightly relieved though it is by the
new western bay which serves as a sort of ante-chapel to the nave and
choir which now form the College Chapel of Christ Church. But the
appearance of the Cathedral owes something of its strangeness to the
fact that it represents, in general plan, the design of King Æthelred's
Church reared upon the site of S. Frideswide's.
CHAPTER II
THE MOUND, THE CASTLE AND SOME CHURCHES
The property of S. Frideswide's Nunnery formed one of the chief elements
in the formation of the plan of Oxford. The houses of the population
which would spring up in connection with it were probably grouped on the
slope by the northern enclosure wall of the nunnery, and were themselves
bounded on the north by the road which afterwards became the High
Street, and on the west by that which was afterwards named Southgate
Street, then Fish Street, and is now known as S. Aldate's. This road,
giving access from Wessex to Mercia, was probably one of the direct
lines from the north-west to London in the tenth century. It led down to
the old fords over the shallows which once intersected the meadows of
South Hincksey, and gave, as some suppose, its name to the town.[3] The
fords were superseded by the old Grand Pont, and Grand Pont in turn by
Folly Bridge.
Folly Bridge, as it now stands, was built a little south of Grand Pont,
the old river-course to the north having been filled up by an
embankment. The river now marks the Shire boundary which was once marked
hereabouts by the Shire Ditch. Crossing the bridge to the Berkshire
shore, the road, wherein you may still trace the piers of the old Grand
Pont "linked with many a bridge," leads up to Hincksey. There the modern
golf-links are, and the "lone, sky-pointing tree" that Clough and Arnold
loved. And this road it was which, in the poetic imagination of Matthew
Arnold, was haunted by the scholar gipsy.
The main road leads over the hill, which is crowned by Bagley Wood, to
Abingdon. That charming village, where once the great monastery stood,
was separated in early days from the city by a great oak forest.
Wandering therein, book in hand, a certain student, so the story runs,
was met by a ferocious wild boar, which he overcame by thrusting his
Aristotle down the beast's throat. The boar, having no taste for such
logic, was choked by it, and his head, borne home in triumph, was served
up, no doubt, at table in the student's hall with a sprig of rosemary in
its mouth. The custom of serving a boar's head on Christmas Day at
Queen's College, whilst the tabarder sang:
"The Boar's Head in hand bear I
Bedecked with bays and rosemary,
And I pray you masters merry be--
Quotquot estis in convivio.
Chorus--_Caput apri defero_
_Reddens laudes Domino_," _etc._,
is said to have originated in that incident.
S. Aldate's Road, after leaving the river, skirted the enclosure of S.
Frideswide, and gradually ascended the sloping gravel bank in a
northerly direction. Here it was met by another road which, coming from
the east, connected Oxford with the Wallingford district. The crossing
of these roads came to be known as the Four Ways, Quadrifurcus,
corrupted into Carfax. And Carfax was the second of the chief elements
in the formation of Oxford. For at this point, as if to mark its
importance in the history of the town, was erected S. Martin's Church,
which has always been the city church, and in the churchyard of which
Town Councils (Portmannimotes) perhaps were held. It was founded under a
Charter of Cnut (1034) by the wealthy and vigorous Abbey of Abingdon,
which, together with the foundation at Eynsham, seems to have thrown the
Monastery of S. Frideswide very much into the shade both as to energy
and influence.
[Illustration: Abingdon Abbey]
The tower, restored by Mr T. G. Jackson, is the only remaining fragment
of the old church. A modern structure was wisely removed in 1896 to
broaden the thoroughfare. Two quaint figures, which in bygone days
struck the quarters on the old church, have been restored to a
conspicuous position on the tower. Shakespeare, who on his way to
Stratford used to stop at the Crown Inn, a house then situated near the
Cross in the Cornmarket, is said to have stood sponsor in the old church
to Sir William Davenant in 1606. 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.
The third element in the formation of the place was the Mound. Mediæval
towns usually began by clustering thickly round a stronghold, and there
is reason to believe that at the beginning of the tenth century Oxford
was provided with a fortress. In the year 912 Oxford is mentioned for
the first time in authentic history. For there is an entry in the Saxon
Chronicle to the effect that
"This year died Æthelred, ealdorman of the Mercians, and King
Edward took possession of London and Oxford and of all the lands
which owed obedience thereto."
The Danes were ravaging the country. Mercia had been over-run by them
the year before. The Chronicle for several years presents a record of
the Danes attacking various places, and either Eadward or his sister
Æthelflæd defending them and building fortresses for their defence. They
fortified, for instance, Tamworth and Warwick and Runcorn, and at each
of these places the common feature of fortification is a conical mound
of earth. Take a tram from Carfax to the railway station, and stop at
the County Courts and Gaol on your way. The County Gaol you need not
visit, or admire its absurd battlements, but within the sham façade is
the tower that remains from the Castle of Robert D'Oigli, and beside the
tower is just such a conical mound of earth--the Castle Mound.
Against raids and incursions Oxford was naturally protected on three
sides. For the Thames on the west and south and the Cherwell on the east
cut her off from the attack of land forces, whilst even against Danes
coming up the Thames from Reading, marsh lands and minor streams within
the belt of these outer waters protected her. For in those early days,
when Nature had things almost entirely her own way, there were many more
branches of the river, many minor tributary streams flowing where now
you see nothing but houses and streets. The Trill Mill stream, for
instance, which left the main stream on the west of what is now Paradise
Square, is now covered over for the greater part of its course; whilst
the main stream, after passing beneath the road some seventy yards
outside South Gate, gave off another stream running due south, parallel
with the road to Folly Bridge, but itself evidently continued its own
course across Merton Fields by the side of what is now Broad Walk, and
finally found its way into the Cherwell. And besides this stream, which
ran under S. Frideswide's enclosure, there were, on the east, the minor
streams which now enclose the Magdalen Walks. But what Oxford needed to
strengthen her was some wall or fosse along the line occupied afterwards
by the northern wall of the city, along the line, that is, of George
Street, Broad Street and Holywell, and also some _place d'armes_, some
mound, according to the fashion of the times, with accompanying ditches.
With these defences it seems probable that she was now provided. Thus
fortified Oxford becomes the chief town of Oxfordshire, the district
attached to it. And during the last terrible struggle of England with
the Danes its position on the borders of the Mercian and West-Saxon
realms seems for the moment to have given it a political importance
under Æthelred and Cnut strikingly analogous to that which it acquired
in the Great Rebellion.
After Sweyn's death Oxford was chosen as the meeting-place of the great
gemot of the kingdom. The gemots, which were now and afterwards held at
Oxford, were probably held about the Mound, where houses were erected
for the royal residence. In one of these Æthelweard, the King's son,
breathed his last; one was the scene of another dastardly murder of
Danes, when Eadric (1015) ensnared Sigeferth and Morkere into his
chamber, and there slew them. And here it was, according to Henry of
Huntingdon, that King Edmund, who had been making so gallant a struggle
against the conquering Cnut, was murdered by Eadric's son. Eadric, we
know, was a traitor, and well-skilled in murders at Oxford. He, when his
son had stabbed Edmund by his directions, came to Cnut and
[Illustration: Cornmarket Street]
"saluted him, saying, 'Hail, thou art sole king.' When he had laid
bare the deed done, the King answered, 'I will make thee on account
of thy great deserts higher than all the tall men of England.'
And he ordered him to be beheaded and his head to be fixed on a
pole on the highest tower of London. Thus perished Edmund, a brave
king."
And Cnut, the Dane, reigned in his stead. Beneath the shadow of the
Mound, built to repel the Danish incursions, the Danish King now held an
assembly of the people. At this gemot "Danes and Angles were unanimous,
at Oxford, for Eadgar's law." The old laws of the country were, then, to
be retained, and his new subjects were reconciled to the Danish King.
But these subjects, the townsmen of those days, are but dim and shadowy
beings to us. It is only by later records that we see them going on
pilgrimage to the shrines of Winchester, or chaffering in their
market-place, or judging and law-making in their husting, their
merchant-guild regulating trade, their reeve gathering his King's dues
of tax or honey, or marshalling his troop of burghers for the King's
wars, their boats floating down the Thames towards London and paying the
toll of a hundred herrings in Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon by the
way. For the river was the highway, and toll was levied on it. In Edward
the Confessor's time, in return for the right of making a passage
through the mead belonging to Abingdon, it was agreed that all barges
that passed through carrying herrings during Lent should give to the
cook of that monastery a hundred of them, and that when the servant of
each barge brought them into the kitchen the cook should give him for
his pains five of them, a loaf of bread and a measure of ale. In the
seventeenth century the river had become so choked that no traffic was
possible above Maidenhead till an Act was passed for the re-opening of
it.
It was at Oxford that a great assembly of all the Witan was held to
elect Cnut's successor Harold, and at Oxford, so pernicious a place for
kings, that Harold died. At Oxford again when the Northumbrian rebels,
slaying and burning, had reached it (1065), the gemot was held which, in
renouncing Tostig, came to the decision, the direct result of which was
to leave England open to the easy conquest of William of Normandy when
he landed in the following year.
Five years later we find Robert D'Oigli in peaceful possession of
Oxford, busy building one of those Norman castles, by which William made
good his hold upon England, strongholds for his Norman friends, prisons
for rebellious Englishmen. The river he held by such fortresses as this
at Oxford, and the Castles of Wallingford and Windsor.
Oxford had submitted without resistance to the Conqueror. There is no
evidence that she suffered siege like Exeter or York, but many
historians, Freeman among them, state that she was besieged. They have
been misled by the error of a transcriber. Savile printed _Urbem
Oxoniam_, for _Exoniam_, in his edition of "William of Malmesbury," and
the mischief was done. A siege at this time has been supposed to explain
a remarkable fact which is recorded in the Domesday Survey. "In the time
of King Edward," so runs the record of Domesday Book:
"Oxeneford paid for toll and gable and all other customs yearly--to
the king twenty pounds, and six measures of honey, and to Earl
Algar ten pounds, besides his mill within the [city]. When the king
went out to war, twenty burgesses went with him in lieu of the
rest, or they gave twenty pounds to the king that all might be
free. Now Oxeneford pays sixty pounds at twenty-pence to the ounce.
_In the town itself, as well within the wall as without, there are
243 houses that pay geld, and besides these there are 478 houses
unoccupied and ruined (tam vastæ et destructæ) so that they can pay
no geld._ The king has twenty wall mansions, which were Earl
Algar's in the time of King Edward, paying both then and now
fourteen shillings less twopence; and one mansion paying sixpence,
belonging to Shipton; another paying fourpence, belonging to
Bloxham; a third paying thirty pence, belonging to Risborough; and
two others paying fourpence, belonging to Twyford in
Buckinghamshire; one of these is unoccupied. They are called wall
mansions because, if there is need and the king command it, they
shall repair the wall.... All the burgesses of Oxeneford hold in
common a pasture outside the wall that brings in six shillings and
eightpence.... If any stranger who chooses to live in Oxeneford,
and has a house, dies there without relatives, the king has all
that he leaves."
The extraordinary proportion of ruined and uninhabited houses enumerated
in this record, however, was probably due not to any siege by the
Normans and not mainly to harsh treatment at their hands, but to the
ravaging and burning of that rebellious band of Northumbrians who had
come upon Oxford "like a whirlwind" in 1065. Robert D'Oigli himself is
recorded to have had
"forty-two inhabited houses as well within as without the wall. Of
these sixteen pay geld and gable, the rest pay neither, on account
of poverty; and he has eight mansions unoccupied and thirty acres
of meadow near the wall and a mill of ten shillings. The whole is
worth three pounds and for one manor held he holds with the
benefice of S. Peter...." (sentence incomplete).
These houses belonged wholly to Holywell Manor,[4] and the mill referred
to is no doubt that known as _Holywell Mill_, supplied with water from
the Cherwell.
Thus Domesday Book gives us a glimpse of a compact little town within a
vallum, half a mile from east to west, and a quarter of a mile south to
north. We may think of the gravel promontory as covered with houses and
their gardens, and inhabited by some thousand souls.
A market-place there would have been at or near Carfax, and fairs must
have been held there, though we have no mention of them till the reign
of Henry I.
The "wall" of the enceinte, which, according to Domesday Book, the
inhabitants of the mural mansions were compelled to repair, was probably
a vallum of earth faced with stone, protected by a deep ditch in front,
and surmounted by wood-work to save the soldiers from arrows.
D'Oigli, we may presume, put the existing fortifications of the town in
order.
The fortifications, which were constructed in the reign of Henry III.,
followed in the main the line of the vallum repaired by D'Oigli. They
consisted of a curtain wall and outer ditch, protected by a parapet and
by round towers placed at regular intervals and advanced so as to
command besiegers who might approach to attack the wall. There were
staircases to the top of the towers. A good idea of them and the general
scheme of the fortifications may be obtained by a visit to the fragment
of the city wall which yet remains within the precincts of New College.
The Slype, as it is called, forms a most picturesque approach to New
College Gardens, and the old-bastioned wall forms part of the boundary
between the New College property and Holywell Street. It is indeed owing
to this fact that the wall still remains there intact, for the licence
to found a College there was granted to William of Wykeham on condition
of keeping the city wall in repair and of allowing access to the mayor
and burgesses once in three years to see that this was done, and to
defend the wall in time of war. From New College the city wall ran down
to the High Street.[5]
The East Gate Hotel, facing the new schools, marks the site of the old
entrance to the city hereabouts. It is a recent construction in
excellent taste by Mr E. P. Warren. From this point the wall ran on to
Merton, and thence to Christ Church. The south wall of the Cathedral
chapter house is on the line of the old city wall. It is said that some
of the old wall was taken down for the erection
[Illustration: The Bastion and Ramparts in New College]
of the College Hall. Along the north side of Brewer Street (Lambard's
Lane, Slaying Lane or King's Street) are here and there stones of the
city wall, if not remnants of the walling. At the extreme end of Brewer
Street the arch of Slaying Lane Well is just visible, once described as
"under the wall."
[Illustration: City Walls]
The south gate spanned S. Aldate's, close to the south-west corner of
Christ Church; Little Gate was at the end of Brewer Street, and the west
gate was in Castle Street, beyond the old Church of S. Peter-le-Bailly.
