r wit and jocularity.... This familiarity, however, only
takes place when the examiners are pot-companions of the
candidate, which indeed is usually the case; for it is reckoned
good management to get acquainted with two or three jolly (p. 152)
young masters of arts, and supply them well with port previously
to the examination. If the vice-chancellor and proctors happen to
enter the school, a very uncommon event, then a little solemnity
is put on.... As neither the officer, nor anyone else, usually
enters the room (for it is reckoned very _ungenteel_), the
examiners and the candidates often converse on the last
drinking-bout, or on horses, or read the newspapers or a novel."

The supply of port was the eighteenth-century relic of the feasts
which used to accompany Determination and Inception, and with which so
many sumptuary regulations of colleges and universities are concerned.
There is a reference to a Determining Feast in the Paston Letters, in
which the ill-fated Walter Paston, writing in the summer of 1479, a
few weeks before his premature death, says to his brother: "And yf ye
wyl know what day I was mead Baschyler, I was maad on Fryday was
sevynyth, and I mad my fest on the Munday after. I was promysyd
venyson ageyn my fest of my Lady Harcort, and of a noder man to, but I
was desevyd of both; but my gestes hewld them plesyd with such mete as
they had, blyssyd be God. Hoo have yeo in Hys keeping. Wretyn at Oxon,
on the Wedenys day next after Seynt Peter."

A few glimpses of the life of this fifteenth-century Oxonian may (p. 153)
conclude our survey. Walter Paston had been sent to Oxford in 1473,
under the charge of a priest called James Gloys. His mother did not
wish him to associate too closely with the son of their neighbour,
Thomas Holler. "I wold," she says, "Walter schuld be copilet with a
better than Holler son is ... howe be it I wold not that he schuld
make never the lesse of hym, by cause he is his contre man and
neghbour." The boy was instructed to "doo welle, lerne well, and be of
good rewle and disposycion," and Gloys was asked to "bydde hym that he
be not to hasty of takyng of orderes that schuld bynd him." To take
Orders under twenty-three years of age might lead, in Margaret
Paston's opinion, to repentance at leisure, and "I will love hym
better to be a good secular man than to be a lewit priest." We next
hear of Walter in May 1478 when he wr