SERLO OF WILTON AND THE SCHOOLS OF OXFORD

Abstract

SERLO OF WILTON AND THE SCHOOLS OF OXFORD Over the last twenty years received opinion on the earliest development of Oxford University has altered. Of course the old myth of Anglo-Saxon origins was already long gone; but until Sir Richard Southern's 197 5 article on Master Vacarius, everyone had in mind a picture of slow and more-or-less continuous development between the early years of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the question of why it happened had hardly been approached.' Now, after Southern's chapter in the History of the University of Oxford, his magisterial interpretation holds the floor, defying challenge alike by its intellectual acuity, its rhetorical force, and the reputation of the author.2 The essence of the Southernian view may be given using his own words: The evidence for a flourishing school of theology at Oxford in the reign of Henry I hangs on the work of two men, Theobald of Etampes ... and Robert Pullen. But on a close inspection it appears likely that Theobald was no more than a schoolmaster who never taught theology at all; and Robert Pullen, who was certainly a serious teacher of theology, stayed only for a few years before going off to the richer pastures of Paris. With him advanced teaching in Oxford emerges for a dim instant only to return almost at once to total obscurity.... On a general view, therefore, there is no evidence of continuous scholastic activity on anything but the humblest level in the first half of the twelfth century. Thereafter ... there is not a single lecturer who can be named at Oxford after Robert Pullen's departure in about 1137 until Alexander Nequam's arrival in about 1190. No doubt schoolmasters continued to teach elementary subjects to unexacting pupils; no doubt also these lowly tasks and aims gradually opened up more specialized fields and more ambitious aims. But the process has left no names until the last decade of the century.3 Southern discounts the possible exception of Master Vacarius, partly because the evidence for his English career seems to locate him elsewhere, but mainly because `there is no evidence of a continuing academic tradition at Oxford until the last years of the twelfth century'.4 The allegedly sudden and considerable change in the 1190os is attributed by Southern to the state of war between England and France, which forced English students to pursue advanced studies at home rather than at Paris, and to the geographical suitability of Oxford for the pursuit of legal studies in particular. Many aspects of this account, both of the chronology and the causation, might be questioned; but let us begin by recognizing that a large part of it hinges on argument ex silentio. Even the identification of a single master teaching at an advanced level in Oxford between c.1140 and c.1190 would cast doubt on the interpretation, and the more such who can be identified the greater the doubt. One identification - in fact a set of identifications - has already been made. In the 197os Henry Mayr-Harting discovered what he has since called `the earliest surviving list of Oxford dons', datable between 1174 and 1180.5 The list comprises nine named persons, `and others', name and number unspecified. The most interesting of the named persons is Master John of Cornwall, about whom other information is available, sufficient to have caused Southern to admit the likelihood that he `was teaching Law and/ or Theology in Oxford after his return from Paris in about 1160'.6 Despite this acknowledgement, Southern was not prepared to modify the broad outlines of his thesis as adumbrated in the History of the University of Oxford. As Professor Mayr-Harting says, presumably this was on the grounds that one swallow does not make a summer. But the importance of the list lies precisely in its evidence that by the 1170s Oxford was already recognized, by judges and parties from far away, as a place where many learned lawyers could be found to provide advice. …