Americans -- England -- Oxford; Education -- United States; Education, Higher -- England -- Oxford; University of Oxford
bulldogs to prog all freshmen caught at night without cap and gown.
The deficit in the university chest was made up at five shillings a
head.
One of the Vice-Chancellor's rules is that no undergraduate shall
enter an Oxford "pub." Now the only restaurant in town, Queen's, is
run in conjunction with a pub, and was once the favorite resort of all
who were bent on breaking the monotony of an English Sunday. The
Vice-Chancellor resolved to destroy this den of Sabbath-breaking, and
the undergraduates resolved no less firmly to defend their stronghold.
The result was a hand-to-hand fight with the bulldogs, which ended so
triumphantly for the undergraduates that a dozen or more of them were
sent down. In the articles of the peace that followed, it was
stipulated, I was told, that so long as the restaurant was closed
Sunday afternoons and nights, it should never suffer from the visit of
proctor or bulldog. As a result, Queen's is a great scene of
undergraduate foregatherings. The dinners are good enough and
reasonably cheap; and as most excellent champagne is to be had at
twelve shillings the bottle, the diners are not unlikely to get back
to college a trifle buffy, in the Oxford phrase.
By an interesting survival of mediæval custom, the Vice-Chancellor
has supreme power over the morals of the town, and any citizen who
transgresses his laws is visited with summary punishment. For a
tradesman or publican to assist in breaking university rules means
outlawry and ruin, and for certain offenses a citizen may be punished
by imprisonment. Over the Oxford theatre the Vice-Chancellor's power
is absolute. In my time he was much more solicitous that the
undergraduate be kept from knowledge of the omnipresent woman with a
past than that dramatic art should flourish, and forbade the town to
more than one excellent play of the modern school of comedy that had
been seen and discussed in London by the younger sisters of the
undergraduates. The woman with a present is virtually absent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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