The food provided at most colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge was equally spare. There were two meals a day, one at about ten, the other at about five, although at New College, Oxford, only one meal was provided on Fridays and Saturdays and in Lent. No butter was served in Lent; and on Lenten Fridays there were raisins, almonds, honey and rice instead of fish. Salt cellars were available as well as cups and dishes, but the scholars had to provide their own trenchers in addition to their knives. Oxford fare was considered so meagre that when he fell foul of the king and lost his office, Sir Thomas More said to a member of his household, ‘My counsel is that we fall not to the lowest fare first; we will not therefore descend to Oxford fare, nor to the fare of New Inn, but we will begin with Lincoln’s Inn diet.’22
Yet a university education was usually very expensive. The scholar had to pay for his teaching as well as his books and his board and lodging. He also, of course, had to pay for his clothes, 8d for a shirt, so the principal of St Mildred’s Hall, Oxford, John Arundell, estimated in 1424, 1d for a belt and 4d for clogs. There was also the cost of a gown – in the case of a scholar at Queen’s College, a ‘blood red’ gown – which was worn over a green, blue or red cassock; and at Oxford, so it was decreed in 1358, the gown should be longer and more flowing than the usual garment since it was ‘decent that those to whom God had given preference with internal mental gifts’ should also ‘be different outwardly in dress’.23 Then there were candles to be paid for, not to mention the journey – perhaps, a very long journey – to and from home. John Arundell estimated that the scholars under his care in the 1420s could not manage on less than 16s 4½d for the first term of their third year, which, after paying 6s 10d for commons and battels, 1s for a gaudy, 1s 8d for lectures, and small sums for other items, allowed only 6d for books.
Since I cannot get through without heavy costs [runs one characteristic letter from a needy scholar who could not make both ends meet] I have scarcely enough money for my expenses till the bearer of this letter returns. For in commons I cannot manage with less than 8d a week, but in other necessaries also I have spent the money allowed to me, and I have to go on spending. To wit, in my journey to Oxford, for myself and my horse, 3s 4d. In the purchase of two books at Oxford, namely the Codex and the Digestum of Vetus, after I got here, 6s 8d, to the teacher from whom I hear my ‘ordinary’ lectures, 2s. And when you reckon in the wages of our manciple and cook, the hire of my study and many other necessities with which I need not trouble you because of their number, it will be obvious that my expenses are not unreasonable.24
I am studying at Oxford with the greatest diligence [another scholar wrote to his father], but the matter of money stands greatly in the way of my promotion, as it is now two months since I spent the last of what you sent me. The city is expensive and makes many demands. I have to rent lodgings, buy necessaries, and provide for many other things which I cannot now specify. There I respectfully beg your paternity that by the promptings of divine pity you may assist me so that I may be able to complete what I have well begun. For you must know that, without Ceres and Bacchus, Apollo grows cold. Farewell.25
Although many scholars were the sons of knights, burgesses or merchants who could afford to meet these demands, there were others whose fathers were not in a position to do so. These paid their way by actings as ‘battelers’, that was to say waiting on richer scholars during meals and acting generally as their servants, or they went begging by reciting poems at rich men’s doors, or were maintained by patrons or friends or by bequests such as that made in the will of Lady Margaret Chocke who in 1483 left one John Langley, ‘six marks yerely during 4 years for to goo to Oxford to scole’.26 Also they might benefit from a fine imposed upon miscreants: in 1208, when the burgesses of Oxford were punished for hanging two clerks, they were required ‘to give annually fifty 2s for the use of poor scholars … and also feed a hundred poor scholars with bread, cereals, drink and a fish or meat course each year on St Nicholas’s Day … They shall also swear to sell to the scholars all necessary provisions at a just and reasonable price’.27 Later Henry VIII ordered that any clergyman with an income of £100 or more must support at least one scholar at grammar school or university. Also, for the poorest scholars, university chests or strongboxes were established and financed by benefactors, and from these money could be borrowed in return for a pledge of a book, say, or pieces of clothing which were auctioned if not redeemed at the end of the year. Yet, despite these charitable arrangements, many scholars were very poor, and looked very poor like those dressed in tattered clothes who gathered around the university chests on a loan day in St Mary’s Church, or like the Oxford cleric who accompanied Chaucer’s pilgrims to Canterbury:
An Oxford Cleric, still a student though,
One who had taken logic long ago,
Was there; his horse was thinner than a rake,
And he was not too fat, I undertake,
But had a hollow look, a sober stare;
The thread upon his overcoat was bare.
