become merely small Colleges, without any foundation except a Principal. The students in those days were mostly poor. Their indigence was almost taken for granted. Some of them begged; chests were provided by the charitable for loans to them. A poor student's life was hard; if he was earnest in study, heroic. He shared a room with three or four chums, he slept under a rug, his fare was coarse and scanty, his garment was the gown which has now become merely an academical symbol, and thankful he was to be provided with a new one. He had no fire in his room, no glass in his window. As his exercises in the University Schools began at five in the morning, it is not likely that he read much at night, otherwise he would have to read by the light of a feeble lamp flickering with the wind. His manuscript was painful to read. The city was filthy, the water polluted with sewage; pestilence often swept through the crowded hive.

Mediæval students were a rough set; not less rough than enthusiastic; rougher than the students of the Quartier Latin or Heidelberg, their nearest counterparts in recent times. They wore arms, or kept them in their chambers, and they needed them not only in going to and from the University over roads beset with robbers, but in conflicts with the townspeople, with whom the University was at war. With the townspeople the students had desperate affrays, ancient precursors of the comparatively mild town and gown rows of this century. The defiant horns of the town were answered by the bells of the University. Arrows flew; blood was shed on both sides; Halls were stormed and defended; till Royalty from Abingdon or Woodstock interfered with its men-at-arms, seconded by the Bishop with bell, book, and candle. A Papal Legate, an Italian on whom national feeling looks with jealousy, comes to Oxford. Scholars crowd to see him. There is a quarrel between them and his train. His cook flings a cauldron of boiling broth over an Irish student. The scholars fly to arms. The Legate is ignominiously chased from Oxford. Excommunications, royal thunders, and penitential performances follow. Jews settle in Oxford, ply their trade among the scholars, and form a quarter with invidiously wealthy mansions. There is a royal edict, forbidding them to exact more than forty-three per cent interest from the student. Wealth makes them insolent; they assault a religious procession, and with them also the students have affrays. Provincial feeling is strong, for the students are divided into two nations, the Northern and the Southern, which are always wrangling, and sometimes fight pitched battles with bows and arrows. The two Proctors, now the heads of University police, were appointed as tribunes of the two nations to settle elections and other matters between them without battle. Amusements as well as everything else were rude. Football and other rough games were played at Beaumont, a piece of ground to the north of the city; but there was nothing like that cricket field in the parks, nor like the sensation now created by the appearance of a renowned cricketer in his paddings before an admiring crowd, to display the fruit of his many years of assiduous practice in guarding his stumps. The Crown and local lords had to complain of a good deal of poaching in Bagley, Woodstock, Shotover, and Stowe Wood.

To this Oxford, with its crowd of youth thirsting for knowledge, its turbulence, its vice, its danger from monkish encroachment, came Walter de Merton, one of the same historic group as Grosseteste and Grosseteste's friend, Adam de Marisco, the man of the hour, with the right device in his mind. Merton had been Chancellor of Henry III. amidst the political storms of the time, from which he would gladly turn aside to a work of peaceful improvement. It was thus that violence in those ages paid with its left hand a tribute to civilisation. Merton's foundation is the first College, though University and Balliol come before it in the Calendar in deference to the priority of the benefactions out of which those Colleges grew. Yonder noble chapel in the Decorated style, with its tower and the old quadrangle beneath it, called, nobody knows why, Mob Quad, are the cradle of College life. Merton's plan was an academical brotherhood, which combined monastic order, discipline, and piety with the pursuit of knowledge. No monk or friar was ever to be admitted to his House. The members of the House are called in his statutes by the common name of Scholars, that of Fellows (Socii), which afterwards prevailed here and in all the other Colleges, denoting their union as an academical household. They were to live like monks in common; they were to take their meals together in the Refectory, and to study together in the common library, which may still be seen, dark and austere, with the chain by which a precious volume was attached to the desk. They had not a common dormitory, but they must have slept two or three in a room. Probably they were confined to their quadrangle, except when they were attending the Schools of the University, or allowed to leave it only with a companion as a safeguard. They were to elect their own Warden, and fill up by election vacancies in their own number. The Warden whom they had elected, they were to obey. They were to watch over each other's lives, and hold annual scrutinies into conduct. The Archbishop of Canterbury was to visit the College and see that the rule was kept. But the rule was moral and academical, not cloistral or ascetic. The mediæval round of religious services was to be duly performed, and prayers were to be said for the Founder's soul. But the main object was not prayer, contemplation, or masses for souls; it was study. Monks were permanently devoted to their Order, shut up for life in their monastery, and secluded from the world. The Scholars of Merton were destined to serve the world, into which they were to go forth when they had completed the course of preparation in their College. They were destined to serve the world as their Founder had served it. In fact, we find Wardens and Fellows of Merton employed by the State and the Church in important missions. A Scholar of Merton, though he was to obey the College authorities, took no monastic vow of obedience. He took no monastic vow of poverty; on the contrary, it was anticipated that he would gain wealth, of which he was exhorted to bestow a portion on his College. He took no monastic vow of celibacy, though, as one of the clerical order, he would of course not be permitted to marry. He was clerical as all Scholars in those days were clerical, not in the modern and professional sense of the term. The allowances of the Fellow were only his Commons, or food, and his Livery, or raiment, and there were to be as many Fellows as the estate could provide with these. Instruction was received not in College, but in the Schools of the University, to which the Scholars of Merton, like the other Scholars, were to resort. A sort of grammar school, for boys of the Founder's kin, was attached to the College. But otherwise the work of the College was study, not tuition, nor did the statutes contemplate the admission of any members except those on the foundation.

MERTON COLLEGE,