Oxbridge and the Stamford Oath

William Whyte writes for History Today on the monopoly Oxford and Cambridge held on university education in England from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century:

From 1334 onwards, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge were required to swear an oath that they would not give lectures outside these two English universities. It was a prohibition occasioned by the secession in 1333 of men from Oxford to the little Lincolnshire town of Stamford. They were escaping the violence and chaos which often attended medieval university life – the frequent battles between students, and between students and other communities within the town – the same conditions, in fact, which had led an earlier generation of scholars to up sticks and leave Oxford for Cambridge. But their action now threatened both universities, and so the Stamford experiment had to be suppressed. The sheriff of Lincoln, the lord chancellor, even the king, Edward III, were all called into play and the result became known as the ‘Stamford Oath’; an oath which Oxford and Cambridge graduates continued to swear until 1827. 

England was thus different than countries on the European Continent or even than Scotland:

This was in sharp contrast to the European experience. Just as Oxford and Cambridge were establishing and policing their unique right to produce graduates, ever growing numbers of universities were being founded across the Continent. In the 14th century new institutions appeared in towns from Pisa to Prague; from Kraków to Cahors. In the years that followed, the gap in numbers between English universities and those on the Continent grew even greater, with over 100 founded or refounded in Europe after 1500. Oxford and Cambridge remained the only universities in England. Indeed . . . in the mid-17th century, universities were springing up in such unlikely places as the small towns of Prešov in Slovakia and Nijmegen in the Netherlands. The English experience was also very unlike that of the Scots, who acquired five universities between 1451, when Glasgow opened, and 1582, when Edinburgh was established.

Whyte explains that religion played a role:

Just as the two universities wanted to control the supply of teachers and students, so the English Church and state wanted to control the universities. Universities could be – indeed, were – the source of dangerous heresies, where people learnt to think the wrong things. Oxford gave birth to the reforming, proto-Protestant Lollard movement in the 14th century. Cambridge was home to an alarming nest of evangelicals – humanist-inspired converts to church reform like the martyrs Robert Barnes (c.1495-1540) and Thomas Bilney (1495-1531) – 200 years later. With only two universities it was easier to control theological debate and even to use one of the institutions to oversee the other. It is no coincidence that the Cambridge-educated bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, together with the Cambridge-educated archbishop Thomas Cranmer, were sent to loyalist, Catholic Oxford to be tried and burnt in the 1550s.

This control was also used to remove Catholics from the universities and to restrict Protestant dissenters from attending them: Anglicans removed Puritans and Puritans removed Anglicans. Two years before the Catholic Emancipation Act passed in 1829, which opened the way for Catholics to attend Oxford or Cambridge again after a few centuries--although receiving a degree would be difficult since graduates still had to swear an oath to uphold the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England--the Stamford Oath was disavowed. 

Whyte describes why:

If the existence of this alliance helps explain why Oxbridge was successful in blocking any rivals, then the breakdown in this relationship also helps account for what happened next. The 1820s were a period of acute crisis for Church, state and the two universities alike. The decision to grant full civil liberties to Dissenters in 1828 and then to Roman Catholics in 1829 reflected – and helped enact – a breakdown in the exclusive link between the Church of England and the government. It also called into question the privileged position of Oxford and Cambridge. Still redoubts of Anglican orthodoxy, still loyal to the confessional state, they both looked, as the poet and critic Matthew Arnold would later observe of Oxford, homes ‘of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties’.

Medieval Manuscripts Digitized at the Fitzwilliam

Whenever people ignorantly refer to the Middle Ages, the long period between the Fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance, as the Dark Ages, the colorful images of medieval prayerbooks, psalters, and Bibles, and of glorious brightly colored stained glass in Gothic cathedrals are two of the best ways to correct them. Of course I know that the Middle Ages had some dark times, but what era hasn't? Seeing the brightness and vividness of the Hours of Philip the Bold and the stained glass of  the Cathedral at Chartres indicates that there's more to learn, at least, about the Middle Ages.

The Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge just opened this exhibit of medieval manuscripts to highlight the color/colour of these works:

This exhibition celebrates the Fitzwilliam’s 2016 bicentenary with a stunning display of 150 illuminated manuscripts from its rich collections. They range from the prayerbooks of European royalty and merchants to local treasures like the Macclesfield Psalter, from an alchemical scroll and a duchess’ wedding gift to the ABC of a five-year old princess.

Manuscripts were at the heart of Viscount Fitzwilliam’s collection with which the Museum was established in 1816. Many of them are displayed here for the first time. They can only be seen at the Museum due to a clause in Fitzwilliam’s bequest which prevents them from leaving the building and reveals the anxieties of the Founder who had assembled his treasures in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

The hundreds of images sheltered in volumes that were cherished in princely and religious libraries for centuries constitute the largest and best preserved repositories of medieval and Renaissance painting. With most panel and wall paintings destroyed by war, greed, puritanical zeal or time, illuminated manuscripts are the richest resources for the study of European painting between the sixth and the sixteenth century - the main focus of this exhibition. Highlights of Byzantine, Armenian, Persian and Sanskrit manuscripts are also included. Travel from eighth-century Northumbria to seventeenth-century Nepal via Oxford, Paris, Bruges, Cologne, Florence, Venice, Constantinople, Jerusalem and Kashmir.