He had found no preferment in the church
And he was too unworldly to make search
For secular employment. By his bed
He preferred having twenty books in red
And black, of Aristotle’s philosophy,
Than costly clothes, fiddle or psaltery.
Though a philosopher, as I have told,
He had not found the stone for making gold.
Whatever money from his friends he took
He spent on learning or another book
And prayed for them most earnestly, returning
Thanks to them thus for paying for his learning.
His only care was study, and indeed
He never spoke a word more than was need,
Formal at that, respectful in the extreme,
Short, to the point, and lofty in his theme.
A tone of moral virtue filled his speech
And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.
At least Chaucer’s student could afford books. When he was at Oxford, St Richard, who became Bishop of Chichester in 1244, was so poor that he and two companions with whom he shared a room could only afford one gown between them. ‘When one, therefore, went out with the gown to hear a lecture, the others sat in their room, and so they went forth alternately; and bread with a little wine and pottage sufficed for their food.’28
While some fellows of colleges were fairly well off, most were almost as poor as the students they taught. Between 1382 and 1444 the Fellows of King’s Hall, Cambridge, received a commons allowance of is 2d a week; but, since the average charge for commons was is 8½d a week, they were usually out of pocket and were obliged to find other sources of income. It was not until 1479 that the first lectureship was established and a fellow was paid a regular salary for delivering a course of lectures.
Lectures were given in Latin and, as books were so expensive, they were the principal, and for some students the only form of education, though copies of extracts from essential textbooks, which were both bought and hired by students, had been available since the thirteenth century. Not all colleges had libraries; and few libraries were well stocked: in the 1470s there were still only 135 books in the library of Lincoln College, Oxford. All libraries had to take note of what books the Chancellor proscribed. In about 1340 he forbade the study of Ovid and ‘any other book’ that might ‘provoke scholars to what is not allowed’.29
The average age of students on entry into the universities was between fifteen and seventeen. Some were much younger: one of the Paston boys seems to have been no more than thirteen when he went to Cambridge. But some halls and colleges fixed minimum ages. In 1380 the minimum age for King’s Hall was fourteen, and for New College sixteen. Many students left after a year or two; yet others remained for far longer than that. It took seven years of study of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, of moral, metaphysical and natural philosophy, and of grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy to qu
alify for the degree of Master of Arts. By the sixteenth century it took sixteen years to become a Doctor of Theology.
