not literature, I wish you first to have in your
minds a vivid picture of what a University town was like, and what its
students were like during the greater part of the 12th and 13th
centuries; that is to say, after the first enthusiasm had died down, when
Oxford or Cambridge had organised itself into a _Studium Generale_, or
_Universitas_ (which, of course, has nothing to do with Universality,
whether of teaching or of frequenting, but simply means a Society.
_Universitas_ = all of us).

To begin with, the town was of wood, often on fire in places; with the
alleviation of frequent winter floods, which in return, in the words of a
modern poet, would 'leave a lot of little things behind them.' It
requires but a small effort of the imagination in Cambridge to picture
the streets as narrow, dark, almost meeting overhead in gables out of
which the house slops would be discharged after casual warning down into
a central gutter. That these narrow streets were populous with students
remains certain, however much discount we allow on contemporary bills of
reckoning. And the crowd was noisy. Men have always been ingenious in
their ways of celebrating academical success. Pythagoras, for example,
sacrificed an ox on solving the theorem numbered 47 in the first book of
Euclid; and even to-day a Professor in his solitary lodge may be
encouraged to believe now and then, from certain evidences in the sky,
that the spirit of Pythagoras is not dead but translated.

But of the mediaeval University the lawlessness, though well attested,
can scarcely be conceived. When in the streets 'nation' drew the knife
upon 'nation,' 'town' upon 'gown'; when the city bell started to answer
the clang of St. Mary's; horrible deeds were done. I pass over massacres,
tumults such as the famous one of St Scholastica's Day at Oxford, and
choose one at a decent distance (yet entirely typical) exhumed from the
annals of the University of Toulouse, in the year 1332. In that year

Five brothers of the noble family de la Penne lived together in a
Hospicium at Toulouse as students of the Civil and Canon Law. One of
them was Provost of a Monastery, another Archdeacon of Albi, another an
Archpriest, another Canon of Toledo. A bastard son of their father,
named Peter, lived with them as squire to the Canon. On Easter Day,
Peter, with another squire of the household named Aimery Beranger and
other students, having dined at a tavern, were dancing with w