Oxford

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This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
from the 1922 Seeley, Service & Co. Ltd. edition.

OXFORD

by Andrew Lang

PREFACE

These papers do not profess even to sketch the outlines of a history
of Oxford. They are merely records of the impressions made by this
or that aspect of the life of the University as it has been in
different ages. Oxford is not an easy place to design in black and
white, with the pen or the etcher's needle. On a wild winter or late
autumn day (such as Father Faber has made permanent in a beautiful
poem) the sunshine fleets along the plain, revealing towers, and
floods, and trees, in a gleam of watery light, and leaving them once
more in shadow. The melancholy mist creeps over the city, the damp
soaks into the heart of everything, and such suicidal weather ensues
as has been described, once for all, by the author of John-a-Dreams.
How different Oxford looks when the road to Cowley Marsh is dumb with
dust, when the heat seems almost tropical, and by the drowsy banks of
the Cherwell you might almost expect some shy southern water-beast to
come crashing through the reeds! And such a day, again, is unlike
the bright weather of late September, when all the gold and scarlet
of Bagley Wood are concentrated in the leaves that cover the walls of
Magdalen with an imperial vesture.

Our memories of Oxford, if we have long made her a Castle of
Indolence, vary no less than do the shifting aspects of her scenery.
Days of spring and of mere pleasure in existence have alternated with
days of gloom and loneliness, of melancholy, of resignation. Our
mental pictures of the place are tinged by many moods, as the
landscape is beheld in shower and sunshine, in frost, and in the
colourless drizzling weather. Oxford, that once seemed a pleasant
porch and entrance into life, may become a dingy ante-room, where we
kick our heels with other weary, waiting people. At last, if men
linger there too late, Oxford grows a prison, and it is the final
condition of the loiterer to take "this for a hermitage." It is well
to leave the enchantress betimes, and to carry away few but kind
recollections. If there be any who think and speak ungently of their
Alma Mater, it is because they have outstayed their natural "welcome
while," or because they have resisted her genial influence in youth.

CHAPTER I--THE TOWN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY

Most old towns are like palimpsests, parchments which have been
scrawled over again and again by their successive owners. Oxford,
though not one of the most ancient of English cities, shows, more
legibly than the rest, the handwriting, as it were, of many
generations. The convenient site among the interlacing waters of the
Isis and the Cherwell has commended itself to men in one age after
another. Each generation has used it for its own purpose: for war,
for trade, for learning, for religion; and war, trade, religion, and
learning have left on Oxford their peculiar marks. No set of its
occupants, before the last two centuries began, was very eager to
deface or destroy the buildings of its predecessors. Old things were
turned to new uses, or altered to suit new tastes; they were not
overthrown and carted away. Thus, in walking through Oxford, you see
everywhere, in colleges, chapels, and churches, doors and windows
which have been builded up; or again, openings which have been cut
where none originally existed. The upper part of the round Norman
arches in the Cathedral has been preserved, and converted into the
circular bull's-eye lights which the last century liked. It is the
same everywhere, except where modern restorers have had their way.
Thus the life of England, for some eight centuries, may be traced in
the buildings of Oxford. Nay, if we are convinced by some
antiquaries, the eastern end of the High Street contains even earlier
scratches on this palimpsest of Oxford; the rude marks of savages who
scooped out their damp nests, and raised their low walls in the
gravel, on the spot where the new schools are to stand. Here half-
naked men may have trapped the beaver in the Cherwell, and hither
they may have brought home the boars which they slew in the trackless
woods of Headington and Bagley. It is with the life of historical
Oxford, however, and not with these fancies, that we are concerned,
though these papers have no pretension to be a history of Oxford. A
series of pictures of men's life here is all they try to sketch.

