Stuart Walton marks St Scholastica’s Day by looking back almost 700 years to a violent incident that began with an argument over wine quality in a city-center tavern and ended up in a murderous two-day riot.
Relations between town and gown in Oxford have historically tended to be abrasive. The sudden hostile silences that could descend on a city-center pub when locals heard a table of posh boys talking about biochemistry or Foucault were still prevalent in the 1980s, and probably still are. Without regular murderous attacks on the University’s students in the medieval era, Cambridge University might never have been founded as a peaceable refuge from them.
The event that has echoed down Oxford’s history, and in the long chronicles of English affray, is the riot that broke out on St Scholastica’s Day in 1355. Sister of St Benedict, Scholastica was an Italian nun who died in the mid-sixth century after a lifetime of devotion. She is the patron both of nuns and of institutions of education, her festival day celebrated on 10 February.
It was on that date in the reign of Edward III that the Oxford disturbances erupted. A group of scholars headed to their customary watering-hole at the Swindlestock Tavern, at the central crossroads now known as Carfax, to enjoy a commodious interlude from their books. Two of their number, beneficed clergymen from parishes in Devon and Somerset, appear to have decided that they were being palmed off with inferior wine. When they challenged the tavern’s vintner, John de Croydon, about the sub-standard muck they were drinking, and demanded something better, Croydon’s professional dignity was affronted.
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As the exchange heated up, and locals began to take an interest in it, one of the scholars, Roger de Chesterfield, the young rector of Ipplepen, threw his cup of wine in Croydon’s face. A roaring chorus of chastisement blew up among the patrons, and many would later swear that the enraged cleric took to belaboring Croydon about the head with his wooden tankard. The scholars themselves, giving evidence to the inquest into the disturbances, insisted that the furious Chesterfield had only thrown his cup in the general direction of Croydon’s head, a more decorous expression of umbrage, it would seem, befitting a minister of the church.
The entire company set to with a will, the ensuing fracas eventually spilling through the tavern doors and on to the crossroads. Somebody dashed into the belltower of St Martin’s church opposite (now Carfax Tower), and yanked the rope, the anguished chimes summoning townspeople to the emergency. At some indeterminate point, the mass brawl evolved into a full-scale riot, with stout-hearted yeomen farmers battering whatever students they could find, while the University’s own precincts soon supplied its own infuriated task-force. Bows and arrows were resorted to.
Millitant horde
Although the unrest appears to have abated somewhat by the close of day on the 10th, fighting resumed on the morning of the 11th, but much worse was to come. Later in the day, a militant horde, around 2,000 strong, of men from the county, many of whom had apparently been paid for their services, arrived to defend Oxford’s honor from the effete pretensions of scholars.
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The students retreated to their rooms in terror, although a few tried to close the city gates to forestall any further incursion. It would be futile. The attackers broke into the University halls and student rooms, bludgeoning and pummelling wherever they went. Students were clobbered senseless, roughly scalped, and left for dead all over academe’s groves. Some of the bodies were thrown on to dung heaps and cesspits, some into the river. In all, by the time the whole affair simmered to a halt on the third day, 62 had been killed.
It so happened that the owner of the Swindlestock, John de Bereford, was also Mayor of Oxford and, although he had ridden to Woodstock to petition the King, who happened to be staying there, to quell the riot, he would be held one of its principal antagonists. Edward removed him from the mayoralty and had him imprisoned in the Marshalsea in London. Everybody who could be identified as having taken part was subjected to exemplary punishment.
The King then sentenced the civic authorities to a symbolic imposition, under which they had to process to St Mary the Virgin, the University church on the High Street, each year on St Scholastica’s Day, and pay a penalty of 63 pennies, one for each student killed. In a particularly vengeful bit of detail, the Mayor had to wear a halter around his neck, in which humiliated guise, he would be roundly jeered along the route by assembled scholars. The University authorities were granted extraordinary powers over the terms of trade in the city, and each newly elected Mayor had to swear to uphold the University’s sovereign rights.
King Edward’s penance on the Oxford burgesses would remain in force until the 19th century, when it was finally diluted to a ritual church observance. The riot had long passed into legend. It was re-enacted in 1907, in the last halcyon years before war broke out on the continental scale, and is vividly depicted on a commemorative postcard printed to mark the event.
The Swindlestock Tavern is now a bank building on the corner of Queen Street and St Aldates, an engraving on the wall recording its long existence, 1250-1709. Bad wine has a lot to answer for in all ages, but if we are tempted to wonder whether the clue might have been in the name, we must recall that swindlers did not make their debut in the English language until the mid-18th century. A swindlestock was an agricultural implement for scraping flax.
St Scholastica, it should be noted, is also the saint whose intercession is held to quell storms. In 1355, she was sleeping on the job.
