Oxford was now a place of importance, favored by royalty, and magnificent figures passed by in her pageant: kings and princes, noblemen and men-at-arms, with colored cloaks over their armor, clattered through the narrow streets and rode in gallant companies in and out of the gates of the city; priests bowed before the altars in the churches, saying masses for the souls of the dead who had already passed by to the tolling of the bell, and candles burned before the shrines of the saints; the sound of chanting drifted out into the streets to mingle with the clattering of horses’ hoofs upon the cobbles and the shrill cries of peddlers, tinkers, merchant apprentices, thieves and vagabonds.
Then came the great merchants, figures of importance who sunned themselves upon their doorsteps, hands folded over portly stomachs, or strolled with patronage over the cobbled streets, holding up their fine furred gowns out of the way of the mud and refuse that strewed them. They were now the princes of Oxford, they and the swarthy financiers who by day issued forth from the Jewish quarter in the heart of the city, one of the wealthiest Jewries in England, and strolled through the streets in their yellow gabardines, and at night sat in dark little rooms lit by rushlights and counted their gold with a kindling eye. Their magnificent Guilds were the glory of Oxford: the Weavers, the Shoemakers, the Glovers, the Barbers, the Tailors, the Goldsmiths, the Corporation of Cooks; they had their revels and their processions, when they paraded the city on horseback with drums beating and torches burning, and they had their special chapels in the different churches, where they burned candles and celebrated mass. The commerce of southern England mainly flowed through the Thames valley and people would stand on the bridge outside South Gate, where Nicolas stood now, and watch the great barges of the merchants passing up and down the river.
These merchants and financiers had it all their own way at first and perhaps they hardly noticed, as they picked their way up the winding High Street in their fine gowns, groups of badly dressed, hungry looking youths crowded together round some narrow entry listening to the words of an older man, lean and poor as themselves, who stood above them on the steps. They would scatter when the merchant barged carelessly in amongst them but they would come back again when he had passed, for the teacher on the steps had food for their minds if not for their bodies and what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? A new Guild was struggling into being, a Guild of Learning that was to be the greatest of all the Guilds and crowd the others almost out of existence; the merchants and the Jews, cursing the ragged scholars who got in their way, did not as yet consider it worth their attention.
They knew, of course, that learning, hitherto confined to the cloister, where in their opinion it should have remained, was creeping out into the world. It was partly their own doing, for the flourishing state of trade had brought a tranquillity in which men’s thoughts turned to the things of the mind, but it was also the doing of Henry Beauclerc the scholar king, who had built Beaumont Palace, and of his grandson Henry the Second, who took it into their heads to become the champions of literary culture. . . . Learning was becoming the fashion. . . . The merchants shook their heads in some disgust at the distressing and effeminate trend of the times, but did not yet realize the tremendous significance of this invasion of their commercial city by a handful of ragged scholars.
But when the handful turned into a horde who blocked up the narrow entries, fought at street corners, got drunk in the taverns and turned the whole place into a Tower of Babel by arguing all day and all night about the existence of God in half a dozen different languages, the merchants made a few disgusted inquiries and found that most of these rogues and vagabonds had come from the University of Paris. France had suddenly become tired of foreign students within her borders and had ejected the lot. In steadily increasing numbers bands of them had crossed the Channel, landed at Dover and marched northwards, billeting themselves upon monasteries and ecclesiastics and eating them out of house and home as they went. They might have settled down at Canterbury, Lambeth or Saint Albans, and the Oxford merchants heartily wished they had, but it was Oxford that drew them; Oxford with her wealthy Guilds, her Royal Palace, her Priory of Saint Frideswide, her churches and fine houses within the city wall, her river winding through the valley between green willows, and all protected from winter storms by a rampart of low hills and dense forests.
