a matter of
high University politics, it would be difficult to exaggerate the
importance of the part played by the Bedel of the Faculty of Arts in the
degree ceremony. It is he who marshals the candidates for presentation,
distributes the testaments on which they have to take their oath, and
superintends the retirement of the Doctors and the M.A.s into the
Apodyterium, whence they return under his guidance in their new robes,
to make their bow to the Vice-Chancellor and Proctors.[20] If the truth
must be added, he is often relied on by these officers to tell them what
they have to do and to say.

[Sidenote: The Proctors.]

If the Vice-Chancellor is responsible for order in the Congregation, and
actually admits to the degree, the Proctors, as representatives of the
Faculty of Arts, play an equally important part in the ceremony. These
officials are to the undergraduate without doubt the most prominent
figures in the University; they form the centre of a large part of
Oxford mythology; it may be said (it is to be hoped the comparison is
not irreverent) that they play much the same part in Oxford stories as
the Evil One does in mediaeval legends, for like him they are mysterious
and omnipresent beings, powerful for mischief, yet often not without a
sense of humour, who are by turns the oppressors and the butts of the
wily undergraduate. To most Oxford men it comes as a discovery, about
the time they take their degree at the earliest, that the Proctors have
many other things to do besides looking after them.

The office goes back to the very beginnings of the University and is
first mentioned in 1248, when the Proctors are associated with the
Chancellor in the charter of Henry III, which gave the University a
right to interfere in the assize of bread and beer.

Their number recalls one of the most important points in the early
history of Oxford. The division of the students according to 'Nations',
which prevailed at mediaeval Paris, and which still survives in some of
the Scotch universities, never was established in the English ones; in
this as in other respects the strong hand of the Anglo-Norman kings had
made England one. But though there was no room for division of
'Nations', there was a strongly-marked line of separation between the
Northerners and the Southerners, i.e. between those from the north of
the Trent, with whom the Scotch were joined, and those south of that
river, among whom were reckoned the Welsh an