The discipline of the earlier colleges was much severer than that of to-day, but the difference is one of degree rather than of kind. The lectures in schools began at six, instead of nine; and at any hour it was forbidden to leave the college except on a studious errand. When attending out-of-college lectures, all scholars were required to go and come in a body; and in one set of statutes even a chaplain was forbidden to leave the gates, except to go to lectures or to the library, without taking at least one companion, who, in the antique phrase of the statute, was to be a "witness of his honest conversation." There were only two meals a day, dinner at ten and supper at five. Breakfast, now the great rallying-point of Oxford hospitality, was the invention of a more luxurious age. Of athletics there was none, or next to none. The only licensed hilarities were certain so-called "honest jokes," with which the tutors were in at least one case required to regale their pupils after dinner, and a "potation" which was permitted after supper, perhaps as an offset to the "honest jokes." [Illustration: NEW COLLEGE GARDENS Showing the mediæval wall of Oxford] The severity of these regulations is mainly explainable in the fact that the inmates of the colleges were fed, clothed, and housed out of the endowment, and might thus be reasonably expected to give a good account of themselves. Furthermore, they were most of them mere boys. A statute dating as late as 1527 requires that "scholars" shall be at least twelve years old. At fourteen or fifteen a scholar might become a fellow. The average age of "determining" as bachelor of arts was little if at all over seventeen. At nineteen, the age at which the modern Oxonian comes up from the public schools, the mediæval student might, if he were clever, be a master of arts, lecturing and disputing in schools for the benefit of the bachelors and scholars of the university. The modern Oxonian delights to tell visiting friends that he is forbidden by statute to play marbles on the steps of the Bodleian, and to roll hoop in the High; but if a mediæval master of arts were to "come up" to-day, he would be amused, not that so many rules framed for his boyish pupils of old should be applied to grown men, but that the men so obviously require a check to juvenile exuberance. Yet this much has been gained, that the outgrown restrictions of college life have kept Oxford wholesomely young. The survivals of the monastic system meanwhile have kept it wholesomely democratic.