It is hard, though not impossible, to form a picture in the mind of
Oxford as she was when she is first spoken of by history. What she
may have been when legend only knows her; when St. Frideswyde built a
home for religious maidens; when she fled from King Algar and hid
among the swine, and after a whole fairy tale of adventures died in
great sanctity, we cannot even guess. This legend of St. Frideswyde,
and of her foundation, the germ of the Cathedral and of Christ
Church, is not, indeed, without its value and significance for those
who care for Oxford. This home of religion and of learning was a
home of religion from the beginning, and her later life is but a
return, after centuries of war and trade, to her earliest purpose.
What manner of village of wooden houses may have surrounded the
earliest rude chapels and places of prayer, we cannot readily guess,
but imagination may look back on Oxford as she was when the English
Chronicle first mentions her. Even then it is not unnatural to think
Oxford might well have been a city of peace. She lies in the very
centre of England, and the Northmen, as they marched inland, burning
church and cloister, must have wandered long before they came to
Oxford. On the other hand, the military importance of the site must
have made it a town that would be eagerly contended for. Any places
of strength in Oxford would command the roads leading to the north
and west, and the secure, raised paths that ran through the flooded
fens to the ford or bridge, if bridge there then was, between
Godstowe and the later Norman grand pont, where Folly Bridge now
spans the Isis. Somewhere near Oxford, the roads that ran towards
Banbury and the north, or towards Bristol and the west, would be
obliged to cross the river. The water-way, too, and the paths by the
Thames' side, were commanded by Oxford. The Danes, as they followed
up the course of the Thames from London, would be drawn thither,
sooner or later, and would covet a place which is surrounded by half
a dozen deep natural moats. Lastly, Oxford lay in the centre of
England indeed, but on the very marches of Mercia and Wessex. A
border town of natural strength and of commanding situation, she can
have been no mean or poor collection of villages in the days when she
is first spoken of, when Eadward the Elder "incorporated with his own
kingdom the whole Mercian lands on both sides of Watling Street"
(Freeman's Norman Conquest, vol. i. p. 57), and took possession of
London and of Oxford as the two most important parts of a scientific
frontier. If any man had stood, in the days of Eadward, on the hill
that was not yet "Shotover," and had looked along the plain to the
place where the grey spires of Oxford are clustered now, as it were
in a purple cup of the low hills, he would have seen little but "the
smoke floating up through the oakwood and the coppice,"

[Greek text which cannot be reproduced]

The low hills were not yet cleared, nor the fens and the wolds
trimmed and enclosed. Centuries later, when the early students came,
they had to ride "through the thick forest and across the moor, to
the East Gate of the city" (Munimenta Academica, Oxon., vol. i. p.
60). In the midst of a country still wild, Oxford was already no
mean city; but the place where the hostile races of the land met to
settle their differences, to feast together and forget their wrongs
over the mead and ale, or to devise treacherous murder, and close the
banquet with fire and sword.

Again and again, after Eadward the Elder took Mercia, the Danes went
about burning and wasting England. The wooden towns were flaming
through the night, and sending up a thick smoke through the day, from
Thamesmouth to Cambridge. "And next was there no headman that force
would gather, and each fled as swift as he might, and soon was there
no shire that would help another." When the first fury of the
plundering invaders was over, when the Northmen had begun to wish to
settle and till the land and have some measure of peace, the early
meetings between them and the English rulers were held in the border-
town, in Oxford. Thus Sigeferth and Morkere, sons of Earngrim, came
to see Eadric in Oxford, and there were slain at a banquet, while
their followers perished in the attempt to avenge them. "Into the
tower of St. Frideswyde they were driven, and as men could not drive
them thence, the tower was fired, and they perished in the burning."
So says William of Malmesbury, who, so many years later, read the
story, as he says, in the records of the Church of St. Frideswyde.
There is another version of the story in the Codex Diplomaticus
(DCCIX.). Aethelred is made to say, in a deed of grant of lands to
St. Frideswyde's Church ("mine own minster"), that the Danes were
slain in the massacre of St. Brice. On that day Aethelred, "by the
advice of his satraps, determined to destroy the tares among the
wheat, the Danes in England." Certain of these fled into the
minster, as into a fortress, and therefore it was burned and the
books and monuments destroyed. For this cause Aethelred gives lands
to the minster, "fro Charwell brigge andlong the streame, fro
Merewell to Rugslawe, fro the lawe to the foule putte," and so forth.
It is pleasant to see how old are the familiar names "Cherwell,"
"Hedington," "Couelee" or Cowley, where the college cricket-grounds
are. Three years passed, and the headmen of the English and of the
Danes met at Oxford again, and more peacefully, and agreed to live
together, obedient to the laws of Eadgar; to the law, that is, as it
was administered in older days, that seem happier and better ruled to
men looking back on them from an age of confusion and bloodshed. At
Oxford, too, met the peaceful gathering of 1035, when Danish and
English claims were in some sort reconciled, and at Oxford Harold
Harefoot, the son of Cnut, died in March 1040. The place indeed was
fatal to kings, for St. Frideswyde, in her anger against King Algar,
left her curse on it. Just as the old Irish kings were forbidden by
their customs to do this or that, to cross a certain moor on May
morning, or to listen to the winnowing of the night-fowl's wings in
the dusk above the lake of Tara; so the kings of England shunned to
enter Oxford, and to come within the walls of Frideswyde the maiden.
Harold died there, as we have seen, but there he was not buried. His
body was laid at Westminster, where it could not rest, for his
enemies dug it up, and cast it forth upon the fens, or threw it into
the river. Many years later, when Henry III. entered Oxford, not
without fear, the curse of Frideswyde lighted also upon him. He came
in 1263, with Edward the prince, and misfortune fell upon him, so
that his barons defeated and took him prisoner at the battle of
Lewes. The chronicler of Oseney Abbey mentions his contempt of
superstitions, and how he alone of English kings entered the city:
"Quod nullus rex attemptavit a tempore Regis Algari," an error, for
Harold attemptavit, and died. When Edward I. was king, he was less
audacious than his father, and in 1275 he rode up to the East Gate
and turned his horse's head about, and sought a lodging outside the
town, reflexis habenis equitans extra moenia aulam regiain in
suburbio positam introivit. In 1280, however, he seems to have
plucked up courage and attended a Chapter of Dominicans in Oxford.

