Two Shades of Blue: A History of Oxford and Cambridge Universities 1200-1700

By Peter Alexander Thompson

At a time when the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge are again under sustained attack from activists and politicians, Two Shades of Blue takes the reader in two volumes from their founding in the early Thirteenth Century up to the reforms and advances of the modern era. The title, Two Shades of Blue, refers to the sporting colours of dark blue for Oxford and light blue for Cambridge. The first volume encompasses the 500 years between 1200 and 1700, starting with the pioneering Oxonians Robert Grosseteste, Adam Marsh and Roger Bacon, and examines the claims of Merton, University and Balliol to be the oldest surviving college. It covers the founding of Cambridge University following the great dispersal of 1209 and the development of aularian houses into residential colleges. It explores the religious turmoil created by John Wycliffe, 'the morning star of the Reformation', who inspired Lollardy, the pre-Protestant movement that would challenge papal authority and campaign for the Holy Bible to be printed in English. It covers Henry VIII's break with Rome which created a dangerous schism in both Universities and cost the Cambridge Chancellor John Fisher and his friend, Sir John More, their lives. The 'New Learning' of the Renaissance reached Oxford in the late 1490s through John Colet, William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre but it was Erasmus who lit the lamp of humanism during his lectures at Cambridge. Religious dissension determined the confessional shape of the Universities under Henry's children, Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, culminating in the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559. Catholics were excluded from many positions and were forbidden to study at the Universities. The narrative features many of the great Tudor names connected with the Universities: Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, Leicester, Cecil, Walsingham and Cheke. It covers the sacrifice of the Protestant martyrs Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, Tyndale, Bilney and the Catholic martyrs Mayne, Campion, Nichols, all Oxford and Cambridge men. Intellectual life developed under the first Stuart king, James I, and his Calvinist Archbishop George Abbot but his son Charles I sponsored the Arminian John Laud who rejected key Calvinist beliefs. Resistance to Laudianism ranged from the Great Tew Circle under Lord Falkland and its greatest member, Lord Clarendon, to the Puritan majority in the House of Commons. The Civil Wars ended in the ruination of many Oxford colleges during the Royalist occupation while Cambridge suffered the desecration of its churches and chapels. Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell enforced further reformation of both Universities during the Interregnum. The Restoration restored the status quo ante in which the Laudian Code of 1636 sought to ensure that Aristotle and the other Greek philosophers would hold centre stage in Oxford and Cambridge indefinitely but no classical bulwark could stem the flow of new scientific discoveries. Isaac Newton plunged into the mysteries of 'natural philosophy' (mathematics and physics) at Cambridge in 1661, leading to his annus mirabilis from 1665 to 1666 and ultimately to the publication of his masterpiece, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), 'the Principia'. James II's attempt to turn the Universities into Catholic seminaries resulted in his removal in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, creating new difficulties for the Universities under the Protestant William of Orange and his wife, Mary II. Volume I ends in 1714 with the death of Mary's sister, Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts, and the arrival of King George, the first of the Hanoverians. The Church remained the chief employer of graduates but it was the Church of England and not the Church of Rome that had prevailed in the religious battles fought under the Tudors and the Stuarts. And it was Parliament and not the Monarchy that held the greater sway over the Universities after their own providential battles for supremacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350957402

Peter Alexander Thompson

Award-winning author Peter Alexander Thompson, a London-based former Fleet Street editor, has written twenty-one books on war, royalty and big business. His titles include Maxwell: A Portrait of Power, the first biography to expose the criminality of the media magnate Robert Maxwell, and Cudlipp's Circus, a memoir which reveals how the author collaborated with the BBC's Panorama team to make 'The Max Factor', the TV documentary that precipitated Maxwell's dramatic fall. Thompson won the Blake Dawson Prize for Business Literature, with co-author Robert Macklin, for The Big Fella: The Rise and Rise of BHP Billiton. Other works are The Private Lives of Mayfair, an historic account of Mayfair personalities over 350 years; Pacific Fury, a best-selling one-volume history of the Pacific War; The Battle for Singapore 1942 and The Quest for Freedom, a biography of Alexander Kerensky and the Russian Revolution. His new book, Two Shades of Blue, is the first of two volumes that will cover the histories of Oxford and Cambridge Universities from their founding in the Thirteenth Century up to the reforms and advances of the modern era.

Book preview

TWO

A HISTORY OF

SHADES

OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE

OF

UNIVERSITIES

BLUE

1200-1700

Peter Alexander Thompson

By the same author

The Quest for Freedom: A life of Alexander Kerensky

The Battle for Singapore: Britain’s Greatest Military Disaster

Pacific Fury: How Australia and her Allies defeated the Japanese

Anzac Fury: The Battle of Crete 1942

Shanghai Fury: Heroes of Revolutionary China

Cudlipp’s Circus: Adventures in Fleet Street

Wesfarmers 100: The People’s Story (1914-2014)

With Robert Macklin

The Battle of Brisbane: Australians and Americans at War

Operation Rimau: The Commando Raid on Singapore

The Adventures of Morrison of China

Keep off the Skyline: The Diggers in Korea

The Big Fella: The Rise and Rise of BHP Billiton*

*Winner of the Blake Dawson Prize for Business Literature

With Anthony Delano

Maxwell: A Portrait of Power

With Marcello Evaristi

The Private Lives of Mayfair

Copyright © Peter Thompson. All rights reserved, 2023.

Peter Thompson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 979-8-35095-740-2

FRONT PAGE (Clockwise from top left): The Old School of Divinity, St John’s Street, Cambridge; the Radcliffe Camera with All Souls College in the background, Oxford; the Christ Church Hall, Oxford.

BACK PAGE: Hubert Le Sueur’s life-sized bronze statue of William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, outside the entrance to the Old Bodleian Library in Old Schools Quadrangle, Oxford.

Cover design and photographs: Peter Thompson

For my parents Arthur and Margaret

and my sisters Jocelyn and Helen

Magdalen College, Oxford

Contents

Author’s Note: ‘The Heart of Dear Old England’

Introduction: The Two Shades of Blue

PART I: THE RIVERS OF TIME

Chapter 1: The Fabulous Antiquities

Chapter 2: The Town and the Gown

Chapter 3: The First Oxonians

Chapter 4: The Collegiate Spirit

Chapter 5: The Wycliffe Threat

Chapter 6: The First Cantabrigians

PART II: THE BATTLE OF THE BIBLES

Chapter 7: The Erasmian Legacy

Chapter 8: The Tudor Tumult

Chapter 9: The King’s Colleges

Chapter 10: The Edwardian Purges

Chapter 11: The Marian Flames

Chapter 12: The Elizabethan Avengers

PART III: THE REIGNS OF CHANGE

Chapter 13: The Royal Visitor

Chapter 14: The Jesuit Martyrs

Chapter 15: The Stuart Coup

Chapter 16: The Scholar King

Chapter 17: The Laudian Knot

PART IV: THE TIDES OF WAR

Chapter 18: The Caroline Cataclysm

Chapter 19: The Road to Edgehill

Chapter 20: The Universities at War

Chapter 21: The Cruel Necessity

Chapter 22: The Cromwellian Cross

Chapter 23: The Primrose Path

Chapter 24: The Royal Slavers

Chapter 25: The Inglorious Exile

Chapter 26: The First 500 Years

Bibliography

Endnotes

Illustrations

Oxford:

Wren’s Tom Tower and the Mercury Statue in Tom Quad, Christ Church. At 9.05 every night Great Tom rings 101 times in memory of the college’s first students.

