The romance of the Oxford colleges

Though in this work, as in the Oxford University Calendar, Merton stands third among the colleges, there is a sense in which the first place may be claimed for it. Both University and Balliol got their endowments at a slightly earlier date, but Merton was the first College to be launched, in 1264, a year before the meeting of the first English Parliament, as a self-governing corporation.

The bequest of William of Durham, which resulted in the foundation of University, was in its origin merely a pension fund, and John of Balliol, in the first instance, only paid for the support of scholars in a hired house. Walter de Merton, on the contrary, began at once to build and to legislate, and his Statutes were the model of the Statutes of subsequent foundations, not only at Oxford, but at Cambridge also. The founder of Peterhouse, the first of the Cambridge colleges, expressly decreed that the Peterhouse students were to live according to “the rule of the scholars of Merton at Oxford.”

It follows that the history of Merton is more closely connected than that of any other college with the earliest turmoils—which were many; and the historian of Merton may properly begin with a glance at those brawls which a later civilisation came to know as “town and gown rows.”

Discord between the town and the University began as soon as the University became important and powerful, and it owed its origin, not to incompatibility of temper between undergraduates and bargees, but to the mutual jealousies of conflicting jurisdictions, ill-defined and therefore liable to clash. Nowadays, of course, the object of the authorities on both sides—the police on the one hand and the proctors on the other—is to keep the peace between the combatants. In the Middle Ages the seniors were as pugnacious as the juniors, and joined as ferociously in the affrays.

Theoretically it was the function of the town to prevent, or punish, breaches of the peace by townsmen, while the University had a similar responsibility with regard to breaches of the peace by gownsmen; but when townsmen and gownsmen fell out, each authority resented the interference of the other. That was one cause of friction, and further friction occurred in connection with disputed points of sanitation and hygiene. The gownsmen objected to the sale of stinking fish and to the brewing of beer from water contaminated by sewage; the townsmen thought the objection fastidious, and were very angry when the University appealed to the King to interfere with these time-honoured customs. Hence constant bickerings, and a frequent exchange of abusive language; hence ultimately open war and that bloody Battle of Saint Scholastica’s Day, in which the townsmen found the scholars of Merton their most formidable foes.

The trouble began in a tavern, on February 10, 1354. Some scholars who were drinking there found fault with the wine, and the vintner said that it was quite good enough wine for them. The scholars then threw the wine at the vintner’s head, and the vintner called his friends and neighbours to the rescue. They rang the bell of the Church of Saint Martin at Carfax, and the populace, summoned by that tocsin, shot at the scholars with bows and arrows. The Chancellor of the University—the Lord Curzon of Kedleston of his epoch—appeared upon the scene, ingeminating peace where there was no peace, and he also was shot at. Then the bell of the University Church of Saint Mary began to ring, and the gownsmen gathered, and the mêlée became general and lasted until the setting of the sun. No one was killed; the gownsmen got the best of it, and the Chancellor supposed that the riot was over. He issued a proclamation bidding the scholars go to their lectures as usual on the following day.

They went, but found the townsmen lying in wait for them. Reinforcements—two thousand peasants carrying an ominous black flag—had swarmed into the city from Cowley, Headington, and Hinksey. The Carfax tocsin pealed out a second time, just after the dinner hour, and the tocsin of Saint Mary’s responded as before. The townsmen, with their bucolic allies, not only assailed the scholars in the streets, but pursued them into their lodgings, inns, and halls, beating down the doors with improvised battering-rams, killing all the gownsmen they could catch, and stealing or destroying all the property that they could lay their hands on.

The Friars came out, carrying their huge crucifix and chanting their Litany, to try to compose the strife, but their intervention was in vain. They themselves became the objects of the popular fury, and one scholar was struck down even while clinging to the crucifix. Other scholars were followed into the churches and massacred at the foot of the altar. Dead bodies were flung on to dunghills, the wounded were hailed to prison, and even torture was not spared. “The crown of some chaplains,” says the chronicler, “viz., all the skin so far as the tonsure went, these diabolical imps flayed off in scorn of their clergy.”

At last the University could resist no more. The gownsmen began to flee into the country—all save the scholars of Merton. These had their solid walls behind which they could retire. Withdrawing to their college, while the town triumphed without—the sole representatives of learning in a deserted city which the Bishop had laid under an interdict—they waited for the day of vengeance and redress of grievances.

It came. The King sent down a special commission to investigate the matter. The Mayor of Oxford and his bailiffs were sent to prison; the sheriff was removed from office; and presently the town was further humiliated by the bestowal of fresh privileges upon the University authorities. They thenceforward, and not the townsmen, were to decide whether fish stank, and if they decided that it did, they were to send it to the hospital for the consumption of the sick. In addition to this privilege, they were to receive pecuniary compensation for the damage done in the riot, and their supremacy was in various other ways established on a firm constitutional basis.

