Part 9 (1/2)

VI.

THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY.

. . . . ”so famous, So excellent in art, and still so rising.”

Some years ago I found myself in a Northern capital, and committed myself to the guidance of a native coachman, whose business and pride it was to drive me from place to place, and indicate to me the important buildings of his majestic city. He was a patriotic showman, and I am bound to say he showed us a great deal; but the most memorable moment of that instructive day was when he stopped before, what seemed to us, a respectable mansion in a respectable street, and announced to us that ”you” was ”the Free Kirk _Univairsity_.” It was the first time in my life that I had heard four stone walls with a roof over them called a University. It was not long, however, before I discovered that I myself had been living with my head in a sack and, in more senses than one, had been of those

Who sweep the crossings, wet or dry, And all the world go by them.

Only so could it have come to pa.s.s that this new meaning for an old word had struck me as strange, not to say ludicrous.

Licuit semperque licebit Signatum praesente nota producere nomen.

_Allowable?_ Yes! and much more than merely allowable; it is inevitable that as the ages roll we should attach new meanings to old words. And if this is inevitable, not the less inevitable is it that, when we desire to trace the history of the thing signified, we should be compelled to recur to the original meaning of the name by which the thing is designated.

A word at starting upon the remarkable book [Footnote: ”The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge, and of the Colleges of Cambridge and Eton.” By the late Robert Willis, M.A., F.R.S. Edited, with large additions, and brought up to the present time, by John Willis Clark, M.A., late Fellow of Trin. Coll., Camb. 4 vols. super-royal 8vo Cambridge: The University Press.] which has suggested the following article. To say of it that it is quite the most sumptuous work that has ever proceeded from the Cambridge Press, is to say little. It is hardly too much to say that it is one of the most important contributions to the social and intellectual history of England which has ever been made by a Cambridge man. The t.i.tle of the work conveys but a very inadequate notion of its wide scope, of the encyclopaedic learning and originality of treatment which it displays, and, least of all, of the abundance of _human interest_ which characterizes it so markedly. It is because of this wealth of human interest that the book must needs exercise a powerful fascination upon those who have a craving to get some insight into the life of their forefathers; and it is because I believe the number of such students of history is in our times rapidly on the increase, that I am anxious to draw attention to some few of the many matters treated of so ably in these magnificent volumes.

The term _University_, in its original acceptation, was used to designate any aggregate of _persons_ a.s.sociated in a political, religious, or trading corporation, having common interests, common privileges, and common property. The inhabitants of a town, the members of a fraternity, the brethren of a guild, the monks or canons of a religious house, when addressed in formal instruments, were addressed as a _University_. Nay! when the whole body of the faithful is appealed to as Christian men, the ordinary phrase made use of by lay or ecclesiastical potentate, when signifying his wishes or intentions, is ”Noverit _Universitas_ vestra.” A University in this sense, regarded as an aggregate of persons, might be localized or it might not; its members might be scattered over the whole Christian world, or they might const.i.tute an inner circle of some larger community, of which they--though a _Universitas_- formed but a part. A University in its original signification meant no more than our modern term an a.s.sociation. When men a.s.sociated together for purposes of trade, they were a trading _Universitas_; when they a.s.sociated for religious objects, they were a religious _Universitas_; when they a.s.sociated for the promotion of learning, they were a learned _Universitas_. But the men came first, the bricks and mortar followed long after. The architectural history, in its merely technical and professional details, could only start at a point where the University, as an a.s.sociation of scholars and students, had already acquired power and influence, had been at work for long, and had got to make itself felt as a living force in the body politic and in the national life. It was because the antiquaries of a former age lost sight of this truth that they indulged in the extravagances they did. Starting from the a.s.sumption that stonewalls make an inst.i.tution, they professed to tell when the Universities came into existence and who were their earliest founders. The authors of this modern _Magnum Opus_ have set themselves to deal with a far more instructive problem. Their object has been to trace the growth of the University of to-day in its concrete form, down from the early times when it existed only in the germ; and to show us how ”the glorious fellows.h.i.+p of living men,”

which const.i.tuted the _personal_ University of the eleventh or the twelfth century, developed by slow degrees into the brick-and- mortar Universities of the nineteenth--such Universities as are springing up all over the world; their teachers advertised for in _The Times_, and their students tempted to come and be taught in them by the bait of money rewards.