The Shrine of St Frideswide, patron saint of Oxford and the University of Oxford, inside Christ Church Cathedral. The priory in her name was closed in 1524 to become part of the Cathedral.

St Frideswide in her shrine.

Merton College from the playing fields on Deadman’s Walk. Merton’s chapel bell rings one strike ahead of Great Tom at the top of Tom Tower in neighbouring Christ Church.

Duke Humfrey’s Library, the oldest reading room in the Bodleian Library, dates from 1487.

The South African magnate Cecil Rhodes in his controversial niche at Oriel College in the High Street.

The fan-vaulted ceiling outside the Christ Church Great Hall.

The Great Hall of Christ Church was opened in 1529, the year after its creator Cardinal Wolsey’s fall.

Christ Church panorama from the War Memorial Gardens leading into Christ Church Meadow.

The Sheldonian Theatre, Wren’s masterpiece, opened on the Broad in 1669.

Alfred Waterhouse’s Gothic Revival facade of Balliol College in Broad Street, Oxford.

The spot in Broad Street at which the Protestant Martyrs met their fate in 1555 and 1556.

George Gilbert Scott’s Martyrs Memorial at the south end of St Giles, Oxford.

Catholic martyrs: Sir Thomas More in Chelsea and a wall plaque in Hollywell Street, Oxford.

The ‘Bridge of Sighs’ over New College Lane links the buildings of Hertford College, Oxford.

The Neo-Classical-style cupola at Queen’s College, Oxford, housing Sir Henry Cheere’s 1735 statue of Caroline of Ansbach, the wife of George II.

Christ Church Cathedral: In 1545, the bishop’s throne was carried from Osney to St Frideswide, which was designated as both the cathedral of the Oxford Diocese and the chapel of the new college.

The Saxon Tower of St Michael’s Church in the Cornmarket dates from 1040.

Carfax Tower, also known as St Martin’s Tower.

All Souls College, Radcliffe Square, Oxford, and (below) Oxford Castle, the former city jail.

St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, scene of many dramatic events including the trial of Archbishop Cranmer.

Cambridge:

The four-towered Tudor Gatehouse of St John’s College, Cambridge.

The Old School of Divinity by Basil Champneys was completed in St John’s Street, Cambridge, in 1879.

Plaque in All Saints Lane, Cambridge, commentating the rise of science at the University.

The amended Double Helix plaque outside the Eagle Tavern, Bene’t Street, Cambridge, giving credit to the critical research of the Australian scientist Rosalind Franklin in the discovery.

Plaque above Cambridge University Bookshop at 1 Trinity Street.

Magdalene College on the Cam. A bridge has spanned the river here since at least 875.

Peterhouse, the first Cambridge college, was founded in 1284 to house scholars ‘who had suffered greatly from the disturbances and exactions of the townsmen’.

Clare Bridge and Trinity Bridge over the Cam leading to The Backs and Cambridge University Library.

The Trinity Hall Garden and Clare College on the Cam with King’s spires in the background.

The Mathematical Bridge, Queens’ College, Cambridge, leading from dark side to light side.

The Great Gate at Trinity, Cambridge, with Henry VIII’s statue above seven stone panels bearing the arms of Edward III and his six sons.

Festive postbox outside the gate of King’s College, King’s Parade, Cambridge.

The Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge, completed in 1695 on the former Garret Hostel Green.

Clare College, King’s Chapel and the Gibbs Building of King’s College from The Backs, Cambridge.

Great St Mary’s Church and Market Square, Cambridge, where Bucer and Fagius were burned.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, known as the Round Church, in the centre of Cambridge.

The Chapel of Jesus College, Cambridge, scene of the dispute over Tobias Rustat’s controversial gift.

Sculling past the Caius’ Boathouse on the Cam.

Goldie Boathouse, headquarters of the Cambridge University Boat Club.

The St John’s College Eight on the Cam during the Summer Eights in July 2021.

St Edward the Martyr, Cambridge, which witnessed the first sermon of the English Reformation.

All photographs © Peter Thompson

Author’s Note

‘The Heart of Dear Old England’

It is easy to fall in love with Oxford and Cambridge. Whatever else they may be – imperious, self-obsessed, antiquated – they are incurably romantic. Every street is paved with history and a romantic spirit fills the air. You can hear it in the chimes of Great Tom and the Merton bells competing across Christ Church Meadow; you can feel it in ‘the measured pulse of racing oars’ along the Cam; you can see it in the mystical light filtering through the stained glass of the Bodleian. Romance hovers over the Round Church, takes tea at Fitzbillies and meanders along The Backs. It is everywhere.

The Universities’ special position in British life is one of the themes in Thomas Hughes’s novel Tom Brown at Oxford, the sequel to Tom Brown’s School Days. Published in serial form in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1859, it describes Oxford University in the early 1840s. Tom Brown’s friend Hardy (a relative of Nelson’s shipmate, no less) tells the young protagonist, ‘I shouldn’t go so serious, Brown, if I didn’t care about the place so much. I can’t bear to think of it as a sort of learning machine, in which I am to grind for three years to get certain degrees I want. No – this place and Cambridge, and our great schools, are the heart of dear old England.’¹

Despite Hardy’s endorsement, there was no escaping the fact that, in his time, the Church of England revelled in its primacy as the Established Church and both Universities were strictly theocratic institutions in which class and wealth were paramount in determining the status of every student who passed through their massive iron-bound gates. Hardy might have been living at the heart of dear old England but as a servitor from an impoverished naval family he had no tassel on his cap and was not allowed to take his meals with his fellow students. Indeed, the nation’s supreme halls of learning were symbols of white male Anglican privilege, and the wealth of preceding generations, whether legally, corruptly or forcibly obtained, had gifted them a rare heritage.

‘It is no good being priggish about this or saying that the earliest colleges were founded for poor scholars,’ the Cambridge historian John Steegmann wrote in 1940. ‘The two universities exist very largely for those who are privileged by birth or income.’ As only communicants of the Church of England were admitted to Oxford and Cambridge in the three centuries following the Sixteenth-Century Reformation, they provided a steady stream of clergymen for the Established Church, as well as conformist doctors, lawyers, teachers, parliamentarians and empire-builders. Many of the Christian explorers, soldiers and administrators who spread British Colonialism around the globe had been exposed to their arcane and intolerant doctrines.²

According to Anthony Wood, the chronicler of late Seventeenth Century Oxford, ‘It is well known that the Universities of this land have had their beginnings and continuances to no other end but to propagate religion and good manners and supply the nation with persons chiefly proficient in the three famous faculties of Divinity, Law and Physics.’ As Divinity supplied vastly more graduates than Law or Physics, the theological studies of its scholars defined the boundaries of orthodox intellectual life.³

Religion was the adhesive that bound families and communities together; it was also the primary cause of great misery and constant warfare. One of the dominant themes of this work is the impact of religious conflict on the Universities and their societies of masters, fellows and scholars. From the medievalism of John Wycliffe and the Lollards, through the English Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the Elizabethan Settlement to the Civil Wars, the Interregnum and the Restoration of the 1600s, religion was the revolutionary force that turned entire social and political orders on their heads. ‘I would have all reformations done by public authority,’ Elizabeth I’s Protestant spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, decided in the 1580s. ‘It were very dangerous that every private man’s zeal should carry sufficient authority of reforming things amiss.’⁴

It was, of course, too late for that - the Age of Reformations had already polarised the peoples of Europe as never before. Slowly but surely, the joy, hope and harmony of the Christian message was dissipated under dark shadows of suspicion and intolerance. Even the Golden Rule – ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ – was trimmed with exceptions. The corroding threads of greed and corruption eroded Christian principles from the holiest to the lowliest as one set of clerics and oligarchs were deposed and another set took their place. The Pope was either the Holy Father or the Antichrist, while Martin Luther and John Calvin were saintly heroes or damnable heretics.

