,
with some modifications, survived the Reformation, and it was not till
the nineteenth century that the Mayor of Oxford ceased to have cause
to regret the battle of St Scholastica's Day.

The accounts of St Scholastica's Day and of most other riots which (p. 127)
have come down to us are written from the standpoint of the scholars,
but the records of the city of Oxford give less detailed but not less
credible instances of assaults by members of the University. On the
eve of St John Baptist's Day in 1306, for example, the tailors of
Oxford were celebrating Midsummer "cum Cytharis Viellis et aliis
diversis instrumentis." After midnight, they went out "de shoppis
suis" and danced and sang in the streets. A clerk, irritated by the
noise, attacked them with a drawn sword, wounded one of them, and was
himself mortally wounded in the skirmish. Of twenty-nine coroners'
inquests which have been preserved for the period 1297-1322, thirteen
are murders committed by scholars. Attacks on townsmen were not mere
undergraduate follies, but were countenanced and even led by officials
of the University, _e.g._ on a March night in 1526 one of the proctors
"sate uppon a blocke in the streete afore the shoppe of one Robert
Jermyns, a barber, havinge a pole axe in his hand, a black cloake on
his backe, and a hatt on his head," and organised a riot in which many
townsmen were "striken downe and sore beaten." Citizens' houses were
attacked and "the saide Proctour and his company ... called for fire,"
threatening to burn the houses, and insulting the inmates with
opprobrious names. When such an incident as this was possible, it (p. 128)
was of little use for the University to issue regulations or even to
punish less exalted sinners, and the town must have suffered much from
the outrages of scholars and of the "chamber-dekens" or pretended
scholars of the University, who were responsible for much of the
mischief. At Paris things became so bad that the Parlement had to
issue a series of police regulations to suppress the bands of
scholars, or pretended scholars, who wandered about the streets at
night, disguised and armed. They attacked passers-by, and if they were
wounded in the affray, their medical friends, we are told, dressed
their wounds, so that they eluded discovery in the morning. The
history of every University town provides instances of street
conflicts--the records of Orleans and Toulouse abound in them--but we
must be content with