Discover the secrets of original masterpieces and modern forgeries. Find out what cutting-edge technologies reveal about their painting materials, and the images’ meaning and value to their owners.

You may sample the digitized images here, and notice those English books that survived the Reformation, as well as those that survived the French Revolution.

Thomas Babington Macaulay the Whig

I found this resource from the University of Cambridge for prospective undergraduate history majors. One of their topics is "The Whig Tradition" of English history, focused on Thomas Babington Macaulay's The History of England:

This important strand in British historiography derives its name from one of the two main political parties in parliament in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the other party were known as Tories. Whigs tended to stress the importance of parliament, as a counterbalance to the Crown and of the Church of England; Tories were much more deeply attached to the power and authority of Crown and Church.

The Whig view of history grew out of the unprecedented strength and prosperity of mid-nineteenth century Britain, which led the world in scientific and technological development and ruled an empire which stretched from Canada to South Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand and the Caribbean. It is little wonder that the Victorians saw themselves as the heirs to the Romans, but with one important difference: instead of an autocratic emperor, the British had a limited, parliamentary monarchy which, they believed, placed Britain on a higher moral plane; as a result the Victorians tended to revere institutions such as parliament, the Church of England, the legal system, the universities and the monarchy, as components of a perfectly balanced constitution, a model for other countries to follow. When the Victorians asked themselves how they had come to live in such an apparently perfect society, they looked for an explanation to the history of England. . . .

Central to the Whig interpretation of history was the long conflict between Crown and Parliament that dominated the seventeenth century. While they regretted the bloodshed of the Civil War and the execution of King Charles I, the Whigs saw the defeat of the Crown and its subjugation to Parliament as essential to the establishment of a free society. However, in 1660 the Stuart monarchy returned. King Charles II, and especially his Catholic brother, James II, seemed to pose a formidable threat to the supremacy of parliament and appeared to be trying to establish Catholic autocratic rule in England. How, in the crucial year 1688, parliament was able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and lay the foundations for the prosperity of Victorian Britain was the story that the Whig writer and administrator Thomas Babington Macaulay set out to tell in his History of England.

Macaulay was a firm believer in the superiority and moral integrity of Britain's institutions. As a member of the government of British India he had dismantled the previous education system by which British administrators learned about the history, languages and culture of India, in favour of an entirely western curriculum, declaring scornfully that there was more value in a shelf of western authors than in the whole literary culture of the east. He applied much the same bumptious self-confidence to his reading of English history, which he sought to relate in an engaging style that, he hoped, would make his book as popular a read as the latest novel. In that aim he certainly succeeded.

The site then offers an excerpt from Macaulay and analyses his method, language, and use of sources. Other topics are addressed on this site, including the discipline of social history, different views the Crusades, etc.

Matthew Parker, RIP--And His Library!

Matthew Parker, Elizabeth I's first Archbishop of Canterbury, and formerly one of Anne Boleyn's chaplains, died on May 17, 1575. In 1574 he gave his library, including a collection of books and manuscripts from the monasteries dissolved from 1536 to 1540, to Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge. According to this website:

Matthew Parker (1504-75) was a powerful figure of the English Reformation who was largely responsible for the Church of England as a national institution. Parker's talents were sought by both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. He served as chaplain to Anne Boleyn and proved himself a capable administrator, becoming Master of Corpus Christi College (1544-53), Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, and Archbishop of Canterbury (1559-75). A benefactor to the University of Cambridge, Parker's greatest tangible legacy is his library of manuscripts and early printed books entrusted to Corpus Christi College in 1574. He was an avid book collector, salvaging medieval manuscripts dispersed at the dissolution of the monasteries; he was particularly keen to preserve materials relating to Anglo-Saxon England, motivated by his search for evidence of an ancient English-speaking Church independent of Rome. The extraordinary collection of documents that resulted from his efforts is still housed at Corpus Christi College, and consists of items spanning from the sixth-century Gospels of St. Augustine to sixteenth-century records relating to the English Reformation.

The Parker Library's holdings of Old English texts account for a substantial proportion of all extant manuscripts in Anglo-Saxon, including the earliest copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (c. 890), unique copies of Old English poems and other texts, and King Alfred's translation of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care. The Parker Library also contains key Anglo-Norman and Middle English texts ranging from the Ancrene Wisse and the Brut Chronicle to one of the finest copies of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Other subjects represented in the collection are theology, music, medieval travelogues and maps, apocalypses, bestiaries, royal ceremonies, historical chronicles and Bibles. The Parker Library holds a magnificent collection of English illuminated manuscripts, such as the Bury and Dover Bibles (c. 1135 and c. 1150) and the Chronica maiora by Matthew Paris (c. 1230-50). Scholars in a variety of disciplines - including historians of art, music, science, literature, politics and religion - find invaluable resources in the Library's collection.

More biographical information here, at his alma mater.