God’s word in one form or another was invoked to reward the faithful and punish the disbeliever. Careers were made or ruined, lives enhanced or lost. Many of the nastiest schisms saw the Universities’ halls and colleges clear out masters and fellows of the opposing faith in brutal purges and rearrange the chapel furniture from Catholic to Protestant and back again at least twice over seemingly futile semantics relating to the points of the compass or different interpretations of Scripture. Personality clashes, donnish vendettas, the male sexist imperative and an inbuilt class system exacerbated religious tensions and led to favouritism and rough justice.

It was inevitable that religious dissension would divert the thoughts of staff and students from the true purpose of a higher education into the cul de sac of religious bigotry and adversarial disputation. The Universities also suffered in other ways, such as the regular culling of books. ‘The forty years of the English Reformation were not encouraging to the prosperity or even the existence of libraries,’ says the historian James Cargill Thompson. ‘The new eagerness of Reformer and counter-Reformer to purge the bookshelves as well as the souls of the nation deprived catalogues of any permanence; the ejection and re-institution of books followed each change of government policy as regularly as the ejection and re-institution of clergy.’⁵

Following the matriculation statute of 1581, matriculants at Oxford were required to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. A similar subscription was required of graduands at Cambridge from 1616 (although after 1772 a Cambridge man who desired a BA degree was allowed to make a simple declaration that he was a bona fide member of the Anglican Church). Under the terms of the 1662 Act of Uniformity, all professors and readers and all heads of house, tutors and fellows were obliged to ‘conform to the liturgy of the Church of England’.⁶

In both Catholic and Protestant England, Scotland and Ireland, ‘heretics’ and ‘blasphemers’ were executed by hanging, dismembering, burning or beheading for the entertainment of baying crowds. Each death represented an assault on the sanctity of personal faith, while the displaying of heads and severed limbs was an obscene warning to other dissenters. The last victim to be executed for blasphemy, Thomas Aikenhead, a twenty-year-old Edinburgh University student, was hanged at Leith on 8 January 1697 for cursing God, denying the Trinity and scoffing at the Scriptures. Thomas Babington Macaulay said of Aikenhead’s death that ‘the preachers who were the poor boy’s murderers crowded round him at the gallows, and… insulted heaven with prayers more blasphemous than anything he had uttered’.

The 1689 Act of Toleration granting limited indulgence to dissenters was hailed as the final achievement of the post-Reformation religious struggle and yet all nonconformity would be regarded as a crime under the laws of England until 1767, while both Universities would remain closed to Catholics, Jews, Nonconformists and non-Christians. It wasn’t until 1871 that the Universities Tests Act abolished the requirement that those taking lay degrees or holding lay offices should make a declaration of religious belief.⁷

There has never been a better time to examine the origins and identities of England’s two most famous Universities, both of which are locked today in furious and degrading controversies on the question of free speech and the multiple issues surrounding political correctness, sexual politics and the counter culture. The most serious debate at both Universities in 2023 centred on whether a woman could have a penis. Nevertheless, the wonderful irony of Oxford and Cambridge is that institutions so immersed in the whirlpool of ‘faith’ could have made such extraordinary progress in the field of ‘reason’ and the scientific method of peer review, leading to discoveries that ease the burden of life, cure our ills and enrich the minds of humanity.

My interest in Oxbridge started at school in Australia. Like many secondary schools throughout the Empire the links with the Universities were there from the very beginning. Brisbane Grammar School (BGS), a non-denominational college, was founded in 1869 and its trustees appointed an Oxbridge graduate as our first headmaster. The successful candidate was Thomas Harlin, a large, bearded Irish classical scholar, mathematician and author of books on Euclid and Algebra.

Born at Lisburn in 1834, ‘Tim’ Harlin went up to Cambridge in 1852 after winning a scholarship to Peterhouse, the University’s oldest surviving college. As a Petrean, he was Ninth Wrangler in 1856, graduated Master of Arts in 1859 and was elected a Fellow of the College. Aged thirty-four, he travelled to Australia in 1866 to take up the appointment of Senior Mathematics Master at Ipswich Grammar School, twenty miles inland from Brisbane.i

By the time BGS opened its doors on 1 February 1869, Harlin had recruited five masters to teach eighty-eight pupils between the ages of nine and nineteen. For the new school’s colours, he chose the red-and-gold of Peterhouse’s crest, colours associated with academic achievement and its concomitant rewards. The school motto was Nil sine labore (Nothing without work).ii ⁸ Things were going smoothly until an almighty row erupted among Queensland politicians, teachers and parents over the nature and purpose of a grammar school education.

During Harlin’s time at Cambridge cries for reform had led to a revolution in the 1850s in which new statutes replaced those that had governed the Universities since Charles I’s time. The reformers had also instigated changes in the course work and the examination procedures of both Universities (which, in the case of Cambridge, would lead to its pre-eminence in scientific research). Tim Harlin, in common with many other teachers who had graduated before the new regime had been enforced, defended the right to teach a traditional Classical education based on Latin, Greek and Mathematics using Arabic numerals.⁹

Thus the BGS curriculum became a controversial issue. The Colonial Secretary, Sir Robert Herbert (Balliol, 1849; All Souls, 1854), had made it clear during the passage of the Grammar Schools Act of 1860 that the Queensland Government preferred a different kind of grammar school from the English model. Queenslanders, he stated, needed a sound education in History, Geography, Arithmetic and a modern language such as French. This, he added, ‘would best qualify the youth of the colony for discharging the duties that would devolve upon them’.¹⁰

Harlin disagreed. ‘The true object of education is to train the mental faculties for use, whatever it may be, to which they may be put in after life,’ he said. Latin was the best subject towards this end because it helped pupils to exercise their reason and to use their judgment. He attached such importance to Latin that he had made it a compulsory subject for every pupil, regardless of age or intelligence.iii

The aim of his curriculum, he said, was to provide a ‘thorough grounding of our boys in English, Latin and Mathematics’. Sir Robert Herbert had returned to the United Kingdom but Harlin found himself at loggerheads with the former Premier Sir Charles Lilley (University College, London) and most of the BGS Trustees. After seven difficult and unhappy years, he was forced to resign at the end of 1875.iv

‘Harlin embodied most of the characteristics of the Christian Scholar, a gentleman always, with contempt for the drones and shufflers,’ says his biographer, R. D. Goodman. ‘He held out to the boys the Protestant ethic that success comes by hard work and honest toil. His kindly, generous disposition won for him great respect and affection among the boys, but among the intellectual leaders with whom he had to deal, this was seen as a sign of weakness.’v ¹¹

After his departure, order broke down among the students and despite the appointment of an acting headmaster BGS sank into what was described as ‘pandemonium’. The acting head, a busy solicitor who specialised in criminal cases, was rarely seen at the school and things reached a low point in 1876 when a pupil wrestled one of the masters to the floor of a classroom after a disagreement.

