Oxford and Its Story

"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 qu?dam 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 medi?val 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 medi?val 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

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 medi?val 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

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 ?thelred 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 ?thelred'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 ?thelred'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 ?thelred was the brother-in-law of Richard-le-bon, the great church-builder of Normandy, need we wonder at the unwonted magnificence of ?thelred'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).

?thelred'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 ?thelred 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 ?thelred 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 ?thelred'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 ?thelred'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

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

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

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 ?thelred's Church reared upon the site of S. Frideswide's.

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.

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. Medi?val 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 ?thelred, 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 ?thelfl?d 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 fa?ade 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 ?thelred 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 ?thelweard, 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

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 vast? et destruct?) 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

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."

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.

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

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

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 medi?val couplet which runs as follows:

"Invigilat port? australi bore?que 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

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. ?bba 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."

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 Thom? 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.

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 medi?val 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.

THE chroniclers of every medi?val 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

The Turret Quad Merton College

enough, in the minds of those who have studied medi?val 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 ingenu? 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 Medi?val 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 medi?val 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 Oxenefordi?, 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 medi?val 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 medi?val 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.

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

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 medi?val 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

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 medi?val 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 chim?ra, 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.