In the earliest days of the universities theology had been of the utmost importance. There were then few students who were not intent upon becoming clerks or priests; and Oxford had been dominated by the mendicant friars, Dominican, Franciscan, Carmelite and Augustinian, all of whom had houses there. Three of the greatest theologians and philosophers of the thirteenth century were closely associated with Oxford. Robert Grosseteste, Chancellor of the University, became first rector of the Franciscans at Oxford in 1224; Duns Scotus, also believed to be a Franciscan, is supposed to have composed his principal theological treatise, Opus Oxoniense, there; and Roger Bacon, another Franciscan, studied and lectured there for several years. These ‘regular’ clergy, the monks and friars, had remained a powerful influence in Oxford during the following century. But by then the ‘secular’ clergy, the priests and deacons and clerks in lower orders, had come to consider themselves the proper authority in the university; and in the furious controversy which centred around the religious reformer, John Wyclif, who was Master of Balliol in 1360, they had taken Wyclif’s side. Since those days religion and religious teaching has played a less intense part in university life; and by the fifteenth century Oxford had become as much a centre of business studies as a training-ground for men intent upon a career in the church or the cloister. Indeed, in a sense it always had been so. ‘If you are a real scholar you are thrust out into the cold,’ John of Garland had written as early as 1241. ‘Unless you are a money-maker, I say, you will be considered a fool, a pauper. The lucrative arts, such as law and medicine are now in vogue, and only those things are pursued that are of cash value.’ Two hundred years later no one could doubt that, even though they might have taken or intended to take minor orders, many if not most undergraduates were at the university to obtain an administrative or secretarial appointment at court or in some large household by the study of letter-writing, accountancy or the law. Robert Wodelarke, who founded St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, in 1473, specifically to improve the quality of England’s teachers, considered the ills of the country had their roots in the universities having become schools of law for careerists rather than places of spiritual uplift.30
The study of law, however, particularly the English Common Law which was not taught at the universities, was by then better undertaken in London at the Inns of Court. These establishments took their name from the inns or town houses, particularly those used as hostels for students and practitioners of law, which had developed in the fourteenth century within easy reach of the courts at Westminster. After the establishment in about 1422 of Lincoln’s Inn – which probably took its name from the third Earl of Lincoln, one of Edward I’s most influential advisers, whose family had acquired land in the area – the inns grew and prospered and by the 1470s there were about 1000 students attached to them. Since it cost a minimum of £13 6s 8d a year to study at the Inns, only the sons of the rich could afford to go to them; and some contemporaries cited this as one good reason why there was so little delinquency at the Inns of Court compared to the state of affairs in Oxford.
Writing between 1464 and 1470, Sir John Fortescue, who was a Governor of Lincoln’s Inn in 1425 and was appointed Chief Justice in 1442, suggested that a student could ‘not well be maintained for under eight and twenty pounds a year’.
If he have servants to wait on him, as for the most part they have [Fortescue continued], the expense is proportionately more: for this reason, the students are sons to persons of quality; those of an inferior rank not being able to bear the expenses of maintaining and educating their children in this way. As to the merchants, they seldom care to lessen their stock in trade by being at such large yearly expenses. So that there is scarce to be found, throughout the kingdom, an eminent lawyer, who is not a gentleman by birth and fortune; consequently they have a greater regard for their character and honour than those who are bred in another way. There is both in the Inns of Court, and the Inns of Chancery, a sort of academy, or gymnasium, fit for persons of their station; where they learn singing, and all kinds of music, dancing and such other accomplishments and diversions, which are called revels, as are suitable to their quality, and such as are usually practised at court. At other times, out of term, the greater part apply themselves to the study of the law … All vice is discouraged and banished. So that knights, barons, and the greatest nobility of their kingdom, often place their children in those Inns of Court; not so much to make the laws their study, much less to live by the profession, having large patrimonies of their own, but to form their manners and to preserve them from the contagion of vice. The discipline is so excellent, that there is scarce ever known to be any piques or differences, any bickerings or disturbances amongst them. The only way they have of punishing delinquents is by expelling them the society: which punishment they dread more than criminals do imprisonment and irons: for he who is expelled out of one society is never taken in by any of the other.31
12 Crime and Punishment
