Oxford University: The Most Extraordinary Institution of Learning in the Western World

 

Nobody founded Oxford University.

That is not a figure of speech. There is no founder. No charter. No pope, no king, no wealthy benefactor who stood up one morning and decided to build a university. Oxford — the oldest university in the English-speaking world, the institution that has educated twenty-eight British prime ministers, at least thirty world leaders, fifty Nobel laureates, and more influential figures in the history of Western civilization than almost any other institution — simply emerged. It grew from nothing, without a plan, without a founding moment, in a way that no institutional history quite manages to explain satisfactorily.

This is the first strange thing about Oxford. It is not the last.

Oxford University has been operating continuously for approximately nine hundred years. It predates the Aztec Empire. It predates the Ottoman Empire. It was already three hundred years old when Columbus sailed to the Americas. It was already five hundred years old when the United States declared independence. It has survived plagues, civil wars, religious reformations, and two world wars.

And the real story of how it began, what it actually was in its early centuries, and what it has meant to the world it helped shape — is almost entirely unknown outside the institution itself.

This is that story.

The Beginning That Was Not a Beginning

Teaching of some kind was happening in Oxford as early as 1096 — a date that makes Oxford older than Cambridge, older than most of the great European universities, older than the majority of the institutions that modern civilization considers ancient.

But 1096 is not a founding date in any conventional sense. There was no university in 1096 — there was teaching. Scholars gathered in Oxford for reasons that are not entirely clear. The town had a royal palace nearby. It was a significant market town at the intersection of important roads. It had existing ecclesiastical establishments that provided some infrastructure for learned men. For reasons that the historical record does not fully explain, Oxford became a place where scholars came and where students followed.

The event that transformed this informal gathering into something more like a recognizable institution was an accident of international politics.

In 1167 King Henry II of England — in the course of a political dispute with the King of France — banned English students from attending the University of Paris. Paris in 1167 was the greatest center of learning in northern Europe. Hundreds of English students were studying there. They were ordered home.

They went to Oxford.

The sudden influx of students trained in the Parisian academic tradition, combined with the scholars already present, created a critical mass of intellectual activity that rapidly developed the organizational structures — the faculties, the examination systems, the degree requirements — of a proper university. By the end of the twelfth century Oxford was recognizably a university in a way it had not been at the beginning of it.

Oxford University was, in its origins, an accident of a border dispute between two medieval kings.

The Town and the Gown — A War That Lasted Centuries

The early history of Oxford University is not primarily a story of serene scholarly contemplation. It is a story of violence — systematic, repeated, sometimes lethal violence between the university's scholars and the town's ordinary inhabitants.

The scholars had privileges that the townspeople deeply resented. They were exempt from the town's jurisdiction. They were tried in university courts rather than civil courts. They could set the prices of goods and lodgings. They were, in effect, a parallel population living in the town but subject to entirely different rules.

The resentment periodically exploded into violence. The most catastrophic of these explosions was the St Scholastica Day Massacre of February 10, 1355.

It began with something trivial. A dispute at a tavern — the Swindlestock Tavern on Carfax — between students and the tavern keeper over the quality of the wine. Words were exchanged. Drinks were thrown. What began as a tavern argument escalated into a street fight, then into a full-scale urban battle that lasted for three days.

The townspeople rang the church bells to summon men from the surrounding countryside. Hundreds of men armed with bows came into Oxford and attacked the scholars systematically. Sixty-three students were killed. Some were scalped — their tonsures cut away as trophies.

The aftermath was extraordinary. The king ruled in favor of the university. The mayor and leading townsmen were forced to attend a ceremony each year on St Scholastica's Day in which they paid a fine of one penny for each scholar killed — sixty-three pennies, paid annually to the university as penance. This ceremony was performed every year for the next five hundred and ten years. It was finally abolished in 1825.

The College System — An Accident That Became a Revolution

Oxford's college system — the feature that most distinguishes it from universities elsewhere in the world — was not planned. It evolved from a practical problem.

