the old symbols of authority. The Bedels, being good Royalists, had gone off with their official staves, and refused to surrender them to the usurping intruders. Resolution after resolution was passed to remedy the defect; the Visitors were reduced to ordering that the stipends of suppressed lectureships should be applied to the purchase of staves, and were finally compelled to appeal to the colleges for contributions towards the replacing of these signs of authority. The present staves date from the eighteenth century, while the old ones[19] rest in honourable retirement at the University Galleries. Though the office of Bedel has ceased to be in our own days a matter of high University politics, it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the part played by the Bedel of the Faculty of Arts in the degree ceremony. It is he who marshals the candidates for presentation, distributes the testaments on which they have to take their oath, and superintends the retirement of the Doctors and the M.A.s into the Apodyterium, whence they return under his guidance in their new robes, to make their bow to the Vice-Chancellor and Proctors.[20] If the truth must be added, he is often relied on by these officers to tell them what they have to do and to say. [Sidenote: The Proctors.] If the Vice-Chancellor is responsible for order in the Congregation, and actually admits to the degree, the Proctors, as representatives of the Faculty of Arts, play an equally important part in the ceremony. These officials are to the undergraduate without doubt the most prominent figures in the University; they form the centre of a large part of Oxford mythology; it may be said (it is to be hoped the comparison is not irreverent) that they play much the same part in Oxford stories as the Evil One does in mediaeval legends, for like him they are mysterious and omnipresent beings, powerful for mischief, yet often not without a sense of humour, who are by turns the oppressors and the butts of the wily undergraduate. To most Oxford men it comes as a discovery, about the time they take their degree at the earliest, that the Proctors have many other things to do besides looking after them. The office goes back to the very beginnings of the University and is first mentioned in 1248, when the Proctors are associated with the Chancellor in the charter of Henry III, which gave the University a right to interfere in the assize of bread and beer.