As to the exact time when a band of scholars and teachers first made their home in Cambridge or Oxford, and began to attract to themselves from the four winds cla.s.ses of eager youths hungry for intellectual food and anxious to listen and learn, that we must be content to leave undetermined. They who like the flavour of the old antiquarianism may enjoy it in its spiciest form, if they choose to hunt up among certain forgotten volumes now grown scarce. They may read what John Caius (p.r.o.nounced Keys) wrote as the champion of Cambridge, and Thomas Caius wrote as champion of Oxford; they may rejoice their hearts over the Battle of the Keys, and come to what conclusion they prefer to arrive at. For most of us, however, this sort of old-world lore has lost its charm. A man lives through his taste for some questions. The student of history nowadays is inclined to say with St. Paul, ”So fight I not as one that beateth the air,”

and to reject with some impatience the frivolous questions which help not a jot towards bringing us into closer relation with the life and personality of our ancestors.

”I am halt sick of shadows,” said The Lady of Shalott;

and we, too, have grown weary of weaving our webs with our backs to the light. There is no making any way in Cloudland. We ask for firm ground on which to plant our footsteps, if we would move onwards.

It would have been very galling to the Oxford antiquaries of Queen Elizabeth's days to have to acknowledge that there was a Cambridge before there was an Oxford. Nevertheless the fact is so. Hide your diminished heads, ye rash ones who would fain have us believe that a thousand years before our era, King Mempric, the wicked king whom the wolves ate--as was right and fitting they should--built a n.o.ble city, which as time went on ”was called _Oxonia_, or by the Saxons _Oxenfordia_.” Alack! it turns out that we must make an enormous step along the course of time before we can find trace of any such city or anything like it. It turns out that ”the year 912 saw Oxford made a fortified town, with a definite duty to perform and a definite district a.s.signed to it.” What! Seven years after the great Alfred had closed his eyes in death, and left to others the work which he had showed them how to do? Yes! Even so. It may be very hard to have to confess the odious crime of youth; but it seems almost capable of demonstration that Cambridge, as a fortress and a a town existed a thousand years before Oxford was anything but a desolate swamp, or at most a trumpery village, where a handful of Britons speared eels, hunted for deer, and laboriously manufactured earthenware pots. What have we to do with thee, thou daughter of yesterday? Stand aside while thine elder sister--ay, old enough to be thy mother--takes her place of honour. She has waited long for her historian; he has come at last, and he was worth waiting for.

In times before the Roman legionaries planted their firm feet in Britain, there was a very formidable fortress at Cambridge. It contained about sixty acres; it was surmounted by one of those mighty earthworks which the hand of man in the old days raised by sheer brute force, or rather by enormous triumph of organized labour. The Romans drove out the Britons, and settled a garrison in the place.

Two of the great Roman roads intersected at this point, and the conquerors called it by a new name, as was their wont, retaining some portion of the old one. In their language it was known as _Caniboritum_. The primeval fortress stood on the left bank of the river, which some called the Granta and some called the Cam; and for reasons best known to themselves, the Romans did not think fit to span that river by a bridge, but they made their great Via Devana pa.s.s sheer through the river-as some Dutch or German Irrationalist has pretended that the children of Israel did when they found the Jordan barring their progress--that is, those Roman creatures constructed a solid pavement in the bed of the sluggish stream, over which less audacious engineers would have thrown an arch. Through the water they carried a kind of causeway, and the name of the place for centuries indicated that it was situated on the _ford_ of the Cam. But what the Roman did not choose to do, that the people that came after him found it needful to do. In the Saxon Chronicle we find that the old fortress which the Romans had held and strengthened, and then perforce abandoned, had got to be called Granta-brygge; and this name, or something very like it, it retained when the great survey was made as the Norman Conqueror's reign was drawing to its close. By this time the town had moved across to the right bank of the river, and had become a town surrounded by a ditch and defended by walls and gates. Already it contained at least four hundred houses, and on the site of the old mound the Norman raised a new castle, and in doing that he laid some twenty-nine houses low.

