In 1894, the twenty-four-year-old writer John Corbin, who had recently received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from Harvard, completed an additional year of study at Oxford University’s Balliol College. During his time there, Corbin felt compelled to document the differences, distinctions, and “defects” of the English institution, in contrast to American higher education. Portions of his richly colored accounts of academic, social, and athletic life at Oxford were first published in Harper’s Weekly and The Atlantic Monthly, among other magazines; Corbin compiled and expanded upon these essays to publish An American at Oxford in 1902.
In the excerpt below, Corbin vividly outlines Oxford’s operations during the Middle Ages, tracing the origins of the modern university model in the West. The author’s descriptions of medieval students’ coursework, residential life, and relations with neighboring townspeople will, at moments, strike contemporary readers as intensely familiar; elsewhere, Corbin’s history shows how profoundly higher education’s role in society has shifted in the centuries since.
I. The University Before the College
In the beginning was the university. The colleges were as unimportant as the university is now. If it be admitted that the university exists to-day, they were less important; for there were no colleges. The origin of the university was probably due to a migration of students in 1167 from the then world-famous University of Paris. The first definite mention of a studium generale at Oxford, or assembly of masters of the different faculties, dates from 1185, when Giraldus Cambrensis, as he himself relates, read his new work, “Topographia Hibernia,” before the citizens and scholars of the town, and entertained in his hostel “all the doctors of the different faculties.”
At this time, and for many centuries afterward, Oxford, like other mediæval universities, was a guild, and was not unlike the trade guilds of the time. Its object was to train and give titles to those who dealt in the arts and professions. The master tanner was trained by his guild to make leather, and he made it; the master of arts was trained by the university to teach, and he taught. He was required to rent rooms in the university schools, for a year and even two, and to show that he deserved his title of master by lecturing in them, and conducting “disputations.” The masters lived directly from the contributions of their hearers, their means varying with the popularity of their lectures; and the students were mainly poor clerks, who sought degrees for their money value.
The lectures were mere dictations from manuscript, necessitated by the lack of accessible texts. The students copied the lectures verbatim for future study. The instruction in arts covered the entire field of secular knowledge, the “seven arts,” the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic or dialectic), and the quadrivium (music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy). The lectures were the main and often the only means of imparting knowledge. The disputations were scholastic arguments—debates—on some set question, and were conducted by the masters. They were the practical application of what the student had learned from the lectures, and were the chief means of intellectual training. Besides attending lectures and disputing, the candidate for the degree had to pass an examination; but the great test of his acquirement seems to have been the skill with which he used his knowledge in debate. Thus the formal disputations occupied very much the same place as the modern written examinations, and they must have required very much the same rare combination of knowledge, address, and pluck. All learning was in a pint-pot; but it was a very serviceable pint-pot.
The university education did not make a man above the work of the world: it made him an engine of so many horse power to perform it. It brought him benefices in that great sphere of activity, the mediæval Church, and important posts in that other sphere of mediæval statecraft, which was so often identified with the Church. If the clerk was above the carpenter, it was not because he came from a different station in life, for he often did not: it was because his work was more important. And he was far above the carpenter. It was a strenuous, glorious life, and the man of intelligence and training found his level, which is the highest. The kings and the nobility were warriors, and may have affected to despise education; but they were far from despising educated men. The machinery of state was organized and controlled by clerks from the university. If the scientific and mechanical professions had existed then, there is no doubt that they would not have been despised as to-day, but would have had full recognition.
Socially, the university was chaos. In the absence of colleges, all the students lived with the townsmen in “chamberdekyns,” which appear to be etymologically and historically the forbears of the “diggings” to which the fourth year man now retreats when he has been routed from college by incoming freshmen and by the necessity of reading for his final examination. But such discipline as is now exerted over out-of-college students was undreamed of. In his interesting and profoundly scholarly history of the universities of the Middle Ages, the Rev. Hastings Rashdall gives a vivid picture of mediæval student life, which was pretty much the same in all the universities of Europe. Boys went up to the university at as early an age as thirteen, and the average freshman could not have been older than fifteen; yet they were allowed almost absolute liberty. Drunkenness was rarely treated as a university offense; and for introducing suspicious women into his rooms, it was only on being repeatedly caught that an undergraduate was disciplined. At the University of Ingolstadt, a student who had killed another in a drunken quarrel had his scholastic effects and garments confiscated by the university. He may have been warned to be good in future, but he was not expelled. “It is satisfactory to add,” Rashdall continues, “that at Prague, a Master of Arts, believed to have assisted in cutting the throat of a Friar Bishop, was actually expelled.” The body of undergraduates was “an undisciplined student-horde.” Hende Nicholas, in Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,” is, it must be admitted, a lively and adventuring youth; but he might have been much livelier without being untrue to student life in chamberdekyns.