The last of the meetings between North and South was held at Oxford
in October 1065. "In urle quae famoso nomine Oxnaford nuncupatur,"
to quote a document of Cnut's. (Cod. Dipl. DCCXLVI. in 1042.) There
the Northumbrian rebels met Harold in the last days of Edward the
Confessor. With this meeting we leave that Oxford before the
Conquest, of which possibly not one stone, or one rafter, remains.
We look back through eight hundred years on a city, rich enough, it
seems, and powerful, and we see the narrow streets full of armed
bands of men--men that wear the cognisance of the horse or of the
raven, that carry short swords, and are quick to draw them; men that
dress in short kirtles of a bright colour, scarlet or blue; that wear
axes slung on their backs, and adorn their bare necks and arms with
collars and bracelets of gold. We see them meeting to discuss laws
and frontiers, and feasting late when business is done, and
chaffering for knives with ivory handles, for arrows, and saddles,
and wadmal, in the booths of the citizens. Through the mist of time
this picture of ancient Oxford may be distinguished. We are tempted
to think of a low, grey twilight above that wet land suddenly lit up
with fire; of the tall towers of St. Frideswyde's Minster flaring
like a torch athwart the night; of poplars waving in the same wind
that drives the vapour and smoke of the holy place down on the Danes
who have taken refuge there, and there stand at bay against the
English and the people of the town. The material Oxford of our times
is not more unlike the Oxford of low wooden booths and houses, and of
wooden spires and towers, than the life led in its streets was unlike
the academic life of to-day. The Conquest brought no more quiet
times, but the whole city was wrecked, stormed, and devastated,
before the second period of its history began, before it was the seat
of a Norman stronghold, and one of the links of the chain by which
England was bound. "Four hundred and seventy-eight houses were so
ruined as to be unable to pay taxes," while, "within the town or
without the wall, there were but two hundred and forty-three houses
which did yield tribute."

With the buildings of Robert D'Oily, a follower of the Conqueror's,
and the husband of an English wife, the heiress of Wigod of
Wallingford, the new Oxford begins. Robert's work may be divided
roughly into two classes. First, there are the strong places he
erected to secure his possessions, and, second, the sacred places he
erected to secure the pardon of Heaven for his robberies. Of the
castle, and its "shining coronal of towers," only one tower remains.
From the vast strength of this picturesque edifice, with the natural
moat flowing at its feet, we may guess what the castle must have been
in the early days of the Conquest, and during the wars of Stephen and
Matilda. We may guess, too, that the burghers of Oxford, and the
rustics of the neighbourhood, had no easy life in those days, when,
as we have seen, the town was ruined, and when, as the extraordinary
thickness of the walls of its remaining tower demonstrates, the
castle was built by new lords who did not spare the forced labour of
the vanquished. The strength of the position of the castle is best
estimated after viewing the surrounding country from the top of the
tower. Through the more modern embrasures, or over the low wall
round the summit, you look up and down the valley of the Thames, and
gaze deep into the folds of the hills. The prospect is pleasant
enough, on an autumn morning, with the domes and spires of modern
Oxford breaking, like islands, through the sea of mist that sweeps
above the roofs of the good town. In the old times, no movement of
the people who had their fastnesses in the fens, no approach of an
army from any direction could have evaded the watchman. The towers
guarded the fords and the bridge and were themselves almost
impregnable, except when a hard winter made the Thames, the Cherwell,
and the many deep and treacherous streams passable, as happened when
Matilda was beleaguered in Oxford. This natural strength of the site
is demonstrated by the vast mound within the castle walls, which
tradition calls the Jews' Mound, but which is probably earlier than
the Norman buildings. Some other race had chosen the castle site for
its fortress in times of which we know nothing. Meanwhile, some of
the practical citizens of Oxford wish to level the Jews' Mound, and
to "utilise" the gravel of which it is largely composed. There is
nothing to be said against this economic project which could interest
or affect the persons who entertain it. M. Brunet-Debaines'
illustration shows the mill on a site which must be as old as the
tower. Did the citizens bring their corn to be tolled and ground at
the lord's mill?