The man brought in to sort things out was Reginald Heber Roe, a twenty-six-year-old Oxford Master of Arts who had rowed in the Balliol College eight in the early 1870s. ‘He came one morning with the acting head and every pupil was assembled in the Great Hall to meet him,’ recalls Alexander Francis, a BGS Old Boy. ‘He looked little more than a boy himself but before he had said many words we felt that the whole school had changed. It rarely happens that the mere personality of one man produces such an effect on an unruly mob. Without introducing any new rules or inflicting punishments, discipline became perfect and work proceeded as it had never done before.’¹²

One of Roe’s first acts was to change the BGS colours to the Oxbridge sporting combination of light blue and dark blue as a mark of respect for his alma mater and its great rival.¹³ This was typical of Roe, a draper’s son from Dorset, who saw his appointment as a lay mission to bring enlightenment to this sunny outpost of Empire. His educational philosophy was said to reflect the thoughts of John Stuart Mill, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Arnold, Edward Thring and Benjamin Jowett.¹⁴

As Dr Arnold had done at Rugby from 1828 to 1841, Roe believed in making BGS a cradle of democracy and good citizenship. It was, he said, a teacher’s duty to develop moral, intellectual and physical qualities in each pupil that would assure his social and professional advancement. Roe’s curriculum favoured modern languages, literature, mathematics and science to equip his students for the age they lived in but he also included Latin and Greek, the required subjects for the matriculation of budding lawyers and doctors.¹⁵

Tall and handsome with a trim beard and athletic physique, Reginald Heber Roe became known to his pupils as ‘The Skipper’. He established an army cadet corps to foster a spirit of public service and he introduced football, cricket, tennis and gymnastics to encourage Dr Arnold’s philosophy of ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’. Soon after the school acquired the use of a boathouse on the Brisbane River, dark blue blazers with light blue edging were awarded to its rowing crews competing in the annual Head of the River races.vi ¹⁶

Many BGS students have since made their way to Oxford and Cambridge Universities, including Frederick Woolnough Paterson, a Rhodes Scholar and the only Australian Communist ever to win a Federal election, and Donald John Markwell, the first Rhodes Scholar to serve as Warden of Rhodes House. Fred Paterson studied Theology at Merton but turned to Communism after witnessing extreme poverty in Ireland and parts of London. Don Markwell, a research fellow at New College and then a fellow and tutor at Merton, became a distinguished social scientist and educational reformer.

Today, ‘Oxbridge’ – an ‘unfortunate neologism’, according to Oxford’s latest historian, Laurence Brockliss – is instantly recognisable as the gold standard in tertiary education and postgraduate research. William Makepeace Thackeray (Trinity, Cambridge, 1829) coined the term as the name of a fictional university in his 1848 novel Pendennis. The narrator talks about coming back from ‘the University of Oxbridge, where my friend Mr Arthur Pendennis passed some period of his life’. Then, in the second volume of Pendennis, Thackeray came up with its counterpart: ‘He was a Camford man and very nearly got the English Prize Poem.’ Since then the more euphonic ‘Oxbridge’ has become universal while ‘Camford’ has fallen into disuse. Even so, it was many years before ‘Oxbridge’ came into conversational use as a portmanteau word for both Universities.vii ¹⁷

A correspondent signing himself ‘Provincial Professor’ used it in that sense in a letter to the Manchester Guardian in 1947 protesting that the University of London had been named as the third best university of England, standing on a par with Oxford and Cambridge. ‘I am a graduate of Oxbridge and have worked in several branches of Redbrick,’ he wrote. ‘I should find it hard to advise anyone to reject Oxbridge, if given the opportunity. But, failing Oxbridge, I am certain that, on the average, a better education is available in almost any provincial university rather than in the over-valued colleges of the Metropolis. London University has none of the general educational amenities of Oxbridge and its activities are much more dispersed and ill-organised than those of Redbrick.’¹⁸

In two volumes, Two Shades of Blue will cover the 800 years from the founding of the Universities in the early Thirteenth Century up to the social, political and educational revolutions of the Nineteenth Century and the advances of the Twentieth Century. The first volume concludes in 1714 with the death of Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts, and the arrival of King George, the first of the Hanoverians.

In 1814 the scholar and poet George Dyer (Emmanuel, 1774) noted in his History of the University and Colleges of Cambridge, ‘Biography is the light of history, and should be the very soul of a University History.’ I have followed that principle throughout this work. Biographical details of many leading Oxbridge figures were obtained with due attributation from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Alumni Oxonienses 1715-1886, edited by the genealogist Joseph Foster, and Alumni Cantabrigienses: Part I: From the earliest times to 1751 and Part II: 1752-1900, the monumental printed works of John Venn and his son John Archibald Venn, as well as their online archive of Oxbridge matriculants and graduates.

The chroniclers followed the alumni of both Universities in all their endeavours, including their exploits on the battlefield. ‘The Horsemen of the Apocalypse have rarely ceased from launching their attacks against the youth of the nation,’ J. A. Venn wrote in 1940. ‘In Part I of Alumni Cantabrigienses are to be found records of those who fell at Flodden, in the Low Countries, in the Civil War, and in every major campaign throughout Europe. Their counterparts of the second series left their bones in the Peninsula, at Waterloo, at Sebastopol, and on the ramparts of Delhi; they went prematurely from Cambridge to fight in South Africa, and they fell in their thousands, in Flanders as ever, in France and at Jutland. Byron’s altruistic gesture to Greece was not unique, for many another Cambridge man laid down his life in out-of-the-way parts of the world for ideals of liberty.’¹⁹

My research was conducted in the Bodleian Library while I was staying at Christ Church, Magdalen and Queen’s colleges, Oxford, and in what Frederic Raphael calls ‘the narcotically comfortable chairs of the Cambridge University Library’ while at Jesus, Christ’s, St John’s and Caius. For the stories of the Universities, I consulted many independent works in addition to the official histories: The History of the University of Oxford in seven volumes (T. H. Aston, General Editor, J. I. Catto, James McConica, Nicholas Tyacke, L. S. Sutherland and L.G. Mitchell, and M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys); and A History of the University of Cambridge in four volumes (C. N. L. Brooke, General Editor, Damien Riehl Leader, Victor Morgan and Peter Searby).

I consulted the database of University College London’s Legacies of British Slave Ownership, which links individuals or their families with the profits of the slave trade and slave labour. I used the archives of The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian and The Observer, as well as the archaeological and historical articles on Oxoniensia.org and the autobiographies or biographies of many alumni of both Universities.

My grateful thanks go to Bob Kingdom for the title, Two Shades of Blue; to Vivien Harris, Archivist of Brisbane Grammar School; to Simon Blundell, Librarian of the Reform Club, London; to the Librarians of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Cambridge University Library; to Robert Macklin for clarifying my thinking on the question of reason versus faith; and to Adam Fairclough (Balliol College, Oxford), Professor Emeritus of Louvain University, and Khevn Limbajee (Girton, Cambridge) for reading some of the manuscript and offering useful suggestions.

For Volume II, Dr Patricia Marsh of Magdalene College, Cambridge, took me to the Summer Eights on the Cam in July 2021 and also loaned me her extensive collection of books on the Boat Race. I’m also grateful to Judith Curthoys, Archivist of Christ Church, Oxford; to Dr Lynsey Darby, Archivist of St John’s College, Cambridge; and to Sue Egan of the Clan Egan MJSE Collection for information about Thomas Selby Egan and his family.