The majority of these scholars were English, for it was with the English and their treatment of Thomas à Becket that France was particularly enraged, but scholars from other European universities had come too; for the mediaeval scholars and masters had the migratory habits of birds and if insulted in one university bands of them would indignantly snatch up their books and decamp halfway across Europe to a second, upon which they would settle like locusts until the fancy took them to cross the sea and swoop down upon some protesting city where could be laid the foundations of yet a third.
The Guild of Learning grew with strength and determination into Oxford University. Pious founders established halls where the scholars could be housed and one by one these elbowed their way up between the houses and the church towers, even as more and more hungry looking scholars elbowed their way through the narrow streets. . . . And the merchants resented this invasion with a fury that lasted for centuries. . . . But neither their fury, nor that of the Jews, had any effect whatever. Upon this spot of earth between the waters men had fought first for security, then for wealth, and now for knowledge, and it was the seekers after knowledge who stood triumphant in final possession.
And now to the figures of Kings and Queens, Merchants and Financiers and triumphant Scholars, passing by in procession, were added the cowled figures of the Friars. Learning had found its way out from the cloister into the world and after it came the monks themselves. New orders were founded of brethren who should tramp the streets of the cities and give their lives to the service of the poor. In the overcrowded slums of Oxford, where filthy narrow lanes, heaped with rubbish, wound between hovels where the rush-strewn floors were never cleansed and leprosy and plague were familiar guests, went the barefoot followers of Dominic and Francis. Order after order founded its house at Oxford: the Grey Friars, the Black Friars, the Carmelites, the Brothers of the Sack and the Crossed Friars soon became as familiar figures in the Oxford streets as the scholars themselves. At first they were content to be unlearned men, vowed to poverty, but later, longing for converts among the scholars as well as among the poor, and finding the love of learning infectious, they too became members of its Guild. They laid aside their poverty to accept gifts of money and land that they might build schools and halls and libraries where friars from all over Europe might come and study. . . . From where Nicolas stood he could see the little gatehouse built over the archway of South Gate that had been the study of Friar Bacon the Franciscan scientist, where, so Nicolas had been told, he had written his great books and raised the devil. . . . The old religious orders followed the example of the friars, founding halls for their student monks, and the University suffered a monastic invasion.
At first it was pleased, but later, as more and more cowled figures jostled the secular scholars in the streets, grabbed the best seats at lectures, and argued, as only ecclesiastics can argue, about this and that and the other till everyone’s head went round, it was as indignant as the merchants had been when the vagabonds from Paris descended upon them out of the blue. A state of war was declared between the secular and religious scholars and went cheerily raging on until, with another cycle completed, the times were ripe for yet another new birth.
It was called the New Learning and it arrived as unobtrusively as the University itself had done. Fifteenth-century Oxford scholars were shocked by the news that the Turks had taken Constantinople, the eastern home of learning and philosophy, and then they thought no more about it and went back to their squabbles and their Aristotle, their horses and dogs and dinner. But meanwhile a handful of scholars had again snatched up their books
and migrated halfway across Europe; this time fugitives flying from Constantinople to Rome, bringing with them a few rescued manuscripts and the wisdom of Greece. Italy flung herself eagerly upon the New Learning, and while her scholars were learning Greek, and rescuing the thought of the ancient world from oblivion, Germany was inventing the art of printing that should diffuse it through the world.
And now renowned and learned men took their part in the pageant, the men who brought the New Learning to Oxford, almost contemporary figures who were not lost in the mists of past ages but walked in the sunlight, plain to see. Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas More were among them, with Erasmus the Dutchman and the humbler figure of Haddon Rood of Cologne who set up Oxford’s first printing press.
