ORIGINAL CONSTITUTION.

The original statutes, if there was a formal organization of the University prior to the year 1818, do not exist, but the following outline of the Constitution and its administration in the first century after its documentary recognition as a public body in 1229, drawn by Dean Peacock in Observations on the Ancient Statutes, is accepted by the latest historian (Mullinger in 1873) as sufficiently accurate :

Chancellor-Reg ́nts.

The University of Cambridge, in the Middle Ages, consisted of a Chancellor, and of the two houses of Regents and Non-Regents. The Chancellor was chosen biennially by the Regents, and might, upon extraordinary occasions, be continued in office for a third year. He summoned convocations or congregations of regents upon all occasions of the solemn resumption or reception of the regency, and likewise of both houses of Regents and NonRegents to consult concerning affairs affecting the common utility, public quiet, and general interests of the university. No graces, as the name in some degree implies, could be proposed or passed without his assent. He presided in his own court, to hear and decide all causes in which a scholar was concerned, unless facti atrocitas vel pubiæ quietis purturbatio required the assent or cognizance of the public magistrates or justices of the realm. He was not allowed to be absent from the university for more than one month during the continuance of the readings of the masters: and though a Vice-Chancellor, or President, might be appointed by the Regents from year to year, to relieve him from some portion of his duties, yet he was not allowed to intrust to him the cognizance of the causes of the regents or non-regents, ex parte rea, of those which related to the valuation and taxation of houses or hostels, or of those which involved as their punishment either expulsion from the university or imprisonment. A later statute, expressive of the jealous feel ng with which the university began to regard the claim of the Bishop of Ely to visitatorial power and conirmation, forbids the election of that bishop's official to the office.

The powers of the Chancellor, though confirmed and amplified by royal charters, were unquestionably ecclesiastical, both in their nature and origin: the court, over which he presided, was governed by the principles of the canon as well as of the civil law; and the power of excommunication and absolution, derived in the first instance from the Bi hop of Ely, and subsequently from the Pope, became the most prompt and formidable instrument for extending his authority: the form, likewise, of conferring degrees, and the kneeling posture of the person admitted, are indicative both of the act and of the authority of an ecclesiastical superior.

It is very necessary in con idering the distribution of authority in the ancient constitution of the university, to separate the powers of the Chancellor from those of the Regents or Non-Regents; for the authority of the Chancellor had an origin independent of the Regents, and his previous concurrence was nece sary to give validity to their acts; he constituted, in fact, a distinct estate in the academical commonwealth; and though he owed his appointment, in the first instance, to the regents, he was not necessarily a member of their body, and represented an authority and exercised powers which were derived from external sources.

House of Regents.

The ancient statutes recognize the existence of two great divi ions of the members of the second estate of our commonwealth, the houses of regents and non-regents, which have continued to prevail to the present time, though with great modification of their relative powers. The enactments of these statutes would lead us to conclude, that in the earliest ages of the university, the regents alone, as forming the acting body of academical teachers and readers, were authorized to form rules for the regulation of the terms of admission to the regency, as well as for the general conduct of the system of education pursued, and for the election of the various officers who were necessary for the proper administration of their affairs. We consequently find, that if a regent ceased to read, he immediately became an alien to the governing body, and could only be permitted to re-ume the functions and exercise the privileges of the regency, after a solemn act of resumption, according to prescribed forms, and under the joint sanction of the Chancellor of the university and of the house of regents. The foundation however of colleges and halls towards the close of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth century,

as well as the establishment of numerous monasteries within the limits of the univer ity with a view to a participation of its franchises and advantages, increased very greatly the number of permanent residents in the university, who had either ceased to participate in the labors of the regency, or who were otherwise occupied with the discharge of the peculiar duties imposed upon them by the statutes of their own societies.

House of Non-Regents.

