A History of the University of Oxford (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: halls, and the system which in. the fifteenth century triumphed .over the rivalry of private hostels may be more properly called aularian than collegiate. Nevertheless, the superiority of colleges as boarding-houses for students inevitably made itself felt from the very first. Humble as their buildings and domestic arrangements may originally have been, they were imposing and luxurious by contrast with those of lodging-houses or halls. Their endowments enabled them to maintain a standard of decency and comfort in itself conducive to study; their statutes ensured regularity of discipline; their corporate privileges and rights of self-government imparted a dignity and security to all connected with them; the example and authority of their elder fellows, mostly engaged in scholastic or scientific research, if not in vigorous lecturing, cannot have been wholly lost upon the juniors. In Merton, and probably in other colleges, disputations were carried on as in the University schools; attendance at Divine service was a statut- able obligation; students were not allowed to go about the streets unless accompanied by a Master of Arts; in the dormitories the seniors were invested with a kind of monitorial authority over the rest; and misconduct was punishable with expulsion. By degrees, some of the halls came into the possession and under the control of colleges, which might naturally elect the most promising of their inmates to scholarships. No wonder that, however weak numerically, the seven colleges founded before the end of the fourteenth century produced an immense proportion of the men who adorned that age by their learning and virtues.1 Thus, out of eighteen 1 Though Canterbury College was founded in this century, it vice-chancellors who can be identified as having fille...