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Updated: June 16, 2025
The youths sat so late to enjoy the folly of their own conversation that the play had begun before we came there, and inquiring for our box we found it in the possession of four gownsmen, who had turned the servant out and seized upon it for themselves. Hector and Andrews began to swear outrageously! Tigers could not have appeared more fierce.
Shortly afterward she sang at a musical festival of Oxford University, whither the report of her supposed bad temper and intractability had preceded her. The gownsmen were as riotous then as now; and as one or two things happened to irritate their lively temper, a row soon became imminent. Mara got angry and flung a book at the head of one of the orchestra, when Dr.
When Mr. Bouncer's party turned the corner of Saint Mary's, they found that the Town, as usual, had taken the initiative, and in a dense body had swept the High Street and driven all the gownsmen before them. A small knot of 'varsity men were manfully struggling against superior numbers by St. Mary's Hall. "Gown to the rescue!" shouted Mr. Bouncer, as he dashed across the street. "Come on, Pet!
The gownsmen began to besiege the theatre in the forenoon, and by one in the afternoon all the seats were filled. About the merits of the piece which had so extraordinary an effect, the public, we suppose, has made up its mind.
Charles went to bed with a bad headache, and woke with a worse. Nothing remained but to order his bill and be off for London. Yet he could not go without taking a last farewell of the place itself. He was up soon after seven; and while the gownsmen were rising and in their respective chapels, he had been round Magdalen Walk and Christ Church Meadow.
The townsmen under great provocation had seized three of the gownsmen in hospitio suo and threw them into the gaol. King John came down to make inquiry, and he hung those three, guiltless though they were, as Matthew Paris assures us. Hereupon there was intense indignation, and the University dispersed. Three thousand of the gownsmen migrated elsewhere, some to Cambridge we learn.
In Oxford there must have been much bewilderment and questioning among citizens and gownsmen when Lord Say and Seale, the new Lord-Lieutenant of the county appointed by the Parliament, came into the town on September 14, 1642, and ordered that the works and trenches made by the scholars should be demolished; yet next day he "sent a drumme up and downe the towne for volunteers to serve the King and Parliament."
They were very well known in Oxford, not for their beauty alone, but for their gentleness and charity, being always ready to succour the sick and afflicted, and to visit with their own presence any stricken houses where trouble of any kind had entered. So that not only the gownsmen but the townsmen were ready to welcome them with cheers, and to acclaim them eagerly as the queens of the day.
There are reputations of this sort made, quite independent of the collegiate hierarchy, in the republic of gownsmen.
The mail-coach, as the national organ for publishing these mighty events, became itself a spiritualized and glorified object to an impassioned heart; and naturally, in the Oxford of that day, all hearts were awakened. There were, perhaps, of us gownsmen, two thousand resident in Oxford, and dispersed through five-and-twenty colleges. In some of these the custom permitted the student to keep what are called "short terms;" that is, the four terms of Michaelmas, Lent, Easter, and Act, were kept severally by a residence, in the aggregate, of ninety-one days, or thirteen weeks. Under this interrupted residence, accordingly, it was possible that a student might have a reason for going down to his home four times in the year. This made eight journeys to and fro. And as these homes lay dispersed through all the shires of the island, and most of us disdained all coaches except his majesty's mail, no city out of London could pretend to so extensive a connection with Mr. Palmer's establishment as Oxford. Naturally, therefore, it became a point of some interest with us, whose journeys revolved every six weeks on an average, to look a little into the executive details of the system. With some of these Mr. Palmer had no concern; they rested upon bye-laws not unreasonable, enacted by posting-houses for their own benefit, and upon others equally stern, enacted by the inside passengers for the illustration of their own exclusiveness. These last were of a nature to rouse our scorn, from which the transition was not very long to mutiny. Up to this time, it had been the fixed assumption of the four inside people, (as an old tradition of all public carriages from the reign of Charles II.,) that they, the illustrious quaternion, constituted a porcelain variety of the human race, whose dignity would have been compromised by exchanging one word of civility with the three miserable delf ware outsides. Even to have kicked an outsider might have been held to attaint the foot concerned in that operation; so that, perhaps, it would have required an act of parliament to restore its purity of blood. What words, then, could express the horror, and the sense of treason, in that case, which had happened, where all three outsides, the trinity of Pariahs, made a vain attempt to sit down at the same breakfast table or dinner table with the consecrated four? I myself witnessed such an attempt; and on that occasion a benevolent old gentleman endeavored to soothe his three holy associates, by suggesting that, if the outsides were indicted for this criminal attempt at the next assizes, the court would regard it as a case of lunacy (or delirium tremens) rather than of treason. England owes much of her grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in her social composition. I am not the man to laugh at it. But sometimes it expressed itself in extravagant shapes. The course taken with the infatuated outsiders, in the particular attempt which I have noticed, was, that the waiter, beckoning them away from the privileged salle-
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