taken his degree. These suppers were not voluntary entertainments, but enforced by law. At supper the talk ranges over University gossip, they tell of the scholar who lately tried to raise the devil in Grope Lane, and was pleased by the gentlemanly manner of the foul fiend. They speak of the Queen’s man, who has just been plucked for maintaining that _Ego currit_, or _ego est currens_, is as good Latin as _ego curro_. Then the party breaks up, and Stoke goes towards Merton, with some undergraduates of that college, Bridlington, Alderberk, and Lymby. At the corner of Grope Lane, out come many men of the Northern nations, armed with shields, and bows and arrows. Stoke and his friends run into Merton for weapons, and ‘standing in a window of that hall, shot divers arrows, and one that Bridlington shot hit Henry de l’Isle, and David Kirkby unmercifully perished, for after John de Benton had given him a dangerous wound in the head with his faulchion, came Will de la Hyde and wounded him in the knee with his sword.’ These were rough times, and it is not improbable that Stoke had a brush with the Town before he got safely back to Catte’s Hall. The old rudeness gave way gradually, as the colleges swallowed up the irregular halls, and as the scholars unattached, _infando nomine Chamber-Dekyns_, ceased to exist. Learning, however, dwindled, as colleges increased, under the clerical and reactionary rule of the House of Lancaster. CHAPTER III THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION WE have now arrived at a period in the history of Oxford which is confused and unhappy, but for us full of interest, and perhaps of instruction. The hundred years that passed by between the age of Chaucer and the age of Erasmus were, in Southern Europe, years of the most eager life. We hear very often—too often, perhaps—of what is called the Renaissance. The energy of delight with which Italy welcomed the new birth of art, of literature, of human freedom, has been made familiar to every reader. It is not with Italy, but with England and with Oxford, that we are concerned. How did the University and the colleges prosper in that strenuous time when the world ran after loveliness of form and colour, as, in other ages, it has run after warlike renown, or the far-off rewards of the saintly life? What was Oxford doing when Florence, Venice, and Rome were striving towards no meaner goal than perfection?