"every freshman according to seniority, was to pluck off his gowne and band and if possible to make himself look like a scoundrell. This done, they conducted each other to the high table, and there made to stand on a forme placed thereon; from whence they were to speak their speech with an audible voice to the company; which if well done, the person that spoke it was to have a cup of cawdle and no salted drink; if indifferently, some cawdle and some salted drink; but if dull, nothing was given to him but salted drink or salt put in college beere, with tucks to boot. Afterwards when they were to be admitted into the fraternity, the senior cook was to administer to them an oath over an old shoe, part of which runs thus: 'Item tu jurabis quod penniless bench (a seat at Carfax) non visitabis' &c. The rest is forgotten, and none there are now remembers it. After which spoken with gravity, the Freshman kist the shoe, put on his gown and band and took his place among the seniors." "This," says Wood, "was the way and custom that had been used in (p. 122) the college, time out of mind, to initiate the freshmen; but between that time and the restoration of K. Ch. 2 it was disused, and now such a thing is absolutely forgotten." His whole description, and especially the parody of the master's oath not to visit Stamford, goes to show that he was right in attributing the ceremonies to remote antiquity, and there are indications that the initiation of freshmen was practised elsewhere in Oxford. Hearne speaks of similar customs at Balliol and at Brasenose, and an eighteenth-century editor of Wood asserts, that "striking traces" of the practice "may be found in many societies in this place, and in some a very near resemblance of it has been kept up till within these few years." Our quotation from Wood may therefore serve to illustrate the treatment of the medieval freshman at Oxford. We possess no details of the jocund advent at Cambridge, but in the medieval Scottish universities, where the name of bajan still survives, there were relics of it within recent times. At St Andrews, a feast of raisins was the last survival of the bajan's "standing treat," and attacks made by "Semis" (second year men) upon a bajan class emerging from a lecture-room were an enlivening feature of student life at Aberdeen up to the end of the nineteenth century. The weapons in use were notebooks, and the belabouring of Aberdeen (p. 123) bajans with these instruments may be historically connected with the chastisement which we have found in some of the medieval initiation ceremonies. It would be fanciful to connect the gown-tearing, which was also a feature of these attacks, with the assaults upon the Rector's robe at Bologna. CHAPTER VII (p. 124) TOWN AND GOWN