Chapter 16

It was hardly to be expected that the progress of religion and charitable feeling should fail to raise up formidable rivals to the District Visitor. To the more ecclesiastical mind she is hardly ecclesiastical enough for the prominent part she claims in the parochial system. Her lace and Parisian bonnet are an abomination. She has a trick of being terribly Protestant, and her Protestantism is somewhat dictatorial. On the other hand, to the energetic organizer whose ideal of a parish is a well-oiled machine turning out piety and charity without hitches or friction she is simply a parochial impediment. She has no system. Her visiting days are determined by somewhat eccentric considerations. Her almsgiving is regulated by no principle whatever. She carries silly likes and dislikes into her work among the poor. She rustles into wrath at any attempt to introduce order into her efforts, and regards it as a piece of ungrateful interference. She is always ready with threats of resignation, with petty suspicions of ill-treatment, with jealousies of her fellow-workers. We can hardly wonder that in ecclesiastical quarters she is retreating before the Sister of Mercy, while in the more organized parishes she is being superseded by the Deaconess. The Deaconess has nothing but contempt for the mere "volunteer" movement in charity. She has a strong sense of order and discipline, and a hatred of "francs-tireurs." Above all she is a woman of business. She is without home or child, and her time and labour are arranged with military precision. She has her theory of the poor and of what can be done for the poor, and she rides her hobby from morning to night with an equal contempt for the sentimental almsgiving of the District Visitor and for the warnings of the political economist. No doubt an amazing deal of good is done, but it is done in a methodical fashion that is a little trying to ordinary flesh and blood. The parish is elaborately tabulated. The poor are grouped and ticketed. The charitable agencies of the parish are put in connection with the hospital and the workhouse. This case is referred to the dispensary, that to the overseer. The Deaconess prides herself on not being "taken in." The washerwoman finds that her "outdoor allowance" has been ascertained and set off against her share in the distribution of alms. The pious old woman who has played off the charity of the church against the charity of the chapel is struck off the list. The miserable creature who drags out existence on a bit of bread and a cup of tea is kindly but firmly advised to try "the house." Nothing can be wiser, nothing more really beneficial to the poor, than the work of the Deaconess, but it is a little dry and mechanical. The ill-used wife of the drunkard sighs after the garrulous sympathy of the District Visitor. The old gossip and dawdle have disappeared from the parochial charity, but with them has gone a good deal of the social contact, the sympathy of rich with poor, in which its chief virtue lay. The very vicar sighs after a little human imperfection and irregularity as he reads the list of sick cases "to be visited this morning."

The one lingering touch of feminine weakness in the Deaconess comes out in her relations with the clergy. The Deaconess is not a "Sister"--she is most precise in enforcing the distinction--but she is a woman with a difference. She has not retired from the world, but a faint flavour of the nun hangs about her. She has left behind all thought of coquetry, but she prefers to work with a married clergyman. Her delicacy can just endure a celibate curate, but it shrinks aghast from a bachelor incumbent. We know a case where a bishop, anxious to retain a Deaconess in a poor parish, was privately informed that her stay would depend on the appointment of a married clergyman to the vacant living. On the other hand, a married clergyman is as great a trial to the Sister of Mercy as an unmarried one to the Deaconess. The "Sister" idealizes the priesthood as she idealizes the poor. Their poverty is a misfortune; their improvidence an act of faith; their superstition the last ray of poetic religion lingering in this world of scepticism and commonplace. All the regularity and sense of order which exists in the Sister's mind is concentrated on her own life in the sisterhood; she is punctilious about her "hours," and lives in a perpetual tinkle of little bells. But in her work among the poor she revolts from system or organization. She hates the workhouse. She looks upon a guardian or an overseer as an oppressor of the poor. She regards theories of pauperism as something very wicked and irreligious, and lavishes her alms with a perfect faith that good must come of it. In a word, she is absolutely unwise, but there is a poetry in her unwisdom that contrasts strangely with the sensible prose of the Deaconess. While the one enters in her book of statistics the number of uneducated children, the other is trotting along the street with little Tommy in one hand and little Polly in the other on their way to the school. She has washed their faces and tidied their hair, and believes she has done service to little angels. Tommy and Polly are very far from being angels, but both sides are the happier for the romantic hypothesis. There is a good deal of romance and sentiment in the Sister's view of her work among the poor; but it is a romance that nerves her to a certain grandeur of soul. A London clergyman in whose district the black fever had broken out could get no nurses among the panic-stricken neighbours. He telegraphed to a "Home," and next morning he found a ladylike girl on her knees on the floor of the infected house, scrubbing, cleaning, putting the worn-out mother to bed, hushing the children, nursing quietly and thoroughly as few nurses could do. The fever was beaten, and the little heroine went off at the call of another telegram to charge another battery of death. It is this chivalrous poetic side that atones for the many follies of Sisterhoods; for the pauperism they introduce among the poor, the cliqueism of their inner life, the absurdities of their "holy obedience." Each of these charitable agencies in fact has its work to do, and does it in its own way. On paper there can be no doubt that the Sister of Mercy is the more attractive figure of the three. The incumbent of a heavy parish will probably turn with a smile to the more methodical labours of the Deaconess. But those who shrink alike from the idealism of one and the system of the other, who feel that the poor are neither angels nor wheels in a machine, and that the chief work to be done among them is the diffusion of kindly feeling and the drawing of class nearer to class, will probably prefer to either the old-fashioned District Visitor.

THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD.

To most Oxford men, indeed to the common visitor of Oxford, the town seems a mere offshoot of the University. Its appearance is altogether modern; it presents hardly any monument that can vie in antiquity with the venerable fronts of colleges and halls. An isolated church here and there tells a different tale; but the largest of its parish churches is best known as the church of the University, and the church of St. Frideswide, which might suggest even to a careless observer some idea of the town's greatness before University life began, is known to most visitors simply as Christchurch Chapel. In all outer seeming Oxford appears a mere assemblage of indifferent streets that have grown out of the needs of the University, and this impression is heightened by its commercial unimportance. The town has no manufacture or trade. It is not even, like Cambridge, a great agricultural centre. Whatever importance it derived from its position on the Thames has been done away with by the almost total cessation of river navigation. Its very soil is in large measure in academical hands. As a municipality it seems to exist only by grace or usurpation of prior University privileges. It is not long since Oxford gained control over its own markets or its own police. The peace of the town is still but partially in the hands of its magistrates, and the riotous student is amenable only to university jurisdiction. Within the memory of living men the chief magistrate of the city on his entrance into office was bound to swear in a humiliating ceremony not to violate the privileges of the great academical body which reigned supreme within its walls.

Historically the very reverse of all this is really the case. So far is the University from being older than the city that Oxford had already seen five centuries of borough life before a student appeared within its streets. Instead of its prosperity being derived from its connection with the University, that connection has probably been its commercial ruin. The gradual subjection both of markets and trade to the arbitrary control of an ecclesiastical corporation was inevitably followed by their extinction. The University found Oxford a busy, prosperous borough, and reduced it to a cluster of lodging-houses. It found it among the first of English municipalities, and it so utterly crushed its freedom that the recovery of some of the commonest rights of self-government has only been brought about by recent legislation. Instead of the Mayor being a dependent on Chancellor or Vice-Chancellor, Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor have simply usurped the far older authority of the Mayor.

The story of the struggle which ended in this usurpation is one of the most interesting in our municipal annals, and it is one which has left its mark not on the town only but on the very constitution and character of the conquering University. But to understand the struggle, we must first know something of the town itself. At the earliest moment, then, when its academic history can be said to open, at the arrival of the legist Vacarius in the reign of Stephen, Oxford stood in the first rank of English municipalities. In spite of antiquarian fancies, it is certain that no town had arisen on its site for centuries after the departure of the Roman legions from the isle of Britain. The little monastery of St. Frideswide rises in the turmoil of the eighth century only to fade out of sight again without giving us a glimpse of the borough which gathered probably beneath its walls. The first definite evidence for its existence lies in a brief entry of the English Chronicle which records its seizure by the successor of Ælfred. But though the form of this entry shows the town to have been already considerable, we hear nothing more of it till the last terrible wrestle of England with the Dane, when its position on the borders of the Mercian and West-Saxon realms seems for the moment to have given it a political importance under Æthelred and Cnut strikingly analogous to that which it acquired in the Great Rebellion. Of the life of its burgesses in this earlier period of Oxford life we know little or nothing. The names of its parishes, St. Aldate, St. Ebbe, St. Mildred, and St. Edmund, show how early church after church gathered round the earlier church of St. Martin. The minster of St. Frideswide, in becoming the later cathedral, has brought down to our own times the memory of the ecclesiastical origins to which the little borough owed its existence. But the men themselves are dim to us. Their town-meeting, their Portmannimote, still lives in shadowy fashion as the Freeman's Common Hall; their town-mead is still Port-meadow. But it is only by later charters or the record of Domesday that we see them going on pilgrimage to the shrines of Winchester, or chaffering in their market-place, or judging and law-making in their busting, their merchant guild regulating trade, their reeve gathering his king's dues of tax or honey or marshalling his troop of burghers for the king's wars, their boats floating down the Thames towards London and paying the toll of a hundred herrings in Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon by the way.

