famous as one of the Parisian teachers.  Thomas of London wandered to Paris from his school at Merton.  But through the peaceful reign of Henry the Second Oxford quietly grew in numbers and repute, and forty years after the visit of Vacarius its educational position was fully established.  When Gerald of Wales read his amusing Topography of Ireland to its students the most learned and famous of the English clergy were to be found within its walls.  At the opening of the thirteenth century Oxford stood without a rival in its own country, while in European celebrity it took rank with the greatest schools of the Western world.  But to realize this Oxford of the past we must dismiss from our minds all recollections of the Oxford of the present.  In the outer look of the new University there was nothing of the pomp that overawes the freshman as he first paces the “High” or looks down from the gallery of St. Mary’s.  In the stead of long fronts of venerable colleges, of stately walks beneath immemorial elms, history plunges us into the mean and filthy lanes of a mediaeval town.  Thousands of boys, huddled in bare lodging-houses, clustering round teachers as poor as themselves in church porch and house porch, drinking, quarrelling, dicing, begging at the corners of the streets, take the place of the brightly-coloured train of doctors and Heads.  Mayor and Chancellor struggled in vain to enforce order or peace on this seething mass of turbulent life.  The retainers who followed their young lords to the University fought out the feuds of their houses in the streets.  Scholars from Kent and scholars from Scotland waged the bitter struggle of North and South.  At nightfall roysterer and reveller roamed with torches through the narrow lanes, defying bailiffs, and cutting down burghers at their doors.  Now a mob of clerks plunged into the Jewry and wiped off the memory of bills and bonds by sacking a Hebrew house or two.  Now a tavern squabble between scholar and townsman widened into a general broil, and the academical bell of St. Mary’s vied with the town bell of St. Martin’s in clanging to arms.  Every phase of ecclesiastical controversy or political strife was preluded by some fierce outbreak in this turbulent, surging mob.  When England growled at the exactions of the Papacy in the years that were to follow the students besieged a legate in the abbot’s house at Osney.  A murderous town and gown row preceded the opening of the Barons’ war.  “When Oxford draws knife,” ran an old rime, “England’s soon at strife.”

[Sidenote:  Edmund Rich]

But the turbulence and stir was a stir and turbulence of life.  A keen thirst for knowledge, a passionate poetry of devotion, gathered thousands round the poorest scholar and welcomed the barefoot friar.  Edmund Rich—­ Archbishop of Canterbury and saint in later days—­came about the time we have reached to Oxford, a boy of twelve years old, from a little lane at Abingdon that still bears his name.  He found his school in an inn that belonged to the