The operation of these causes produced a body of non-regents, continually increasing in number and importance, who claimed and exercised a considerable influence in the conduct of those affairs of the university which were not immediately connected with the proper functions of the regency; and we consequently find that at the period when our earliest existing statutes were framed, the non-regents were recognized as forming an integrant body in the constitution of the university, as the house of non-regents, exercising a concurrent jurisdiction with the house of regents in all questions relating to the property, revenues, public rights, privileges, and common good of the university. Under certain circumstances also they participated with the regents in the elections; they were admitted likewise to the congregations of the regents, though not allowed to vote; and, in some cases, the two houses were formed into one assembly, who deliberated in common upon affairs which were of great public moment.

Proctors or Rectors.

When graces were submitted by the Chancellor to the approbation of the senate, the proctors collected the votes and announced the decision in the house of regents, and the scrutators in that of the non-regents; and when the two houses acted as one body, their votes were collected by the proctors. It does not appear, from the earlier statutes, that the Chancellor was controlled in the sanction of graces, by any other authority; but, in later times, such graces, before they were proposed to the senate, were submitted to the discussion and approbation of a council or caput, which was usually appointed at the beginning of each congregation. Under very peculiar circumstance, the Chancellor might be superseded in the exercise of his distinctive privilege, when he obstinately refused the sanction of his authority for taking measures for the punishment of those who had injured or insulted a regent or a community; for, in such a case, as appears by a very remarkable statute, the proctors were empowered, by their sole authority, to call a congregation of regents only, or of both regents and non-regents, notwithstanding any customs which might be contrary to so unusual a mode of proceeding.

The two proctors, called also rectors, after Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor, were the most important administrative officers in the university. They were chosen annually, on the tenth of October, by the regents, the master of glomery and two junior regents standing in scrutiny and collecting the votes; they regulated absolutely the times and modes of reading, disputations, and inceptions in the pub ic schools, and the public ceremonies of the university; they superintended the markets, with a view to the supply of wine, bread, and other necessaries for the scholars, and to the suppression of monopolies and forestallings and those other frauds, in the daily transactions of buyers and sellers, which furnished to our ancestors the occasions of such frequent and extraordinary legislation; they managed the pecuniary affairs and finances of the university; they poses ed the power of suspending a gremial from his vote, and a non gremial from his degrees, for disobeying their regulations or resisting their lawful authority; they collected the votes and announced the decisions of the house of regents, whose peculiar officers they were; they examined the questionists by themselves or by their deputies; they superintended or controlled all public disputations and exercises, either by themselves or by their officers the bedels; they administered the oaths of admis sion to all degrees, and they alone were competent to confer the important privileges of the regency.

Bedels, Scrutators, Tazors.

The other officers of the university were the bedels, scrutators, and taxors. The bedels were originally two in number, who were elected by grace by the concurrent authority of the regent and non-regents in their respective houses. The first was called the bedel of theology and canon law, and the other of arts, from their attending the schools of those faculties. They were required to be in the almost perpetual attendance upon the chancellor, proctors, and at the disputations in the public schools.

The two scrutators were elected by the non-regents at each congregation, to collect the votes and announce the decisions of their house, in the same manner as was done by the two proctors in the house of regents.

The two taxors were regents appointed by the house of regents, who were empowered, in conjunction with two burgesse (liegemen, to tax or fix the rent of the hostels and houses occupied by students, in conformity with the letters patent of Henry III. They also assisted the proctors in making the assize of bread and beer, and in all affairs relating to the markets.

PAPAL RECOGNITION AS A STUDIUM GENERALE.

It was not until the year 1318 that Cambridge received from Pope John XXII. a formal recognition as a Stutum General- or Universitas, whereby the masters and scholars became inve ted with all the rights belonging to such a corporation. Among other privileges resulting from this sanction, doctors of the university, before restricted to their own schools, obtained the right of lecturing throughout Chri-tendom; but the most important was undoubtedly that which conferred full exemption from the ecclesiastical and spiritual power of the bishop of the diocese, and of the archbi hop of the provincethese powers, so far as members of the university were concerned, being ve ted in the chancellor.

EARLIEST UNIVERSITY INSTRUCTION.

