"How dare you disturb the peace again, you good-for-nothing brawlers?" he cried in ringing accents. "Let me have such another scene within the week, and I will have some of you to answer for it in the Chancellor's Court. As if it were not enough that you must be fighting the burgesses, fighting the citizens, fighting the Jews, but ye must be fighting one another too, and that in broad daylight, when you should be at your studies. To your Halls and lodgings, every man of you; and if I hear of such another brawl as ye come from lecture, I will deal differently with some of you." The clerks, who had pulled up suddenly at sight of this stalwart functionary, now began to slink away this way and that. Many of them were mere lads, led on by the boyish instinct of fighting; a few were evilly-disposed rogues, who were always to be found in the streets, ready for any brawl; others, again, were scholars who had followed in the wake of the crowd, with an idle interest in anything that savoured of a fight rather than with any particular desire to take part in it. These sorts of frays were of almost daily occurrence in old Oxford, and only when they became too numerous or too severe was any particular notice taken of them. The students for the most part lived and brawled, studied and played, very much as it pleased them, and a fight, with many or with few, was part of the day's work. Jack espied Gilbert at the edge of the crowd, and made for him quickly. "What is the matter? and who is he that stayed the fight?" he asked, with eager curiosity; and Gilbert answered, laughing,-- "There is naught the matter; the fight was but a bit of play as the men came out from lecture. We have such almost every day, and they seldom come to more than a few cracked crowns. Yon man of the gown is the Proctor of the South. There be two such in the University, one for the North and one for the South; and I trow they have their hands full to keep order sometimes! But come along, let us to dinner, and ye shall tell your news." CHAPTER V. _THE NEW LIFE._ Before a week had passed away, Leofric and Jack felt as though they had been months at Oxford, so many new experiences had been crowded into that short space. The more they saw of the strange life of the place, the more glad were they of the chance which had given to them this little private shelter of their own, instead of casting them amongst a number of strange clerks in one of the poorer Halls or lodgings of the city.