Though Robert was bent on works of war, he had a nature inclined to
piety, and, his piety beginning at home, he founded the church of St.
George within the castle. The crypt of the church still remains, and
is not without interest for persons who like to trace the changing
fortunes of old buildings. The site of Robert's Castle is at present
occupied by the County Gaol. When you have inspected the tower
(which does not do service as a dungeon) you are taken, by the
courtesy of the Governor, to the crypt, and satisfy your
archaeological curiosity. The place is much lower, and worse
lighted, than the contemporary crypt of St. Peter's-in-the-East, but
not, perhaps, less interesting. The square-headed capitals have not
been touched, like some of those in St. Peter's, by a later chisel.
The place is dank and earthy, but otherwise much as Robert D'Oily
left it. There is an odd-looking arrangement of planks on the floor.
It is THE NEW DROP, which is found to work very well, and gives
satisfaction to the persons who have to employ it. Sinister the
Norman castle was in its beginning, "it was from the castle that men
did wrong to the poor around them; it was from the castle that they
bade defiance to the king, who, stranger and tyrant as he might be,
was still a protector against smaller tyrants." Sinister the castle
remains; you enter it through ironed and bolted doors, you note the
prisoners at their dreary exercises, and, when you have seen the
engines of the law lying in the old crypt you pass out into the place
of execution. Here, in a corner made by Robert's tower and by the
wall of the prison, is a dank little quadrangle. The ground is of
the yellow clay and gravel which floors most Oxford quadrangles. A
few letters are scratched on the soft stone of the wall--the letters
"H. R." are the freshest. These are the initials of the last man who
suffered death in this corner--a young rustic who had murdered his
sweetheart. "H. R." on the prison wall is all his record, and his
body lies under your feet, and the feet of the men who are to die
here in after days pass over his tomb. It is thus that malefactors
are buried, "within the walls of the gaol."

One is glad enough to leave the remains of Robert's place of arms--as
glad as Matilda may have been when "they let her down at night from
the tower with ropes, and she stole out, and went on foot to
Wallingford." Robert seems at first to have made the natural use of
his strength. "Rich he was, and spared not rich or poor, to take
their livelihood away, and to lay up treasures for himself." He
stole the lands of the monks of Abingdon, but of what service were
moats, and walls, and dungeons, and instruments of torture, against
the powers that side with monks?

The Chronicle of Abingdon has a very diverting account of Robert's
punishment and conversion. "He filched a certain field without the
walls of Oxford that of right belonged to the monastery, and gave it
over to the soldiers in the castle. For which loss the brethren were
greatly grieved--the brethren of Abingdon. Therefore, they gathered
in a body before the altar of St. Michael--the very altar that St.
Dunstan the archbishop dedicated--and cast themselves weeping on the
ground, accusing Robert D'Oily, and praying that his robbery of the
monastery might be avenged, or that he might be led to make
atonement." So, in a dream, Robert saw himself taken before Our Lady
by two brethren of Abingdon, and thence carried into the very meadow
he had coveted, where "most nasty little boys," turpissimi pueri,
worked their will on him. Thereon Robert was terrified and cried
out, and wakened his wife, who took advantage of his fears, and
compelled him to make restitution to the brethren.