From the south gate faint traces in "The Friars" indicate its course,
and the indications are clear enough by New Inn Hall Street, Ship Inn
Yard and Bullock's Alley. Cornmarket Street was crossed by S. Michael's
Church, where stood the north gate. The gate house of the north gate was
used as the town prison. It rejoiced in the name of Bocardo, jestingly
so called from a figure in logic; for a man once committed to that form
of syllogism could not expect to extricate himself save by special
processes.
Old bastions and the line of the ditch are found behind the houses
opposite Balliol College. The site of Balliol College was then an open
space, and Broad Street was Canditch. This name was derived by Wood from
Candida Fossa, a ditch with a clear stream running along it. Wood's
etymology is not convincing. Mr Hurst has suggested a more likely
derivation in Camp Ditch. As a street name it reached from the angle of
Balliol to Smith Gate. An indication of the old fosse, filled up, is to
be found in the broad gravel walk north of the wall near New College.
From Bocardo the wall ran towards the Sheldonian Theatre. The outer line
of the passage between Exeter Chapel and the house to the north of it
was the line of the south face of the old city wall. A bastion was laid
bare in 1852 in the north quad of Exeter. The wall passed in a diagonal
line across the quadrangle south of the Clarendon Building, turned
northwards in Cat's Street, and ran up to the octagonal Chapel of Our
Lady by Smith Gate. The remains of this little chapel, with a beautiful
little "Annunciation" in a panel over the south entrance, have recently
been revealed to the passer-by by the new buildings of Hertford College,
between which and the feeble mass of the Indian Institute it seems
strangely out of place.
[Illustration: CHAPEL OF OUR LADY.]
From Smith Gate the wall returned to New College, and so completed the
circuit of the town. A reference to the map will elucidate this bare
narration of mine.
But to return to Robert D'Oigli, the Conqueror's Castellan. From what
little we know of him, he would appear to have been a typical Norman
baron, ruthless, yet superstitious, strong to conquer and strong to
hold. Very much the rough, marauding soldier, but gifted with an
instinct for government and order, he came over to the conquest of
England in the train of William the Bastard and in the company of Roger
D'Ivry, his sworn brother, to whom, as the chronicler tells us, he was
"iconfederyd and ibownde by faith and sacrament." Oxfordshire was
committed to his charge by the Conqueror, to reduce to final subjection
and order. He seems to have ruled it in rude soldierly fashion,
enforcing order, tripling the taxation of the town and pillaging without
scruple the religious houses of the neighbourhood. For it was only by
such ruthless exaction that the work which William had
[Illustration: BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF OXFORD BY RALPH AGAS (1578): FROM THE
ENGRAVING BY WHITTLESEY (1728).]
set him to do could be done. He had indeed been amply provided for, so
far as he himself was concerned, by the Conqueror, chiefly through a
marriage with a daughter of Wiggod of Wallingford, who had been
cupbearer to Edward the Confessor; but money was needed for the great
fortress which was now to be built to hold the town, after the fashion
of the Normans, and by holding the town to secure, as we have said, the
river.
"In the year 1071," it is recorded in the Chronicle of Osney Abbey, "was
built the Castle of Oxford by Robert D'Oigli." And by the Castle we must
understand not the mound which was already there, nor such a castle as
was afterwards built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but at
least the great tower of stone which still exists and was intended to
guard the western approach to the Castle. S. George's tower, for so it
was called because it was joined to the chapel of S. George's College
within the precincts, was upon the line of the enceinte. The walls are
eight feet four inches thick at the bottom, though not more than four
feet at the top. The doorway, which is some twelve feet from the ground,
was on the level of the vallum or wall of fortification, and gave access
to the first floor. There are traces of six doorways above the lead
roof, which gave access to the "hourdes." These were wooden hoardings or
galleries that could be put up outside. They had holes for the
crossbows, and holes for the pouring down of stones, boiling pitch or
oil on to the heads of threatening sappers. They were probably stored in
the top room of the tower, which is windowless.
The construction of the staircase of the tower is very peculiar. Ascend
it and you will obtain a magnificent view of Oxford, of Iffley and
Sandford Lock, Shotover and the Chiltern Hills, Hincksey, Portmeadow,
Godstow, Woodstock and Wytham Woods.
On the mound close at hand there was, after D'Oigli's day, a ten-sided
keep built in the style of Henry III. To reach the mound you go within
the gaol, and pass by a pathetic little row of murderers' graves,
sanded heaps, distinguished by initials. Under the mound is a very deep
well, covered over by a groined chamber of Transitional design.
Five towers were added later to the Castle, as Agas' map (1568) shows
us. After the Civil War, Colonel Draper, Governor of Oxford,
"sleighted," as Wood expresses it, the work about the city, but greatly
strengthened the Castle. But in the following year (1651), when the
Scots invaded England, he, for some reason, "sleighted" the Castle works
too. The five towers, shown in Agas' map, and other fortifications then
disappeared. S. George's tower alone survives.
Stern and grim that one remaining fragment of the old Castle stands up
against the sky, a landmark that recalls the good government of the
Norman kings. But the most romantic episode connected with it occurred
amidst the horrors of the time when the weakness and misrule of Stephen,
and the endeavours of Matilda to supplant him, had plunged the country
into that chaos of pillage and bloodshed from which the Norman rule had
hitherto preserved it. After the death of his son, Henry I. had forced
the barons to swear to elect his daughter Matilda as his successor. But
they elected Stephen of Blois, grandson of the Conqueror, whose chief
claim to the Crown, from their point of view, was his weak character. In
a Parliament at Oxford (1135) he granted a charter with large liberties
to the Church, but his weakness and prodigality soon gave the barons
opportunities of revolt. Released from the stern control of Henry they
began to fortify their castles; in self-defence the great ministers of
the late King followed their example. Stephen seized the Bishops of
Salisbury and Lincoln at Oxford, and forced them to surrender their
strongholds. The King's misplaced violence broke up the whole system of
government, turned the clergy against him and opened the way for the
revolt of the adherents of Matilda. The West was for her; London and the
East supported Stephen. Victory at Lincoln placed Stephen a captive in
the hands of Matilda, and the
[Illustration: Oxford Castle]
land received her as its "Lady." But her contemptuous refusal to allow
the claims of the Londoners to enjoy their old privileges, and her
determination to hold Stephen a prisoner, strengthened the hand of her
opponents. They were roused to renew their efforts. Matilda was forced
to flee to Oxford, and there she was besieged by Stephen, who had
obtained his release.
Stephen marched on Oxford, crossed the river at the head of his men,
routed the Queen's supporters, and set fire to the city. Matilda shut
herself up in the Castle and prepared to resist the attacks of the King.
But Stephen prosecuted the siege with great vigour; every approach to
the Castle was carefully guarded, and after three months the garrison
was reduced to the greatest straits. Provisions were exhausted; the
long-looked-for succour never came; without, Stephen pushed the siege
harder than ever. It seemed certain that Matilda must fall into his
hands. Her capture would be the signal for the collapse of the
rebellion. But just as the end seemed inevitable, Matilda managed to
escape in marvellous wise. There had been a heavy fall of snow; so far
as the eye could see from the Castle towers the earth was hidden beneath
a thick white pall. The river was frozen fast. The difficulty of
distinguishing a white object on this white background, and the
opportunity of crossing the frozen river by other means than that of the
guarded bridge, suggested a last faint chance of escape. Matilda's
courage rose to the occasion. She draped herself in white, and with but
one companion stole out of the beleaguered Castle at dead of night, and
made her way, unseen, unheard through the friendly snow. Dry-footed she
stole across the river, and gradually the noise of the camp faded away
into the distance behind her. For six weary miles she stumbled on
through the heavy drifts of snow, until at last she arrived in safety at
Wallingford.
The bird had flown, and the Castle shortly afterwards surrendered to the
baffled King (_Gesta Stephani_).
During this siege the people were deprived of the use of the Church of
S. George, and to supply their spiritual needs a new church sprang into
existence. It was dedicated to S. Nicholas, and afterwards to S. Thomas
a Becket. Of the original church, just opposite the L. & N.W. Railway
Station, part of the chancel remains. The tower is fifteenth century.
The Castle mill is mentioned in the Domesday Survey. The present mill no
doubt occupies the same site; its foundations may preserve some of the
same masonry as that which is thus recorded to have existed hereabouts
before the Conquest.
You will notice that the Castle occupies almost the lowest position in
the town, and remembering all the other Norman castles you have seen,
Windsor or Durham, Lincoln or William the Bastard's own birth-place at
Falaise, the Oxford site may well give you pause, till you remember that
the position of the old tenth-century fort had been chosen as the one
which best commanded the streams against the Danes, whose incursions
were mainly made by means of the rivers. If Carfax had been clear,
D'Oigli would have built his castle at Carfax; but it was covered with
houses and S. Martin's; and, shrinking from the expense that would have
been involved, and the outcry that would have been raised, if he had
cleared the high central point of the town, he was content to modify and
strengthen the old fort. But as the descent of Queen Street from Carfax
threatened the Castle, if the town were taken, there was no regular
communication made between the Castle and the town. A wooden drawbridge
across the deep ditches that defended the Castle led to the town,
somewhere near Castle Street. This would be destroyed in time of danger.
No other entrance to the town was allowed on this side. "All persons
coming across the meadows from the West and all the goods disembarked at
the Hythe from the barges and boats would have to be taken in at the
North Gate of the town, the road passing along the North bank of the
City ditch and following, probably, exactly the same course as that
followed by George Street to-day" (Parker). And round about the Castle
itself an open space was preserved by the policy of the Castellan, and
known as the Bailly (ballium, outer court). The Church of S. Peter le
Bailly recalls the fact.
Study the history of most cathedrals and you will discover that, like
Chartres or Durham, "half house of God, half castle 'gainst the Scot,"
they have served and were intended to serve at some period of their
career as fortresses as well as churches.
When Bishop Remigius removed the see from Dorchester to Lincoln, as he
did at this time (1070), Henry of Huntingdon writes: "He built a church
to the Virgin of Virgins, strong in a strong position, fair in a fair
spot, which was agreeable to those who serve God and also, as was
needful at the time, impregnable to an enemy." The tower of S. Michael's
at North Gate is a good example of this mingling of the sacred with the
profane, and the architectural feature of it is that it combines the
qualities of a campanile with those of the tower of the Castle. It was a
detached tower, and not part and parcel of the church which stood at the
North Gate, as it is now. In the fifteenth century the city wall was
extended northwards so as to include the church.
The tower is placed just where we should expect to find that the need of
fortification was felt. South and East, Oxford was now protected by the
Thames and the Cherwell as well as by her "vallum," and on the west was
the Castle. But the North Gate needed protection, and D'Oigli built the
tower of S. Michael's to give it, spiritual and temporal both. At a
later date there was erected a chapel, also dedicated to S. Michael,
near the South Gate, and with reference to this church and chapel and
the Churches of S. Peter in the East and in the West, there is a
mediæval couplet which runs as follows:
"Invigilat portæ australi boreæque Michael,
Exortum solem Petrus regit atque cadentem."
"At North Gate and at South Gate too S. Michael guards the way,
While o'er the East and o'er the West S. Peter holds his sway."
The military character of S. Michael's tower is marked by that
round-headed doorway, which you may perceive some thirty feet from the
ground on the north side. Just as the blocked-up archways at the top of
the Castle tower once gave access to the wooden galleries which
projected from the wall, so this doorway opened on to a lower gallery
which guarded the approach to the adjoining gateway. On the south side
of the tower you will find traces of another doorway, the base of which
was about twelve feet from the level of the ground. It is reasonable to
suppose that the tower projected from the north side of the rampart, and
that this doorway was the means of communication between them. The other
doorway, on the west side, level with the street, gave access from the
road to the basement story of the tower.
Architecturally the tower may be said to be a connecting link between
the romanesque and Norman styles. The system of rubble, with
long-and-short work at the angles, has not yet given place to that of
surface ashlar masonry throughout, and the eight pilaster windows, it
should be observed, of rude stone-work carved with the axe, present the
plain, pierced arches, with mid-wall shafts, which preceded the splayed
Norman window and arches with orders duly recessed. The church itself
adjoining the tower is of various periods, chiefly fourteenth century.
It was, together with S. Mildred's, united (in 1429) to All Saint's
Church, which then was made a collegiate parish church by the foundation
of Lincoln College adjoining.
Not only was Robert D'Oigli a builder of walls and towers, but, in the
end, of churches also. The Chronicle of Abingdon Abbey records the story
of his conversion.
"In his greed for gain, says the Chronicler, he did everywhere
harass the churches, and especially the Abbey of Abingdon. Amongst
other evil deeds he appropriated for the use of the Castle garrison
a meadow that lay outside the walls of Oxford and belonged to the
Abbey. Touched to the quick the brethren assembled before their
Altar and cried to Heaven for vengeance. Meantime, whilst day and
night they were thus calling upon the Blessed Mary, Robert fell
into a grievous sickness in which he continued many days
impenitent, until one night he dreamed that he stood within the
palace of a certain great King. And before a glorious lady who was
seated upon a throne there knelt two of the monks whose names he
knew and they said 'Lady, this is he who seizes the lands of your
church.' After which words were uttered she turned herself with
great indignation towards Robert and commanded him to be thrust out
of doors and to be led to the meadow. And two youths made him sit
down there, and a number of ruffianly lads piled burning hay round
him and made sport of him. Some tossed haybands in his face and
others singed his beard and the like. His wife, seeing that he was
sleeping heavily, woke him up and on his narrating to her his dream
she urged him to go to Abingdon and restore the meadow. To Abingdon
therefore he caused his men to row him and there before the altar
he made satisfaction."
There are two points to be noted in this story. First, that the meadow
in question was doubtless that which bears the name of _King's Mead_ to
this day; second, that the river was a much used highway in those and in
much later times, ere money and Macadam, and afterwards George
Stephenson, had substituted roads and rails and made the water-way slow
and no safer. To return to our Chronicler.
"And after the aforesaid vision which he had seen, how that he was
tortured by evil demons at the command of the Mother of God, not
only did he devote himself to the building of the Church of S. Mary
of Abingdon but he also repaired at his own expense other parish
churches that were in a ruined state both within and without the
walls. A great bridge, also, was built by him on the North side of
Oxford (High or Hythe (= Haven) Bridge). And he dying in the month
of September was honourably buried within the Presbytery at
Abingdon on the north side, and his wife lies in peace buried on
his left."
