University of Oxford: How England's Oldest University Began

The University of Oxford grew gradually rather than being founded on one day. Masters were teaching in the town by about 1096, the schools expanded rapidly after 1167, and by the early thirteenth century Oxford was a recognised university with its own chancellor. It is the oldest university in the English-speaking world, and its medieval colleges created a model of residential education that spread across Britain and its former colonies.

Why Oxford?

In the late eleventh century Oxford was a prosperous market town on the Thames, with a royal residence nearby and several religious houses, including the priory of St Frideswide and the abbey of Osney. It sat on major roads between London, the Midlands and the West Country, which made it easy to reach for students and churchmen.

The earliest named teacher is Theobald of Étampes, a scholar from northern France who described himself as a master at Oxford in letters written around 1095–1100. In the 1130s the theologian Robert Pullen lectured in the town. These masters were individuals attracting pupils, not part of an institution. At this stage Oxford resembled the many cathedral and town schools of Europe, rather than the great centres such as Paris or Bologna.

The influx of 1167

The turning point came in the second half of the twelfth century. A widely repeated explanation links Oxford’s growth to 1167, when Henry II of England, at odds with Louis VII of France and with Archbishop Thomas Becket, is said to have ordered English clerics to return from Paris. The surviving evidence for an explicit royal ban is limited, and historians treat the date as a convenient marker rather than a proven cause.

What is clear is that Oxford’s schools grew markedly in the following decades. By about 1188 the writer Gerald of Wales could read his new book on Ireland aloud to the town’s assembled doctors and scholars over three days. By the end of the century Oxford had masters teaching the liberal arts, theology, canon law and civil law.

Town and gown

The arrival of hundreds of young clerics created tensions with townspeople that would last for centuries. Students needed lodgings, food and drink, and landlords and tradesmen were accused of overcharging. The scholars, as clerics, claimed to answer only to church courts.

In 1209 a woman was killed in Oxford, reportedly by a student. When the suspect fled, townsmen seized and hanged two or three scholars who shared his lodgings, with the approval of King John’s officials. In protest the masters suspended teaching and many scholars left. Some went to Cambridge, where their arrival helped begin the University of Cambridge.

The dispute was settled in 1214 by a papal legate, Nicholas de Romanis. The townsmen had to do penance, reduce rents for ten years, pay an annual sum for poor scholars and feed them each year. The settlement also referred to a chancellor appointed by the Bishop of Lincoln to oversee the scholars, the first clear evidence of the university as an organised body. Tradition names Robert Grosseteste, later Bishop of Lincoln, as an early head of the schools.

Conflict continued. The worst outbreak, the St Scholastica Day riot, began on 10 February 1355 with a quarrel over wine at the Swindlestock Tavern. Fighting lasted for days, and around 63 scholars were killed, along with townspeople whose number is uncertain. The king sided with the university, and the town was obliged to hold an annual act of penance that was only abandoned in 1825.

Halls and the first colleges

Most early students lived in rented houses or in academic halls run by a master. These halls were numerous and short-lived. Colleges were different: they were endowed, permanent communities with their own property and statutes, originally intended mainly for graduates studying for higher degrees.

Three colleges claim to be the oldest. University College is based on a bequest left by William of Durham in 1249. Balliol grew from payments John de Balliol was ordered to make to poor scholars around 1263, as penance for a dispute with the Bishop of Durham. Merton College, founded by Walter de Merton, Henry III’s chancellor, received statutes in 1264 and is generally regarded as the first college to govern itself fully. Its Mob Quad, built between the late thirteenth and late fourteenth centuries, is often called the oldest quadrangle in Oxford.

Others followed, including Exeter (1314), Oriel (1326), Queen’s (1341) and New College (1379), founded by William of Wykeham for an unusually large community of scholars.

Learning and scholars

A medieval student usually arrived aged about fourteen to sixteen. He studied the arts course, based on grammar, logic, rhetoric and the mathematical subjects, for around four years to become a bachelor, and three more to become a master. Advanced study in theology could take a further decade. Teaching was in Latin, by lectures on set texts and by formal disputations.

Medieval Oxford produced some of Europe’s leading thinkers. Robert Grosseteste wrote on optics and natural science; Roger Bacon promoted experiment; John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham reshaped philosophy and theology. In the fourteenth century John Wycliffe, an Oxford theologian, challenged church authority and inspired the first complete English Bible translations.

Myths and facts

How the university was organised

Like Paris, on which it was partly modelled, Oxford was a corporation, in Latin a universitas, of masters and scholars. Its teachers were grouped into faculties: arts, which every student entered first, and the higher faculties of theology, canon law, civil law and medicine. Regent masters, those actively teaching, met in a body called Congregation, which made statutes and granted degrees.

Students were divided into two “nations”: the Northerners, from north of the River Trent and Scotland, and the Southerners, who included the Welsh and the Irish. Brawls between the nations were frequent until the division was formally abolished in 1274. The chancellor, a cleric chosen by the masters and confirmed by the Bishop of Lincoln, had his own court, which tried cases involving scholars and gradually took over the policing of prices, weights and measures in the town.

Royal favour strengthened the university against the townspeople. Henry III issued charters in the 1240s and 1250s confirming its privileges, and after 1355 the chancellor gained control over the town’s markets. Oxford’s population in the thirteenth century may have included somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 scholars, though estimates vary widely.

Timeline

• c. 1095–1100: Theobald of Étampes teaches as a master in Oxford.
• 1133: Robert Pullen lectures on theology in the town.
• 1167: English scholars are reported to leave Paris; Oxford’s schools grow.
• c. 1188: Gerald of Wales reads his work to Oxford’s masters.
• 1209: Scholars are hanged by townsmen; many leave, some for Cambridge.
• 1214: A papal legate’s settlement establishes privileges and a chancellor.
• 1249: William of Durham’s bequest, the basis of University College.
• 1264: Walter de Merton issues statutes for his college.
• 1355, 10 February: The St Scholastica Day riot begins.

Why it matters

Oxford shows how a medieval university emerged from below, as a guild of teachers and students, before kings and popes gave it legal shape. Its privileges, its struggles with the town and above all its endowed colleges created a distinctive model of higher education, copied at Cambridge and later carried to North America and across the world, alongside the parallel tradition of the University of Paris.