In the thirteenth or fourteenth century some Oxford citizen would build a pair of cottages, where a carpenter and an innkeeper came to live. At the inrush of students to welcome a famous lecturer, the spare rooms of those cottages received their share. Some of the lodgers stayed on, liked the carpenter and his wife and family, with whom they lived on terms of social equality; and in a generation the tradition of entertaining scholars was established. A few years saw the formation of a colony of students from one countryside or great estate. As the custom was, they chose a superior from among their number. In those days, if an American had run upstairs to the head, he might have had a more satisfactory answer than he had yesterday to his command: “I’ve come to take rooms in your college!” for the hostel was, roughly speaking, an hotel. The members fought side by side in the battles of the nations (viz. Northerners, Southerners, etc.), and of town and gown. They bent over the same books. They sang the same songs. And together they came to love the place, the two cottages and those adjacent into which they had overflowed. Such a group fled from the ancient Brasenose Hall to Stamford, in one of the University migrations, in 1334; carried with them the knocker of their lodgings in the shape of a brazen nose, and fixed it to the door of their “Brasenose Hall in Stamford.” If they forgot to take it back on their return, it nevertheless “got perched upon the top of the pineal gland” of the college brain; and with characteristic spirited piety the descendants of the old hall-men found it out in 1890, and hung it in a place of honour and safety. In later life one of the carpenter’s tenants became a bishop, or a royal almoner. Either at the height of his fame and wealth, or on his deathbed, he would remember his old retreat, and its associations with law and Aristotle and Breed and chese and good ale in a jubbe. There his old friends or their successors still dwelt, and learned and taught and fought. So he gave money for the purchase of the cottages; a neighbouring garden plot, perhaps a strip of woodland outside the walls, and the rents of some home farms for the revenue; together with the advowson of a church--if possible the one which he remembered best in Oxford, or if not, then one within his diocese or influence. He sketched the statutes, which fixed the number of the scholars and the rules for electing new ones and a head. He himself chose the first head. The scholars were to remain unmarried and in residence; to study the Arts, or Theology, or Canon and Civil Law; and to pray for his soul.