Together with his sworn friend, Roger D'Ivry, he founded the "Church of
S. George in the Castle of Oxenford." This church stood adjacent to the
Castle tower, but it was removed in 1805 to make room for the prison
buildings.[6]
Probably, also, D'Oigli founded a church, dedicated to S. Mary Magdalen,
situated just without the North Gate, and intended to supply the
spiritual wants of travellers and dwellers without the walls. The church
was on the site of the present Church of S. Mary Magdalen; but no trace
of the original work has been left by the early Victorian restorers. It
passed with the Church of S. George to Osney Abbey, and then with its
patron to the successors of the canons of S. Frideswide's, the prebends
or canons of Christ Church.
D'Oigli probably built also the Church of S. Michael at the North Gate
and S. Peter's within the East Gate; and as for his restorations, they
may have included the parish church, S. Martin's, and also S. Mary's and
S. Ebbe's, which latter may possibly have been built in the time of
Edward the Confessor.
How very literally S. Peter's guarded the east may be gathered by
inspecting the two turrets at the east end of the church. There were
small openings in these whence a watch could be kept over the streams
and the approach to East Gate.
Whether the crypt of this church, as we now have it, dates entirely from
D'Oigli's time is a moot point. It may be that it does, but the actual
masonry, it will be noticed, the ashlar work, capitals and arches, are
superior to that of the Castle and S. Michael's. The plan of the
original crypt of S. George's in the Castle shows that it had, in
accordance with the general rule of eleventh-century work in this
country, an apsidal termination. The crypt of S. Peter's, as built in
D'Oigli's day, was, it is suggested, no exception. It had an apsidal
termination which did not extend so far towards the east as the present
construction. But, as happened again and again in the history of
innumerable churches and cathedrals at
[Illustration: S. Peter's in the East]
home and abroad, of Chartres, Rochester, Canterbury, for instance, the
crypt was presently extended eastwards. The extension in the present
case would enable the small apse to be changed into a larger choir with
a rectangular east end. The result is, that looking eastwards, and
noticing that there is no apparent break between the wall of the crypt
and the wall of the chancel above, which evidently belongs to the middle
of the twelfth century, you would be inclined to attribute the whole
crypt to that date, if you did not notice the small doorways on either
side and at the western end. Looking westward, you see work which
carries you back to the days when S. Michael's and the Castle tower were
being built. For the three western arches, two of them doorways now
blocked up and the central one open, indicate a type of crypt which is
generally held not to have been used later than the beginning of the
twelfth century. The essential features of this type were that the vault
of the crypt was raised some feet above the level of the floor of the
nave, and that both from the north and south side of the nave steps led
down into the crypt. And in some cases there were central steps as well,
or at least some opening from the nave. Here then, as at Repton, you
have indications of this type, for behind each of the blocked-up
doorways is a passage leading to some steps or clear traces of steps,
and the central archway may have provided originally an opening to the
nave, through which a shrine may have been visible, or else a
communication by central steps.
The entrance to this remarkable crypt, with its vaulting of
semi-circular arches of hewn stone, is from the outside. The crypt has
capitals of a peculiar design to several of the shafts, and four of the
bases ornamented with spurs formed by the heads of lizard-shaped
animals. The chancel and the south doorway afford remarkably rich
examples of the late Norman style. The fifteenth-century porch, with a
room over it, somewhat hides, but has doubtless protected the latter.
The early decorated tower, the exterior arcading of the chancel, the
unique groining of the sanctuary ("S. Peter's Chain,") and the two
beautiful decorated windows on the north, and the early English arcade
of the nave, are all worthy of remark in this interesting church.
Of the old Church of S. Ebbe (S. Æbba was the sister of S. Oswald),
which was rebuilt in 1814 and again partially in 1869, nothing now
remains save the stone-work of a very rich late Norman doorway, which
was taken down and built into the south wall of the modern building.
The other church which is mentioned at this period is S. Aldate's. Now,
nothing is known of the Saint to whom this church is supposed to have
been dedicated, and from whom, as we have seen, the street which runs
from Carfax to Folly Bridge borrows its name. In no ancient martyrology
or calendar does S. Aldate appear. It is quite possible that there was
such a Saint, and if there was, he would not be the only one who
survives in our memory solely by virtue of the churches dedicated to
him. But the corruption--S. Told's--S. Old's is found in
thirteenth-century chartularies and in popular parlance to-day. This
corruption is curious, and may be significant. S. Aldate's Church at
Oxford lies just within the old South Gate of the town; the only other
church of the same name lies just within the old North Gate of
Gloucester. In an old map of Gloucester this latter church is called S.
Aldgate's; in an old map of Oxford the same spelling occurs. At Oxford
the street now known as S. Aldate's was once called South Gate Street.
It seems likely, therefore, that Aldate represents a corruption from Old
Gate = Aldgate = Aldate, and that the name, when it had become so far
corrupted, was supposed to be that of a Saint. But the true meaning, as
so often happens, lived on, when men spoke with unconscious correctness
of S. Old's.
The church itself, as it now stands, is chiefly the product of a
restoration in 1863,[7] but the south aisle was built in 1335 by Sir
John Docklington, a fishmonger who was several times mayor. Over it
there used to be an upper story which served as a library for the use of
students in Civil Law who frequented the neighbouring hall, Broadgates
Hall, which became Pembroke College in 1624, when Thomas Tesdale endowed
it and named it after Lord Pembroke the Chancellor, and King James
assumed the honours of founder. In the library the refectory of the old
hall survives. The rest of the front quadrangle was added in the
seventeenth century and Gothicised in the eighteenth. It was in a room
over the gateway that Dr Johnson lived, when Pembroke was "a nest of
singing birds." The eighteenth-century chapel, decorated (1884) by Mr
Kempe, and the new hall should tempt the visitor into the back
quadrangle.
In the days of Robert D'Oigli, then, Oxford was provided with no less
than eight churches, dedicated to S. Frideswide, S. Martin, S. George,
S. Mary Magdalen, S. Mary the Virgin, S. Peter, S. Michael and S. Ebbe.
By the end of the reign of Henry I. this number had been more than
doubled. And seeing that much church building is and always was a sign
of prosperity and security, the fact that eight new churches sprang up
within so short a time after the Norman Conquest may be taken to prove
that under her sheriffs and portreeves Oxford enjoyed good government
and made rapid progress in population and wealth. Of these eight or ten
new churches no trace remains of S. Mildred's, save the pathway across
the old churchyard which survives in the modern Brasenose Lane; and the
church dedicated to S. Eadward the martyr, which lay between S.
Frideswide's and the High, has likewise disappeared; the exact sites of
the church of S. Budoc, the Chapel of the Holy Trinity and of S. Michael
at the South Gate, cannot be identified; the Chapel of S. Clement, on
the other side of Magdalen Bridge, gave way to a fourteenth-century
church, and was wholly cleared away at the beginning of the nineteenth
century; All Saint's and S. Peter's, in the bailey of the Castle, were
entirely rebuilt in the eighteenth century, and the latter re-erected on
another site in the nineteenth. The old chancel arch in the Church of
S. Cross (Holywell) dates from the end of the eleventh century, and this
church was probably founded about this time by Robert D'Oigli or his
successors for the benefit of the growing population on Holywell Manor.
The present Church of S. Clement, on the Marston Road, near the new
Magdalen and Trinity Cricket Grounds, is an early Victorian imitation of
Norman style, and well described as the "Boiled Rabbit."
The Castle tower, the tower of S. Michael's, the crypt of S. Peter's in
the East, Holywell and the Castle mill, the chancel of S. Cross, these
are all landmarks that recall the days when D'Oigli governed Oxford, and
the servants of William surveyed England and registered for him his new
estate. But there is one other item in the Domesday record which
deserves to be noticed:
"All burgesses of Oxford hold in common a pasture without the wall
which brings in 6s. 8d."
How many Oxford men realise, when they make their way to Port Meadow to
sail their centre-boards on the upper river, that this ancient "Port"
(or "Town") Meadow is still set apart for its ancient purpose, that the
rights of the freemen of Oxford to have free pasture therein have been
safeguarded for eight hundred years by the portreeve or shire-reeve
(sheriff), annually appointed to fulfil this duty by the Portmannimot
(or Town Council)?
Robert D'Oigli died childless. He was succeeded by his nephew, the
second Robert, who had wedded Edith, a concubine of Henry I. She,
dwelling in the Castle, was wont to walk in the direction of what is now
the Great Western Railway Station and the cemetery, being attracted
thither by the "chinking rivulets and shady groves."
[Illustration: Entrance Front
Pembroke College]
And it is said that there one evening, "she saw a great company of
pyes gathered together on a tree, making a hideous noise with their
chattering, and seeming, as 'twere, to direct their chatterings to
her." The experience was repeated, and the Lady sent for her
confessor, one Radulphus, a canon of S. Frideswide's, and asked him
what the reason of their chattering might be. Radulphus, "the
wiliest pye of all," Wood calls him, explained that "these were no
pyes, but so many poor souls in purgatory that do beg and make all
this complaint for succour and relief; and they do direct their
clamours to you, hoping that by your charity you would bestow
something both worthy of their relief, as also for the welfare of
yours and your posterity's souls, as your husband's uncle did in
founding the College and Church of S. George." These words being
finisht, she replied, "And is it so indeed? now de pardieux, if old
Robin my husband will concede to my request, I shall do my best
endeavour to be a means to bring these wretched souls to rest." And
her husband, as the result of her importunities, "founded the
monastery of Osney, near or upon the place where these pyes
chattered (1129), dedicating it to S. Mary, allotting it to be a
receptacle of Canon Regulars of S. Augustine, and made Radulphus
the first Prior thereof."
Osney was rebuilt in 1247. The Legate proclaimed forty days' indulgence
to anyone who should contribute towards the building of it. The result
was one of the most magnificent abbeys in the country. "The fabric of
the church," says Wood, "was more than ordinary excelling." Its two
stately towers and exquisite windows moved the envy and admiration of
Englishmen and foreigners alike. When, in 1542, Oxford ceased to belong
to the diocese of Lincoln, and the new see was created, Robert King, the
last Abbot of Osney, was made first Bishop of Osney. But it was only for
a few years that the bishop's stool was set up in the Church of S. Mary.
In 1546 Henry the VIII. moved the see to S. Frideswide's, and converted
the priory, which Wolsey had made a college, into both college and
cathedral. And the Abbey of Osney was devoted to destruction. "Sir,"
said Dr Johnson when he saw the ruins of that great foundation, stirred
by the memory of its splendid cloister and spacious quadrangle as large
as Tom Quad, its magnificent church, its schools and libraries, the
oriel windows and high-pitched roofs of its water-side buildings, and
the abbot's lodgings, spacious and fair, "Sir! to look upon them fills
me with indignation!" Agas' map (1568) represents the abbey as still
standing, but roofless; the fortifications in 1644 accounted for the
greater part of what then remained. The mean surroundings of the railway
station mark the site of the first Cathedral of Oxford. The Cemetery
Chapel is on the site of the old nave. A few tiles and fragments of
masonry, the foundations of the gateway and a piece of a building
attached to the mill, are the only remains that will reward you for an
unpleasant afternoon's exploration in this direction. Better, instead of
trying so to make these dead stones live, to go to the Cathedral and
there look at the window in the south choir aisle, which was buried
during the Civil War and, thus preserved from the destructive Puritans,
put up again at the Restoration. This painted window, which is perhaps
from the hand of the Dutchman Van Ling (1634), represents Bishop King in
cope and mitre, and among the trees in the background is a picture of
Osney Abbey already in ruins. The bishop's tomb, it should be added, of
which a missing fragment has this year been discovered, lies in the bay
between the south choir aisle and S. Lucy's Chapel. But there is one
other survival of Osney Abbey of which you cannot long remain unaware.
You will not have been many hours in the "sweet city of the dreaming
spires" before you hear the "merry Christ Church bells" of Dean
Aldrich's[8] well-known catch ring out, or the cracked B flat of Great
Tom, booming his hundred and one strokes, tolling the hundred students
of the scholastic establishment and the one "outcomer" of the Thurston
foundation, and signalling at the same time to all "scholars to repair
to their respective colleges and halls" and to all the Colleges to close
their gates (9.5 P.M.).
And these bells, Hautclerc, Douce, Clement, Austin, Marie, Gabriel et
John, as they are named in the hexameter, are the famous Osney bells,
which were held to be the finest in England in the days when
bell-founding was a serious art and a solemn rite, when bells were
baptized and anointed, exorcised and blessed by the bishop, so that they
might have power to drive the devil out of the air, to calm tempests, to
extinguish fire, and to recreate even the dead. They are hung within the
Bell-Tower (above the hall-staircase of Christ Church), which Mr Bodley
has built about the wooden structure which contains them, and which he
intended to surmount with a lofty and intricate wooden superstructure.
But Tom is placed in his own tower, over the entrance from S. Aldate's
into the great Quad to which he has given his name.
The lower story of Tom Tower was built by Wolsey (the Faire Gate it was
called, and the cardinal's statue is over the gateway), but the
octagonal cupola which gives to it its characteristic appearance was
added by Sir Christopher Wren. Tom weighed 17,000 pounds, and bore the
inscription:--
_In Thomæ laude resono Bim Bom sine fraude_,
but he was re-cast in 1680 (7 ft. 1 in. in diameter, and weighing over 7
tons). The inscription records:--
_Magnus Thomas Clusius Oxoniensis renatus, Ap. 8, 1680._
Translated here, he has rung out, since the anniversary of the
Restoration on the 29th of May 1684, nightly without intermission, save
on that night some years ago when the undergraduates of Christ Church
cut the rope as a protest when they were not allowed to attend the ball
given at Blenheim in honour of the coming of age of the Duke of
Marlborough, and curfew did not ring that night.
There is one other monument in Oxford which is connected by popular
tradition with the last Abbot of Osney, and that is the exceedingly
picturesque old house[9] in S. Aldate's. Richly and quaintly carved,
this old timber mansion is known as the Bishop's Palace, and is said to
have been the residence of Bishop King, after the See was transferred
from Osney to Christ Church.
[Illustration: Gables in St Aldate's]
The town, we have seen, had been ruined, and very many of the houses
were "waste," when the Normans conquered England. But in the new era of
prosperity and security which their coming gave to the land, in the
sudden development of industry and wealth which the rule of the
conquerors fostered, Oxford had her full share. The buildings of which
remnants or records remain bear witness to the new order of things.