After this vision, Robert gave himself up to pampering the monastery
and performing other good works. He it was who built a bridge over
the Isis, and he restored the many ruined parish churches in Oxford--
churches which, perhaps, he and his men had helped to ruin. The
tower of St. Michael's, in "the Corn," is said to be of his building;
perhaps he only "restored" it, for it is in the true primitive style-
-gaunt, unadorned, with round-headed windows, good for shooting from
with the bow. St. Michael's was not only a church, but a watchtower
of the city wall; and here the old northgate, called Bocardo, spanned
the street. The rooms above the gate were used till within quite
recent times, and the poor inmates used to let down a greasy old hat
from the window in front of the passers-by, and cry, "Pity the
Bocardo birds":

"Pigons qui sont en 1'essoine,
Enserrez soubz trappe voliere,"

as a famous Paris student, Francois Villon, would have called them.
Of Bocardo no trace remains, but St. Michael's is likely to last as
long as any edifice in Oxford. Our illustrations represent it as it
was in the last century. The houses huddle up to the church, and
hide the lines of the tower. Now it stands out clear, less
picturesque than it was in the time of Bocardo prison. Within the
last two years the windows have been cleared, and the curious and
most archaic pillars, shaped like balustrades, may be examined. It
is worth while to climb the tower and remember the times when arrows
were sent like hail from the narrow windows on the foes who
approached Oxford from the north, while prayers for their confusion
were read in the church below.

That old Oxford of war was also a trading town. Nothing more than
the fact that it was a favourite seat of the Jews is needed to prove
its commercial prosperity. The Jews, however, demand a longer notice
in connection with the still unborn University. Meanwhile, it may be
remarked that Oxford trade made good use of the river. The Abingdon
Chronicle (ii. 129) tells us that "from each barque of Oxford city,
which makes the passage by the river Thames past Abingdon, a hundred
herrings must yearly be paid to the cellarer. The citizens had much
litigation about land and houses with the abbey, and one Roger
Maledoctus (perhaps a very early sample of the pass-man) gave
Abingdon tenements within the city." Thus we leave the pre-Academic
Oxford a flourishing town, with merchants and moneylenders. As for
the religious, the brethren of St. Frideswyde had lived but loosely
(pro libito viverunt), says William of Malmesbury, and were to be
superseded by regular canons, under the headship of one Guimond, and
the patronage of the Bishop of Salisbury. Whoever goes into Christ
Church new buildings from the river-side, will see, in the old
edifice facing him, a certain bulging in the wall. That is the mark
of the pulpit, whence a brother used to read aloud to the brethren in
the refectory of St. Frideswyde. The new leaven of learning was soon
to ferment in an easy Oxford, where men lived pro libito, under good
lords, the D'Oilys, who loved the English, and built, not churches
and bridges only, but the great and famous Oseney Abbey, beyond the
church of St. Thomas, and not very far from the modern station of the
Great Western Railway. Yet even after public teaching in Oxford
certainly began, after Master Robert Puleyn lectured in divinity
there (1133; cf. Oseney Chronicle), the tower was burned down by
Stephen's soldiery in 1141 (Oseney Chronicle, p. 24).

CHAPTER II--THE EARLY STUDENTS--A DAY WITH A MEDIEVAL UNDERGRADUATE

Oxford, some one says, "is bitterly historical." It is difficult to
escape the fanaticism of Antony Wood, and of "our antiquary," Bryan
Twyne, when one deals with the obscure past of the University.
Indeed, it is impossible to understand the strange blending of new
and old at Oxford--the old names with the new meanings--if we avert
our eyes from what is "bitterly historical." For example, there is
in most, perhaps in all, colleges a custom called "collections." On
the last days of term undergraduates are called into the Hall, where
the Master and the Dean of the Chapel sit in solemn state.
Examination papers are set, but no one heeds them very much. The
real ordeal is the awful interview with the Master and the Dean. The
former regards you with the eyes of a judge, while the Dean says,
"Master, I am pleased to say that Mr. Brown's PAPERS are very fair,
very fair. But in the matters of CHAPELS and of CATECHETICS, Mr.
Brown sets--for a SCHOLAR--a very bad example to the other
undergraduates. He has only once attended divine service on Sunday
morning, and on that occasion, Master, his dress consisted
exclusively of a long great-coat and a pair of boots." After this
accusation the Master will turn to the culprit and observe, with
emphasis ill represented by italics, "Mr. Brown, the COLLEGE cannot
hear with pleasure of such behaviour on the part of a SCHOLAR. You
are GATED, Mr. Brown, for the first fortnight of next term." Now why
should this tribunal of the Master and the Dean, and this dread
examination, be called collections? Because (Munimenta Academica,
Oxon., i. 129) in 1331 a statute was passed to the effect that "every
scholar shall pay at least twelve pence a-year for lectures in logic,
and for physics eighteenpence a-year," and that "all Masters of Arts
except persons of royal or noble family, shall be obliged to COLLECT
their salary from the scholars." This collection would be made at
the end of term; and the name survives, attached to the solemn day of
doom we have described, though the college dues are now collected by
the bursar at the beginning of each term.

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