No founding date
Oxford has no founder and no founding charter. Its university grew out of teaching that began in the town during the twelfth century and slowly became an organized community of masters and students. Later legends credited the origin to Alfred the Great, and some old histories claimed schools there from Anglo-Saxon times. Modern historians do not accept these claims; there is no reliable evidence for them, and the account below sticks to what is better supported.
Why Oxford
Oxford in the twelfth century was a busy town on the Thames, with a castle, a market and several religious houses, including the priory of St Frideswide and Oseney Abbey. It lay in a convenient central spot between London and the Midlands, and it was a place where kings sometimes held court. By the early twelfth century there is evidence of teachers in the town, and the reputation of its schools grew from the middle of the century.
A common tradition links part of the growth to events in 1167, when King Henry II, then in a quarrel with the French king, is said to have called English students home from Paris. Many are thought to have turned to Oxford. This account is plausible and is often repeated, though the evidence for it is indirect and the size of the effect is uncertain. Oxford’s growth was more likely the result of several overlapping causes, including the arrival of masters, its location, and the large demand for educated clerks in the kingdom.
From masters to a corporation
At first teachers were independent. By the end of the twelfth century there were enough of them that they had begun to cooperate, and in the first years of the thirteenth century there are references to a head of the scholars, who became known as the chancellor. The chancellor was not simply a university officer in the modern sense; he had authority over the scholars and was connected to the bishop of Lincoln, whose enormous diocese included Oxford.
Like other medieval universities, Oxford followed the pattern of a guild of masters. The masters set the rules for teaching and for admitting new members to the guild. Students enrolled under a particular master, and the master was responsible for them.
The crisis of 1209 and the legate’s settlement
The key moment in early Oxford history was a conflict with the town. According to tradition, in 1209 a student killed a woman, possibly accidentally, and townspeople responded by hanging two or three students. In protest, the masters suspended teaching and left, and the university effectively dispersed for some years, with some scholars going to Cambridge and elsewhere. These details are known mainly from later chronicles, so the exact numbers and circumstances are open to question, but the existence of a serious conflict is accepted.
The dispute ended when the pope’s legate, Nicholas de Romanis, issued a settlement in 1214. It required the town to take steps such as paying a yearly sum to be used for poor scholars, to hold annual feasts in penance, and to lower rents for students. It also strengthened the chancellor’s power over scholars and placed disputes under the university’s jurisdiction. The settlement came in the same troubled period as Magna Carta in 1215, when King John’s quarrels with the Church and barons dominated English politics. It is often treated as the first formal recognition of the university’s privileges, and it shows how outside authorities, whether pope or king, shaped the relationship between a university and its town. The long-running rivalry that followed is part of what is later called town and gown.
Halls, hostels and the first colleges
Early students rented rooms in private houses. Over time, masters or landlords ran “halls,” also called hostels, in which a group of students lived under a principal. Halls were commercial or semi-private ventures, with no endowment, and a hall could disappear when its leader left. Many existed in Oxford during the Middle Ages.
Colleges began differently. A college was an endowed community, and its founder supplied property and rules. The three earliest, which gained their form in the thirteenth century, are usually listed as:
- University College, whose origins are linked to a bequest made by William of Durham, who died in 1249. The college did not take a settled form until later, and the traditional claim of founding by King Alfred has no basis.
- Balliol College, associated with John Balliol and his wife Dervorguilla, with a settled form from around the 1260s onward.
- Merton College, established by Walter de Merton, who gave it statutes in 1264 and moved it to Oxford in the 1270s. Merton was an influential model, with a self-governing community of fellows and a detailed set of rules, and its statutes were copied elsewhere, including at Cambridge.
Early colleges housed graduates, usually masters or advanced students, who were often supported to study theology or other higher subjects. They were small, charitable institutions, much like other medieval endowments for the poor and the pious.
Friars, the arts and the higher faculties
Teaching in Oxford followed the usual pattern of arts first, then theology, law or medicine. The arts course included logic and Aristotle, and it was among the most important parts of the program. The friars, including followers of the Franciscan order and the Dominicans, arrived in the early thirteenth century and set up houses of study in the town, which became a major part of Oxford’s intellectual life. Teaching increasingly used the scholastic method of lecture and formal disputation.
Growth in the fourteenth century
By the fourteenth century Oxford had become one of the largest and best-known universities in northern Europe, though numbers are difficult to estimate. New colleges appeared with more generous endowments, such as New College, founded in 1379 by William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester. It combined a college for fellows with a school at Winchester to feed it, a model later used by King’s College at Cambridge. Other colleges, including Queen’s and Exeter, were founded in the same era. These institutions gradually shifted the center of student life from rented halls to endowed colleges, though this change took time and was still incomplete at the end of the Middle Ages.
The Black Death in the late 1340s hit Oxford, as it did the rest of England, and it likely reduced numbers for a time. How much it changed the university is uncertain, since records are patchy.
Common misunderstandings
A few points are worth keeping in mind:
- The oldest existing college building is not the same as the date of the college’s founding.
- Many legends were written down centuries after the events they describe, often to give a college or the university a grander origin.
- Degrees such as bachelor and master were stages on a path to teaching, not a modern career credential.
In brief, Oxford rose through a mix of royal attention, town location and the arrival of teachers, and it became a corporation partly through conflict. The colleges came later, as a way to support the scholars the corporation already contained.