In Oxford the Renaissance chiefly took the form of a religious revival; it meant the study of the New Testament in Greek, a getting back to the original truth of things that had been obscured by medieval accretions of ignorance and superstition; it meant, through the printing press, a New Testament in the hand of everyone who could learn to read. The good news of this new birth seemed to its messengers more glorious than any that had gone before, for how could there ever again be war or wickedness or degradation, these scholars asked each other, when it would soon be possible for every man, woman and child to read with their own eyes the record of the life of the Son of God? “I would have those words translated into all languages,” wrote Erasmus, “so that not only Scots and Irishmen, but Turks and Saracens might read them. I long for the plowboy to sing them to himself as he follows the plow, the weaver to hum them to the tune of his shuttle, the traveler to beguile with them the dullness of his journey. Other studies we may regret having undertaken, but happy is the man upon whom death comes when he is engaged in these. These sacred words give you the very image of Christ speaking, healing, dying, rising again, and make Him so present that were He before your very eyes you would not more truly see Him.”
And for a little while it seemed that the Golden Age was on the way, for all over the world Oxford was now famed for her beauty and her learning. The greatest scholars of Europe were amazed at her loveliness; the woods and streams and meadows outside her walls, the great churches with their wonderful stained glass and treasures of gold and silver, the abbeys with their hospitals and priceless libraries, and the beautiful Colleges that were still rising gloriously.
One of the fairest of these was Wolsey’s Cardinal College at Oxford, which he built as a home of the New Learning. He built his quadrangle of stone from Headington that in its freshness gleamed gold in the sun and white in the moonlight, like the Acropolis at Athens, and he embellished it with every lovely art that man could devise. To the south was the great dining hall where a hundred and one men, Dean and scholar Canons, could feast royally in the intervals of applying themselves to learning, and to the east the priory of Saint Frideswide became the Cathedral church, where chaplains, lay clerks and choristers were to praise and worship God with fitting glory and honor.
In his imagination Nicolas saw the quadrangle of his College full of an army of ghosts, busy architects, masons, carpenters, artists, glaziers, scholars in their long gowns and round-faced cherubic choristers; and in and out among them, cheering, inspiring and commanding, moved the portly figure of the great Cardinal, clothed in scarlet and mounted on a palfrey.
But upon this busy and happy scene there entered an ominous figure; a vulgar bloated man with a paunch and swollen legs, the predatory monster into whom the charming young Henry Tudor had unaccountably developed. He entered magnificently, clothed in crimson and gold that accentuated the imperfections of his figure, with trumpets blowing and drums sounding, with a gorgeous retinue and the assumption of geniality and friendship; but his coming was as destructive to Oxford as an earthquake.
For the mania of the King’s Grace for matrimony, and the consequent habit of marrying one wife while her predecessor was still alive, led to a quarrel with the Pope and the denial of his authority in England, while the failure of Cardinal Wolsey to secure a divorce for Henry brought about his own downfall and that of his College. The wealth of the monasteries, that formed so large a part of the treasure of Oxford, was at the mercy of the King’s greed, he being now by his own appointment head of the Church, and those of her sons who dared stand firm for Pope and conscience were doomed.
Oxford endured loss upon loss: the death of Wolsey, who, when in his last days he bethought him of his not yet completed College, “could not sleep for the thought of it and could not write for weeping and sorrow”; the execution of Thomas More, once High Steward of Oxford and always her friend; the destruction of the religious houses; the looting of the churches and libraries; the impoverishment of the people and the destruction of laughter and the singing voice.
But the monster had a certain reputation as an enlightened patron of learning and having dissolved Cardinal College, sold its lands to hungry courtiers, stolen the Cathedral vestments and ornaments and swept away its greatest treasure, the Shrine of Saint Frideswide, he bethought himself of this reputation and set to work to build up another College on the foundations of the old. He united the episcopal see with the collegiate foundation and called it Christ Church. The foundation consisted of a Dean and eight Canons, including three Regius Professors, a hundred scholars, twenty-four servants and officers and twenty-four bedesmen. Life of a sort flowed into it again. Laughter rang out once more in the quadrangle and the sound of chanting drifted out from the Cathedral. . . . It was the germ of the College that Nicolas knew and loved.
