Life in the Medieval UniversityRait, Robert S. (Robert Sangster)
History
Life in the Medieval University
Rait, Robert S. (Robert Sangster)
College students -- Europe -- History; Education, Medieval; Universities and colleges -- Europe -- History
Minor penalties were enforced by the Head of a college, the Vice-Head,
the Deans, and, in sixteenth-century colleges, by the tutors. By later
college statutes, these officers received for their personal use a
portion of the fines they inflicted, and appeals were sometimes
permitted from an officer to the Head, and even to the Chancellor or
Vice-Chancellor of the University. The oath taken by scholars
frequently bound them to reveal to the authorities, any breach of the
statutes, and there are indications that members of the College were
encouraged to report each other's misdeeds. Thus the Master of
Christ's is to fine anyone whom he hears speaking one complete
sentence in English, or anyone whom he may know to have been guilty of
this offence, except in sleeping-rooms or at times when permission had
been given.
Oxford and Cambridge Colleges were, as we have seen, endowed homes for
the education of secular clerks. All of them, on entrance, had to have
the tonsure, and provision was often made for the cutting of their
hair and beard. At Christ's College, there was a regular College
barber "qui ... caput et barbam radet ac tondebit hebdomadis singulis."
They wore ordinary clerical dress, and undue expenditure on clothes
and ornaments was strictly prohibited, _e.g._ the Fellows of (p. 070)
Peterhouse were forbidden to wear rings on their fingers "ad inanem
gloriam et jactantiam." The early founders did not insist upon Holy
Orders for the Heads or Fellows of their colleges, though many of them
would naturally proceed to the priesthood, but in later college
statutes all the Fellows were ultimately to proceed, at stated times,
to Holy Orders and to the priesthood, though dispensations for delay
might be granted, and students of Medicine were sometimes excused from
the priesthood. When they became priests they were, like other
priests, to celebrate mass regularly in the Chapel, but were not to
receive payment for celebrations outside the College. As mere tonsured
undergraduates, they were not, at first, subject to regulations for
daily attendance at divine service; but later founders were stricter
in this, as in other matters. Bishop Bateman, who, in the middle of
the fourteenth century, legislated for the infant Gonville College,
ordered that every Fellow should hear one mass daily and say certain
prayers, and in his own foundation of Trinity Hall, he repeated the
injunction. The prescribed prayers included petitions for the Founder,
or for the repose of his soul; every Fellow of Trinity Hall was to
say, immediately upon rising in the morning and before going to bed at
night, the prayer "Rege quaesumus Domine," during the Bishop's lifetime,
and after his death, "Deus qui inter Apostolicos Sacerdotes," and (p. 071)
to say the psalm "De profundis clamavi" and a "Kurie eleeson" for the
repose of the soul of the Founder's father and mother, his predecessors
in the see of Norwich, and after his death for his own soul. The ten
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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