Oxford and Cambridge

After the 1220s, the friars, followers of St Francis and St Dominic, in theory pledged to lives of poverty like the original disciples of Christ, had settled in many English towns and had brought new insights to their preaching, in particular in their condemnation of materialism and the pleasures which money could buy. Jesus, so they argued, had sent his followers penniless into the world, and it was by abandoning money rather than by fleeing the world that the religious could best pursue their vocation.

Because of their emphasis upon preaching, generally regarded as a learned pursuit, the friars had established particular connections with the schools, settling in both Oxford and Cambridge almost immediately after their arrival in England. Already by the time of Gerald of Wales in the 1180s, Oxford was emerging as England’s pre-eminent seat of learning. Even earlier, Geoffrey of Monmouth, weaving his fabulous account of English history, claimed to have relied upon a book belonging to the archdeacon of Oxford, just as today’s fantasists and conspiracy theorists might cite anything that lent the approval of Oxford University Press to their own fantastical ideas. Walter Map, court chronicler and wit under Henry II, was himself archdeacon of Oxford.

Why Oxford? In part because the town was a regular meeting place for ecclesiastical courts, one of the most convenient points close to London in a diocese, the see of Lincoln, which stretched from the Thames as far north as the Humber. It was also, perhaps, a place of cheap rents. With Oxford today boasting some of the highest property prices in England, it is hard to imagine that the city was once awash with tenements, plots and halls where students could be lodged at little expense. In the twelfth century, however, the silting up of the Thames reduced navigation and ensured a glut of cheap property into which teachers and students now moved. It was precisely to guard against the further congestion of the Thames and the Medway navigations that Magna Carta, in 1215, forbade the construction of fish weirs on either of these rivers.

The self-government of the University of Oxford dates from this same period, with the removal of authority over students and schools from the bishop of Lincoln and their investment in a new officer, the University’s Chancellor. The dominance of the University over the city of Oxford, gown over town, was not finally cemented until the reign of Edward III, following a full-blown riot, provoked by an argument in the Swindlestock Tavern on St Scholastica’s Day 1355 (10 February). In penance for the slaying of a considerable number of students, the mayor and corporation were condemned to pay an annual fine to the University (last paid in the 1820s), and the University henceforth obtained wide-ranging authority over the city’s markets and commerce.

Cambridge, likewise a port town with a declining trade and navigation, emerged as the location for a much smaller and, during the Middle Ages, less-distinguished university only a few years after Oxford. The precise circumstances here remain unclear, but perhaps, where the presence of the bishop and archdeacon’s courts had been crucial to the emergence of the schools of Oxford, the freedom of Cambridge from supervision by the local bishop, and the fact that, in the 1220s, the archdeacon of Ely was an absentee Italian, more often to be found acting as papal agent in Croatia or Hungary than on the wind-swept banks of the Cam, encouraged the emergence, by 1225, of a university Chancellor apparently ruling the scholars and their schools.

To begin with, both at Oxford and at Cambridge, scholars and masters were lodged in halls and dormitories, bought and sold as private enterprises, with no permanent endowment to ensure their long-term survival. The first of the endowed Cambridge colleges, Peterhouse, was founded in 1284 by a Benedictine monk, Hugh of Balsham, bishop of Ely, whose statutes grafted elements of the Benedictine rule on to decrees already awarded, twenty years earlier, to one of the first of the Oxford colleges, founded by Walter de Merton, chancellor to King Henry III. Another of the early Oxford colleges, Balliol, was founded in the 1260s by the father and mother of the future King of Scotland, John de Balliol. New College at Oxford, was the work of William of Wykeham, chancellor to Edward III, established in 1379 as the Oxford end of an educational network that was intended to channel boys from school at Wykeham’s foundation at Winchester to higher learning at Oxford. All told, of the surviving Oxford and Cambridge colleges, fourteen were founded before 1370, a further eight between 1370 and 1480.