Merton, that is to say, saved the University at an hour when, but for Merton, the townsmen would have wiped it out, and its clerks would have been dispersed over the face of the country.

As Merton was, through the scenes above described, the first college to be interesting, so, too, it was the first college to rise to conspicuous dignity, and enjoy the glories of a golden age. The supreme position achieved by Christ Church towards the end of the eighteenth and by Balliol in the middle of the nineteenth century, was won by Merton in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, under the Wardenship of Sir Henry Savile, and at the time when the founder of the Bodleian Library was a Fellow of the College.

It may be that Savile’s name has not echoed down the corridors of time quite as loudly as the names of some other Oxford men; but it is kept alive by the Savilian Professorships, and one may fix his position fairly well by saying that he was at once the Jowett and the Liddell of his generation. He was, that is to say, a great scholar and a great teacher; a great innovator and a man of great personal prestige; a link between the academic world and the world of action; the sort of man whom kings delighted to honour. Elizabeth honoured him, and so also did James I.

It was Savile who entertained Elizabeth on her visit to Oxford in 1592. He presided over the disputations held in her honour in Saint Mary’s Church, and delivered a ringing panegyric on her reign with the inevitable reference to the British triumph over the Armada: “Tuis auspiciis Hispania Anglum non vidit nisi victorem, Anglia Hispanum nisi captivum.” It was after enjoying his hospitality at Merton that her Majesty, as she rode away, paused on Shotover, and “looking wistfully towards Oxford,” said: “Farewell, farewell, dear Oxford! God bless thee and increase thy sons in number, holiness, and virtue!”

Elizabeth furthermore made Savile Provost of Eton—an office which he held concurrently with the Merton Wardenship. She gave him the office in spite of the fact that the Statutes reserved it for clergymen, and that Savile was a layman. He suggested to her Majesty that Statutes could not bind a sovereign, and her Majesty agreed with him, and it was while he was Provost of Eton that he entertained James I. and was made a baronet.

The Fellows of Merton of those days were already far removed from their early condition of “poor scholars.” They could hold their own at Court, and were well qualified to serve their country as ambassadors. Elizabeth sent one Merton man as Ambassador to Madrid, and another to Venice, Switzerland, and France; but the College did not lose touch with learning because it had gained touch with affairs. Sir Thomas Bodley, as all the world knows, returned from his travels to found the library which bears his name, and Savile assisted in the preparation of the Authorised Version of the Bible, produced an edition of St. Chrysostom which cost him £8,000, and founded the Professorships of Geometry and Astronomy in order that the multitude might no longer think “that the most useful branches of Mathematicks were spells and her professors limbs of the devil.”

He is said to have been a “very severe governor”—one whose students “hated him for his austerity.” He preferred the plodding and persevering to the brilliant. “If I would look for wits,” he said, “I would go to Newgate. There be the wits.” And there is a story of his own assiduous devotion to his studies, which probably illustrates the attitude of a good many homely wives towards learned husbands.

“He was so sedulous,” we read, “at his study that his lady thereby thought herself neglected, and coming to him one day as he was in his study, saluted him thus: ‘Sir Henry, I would I were a book too, and then you would a little more respect me.’ Whereto, one standing by replied, ‘Madam, you must then be an almanack, that he might change every year.’ Whereat she was not a little displeased.”

Those were the great days; but the times were to be more exciting when the Civil War broke out, and Oxford, after the battle of Edgehill, became the Royalist headquarters, garrisoned by the royal troops, surrounded by fortifications which townsmen and gownsmen helped to build, and beleaguered, more or less—at first rather less than more, but finally rather more than less—by the Parliamentary forces under Fairfax, who threw a bridge over the Cherwell, near Marston, and mounted a battery on Headington Hill.

One cannot pause to tell that story at length, or draw that picture in detail; but a stray fact or two will indicate what Oxford in general and Merton College in particular then looked like.

Soldiers were, of course, encamped wherever there was room for them. The New College cloisters were turned into an arsenal, and a powder factory was established at Osney. New Inn Hall was the mint at which the College plate was being melted down and coined into money. A line of earthworks ran from Folly Bridge across Christ Church Meadows. Parliament—the Royalist section of Parliament, that is to say—met in the House of Convocation. Prisoners of war were stowed away, and very nearly starved, in the castle in which Queen Maud had once been beleaguered by King Stephen. Charles I. held his Court at Christ Church, and Queen Henrietta Maria held hers at Merton, the two royal apartments being connected by a secret passage.