_______________

i Famous Petreans included the inventors Charles Babbage (computer), Frank Whittle (jet engine), Henry Cavendish (hydrogen) and Sir Christopher Cockerell (Hovercraft).

ii Peterhouse’s rugby colours, however, are blue and white.

iii Greek was not a compulsory subject and by 1873 only one class of twelve was studying it. In the author’s time (1956-1959) the number was down to four.

iv Lilley endowed the school with silver medals for Latin and Greek but a gold medal for English, which he rated as more important in the modern world than the other two languages.

v Despite the references to Christianity and ‘the Protestant ethic’, BGS also had Catholic, Jewish and Muslim students. Tim Harlin’s major contribution to education in Australia was the role he played in the introduction of the State Scholarship system that enabled thousands of Queenslanders to enjoy a secondary education that their parents would otherwise have been unable to afford.

vi Reginald Roe married Annie Maud Whish on 23 December 1879 in Brisbane. He died in St Martin’s Hospital, Brisbane, on 21 September 1926, survived by his wife, four sons and two daughters.

vii Frederic W. Farrar named his fictional university Camford in Julian Home: A Tale of College Life (Black 1859). H. G. Wells used ‘Oxbridge’ as the name of a university in his novel Marriage (Macmillan 1912) and later, in 1939, he wrote, ‘Camford had never made the slightest attempt to give any coherent picture of the universe to the new generation that came to it for instructions.’

Introduction

The Two Shades of Blue

For the past 800 years Oxford and Cambridge have rivalled one another with the stealth and ferocity of medieval claimants to the Crown. In his diary entry of 5 May 1669, Samuel Pepys (Magdalene, Cambridge, 1651) records a verbal duel over the relative merits of the two Universities with a Doctor of Law from New College, Oxford, after lunch at the Spanish Ambassador’s house in London with Sir Thomas Allen, Sir Edward Scott and Lord Carlingford.i ‘And by and by,’ Pepys says, ‘he and I to talk; and the company very merry at my defending Cambridge against Oxford.’ The diarist says he won this contest because he had an advantage: during the meal he had noticed that his opponent, ‘a gentle sort of scholar, sat like a fool for want of French or Spanish; but only Latin, which he spoke like an Englishman. I made much use of my French and Spanish here, to my great content.’¹

Pepys would have made a formidable adversary for any Oxonian, though a name-dropping contest between the two Universities would inevitably have ended in a draw. Among the Oxford alumni within the compass of this work are Matthew Arnold, Roger Bacon, Beau Brummell, John Donne, Charles James Fox, Edward Gibbon, William Ewart Gladstone, Samuel Johnson, William Morris, John Henry Newman, Sir Robert Peel, Sir Walter Raleigh, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adam Smith, Jonathan Swift, John Wesley, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, John Wycliffe and Christopher Wren.

In the same period, Cambridge could boast Charles Babbage, Francis Bacon, Lord Burghley, Lord Byron, Viscount Castlereagh, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oliver Cromwell, Charles Darwin, the Earl of Essex, Earl Grey, Thomas Babbington Macaulay, Christopher Marlowe, Lord Melbourne, John Milton, Isaac Newton, Lord Palmerston, William Pitt, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray, William Wilberforce and William Wordsworth.

Cambridge has produced fourteen British Prime Ministers, compared with Oxford’s thirty, with Christ Church alone contributing thirteen, the highest number of any college. The question of which University should come first in correspondence and legislation arose in 1621 when the Commons debated a Subsidy Bill. According to the Puritan John Pym, an Oxford man, ‘All those which had been of either Universitie inclined to that place of which they were. But such as had been of neither remained indifferent and were only swayed by reason. Soe that uppon the question the precedence was appointed to Oxford.’²

Competition is so fierce between the two shades of blue that they refer to one another as ‘the Other Place’, as though it would be blasphemous for the actual word to pass their lips. Insults abound. When Abba Eban, the Israeli Foreign Minister, was complimented on his Oxford accent, he replied, ‘Sir, I would have you know that I went to Cambridge – but in public life you must expect to be smeared.’ In ridiculing the executed Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, Thomas Babington Macaulay (Trinity, Cambridge, 1818), the future Lord Macaulay, speculated that ‘the severest punishment which the two Houses could have inflicted on him would have been to set him at liberty and send him to Oxford.’³

The humanist seer Erasmus, on the other hand, decided after spending two-and-a-half-years at Cambridge between 1511 and 1514, ‘Vulgus Cantabrigiense inhospitales Britannos antecedit’. ‘The Cantabrigians are even more inhospitable than the English.’ A century later the German traveller Conrad von Uffenbach cast an unsparing Teutonic eye over Cambridge and concluded that the town was as mean as a village and if it hadn’t been for the colleges ‘it would be one of the sorriest places in the world’.⁴

Nevertheless, another visitor, Vladimir Nabokov, loved it. Fresh out of revolutionary St Petersburg, he described Cambridge as ‘this little provincial English town, where, like a great soul in a small body, an ancient university lives its proud life’. Nabokov started reading Zoology at Trinity, switched to Slavic and Romance languages, and ended up translating Oxford’s 1865 classic fairytale, Alice in Wonderland, into Russian. He also played in goal for his college.⁵

No opportunity is lost to gloat over any perceived failing in their rival. John Wright, an aspiring mathematician at Trinity, Cambridge, noted that the coach service between Cambridge and Oxford in the early 1800s was called ‘the pluck coach’ because it carried students who had been plucked from Cambridge colleges to try their luck at the Other Place. No doubt Oxford historians, one of whom referred to Cambridge as ‘that distant marsh town’, had a name for the coach going in the opposite direction.⁶

Both Universities have a special relationship with the Virgin Mary through the Church of St Mary the Virgin at Oxford and the Church of St Mary the Great, commonly known as Great St Mary’s, at Cambridge. Founded in the Thirteenth Century, these two Houses of God provided refuge for generations of administrators and masters, and became the nuclei around which the Universities’ own buildings were developed. Five of Oxford’s most prized possessions - the Bodleian Library, the Sheldonian Theatre, the Clarendon Building, the Radcliffe Camera and the Old Ashmolean Museum - are clustered together in an acre of space behind St Mary the Virgin in the High Street. Cambridge’s prizes - the Senate House and the Old Schools Buildings, once housing the schools of Divinity and Law and the University Library - are within a few paces of Great St Mary’s.ii

Both Universities, however, rely on their seventy constituent colleges to provide the physical and spiritual éclat essential to a thriving educational metropolis. This is especially true of those colleges in the city centres - All Souls, Balliol, Brasenose, Christ Church, Corpus Christi, Exeter, Hertford, Magdalen, Merton, New College, Oriel, Queen’s, St Edmund Hall, Trinity and University College at Oxford; Christ’s, Clare, Corpus Christi, Gonville and Caius, King’s, Magdalene, Pembroke, Peterhouse, Queens’, St Catharine’s, St John’s, Sidney Sussex, Trinity and Trinity Hall at Cambridge.

Most colleges were initially built around a cloister or courtyard along monastic lines, with a porter’s lodge next to the gateway and scholars’ chambers arranged vertically up staircases on one side and kitchen, buttery and dining hall, common or combination room, chapel, library and master’s lodge on the other three sides. Disgorging battalions of bicycling academics into the swirling morning mists and rigorously protecting their individuality behind thick stone walls, the colleges are the very lifeblood of the University communities.