Such works as those which we have described could not then or now be
done without money. The transformation of Oxford at this period, from a
town of wooden houses, in great part uninhabited, to a town of stone
houses, with a castle and many churches of stone, is an indication of
wealth. And that wealth was a product not only of the new régime of
order and security, but also of the new policy of the foreign kings.
The erection of stately castles and yet statelier Abbeys which followed
the Conquest, says Mr Green, the rebuilding of almost every cathedral
and conventual church, mark the advent of the Jewish capitalist. From
this time forward till 1289 the Jew was protected in England and his
commercial enterprise fostered. He was introduced and protected as a
chattel of the King, and as such exempt from the common law and common
taxation of Englishmen. In Oxford, as elsewhere, the Jews lived apart,
using their own language, their own religion and laws, their own
peculiar commerce and peculiar dress. Here the Great and Little Jewries
extended along Fish Street (S. Old's) to the present Great Gate of
Christ Church, and embraced a square of little streets, behind this
line, which was isolated and exempt from the common responsibilities and
obligations of the town. The church itself was powerless against the
Synagogue, which rose in haughty rivalry beside the cloister of S.
Frideswide. Little wonder if the Priory and Jewry were soon at deadly
feud. In 1185 we find Prior Phillip complaining of a certain
Deus-cum-crescat (Gedaliah) son of Mossey, who, presuming upon his
exemption from the jurisdiction of any but the King, had dared to mock
at the Procession of S. Frideswide. Standing at his door as the
procession of the saint passed by, the mocking Jew halted and then
walked firmly on his feet, showed his hands clenched as if with palsy
and then flung open his fingers. Then he claimed gifts and oblations
from the crowd who flocked to S. Frideswide's, on the ground that such
recoveries of limb and strength were quite as real as any Frideswide had
wrought. But no earthly power, ecclesiastic or civil, ventured to meddle
with Deus-cum-crescat.
The feud between Jewry and Priory lasted long. It culminated in 1268 in
a daring act of fanaticism, which incidentally provides a curious proof
of the strong protection which the Jews enjoyed, and of the boldness
with which they showed their contempt for the superstitions around them.
As the customary procession of scholars and citizens was returning on
Ascension Day from S. Frideswide's, a Jew suddenly burst from the group
of his friends in front of the synagogue, and snatching the crucifix
from its bearer, trod it underfoot. But even in presence of such an
outrage, the terror of the Crown shielded the Jewry from any burst of
popular indignation. The King condemned the Jews of Oxford to make a
heavy silver crucifix for the University to carry in the processions,
and to erect a cross of marble where the crime was committed; but even
this punishment was in part remitted, and a less offensive place was
allotted for the cross in an open plot by Merton College.
But the time of the Jews had almost come. Their wealth and growing
insolence had fanned the flames of popular prejudice against them.
Protected by the kings whose policy it was to allow none to plunder them
but their royal selves, they reaped a harvest greater than even the
royal greed could reap.[10]
Their position as chattels of the King, outside the power of clergy or
barons, and as citizens of little towns within towns in whose life they
took no part except to profit by it, stirred the jealousy of the
various classes. Wild stories were circulated then, as on the Continent
still, of children carried off to be circumcised or crucified. The sack
of Jewry after Jewry was the sign of popular hatred and envy during the
Barons' war. Soon the persecution of the law fell upon these unhappy
people. Statute after statute hemmed them in. They were forbidden to
hold real property, to employ Christian servants, and to move through
the streets without two tell-tale white tablets of wool on their
breasts. Their trade, already crippled by the competition of bankers,
was annihilated by the royal order which bade them renounce usury, under
the pain of death. At last Edward, eager to obtain funds for his
struggle with Scotland, yielded to the fanaticism of his subjects and
bought the grant of a fifteenth from the clergy and laity at the price
of driving the Jews from his realm. From the time of Edward to that of
Cromwell no Jew touched English soil.
There is no reason to suppose with many historians that the Jews of
Oxford contributed through their books, seized at this time, to the
cultivation of physical and medical science, or that it was through the
books of the Rabbis that Roger Bacon was enabled to penetrate to the
older world of research. The traces which they have left in Oxford, save
in the indirect manner I have suggested, are not many. The rising
ground, now almost levelled, between the Castle and Broken Hayes, on the
outer edge of the Castle ditch on the north side, was long known as the
Mont de Juis, but being the place of execution, the name may more likely
be derived from justice than from Jews. A more interesting reminiscence
is provided by the Physic Garden opposite Magdalen College.
Henry II. had granted the Jews the right of burial outside of every city
in which they dwelt. At Oxford their burial place was on the site where
S. John's hospital was afterwards built, and was then transferred to the
place where the Physic Garden now stands.
This garden, the first land publicly set apart for the scientific study
of plants, was founded by Henry, Earl of Danby (1632), who gave the land
for this purpose. Mr John Evelyn visiting it a few years later was shown
the Sensitive Plant there for a great wonder. There also grew, he tells
us, canes, olive trees, rhubarb, but no extraordinary curiosities,
besides very good fruit. Curious, however, the shapes of the clipped
trees were, if we may believe Tickell, who writes enthusiastically:
"How sweet the landskip! where in living trees,
Here frowns a vegetable Hercules;
There famed Achilles learns to live again
And looks yet angry in the mimic scene;
Here artful birds, which blooming arbours shew,
Seem to fly higher whilst they upwards grow."
The gateway was designed by Inigo Jones, and the figures of Charles I.
and II. were added later, the expense being defrayed out of the fine
levied upon Anthony Wood for his libel upon Clarendon.
About the same time that Osney Abbey was finished the palace which Henry
Beauclerk had been building at Beaumont, outside the north gate of the
city, was finished also. To satisfy his love of hunting he had already
(1114) constructed a palace and park at Woodstock. Within the stone
walls of the enclosure there he nourished and maintained, says John
Rous, lions, leopards, strange spotted beasts, porcupines, camels, and
such like animals, sent to him by divers outlandish lords.
The old palace at Beaumont lay to the north-east of Worcester College.
Its site, chosen by the King "for the great pleasure of the seat and the
sweetness and delectableness of the air," is indicated by Beaumont
Street, a modern street which has revived the name of the palace on the
hill,--Bellus mons.
When not occupied with his books or his menagerie, the Scholar-King
found time to grant charters to the town, and he let to the city the
collective dues or fee-farm rent of the place.
Henry II. held important councils at Beaumont. The one romance of his
life is connected with Woodstock and Godstow.
One of the most charming of the many beautiful excursions by road or
river from Oxford takes you to the little village of Godstow,
"Through those wide fields of breezy grass
Where black-winged swallows haunt the glittering Thames."
To sail here from Folly Bridge or the Upper River, to fish here, to play
bowls or skittles here, to eat strawberries and cream here, has for
centuries been the delight of Oxford students.
"So on thy banks, too, Isis, have I strayed
A tasselled student, witness you who shared
My morning walk, my ramble at high noon,
My evening voyage, an unskilful sail,
To Godstow bound, or some inferior port,
For strawberries and cream. What have we found
In life's austerer hours delectable
As the long day so loitered?"
Just opposite the picturesque old Trout Inn and the bridge which spans
the river here you may see an old boundary wall, enclosing a paradise of
ducks and geese, at one corner of which is a ruined chapel with a
three-light perpendicular window. These are the only remaining fragments
of the once flourishing Nunnery, which was the last home of Rosamund,
Rosa Mundi, the Rose of the World.
During his residence at Oxford, Henry granted the growing city an
important charter, confirming the liberties they had enjoyed under Henry
I.,
"and specially their guild merchant, with all liberties and
customs, in lands and in goods, pastures and other accessories, so
that any one who is not of the guildhall shall not traffic in city
or suburbs, except as he was wont at the time of King Henry, my
grandfather. Besides I have granted them to be quit of toll and
passenger tax, and every custom through all England and Normandy,
by land, by water, by sea-coast, _by land and by strand_. And they
are to have all other customs and liberties and laws of their own,
which they have in common with my citizens of London. And that they
serve me at my feast with those of my Butlery, and do their traffic
with them, within London and without, and everywhere."
Oxford then (1161) enjoyed customs and liberties in common with London;
her charter was copied from that of the Londoners, and on any doubtful
matter she was bound to consult the parent town. She was soon provided
with aldermen, bailiffs, and chamberlains, whose titles were borrowed
from the merchant guild, and with councilmen who were elected from the
citizens at large. The Mayor was formally admitted to his office by the
Barons of the Exchequer at Westminster, and on his return thence, he was
met always by the citizens in their liveries at Trinity Chapel, without
Eastgate, where he stayed to return thanks to God for his safe return,
and left an alms upon the altar.
The merchant guild was originally distinct from the municipal
government, though finally the Guildhall became the common hall of the
city. In practice the chief members of the merchant guild would usually
be also the chief members of the Court-leet. The business of the
merchant guild was to regulate trade. Its relation to the craft guilds
is analogous to that which exists between the University and the
Colleges.
The Crafts, to which, as to the freedom of the city, men obtained
admission by birth, apprenticeship, or purchase, were numerous,
flourishing and highly organised. Every trade from cordwainers to cooks,
from tailors, weavers, and glovers to butchers and bakers, was a
brotherhood, with arms and a warden, beadle, and steward of its own, and
an annually elected headmaster.
The various Guilds had special chapels in the different churches where
they burnt candles and celebrated mass, on particular days. The glovers
held mass on Trinity Monday in All Saints' Church; the tailors in the
same church, and they also founded a chantrey in S. Martin's. "A token
of this foundation is a pair of tailor's shears painted in the upper
south window of the south aisle" (Wood). The cooks celebrated their
chief holiday in Whitsun week, when they showed themselves in their
bravery on horseback.
The tailors had their shops in Wincheles Row, and they had a custom of
revelling on the vigil of S. John the Baptist.
"Caressing themselves with all joviality in meats and drinks they
would in the midst of the night dance and take a circuit throughout
all the streets, accompanied by divers musical instruments, and
using some certain sonnets in praise of their profession and
patron."
But such customs led to disturbances and were finally prohibited. The
barbers, a company which existed till fifty years ago, maintained a
light in Our Lady's Chapel at S. Frideswide's. Some of the regulations
by which they bound themselves when they were incorporated by order of
the Chancellor in 1348 are typical. The barbers, it should be added,
were the mediæval physicians too.
Their ordinances provided that no person of that craft should work on a
Sunday or shave any but such as were to preach or do a religious act on
Sundays. No servant or man of the craft should reveal any infirmity or
secret disease he had to his customers or patients. A master of the
craft was to be chosen every year, to whom every one of his craft should
be obedient during his year of office. Every apprentice that was to set
up shop after his time was expired should first give the master and
wardens with the rest of the society a dinner and pay for one pound of
wax, and that being done, the said master and wardens with three other
seniors of the craft should bring him to the chancellor upon their
shoulders, before whom he was to take his oath to keep all the
ordinations and statutes of the craft, and pay to Our Lady's box
eightpence and the like sum to the chancellor. The same procedure must
be observed by any foreigner that had not been prenticed in Oxford but
desired to set up a shop to occupy as barber, surgeon, or waferer or
maker of singing bread. All such as were of the craft were to receive at
least sixpence a quarter of each customer that desired to be shaved
every week in his chamber or house. If any member of the craft should
take upon him to teach any person not an apprentice, he should pay 6s.
8d., whereof 3s. 4d. should go to the craft, 1s. 8d. to the chancellor,
and 1s. 8d. to the proctors. Rules are also given for the observance of
the barbers' annual holiday and the election of their master.
Stimulated by the presence of the kings without its walls and the growth
of the university within, trade flourished so greatly that it was soon
necessary to regulate it by minute provisions. In the reign of Edward
II. (1319) the mayor and bailiffs were commanded to "prevent confusion
in the merchandising of strangers, and those who were not free of any
guild from thrusting out those who were." All traders and sellers who
came to Oxford on market days--Wednesdays and Saturdays--were to know
each one their places.
"The sellers of straw, with their horses and cattle that bring it,"
so ran the regulation, "shall stand between East Gate and All
Saints' Church, in the middle of the King's Highway. The sellers of
wood in carts shall stand between Shidyard (Oriel) Street and the
tenement of John Maidstone and the tenement on the east side of the
Swan Inn (now King Edward's Street, the ugly row of smug,
commonplace houses which has been erected on the site of Swan
Yard). The sellers of bark shall stand between S. Thomas' Hall
(Swan Inn) and S. Edward's Lane (Alfred Street). The sellers of
hogs and pigs shall stand between the churches of S. Mary and All
Saints; the ale sellers between S. Edward's Lane and the Chequer
Inn; the sellers of earthen-pots and coals by the said lane of S.
Edward on the north side of the High Street. The sellers of gloves
and whitawyers (dresses of white leather) shall stand between All
Saints' Church and the house on the west side of the Mitre Inn; the
furriers, linen and woollen drapers by the two-faced pump (which
perhaps stood on the site of the later conduit at Carfax. This
conduit was erected in 1616 and water brought to it from the hill
springs above North Hincksey. It was removed in 1787 and presented
to Earl Harcourt, who re-erected it at Nuneham Park some five miles
from Oxford, where it may still be seen, on a slope commanding an
extensive view of the Thames Valley between Abingdon and Oxford.)
"The bakers," the regulation continued, "shall stand between Carfax
and North Gate, and behind them the foreign sellers of fish and
those that are not free or of the guild. The tanners shall stand
between Somner's Inn and Carfax; the sellers of cheese, milk, eggs,
beans, new peas and butter from the corner of Carfax towards the
Bailly; the sellers of hay and grass at the Pillory; the
cornsellers between North Gate and Mauger Hall (the Cross Inn)."
Besides these market-stands the permanent trades and resident guilds had
distinct spheres allotted to them. The cutlers, drapers, cooks and
cordwainers had their special districts; the goldsmiths had their shops
in All Saints' parish, the Spicery and Vintnery[11] lay to the south of
S. Martin's; Fish Street extended to Folly Bridge, the Corn Market
stretched away to North Gate, the stalls of the butchers ranged in their
Butchers' Row along the road to the Castle (Queen's Street). As for the
great guild of weavers, there was a wool market in Holywell Green. Part
of the ground since included in Magdalen College Grove was known as
Parry's Mead, and here twenty-three looms were working at once, and
barges came up to it on the Cherwell.
Thus then Oxford had attained to complete municipal self-government. She
stood now in the first rank of municipalities. 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
[Illustration: The Turret Quad Merton College]
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."