The instruction which originally prevailed in Cambridge could only have been that of the ordinary grammar school of a later period-the preparatory school almost always found in our day in the opening of an institution of - higher learning, which preparatory schools do not observe. The Latin language, or 'grammar' as it was designated, formed the basis of the whole course: Priscian, Terence, and Boethius, were the authors commonly read. There were probably some dozen or more separate schools, each presided over by a master of grammar, while the Magister Glomeric represented the supreme authority. It is in connection with this officer, whose character and functions so long baffled the researches of the antiquarians, that we have an explanation of those relations to Ely, as a tradition of the earliest times, which formed the precedent for that ecclesiastical interference which was terminated by the Barnwell Process. The existence of such a functionary and of the grammar schools, prior to the university, enables us to understand how, in the time of Hugh Balsham an exertion of the episcopal authority, like that which has already come under our notice, became necessary in order to guard against collision between the representatives of the old and the new orders of things-between the established right of the Master of Glomery and rights like those which, by one of our mo t ancient statutes, were vested in the regent masters in the exercise of their authority over those students enrolled on their books. If we picture to ourselves some few hundred students, of all ages from early youth to complete manhood, mostly of very slender means, looking forward to the monastic or the clerical life as their future avocation, lodging among the townsfolk, and receiving such accommodation as inexperienced poverty might be likely to obtain at the hands of practised extortioners, resorting for instruction to one large building, the grammar schools, or sometimes congregated in the porches of their respective masters' houses, and there receiving such instruction in Latin as a reading from Terence, Boethius, or Orosius, eked out by the more elementary rules from Priscian or Donatus, would represent,-we shall probably have grasped the main features of a Cambridge course at the period when Irnerius began to lecture at Bologna, Vacarius at Oxford, and when Peter Lombard compiled the Sentences.

Meagre as such a 'course' may appear, there is every reason for believing that it formed, for centuries, nearly the sole acquirement of the great majority of our university students. The complete trivium, followed by the yet more formidable quadrivium, was far beyond both the ambition and the resources of the ordinary scholar. His aim was simply to qualify himself for ho'y orders, to become Sir Smith or Sir Brown, as distinguished from a mere 'hedge priest,' and to obtain a license to teach the Latin tongue. For this

the degree of master of grammar was sufficient, and the qualifications for that degree were slight-to have studied the larger Priscian in the original, to have responded in three public disputations on grammar, to have given thirteen lectures on Priscian's Book of Constructions, and to have obtained from three masters of arts ce tificates of his 'learning, ability, knowledge, and moral character,' satisfied the requirements of the authorities. His licen e obtained, he might either be appointed by one of the colleges to teach in the grammar school frequently attached to the early foundations; or he might become principal of a hostel and receive pupils in grammar on his own account; or he might, as a secular clergyman, be presented to a living or the mastership of a grammar school at a distance from the university.

With the latter part of the twelfth century the studies of the trivium and quadrimum, or in other words the discipline of an arts faculty, were probably introduced at Cambridge. This development from a simple school of grammar into a studium generale was not marked, it is true, by the same éclat that waited on the corresponding movements at Bologna, Paris, or even Oxford, but it is not necessary to infer from thence that Cambridge was much inferior either in numbers or organization. The early reputation of those seats of learning survives almost solely in connection with a few great names, and the absence of any teacher of eminence like Irnerius, Abelard, or Vacarius, at our own university, is a sufficient explanation of the fact that no accounts of her culture in the twelfth century have reached us. On the other hand, the influx of large numbers from the university of Paris, which we have already noted as taking place about the year 1229, can only be accounted for by supposing that the university was by that time fairly established.

