sake. The University obtained a charter, elected its Chancellor, formed its academical Legislature of graduates, obtained jurisdiction over its own members. In time it marshalled its teachers and students into regular Faculties of theology, law, and medicine, with arts, or general and liberal culture, if the name can be applied to anything so rudimentary as the literature and science of that day, forming the basis of all. At first the professors taught where they could; in the cloisters, perhaps, of St. Frydeswide's monastery, subsequently absorbed by Christ Church; in the porches of houses. A row of lecture-rooms, called the Schools, was afterwards provided in School Street, which ran north and south just under the Radcliffe. So little anchored was the University by buildings, that when maltreated at Oxford it was ready to pack up its literary wares and migrate to another city such as Northampton or Stamford. Many of the undergraduates at first were mere boys, to whom the University was a grammar school. For the real University students the dominant study was that of the School philosophy, logical and philosophical, with its strange metaphysical jargon; an immense attempt to extract knowledge from consciousness by syllogistic reasoning, instead of gathering it from observation, experience, and research, mocking by its barrenness of fruit the faith of the enthusiastic student, yet training the mind to preternatural acuteness, and perhaps forming a necessary stage in the mental education of the race. The great instrument of high education was disputation, often repeated, and conducted with the most elaborate forms in the tournaments of the Schools, which might beget readiness of wit and promptness of elocution, but could hardly beget habits of calm investigation or paramount love of truth. The great event in the academical life was Inception, when the student performed exercises which inaugurated his teachership; and this was commonly celebrated by a feast, the expenditure on which the University was called upon to restrain. Oxford produced some of the greatest schoolmen: Duns Scotus, the "subtle," who had written thirteen folio volumes of arid metaphysics before his early death; Bradwardine, the "profound," and Ockham, the "invincible and unmatched." The idol was Aristotle, viewed mainly as the metaphysician, and imperfectly understood through translations. To reconcile Aristotelian speculation with orthodox theology was a hard task, not always successfully performed. Theology was, of course, first in dignity of the Faculties, but the most lucrative was the civil and canon law practised in the ecclesiastical courts and, as Roman, misliked by the patriotic Parliament. Philosophy complained that it had to trudge afoot while the liegemen of Justinian rode high in the car of preferment. Of physical science the hour was not yet come, but before its hour came its wonderful and almost miraculous precursor, Roger Bacon, who anticipated the invention of gunpowder and the telescope, and whose fabled study stood over Folly Bridge, till, with Carfax's monument and Cranmer's prison, it was cleared away by an improving city corporation. Roger Bacon was, of course, taken for a dealer in black arts; an astrologer and an alchemist he was, and at the same time an illustrious example of the service indirectly rendered by astrology and alchemy in luring to an investigation of nature which led to real discoveries, just as Columbus, seeking a western passage to the golden cities of the East, discovered America.

All the Universities belonged not to one nation but to Latin Christendom, the educated population of which circulated among them. At one time there was a migration to Oxford from the University of Paris, which had got into trouble with the government. Of all the Universities alike, ecclesiastical Latin was the language. The scholars all ranked with the clerical order, so that at Oxford, scholar and clerk, townsman and layman, were convertible terms. In those days all intellectual callings, and even the higher mechanical arts, were clerical. The student was exempted by his tonsure from lay jurisdiction. The Papacy anxiously claimed the Universities as parts of its realm, and only degrees granted by the Pope's authority were current throughout Christendom. When, with Edward III., came the long war between England and France, and when the confederation of Latin Christendom was beginning to break up, the English Universities grew more national.

Incorporated with the buildings of Worcester College are some curious little tenements once occupied by a colony from different Benedictine Monasteries. These, with the Church of St. Frydeswide, now Christ Church Cathedral, and the small remains of Osney Abbey, are about the only relics of monastic Oxford which survived the Reformation. But in the Middle Ages there were Houses for novices of the great Orders, Benedictines, Cistercians, Carmelites, Augustinians, and most notable and powerful of all, the two great mendicant Orders of Dominicans and Franciscans. The Mendicants, who came into the country angels of humility as well as of asceticism, begging their bread, and staining the ground with the blood from their shoeless feet, soon changed their character, and began in the interest of Holy Church to grasp power and amass wealth. The Franciscans especially, like the Jesuits of an after day, strove to master the centres of intellectual influence. They strove to put the laws of the University under their feet. Struggles between them and the seculars, with appeals to the Crown, were the consequence. Attraction of callow youth to an angelic life seems to have been characteristic of the Brethren of St. Francis, and it is conjectured that in this way Bacon became a monk. Faintly patronised by a liberal and lettered Pope, he was arraigned for necromancy by his Order, and ended his days in gloom, if not in a monastic prison. The Church of the Middle Ages with one hand helped to open the door of knowledge, with the other she sought to close it. At last she sought to close it with both hands, and in her cruel panic established the Inquisition.

Tory in its later days, the University was liberal in its prime. It took the part of the Barons and De Montfort against Henry III., and a corps of its students fought against the King under their own banner at Northampton. Instead of being the stronghold of reaction, it was the focus of active, even of turbulent aspiration, and the saying ran, that when there was fighting at Oxford there was war in England. Oxford's hero in the thirteenth century was its Chancellor, Grosseteste, the friend of De Montfort and the great reformer of his day, "of prelates the rebuker, of monks the corrector, of scholars the instructor, of the people the preacher, of the incontinent the chastiser, of writings the industrious investigator, of the Romans the hammer and contemner." If Grosseteste patronised the Friars, it was in their first estate.

At first the students lodged as "Chamberdekyns" with citizens, but that system proving dangerous to order, they were gathered into hostels, or, to use the more dignified name, Halls (aulæ) under a Principal, or Master of the University, who boarded and governed them. Of these Halls there were a great number, with their several names and signs. Till lately a few of them remained, though these had lost their original character, and