The University was the only corporation of the learned, and she
struggled into existence after hard fights with the town, the Jews,
the Friars, the Papal courts. The history of the University begins
with the thirteenth century. She may be said to have come into being
as soon as she possessed common funds and rents, as soon as fines
were assigned, or benefactions contributed to the maintenance of
scholars. Now the first recorded fine is the payment of fifty-two
shillings by the townsmen of Oxford as part of the compensation for
the hanging of certain clerks. In the year 1214 the Papal Legate, in
a letter to his "beloved sons in Christ, the burgesses of Oxford,"
bade them excuse the "scholars studying in Oxford" half the rent of
their halls, or hospitia, for the space of ten years. The burghers
were also to do penance, and to feast the poorer students once a
year; but the important point is, that they had to pay that large
yearly fine "propter suspendium clericorum"--all for the hanging of
the clerks. Twenty-six years after this decision of the Legate,
Robert Grossteste, the great Bishop of Lincoln, organised the payment
and distribution of the fine, and founded the first of the CHESTS,
the chest of St. Frideswyde. These chests were a kind of Mont de
Piete, and to found them was at first the favourite form of
benefaction. Money was left in this or that chest, from which
students and masters would borrow, on the security of pledges, which
were generally books, cups, daggers, and so forth.

Now, in this affair of 1214 we have a strange passage of history,
which happily illustrates the growth of the University. The
beginning of the whole affair was the quarrel with the town, which,
in 1209, had hanged two clerks, "in contempt of clerical liberty."
The matter was taken up by the Legate--in those bad years of King
John the Pope's viceroy in England--and out of the humiliation of the