DISCUSSION

By the time of the Norman conquest, Oxford was already promising to become one of England's leading towns, the sheep-grazing lands in the area making it a natural centre for the wool trade and the cloth industry; its prosperity was furthered by the presence of consumer groups in the form of two monasteries and a sizable Jewish community. The town's natural course of development, in terms of acquiring control of its own internal affairs along the lines of other towns, was however checked by the emergence of a university by the close of the twelfth century. Formal colleges were endowed in the next century, a chancellor appointed to head the loose confederation, and the students and teachers – mostly lodging with townsmen or in houses rented within the town – became a sizable minority within the urban population. Thereafter it was the disharmonious town-gown relations that dominated the central course of Oxford's history.

The exercise of jurisdiction in Oxford was an awkward matter because the town proper and the university were competitors of about equal strength; what the university lacked in size it made up for by having the protection and support of the king, who periodically gave more powers to the university, often at the expense of the town. It was like two separate communities within the same town, each vying for dominance. The main areas under dispute were control over trade and commerce (which impacted the scholars as consumers) and jurisdiction over legal matters; the power to assess rents on houses rented by the scholars was another touchy issue. Futhermore, because university students were subject to "benefit of clergy", those who gave free rein to licentious or unruly behaviour (which the benefit may have encouraged), or worse, were protected from prosecution in the town courts, but had to be handed over to the university authorities, who tended to be more lenient.

The Chancellor had his own court, whose jurisdictional scope was resented by the town authorities. The Chancellor's privileges included the right to banish from the town those he considered undesirables, and to excommunicate those who defied his authority. His court had jurisdiction over certain cases in which a member of the university was one of the parties, thus depriving the town court of income from fines. After town-gown disputes at the end of the thirteenth century, a settlement extended this to all trespasses in which scholars were involved. One consequence of this jurisdiction was that townsmen were sometimes tempted to involve (fraudulently) scholars in their legal disputes in order to have the case tried by the Chancellor's court.

The thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries were in fact punctuated by conflicts between town and university, not infrequently erupting into violence, followed by settlements that invariably strengthened the university. Salter noted that difficulty in dating the first of the three documents above stemmed from the fact that this type of complaint was frequently being made by the town authorities, and particularly during a period of town-gown conflict towards the mid-point of the century. The second is also difficult to date; Salter suggested that 1335, a year of town-gown disturbances, might be a candidate.

If the town authorities had many complaints about interference with or obstruction of their powers or rights, the university authorities made at least as many complaints on their side. On one occasion when tempers reached boiling point, the St. Scholastica's Day riot, or massacre as it is sometimes exaggeratedly called, occurred. The document translated here of course represents the town authorities' perspective, aiming at placing blame for what happened on provocations by the students. The "resistance" of the townspeople, prompted by raising hue and cry, was organized by several leading townsmen; they recruited help from residents of the surrounding countryside, whose forces broke through the west gate, closed by the students. Over the next three days there were repeated assaults on and plundering of various university buildings; several students were killed.

The king and the Bishop of Lincoln both intervened, the latter placing the town under interdict until 1356, and the former demanding both town and university surrender their charters of liberties. The king continued to favour the university. A new charter granted to the town in July excluded from the restoration of liberties some key privileges: market assizes, investigations of forestalling or of sale of bad meat or fish, punishment of carrying arms in town, control over street-cleaning, and taxation of scholars' servants. The transfer of these powers to the university were a severe blow to local government. In addition, the king deposed the mayor, who was thrown into prison, and the bailiffs, required the townspeople to restore all possessions plundered from the university, and imposed damages of £250. In a final settlement in 1357, the mayor, bailiffs and aldermen were subjected to the further humiliation of having to attend a service in the university's church every St. Scholastica day and make an offering of 1d. each on that occasion, as a gesture of submission.

The 1355 riot exhausted the town's efforts to dominate the university and relations actually improved thereafter – or at least were more subdued; resentment continuing to find outlets in disputes, but rarely reaching the point of violence.