Oxford University

Oxford University. When the quarrel between Henry II and Philip Augustus in 1167 made it impossible for English students to attend the University of Paris, the opportunity for developing a similar institution arose at Oxford. The town was already the residence of kings and by 1186 Gerald of Wales was lecturing to doctors, masters, and scholars. By the beginning of the 13th cent. there was a sufficient body of scholars to cause an encounter with the townspeople in 1209, leading to the long-running ‘town versus gown’ dispute.

Dominican friars established their main house of study there on arrival in England in 1221 and were followed in 1224 by the Franciscans. Divinity was constituted as a superior faculty and students were admitted who already possessed an arts degree. Until the dissolution of the monasteries, Oxford came within the diocese of Lincoln, with the chancellor appointed by the bishop. The first recorded chancellor was the great scholar Robert Grosseteste.

University colleges, endowed by patrons, were gradually formed where students resided during their long courses of study. Though the claim that University College was founded by Alfred the Great is no longer seriously entertained, the donation by William of Durham on which it was founded came in 1249. John Balliol left money which his widow applied to founding Balliol College in 1282. Earlier, in 1264, Walter de Merton, chancellor of England, devoted most of his fortune to establishing Merton College. Clerical patrons were particularly prominent and included William of Wykeham, who founded New College (1379), Richard Foxe, who founded Corpus Christi College (1517), and Cardinal Wolsey, whose great college became Christ Church in 1546. Undergraduates were admitted for the first time about 1500. By Elizabeth's reign, there were fifteen colleges, including Oriel (1324), All Souls (1438), and Brasenose, refounded 1502 by William Smyth, bishop of Lincoln. As at Cambridge, they increasingly attracted the sons of wealthy or aristocratic families rather than poor scholars.

The Oxford statutes were revised in 1636 by Archbishop Laud, a great benefactor to the university. Oxford became associated with high-church views, reinforced after the 1640s when the city was the headquarters of the royalist army during the Civil War. In the early Hanoverian period it was reputed a nest of Jacobitism, though such disloyalty as there was caused the authorities little more than momentary irritation. More than two-thirds of its graduates entered the Church of England, and the Oxford movement in the 19th cent. reflected their concerns about priesthood.

The 19th cent. saw the beginnings of change. Degrees were no longer awarded without written examination. Honours degrees in both classics and mathematics were introduced in 1801, creating the ‘double first’, and a similar provision was made for science and law in 1890. Further reforms followed the Oxford University Act of 1854, pushed through by Gladstone and instituting a new and less oligarchical constitution, and in 1871 the requirement that dons should be in holy orders was abandoned.

From the last quarter of the 19th cent. the number of Oxford colleges began to increase. The first two colleges for women were Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville (1879), and since 1937 colleges for postgraduate study, such as Nuffield, St Antony's, Linacre, and Wolfson, have been founded.

Peter Gordon