The Masters (42 page)

As I said, this physical contact with past time made it hard to keep one’s head. It was so easy to imagine our predecessors as they walked through the same court, dined in the same hall, drank their wine in the same combination room, elected a Master according to the same forms. It was easy to go a step further and think the election of a Master two or three hundred years ago was almost indistinguishable from ours now: it was easy to think that our predecessors and ourselves could be exchanged with no one noticing. One lost one’s sense of fact. Of course, there would be resemblances between any elections to the Mastership; take a dozen men, ask them to elect their own head, and they will go through the same manoeuvres as we were going through now; put an ambitious man like Jago in the college three hundred years ago, and he would have wanted the Mastership – put Brown there too, and he would have tried to work it for him.

But there would have been one deep difference between then and now. The dozen fellows would have been mostly youths in their early twenties. The core of solid, middle-aged, successful married men who now gave the college its strong and adult character – of these there could be no trace. The Winslows, Browns, Chrystals, Jagos, Gays, Getliffes, Crawfords could have no counterparts at all. Of the present society, one might expect to find in a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century college one or two old bachelors like Despard-Smith and Pilbrow – and apart from them only the very young. The average age of the fellows in 1937 was over fifty. In 1870 it was twenty-six. In 1800 it was twenty-seven. In 1700 it was twenty-five. For 1600 the figures are not so certain, but the average age seems to have been even less.

This juvenile nature of the society meant incidentally that the Master had a predominance quite unlike the present day. He was often elected as a young man (Francis Getliffe or I would have been a reasonable age for a seventeenth-century Master), but his dividends were much greater than the fellows’, he did most of the administration of the college, including the work of the modern bursar, he remained in the post for life and could be married. It was not an accident that the Lodge had its stately bedroom, while fellows’ sets, even those as handsome as mine, contained as sleeping places only their monastic cells. The Masters down to 1880 lived a normal prosperous adult life in the midst of celibates, young and old: and they inclined in fact to form a separate aristocratic class in Cambridge society.

By now that segregation had disappeared. The Mastership which Jago longed for would not make him rich among the fellows: as Brown calculated, he would lose a little money on it: in the comfortably middle-class Cambridge of the thirties, most dons drew in between £1,000 and £2,000, Masters as well as the rest. The old predominance and powers had gone. The position still had glamour, repute, a good deal of personal power. It carried a certain amount of patronage. But its duties had faded away. Anyone who filled it had to create for himself the work to do.

This was one of the signs which showed how the college itself was changing. The forms remained, but the college was changing now, as it had changed in essence before in its six hundred years.

Few human institutions had a history so continuous, so personal, so day-to-day, I thought one night, listening to the rain on the windows. The cathedral schools of Milan and the like have histories of a kind which takes one back to the Roman Empire; but they are not histories like the college’s, of which one could trace each step in the fabric, in the muniment-room, in the library, in the wine books, in the names scratched on the windows and cut into the walls. Over the fireplace, a couple of yards from my chair, there were four names cut in the stone: in the sixteenth century they had shared this room, and slept in bunks against the panelling: those four all became (it is strange that they came together as boys) leaders of the Puritan movement: they preached at Leyden, wrote propaganda for the Plymouth plantation, advised Winthrop before he went to Boston. Two of them died, old men, in America.

It was astonishing how much stood there to be known of all those lives. The bottles of wine drunk by each fellow were on record, back almost for two hundred years.

I looked at the names carved into the fireplace, and I reverted to my thought of a few moments before. All this physical intimacy with the past could fill one’s imagination as one sat before the fire; but there were times when it intoxicated one too much to see what the past was like. It was hard to remember, within these unchanging, yard-thick walls, how much and how often the college had changed, in all it stood for and intended to do.

It had begun as nothing very lofty. It had begun, in fact, as a kind of boarding-house. It was a boarding-house such as grew up round all the medieval universities; the universities drew students to the town, and there, as quite humble adjuncts, were houses for students to lodge – sometimes paid for by their clubbing together, sometimes maintained by an older man who paid the rent and then charged his lodgers.

