k, and a student caught off the grounds without leave was
punished. The teacher was a vicarious soldier. At that time each school
had a prison attached, of which the "carcer" at Heidelberg is the
surviving type. Up to the Sixteenth Century, every university was a kind
of castle or fort, and the students might at any time be compelled to do
military duty. The college had its towers for fighting-men, its high
walls, its fortressed fronts and iron gates. These gates and walls still
survive in rudimentary form, and the sixteen-foot spiked steel fence at
Harvard is the type of a condition that once was an actual necessity:
the place was a law unto itself, paid no taxes, and at any time might be
raided. Colleges yet pay no taxes and are also quasi-mendicant
institutions.

It was not until well into the Sixteenth Century that requirements,
examinations, system and discipline began to dawn upon the world. Before
that, a student was a kind of troubadour, a cross between a monk and a
crusader, a knight-errant of love and letters, and the moral code for
him did not apply. An argument can be made for his chivalric tendencies,
and his pretense for learning had its place, for affectation is better
than indifference. The roistering student is not wholly bad.

Poetry and love-making were to the velvet-breeched youth the real
business of life. Like knights in armor, he often wore the colors of a
lady who merely smiled at him from a latticed window. If she dropped for
him her glove or handkerchief, he was in the seventh heaven. As his
intents were not honorable nor his purpose marriage, it made no
difference whether the lady was married or single, young or old. Whether
the love remained upon a Platonic and purely poetic basis depended, of
course, entirely upon the lady and her watchful relatives. If the family
were poor and the lover rich, these things might have a bearing. We hear
of alliances in those days, not dishonorable, where the husband was
complacent and looked upon it as a distinction to have worthy scions of
greatness pay court to his wife. Such men were referred to as
"fribblers" or "tame-cats." The woman was often much older than the
alleged student, and this seems to have been no disadvantage, for charms
o'erripe are oft alluring to a certain type of youth.

Such things now would lead to headlines in the daily papers and
snapshots of all parties concerned, followed by divorce-court
proceedings. Then, even among honorable