It followed, therefore, that Merton was the centre of the light side of war. The Warden, Nathaniel Brent, was a Parliamentarian, and was absent, acting as Judge-Marshal in the Parliamentary Army; William Harvey, of Caius College, Cambridge, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, was thrust into his place; and Merton, having accepted him under protest, lived joyously, doing its best to entertain the Queen and her ladies, who, on their part, did their best to be gracious to Merton. “Tota Academia morbo castrensi afflicta” is one Mertonian’s summing up; but that is a grumbler’s unkind way of putting it.

Regiments of University men were raised. They did good service, but they could not always be fighting. They sallied, and raided, and cut up convoys, and then returned to their headquarters; and, on their return, the dust-soiled warriors were received by smiling ladies in the Merton Gardens or the Christ Church Broad Walk, or listened, with the ladies, to concerts in the college chapels, or played in a masque in one of the college halls for their diversion.

It was a glorious time—a time when gaudily apparelled boys swaggered about with the assurance of men and the sincere conviction that the only life worth living was the life of the gallant who fought the King’s enemies in the morning and made love to the Queen’s ladies at night. But it was not a time at which students could be expected to mind their books; and the habit of study, when once lost, is not easily recovered. Amid the clash of arms Merton ceased to be a reading college, and circumstances conspired to prevent it from reverting to that character until after the lapse of many generations.

Three later royal visits—two by Charles II. and one by James II.—may be supposed to have operated unfavourably to study; and another cause of deterioration can be detected in the measures which the College took for the relief of its pecuniary embarrassments. A resolution was passed to the effect that the presence of poor men in the College should be discouraged, and that preference should be shown to postulants who were willing to present the College with silver tankards and subscribe heavily to the replenishment of the College Library.

The plan served its purpose. The Merton plate-chest was soon full to overflowing, and the shelves of the Merton library were also filled. But the College had, in the meantime, become a College of rich men, bent upon amusement rather than profit, and more eager to kindle material bonfires in the quad than to hand on the metaphoric torch of culture. Perhaps it has, by this time, lived down that reputation, but it certainly retained, and even nursed it, long after most of the other colleges had begun to take life seriously.

In the eighteenth century, indeed, one does not expect to find the age anything but dark; but even in that scandalous period Merton was distinguished by a special scandal of its own. Ladies of more charm than reputation came to Oxford in large numbers in those days, and the gardens of Merton were their favourite haunt. Their presence there has been celebrated alike in verse and prose. The prose censor rudely complains of “that multitude of Female Residentiaries who have of late infested our learned retirements”; while the poetical satirist exclaims:

From which state of things there resulted “imprudent marriages”—and worse—with the result that sleepy authority at last awoke to what was going on, and locked the garden gates.

The locking of the garden gates, however, did not in itself suffice to make Merton a hive of industry, or even a home of order; and legends of stormy occurrences within its walls continue to be frequent until a comparatively recent date. “All that I can say, gentlemen,” said the Warden, Dr. Marsham, on one occasion, haranguing the undergraduates in hall—“all that I can say is, that if you want to behave like barbarian savages, why—ahem! ahem!—you should come and ask leave first”; and an authentic story relates that Dr. Mandell Creighton, the late Bishop of London, was once, while an undergraduate, “employed to fetch in after dinner a supply of penny whistles and other musical instruments, armed with which, with tea-trays as drums, making the most horrible din, and letting off squibs and crackers as they went, the undergraduates marched round and round the Fellows’ quad.”

And, if Creighton did these things, what may we suppose to have been done by Creighton’s pupil, the late Lord Randolph Churchill? That is a delicate subject on which Lord Randolph’s biographers do not as a rule say more than is strictly necessary; but there is at any rate one story of his undergraduate days which it seems right to tell, because the delightful audacity of the future leader of the Fourth Party is foreshadowed in it.

Lord Randolph, it is said, was once “sent for” to be “ragged,” whether for cutting lectures or for some other offence against discipline. He was received by an indignant don, who began to deliver stern expostulations from the hearthrug, on which he stood, warming his back at the fire. In the heat of self-justification Lord Randolph advanced boldly, and the don, intimidated, shrank away. As the interview was approaching its conclusion, another undergraduate, who had also been summoned to the presence, knocked and entered. He found Lord Randolph on the hearthrug, with his coat-tails comfortably drawn up, delivering a vehement harangue, while the don cowered submissively in a corner of the apartment listening to him.

Remembering that story, we cannot wonder that Lord Randolph is still a hero with the rising generation of the College which educated him so imperfectly that when, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was confronted with some decimal fractions, he had to send for a permanent official to tell him “the meaning of those d—d dots.”