The medieval universities came to full existence very quickly. They happened, it seems, because the closed, settled, stagnant world of the dark ages was at last breaking up; the towns, which had become small and insignificant in the seventh and eighth centuries, were growing again as – for some reason still not clear – trade began to flow once more over Europe, though still nothing like so freely as under the Antonines. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the exchange of trade was becoming lively; and there was a need for an educated professional class to cope with affairs that were daily growing more complex. This seems to have been the reason why western Europe suddenly broke out in universities – Bologna, Salerno, Pisa, Paris. In England Oxford became in the thirteenth century a university of European reputation; Cambridge, which originated by the simple process of a few masters leaving Oxford, setting up in the little fen market town, and starting to teach, was not a rival in the same class for a long time.

In these universities, students attended to hear the teachers lecturing in the schools. The lectures began early in the morning, finished at dusk, in the cold, comfortless, straw-strewn rooms. The stuff of the lectures, the Quadrivium and the Trivium, seems to us arid, valueless, just word-chopping; but out of it the students may have gained plenty of zest and facility in argument. The course was a very long one and many did not stay it. At the end there was a sort of examination; as with a modern PhD, everyone who stayed the course seems to have passed.

But this somewhat unattractive prospect did not put students off. They scraped money to come to Cambridge, some of them lived in bitter poverty and half-starved. There was one main motive: if they could get their degree, jobs lay ahead. Jobs in the royal administration, the courts, the church; jobs teaching in the schools – the fees were not light, and the teachers made a good living. The training was in fact vocational, and jobs lay at the end.

And the students liked the life. It was wild, free, and entirely uncontrolled. Some came as men, some as boys of fifteen or sixteen, some as children of twelve. They looked after themselves, and did as they wanted. The university offered them nothing but lectures, to which they went if they pleased. They found their own lodging, often in the garrets of the little town. Their time was their own, to talk, gamble, drink, fornicate. They seem to have been unusually active with their knives. They must have felt the wild hopes of youth, reeling hilariously through the squalid streets. Some of them wrote poems in silver Latin, full of ardour, passion, humour and despair.

The students liked their life, but no one else did. Certainly not the townspeople; nor the students’ parents; nor the teachers; nor possibly the more bookish and domesticated of the students themselves. So, almost from the origin of the university, there were attempts to get them out of their lonely lodgings into boarding-houses. Boarding-houses were cheaper, they could live four or five to a room and have meals in common – the salt meat, salt fish, beer and bread of a medieval Cambridge winter. It was possible to get a university teacher to live in the same house and keep an eye on them.

These boarding-houses had nothing to do with teaching; the students just lodged there, and went off in the morning to the schools. They were simply a sensible means of keeping those youths from the wilder excesses. Some of them were given money, rules, and became known as colleges, but their purpose remained the same.

They were a mixed crowd of people who endowed the first colleges – ecclesiastical politicians and administrators, country clergymen, noble ladies, local guilds, kings and lords. Behind the kings and noble ladies one can usually find the hand of some priestly adviser who had himself attended in the schools; those who knew the needs from direct experience set about getting money, and went as high as their influence could take them. And those who were persuaded, and provided a little money and the rents of a bit of land (for the gifts were small): what moved them? Possibly the sensible recognition of a need: not a specially important need, but one on which their confessor seemed to lay some stress. Possibly a spark of imagination. Certainly the desire to allay anxiety by having a few young clerks obliged to say each day in perpetuity a mass for the founder’s soul. Certainly the desire to have their names remembered on earth: no one likes to leave this mortal company without something to mark his place. They were the same motives, rationalized into different words, as might now have moved Sir Horace Timberlake.

