Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 16.pdf/708

Rh

HE student in our colleges today inherits privileges, which appear to him as having always existed. No matter how far distant his home may be, he journeys from it in safety. Even though he be the only representative from his State or city, he is entitled to all the rights of citizenship in his university. And not only does his college town give to him all the benefits which she allows her townspeople, she not infrequently offers him special inducements to dwell within her borders.

But the time was, and it was not so long ago, when these privileges were by no means assured to the man who would study at a university. In the middle ages the student came to the university at his own peril, or it may be protected by a "safe conduct" from the King. There he found himself a member of a group that was either superior or inferior to the other students of the university according as his section of the land was numerically represented, but in either case he had to fight his way to his privileges. If his nationality — Welsh or Scotch for example — held the balance of power, then he must fight to maintain it. If he belonged to a small group, he needs must fight to live at all within the university. And then his feud with his fellow students was but incidental to the feud which all the students had with the town, which was seeking either to expel the university from its gates or to exploit the scholars for its own benefit. The student must fight both his fellow students and the town.

The privileges which the student of our own time enjoys as his right, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries belonged to the "projected efficiency" of college life. And the students of those centuries were busily engaged in projecting their efficiency.

It is proposed to show in these articles how the contentions among the students from about the time of the Conquest down to the reign of Richard II. did really project the privileges which we of today somewhat heedlessly enjoy. And it is also proposed to suggest the significance of this new chapter of Oxford history, now beginning with the Rhodes Scholarships, as it appears in the light of these old time contentions and their issue.

In order to understand these long and bitter struggles, it is necessary first to know something of the university life at Oxford at the beginning of the thirteenth century; the number of students, their habits, the conditions of the town which they infested, and the powers outside the university to which the disputants constantly appealed.

Both teachers and pupils came to Oxford from all peoples, nations and languages, from England, Wales and Ireland, and from the continental possessions of the English crown. There were Spaniards, Swedes, Bohemians and natives of Hungary and Po land, there were Scotchmen who held a "safe conduct" from the English King, and there were Parisians whose coming was for many years the subject of special clauses in the Anglo-French treaties.

This concourse of foreign students would seem to indicate a large body of men in the University, and yet there is hardly a point in its early history more difficult to determine than its size. The Archbishop of Armagh, Richard Fitz-Ralph, declared before the Papal Consistory at Avignon in 1357