harges against Parisian scholars were tried in the Bishop's
Court, and civil actions in the Court of the Provost of Paris. At
Oxford, where the whole jurisdiction belonged to the Chancellor of (p. 096)
the University, disciplinary statutes are much more numerous. We find,
from the middle of the thirteenth century onwards, a series of edicts
against scholars who break the peace or carry arms, who enter
citizens' houses to commit violence, who practise the art of sword and
buckler, or who are guilty of gross immorality. A statute of 1250
forbids scholars to celebrate their national feast days disguised with
masks or garlands, and one of 1313 restricts the carrying of arms to
students who are entering on, or returning from, long journeys.
Offenders who refuse to go to prison, or who escape from it, are to be
expelled. As early as the middle of the thirteenth century, it was the
duty of the proctors and of the principals of halls, to investigate
into, and to report the misdeeds of scholars who broke the rules of
the University or lived evil lives. A list of fines drawn up in 1432
(a period when in the opinion of the University a pecuniary penalty
was more dreaded than anything else) prescribes fines of twelve pence
for threatening violence, two shillings for wearing arms, four
shillings for a violent shove with the shoulders or a blow with the
fist, six shillings and eight pence for a blow with a stone or stick,
ten shillings for a blow with a sword, a knife, a dagger or any
similar "bellicose weapon," twenty shillings for carrying bows and
arrows with evil intent, thirty shillings for collecting an (p. 097)
assembly to break the peace, hinder the execution of justice, or make
an attack upon anyone, and forty shillings for resisting the execution
of justice or wandering about by night. In every case damages have
also to be paid to any injured person. The device of overaweing a
court (familiar in Scottish history) is prohibited by a regulation
that no one shall appear before the Chancellor with more than two
companions.

The records of the Chancellor's Court furnish us with instances of the
enforcement of these regulations. In 1434, a scholar is found wearing
a dagger and is sentenced to be "inbocardatus,"[1] _i.e._ imprisoned
in the Tower of the North Gate of the city, and another offender, in
1442, suffers a day's imprisonment, pays his fine of two shillings,
and forfeits his arms. In the same year, John Hordene, a