The Oxford Degree Ceremony

CHAPTER IV

THE OFFICERS OF THE UNIVERSITY

The Origin of the Chancellor's Authority.

The beginning of the organized authority of the University, as has been already said (p. 22), is the mention of the Chancellor in the charter of 1214. In the earliest period this officer was the centre of the constitutional life of Oxford. Although the bishop's representative, and as such endowed with an authority external to the University, he was, perhaps from the first, elected by the Doctors and Masters there. Hence by a truly English anomaly, the representative of outside authority becomes identified with the representative of the democratic principle, and the Oxford Chancellor combined in himself the position of the elected Rector of a foreign university, and that of the Chancellor appointed by an external power. The reason for this anomaly is partly the remote position of the episcopal see; Lincoln, the bishop's seat, was more than 100 miles from the University town, which lay on the very borders of his great diocese. The combination too was surely made easy by the influence of the great scholar-saint, Bishop Grosseteste, who had himself filled the position of Chancellor (though he may not have borne the title) before he passed to the see of Lincoln, which he held for eighteen years (1235-1253) during the critical period of the growth of the academic constitution.

During the first two centuries of the University's existence, the Chancellor was a resident official; but in the fifteenth century it became customary to elect some great ecclesiastic, who was able by his influence and wealth to promote the interests of Oxford and Oxford scholars; such an one was George Neville, the brother of the King-Maker Earl of Warwick, who became Chancellor in 1453 at the age of twenty. He no doubt owed his early elevation to the magnificence with which he had entertained the whole of Oxford when he had proceeded to his M.A. from Balliol College in the preceding year.

The Vice-Chancellor.

From the fifteenth century onwards the Vice-Chancellor takes the place of the Chancellor as the centre of University life; as the Chancellor's representative, he is nominated every year by letters from him, though the appointment is in theory approved by the vote of Convocation.

The nomination of a Vice-Chancellor is for a year, but renomination is allowed; as a matter of fact, the Chancellor's choice is limited by custom in two ways; no Vice-Chancellor is reappointed more than three times, i.e. the tenure of the office is limited to four years, and the nomination is always offered to the senior head of a house who has not held the position already; if any head has declined the office when offered to him on a previous occasion, he is treated as if he had actually held it.

The Vice-Chancellor has all the powers and duties of the Chancellor in the latter's absence; but in the rare cases when the Chancellor visits Oxford, his deputy sinks for the time into the position of an ordinary head of a college.

The Control of Examinations.

The only duties of the Vice-Chancellor that need be here mentioned are his authority and control over examinations and over degrees, duties which are of course connected. Any departure from the ordinary course of proceeding needs his approval: e.g. (to take a constantly recurring case) he alone can give permission to examine an undergraduate out of his turn, when any one has failed to present himself at the right time for viva voce.

Now that all Oxford arrangements for examinations have developed into a cast-iron system, the appeal, except in matters of detail, to the Vice-Chancellor is rare; but it was not always so; his control was at one time a very real and important matter. In the case of the famous Dr. Fell, Dean of Christ Church, Antony Wood notes 'that he did frequent examinations for degrees, hold the examiners up to it, and if they would or could not do their duty, he would do it himself, to the pulling down of many'. It is no wonder that men said of him:—

I do not like thee, Dr. Fell,

The reason why I cannot tell.

He was equally careful of the decencies and proprieties of the degree ceremony; 'his first care (as Vice-Chancellor) was to make all degrees go in caps, and in public assemblies to appear in hoods. He also reduced the caps and gowns worn by all degrees to their former size and make, and ordered all cap-makers and tailors to make them so.'

It was necessary for him to be strict; some of the Puritans, although they were not on the whole neglectful of the dignity and the studies of the University, had carried their dislike of all ceremonies and forms so far as to attempt to abolish academical dress. 'The new-comers from Cambridge and other parts (in 1648) observed nothing according to statutes.' It was only the stubborn opposition of the Proctor, Walter Pope (in 1658), which had prevented the formal abolition of caps and gowns; and one of Fell's predecessors as Vice-Chancellor, the famous Puritan divine, John Owen, also Dean of Christ Church, had caused great scandal to the 'old stock remaining' by wearing his hat (instead of a college cap) in Congregation and Convocation; 'he had as much powder in his hair as would discharge eight cannons' (but this was a Cambridge scandal, and may be looked on with suspicion), and wore for the most part 'velvet jacket, his breeches set round at knee with ribbons pointed, Spanish leather boots with Cambric tops'. But in spite of this somewhat pronounced opposition to a 'prelatical cut', Owen had been in his way a disciplinarian. He had arrested with his own hands, pulling him down from the rostrum and committing him to Bocardo prison, an undergraduate who had carried too far the wit of the 'Terrae Filius', the licensed jester of the solemn Act.

The Bedels.