Extending beyond the immediate needs of education, the idea of the college, served by a body of clergy celebrating the liturgy in honour of their founder, often with elaborate choir schools or professional musicians attached, itself became one of the most characteristic phenomena of the late medieval English Church, inspiring the actions of Edward III himself in his foundation of the colleges of St George at Windsor and St Stephen’s at Westminster, within the shadow of the monastic abbey and royal palace. Music, that great accomplishment and delight of the English, appears as an especially royal art from the 1350s onwards, associated with the collegiate foundations of Edward III, as later of William of Wykeham or King Henry VI. Those who tune in to the service of nine lessons and carols from King’s College Cambridge at Christmas each year are probably aware that this particular service is a Victorian pastiche. The basic idea, however, of a college, with a royal or distinguished founder and with religious songs to accompany the good and godly learning of its fellows is at least seven centuries old.

Like Walter de Merton and other college founders, Wykeham, both at Winchester and New College, laid particular stress upon the obligation of his foundations to support and educate his own kinsmen. Even now, the names Balliol or Wykeham have a resonance, thanks to their educational foundations, that others, just as famous in their day now lack. Wykeham was in some ways a less competent or significant administrator than his predecessor as bishop of Winchester, William Eddington, yet, thanks to his school and his college, it is Wykeham not Eddington whose memory has survived. Founders’ kin were still being admitted to Oxford, on preferential terms, as late as the 1850s, resulting in a lucrative though shadowy trade in false pedigrees intended to demonstrate kinship to long dead bishops. In particular, kinship to Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, founder of All Souls College Oxford, could guarantee a handsome lifelong stipend in a college which had no undergraduates but only fellows whose original purpose had been to pray for the dead of the Hundred Years War. It is sometimes asserted that medieval monasticism was swept away in England by the Reformation of the sixteenth century. In practice, a large number of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges retain identities that are essentially medieval and monastic, the arrangement of their buildings, and the election, dining and self-government of their ‘fellows’ (or teachers) being conducted according to procedures remarkably similar to those practised by medieval monks. Even monastic celibacy persisted long after the Reformation. The majority of the fellows of the Oxford colleges were not permitted to marry until as recently as 1881.

The fourteenth century marked a high point for the universities, especially for Oxford where a rich tradition of theological speculation emerged, associated with such names as Duns Scotus (perhaps trained at Oxford, though owing his fame to his teachings at Paris), William of Ockham (trained at Oxford, but for most of his life an exile from England), and John Wycliffe (one time master of Balliol College, who we will encounter again in due course, and who throughout the 1360s and 70s was the most distinguished theologian permanently resident in Oxford, albeit later denounced as a heretic). Even these representatives of the highest of high learning nonetheless had their feet firmly on the ground of politics and the day-to-day management of the Church.  

Ockham wrote in support of the legitimacy of royal or imperial authority judged against that of the Pope. Wycliffe stood on the fringes of the circle around Edward III’s son, John of Gaunt, employed as a tame intellectual to bait the advocates of the Avignon papacy and to deny the Church’s claims to temporal as well as spiritual rule. All of these scholars, and in particular Scotus, played with the Latin language and invented their own terms of reference in ways that, on occasion, rival the most baffling of the statements of Wittgenstein or the modern philosophers of language. Nonetheless, grammar and the correct apprehension of terms and meanings remained at the heart of academic discourse. The outcome in the late medieval schools was perhaps a growing divorce between the worlds of thought and action, the relegation of much academic discourse to that bickering over abstractions that later critics would decry as ‘mere scholasticism’. Even so, the most famous question said to have been debated in the late medieval schools – ‘How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’, probably invented by critics – was nothing like so absurd as it might appear. Behind it lay debates over mathematical infinity, the nature of corporeal bodies and abstract entities, the mechanics of space, time and movement that would still engage university students in the lecture rooms of Oxford or Harvard today.

As in nineteenth-century England, where an intense grounding in the ancient languages of Latin and Greek was assumed to be the best training for those who would go on to rule nation and empire, so in medieval Oxford, there was an intensely practical side to a lot of tuition. ‘Business’ or ‘Management’ studies were already a feature of the Oxford curriculum in the fourteenth century, long before the twentieth-century mania for capitalist efficiency led to the endowment of some of the most hideous structures in a city famed for the ugliness of much of its modern building. Students were taught about angels, but also how to draft a letter, how to read a budget, how to conceal or disclose meanings from linguistic statements. From the debates of Ockham to the running of a diocese or service as a King’s clerk was only a short step. It was civil servants, not philosophers, that the universities were chiefly intended to produce.