Then it must be remembered that the scholarship took a
quasi-ecclesiastical form. The universities were all monastic
institutions, where the teachers were professional and the students
amateur celibates. The scholars were gathered into hostels in which they
lived with their teachers, and were taught to consider themselves very
superior persons. The statutes of mediæval Oxford declare that God created
“clerks” with gifts of intelligence denied to mere lay persons; that it
behoved “clerks” to exhibit this difference by their outward appearance;
and that the university tailors, whose duty it was to make men
_extrinsecus_ what God had made them _intrinsecus_, were to be reckoned as
members of the University. Those mediæval students sometimes assumed airs
which roused the passions of the laity, and frequently led to tremendous
riots. Thus in 1513 the townsfolk of Erfurt battered in the gates of the
University with cannon, and after the flight of the professors and
students destroyed almost all the archives and library. About the same
time some citizens of Vienna having jeered at the sacred student dress,
there ensued the “Latin war,” which literally devastated the town. This
pride of separation between “clerks” and laity culminated in the great
annual procession, when the newly capped graduates, clothed in all the
glory of new bachelors’ and masters’ gowns and hoods, marched through the
principal streets of the university town, in the midst of the university
dignitaries and frequently attended by the magistrates in their robes.
Young Luther confessed that when he first saw the procession at Erfurt he
thought that no position on earth was more enviable than that of a newly
capped graduate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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