Eighteenth-Century Cambridge
Unreformed Cambridge. By D. A. Winstanley. (Cambridge University Press. I 68.) IT was a Professor of. old-time Oxford, I think, and not of the sister University, who, when asked about his teaching by some reforming body, answered, " I lecture once a year : bat not every year." People have in their minds the idea that in the eighteenth century the two English Universities (for there were no more then) were dead-alive places : and indeed there was much to criticise. But even the most forcible criticism misses its mark without understanding and knowledge of the circumstances : and I cannot imagine the Cambridge man who will not find much to learn from Mr. Winstanley!s fascinating book.
The fact is that by the eighteenth century the University was being strangled by , the statntes granted by Queen Elizabeth in the twelfth year of her. reign. They were admirably constituted for the time of their promulgation, though they attempted to regulate far too ,minutely the government, curriculum and . discipline of the place : and this very minuteness made them less and less suitable for strict observation as time and circumstances changed. The Englishman has traditionally been famous for keeping old names and worthy forms, while changing the content in the direction of liberty and to suit new conditions : Mr. Winstanley shows how this was, to a Lsrge, extent unconsciously, being done at Cambridge in the eighteenth century ; but the strait- waistcoat was too tight to endure for ever, and more radical measures were necessary in Victorian days.
The government of unreformed Cambridge was, under the Vice-Chancellor (with the Chancellor, almost always a great nobleman, in the background, though we occasionally find one, such as the Duke of Newcastle, too ready to intervene in matters of detail), in the hands of three bodies, the Caput Senatus, usually called the Caput, and the regent and non-regent houses of the Senate. These terms need a little explanation, so remote nowadays are the institutions which they connoted.
The Caput is believed by many who ought to know better to have consisted of the Masters of the various colleges, and to have formed a tyrannical oligarchy which oppressed and stifled the University. Nothing could be further from the truth : it was made up of the Vice-Chancellor, a doctor of divinity, law and medicine, a regent master of arts and a non-regent master (these terms will be explained presently), and was elected annually by the Heads of Houses, the doctors, and a couple of scrutators from the non-regent house. The narrowness of the franchise was one of its weaknesses : the other, that each member of the Caput had a liberum veto, and could by his individual vote stop a grace or formal proposal. But this seemingly unreasonable provision was worse in theory than in practice : `•` the Caput did not often reject a grace," says Mr. Winstanley, " and still less rarely [I think he must mean " still more rarely "] rejected one by a single vote.' " Now for the two houses of the Senate. In the regent house sat the Vice-Chancellor, the Proctors, the Taxors, the Moderators, the Esquire Bedells, all masters of arts of less than five years' standing from their creation, and doctors of less than two years' standing ; in the non-regent house sat all masters of arts of more than five years' standing. Pre- mising that " regent " and " non-regent " are words that have nothing to .do with the ruling of the University, but describe those who were entitled regere scholis, i.e., to conduct examinations, I have italicised the words which show the large junior element massed together in one of the houses, so giving a very real power to the younger residents in the University. Small service was done to Cambridge
• when this distinction was swept away in the nineteenth century reforms, and the merging of seniors and juniors into a single home put its governance into the hands of greybeards.
Such was the legislative machinery of the University : it is not necessary to dwell long on the executive, which has suffered far fewer changes today. The Vice-Chancellorship went round among the Heads of Houses, as it still does : there were occasional failures, due to keeping too closely to the rule of reversion, among them one from my own College of Magdalene : the Master who succeeded in 1774, Barton Wallop, a grandson of the first Earl of Portsmouth, had been appointed after a rather discreditable " warming-pan " episode, and became Vice-Chancellor in the following November. He had never been resident in Cambridge since his undergraduate days, and did not at first come up—he was a hard-drinking, hard- riding country parson, interested in little but dogs and racing. Later in his year of office he did appear, and was helped by one of the Professors to g. t through the rest of his time without disgrace, being coached " to read his speeches with a proper accent and quantity." Having so just scrambled through, he: revisited Cambridge no more 1 No part of Mr. Winstanley's examination of eighteenth century conditions is more interesting than that of the duties and performances of the professors. He describes in detail.
and in chronological order the foundation of the various pro-. fessorships : but it is impossible to be blind to the fact that those who held the oldest (and best paid) had wad ically ceased to lecture. Yet it must always be remembered that the duty of the professOr to preside at the oral examinations, called ordinarily, if not quite accurately, acts and oppo- nencies (which led to approval, reception, and a degree), was not only a serious and exhausting one, but involved .
a final summing-up. and determination by the professor which was often a considerable work of art and a test both of his, scholarship and power of exposition. Mr. Winstanley, who adorns (I use the word deliberately) the office of Vice-. Master of Trinity, is by no means a blind admirer of the greatest of the Masters of his College, Bentley, and recounts at length the intrigues by which he obtained the Regius Professorship of Divinity over obstacles which would have deterred a lesser num from even making a s tart ; once elected, he delivered an inaugural lecture (this, I think, was regularly observed) and then relapsed into silence for the rest of his tenure. But he was not alone, and nobody seems to have said much about it, except his enemy Conyers Middleton : and it is perhaps an extenuation that some—but not the professors who never meant to give tongue applied to the Senate for leave to appoint a deputy, who gave some lectures for a moderate remuneration.
Mr. Winstanley's account of the condition of the various colleges is as good as that of the University at large, and must
have been very hard to put together. It appears that numbers were low (there were then no undergraduates living. out of College), that fairly adequate teaching was given by the College tutors, that the faults and failings of the Fellows arose largely from lack of occupation, that there was intrigue for power and place in a College as in the University : that many of the undergraduates worked well and conscientiously, that the noblemen and fellow-commoners who could get some kind of a degree without proper examination were a nuisance both to the Dons and to the fellow-students whose time they wasted. Unlike his successor of today, the eighteenth-century undergraduate was careful of his dress, made a fairly elaborate
toilette for dinner in Hall, and was even found petitioning the authorities for a change in academical costume on purely aesthetic grounds. The great difference between him and his latter-day successors was the absence of organised games. I don't think he missed them, and got much amusement in the
country-side in a more individual manner, with some riding, hunting, wild-fowling and of course much of the now dead art of walking. The celibacy (and consequent in-College residence) of the great majority of the Fellows perhaps meant a closer touch with undergraduates than today ; the married
Fellow, with the best will in the world, cannot see so much of his pupils as under the old regime, when he comes down to rooms in College to teach and administer at stated hours, instead of living there permanently.
And so I must take leave of this entrancing book (first con- demning soundly its infuriating practice of crowding all the notes together at the end, so that they require—when you can find the reference at alt—a constant turning of leaves to and fro which tires the eyes and fingers, and frets the paper).
Cambridge will do all right if she is left alone : she has recently come into great danger by accepting Government grants, though I think the danger has been weathered for the moment : and she can profit by a consideration of her past, now so dim as to be almost as of a forgotten age, thus • brilliantly set forth and illumined by Mr. Winstanley. He has laid his University under a very deep obligation, and I am glad to pay him here a tribute of the thanks of all graduates, regent and non-regent, for a work affording us unalloyed
Previous page