The Elysium of past heads of house is filled with men of great erudition and remarkable character, such as John Fell of Christ Church, Ralph Kettel of Trinity Oxford, Richard Bentley of Trinity Cambridge and Robert Brady of Gonville and Caius to name only a handful, while alumni of both Universities have risen to the highest position in the Anglican Church. Of the twelve Archbishops of Canterbury between 1503 and 1678, six came from Oxford (William Warham, Reginald Pole, George Abbot, William Laud, William Juxon and Gilbert Sheldon) and six from Cambridge (Thomas Cranmer, Matthew Parker, Edmund Grindal, John Whitgift, Richard Bancroft and William Sancroft).

Appearances are important. Many of the great architects, including James Essex, James Gibbs, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Edwin Lutyens, Augustus Pugin, William Wilkins, Christopher Wren and James Wyatt, turned their hand to building and then rebuilding the churches, colleges and libraries in Gothic, Renaissance, Classical, Gothic Revival, Neo-Classical and Modern styles. They gave the Universities their soaring Corinthian columns and Ionic pilasters, beautiful fan-vaulted ceilings and hammer-beamed roofs to replace the ‘barbarous’ medieval buildings afflicted with what John Evelyn (Balliol, 1637) called ‘Congestions of Heavy, Dark, Melancholy and Monkish Piles, without any just Proportion, Use or Beauty, compar’d with the truly Ancient’.⁷

Evelyn was particularly critical of Cambridge’s architecture. Many of its most noble facades had yet to come into existence when he wrote in his diary on 31 August 1654 after viewing the townscape from the pinnacled heights of King’s Chapel, that it was ‘a low dirty and unpleasant place, the streets ill-paved, the air thick and infected by the Fens, nor are its churches (of which St Mary’s is the best) anything considerable in compare to Oxford’.

By the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge wore its antiquity with pride. Balloonists such as the aeronaut Charles Green could confirm that it was no longer the slum of John Evelyn’s memory. On Friday 19 October 1827, Green took off in his coal-gas balloon from Nuns’ Close, a patch of ground at Jesus College opposite the Manor House of St Radegund. In the soft autumn light, the colleges, churches, houses and inns were laid out like exquisitely carved pieces on a russet-and-gold chessboard.iii The two most outstanding buildings were Great St Mary’s, which cast a long Gothic shadow over the cobbled streets around Market Square, and its neighbour across King’s Parade, the Chapel of King’s College, with William Wilkins’s almost-completed white-stone screen and pinnacled gatehouse enclosing the Front Court.

The balloonist could count eight colleges and four churches on the London road and six churches and four colleges on the Huntingdon road. Towering gateways led into private courts with glorious green velvet lawns, medieval cloisters, battlements and arches. Social progress was epitomised in terraces of creamy Regency houses with wrought-iron balconies and bow windows. Further along the old High Street, the three mellowed Tudor redbrick courts of St John’s marched down to the Cam where, on the marshy west bank, the New Court – a fabulous confection of Gothic Revival crinkle-crankle nicknamed ‘the Wedding Cake’ - was being staked out among Capability Brown’s gardens, meadows and tree-lined avenues.

From the Magdalene Bridge, the river meandered along The Backs, under the Kitchen Bridge of St John’s to the Baroque splendour of the Wren Library at Trinity, the formal walks and yew hedges of Trinity Hall’s walled garden, and the neo-classical facade of Clare College. Past the Gibbs Building on the Great Lawn at King’s, it flowed under the Mathematical Bridge that connected the ‘light side’ of Queens’ with its ‘dark side’. Finally, on reaching the old Silver Street Bridge, the Cam assumed its ancient identity as the Granta for the journey to Grantchester, Saffron Walden and Audley End.

Despite these visible signs of progress, William Everett, an American alumnus of Trinity College, traduced Cambridge in an 1864 public lecture as ‘the last town on the chalk and the first on the fen - a combination admirable for raising wheat but wholly at variance with beauty of all kinds’. Everett was a Harvard graduate who had served as President of the Cambridge Union in 1862 and had taken his BA the following year. He found the streets of Cambridge too crooked to be convenient or imposing but not crooked enough to be picturesque.⁸

‘The buildings are mostly of bricks baked of the local clay, which is of a dirty white, relieved by occasional touches of dingy red,’ he told an American audience. ‘Here and there a building in the white freestone of the neighbourhood would be really ornamental were it not for the uniform pall of coal-smoke that blackens everything in an English market-town, and is in Cambridge rendered doubly swarthy by the condensations of the marsh fog.’⁹

There was no denying that black and grey were the predominant colours of both Oxford and Cambridge from their exposure to soot, smoke, dust and damp until the universal stone-cleaning of British buildings in the 1980s liberated the hidden visual sensations beneath the grime. Today, the golden, pink-tinged Ketton stone of Clare College and the Wren Library at Trinity contrasts favourably with the brown limestone of neighbouring King’s Chapel and the white Portland stone of the Gibbs Building.¹⁰

Had William Everett visited Cambridge five years later he would have seen Sir George Gilbert Scott’s New Chapel at St John’s (1869), which was built of Ancaster limestone in a style that was prevalent in the 1280s and had been used for the Hospital of St John the Evangelist that preceded the college on that site. The piers of the Chapel’s Tower were of Ketton stone, with shafts of red Peterhead granite and Devonshire, Irish and Serpentine marble, while the abaci of all the piers were made from black Derbyshire marble.¹¹

Oxford, on the other hand, is on the edge of ‘stone country’, with natural building materials available all over the Cotswolds in the northwest as far as the Vale of Evesham and all the way north to Banbury and beyond. From the Fifteenth Century bricks were made at Nettlebed, twenty miles to the south, but there is no sign that they were used for building in Oxford. Indeed, most of the colleges were constructed of Cotswold sandstone or Headington golden-buff limestone, giving their facades a golden glow until age covered them in the same filthy patina as Cambridge’s. According to the architectural historian Sir Howard Colvin, Oxford in the 1680s was essentially medieval in its planning and predominantly Gothic in style.¹²

The German pastor Charles Moritz was just as scathing about Oxford in 1782 as John Evelyn had been about Cambridge a century earlier. ‘The colleges are mostly in the Gothic taste, much overloaded with ornaments, and built with grey stone; which, perhaps, while it is new, looks pretty well, but it has now the most dingy, dirty and disgusting appearance that you can possibly imagine,’ he wrote. ‘Only one of these colleges is in the modern style. The houses of the city are in general ordinary; in some parts quite miserable; in some streets they are only one storey high and have shingled roofs. To me Oxford seemed to have but a dull and gloomy look and I cannot but wonder how it ever came to be considered as so fine a city, and next to London.’¹³

From the late Victorian era, however, Oxford’s central vistas from the Neo-Classical cupola of Queen’s to the Magdalen Tower on the High Street, or the precipitous Great Tom façade of Christ Church in St Aldate’s, the avenue named after a venerated Sixth Century Bishop of Gloucester, were nothing sort of spectacular. Christ Church’s buildings reflected the fact that it had always enjoyed wealth - in 1682 it was rated at £2000 (£360,000), compared with just £100 (£18,000) each for Balliol, Jesus, Pembroke, Wadham and University College. Having a medieval cathedral and the most glamorous of dining halls in its midst had put it into a class of its own.