The University cannot, then, claim Alfred the Great either as her
founder or restorer. All the known facts and indications point the other
way. It was not till 912, some years after Alfred's death, that Edward
the Elder obtained possession of Oxford, which was outside Alfred's
kingdom; Asser knew nothing of this foundation. It was not till the days
of Edward III., that Ralph Higden's _Polychronicon_ apparently gave
birth to the myth with the statement that Alfred--
"By the counsel of S. Neot the Abbot, was the first to establish
schools for the various arts at Oxford; to which city he granted
privileges of many kinds."
And from that time the myth was repeated and grew.
But if King Alfred did not found the University who did? or how did it
come into existence?
Briefly the case stands thus. Before the second half of the twelfth
century--the age of Universities--there are no discoverable traces of
such a thing at Oxford, but in the last twenty years of that century
references to it are frequent and decided. The University was evidently
established, and its reputation was widely spread.
There abounded there, contemporaries inform us, "men skilled in mystic
eloquence, weighing the words of the law, bringing forth from their
treasures things new and old." And the University was dubbed by the
proud title "The Second School of the Church."
She was second, that is, to Paris, as a school of Theology, and to
Paris, the researches of modern experts like Dr Rashdall lead us to
believe, she owed her origin.
The Universities, the greatest and perhaps the most permanent of
Mediæval Institutions, were a gradual and almost secret growth. For long
centuries Europe had been sunk in the gloom of the Dark Ages. The light
of learning shone in the cloister alone, and there burned with but a dim
and flickering flame. In Spain not one priest in a thousand about the
age of Charlemagne could address a common letter of salutation to
another. Scarcely a single person could be found in Rome who knew the
first elements of letters; in England, Alfred declared that he could not
recollect one priest at the time of his accession who understood the
ordinary prayers. Learning lay buried in the grave of Bede. At Court,
emperors could not write, and in the country contracts were made
verbally for lack of notaries who could draw up charters.
But towards the end of the eleventh century Europe began to recover from
this state of poverty and degradation. Christendom had gained a new
impulse from the Crusades. Trade revived and began to develop, some
degree of tranquillity was restored, and the growing wealth of the world
soon found expression in an increasing refinement of manners, in the
sublime and beautiful buildings of the age of Cathedrals, and in a
greater ardour for intellectual pursuits.
A new fervour of study arose in the West from its contact with the more
cultured East. Everywhere throughout Europe great schools which bore the
name of Universities were established.
The long mental inactivity of Europe broke up like ice before a summer's
sun. Wandering teachers, such as 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 of
mankind, either local or intellectual, that had hurried half Christendom
to the tomb of its Lord, crowded the roads with thousands of young
scholars, hurrying to the chosen seats where teachers were gathered
together. A new power, says an eloquent historian, had sprung up in the
midst of a world as yet under the rule of sheer brute force. Poor as
they were, sometimes even of a servile race, the wandering scholars, who
lectured in every cloister, were hailed as "Masters" by the crowds at
their feet.
This title of "Master" suggests, of course, the nomenclature of the
Guilds. A University, in fact, was a Guild of Study. The word
implies[13] a community of individuals bound together for any purpose,
in this case for the purpose of teaching. It was applied to the whole
body of students frequenting the "studium," and hence the term came to
be used as synonymous with "studium" to denote the institution itself.
The system of academical degrees dates from the second half of the
twelfth century. After the manner of mediæval craftsmen in other trades,
the profession of teaching was limited to those who had served an
apprenticeship in a University or Guild of Study and were qualified as
Masters of their Art. Nobody was allowed to teach without a licence from
such a Guild, just as no butcher or tailor was allowed to ply his trade
without having served his proper term and having been approved by the
Masters of his Guild. A University degree, therefore, was originally
simply a diploma of teaching, which afterwards came to be regarded as a
title, when retained by men who had ceased to lecture or teach.
"Bachelor" was the term applied to students who had ceased to be pupils
but had not yet become teachers. The word was generally used to denote
an apprentice or aspirant to Knighthood, but in the Universities came to
have this technical signification. The degree of Bachelor was in fact an
important step on the way to the higher degree of Master or Doctor.
One of the first symptoms of the twelfth century renaissance may be
traced in the revival in Italy of the study of jurisprudence as derived
from the laws of Justinian. For early in the twelfth century a professor
named Irnerius opened a school of civil law at Bologna, and Lombardy was
soon full of lawyers. Teachers of that profitable art soon spread from
Bologna throughout Europe, and their University was the first to receive
from Frederic Barbarossa the privileges of legal incorporation. It
presently became known as the special University of young archdeacons,
whose mode of life gave rise to the favourite subject of debate "Can an
archdeacon be saved?" But it was the school of philosophy at Paris which
chiefly attracted the newly-kindled enthusiasm of the studious. The
tradition of the schools of Charlemagne may have lingered there,
although no direct connection between them and the University which now
sprang into being can be proved. As early as 1109 William of Champeaux
opened a school of logic, and it was to his brilliant and combative
pupil, Peter Abelard, that the University owed its rapid advancement in
the estimation of mankind. The multitude of disciples who flocked to his
lectures, and listened with delight to his bold theories and his
assertion of the rights of reason against authority, showed that a new
spirit of enquiry and speculation was abroad. The poets and orators of
antiquity were, indeed, beginning to be studied with genuine admiration,
and the introduction into Europe of some of the Arabian writings on
geometry and physics was opening the door to the development of
mathematical science. But the flower of intellectual and scientific
enquiry was destined to be nipped in the bud by the blighting influence
of scholasticism. Already among the pupils of Abelard was numbered Peter
Lombard, the future author of "The Sentences," a system of the doctrines
of the Church, round which the dogmatic theology of the schoolmen,
trammelled by a rigid network of dialectics, was to grow up.
It was the light before a dawn which never broke into day. But as yet
the period was one of awakening and promise. Students from all parts
crowded to Paris, and the Faculty[14] of Arts in the University was
divided into four "nations"--those of France, Picardy, Normandy and
England. John of Salisbury became famous as one of the Parisian
teachers. Becket wandered to Paris from his school at Merton. After
spending twelve years at Paris, John of Salisbury, the central figure of
English learning in his time, finally returned to England. S. Bernard
recommended him to Archbishop Theobald, and in the archbishop's
household at Canterbury he found in existence a very School of
Literature, where scholars like Vacarius came to lecture on civil law,
where lectures and disputations were regularly held, and men like Becket
and John of Poictiers were trained.
"In the house of my Lord the Archbishop," writes Peter of Blois,
"are most scholarly men, with whom is found all the uprightness of
justice, all the caution of providence, every form of learning.
They after prayers and before meals, in reading, in disputing, in
the decision of causes constantly exercise themselves. All the
knotty questions of the realms are referred to us...."
This archiepiscopal school was in fact a substitute for the as yet
undeveloped Universities. Besides this school there were, in England,
schools in connection with all the great Cathedral establishments and
with many of the monasteries as well as the houses of the nobles. There
were, for instance, great schools at S. Alban's and at Oxford. But these
_studia_ were not _studia generalia_; they were schools merely, not
Universities. It was perhaps to the school which had sprung up in
connection with S. Frideswide's monastery that Vacarius lectured, if he
lectured at Oxford at all.
It was in such a monastic school, in connection with S. Frideswide's,
Osney, or S. George's in the Castle, that Robert Pullen of Paris
lectured on the Bible for five years (1133), and Theobaldus Stampensis
taught. Henry Beauclerc endeavoured to retain the services of the former
by offering him a bishopric, but he refused it and left England;
Stephen, on the other hand, bade Vacarius cease from lecturing, since
the new system of law, which he taught and which had converted the
Continent, was inconsistent with the old laws of the English realm. As
to Theobaldus Stampensis, he styles himself Magister Oxenefordiæ, and
letters from him exist which show that he, a Norman ecclesiastic who had
taught at Caen, taught at Oxford before 1117. An anonymous reply to a
tractate in which he attacked the monks, is responsible for the
statement that this former Doctor of Caen had at Oxford "sixty or a
hundred clerks, more or less." 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. But at
Oxford, the masters and scholars were never under the jurisdiction of
the Prior or Abbot of S. Frideswide's or Osney. If they had been, some
trace or record of their struggle for emancipation must have survived.
The Chancellor, moreover, when he is first mentioned, proves to be
elected by the masters and scholars and to derive his authority, not
from any capitular or monastic body in Oxford, but from the Bishop of
Lincoln. And the University buildings themselves, in their primitive
form, bear silent witness to the same fact, that the schools or studium
in connection with which the University grew up were in no way connected
with conventual churches and monasteries. For the schools were not near
S. Frideswide's but S. Mary's.
The independence of the Oxford masters from any local ecclesiastical
authority is a significant fact. Combined with another it seems to admit
of but one explanation. That other fact is the suddenness with which the
reputation of Oxford sprang up. Before 1167 there is, as we have shown,
no evidence of the existence of a _studium generale_ there, but there
are indications enough that in the next few years students began to
come, clerks from all parts of England.
The account of the visit of Giraldus Cambrensis (1184-5) reveals the
existence of a Studium on a large scale, with a number of Masters and
Faculties. It is a Studium Generale by that time without a doubt. And in
1192 Richard of Devizes speaks of the clerks of Oxford as so numerous
that the city could hardly feed them.
What, then, is the explanation of this so sudden development? Probably
it lies in a migration of scholars to Oxford at this time. The migratory
habits of mediæval masters and scholars are familiar to everyone who has
the smallest acquaintance with the history of the Universities. The
Universities of Leipzig, Reggio, Vicenza, Vercelli, and Padua, for
instance, were founded by migrations from one University or another. The
story of Oxford itself will furnish instances in plenty of the readiness
of the University to threaten to migrate and, when hard pressed, to
fulfil their threat. Migrations to Cambridge, Stamford, and Northampton
are among the undoubted facts of our history. Such a migration then
would be in the natural course of things, though it would not satisfy
the pride of the inventors of the Alfred myth. But a migration of this
kind did not take place without a cause. A cause however is not to seek.
At this very period the quarrel of Henry II. with Thomas a Becket was
the occasion for a migration from Paris, the ordinary seat of higher
education for English ecclesiastics.
A letter from John of Salisbury to Peter the Writer in 1167 contains
this remark: "France, the most polite and civilised of all nations, has
expelled the foreign students from her borders."
This, as Dr Rashdall suggests, may possibly have been a measure of
hostility aimed by the French King against the oppressor of Holy Church
and against the English ecclesiastics, who as a body sided with their
King against their not yet canonised primate.
Henry II., on the other hand, took the same measures to punish the
partisans of Becket. All clerks were forbidden to go to or from the
Continent without leave of the King, and all clerks who possessed
revenues in England were summoned to return to England within three
months, "as they love their revenues." This would produce an exodus from
Paris. A large number of English masters and scholars must have been
compelled to return home. According to the usual procedure of mediæval
students they were likely to collect in some one town and set up under
their old masters something of their old organisation. These ordinances
were promulgated between the years 1165 and 1169. The ports were
strictly watched in order to enforce this edict.
The migrating scholars would land at Dover and lodge, perhaps, for a
night or two at the Benedictine Priory there, before going on to
Canterbury. Here, if they had been so minded, they might have stayed,
and swelled the great literary circle, with its teachers and libraries,
which had been formed there. But they left Gervase at Canterbury to
write his history, and Nigel to compose his verses and polish his
satires. Passing northwards, they might, had they come a little later,
have been absorbed at Lambeth, and the scheme of Archbishop Baldwin for
setting up a College there, which should be a centre of ecclesiastical
learning, emancipated from monastic restrictions, might then have been
realised. Or, if they had wished to attach themselves to any existing
establishment, the monastic schools of St Alban's might have welcomed
them.
But they chose otherwise. It may be that their experience of Paris led
them to choose a place which was neither a capital nor a See-town. At
any rate the peculiar position of Oxford, which was neither of these and
yet an important commercial and political centre, made it admirably
suited for the free development of a University, unharassed by bishops
and unmolested by lord mayors.
At Oxford, too, was the Palace of the King, and Henry II. was a champion
of literary culture by his very descent. His grandfather had earned the
title of Henry Beauclerk, the scholar King; and Fulk the Good, who had
told King Lothar that an unlearned king is a crowned ass, was a lineal
ancestor of his. And apart from his own hereditary tastes, the position
of Henry as the most powerful king of the West, and the international
correspondence which that position involved, tended to make the Court a
centre of literary activity. Learning was sought not for itself only,
but as a part of the equipment of a man of the world. For whatever
reason, whether they were influenced by a desire, springing from
experience of Paris, to establish themselves where they might be most
independent, or by the physical advantages of Oxford, or the hope of
favour from the King who had recalled them, and who at his Court and
about his Palace of Beaumont had gathered round him all that was
enlightened and refined in English and Norman society, or whether they
were directed by mere chance, settling for a session and staying for
centuries, it was to Oxford they came.
Here ready to receive them they would find a town which stood in the
front rank of municipalities, commanding the river valley along which
the commerce of Southern England mainly flowed. The mitred Abbey of
Austin Canons, the Priory of S. Frideswide, the Castle of the D'Oiglis,
and the Royal Palace without the Vallum marked the ecclesiastical and
political importance of the place; the settlement of one of the
wealthiest of the English Jewries in the very heart of the town
indicated, as it promoted, the activity of its trade. It was still
surrounded on all sides by a wild forest country. The moors of Cowley
and Bullingdon fringed the course of the Thames; the great woods of
Shotover and Bagley closed the horizon on south and east. But Oxford was
easy of access, for there were the great roads that crossed at Carfax
and there was the thoroughfare of the Thames. And facility of
communication meant regularity of supplies, a matter of great importance
to a floating population of poor students.
Here, then, the migrating masters and scholars set up their schools, and
within a very short time the reputation of the University was
established throughout the length and breadth of the land.
Giraldus Cambrensis, a Welshman, who had achieved fame as a lecturer at
Paris, has given us an interesting account of his visit to Oxford in
1187. He came there with the purpose of reading aloud portions of his
new work, as Herodotus read his history at the Panathenaic festival at
Athens or at the National Games of Greece. Giraldus had written a book
on Ireland--Topographia--and he chose this method of publishing and
advertising it. He writes of himself in the third person, without any
excessive modesty. You might almost think he was a modern author, asking
his critics to dinner and writing his own "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 upheld the tradition of his College. For, he
argued, if Oxford was in the hands of the Danes at the time when Alfred
founded the University, that fact only strengthened their case. For King
Alfred was a man so much in advance of his age that it is not surprising
to find that he had anticipated the modern political doctrine, which
teaches us that the surest way to earn popularity, is to give away the
property of our opponents.
