eenth-century editor of Wood
asserts, that "striking traces" of the practice "may be found in many
societies in this place, and in some a very near resemblance of it has
been kept up till within these few years." Our quotation from Wood may
therefore serve to illustrate the treatment of the medieval freshman
at Oxford. We possess no details of the jocund advent at Cambridge,
but in the medieval Scottish universities, where the name of bajan
still survives, there were relics of it within recent times. At St
Andrews, a feast of raisins was the last survival of the bajan's
"standing treat," and attacks made by "Semis" (second year men) upon a
bajan class emerging from a lecture-room were an enlivening feature of
student life at Aberdeen up to the end of the nineteenth century. The
weapons in use were notebooks, and the belabouring of Aberdeen (p. 123)
bajans with these instruments may be historically connected with the
chastisement which we have found in some of the medieval initiation
ceremonies. It would be fanciful to connect the gown-tearing, which
was also a feature of these attacks, with the assaults upon the
Rector's robe at Bologna.

CHAPTER VII (p. 124)

TOWN AND GOWN

The violence which marked medieval life as a whole was not likely to
be absent in towns where numbers of young clerks were members of a
corporation at variance with the authorities of the city. University
records are full of injuries done to masters and students by the
townsfolk, and of privileges and immunities obtained from Pope or King
or Bishop at the expense of the burgesses. When a new University was
founded, it was sometimes taken for granted that these conflicts must
arise, and that the townsmen were certain to be in the wrong. Thus,
when Duke Rudolf IV. founded the University of Vienna in 1365, he
provided beforehand for such contingencies by ordaining that an attack
on a student leading to the loss of a limb or other member of the body
was to be punished by the removal of the same member from the body of
the assailant, and that for a lesser injury the offender's hand was to
be wounded ("debet manus pugione transfigi"). The criminal might
redeem his person by a fine of a hundred silver marks for a serious
injury and of forty marks for slighter damages, the victim to (p. 125)
receive half of the fine. Assailants of students were not to have
benefit of sanctuary. Oxfor