The 1887 edition of Baedeker’s Guide to Great Britain decided that ‘Oxford is on the whole more attractive than Cambridge to the ordinary visitor, who should therefore visit Cambridge first, or omit it altogether if he cannot visit both.’ It was typical of the age that only the male perspective was considered, even though Oxford and Cambridge in 1887 possessed four women’s colleges: Lady Margaret Hall (1878) and Somerville (1879) at Oxford and Girton (relocated from Hitchen in 1872) and Newnham (1871) at Cambridge.

Women’s qualifications, however, were not formally recognised at that time, an abomination considering that Queens Mary, Elizabeth, Anne and Victoria had ruled England in their own right for 127 years during the centuries under review here. Indeed, prejudice against women meant that England was the last major country in the world to train women doctors. The first school for women physicians was not opened in London until 1874, while seventeen such colleges were available to American women around the same time.

Rituals, language and idiosyncrasies are cherished. At Cambridge, Oxford students are known as ‘fordies’, a reference to the ancient oxen ford over the Isis (as the Thames is classically styled from the Latin Thamesis on its passage through Oxford), while Oxonians refer to Cambridge students as ‘tabs’, short for Cantab, which is itself an abbreviation of Cantabrigian or Cantabrigienis.¹⁴

Matriculation confers University membership on students according to the current statutes and regulations of either place. Oxford’s matriculation happens in a formal ceremony at the Sheldonian Theatre when freshmen and women wear sub fusc (see below). At Cambridge, every matriculant must subscribe to the following declaration: ‘I promise to observe the Statutes and Ordinances of the University as far as they concern me, and to pay due respect and obedience to the Chancellor and other officers of the University.’

Oxford’s three terms of the academic year are Michaelmas (October to early December), Hilary (January to early March) and Trinity (April to mid-June); Cambridge has Michaelmas (October to early December), Lent (January to early March) and Easter (April to mid-June). The Easter term is sometimes called ‘Exam term’.iv At both Universities students ‘come up’ at the beginning of term and ‘go down’ at the end of it (unless they are ‘sent down’ – expelled - beforehand for a serious misdemeanour). For lesser offences, some might be ‘gated’ (‘confined to gates’ for a specific period), while others could be ‘rusticated’ (suspended for a year).

Encaenia is the ceremony in which Oxford awards honorary degrees to distinguished men and women, and commemorates its benefactors on the Wednesday of the ninth week during Trinity Term. The Greek word for ‘festival of renewal’, encaenia is the surviving part of ‘The Act’, the elaborate entertainment that used to include original musical works and a satirical speech by an anonymous speaker known as Terrae Filius, ‘Son of the Earth’. The Act was originally held in St Mary the Virgin, though this was thought inappropriate and it was moved to the new Sheldonian Theatre in 1670.

At Cambridge, graduation ceremonies are called Congregations and have taken place in the Senate House since the Eighteenth Century. The largest Congregation, known as General Admission, takes place in June when undergraduate degrees (and some postgraduate degrees) are conferred and each college presents its students to the Congregation on a specific day.

The earliest student residences were known as halls in Oxford and hostels in Cambridge. An Oxford commoner, ie a student who had no scholarship or exhibition, was called a pensioner in Cambridge, while a sizar at Cambridge was a servitor at Oxford, except at The Queen’s College where a servitor was a tabarder or taberdar. Samuel Pepys and William Wordsworth were both sizars, students in need of financial assistance who paid the lowest rates for room and tuition; a demy paid half the usual fee. Some sizars were forced to perform menial duties in return for their meals.v

John Eachard, a future Master of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, described the misery of his sizarship at the college between 1653 and 1655: ‘They had a very good method of saving a servant’s wages and preventing Sizars overheating their brains. Bed-making, Chamber-sweeping and Water-fetching were doubtless great preservations against too much vain Philosophy.’¹⁵

It has been said that if Cambridge contributed nothing else to the world Isaac Newton (Trinity, 1661) alone would justify its existence and yet few students rose from humbler origins. In his early years at Trinity he was a subsizar, an even lower rank than sizar, who received nothing from his college, was paid a pittance for carrying out menial tasks and was forbidden to take his meals with other students.¹⁶

Oxford also had battelers (battellars at Wadham), students ranked between commoners and servitors who received no commons but only battels, the food they could afford to buy from the buttery for themselves. The word ‘battels’ survives today in the form of ‘battels books’ containing paper tokens with which students at colleges such as Balliol pay for meals and drinks in college.

According to a Nineteenth-Century Brasenose wit, the college buttery was ‘an emporium of bread, butter and what is facetiously miscalled ale. It is commonly surrounded by a thirsty crew of duns, scouts, scullions, porters and poachers’.¹⁷ Charles Lamb gave a different impression in his 1823 essay ‘Oxford in the Vacation’ in which he ‘peeped into butteries, and sculleries, redolent of antique hospitality; the immense caves of kitchens, kitchen fireplaces, cordial recesses; ovens whose first pies were baked four centuries ago; and spits which have cooked for Chaucer!’

Chaucer never attended either University, though he knew Oxford well. His characters in The Canterbury Tales include the Clerk of Oxenford who would ‘lever have at his beddes heed/Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed,/Of Aristotle and his philosophye,/than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie’. ‘The Clerk’s Tale’ concerns Griselda, a young woman whose husband tests her loyalty in a series of cruel torments that recall the Book of Job, while ‘The Miller’s Tale’ has Nicholas, a clever Oxford scholar, using his knowledge of astronomy to seduce the wife of his landlord.

The manicured squares of grass found in most colleges are ‘courts’ in Cambridge but ‘quadrangles’ in Oxford (Mob Quadrangle at Merton being the oldest and Tom Quad, or Great Quad, at Christ Church the largest). Originally named Mary, the Tom Quad bell was rescued from Osney Abbey on its dissolution in 1545 and moved to St Frideswide’s Priory. After recasting several times and renamed Great Tom in memory of Thomas Becket, it was rehung in Wren’s late Gothic Tom Tower at Christ Church between 1681 and 1682. Great Tom rings 101 times at 9.05 every evening to commemorate the first 100 students plus one to attend ‘The House’ (as Christ Church is called from its Latin title, Aedes Christi, ‘the House of Christ’). The extra five minutes is the difference between Oxford Time and Greenwich Mean Time.

The neighbouring eight bells of Merton Chapel were cast by Christopher Hodson in 1680 and remain the oldest complete set by one founder in existence. One or two of the bells are tolled before every service, while all eight are rung on special occasions such as Remembrance Sunday (half-muffled), Shrove Tuesday (to commemorate the Founder, Walter de Merton) and the reigning sovereign’s Official Birthday.

At Cambridge, the clock of King Edward’s Tower in the Great Court at Trinity College has struck every hour twice since the early Eighteenth Century, once for Trinity and once for its neighbour St John’s, which has no clock. Trinity’s Master, Richard Bentley, a St John’s alumnus, ordered that the clock chime first on a low note, A flat, for Trinity and then on a higher note, E flat, for St John’s.¹⁸

Trinity is also home of the Great Court Run, a race against time in which competitors attempt to cover the 355-metre circumference in the 43 seconds it takes for the double strike at twelve o’clock. The first athlete to achieve this feat was the Olympic hurdler David Brownlow, later Lord Burghley (1905-1981). An honorary credit was given to the 1924 Olympic 100 metres gold medallist Harold Abrahams, a Caian scholar, in Chariots of Fire.¹⁹

College cleaners are ‘bedders’ and ‘gyps’ (from the Greek word for vulture) in Cambridge and ‘scouts’ in Oxford. A Doctor of Philosophy degree is a ‘Ph. D.’ at Cambridge and a ‘D. Phil.’ at Oxford. The regular teaching meetings between student and don are ‘tutorials’ at Oxford and ‘supervisions’ at Cambridge, although both Universities have tutors. One tutor at St John’s, Cambridge, was given the daunting responsibility of keeping his students out of the company of ‘Tobacco takers, Drinkers and Swaggereres’. ‘Handshaking’ happens at Oxford at the end of term when scholars meet their tutors for a frank assessment of their progress (or lack thereof).