[Illustration: University College]
The story of the lawsuit will be found to be instructive if
discreditable.
In 1363 the College by two purchases obtained possession of considerable
property in land and houses which had been the estate of Philip Gonwardy
and Joan his wife. After the College had been in possession some
fourteen years, however, a certain Edmund Francis and Idonea his wife
came forward to dispute the right to it. They maintained that Philip
Gonwardy and his wife had had no true title to the estate, for it, or
part of it, had been bequeathed to them by one John Goldsmith in 1307.
And he, they asserted, had by a later document settled the same property
upon them. The case was tried at Westminster; transferred to Oxford,
where the College obtained a verdict in their favour, and then taken
back on appeal to Westminster.
It was at this point that the document known as the French petition--it
is written in the Court French of the day--was filed. Finding,
apparently, that the case was going against them, the College determined
to use the myth about Alfred, claim to be a royal foundation and thus
throw the matter, and their liberties along with it, into the King's
hands, leaving the case to be decided by the Privy Council.
"To their most excellent and most dread and most sovereign Lord the
King," so ran the petition, "and to his most sage council, shew his
poor orators, the master and scholars of his College, called Mickle
University Hall in Oxenford, which College was first founded by
your noble progenitor, King Alfred, whom may God assoil, for the
maintenance of twenty-six divines for ever; that whereas one Edmund
Francis, citizen of London, hath in virtue of his great power
commenced a suit in the King's Bench, against some of the tenants
of the said masters and scholars, for certain lands and tenements,
with which the College was endowed ... and from time to time doth
endeavour to destroy and utterly disinherit your said College of
the rest of its endowment.... That it may please your most
sovereign and gracious Lord King, since you are our true founder
and advocate, to make the aforesaid parties appear before your very
sage council, to show in evidences upon the rights of the
aforesaid matter, so that upon account of the poverty of your said
orators your said College be not disinherited, having regard, most
gracious Lord, that the noble saints, John of Beverley, Bede, and
Richard Armacan (Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh), and many other
famous doctors and clerks, were formerly scholars in your said
College, and commenced divines therein, and this for God's sake,
and as a deed of charity."
This deed, then, and others, these mere children in litigation did
deliberately forge, attaching the Chancellor's seal thereto, in order to
substantiate their absurd, but profitable, pretension.
The device was successful for a time, although the very petition
contains within itself glaring historical contradictions, which either
show supreme ignorance on the part of the masters and scholars or a
cynical assumption of the historical ignorance of lawyers. If the
College was founded by King Alfred who came to the throne in 872, it
would seem a little unwise to instance as famous scholars of that
foundation "noble Saints" like John of Beverley, who was Archbishop of
York in 705, and the venerable Bede who died in 735.
As to the real founder of University College all the evidence points to
William, Archdeacon of Durham, who is mentioned as one of the five
distinguished English scholars who left Paris in 1229, in consequence of
the riots between the townsfolk and the University. Henry's invitation
to the Paris masters to come and settle at Oxford was immediately
accepted by the other four. Their example was probably soon followed by
William, after a sojourn at Angers. He was appointed Rector of
Wearmouth, and is said to have "abounded in great revenues, but was
gaping after greater." Some litigation with the Bishop of Durham led him
to appeal to the Papal Court. His appeal was successful, but it availed
him little, for on his journey home he died at Rouen (1249). His bones
are said by Skelton to lie in the Chapel of the Virgin in the Cathedral
there. He left 310 marks in trust to the University to invest for the
benefit and support of a certain number of masters. It was actually the
first endowment of its kind, but it is to Alan Basset, who died about
1243, that the credit of providing the first permanent endowment for an
Oxford scholar is due. For he conceived the idea of combining a
scholarship with a Chantry. He left instructions in his will in
accordance with which his executors arranged with the Convent of
Bicester for the payment of eight marks a year to two chaplains, who
should say mass daily for the souls of the founder and his wife, and at
the same time study in the schools of Oxford or elsewhere.
This was a step in the direction of founding a College, and indeed the
original plan of William was hardly more imposing.
The University placed Durham's money in a "Chest," and used it partly on
their own business and partly in loans to others, barons in the Barons'
War for instance. Such loans were seldom repaid, and only 210 marks
remained. This sum was expended in purchasing houses. The first house
bought (1253) by the University was at the corner of School Street and
St Mildred's Lane (_tenementum angulare in vico scholarum_).
The site of this the first property held by the University for
educational purposes[15] is now included in the front, the noisy,
over-decorated front, of Brasenose College. It was called, naturally
enough, first the Hall of the University and afterwards the little Hall
of the University. A second purchase was made in 1255, when a tenement
called Drogheda Hall, the then first house in the High Street on the
north side, was bought. It stands almost opposite to the present Western
Gate of the College. Brasenose Hall was the next purchase under
William's bequest (1262), and (1270) a quit rent of fifteen shillings,
charged on two houses in S. Peter's parish, was the last. William of
Durham had not founded a College. There is nothing to show that the
purchase of houses by the University was originally made with any other
object than that of securing a sound investment of the trust money.
There is nothing to show, that is, either that the houses were bought
originally and specifically as habitations for the pensioned masters
(though they _may_ have lodged there), or that it was originally
intended, either by the University or the founder, that they should form
a community.
Statutes were not granted to the masters admitted to the benefits of
this foundation until the year 1280, and by that time a precedent had
been created. From the year 1280, then, may be dated the incorporation
of what is now known as University College. A very small society of poor
masters were, according to the revised plan, to live together on the
bounty of William of Durham and devote themselves to the study of
theology. And this idea of association was evidently adopted from the
rule for Merton Hall laid down by Merton six years before. The revenue
from the fund increased rapidly, so that by 1292, the society was
increased from "four poor masters" to one consisting of two classes of
scholars, the seniors receiving six and eightpence a year more than the
juniors, and having authority over them. Other clerks of good character,
not on the foundation, were permitted to hire lodgings in the Hall,
prototypes of the modern commoner. Funds and benefactions accrued to the
Hall. A library was built, and the society gradually enlarged. Members
of it were enjoined to live like Saints and to speak Latin. In the
election of new Fellows a preference was given to those "born nearest to
the parts of Durham." And a graduated fine was imposed, according to
which a scholar who insulted another in private was to pay a shilling,
before his fellows two shillings, and if in the street, in church or
recreation ground, six and eightpence. For the administration of the
College funds a bursar was annually appointed, whose accounts were
subsequently approved and signed by the Chancellor. This practice of
University supervision was maintained till 1722.
Yet another body of statutes was promulgated in 1311. The study of
theology and the preference given to those who hailed from Durham were
emphasised in accordance with the founder's wishes. The Senior Fellow
was required to be ordained, but any Fellow who was appointed to a
benefice of five marks a year now forfeited his election. This latter
regulation, which occurs in substance in most of the fourteenth century
foundations--by the Statutes of Queens, indeed, a Fellow who refused a
benefice forfeited his fellowship--shows that fellowships were intended
not as mere endowments of learning but as stepping-stones to preferment.
It does not, on the other hand, show that the founders did not
contemplate the existence of life-fellows. I think that it is tolerably
clear Walter de Merton did. The office of Master of the College grew out
of the position of the Senior Fellow; his authority was asserted by new
statutes given in 1476.
It was in 1332 that the scholars of William of Durham moved from the
corner house on the north side of the High Street, if that was where
they abode, to the site of their present College, bounded by Logic Lane
and Grove Street, and forming in the southern curve of the High Street,
one of the most effective and noble features in that splendid sweep
which embraces, on the other side, Queen's, All Souls', St Mary's,
Brasenose, and All Saints'.
The society had received large benefactions from a generous donor,
Philip Ingleberd of Beverley, and they now purchased Spicer's (formerly
Durham's) Hall, the first house in St Mary's parish, which stood near
the present western gateway of University College. Further benefactions
made further purchases possible. White Hall and Rose Hall in Kybald
Street were bought, and Lodelowe Hall, on the east of Spicer's Hall
(1336). Spicer's Hall soon came to be known as the University Hall; the
hall next to it, when acquired, was distinguished as Great University
Hall. The reversion to the remainder of the High Street frontage,
between Lodelowe Hall and the present Logic Lane, was not secured till
1402, when the munificence of Walter Skirlaw, Bishop of Durham, enabled
the society to extend their property and their numbers. The tenements
thus acquired were called Little University Hall and the Cock on the
Hoop. The next purchase of the College involved them in that lawsuit
which has had so curious a result upon the imaginations of its
subsequent members.
Thus, then, the foundation of William had become a College, "the first
daughter of Alma Mater." Being the first "Hall" acquired by the
University it came to be spoken of as "The Hall of the University," and
the members of the foundation, as "Scholars of University Hall." Their
proper title, "Scholars of the Hall of William of Durham," gradually
fell out of use. Strangers to the University system usually find
themselves confused by the relations of the University and the Colleges.
The University, then, let it be said, is a corporation existing apart
from the Colleges; the Colleges are separate incorporated foundations,
independent though practically subordinate to it.
The old thatched halls of wood and clay were used till it became
necessary to rebuild in 1632. A smaller version of the seventeenth
century quadrangle then constructed was finished in 1719.
For in 1714 had died Dr John Radcliffe, a famous and witty doctor, whose
skill had secured him the post of court physician and whose wit had
deprived him of it. For he offended William III. by remarking to that
dropsical monarch, that he would not have his two legs for his two
kingdoms. It had long been known that the worthy doctor intended to make
his College and his University his heirs. His munificence was rewarded
by a public funeral of unexampled splendour and a grave in the nave of
St Mary's. The bulk of his fortune he devoted to specific purposes
benefiting the University, but he left a large sum to University College
"for the
[Illustration: Radcliffe Library from Brasenose Quad.]
building of the front down to Logic Lane, answerable to the front
already built, and for building the master's lodging therein, and
chambers for his two travelling Fellows," whom he endowed. The Radcliffe
Quadrangle commemorates his benefaction to his College; the Radcliffe
Infirmary (Woodstock Road, 1770), the Radcliffe Observatory, built
1772-1795, on a site given by George, Duke of Marlborough; and last, but
not least the Radcliffe Library, or as it is more usually termed the
Camera Bodleiana (James Gibbs, architect, 1737-1749) stand forth in the
city as the noble monuments of his intelligent munificence.
The magnificent dome of the latter forms one of the most striking
features among Oxford buildings.[16]
* * * * *
Neither the University of Oxford nor University College can justly claim
to be connected with the name of Alfred the Great. But there are relics
of Alfred and Alfred's time preserved at Oxford which should be of
interest to the visitor. In the Bodleian may be seen certain coins which
have led historians to assume that Alfred set up a mint at Oxford, and
to argue from this supposed fact that his rule was firmly established
over Mercia. The coins in question, which were all found in Lancashire,
are variations of the type bearing these letters;--
_Obverse._ ORSNA, then in another line ELFRED, and in the third
line FORDA. _Reverse_ BERNV + + + ALDNº
It is assumed that these words indicate that Bernwald was a moneyer who
was authorised by Alfred to strike coins at Oxford. But why Oxford
should be written Orsnaforda and why, instead of the usual practice of
abbreviation, the name of the place of the mint should have been written
wrongly and at excessive length is not explained. I do not think there
is any sufficient reason to connect the Orsnaforda coins with Oxford at
all.
Whether Alfred's sceptre held sway over Mercia so that it can be stated
definitely that "Wessex and Mercia were now united as Wessex and Kent
had long been united by their allegiance to the same ruler" (Green) or
not, the fact is not to be deduced from an imaginary mint at Oxford, any
more than from the forged documents in the archives of University
College or from the presence of what is known as King Alfred's jewel in
the University galleries, (Beaumont Street).
This beautiful specimen of gold enamelled work was found in
Somersetshire in 1693 and added to the Ashmolean collections a little
later. The inscription "Aelfred mee heht gevvrcan" (Alfred ordered me to
be made) which it bears has earned it its title.
* * * * *
The promotion of Edmund Rich, the Abingdon lad who was first made an
archbishop and then a saint, to the degree of Master of Arts, is the
earliest mention of that degree in Oxford. The story of his life there
gives the best illustration we have of the early years and growth of the
University.
In the ardour of knowledge and the passionate purity of youth he vowed
himself to a life of study and chastity. In the spirit of mystical piety
which was ever characteristic of him, secretly as a boy he took Mary for
his bride. Perhaps at eventide, when the shadows were gathering in the
Church of S. Mary and the crowd of teachers and students were breaking
up from the rough schools which stood near the western doors of the
church in the cemetery without, he approached the image of the Virgin
and slipped on Mary's finger a gold ring. On that ring was engraved
"that sweet Ave with which the Angel at the Annunciation had hailed the
Virgin." Devout and studious, the future saint was not without boyish
tastes. He paid more attention to the music and singing at S. Mary's, we
are told, than to the prayers. On one occasion he was slipping out of
the church before the service was finished in order to join the other
students at their games. But at the north door a divine apparition bade
him return, and from that time his devotion grew more fervent. It is
recorded with astonishment by his biographers as a mark of his singular
piety, that when he had taken his degree as Master he would attend mass
each day before lecturing, contrary to the custom of the scholars of
that time, and although he was not yet in orders. 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. He
would throw down the money on the window-sill, and there burying it in
the dust which had accumulated, "dust to dust, ashes to ashes," he would
cry, celebrating its obsequies. And there the fee would lie till a
student in joke or earnest theft ran off with it. So for six years he
lectured in Arts. But even knowledge brought its troubles. The Old
Testament, which with the copy of the Decretals long formed his sole
library, frowned down upon a love of secular learning, from which Edmund
found it hard to wean himself. The call came at last. He was lecturing
one day in Mathematics, when the form of his dead mother appeared to
him. "My son," she seemed to say, "what art thou studying? What are
these strange diagrams over which thou porest so intently?"
She seized Edmund's right hand, and in the palm drew three circles,
within which she wrote the names of the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost.
"Be these thy diagrams henceforth, my son," she cried. And so directed,
the student devoted himself henceforth to Theology.
This story, Green observes, admirably illustrates the latent opposition
between the spirit of the University and the spirit of the Church. The
feudal and ecclesiastical order of the old mediæval world were both
alike threatened by the new training. Feudalism rested on local
isolation. The University was a protest against this isolation of man
from man. What the Church and Empire had both aimed at and both failed
in, the knitting of Christian nations together into a vast commonwealth,
the Universities of the time actually did.
