corporate property held by the University. They continued to multiply up to the end of the fifteenth century, when they had reached the number of twenty-four at least, and are computed to have contained an aggregate sum of 2,000 marks, all of which might be in circulation on loan at the same time.1 It is very difficult to ascertain what other sources of revenue the University may have possessed in the first stage of its existence. In the next stage, its income seems to have been largely derived from academical fines and fees on graces, as well as from duties paid by masters keeping grammarschools and principals of halls, into which the primitive boarding-schools were first transforming themselves. It is clear that, at this period, the great mass of students, not being inmates of religious houses, were lodged and boarded in these unendowed halls, mostly hired from the citizens by clerks, who in some cases were not even graduates, but were regularly licensed by the chancellor or his commissary on September 9, and were subject to fixed rules of discipline laid down from time to time by the governing body of the University. How many of them may have been open in the middle of the thirteenth century is a question which cannot be answered. About seventy are specified by name in a list compiled nearly two centuries later, but we have no means of knowing how many ancient halls may have then become extinct, or how many new halls may have been founded. The evidence now in our possession does not enable us to identify more than about eighty

See the Introduction to Anstey's Munimenta Academica, pp. XXXV. et sqq.

as having ever existed, and it is certain that all these did not exist at any one time. Even if we suppose that several hundred students were housed in monastic buildings during the age preceding the foundation of colleges, and make a large allowance for those in private lodging-houses, we cannot estimate the whole number of University scholars at more than 2,000, or at the most 3,000. The loose statement of Richard of Armagh, so lightly repeated by Anthony Wood and others, that some 30,000 scholars were collected at Oxford in this age, not only rests upon no sure historical ground, but is utterly inconsistent with all that we know of the area covered by the city, and of the position occupied by the academical population.

University

It is well known that Henry III. frequently visited Oxford for the purpose of holding councils or otherwise, Early and his relations with the University were charters constant. Amongst the letters and charters issued by him in regard to University affairs three are specially notable. One of these letters, dated 1238, was addressed to the mayor and burghers, directing them to inquire into the circumstances of a riot at Oseney Abbey between the servants of Otho, the Papal Legate, and a body of disorderly students. This riot led to a struggle, lasting a whole year, between the Legate and the University, supported by the English bishops, and especially by Robert Grosteste. The Legate was ultimately appeased by the public submission of the University representatives in London to his authority, whereupon he withdrew the interdict which he had laid upon the Oxford clerks, some of whom had retired to Northampton, and others, it is said, to Salisbury.

Meanwhile the conflicts between the students and townspeople were incessant. In 1244, after a violent attack of gownsmen on the Jewry, the chancellor of the University was given by a royal writ exclusive cognisance of all pleas arising out of contracts relating to personalty, and in 1248 the 'mayor's oath' of fidelity to the privileges of the University was imposed by letters patent. By a similar charter, granted in 1255 to the city of Oxford, these privileges are incidentally confirmed, for it is there provided that if a ' clerk' shall injure a townsman he shall be imprisoned until the chancellor shall claim him, while, if a townsman shall injure a clerk, he shall be imprisoned until he make satisfaction according to the judgment of the chancellor. Two years later (in 1257) the liberties of the University were defended against the bishop of Lincoln himself before the king at St. Albans, on the ground that Oxford was, after Paris, schola secunda ecclesiæ.

Rise of

CHAPTER II.

THE EARLY COLLEGES.

By far the most important event in the academical history of the thirteenth century was the foundation of University, Balliol, and Merton Colleges. The Colleges idea of secular colleges, it is true, was not wholly new. Harold's foundation at Waltham, afterwards converted into an abbey, was originally non-monastic, and designed to be a home for secular priests, but

it was not an educational institution. There were colleges for the maintenance of poor scholars at Bologna; rather, however, in the nature of the Oxford halls. If the founders of the earliest Oxford college were indebted for their inspiration to any foreign source, they must have derived it from the great French University in Paris, of which the collegiate system already formed a distinctive feature. Not to speak of still more ancient colleges at Paris, either attached to monasteries or serving the purpose of mere lodginghouses, the Sorbonne, founded about 1250, furnishes a striking precedent for its Oxford successors, as an academical cloister specially planned for the education of the secular clergy. Nevertheless, there is no proof that its constitution was actually imitated or studied by the founder of any Oxford college, and there is one important difference between the Paris and Oxford colleges, that whereas the former were appropriated to special faculties, the latter welcomed students in all faculties. It is, therefore, by no means improbable that in the development of the college system, as in the original incorporation of schools into an academical body, like causes produced like results by independent processes at the French and English Universities.

The claim of University College to priority among Oxford colleges cannot be disputed, if the foundation of a college is to be dated from the earliest of the endowments afterwards appropriated to its support. It was in 1249 that William of Durham left by will a sum of 310 marks to the University of Oxford for the maintenance of ten or more Masters, being natives of

of Univer

sity and

Balliol

the county of Durham, in lodgings to be provided at Oxford out of this fund. Two houses in School Street, Foundation Oxford, and one in High Street, were purchased by the University before 1263, and were probably occupied by students. There was, however, no royal charter of incorporation, no provision for corporate self-government, or for the succession of fellows, no organised society, no distribution of powers or definition of duties. In a word, the institution founded by William of Durham was not a college, but an exhibition-fund to be administered by the University. It was not until 1292 that this scattered body of exhibitioners was consolidated into 'the Great Hall of the University,' as it was then called, under statutes which are a very meagre copy of those issued nearly thirty years earlier by Walter de Merton, and which, unlike his, were imposed, not by the founder, but by the University itself. Meanwhile, at some time between 1263 and 1268, John Balliol, of Barnard Castle, father of John Balliol, king of Scotland, provided similar exhibitions for poor scholars at Oxford. His intention was completed by his wife, Dervorguilla, who collected the recipients of his bounty into a single building on the present site of the college, increased the endowments so that it might support a body of sixteen exhibitioners with a yearly stipend of twenty-seven marks apiece, and in 1282 issued statutes regulating the new foundation, but fully conceding the principle of self-government.

In the meantime Merton College had been founded on a far larger scale, and had received statutes which,

C. H.