all important, and we see the central unity tending to decay. In short, the general effect is much as if we had to compare a century of the history of the early Roman Empire with that of a century of Medieval Europe. When the ancient unity has collapsed, and we have to trace the ups and downs of a score of small corporations, some growing in importance, some dwindling, some (like half a dozen medieval colleges of which Sir Charles Mallet tells) disappearing altogether, we are reminded of the difficulties that beset the compilers of the Cambridge Medieval History. Unlucky are the writers who have to arrange in one volume the annals of the kingdom of Lesser Burgundy, the principality of Salerno, or the duchy of Aquitaine, as well as the larger fortunes of the Holy Roman Empire. And so it is with Oxford history, when we have to interrupt our general view of the Wycliffite movement or the Reformation in order to investigate the fortunes of New College or All Souls, of Magdalen or Christ Church. Sir Charles Mallet frankly confesses that the problem of how college history is to be dovetailed into University history is not soluble in any satisfactory fashion. I have had to choose between two courses, neither of which is free from objection: either to break up the history of each college into separate periods, and to return to it from time to time, or else to follow it up as it arises, to make it for the purposes of these volumes continuous, and thus to anticipate the general history. After trying both courses, I am satisfied that the better one is to make the historical sketch of each college complete (so far as may be) in itself, even though this involves, in the case of the earlier colleges especially, anticipating the general story of the University by many years (p. ix). It must be confessed that the author's choice of this method leads to puzzling chronological and intellectual gymnastics. Having founded University College or Balliol in 1249 or 1266, he takes on their annals to the days of Wycliffe, of Charles I and James II, while the general history has not yet got to the teaching of Duns Scotus (circ. 1300), the riots of St. Scholastica's day (1355), or the famous "secession" to Stamford (1334), which only just failed to set up a second Oxford on a lower level in the eastern counties. Thus we are continually forced to skip backward and forward across the centuries, and to learn a number of odd facts e.g., about the Reformation, before we have yet been instructed as to what the Reformation was. After carefully perusing many an interesting page, we are bound to confess that on the whole we should have preferred to have the general history of the University written continuously, with a series of short monographs on the particular histories of each college put at the end of the whole book. We are quite aware that this scheme also would have had its drawbacks; but at least it would not have led to the long interruptions of the main thread of academic history that are to be found in the plan that Sir Charles has adopted; and there would have been no inversion or confusion of chronology. It may perhaps be put in as a defence of the author that the students who will take up these fascinating volumes and read them straight through from end to end, in conscientious fashion, will probably be few. A majority of readers will use them rather as a dictionary or a "browsing ground," and will have recourse to them rather to find out e.g. the tenets of Ockham, or the meaning of a "Black Congregation," or the character of undergraduate rowdiness in the fifteenth century, than to trace the general course of academic organization across the centuries. And this is a reasonable plea, for we can imagine no more interesting book to pick up and to dip into for half an hour, if the casual reader is in search of the odd points of medieval society. The chapters on University life are full of the most extraordinary anecdotes, and sidelights on the daily doings of the medieval scholar and his tutor and their successors in Tudor and Stuart times were beings of almost as odd a type. We do not allude so much to the actual crimes or the wild pranks and habitual unruliness of the undergraduate of the thirteenth or fourteenth century. These were only the local University expression of that general tendency to boisterous misbehaviour and assault and battery, which Judge Fortescue considered to be such a special and rather genial characteristic of all Englishmen. It was this which made them, as the great Lancastrian judge considered, so superior as a race to the tamer populations of the Continent. The medieval scholar loved to attack citizens, or members of the other University faction, according as he was a Northerner or a Southerner. He was much inclined to poaching, and would fight the gamekeepers of Shotover or Stow Wood when they pounced upon him. He possessed, as all young Englishmen did, a bow and arrows things all too tempting in an hour of medley or riot, and prone to kill at any distance. He would even seem to have often owned a sword, and the use of it was such a common thing that we find in a fifteenth century code of fines the very modest sum of twenty shillings as the appropriate penalty for falling upon an enemy with such a weapon, and inflicting slashes upon him. Of course, if the arrow or the sword went too deep into the vitals of a citizen, a game-keeper, or another student, there was a chance that their owner might find himself appearing as the most prominent figure in a ceremony at " Gownsman's Gallows," the well-known gibbet, still shown in Agas's Elizabethan map of Oxford as standing in the broad space at the north end of Long Wall, close to the point where the corner tower of Magdalen Park now rises. But candidates for its use do not seem to have been so numerous as might have been expected, considering the curious medley of undesirables who used to hang around the outskirts of a medieval University: wild Welsh or Irish "Chamberdekynis," matriculated servants or tradesmen of doubtful antecedents, and adventurers of all sorts who tried to