On the other hand, the spirit of intellectual inquiry promoted by the
Universities, ecclesiastical bodies though they were, threatened the
supremacy of 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. For, according to the monastic ideal, theology was confined to
mere interpretation of the text of Scripture and the dicta of the
Fathers or Church. To this narrow science all the sciences were the
handmaids. They were regarded as permissible only so far as they
contributed to this end. But the great outburst of intellectual
enthusiasm in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries created a momentary
revolution in these matters. The whole range of science as revealed by
the newly discovered treasures of Greek thinkers and Roman Jurists was
now thrown open to the student. And this faint revival of physical
science, this temporary restoration of classical literature, a
re-discovery as it were of an older and a greater world, and contact
with a larger, freer life, whether in mind, in society or politics,
introduced a spirit of scepticism, of doubt, of denial, into the realms
of unquestionable belief.
But the Church was alive to the danger. Fiercely she fought
[Illustration: Garden Front
S John's College]
the tide of opposition, and at last won back the allegiance of the
Universities. Through the Schoolmen ecclesiasticism once more triumphed,
and the reign of Theology was resumed. Soon scholasticism absorbed the
whole mental energy of the student world. The old enthusiasm for
knowledge died down; science was discredited, and literature in its
purer forms became extinct.
The scholastic philosophy, so famous for several ages, has passed away
and been forgotten. We cannot deny that Roscelin, Anselm, Abelard, Peter
Lombard, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Ockham were
men of acute and even profound understanding, the giants of their own
generation. But all their inquiries after truth were vitiated by two
insurmountable obstacles--the authority of Aristotle and the authority
of the Church. For Aristotle, whom the scholastics did not understand,
and who had been so long held at bay as the most dangerous foe of
mediæval faith, whom none but Anti-Christ could comprehend, was now
turned, by the adoption of his logical method in the discussion and
definition of theological dogma, into its unexpected ally. It was this
very method which led to that "unprofitable subtlety and curiosity"
which Lord Bacon notes as the vice of the scholastic philosophy.
Yet the scholastic mode of dispute, admitting of no termination and
producing no conviction, was sure in the end to cause scepticism, just
as the triviality of the questions on which the schoolmen wasted their
amazing ingenuity was sure at last to produce disgust. What could be
more trifling than a disquisition about the nature of angels, their
means of conversing, and the morning and evening states of their
understanding, unless perhaps it were a subtle and learned dispute as to
whether a chimæra, buzzing in a vacuum, can devour second intentions?
John of Salisbury observed of the Parisian dialecticians in his own
time, that after several years absence he found them not a step
advanced, and still employed in urging and parrying the same arguments.
His observation was applicable to the succeeding centuries. After three
or four hundred years the scholastics had not untied a single knot or
added one equivocal truth to the domain of philosophy. Then men
discovered at last that they had given their time for the promise of
wisdom, and had been cheated in the bargain. At the revival of letters
the pretended science had few advocates left, save among the prejudiced
or ignorant adherents of established systems.
And yet, in the history of education and of the historical events which
education directs, the discussions of the schoolmen hold a place not
altogether contemptible. Their disputes did at least teach men to
discuss and to define, to reason and to inquire. And thus was promoted
the critical spirit which was boldly to challenge the rights of the
Pope, and to receive and profit by the great disclosures of knowledge in
a future age.
Of the early schools and the buildings which sprang into existence to
mark the first beginnings of the University, no trace remains.
The church of S. Giles in north Oxford, which, as we have seen, is the
church claimed by Rous as the S. Mary's of his imaginary University in
Beaumont Fields, is the only architectural illustration of this period.
It was consecrated by S. Hugh, the great Bishop of Lincoln, and is of
interest as affording one of the earliest examples of lancet work in
England (1180-1210?). The high placed windows in the north wall of the
nave are Norman; the tower is in the Transition style.
CHAPTER IV
THE COMING OF THE FRIARS
Scarcely had the University established itself in Oxford, when an
immigration into that city took place, which was destined to have no
inconsiderable influence on its history. Bands of men began to arrive
and to settle there, members of new orders vowed to poverty and
ignorance, whose luxury in after years was to prove a scandal, and whose
learning was to control the whole development of thought.
In the thirteenth century the power of the priesthood over Christendom
was at its height, but it was losing its religious hold over the people.
The whole energy of the Church seemed to be absorbed in politics;
spiritually the disuse of preaching, the decline of the monastic orders
into rich landowners, the non-residence and ignorance of parish priests
combined to rob her of her proper influence. Grossetete issued
ordinances which exhorted the clergy, but in vain, not to haunt taverns,
gamble or share in drinking bouts, and in the rioting and debauchery of
the barons.
It was in these circumstances that Dominic and Francis, men so strangely
different in other ways, were moved to found orders of New Brethren, who
should meet false sanctity by real sanctity; preaching friars who should
subsist on the alms of the poor and carry the Gospel to them. The older
monasticism was reversed; the solitary of the cloister was exchanged for
the preacher, the monk for the friar. Everywhere the itinerant
preachers, whose fervid appeal, coarse wit and familiar stories brought
religion into the market-place, were met with an outburst of
enthusiasm. On their first coming to Oxford, the Dominicans or Black
Friars were received with no less enthusiasm than elsewhere.
Lands were given to them in Jewry; buildings and a large school were
erected for them by benefactors like Walter Malclerk, Bishop of
Carlisle, and Isabel de Boulbec, Countess of Oxford, or the friendly
Canons of St Frideswide. So greatly did they flourish that they soon
outgrew their accommodation. They sold their land and buildings, and
with the proceeds built themselves a house and schools and church "on a
pleasant isle in the south suburbs," which was granted them by Henry
III. (1259). The site of their new habitation at the end of Speedwell
Street (Preachers' Lane) is indicated by the Blackfriars Road and
Blackfriars Street in the parish of St Ebbe. Their library was large and
full of books; the church was dedicated to S. Nicholas. It was situated
near Preachers' Bridge, which spanned the Trill Mill Stream.
The Grey Friars followed hard on the heels of the Black. For in the year
1224 nine Franciscans arrived at Dover. Five of them went to Canterbury,
four to London, whence two of them made their way to Oxford--Richard of
Ingeworth and Richard of Devon. Their journey was eventful. Night drew
on as they approached Oxford. The waters were high and they were fain to
seek shelter in a grange belonging to the monks of Abingdon "in a most
vast and solitary wood" (Culham?).
"Humbly knocking at the door, they desired the monks for God's love
to give them entertainment for that night. The porter who came to
the door looked upon them (having dirty faces, ragged vestments,
and uncouth speech) to be a couple of jesters or counterfeits. The
Prior caused them to be brought in that they might quaff it and
show sport to the monks. But the friars said they were mistaken in
them; for they were not such kind of people, but the servants of
God, and the professors of an apostolic life. Whereupon the
expectation of the monks being thus frustrated, they vilely spurned
at them and caused them to be thrust out of the gate. But one of
the young monks had compassion on them and said to the porter: 'I
desire thee for the love thou bearest me that when the Prior and
monks are gone to rest thou wouldest conduct those poor people into
the hayloft, and there I shall administer to them food.' Which
being according to his desire performed, he carried to them bread
and drink, and remaining some time with them, bade them at length a
good night, and devoutly commended himself to their prayers.
"No sooner had he left them, solacing their raging stomachs with
refreshment, but he retired to his rest. But no sooner had sleep
seized on him, than he had a dreadful dream which troubled him
much. He saw in his sleep Christ sitting upon His throne calling
all to judgment; at length with a terrible voice He said: 'Let the
patrons of this place be called to me.' When they and their monks
appeared, came a despised poor man in the habit of a minor friar,
and stood opposite them saying to Christ these words: 'O just
Judge, the blood of the minor friars cryeth to thee, which was the
last night by those monks standing there endangered to be spilt;
for they, when they were in great fear of perishing by the fury of
hunger and wild beasts, did deny them lodging and
sustenance--those, O Lord, who have leaved all for thy sake and are
come hither to win souls for which thou dying hast redeemed--have
denied that which they would not to jesters.' These words being
delivered, Christ with a dreadful voice said to the Prior: 'Of what
order art thou?' He answered that he was of the order of S.
Benedict. Then Christ, turning to S. Benedict said, 'Is it true
that he speaks?' S. Benedict answered, 'Lord, he and his companions
are overthrowers of my religion, for I have given charge in my rule
that the Abbot's table should be free for guests, and now these
have denied those things that were but necessary for them.' Then
Christ, upon this complaint, commanded that the Prior before
mentioned should immediately be hanged on the elm-tree before the
cloister. Afterwards the sacrist and cellarer being examined did
undergo the same death also. These things being done, Christ turned
Himself to the young monk that had compassion on the said friars,
asking him of what order he was. Who thereupon, making a pause and
considering how his brethren were handled, said at length, 'I am of
the order that this poor man is.' Then Christ said to the poor man,
whose name was as yet concealed, 'Francis, is it true that he
saith, that he is of your order?' Francis answered, 'He is mine, O
Lord, he is mine; and from henceforth I receive him as one of my
order.' At which very time as those words were speaking, Francis
embraced the young monk so close that, being thereupon awakened
from his sleep, he suddenly rose up as an amazed man; and running
with his garments loose about him to the Prior to tell him all the
passages of his dream found him in his chamber almost suffocated in
his sleep. To whom crying out with fear, and finding no answer from
him, ran to the other monks, whom also he found in the same case.
Afterwards the said young monk thought to have gone to the friars
in the hayloft; but they fearing the Prior should discover them,
had departed thence very early. Then speeding to the Abbot of
Abingdon, told him all whatsoever had happened. Which story
possessing him for a long time after with no small horror, as the
aforesaid dream did the said young monk, did both (I am sure the
last) with great humility and condescension come afterwards to
Oxon, when the said friars had got a mansion there, and took upon
them the habit of S. Francis."
This quaint story of the first coming of the Grey Friars to Oxford
illustrates very plainly the hostility between the old orders of the
friars and the new; the opposition of the parochial priesthood to the
spiritual energy of the mendicant preachers, who, clad in their coarse
frock of grey serge, with a girdle of rope round their waist, wandered
barefooted as missionaries over Asia, battled with heresies in Italy and
Gaul, lectured in the Universities and preached and toiled among the
poor.
The Grey Friars were hospitably received by the Black, till Richard le
Mercer, a wealthy burgess, let them a house in St Ebbe's parish,
"between the church and water-gate (South-gate), in which many honest
bachelors and noble persons entered and lived with them." Perhaps it was
this increase in their numbers which compelled them to leave their first
abode somewhere by the east end of Beef Lane, and to hire a house with
ground attached from Richard the Miller. This house lay between the wall
and Freren Street (Church Street). All sorts and conditions of men
flocked to hear them. Being well satisfied, it is said, as to their
honest and simple carriage and well-meaning as also with their doctrine,
they began to load them with gifts and to make donations to the city
for their use. One of their benefactors, Agnes, the wife of Guy, for
instance, gave them "most part of that ground which was afterwards
called Paradise" (_cf._ Paradise Square). A small church was built, and
bishops and abbots relinquishing their dignities and preferments became
Minorites. They scorned not "the roughness of the penance and the robe,"
but "did with incomparable humility carry upon their shoulders the coul
and the hod, for the speedier finishing this structure." The site chosen
by the Grey Friars for their settlement is not without significance. The
work of the friars was physical as well as moral. Rapid increase of the
population huddled within the narrow circle of the walls had resulted
here as elsewhere in overcrowding, which accentuated the insanitary
conditions of life. A gutter running down the centre of unpaved streets
was supposed to drain the mess of the town as well as the slops thrown
from the windows of the houses. Garbage of all sorts collected and
rotted there. Within the houses the rush-strewn floors collected a foul
heritage of scraps and droppings. Personal uncleanliness, encouraged by
the ascetic prohibitions and directions of a morbid monasticism, which,
revolting from the luxury of the Roman baths and much believing in the
necessity of mortifying the flesh, regarded washing as a vice and held
that a dirty shirt might cover a multitude of sins, was accentuated by
errors of diet, and had become the habit of high and low. Little wonder
that fever or plague, or the more terrible scourge of leprosy, festered
in the wretched hovels of the suburbs of Oxford as of every town. Well,
it was to haunts such as these that S. Francis had pointed his
disciples. At London they settled in the shambles of Newgate; at Oxford
they chose the swampy suburb of S. Ebbe's. Huts of mud and timber, as
mean as the huts around them, rose within the rough fence and ditch that
bounded the Friary; for the Order of St Francis fought hard, at first,
against the desire for fine buildings and the craving for knowledge
which were the natural tendencies of many of the brethren. In neither
case did the will of their founder finally carry the day.
"Three things," said Friar Albert, Minister General, "tended to the
exaltation of the Order--bare feet, coarse garments, and the rejecting
of money." At first the Oxford Franciscans were zealous in all those
respects. We hear of Adam Marsh refusing bags of gold that were sent
him; we hear of two of the brethren returning from a Chapter held at
Oxford at Christmas-time, singing as they picked their way along the
rugged path, over the frozen mud and rigid snow, whilst the blood lay in
the track of their naked feet, without their being conscious of it. Even
from the robbers and murderers who infested the woods near Oxford the
barefoot friars were safe.
But it was not long before they began to fall away from "the Rule," and
to accumulate both wealth and learning. Under the ministry of Agnellus
and his successor the tendency to acquire property was rigorously
suppressed, but under Haymo of Faversham (1238) a different spirit began
to prevail. Haymo preferred that "the friars should have ample areas and
should cultivate them, that they might have the fruits of the earth at
home, rather than beg them from others." And under his successor they
gained a large increase of territory. By a deed dated Nov. 22, 1244,
Henry III. granted them
"that they might enclose the street that lies under the wall from
the Watergate in S. Ebbe's to the little postern in the wall
towards the castle, but so that a wall with battlements, like to
the rest of the wall of Oxford, be made about the dwelling,
beginning at the west side of Watergate, and reaching southward to
the bank of the Thames, and extending along the bank westward as
far as the land of the Abbot of Bec in the parish of S. Bodhoc, and
then turning again to the northward till it joins with the old wall
of the borough, by the east side of the small postern." In 1245 he
made a further grant. "We have given the Friars Minor our island in
the Thames, which we bought of Henry, son of Henry Simeon, granting
them power to build a bridge over the arm of the Thames (Trill
stream) which runs between the island and their houses, and enclose
the island with a wall."