There is good reason however for upposing that originally the masters and students of grammar were not looked upon as occupying an essentially inferior po ition: their decline in estimation was probably the result of those new additions to university learning which have occupied our attention in preceding chapters. With the introduction of that portion of the Organon which was known as the Nova Ars, logic, the second branch of the trivivm, began to engross a much larger amount of the student's time. To this succeeded the Sunmula of Petrus Hispanus, and logic was crowned in the schools as the mistress of arts, the science of sciences. In the meantime the stores of Latin literature had been but slightly augmented. Discoveries like those with which Petrarch was startling the learned of Italy, failed for a long time to awaken any interest in the northern universities. The splendid library which Duke Humphrey bequeathed to Oxford, though received with profuse expressions of gratitude, was valued not for its additions to the known literature of antiquity, but for its richness in mediæval theology. Hence the grammarian's art declined relatively in value, and the study of logic over hadowed all the rest. With the sixteenth century the balance was readjusted; the grammarian along with the rhetorician claimed equal honors with the logician, and the course of the grammar student was correspondingly extended. During the latter part of the Middle Ages, however, it was undoubtedly the dialectician's art that was the chief object of the scholar's reverence and ambition. A course of study, moreover, in but one subject and occupying but three years, was obviously not entitled to the same con ideration as a seven years' course extending through the trivium and quadrinium. Thus the masters and scholars in grammar gradually subsided into acknowledged inferiority to those in arts, an inferiority which is formally recognized in the statute requiring that the funeral of a regent master of arts or of a scholar in that faculty shall be attended by the chancellor and the regents, and at the same time expressly declaring that masters and

scholars of grammar are not entitled to such an honor. The grammarian indeed in those days was nothing more than a schoolmaster, and the estimation in which that vocation was held had perhaps reached its lowest point. The extended sense in which the term grammaticus had been originally understood, and in which it was again before very long to be employed, did not apply to the master of a grammar school in the fourteenth century. He taught only schoolboys, and they learned only the elements. It was sadly significant moreover of the character of his vocation that every inceptor in grammar received a 'palmer' (ferule), and a rod, and then proceeded to flog a boy publicly in the schools. Hence Erasmus in his Encomium Moria, dear as the cause of Latin learning was to his heart, does not hesitate to satirize the grammarians of his time as 'a race of all men the most miserable, who grow old at their work surrounded by herds of boys, deafened by continual uproar, and poisoned by a close, foul atmosphere; satisfied however so long as they can overawe the terrified throng by the terrors of their look and speech, and, while they cut them to pieces with ferule, birch, and thong, gratify their own merciless natures at pleasure.' Similarly, in a letter written somewhat later, he tells us what difficulty he encountered when he sought to find at Cambridge a second master for Colet's newly founded school at St. Paul's, and how a college don, whom he consulted on the subject, sneeringly rejoined 'Who would put up with the life of a schoolmaster who could get his living in any other way?'

Course of Study for an Arts Student.

As the university gathered its members from all parts of the kingdom, and many of the students came from districts a week's journey remote, it was customary for parents to entrust their sons to the care of a 'fetcher,' who after making a preliminary tour in order to form his party, which often numbered upwards of twenty, proceeded by the most direct route to Cambridge. On his arrival two courses were open to the youthful freshman:-he might either attach himself to one of the religious foundations, in which case his career for life might be looked upon as practically decided; or he might enter himself under a resident master, as intending to take holy orders, or perhaps, though such instances were probably confined to the nobility, as a simple layman. In no case however was he permitted to remain in residence except under the surveillance of a superior. Unless it was the design of his parents that he should follow the religious life, he would probably before setting out have been fully warned against the allurements of all Franciscans and Dominicans, until a friar had come to be regarded by him as a kind of ogre, and he would hasten with as little delay as possible to put himself under the protection of a master. The disparity of age between master and pupil was generally less than at the present day: the former would often not be more than twenty-one, the latter not more than fourteen or fifteen; consequently their relations were of much less formal character, and the selection, so far as the scholar was concerned, a more important matter. A scholar from the south chose a master from the same latitude; if he could succeed in meeting with one from the same county he considered himself yet more fortunate; if aspiring to become a canonist or a civilian he would naturally seek for a master also engaged upon such studies. The master in turn was expected to interest himself in his pupil; no scholar was to be rudely repulsed on the score of poverty; if unable to pay for both lodging and tuition he often rendered an equivalent in the shape of very humble services; he waited at table, went on errands, and, if we may trust the authority of the PseudoBoethius, was often rewarded by his master's left-off garments. The aids held out by the university were then but few. There were some nine or ten