Of the conquest of Oxford by William the Norman we know nothing, though the number of its houses marked "waste" in the Survey seems to point to a desperate resistance. But the ruin was soon repaired. No city better illustrates the transformation of the land in the hands of its new masters, the sudden outburst of industrial effort, the sudden expansion of commerce and accumulation of wealth which followed the Conquest. The architectural glory of the town in fact dates from the settlement of the Norman within its walls. To the west of the town rose one of the stateliest of English castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly less stately Abbey of Osney. In the fields to the north the last of the Norman kings raised his palace of Beaumont. The canons of St. Frideswide reared the church which still exists as the diocesan cathedral: the piety of the Norman earls rebuilt almost all the parish churches of the city and founded within their new castle walls the church of the canons of St. George.

But Oxford does more than illustrate this outburst of industrial effort; it does something towards explaining its cause. The most characteristic result of the Conquest was planted in the very heart of the town in the settlement of the Jew. Here as elsewhere the Jewry was a town within a town, with its own language, its own religion and law, its peculiar commerce, its peculiar dress. The policy of our foreign kings secured each Hebrew settlement from the common taxation, the common justice, the common obligations of Englishmen. No city bailiff could penetrate into the square of little streets which lay behind the present Town-hall; the Church itself was powerless against the synagogue that rose in haughty rivalry beside the cloister of St. Frideswide. The picture which Scott has given us in 'Ivanhoe' of Aaron of York, timid, silent, crouching under oppression, accurately as it represents our modern notions of the position of his race during the Middle Ages, is far from being borne out by historical fact. In England at least the attitude of the Jew is almost to the end an attitude of proud and even insolent defiance. His extortion was sheltered from the common law. His bonds were kept under the royal seal. A royal commission visited with heavy penalties any outbreak of violence against these "chattels" of the king. The thunders of the Church broke vainly on the yellow gaberdine of the Jew. In a well-known story of Eadmer's the Red King actually forbids the conversion of a Jew to the Christian faith: it was a poor exchange which would have robbed him of a valuable property and given him only a subject.

At Oxford the attitude of the Jewry towards the national religion showed a marked consciousness of this royal protection. Prior Philip of St. Frideswide complains bitterly of a certain Hebrew with the odd name of "Deus-cum-crescat," who stood at his door as the procession of the saint passed by, mocking at the miracles wrought at her shrine. Halting and then walking firmly on his feet, showing his hands clenched as if with palsy and then flinging open his fingers, the mocking Jew claimed gifts and oblations from the crowd who flocked to St. Frideswide's on the ground that such recoveries of limb and strength were quite as real as any Frideswide had wrought. But though sickness and death, in the prior's story, avenge the insult to his shrine, no earthly power, ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have ventured to meddle with "Deus-cum-crescat." The feud between the priory and the Jewry went on unchecked for a century more to culminate in a daring act of fanaticism on the Ascension-day of 1268. As the usual procession of scholars and citizens returned from St. Frideswide's, a Jew suddenly burst from the group of his comrades in front of the synagogue, and snatching the crucifix from its bearer trod it under foot. But even in presence of such an outrage as this the terror of the Crown shielded the Jewry from any burst of popular indignation. The sentence of the king condemned the Jews of Oxford to erect a cross of marble on the spot where the crime was committed; but even this was remitted in part, and a less offensive place was allotted for the cross in an open plot by Merton College.

With the Jewish settlement began the cultivation of physical science in Oxford. The Hebrew instruction, the Hebrew books which he found among its rabbis, were the means by which Roger Bacon penetrated to the older world of material research. A medical school which we find established there and in high repute during the twelfth century can hardly have been other than Jewish: in the operation for the stone, which one of the stories in the 'Miracles of St. Frideswide' preserves for us, we trace the traditional surgery which is still common in the East. But it is perhaps in a more purely material way that the Jewry at Oxford most directly influenced our academical history. There as elsewhere the Jew brought with him something more than the art or science which he had gathered at Cordova or Bagdad; he brought with him the new power of wealth. The erection of stately castles, of yet statelier abbeys, which followed the Conquest, the rebuilding of almost every cathedral or conventual church, marks the advent of the Jewish capitalist. No one can study the earlier history of our great monastic houses without finding the secret of that sudden outburst of industrial activity to which we owe the noblest of our minsters in the loans of the Jew. The bonds of many a great baron, the relics of many an abbey, lay pledged for security in the "Star-chamber" of the Jew.