When it was completed, then, the Convent of the Grey Friars could
compare favourably with any convent or college in Oxford, except perhaps
S. Frideswide's or Osney. On the east side of it, where the main
entrance lay, at the junction of the present Littlegate Street and
Charles Street, was the road leading from Watergate to Preacher's
Bridge; on the South side, Trill Mill stream; on the West, the groves
and gardens of Paradise; on the North, as far as West-gate, ran the City
wall.
"Their buildings were stately and magnificent; their church large
and decent; and their refectory, cloister and libraries all
proportionable thereunto."
The traditional site of this church is indicated by Church Place as it
is called to-day. The cloisters probably lay to the south of the church,
round "Penson's Gardens."
As the Franciscans fell away by degrees from the ideal of poverty, so
also they succumbed to the desire of knowledge. "I am your breviary, I
am your breviary," S. Francis had cried to a novice who had asked for a
Psalter. The true Doctors, he held, were those who with the meekness of
wisdom show forth good works for the edification of their neighbours.
But the very popularity of their preaching drove his disciples to the
study of theology. Their desire not only to obtain converts but also to
gain a hold on the thought of the age had led the friars to fasten on
the Universities. The same purpose soon led them to establish at Oxford
a centre of learning and teaching.
Their first school at Oxford was built by Agnellus of Pisa, and there he
persuaded Robert Grossetete, the great reforming bishop of Lincoln, to
lecture. Agnellus himself was a true follower of S. Francis and no great
scholar. "He never smelt of an Academy or scarce tasted of humane
learning." He was indeed much concerned at the results of Grossetete's
lectures. For one day when he entered this school to see what progress
his scholars were making in literature, he found them disputing eagerly
and making enquiries whether there was a God. The scandalised Provincial
cried out aloud in anger, "Hei mihi! Hei mihi! Fratres! Simplices
coelos penetrant, et literati disputant utrum sit Deus!" The miracles
which were afterwards reputed to be performed at the grave of this same
excellent friar caused the church of the Grey Friars to be much
frequented.
The friars now began to accumulate books and we soon find mention of two
libraries belonging to them. The nucleus of them was formed by the books
and writings of Grossetete, which he bequeathed to the brethren. And
they collected with great industry from abroad Greek, Hebrew and
mathematical writings, at that time unknown in England. The fate of this
priceless collection of books was enough to make Wood "burst out with
grief." For, when the monasteries had begun to decay, and the monks had
fallen into ways of sloth and ignorance and were become "no better than
a gang of lazy, fat-headed friars," they began to sell their books for
what they would fetch and allowed the remainder to rot in neglect.
Meanwhile the teaching of such scholars as Grossetete and Adam Marsh (de
Marisco), the first of the Order to lecture at Oxford, was not without
result. From the school of the Franciscans came forth men who earned for
the University great fame throughout Europe. Friars were sent thither to
study, not only from Scotland and Ireland, but from France and
Acquitaine, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Germany; while many of the
Franciscan schools on the Continent drew their teachers from Oxford.
Duns Scotus and William Ockham were trained by these teachers; Roger
Bacon, the founder of modern scientific enquiry, ended his days as one
of the Order. His life, which stretched over the greater portion of the
thirteenth century, was passed for the most part at Oxford; his
aspirations and difficulties, his failures and achievements form an
epitome, as it were, of the mental history of his age.
It was only when he had spent forty years and all his fortune in
teaching and scientific research that, having gained the usual reward of
scholarship, and being bankrupt in purse, bankrupt in hope, he took the
advice of Grossetete, and became a Friar of the Order of S. Francis.
"Unheard, buried and forgotten," as a member of an Order which looked
askance on all intellectual labour not theological, he was forbidden to
publish any work under pain of forfeiture, and the penance of bread and
water. Even when he was commanded by the Pope to write, the friars were
so much afraid of the purport of his researches that they kept him in
solitude on bread and water, and would not allow him to have access even
to the few books and writings available in those days. Science, they
maintained, had already reached its perfection; the world enjoyed too
much light; why should he trouble himself about matters of which enough
was known already? For as an enquirer Bacon was as solitary as that lone
sentinel of science, the Tuscan artist in Valdarno. From the moment that
the friars settled on the Universities, scholasticism had absorbed the
whole mental energy of the student world. Theology found her only
efficient rivals in practical studies such as medicine and law.
Yet, in spite of all difficulties and hindrances, so superhuman was
Bacon's energy, and so undaunted his courage, that within fifteen months
the three great works, the Opus Majus, the Opus Minus, and the Opus
Tertium were written. If this had been true of the Opus Majus alone, and
if that work had not been remarkable for the boldness and originality of
its views, yet as a mere feat of industry and application it would have
stood almost if not quite unparalleled. For the Opus Majus was at once
the Encyclopædia and the Novum Organum of the thirteenth century.
Of the Opus Minus the only MS. of the work yet known is a fragment
preserved in the Bodleian Library (Digby, No. 218).
The amazing friar met with no reward for his labours. According to one
story, indeed, his writings only gained for him a prison from his Order.
His works were sold, allowed to rot, or nailed to the desks that they
might do no harm. For Bacon's method of study exposed him to the charge
of magic. It was said that he was in alliance with the Evil One, and the
tradition arose that through spiritual agency he made a brazen head and
imparted to it the gift of speech, and that these magical operations
were wrought by him while he was a student at Brazen Nose Hall.
Necromancy, you see, _was_ practised by the more daring students, for
was there not a certain clerk in Billyng Hall who, when he had summoned
the Devil into his presence by his art, observed with astonishment that
he did reverence when a priest carrying the sacrament passed without.
"Thereupon the student was much disturbed and came to the conclusion
that God was much the greater and that Christ should be his Lord...."
And later, was not Dr Thomas Allen of Gloucester Hall, the astrologer
and mathematician to whom Bodley left his second best gown and cloak--a
common sort of bequest in those days--suspected by reason of his
figuring and conjuring, so that his servitor found a ready audience
when, wishing to impose upon Freshmen and simple people, he used to say
that sometimes he would meet the spirits coming up his master's stairs
like bees?
Apart from the tradition of the Brazen Nose, Bacon's long residence in
Oxford left other marks on the nomenclature of the place. Wood tells us
that in his day a fragment of the ruined Friary was pointed out as the
room where the great wizard had been wont to pursue his studies. And at
a later time tradition said that Friar Bacon was wont to use as an
observatory the story built over the semi-circular archway of the gate
on the south bridge, and it was therefore known as Friar Bacon's Study.
The little "gate-house" must have resembled Bocardo. It was leased to a
citizen named Welcome, who added a story to it, which earned it the name
of "Welcome's Folly." So the bridge came to be called Folly Bridge, and
though gate and house have disappeared, the new bridge still retains the
name.
[Illustration: Gables in Worcester College]
The Black and the Grey Friars were followed to Oxford some years later
by the White or Carmelite Friars. Nicholas de Meules or Molis, sometime
governor of the castle, gave them a house on the west side of Stockwell
Street,[17] now part of Worcester College. They would seem, like the
other Orders, soon to have forgotten their traditional austerity. Lands
accrued to them; they erected suitable buildings with planted groves and
walks upon a large and pleasant site. But not content with this, they
presently obtained from Edward II. the royal Palace of Beaumont. Thus
they presented the curious paradox of an Order of monks who derived
their pedigree in regular succession from Elijah, and trod in theory in
the footsteps of the prophets who had retired into the desert, living at
Oxford in the palace of a king.
"When King Edward I. waged war with the Scots (1304) he took with
him out of England a Carmelite friar, named Robert Baston,
accounted in his time the most famous poet of this nation,
purposely that he should write poetically of his victories. Again,
when King Edward II. maintained the same war after the death of his
father, he entertained the same Baston for the same purpose. At
length the said king encountering Robert Bruce, was forced with his
bishops to fly. In which flight Baston telling the king that if he
would call upon the Mother of God for mercy he should find favour,
he did so accordingly, with a promise then made to her that if he
should get from the hands of his enemies and find safety, he would
erect some house in England to receive the poor Carmelites.... Soon
after, Baston and some others were not wanting to persuade him to
give to the Carmelites his palace at Oxford" (1317),
where Richard Coeur de Lion had been born. Beaumont Palace, whilst it
remained in the hands of the Carmelites, was used not merely as a
convent for the habitation of twenty-four monks, but also as a place of
education for members of this Order throughout England; as well as for
seculars who lived there as "commoners." Cardinal Pole is said to have
been educated in this seminary.
The library and the church of the White Friars were unusually fine.
The Austin Friars (or Friars eremite of S. Augustine) came also to
Oxford and gradually acquired property and settled "without Smith Gate,
having Holywell Street on the south side of it and the chief part of the
ground on which Wadham College now stands on the north."
The Austin Friars were famous for their disputations in grammar, and
soon drew to themselves much of the grammatical training of the place.
They engaged also in violent philosophical controversies with the other
Orders, so that at last they were even threatened with excommunication
if they did not desist from their quarrelling. It was in their convent
that the weekly general disputations of Bachelors, known for centuries
after as "Austins," were held.
[Illustration: Wadham College, from the Gardens]
In 1262 the Penitentiarian Friars or Brothers of the Sack, so called
because they wore sackcloth, obtained from Henry III. a grant of land
which formed the parish of S. Budoc and lay to the west of the property
of the Franciscans. The Order was soon afterwards suppressed and the
Franciscans acquired their house and lands.
The brethren of the Holy Trinity also made a settlement in Oxford
(1291). Their house, afterwards known as Trinity Hall, was situated
outside the East Gate (opposite Magdalen Hall). They also acquired the
old Trinity Chapel adjoining and the surrounding land.
The Trinitarians had, besides, a chapel within the East Gate, which was
purchased by Wykeham to make room for New College.
The Crossed or Cruched Friars, after one or two moves, settled
themselves in the parish of S. Peter's in the East.
The older religious Orders were presently stimulated by the example and
the success of the friars to make some provision for the education of
their monks. But they never aimed at producing great scholars or learned
theologians. Historians of their Order and canonists who could transact
their legal business were the products which the monastic houses
desired.
A Chapter-General held at Abingdon in 1279 imposed a tax on the revenues
of all the Benedictine monasteries in the province of Canterbury with a
view to establishing a house at Oxford where students of their Order
might live and study together. John Giffard, Lord of Brimsfield, helped
them to achieve their object.
Gloucester Hall, adjoining the Palace of Beaumont, had been the private
house of Gilbert Clare, Earl of Gloucester, who built it in the year
1260. It passed to Sir John Giffard, who instituted it a "nursery and
mansion-place solely for the Benedictines of S. Peter's Abbey at
Gloucester." The buildings were afterwards enlarged to provide room for
student-monks from other Benedictine abbeys. Of the lodgings thus
erected by the various abbeys for their novices, indications may still
be traced in the old monastic buildings which form the picturesque south
side of the large quadrangle of Worcester College. For over the doorways
of these hostels the half-defaced arms of different monasteries, the
griffin of Malmesbury or the Cross of Norwich, still denote their
original purpose.
[Illustration: Gateway, Worcester Gardens]
At the dissolution, the college was for a short while made the residence
of the first bishop of Oxford. After his death it was purchased by Sir
Thomas White, and by him converted into a hall for the use of his
College of S. John. Gloucester Hall, now become S. John Baptist Hall,
after a chequered career, was refounded and endowed in 1714 as Worcester
College out of the benefaction of Sir Thomas Cookes. In the latter half
of the eighteenth century the hall, library and chapel were built and
the beautiful gardens of "Botany Bay" were acquired.
The Benedictines also held Durham Hall, on the site of the present
Trinity College, having secured a property of about ten acres with a
frontage of about 50 feet (including Kettell Hall) on Broad Street, and
500 feet on the "Kingis hye waye of Bewmounte." It was here that Richard
de Bury, Bishop of Durham, founded the first public library in Oxford.
Bury had studied at Oxford and was the tutor of Edward III.; statesman
and churchman, he was above all
Gateway in Garden of Worcester College things a book-lover. He had more
books, it is recorded, than all the other bishops put together and,
wherever he was residing, so many books lay about his bed-chamber that
it was hardly possible to stand or move without treading upon them. In
the _Philobiblon_ the bishop describes his means and methods of
collecting books. In the course of his visitations he dug into the
disused treasures of the monasteries, and his agents scoured the
Continent for those "sacred vessels of learning." The collection of
books so made he intended for the use of scholars, not merely for
himself alone.
"We have long cherished in our heart of hearts," he writes, "the
fixed resolve to found in perpetual charity a hall in the reverend
University of Oxford, and to endow it with the necessary revenues,
for the maintenance of a number of scholars; and, moreover, to
enrich the hall with the treasures of our books, that all and every
one of them should be in common as regards their use and study, not
only to the scholars of the said hall, but by their means to all
the students of the aforesaid University for ever."
And he proceeds to lay down strict regulations based on those of the
Sorbonne, for the use and preservation of his beloved books and the
catalogue he had made of them.
Richard of Hoton, prior of Durham Monastery, had begun in 1289 the
erection of a college building to receive the young brethren from that
monastery, whom his predecessor, Hugh of Darlington, had already begun
to send to Oxford to be educated. This colony of Durham students it was
apparently Richard de Bury's intention to convert into a body corporate,
consisting of a prior and twelve brethren. And in gratitude for the
signal defeat of the Scots at Halidon Hill, Edward III. took the
proposed college under his special protection. Bury, however, died, and
died in debt, so that he himself never succeeded in founding the hall he
intended. His successor, Bishop Hatfield, took up the scheme, and
entered into an agreement with the prior and convent of Durham for the
joint endowment of a college for eight monks and eight secular
scholars. This project was completed, by agreement with his executors,
after his death (1381).
But what became of the books of the bishop and bibliophile, Richard de
Bury? Some of them, indeed, his executors were obliged to sell, but we
need not distrust the tradition which asserts that some of them at least
did come to Oxford. There, it is supposed, they remained till Durham
Hall was dissolved by Henry VIII., when they were dispersed, some going
to Duke Humphrey's library, others to Balliol College, and the remainder
passing into the hands of Dr George Owen, who purchased the site of the
dissolved college.
Whatever happened to Bury's books, it is certain that the room which
still serves as a library was built in
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/46274