The endowments were small (no founder spent anything like the equivalent in medieval money of what Sir Horace was contemplating now). These glorified boarding-houses were not ambitious affairs. They were called colleges, for that was the jargon of the day for any collection of men – there were colleges of fishmongers, cardinals and undertakers. A large proportion of the endowments went into buildings, as is the usual wish of benefactors, since buildings are easy to see and give a satisfactory impression of permanence. They were good stout simple buildings, though not as a matter of fact as stout as they looked; for the money was never enough, there was a good deal of jerry-building, and the yard-thick walls of my rooms, for instance, contained two feet of rubble. In these buildings there were just the bare necessities of a medieval community: a kitchen; a large room to eat in; stark unheated rooms where the young men could live in twos and threes and fours; a set of rooms for the university teacher who was paid to look after the college and was called the Master (he was, of course, an unmarried priest till Elizabeth’s time, and the Master’s quarters in the early colleges were nothing like the great Lodges of later years). The only luxury was the chapel, which was larger than such a small community required; it was built unnecessarily large to the glory of God, and in it masses were celebrated for the founder’s soul.

The community was usually a very small one. This college of ours was founded, by taking over a simple boarding-house, towards the end of the fourteenth century. It was given rents of a few manors in order to maintain a Master (usually a youngish teacher, a master of arts who lectured in the schools), eight fellow-scholars, who had passed their first degree and were studying for higher ones (they were normally youths of about twenty) and thirty-six scholars, who were boys coming up for the courses in the schools. These were the college; and it was in that sense that we still used the arrogant phrase ‘the college’, meaning the Master and fellows. ‘The governing body’ was a modern and self-conscious term, which betrayed a recognition of hundreds of young men, who liked to think that they too were the college. The eight fellow-scholars elected their own Master; the number stayed eight until the college received a large benefaction in the 1640s.

This was the college when it began. It was poor, unpretentious, attempted little save to keep its scholars out of mischief, counted for very little. It had the same first court as now, a Master, some of the same titles. In everything else it was unrecognizably different.

Then three things happened, as in all Oxford and Cambridge colleges at that time. Two were obvious and in the nature of things. The third, and the most important, is mysterious to this day. The first thing was that the Master and the young fellow-scholars took to looking over the young boys’ studies. They heard their exercises, heard them speak Latin, coached them in disputing. Instead of staying a simple boarding-house, the college became a coaching establishment also. Before long, the college teaching was as important as the lectures in the schools. The university still consisted of those who lectured in the schools, conducted examinations, gave degrees; but, apart from the formal examination, the colleges took over much that the university used to do.

That was bound to happen. It happened in much the same fashion in the great mother university of Paris, the university of the Archpoet, Gerson, William of Ockham, and Villon, and in Bologna, Siena, Orleans, the universities all over Europe.

It was also natural that the colleges should begin to admit not only scholars to whom grants were paid, but also boys and young men who paid their own way – the ‘pensioners’. These young men were allowed into the colleges on sufferance, but soon swamped the rest in numbers. They added to the power and influence of the colleges, and considerably to their income – though the endowments were always enough, from the foundation down to the time of Brown and Chrystal, for the fellows to survive without any undergraduates at all.

That raises the question of the third process which gave Oxford and Cambridge their strange character and which is, as I said, still unexplained. For some reason or by some chance, the colleges flourished from the beginning. They attracted considerable benefactions in their first hundred years; this college of ours, which started smaller than the average, was enriched under the Tudors and drew in two very large benefactions in the seventeenth century (it then became a moderately prosperous college of almost exactly the middle size). The colleges became well-to-do as early as the Elizabethan period; old members gave their farms and manors, complete outsiders threw in a lease of land or a piece of plate. Astonishingly quickly for such a process, the colleges became wealthy, comfortable, in effect autonomous, far more important than the university. And the process once properly started, it went on like the growth of a snowball; the colleges could attract the university teachers to be Masters or fellows, because they could pay them more. The university was poor; no one left it money, it was too impersonal for that, men kept their affection and loyalty and nostalgia for the house where they had lived in their young manhood; the university had just enough to pay its few professorships, to keep up the buildings of the schools, where the relics of the old lectures still went on; the university still had the right to examine and confer degrees. Everything else had passed to the colleges. Quite early, before the end of the sixteenth century, they did all the serious teaching; they had the popular teachers, the power, the prestige, the glamour, and the riches. As the years passed, they got steadily richer.