The townspeople seem to have been the not unnatural fathers of the tradesmen and landlords of modern Oxford; and the likeness is well borne out in the matter of charges. But where to-day a man sometimes tries amiably to beat down the landlord’s prices, the way of the Middle Ages was to beat down the landlord. As the student was in many cases of the same station in life as the townsman, he naturally failed to command the servility with which the modern undergraduate is regarded. Both sides used to gird on their armor, and meet in battles that began in bloodshed and often ended in death. Pages of Rashdall’s history are filled with accounts of savage encounters between town and gown, which are of importance historically as showing the steps by which the university achieved the anomalous legal dominance over the city which it still in some measure retains. For our present purpose, it is enough to note that mediæval Oxford was unruly, very. “Fighting,” says Rashdall, “was perpetually going on in the streets of Oxford.... There is probably not a single yard of ground in any part of the classic High Street that lies between St. Martin’s and St. Mary’s [almost a quarter of a mile] which has not at one time or other been stained with human blood. There are historic battlefields on which less has been spilt.”
As if this were not enough, there were civil feuds. In the Middle Ages, sectional differences were more obvious and more important than now; and the first subdivision of the universities, both in England and on the Continent, was by “nations.” At Oxford there were two nations; and if, when the north countryman rubbed elbows with the south countryman, he was offended by his silken gown and soft vowels, he rapped him across the pate. Hence more strife and bloodshed. Amid all this disorder there was a full measure of mediæval want and misery. At best, the student of moderate means led a precarious life; and poor students, shivering, homeless, and starved, lived by the still reputable art of the beggar. Something had to be done.
II. The Medieval Hall
The mediæval spirit of organization, which resulted in so many noble and deathless institutions, was not slow in exerting itself against the social chaos of the university. Out of chaos grew the halls, and out of the halls the colleges. The first permanent organizations of student life were small, and had their origin in the immediate wants of the individual. To gain the economy of coöperation and the safety of numbers, the students at Oxford, as at Paris and elsewhere, began to live in separate small colonies under one roof. These were called aulæ or halls. They were no less interesting in themselves than for the fact that they were the germ out of which the Oxford college system grew.
At first the halls appear to have been mere chance associations. Each had a principal who managed its affairs; but the principal had no official status, and might even be an undergraduate. The halls correspond roughly to the fraternities of American college life. Their internal rule was absolutely democratic. The students lived together by mutual consent under laws of their own framing, and under a principal of their own electing. They were quite without fear or favor of the university. The principal’s duties were to lease the hall, to be a sort of over-steward of it, and to lead in enforcing the self-imposed rules of the community. His term of office, like his election, depended on the good-will of his fellows; if he made himself disliked, they were quite at liberty to take up residence elsewhere. In the thirteenth century there was really no such thing as university discipline. The men who lived in the halls came and went as they pleased, and were as free as their contemporary in chamberdekyns to loiter, quarrel, and carouse. Chaucer’s “Reeve’s Tale” gives us a glimpse into “Soler Halle at Cantebregge,” from which it would appear that the members were quite as loose and free as Hende Nicholas, their Oxford contemporary. But the liberty was an organized liberty. In contrast with the chaos of the life of the students in chamberdekyns, the early halls must have been brave places to work and to play in, and one might wish that a fuller record had been left of the life in them. It was their fate to be obscured by the greater splendor and permanence of the colleges to which they paved the way.
III. The College System
The English college, roughly speaking, is a mediæval hall supported by a permanent fund which the socii or fellows administer. The first fund for the support of scholars was bequeathed in 1243, but it can scarcely be regarded as marking the first college, for it provided for two scholars only, and these lived where they pleased. In 1249 William of Durham bequeathed a fund for the support of ten or more masters of arts. At first these also lived apart; it was only in 1280, after the type of the English college had been fixed, that they were formed into the body now known as University College. The first organized community at Oxford was founded by Sir John de Balliol some little time before 1266; but the allowances to the scholars, as was the case in colleges of the University of Paris, after which it was doubtless modeled, were not from a permanent fund, being paid annually by the founder. Balliol cannot therefore be regarded as the first characteristic English college. It was not until 1282 that Sir John’s widow, Dervorguilla, adopted the new English idea by making the endowment of the “House of Balliol” permanent, and placing it under the management of the fellows.
The real founder of the English college was Walter de Merton. In 1264 Walter provided by endowment for the permanent maintenance of twenty scholars, who were to live together in a hall as a community; and in 1274 he drew up the statutes which fix the type of the earliest English college. The principal of Merton was not, like the principal of a mediæval hall, the temporary head of a chance community, but a permanent head with established power; and he had to manage, not the periodic contributions of free associates, but a landed estate held in permanent trust. He was called “warden,” a title which the head of Merton retains to this day. This idea of a body supported in a permanent residence by a permanent fund is perhaps of monastic origin, and was accompanied by certain features of brotherhood rule. The scholars lived a life of order and seclusion which was in striking contrast to the life of the students in chamberdekyns, and even of those in the halls. But with the monastic order they had also the monastic democracy, so that in one way the government of the college was strikingly similar to that of the halls. Vacancies in the community were filled by cooptation, and the warden was elected by the thirteen senior fellows from their own number. Though partly monastic in constitution, the Hall of Merton was not properly a religious body. The fellows took no vows, and seem rather to have been expected to enter lay callings. This College of Merton was the result of a gradual development of the hall along monastic lines—a lay brotherhood of students. It was destined to work a revolution in English university life and in English university teaching. The constitutions of University and Balliol were, as I have indicated, remodeled on the lines of Merton; and other colleges were founded as follows: Exeter, 1314; Oriel, 1324; Queens, 1341; and Canterbury, now extinct, 1362, most of which were profoundly influenced by the constitution of Merton.