During the anarchic reign of King Stephen in the twelfth century, so the Peterborough Chronicle reported, the dungeons of the barons’ castles were full of ‘both men and women put in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured with pains unspeakable’. Crimes such as these seem to have been common throughout England at all times of unrest. When the misgovernment of Henry III provoked Simon de Montfort into leading his followers into civil war, marauding gangs of robbers, for centuries one of the hazards of English life, overran the entire country. Commissioners appointed in 1305 found that these gangs had not only forcibly seized and held estates, bought others for paltry sums by threats, ‘impeded and corrupted constables, bailiffs and the King’s officers’, but had invaded manor houses and plundered them from cellar to loft, attacked and maimed jurors and witnesses to prevent them telling the truth at assizes, and hired assassins for battery, assault and mayhem. Later on in the century Bristol was for some years in the hands of a brigand who had taken possession of the port, seized its cargoes and issued proclamations in the royal style. In Norfolk, 300 men marched about the country under their own banner like an army of invasion, defying all authority. In Suffolk, a gang of versatile criminals exported stolen wool, imported counterfeit money, forged documents and seals and abducted people from their homes and from church and held them to ransom. When a ‘great multitude of men’, including one of his former chaplains, marched in military array upon one of his manors, demolished his fences and gates, broke into his buildings, and carried off 300 head of cattle and 1000 sheep, the Bishop of Exeter believed at first that a ‘foreign enemy had landed’ and was collecting supplies for an army. The Archbishop of Canterbury, in a similar raid, lost not only his animals and trees but even his corn. The Countess of Lincoln also lost all her timber and most of her game when her estate at Kingston Lacy was attacked by a band of fifty men, including the Abbots of Sherbourne and Middleton. In a raid upon an estate in Wiltshire, in which the Prior of Bristol took part, all the inmates of the manor house were murdered, the lady of the house was raped, and her chaplain died of fright. Some years later a gang of 400 armed men rode to Walsingham while the sessions were being held there and secured the acquittal of all their friends. All over the country rival claimants to land were demanding payment of rent from tenants who were either forced to pay twice over or to suffer the consequences of failing to do so.1
The manor courts were often powerless to redress wrongs. In peaceable times these courts – presided over by a senior official of the lord or by the lord himself attended by clerk and beadle – conducted their business well enough. They normally dealt with such matters as disputes over labour service and trespass, with allegations of immorality and slander; they fined men for brawling or poaching or using false weights, and punished girls for reducing their value by losing their virginity. But in years of unrest there were more serious crimes to consider; and the manor courts were unable to de
al with them. On some manors the lord, declining to wait for the royal coroner, usurped the king’s authority by setting up gallows and hanging offenders, even those found guilty of crimes committed elsewhere.
During the Wars of the Roses, official records and private correspondence alike provided sad and vivid testimony of appalling lawlessness, of what a petition set out in the Rolls of Parliament for 1459 described as ‘robberies, ravishments, extortions, oppressions, riots and unlawful assemblies … universally [committed] throughout every part of [the] realm [by] misdoers favoured and assisted by persons of great might’. Twelve years later the state of the realm was said to be more disordered than ever. A petition of 1472 complained of further ‘great abominable murders, robberies … affrays and assaults … committed by such persons as either be of great might or else favoured under persons of great power in such wise as their outrageous demerits as yet remain unpunished’.2
Gangs of brigands, often in the pay of powerful magnates, remained for years in complete control of towns and of large areas of the countryside. One gang, representative of many, ‘would issue out at their pleasure’, in the words of the information laid against them, ‘sometimes six in number, sometimes twelve, sometimes thirty or more, armed, jacked and salleted, with bows arrows, spears and bills, and over-ride the country and oppress the people and do many horrible and abominable deeds’.3 They invaded churches and attacked men at Mass; battered down the doors of houses, stole the contents, murdered the inmates; and rode about the country rounding up sheep and cattle. In the west of England the ferocious-feud between the Earl of Devon and Lord Bonville provoked ‘great and grievous riots by which some men have been murdered, some robbed, and children and women taken’. At the same time in East Anglia, as the Paston Letters show, veritable armies were on the move in the attempted settlement of private claims, and had long been so. In one letter Margaret Paston advises her husband in London to ‘get some crossbows, and windlasses to wind them with, and crossbow bolts, for your houses here are so low that no one can shoot out of them with a longbow … And I would also like you to get two or three short pole-axes to keep indoors, and as many leather jackets if you can.’ In a subsequent letter she adds: ‘It would be a good idea it seems to me, for you to order now a neat defensive jacket for yourself, for there [in London] they make the best and the cheapest ones.’ She feared that Lord Moleyns, who laid claim to a property at Gresham which the Paston family had bought, would attempt to seize it by force; and her fears were justified, as a petition to the king from her husband soon afterwards makes clear:
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