make the clerk's gown cover a lurid past. Some undergraduate crime of the fourteenth century has its faint echo even in the twentieth. The purloining of a sorry nag to take one home at the beginning of the long vacation is reflected to-day in the fashion in which the unscrupulous pick the first bicycle that comes to hand out of the heap by the door, at the end of a popular lecture or a crowded Union debate. Riotous and insulting noises made when the dons are holding some high feast has provoked censure from the highest quarters in very recent years, though not censure worded in the delightful terminology of 1350. And it is interesting to find that surreptitious visits to dances of doubtful respectability have irritated the proctors of almost every century. As to scuffles with the watch, is it so many years ago since the advent of royalty, and of unsympathetic London police, led to many smashed helmets and many cracked academic crowns--including one crown that has since worn the most august of wigs? But we have grown tame; if we had the convictions of our academic predecessors, we should logically have substituted automatic pistols for the bows and arrows of which they made free use up and down the High Street, or in the fields outside Bocardo. It is not in his hours of riot that the medieval undergraduate seems most unintelligible to us, but rather in his hours of enthusiasm and high intellectual emprise. We know his curriculum, his books are still with us (if unread); we have surviving examples of the hurriedly copied and vilely penned manuscripts, which circulated from hand to hand, and we stand amazed at the sort of stuff which formed his pabulum and evidently aroused in him the joy of eventful living. It is seldom that we are able to sympathise in full with the militant scholars of the Renaissance; but we can most heartily endorse all their acrid remarks on the studies of the "Trojans," who tried to exclude Greek from the University curriculum, and declared that the fourteenth century course needed no change in the sixteenth. Erasmus called them formalists, dogmatists, pedants, blind leaders of the blind, and he was not wrong. It is difficult to speak with justice of the contents of the lectures and handbooks which inspired the medieval University. The medical lectures were founded on Galen, and deprecated the knowledge of anatomy as connected with that horrible thing, the dissection of corpses, from which the soul revolted. And medicine was closely connected with magic even such a man as Roger Bacon considered that the most valuable elixirs, compounded in part of pearls and precious stones, should be exposed to the influence of the planets at proper hours. And it was commonly held that "a doctor without astrology was like an eye without the power to see, for any competent medical man must of necessity know the natures and conjunctions of the stars" (vol. I, p. 100). Professional astronomers occasionally crop up in the University. There are some fourteenth century bronze instruments belonging to a fellow of Merton, preserved in the Lewis Evans Museum. But it is to be feared that astronomy was only valuable for the practical end of astrology. Every ambitious young man wanted to have his own horoscope cast, and politicians of the shady sort were always seeking to get leading facts as to the probable health of the king-sometimes with dire results to themselves and their learned employé, as witness the case of Master Roger Bolingbroke. History never formed a part of the medieval course; it came neither with the Trivium nor the Quadrivium; yet some men could not restrain an unofficial interest in it-unfortunately their knowledge was drawn from imperfect or tainted sources. Greek history was only known to them from Latin epitomes, and not only were the Greek historians themselves unobtainable, but of the better Roman writers many, such as Tacitus, were not yet rediscovered. Orosius-first Christian historiographer and most one-sided of observers-served for most purposes; or even Orosius as excerpted by medieval compilers of the type of Higden. And all early English history, and much Roman history also, was corrupted by the abominable and ever-popular inventions of Geoffrey of Monmouth--to whom we owe Old King Cole, "Brutus the Trojan," Lud, and Belinus, and all the other mythical nonsense which cumbered the pages of every volume of English annals, even down to Milton's day. The fellows of University College fished up King Alfred as a likely founder for their own corporation, when in a medieval lawsuit they found it convenient to claim that they were a royal house. But this was nothing compared to the earlier assertion in the "Chancellor's Book, Registrum A, in the academic archives, to the effect that King Mempricius (one of Geoffrey's creations) started a University at Cricklade, in the tenth century before Christ, which was shortly after removed to Oxford. There was nothing in the story which shocked contemporary historical critics and Cambridge, in emulation, indulged in similar “prehistoric peeps." : Many of the Latin classics were, of course, known and taught in medieval Oxford, but there was little faculty to discern the good from the mediocre among them. Terence and Seneca and Statius were taken as seriously as Virgil and Horace. It is obvious that the want of knowledge of the Greek originals of so much second-hand Latin literature caused a curious overvaluation of many authors. Cicero was ranked as a serious philosopher, because the sources from which he filched so freely were not even suspected to exist. Virgil was taken for a demigod, because no one had read Homer: if the Ionian bard had been known, the Mantuan would not have dominated a whole series of folktales, or have guided Dante through the Underworld. But, neither medicine nor law, nor astronomy, nor pure literature, were the main pabulum of the medieval scholar. The studies which dominated all others, and which engrossed the intellectual interests of three centuries were logic, philosophy, and theology--all three closely connected and intertwined with each |