from the rostrum and committing him to Bocardo prison, an
undergraduate who had carried too far the wit of the 'Terrae Filius',
the licensed jester of the solemn Act.

[Sidenote: The Bedels.]

Fortunately the Vice-Chancellor in these more orderly days has not to
carry out discipline with his own hands in this summary fashion. He has
his attendants, the Bedels, for this purpose, who, as the statutes
order, 'wearing the usual gowns and round caps, walk before him in the
customary way with their staves, three gold and one silver.' The office
of Bedel is one of the oldest in Oxford, and is common to all
Universities; Dr. Rashdall goes so far as to say that 'an allusion to a
bidellus is in general (though not invariably) a sufficiently
trustworthy indication that a School is really a University or Studium
Generale'. The higher rank of 'Esquire Bedel' has been abolished, and
the old office has sadly shrunk in dignity; it is hard now to conceive
the state of things in the reign of Henry VII, when the University was
distracted by the counter-claims of the candidates for the post of
Divinity Bedel, when one of them had the support of the Prince of Wales,
and another that of the King's mother, the Lady Margaret, and when the
electors were hard put to it to decide between candidates so royally
backed; it was a contest between gratitude in the sense of a lively
expectation of favours to come, and gratitude for benefits already
received (i.e. the Lady Margaret Professorship of Divinity, the first
endowment of University teaching in Oxford). Even the Puritans had
attached the greatest importance to the office, and a humorous side is
given to the sad account of the Parliamentary Visitation in 1648 and the
following years, by the distress of the Visitors at the disappearance of
the old symbols of authority. The Bedels, being good Royalists, had gone
off with their official staves, and refused to surrender them to the
usurping intruders. Resolution after resolution was passed to remedy the
defect; the Visitors were reduced to ordering that the stipends of
suppressed lectureships should be applied to the purchase of staves, and
were finally compelled to appeal to the colleges for contributions
towards the replacing of these signs of authority. The present staves
date from the eighteenth century, while the old ones[19] rest in
honourable retirement at the University Galleries.

Though the office of Bedel has ceased to be in our own days