In the early university, students lived wherever they could find accommodation in the town — in lodging houses, in whatever was available. This arrangement was chaotic, expensive, and dangerous. The college was the solution. Beginning in the thirteenth century, wealthy benefactors began to endow residential communities — houses where scholars could live together under supervision, with their basic needs provided for. University College, Balliol, and Merton — the three oldest Oxford colleges — were all founded in the 1260s and 1270s.

What began as student accommodation became something considerably more significant. The colleges developed their own libraries, their own chapels, their own teaching staff, their own intellectual identities. They became, over centuries, the primary unit of Oxford life.

The tutorial system — in which students meet one-on-one or in very small groups with expert tutors for intensive weekly sessions — developed within the college structure and became the pedagogical method that Oxford is most famous for. It is extraordinarily expensive in terms of academic labor and produces a quality of intellectual engagement that the large lecture-based systems of most modern universities cannot replicate.

The Reformation — When Oxford Almost Ceased to Exist

The most dangerous moment in Oxford's history was the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.

The Edwardian commissioners who visited Oxford in 1550 ordered the burning of books — manuscripts and printed volumes from the university's library deemed too Catholic. The Bodleian Library was stripped bare. The shelves were sold for timber. The books were burned.

Thomas Bodley — a scholar and diplomat who had watched this destruction — refounded the library in 1598 and devoted the rest of his life and fortune to restoring it. The Bodleian Library that exists today, with its eleven million items and its requirement to receive a copy of every book published in Britain, is the direct descendant of his act of recovery.

The Reformation also gave Oxford its martyrs. Bishops Latimer and Ridley were burned at the stake in the Oxford town ditch in October 1555. Archbishop Cranmer — who had recanted his Protestantism under torture and then publicly withdrew his recantation at the last moment, thrusting the hand that had signed the recantation into the flames first — was burned at the same spot five months later.

The spot on Broad Street where they died is marked by a cross set into the tarmac. Most people walk over it without noticing.

The People Oxford Made

The list of people educated at Oxford is a significant portion of the list of people who shaped the modern world.

Twenty-eight British prime ministers studied at Oxford. William Gladstone. Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair. Harold Macmillan. The decisions that shaped the British Empire, two world wars, and the structure of the modern state were made by people whose minds were formed in Oxford's tutorial rooms.

John Locke studied at Christ Church. His Two Treatises of Government — which argued that governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed and that people have the right to overthrow governments that violate their natural rights — was the direct philosophical foundation of the American Declaration of Independence. The American Revolution was built on ideas formed in an Oxford college room.

Roger Bacon — the thirteenth-century Oxford friar who anticipated the scientific method by four centuries, who wrote about flying machines and mechanically propelled ships in the 1260s — was so far ahead of his time that his contemporaries thought he was a sorcerer.

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were both Oxford academics and members of the Inklings — an informal literary group that met in an Oxford pub called the Eagle and Child. The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings were first read aloud and debated in that pub.

The Lord of the Rings was workshopped in an Oxford pub. That is a sentence that deserves to be read twice.

The Oxford That Still Exists

Oxford today has thirty-nine colleges and six permanent private halls. It has approximately twenty-four thousand students. It is consistently ranked among the top three universities in the world.

It also looks almost exactly as it did five hundred years ago. The medieval and early modern buildings that line the High Street and Broad Street — the Bodleian Library, the Radcliffe Camera, the Sheldonian Theatre designed by Christopher Wren, the college quads and chapels and dining halls — are still standing, still in use, still the daily environment of the students who work in them.

A student who attended Merton College in 1310 and somehow found themselves transported to Merton College today would recognize the buildings. The Mob Quad — the oldest complete quadrangle in Oxford, built between 1288 and 1378 — looks now almost exactly as it looked when it was finished.

Nobody founded it. It simply grew — from a group of scholars gathering in a medieval market town, through a massacre, through a Reformation that burned its books, through centuries of conflict and transformation — into something that has shaped the modern world more thoroughly than almost any institution that has ever existed.

Nine hundred years old and still teaching.

That is perhaps the most extraordinary fact of all.

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