Fortunately the Vice-Chancellor in these more orderly days has not to carry out discipline with his own hands in this summary fashion. He has his attendants, the Bedels, for this purpose, who, as the statutes order, 'wearing the usual gowns and round caps, walk before him in the customary way with their staves, three gold and one silver.' The office of Bedel is one of the oldest in Oxford, and is common to all Universities; Dr. Rashdall goes so far as to say that 'an allusion to a bidellus is in general (though not invariably) a sufficiently trustworthy indication that a School is really a University or Studium Generale'. The higher rank of 'Esquire Bedel' has been abolished, and the old office has sadly shrunk in dignity; it is hard now to conceive the state of things in the reign of Henry VII, when the University was distracted by the counter-claims of the candidates for the post of Divinity Bedel, when one of them had the support of the Prince of Wales, and another that of the King's mother, the Lady Margaret, and when the electors were hard put to it to decide between candidates so royally backed; it was a contest between gratitude in the sense of a lively expectation of favours to come, and gratitude for benefits already received (i.e. the Lady Margaret Professorship of Divinity, the first endowment of University teaching in Oxford). Even the Puritans had attached the greatest importance to the office, and a humorous side is given to the sad account of the Parliamentary Visitation in 1648 and the following years, by the distress of the Visitors at the disappearance of 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 ones19 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.

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.

Their number recalls one of the most important points in the early history of Oxford. The division of the students according to 'Nations', which prevailed at mediaeval Paris, and which still survives in some of the Scotch universities, never was established in the English ones; in this as in other respects the strong hand of the Anglo-Norman kings had made England one. But though there was no room for division of 'Nations', there was a strongly-marked line of separation between the Northerners and the Southerners, i.e. between those from the north of the Trent, with whom the Scotch were joined, and those south of that river, among whom were reckoned the Welsh and the Irish. The fights between these factions were a continual trouble to the mediaeval University, and it was necessary for the M.A.s of each division to have their own Proctor; hence originally the Senior Proctor was the elect of the Southerners and the Junior Proctor of the Northerners.

Proctorial elections were a source of constantly recurring trouble, till Archbishop Laud at last transferred the election to the colleges, each of which took its turn in a cycle carefully calculated according to the numbers of each college. In our own generation this system has been carried a step further, and all colleges, large or small alike, have their turn for the Proctorship, which comes to each once in eleven years. The electors for it are the members of the governing body along with all members of Congregation belonging to the college.

The Proctors represent the Masters of Arts as opposed to the higher faculties (i.e. the Doctors), and it is in virtue of the time-honoured right of the Faculty of Arts to decide all matters concerning the granting of 'graces', that the Proctors take their prominent part in the degree ceremony. Although the Vice-Chancellor is presiding, it is the Proctor who submits the degrees to the House, and declares them 'granted'. Before doing this the two Proctors, as has been said (p. 9), walk half-way down the House and return, thus in form fulfilling the injunction of the statutes that 'they should take the votes in the usual way'.21

The Registrar.

One other University official must be mentioned, the Registrar, i.e. the Secretary of the University. The existence of a Register of Convocation implies that there must have been an officer of this kind in mediaeval Oxford, but the actual title does not occur till the sixteenth century; its first holder seems to have been John London of New College, so scandalously notorious in the first days of the Reformation. But the character of University officials was not high in the sixteenth century. One of the earliest Registrars, Thomas Key of All Souls, was expelled from his post in 1552 for having during two years neglected to take any note of the University proceedings; he actually struck in the face another Master of Arts who was trying to detain him at the order of the Vice-Chancellor. For this he was sent to prison, and fined 26s. 8d.; but he was released the very next day, and his fine cut down to 4d. He lived to be elected Master of University College nine years later, and to be the mendacious champion of the antiquity of Oxford against the Cambridge advocate. This was his namesake Dr. Caius, equally mendacious but more reputable, the pious 'second founder' of a great Cambridge college.

The Registrar's duty in the degree ceremony, as has been said (p. 5), is to certify that the candidates have fulfilled all the requirements for the degree, that they have received 'graces' from their colleges as to proper residence, and that all examinations have in every case been passed; the Registrar derives this latter information from the University books in which records are now kept of each stage of an undergraduate's career. It is only recently, however, that this system has been adopted; less than twenty years ago each candidate for a degree had to produce his 'testamur', the precious scrap of blue paper issued after every examination to each successful candidate, pass-man and class-man alike. It was a clumsy system, but it had strong claims of sentiment; most old Oxford men will remember the rush to get the 'testamur' for self or for friend, and the triumph with which the visible symbol was brought home. Since the University has abolished these, it might with advantage introduce the custom of granting to each graduate, on taking his degree, a formal certificate of the examinations he has passed, of his residence and of the rank to which he has attained. Such a certificate, whether called 'diploma' or by any other name, would be of practical value; in these days study is international, and the number of men is very great, and is increasing, who need to produce evidence of their University career and its results for the authorities of foreign or American universities. These bodies often issue diplomas of most dignified appearance; it is a pity that Oxford, which in some ways is so rich in survivals of picturesque custom, should fail in this matter. It is true that a certificate of the degree can be obtained, if a man writes to the Registrar for it and pays an extra fee; this additional payment seems a little unjust; and men would be more willing to take the degree if, as they say, 'they had something definite to show for it.'

The Presenters for the degrees.

The presenters for the degrees are mainly college officials; it is only for the higher degrees that University professors present, and then not simply in virtue of being University officials22, but also as having already attained the degree which the candidate is seeking. The old Oxford theory was that of the Roman magistracy, that only those who were of a certain rank could admit others to that rank. Thus the Regius Professor of Medicine usually presents our medical Bachelors and Doctors; but he performs this duty because he is a Doctor; he has, however, as occupying the professorial chair, the right to claim presentations for himself, as against all other Doctors, even those senior to him in standing. This right is a matter of immemorial custom for the Regius Professors; it has been given to the Professor of Music by a recent statute (1897).