But the Guild of Learning, that had lain sick unto death while libraries were sacked and churches despoiled, was given only a short breathing space of peace. Men were learning to adjust themselves, to rejoice that a foreign Pope could no longer command their allegiance, to become firmly set in new convictions that suited the temperament of an independent people, when Queen Mary the bigot, daughter of one Spaniard and destined wife of another, came to the throne set upon the reversal of all her father’s actions, and the tide of persecution turned and flowed back again. For three and a half years it swept through Oxford in a horror of blood and fire. The English Bibles that Erasmus had hoped to see in the hands of every plowboy, weaver and traveler were burned in the market place, the martyrs were dragged through the streets to be burned at the stake outside North Gate and men’s hearts failed them for fear. The choice of those who could not change their convictions to order was between exile and the stake and men who, like Gervas Leigh, were finally able to escape to loneliness and poverty abroad counted themselves the favored of fortune. England was no longer a country fit to live in. It had neither unity nor spirit. To all intents and purposes it was a province of Spain.
But every horror and stupidity has its ending and peace comes back. One dark morning in November the citizens of Oxford woke to hear the bells ringing. What was it? It was not May-Day for the damp fogs of winter were gathering thickly upon them, and it was not yet Christmas; and there seemed little in the life of this tormented city upon which it could congratulate itself. Then the word went round—the Queen was dead. From every tower in Oxford the bells rang out: the bells of Christ Church and Saint Mary the Virgin, the bells of Saint Martin’s and Saint Michael’s at the North Gate, of All Saints’, Saint Aldate’s and Saint Ebbe’s; the foggy air seemed alive with their joy and clamor. People ran out into the streets, laughing and exclaiming. They told each other that the birds were singing as though it were spring. Surely, they said, this new age would be a time of resurrection from the horrors that were past. . . . One name was on all their lips. . . . Elizabeth. . . . The Queen was dead. . . . Long live the Queen. . . . The bells rang out afresh and the sun broke through the clouds.
To Nicolas this was contemporary history. Englishmen had turned in something like despair to a young woman for salvation and she had not disappointed them. The worst horrors of religious persecution were over and laughter and the singing voice were coming back.
r /> It was yet another period of renewal for Oxford. The scholars who had gone into exile returned rejoicing and with quiet minds and hopeful hearts looked again for the Golden Age. To their eyes Oxford had clothed herself in a fresh beauty, though it seemed to them a frightened loveliness, as though in remembering past violence that men had committed against her she feared for yet worse at their hands in years to come.
But for the moment there seemed nothing but good. To Oxford’s great profit the Queen’s Grace was a lover of learning and was herself no mean scholar; and having found much delight in learning it was her pleasure that others should do the same. In past years Oxford scholars had seldom been drawn from the nobility but now, goaded to it by the Queen herself, young gentlemen of birth were presenting themselves at the University, to get a little something into their heads if possible and to enjoy themselves at all costs. The Queen’s Grace was taking a particular interest in Christ Church, the College founded by her father. She had appointed Thomas Godwin, “a tall and comely person’’ much in favor with her, to be its Dean* and she assigned certain of the Christ Church studentships to boys educated at her own royal foundation of Saint Peter’s Westminster. The vanguard of a long line of pilgrims from Westminster to Christ Church were in these later days traveling over hill and dale and knocking for admittance at the gates of the College. . . . They were the last figures in Nicolas’s dream pageant and as they clattered by him it seemed to him that they picked him up and carried him with them under South Gate and up the street to Christ Church. It was a surprise to him to find himself standing quite alone outside the Fair Gate.
*Note. The Queen continued to take an interest in the Deans of Christ Church, particularly if good looking, for “she loved good parts well, but better when in a goodly person.” Thomas Godwin remained in favor until he insisted upon pleasing himself rather than the Queen’s Grace in the matter of his second marriage, when Her Majesty became “alienated.” With only one Dean, Richard Cox, it is recorded that she seriously fell out, and then only after she had made him a bishop and he had dared to differ from her in regard to her plans for his garden. “Proud Prelate,” she wrote, “you know what you were before I made you; if you do not immediately comply with my request, by God, I will unfrock you. Elizabeth.”