Clerks of Oxenford: a new history of the University of Oxford

Abstract

Of the subjects in Education which exercise the talents of academics that of the universities and their historical development has achieved a scholarly respectability denied to many other topics. And that respectability is by no means spurious, as a brief survey of the range of books on the University of Oxford indicates. The work on medieval universities which is referred to throughout by the contributors to the first volume of the new History of the University of Oxford,* Dean (Hastings) Rashdall's The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (3 volumes, 1st edition Oxford 1895; new edition, edited by F. M. Powicke and A. B. Emden, Oxford 1936) is a truly monumental contribution to scholarship, a standard work deserving the description. Rashdall devotes most of Volume III to the English universities, and over half to Oxford. For the scholarship of Rashdall's third volume we have Volume I of Sir Charles Mallet's more popular History of the University of Oxford (Vols. I & II, London 1924; Vol. III, 1927) which remains widely known and readable after half a century and has been republished in a modern facsimile edition. Individual colleges have received detailed treatment in the well-known College Histories series, and the only surviving medieval hall, St Edmund Hall, is the subject of a study of great depth by A. B. Emden, its one-time Principal: An Oxford Hall in Medieval Times (Oxford 1927). Emden's authority, according to M. B. Hackett in the present volume, 'verges on the infallible', and his A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500 (3 volumes, Oxford 1957-9) has clearly been indispensable to the contributors to the new History. In addition to several short histories and studies of individual periods (such as A. D. Godley's Oxford in the Eighteenth Century of 1908) and the many outstanding individual works devoted to the nineteenth century (among them W. R. Ward's Victorian Oxford (1965), V. H. H. Green's Oxford Common Room (1957) and his subsequent works, A. J. Engel's From Clergyman to Don (1983) and John Sparrow's Clark lectures, published as Mark Pattison and the Idea of a University (1967)) there are innumerable personal accounts like Pattison's own Memoirs of 1885 and the delightful Reminiscences of Oxford by Tuckwell (1900). There is then an embarras de richesse as far as Oxford is concerned. The General Editor of the new History, Trevor Aston, discusses the merits and demerits of the available literature, notably the publications of the Oxford Historical Society from 1884 onwards-the renowned H. E. Salter (1863-1951) had a hand in 35 of