College staircases leading to the sets or chambers in Oxford are typically numbered in Roman numerals, while those in Cambridge are assigned letters (minus J out of tradition in some colleges, with double letters when there are more than twenty-five or twenty-six staircases). There is unanimity about one thing: rooms for undergraduates and fellows at both Oxford and Cambridge colleges have two wooden doors at the entrance which Charles Astor Bristed, an American alumnus of Trinity, Cambridge, likened in the 1840s to ‘the portals of a feudal dungeon’.²⁰

Inside, however, there was nothing mean or subterranean about many of the sets which might have several cosy, well-furnished rooms. Sharing was common. At King’s College, four scholars and young fellows were quartered in each chamber, which bore a distinctive name, such as ‘The Tolebothe’, ‘Horsekeeper’s Inn’ or ‘Barber’s Inn’, while the fellows’ chambers had two instead of four beds.²¹

When the outer door (‘the oak’) is open, visitors are welcome to knock on the inner door but if the occupant has closed the outer door (‘sported the oak’), he is either absent or wishes to be left alone. The Rev. Henry John Crickitt Blake (King’s, 1809) noted in his memoirs, The Cantab, ‘When once the oak is sported, no Fellow or Officer of a College has any right to gain admission to whatever scenes may be going on within the sacred doors.’²²

At University College, Percy Bysshe Shelley, the seventeen-year-old son of a baronet, regarded the oak as ‘a blessing’ because it protected him from bores. ‘The oak alone goes far towards making this place a paradise,’ he told his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg. ‘In what other spot in the world, surely none that I have hitherto visited, can you say confidently, it is perfectly impossible, physically impossible, that I should be disturbed?’²³

Several colleges in both places bear the same name - Pembroke, Corpus Christi, Jesus, St John’s and Trinity - but while the two Jesus colleges and the two Corpus Christies are paired as sisters, this is not always the case. St John’s, Oxford, is the sister college of Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, and St John’s, Cambridge, is the sister college of Balliol, Oxford. Pembroke, Cambridge, is paired with The Queen’s College, Oxford, while Pembroke, Oxford, partners Queens’, Cambridge. Magdalene, Cambridge, which was originally spelled ‘Magdalen’, is paired with Magdalen, its namesake in Oxford. Students are Jesuans at Jesus, Johnians at St John’s, Trinitarians at Trinity, Corpuscles at Corpus Christi, Mertonians at Merton, Emmanuelists at Emmanuel and Caians at Gonville and Caius. As the only surviving medieval hall, the members of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, are known as Aularians from ‘aula’, the Latin word for ‘hall’.

Each University hierarchy consists of the Chancellor, the Vice-Chancellor, the Heads of House, the Regent Masters (Masters of Arts with responsibilities for teaching) and the Non-Regent Masters (the rest of the graduate community). The Heads of House have a number of different titles. At Oxford, All Souls, Merton, Wadham and New College have a Warden; Magdalen, Corpus Christi, St John’s and Trinity a President; University, Brasenose and Jesus a Principal; Exeter and Lincoln a Rector; Oriel and Queen’s a Provost; Balliol a Master; and Christ Church a Dean. All heads of Cambridge colleges have the title of Master except King’s, where the head is styled Provost, and Queens’, which has a President. Trinity Cambridge remains the only college whose Master is nominated by the Crown on the recommendation of the Prime Minister.

Both Universities have ‘dons’, a Seventeenth Century term from the Latin dominus for lord or master of a house, though Cambridge lexicographers insist the term is correctly applied only at Oxford. Properly used, a don is a teaching fellow of a college but in common usage it denotes any resident senior member of the University. According to Reginald Ross Williamson (Emmanuel, 1924), ‘donnishness’ used to infer an attitude of God-given superiority. ‘It was possible to obtain a life fellowship of a college at the age of twenty-one,’ he wrote in Ackermann’s Cambridge (1951), ‘and to live for ever afterwards in superb comfort, to dine daily at as good a table as there was in England, to enjoy the respect of the young – and, if you desired, to become thoroughly nasty.’

Vicesimus Knox, a senior fellow at St John’s, Oxford, in the 1770s, saw himself as ‘a little monarch within the verge of my college. The statutes required that persons of the lower degrees should pass before me, nay, stand in the quadrangle whenever I was present, with heads uncovered. From this general obeisance, and from many other circumstances, I had been led to conceive myself a person of great importance.’²⁴

William Wordsworth’s nephew Charles Wordsworth recalled traveling to Oxford in the same railway carriage as his Christ Church tutor in April 1826. ‘Though I was in lecture with him all last term, and am at present, and though for the last sixteen miles we two were the only persons outside, he did not favour me with a single syllable - no, not so much as How d’ye do? Oh, the amiableness of Oxford manners.’²⁵

Leslie Stephen, a don at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, says that ‘don’ was ‘a proverbial expression for an unpleasant variety of the great genus prig’. Dons were considered ‘as mere human ciphers, or as professional bachelors supporting each other in a creed of cynical indifference’. Stephen saw himself as ‘an old don - a superannuated bachelor standing apart from all thought of domestic happiness’ until he ‘undonned’ himself and married Thackeray’s youngest daughter, Harriet ‘Minny’ Thackeray, in 1867.²⁶

Many dons, however, chose to remain bachelors for life. ‘While not necessarily homosexual,’ says Peter Parker, the biographer of A. E. Housman, ‘universities tended to be homosocial: even after women were admitted as undergraduates, they were corralled within their own colleges, leaving the masculine world of other colleges largely undisturbed’.²⁷ The Socialist Terry Eagleton described the dons he met during his stints at Trinity, Cambridge, in the 1960s and later as a professor of English at Oxford as ‘petulant, snobbish, spiteful, arrogant, autocratic and ferociously self-centred’. ‘If a don spits in your beef stew or allows his pet parrot to lacerate your cheekbone,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘he is simply being lovably idiosyncratic.’²⁸

The historian Noel Annan (King’s College, 1935), who studied generations of dons for his 1999 book The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses, advised against creating such stereotypes. He spoke admiringly of donnish specialisation, quoting the fossil-cave investigations of William Buckland (Corpus Christi, Oxford, 1801), who dropped to his knees to lick a patch of martyr’s blood in an Italian cathedral and declared, ‘I can tell you what it is; it’s bat’s urine.’²⁹

Dons usually dine with the head of house at High Table on a raised platform at the far end of the Hall. Undergraduates are also fed in Hall at long refectory-style tables but can relax over a drink and play games in the Junior Common Room in Oxford and the Junior Combination Room in Cambridge. Graduates retire to the Middle Common Room and Middle Combination Room and fellows to the Senior Common Room and Senior Combination Room.

Trinity Cambridge opened the first Combination Room of any college in 1650, with Merton following with Oxford’s first