His arrival at Oxford is marked by the military and ecclesiastical erections of its Norman earls. But a result of his presence, which bore more directly on the future of the town, was seen in the remarkable developement of its domestic architecture. To the wealth of the Jew, to his need of protection against sudden outbursts of popular passion, very probably to the greater refinement of his social life, England owes the introduction of stone houses. Tradition attributes almost every instance of the earliest stone buildings of a domestic character to the Jew; and where the tradition can be tested, as at Bury St. Edmunds or Lincoln, it has proved to be in accordance with the facts. In Oxford nearly all the larger dwelling-houses which were subsequently converted into halls bore traces of their Jewish origin in their names, such as Moysey's Hall, Lombards', Jacob's Hall. It is a striking proof of the superiority of the Hebrew dwellings to the Christian houses around them that each of the successive town-halls of the borough had, before their expulsion, been houses of Jews. Such houses were abundant in the town, not merely in the purely Jewish quarter on Carfax but in the lesser Jewry which was scattered over the parish of St. Aldate; and we can hardly doubt that this abundance of substantial buildings in the town was at least one of the causes which drew teachers and students within its walls.

The same great event which flung down the Jewish settlement in the very heart of the English town bounded it to the west by the castle and the abbey of the conquerors. Oxford stood first on the line of great fortresses which, passing by Wallingford and Windsor to the Tower of London, guarded the course of the Thames. Its castellan, Robert D'Oilly, had followed William from Normandy and had fought by his side at Senlac. Oxfordshire was committed by the Conqueror to his charge; and he seems to have ruled it in rude, soldierly fashion, enforcing order, heaping up riches, tripling the taxation of the town, pillaging without scruple the older religious houses of the neighbourhood. It was only by ruthless exaction such as this that the work which William had set him to do could be done. Money was needed above all for the great fortress which held the town. The new castle rose on the eastern bank of the Thames, broken here into a number of small streamlets, one of which served as the deep moat which encircled its walls. A well marked the centre of the wide castle-court; to the north of it on a lofty mound rose the great keep; to the west the one tower which remains, the tower of St. George, frowned over the river and the mill. Without the walls of the fortress lay the Bailly, a space cleared by the merciless policy of the castellan, with the church of St. Peter le Bailly which still marks its extent.

The hand of Robert D'Oilly fell as heavily on the Church as on the townsmen. Outside the town lay a meadow belonging to the Abbey of Abingdon, which seemed suitable for the exercise of the soldiers of his garrison. The earl was an old plunderer of the Abbey; he had wiled away one of its finest manors from its Abbot Athelm; but his seizure of the meadow beside Oxford drove the monks to despair. Night and day they threw themselves weeping before the altar of the two English saints whose names were linked to the older glories of their house. But while they invoked the vengeance of Dunstan and Æthelwold on their plunderer, the earl, fallen sick, tossed fever-smitten on his bed. At last Robert dreamt that he stood in a vast court, one of a crowd of nobles gathered round a throne whereon sate a lady passing fair. Before her knelt two brethren of the abbey, weeping for the loss of their mead and pointing out the castellan as the robber. The lady bade Robert be seized, and two youths hurried him away to the field itself, seated him on the ground, piled burning hay around him, smoked him, tossed haybands in his face, and set fire to his beard. The earl woke trembling at the divine discipline; he at once took boat for Abingdon, and restored to the monks the meadow he had reft from them. His terror was not satisfied by the restitution of his plunder, and he returned to set about the restoration of the ruined churches within and without the walls of Oxford. The tower of St. Michael, the doorway of St. Ebbe, the chancel arch of Holywell, the crypt and chancel of St. Peter's-in-the-East, are fragments of the work done by Robert and his house. But the great monument of the devotion of the D'Oillys rose beneath the walls of their castle. Robert, a nephew of the first castellan, had wedded Edith, a concubine of Henry I. The rest of the story we may tell in the English of Leland. "Edith used to walke out of Oxford Castelle with her gentlewomen to solace, and that oftentymes where yn a certen place in a tree, as often as she cam, a certain pyes used to gather to it, and ther to chattre, and as it were to spek on to her, Edyth much mervelyng at this matter, and was sumtyme sore ferid by it as by a wonder." Radulf, a canon of St. Frideswide's, was consulted on the marvel, and his counsel ended in the erection of the priory of Osney beneath the walls of the castle. The foundation of the D'Oillys became one of the wealthiest and largest of the English abbeys; but of its vast church and lordly abbot's house, the great quadrangle of its cloisters, the almshouses without its gate, the pleasant walks shaded with stately elms beside the river, not a trace remains. Its bells alone were saved at the Dissolution by their transfer to Christchurch.