The early history of Oxford is more or less connected with that of the obscure and insignificant monastery of St. Frideswide, though even at Oxford it is observable that the town and the University grew up in almost entire independence of any influence exercised by any of the older religious houses. At Cambridge this was much more the case.

There were no _monks_ at Cambridge at any time; there never were any nearer than at the Abbey of Ely, in the old times a long day's journey off, and accessible in the winter, if accessible at all, only by water. King Knut, we are told, greatly favoured the Abbey of Ely, visited it, was entertained there, in fact restored it. But at Cambridge there were no monks. No _real_ monks; a fact which ought to be a significant hint to ”all educated men,” but which, unhappily, is likely to be significant only to the few who have taken the trouble to learn what a real monk professed to be. If there were no monks at Cambridge, there was something else. Outside the walls of the town there rose up, in the twelfth century, the priory of Barnwell-a priory of Augustinian _canons_; and, moreover, a nunnery-the Benedictine nunnery of St. Rhadegunda. Within the walls there was another house of Augustinians, which was known as St.

John's Hospital; that is, a house where the canons made it part of their duty to provide a spurious kind of _hospitality_ to travellers, much in the same way that the Hospice of St. Bernard offers food and shelter now to the wayfarer, and with such food and shelter something more--to wit, the opportunity of wors.h.i.+pping the Most High in peace, up there among the eternal snows. At St. John's Hospital, as at St. Bernard's, the grateful wanderer who had found a refuge would leave behind him his thankoffering in recognition of the kindly treatment he had met with, and it might happen that these free gifts const.i.tuted no small portion of the income on which the canons-- for the most part a humble and unpretentious set of men-kept up their houses.

With the dawn of the thirteenth century came the great revivalists-- the friars. Wherever the friars established themselves they began not only to preach, but to teach. They were the awakeners of a new intellectual life; not only the stimulators of an emotional pietism always p.r.o.ne to run into religious intoxication and extravagance.

With the coming of the friars what may be called the modern history of Cambridge begins. Not that it can be allowed that there were no schools of repute on the banks of the Cam till the coming of the friars; it is certain that learning had her home at Cambridge long before this time.

As early as 1187 Giraldus Cambrensis came to Oxford and read his _Expugnatio Hiberniae_ in public lectures, and entertained the doctors of the diverse faculties and the most distinguished scholars.

[Footnote: Bishop Stubbs's ”Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern History,” p. 141, 8vo, 1886.] Oxford was doubtless at that time more renowned, but Cambridge followed not far behind. If the friars settled at Cambridge early in their career, it was because there was a suitable home for them there--an opening as we say--which the flouris.h.i.+ng condition of the University afforded. There were scholars to teach, there were masters to dispute with, there were doctors to criticize, oppose, or befriend. Doubtless, too, there were already strained relations between the townsmen and the gownsmen at Cambridge as at Oxford. The first great ”town and gown row” which we hear of took place at Oxford in 1209, but when we do hear of it we find the other University mentioned by the historian in close connection with the event recorded. The townsmen under great provocation had seized three of the gownsmen _in hospitio suo_ and threw them into the gaol. King John came down to make inquiry, and he hung those three, guiltless though they were, as Matthew Paris a.s.sures us. Hereupon there was intense indignation, and the University dispersed. Three thousand of the gownsmen migrated elsewhere, some to Cambridge we learn. Oxford for a while was deserted. This was fifteen years before the Franciscans settled among us. It was the year in which King John was excommunicated. There were only three bishops left in England; the king had worried all the rest away. There was misery and anarchy everywhere. Yet, strange to say, in the midst of all the bitterness men _would_ have their sons educated, and the Universities did not despair of the republic. Shadowy and fragmentary as all the evidence is on which we have to rely for the history of the Universities during the twelfth century, it is enough to make us certain that the friars settled at Cambridge because there they found scope for their labours. There was undoubtedly a University there long before they arrived. Nevertheless, it is not till the middle of the reign of Henry the Third (A.D. 1216-1272) that we come upon any direct mention of a corporation which could be regarded as a chartered society of scholars at Cambridge, and it is difficult to resist the conviction that, whatever may have been its previous history, and however far back its infancy may date, the friars were to some extent nursing fathers of the University of Cambridge.