These roofless squares have velvet grass, with wide walks around the outside, against the buildings, and cross-paths leading to the doorways and arches. Scrupulously clean is every inch of college ground in Oxford. Not a piece of paper litters the lawn; and many students have flower-pots at their windows. Fuschias, petunias, nasturtiums, and geraniums were abundant. The buildings vary in design, but are all three or four stories high. Some of them are built out flush; and others have corridors, cloister-like, under the second story, around their quadrangles.
Connected with many colleges are large parks, for centuries used as places of academic resort. They have avenues and trees like Boston Common, and the main avenue at Merton College has a circuit miles in length. Too much cannot be said in praise of those classic grounds. Flower-plats are cultivated, and fine shrubbery; and there are brooks, embankments, and bridges. In a word, if paradise ever was lost, much of it has here been regained. It is no stretch of the imagination to think that Milton, educated amidst similar grounds at Cambridge, was on their account more inclined to meditate on "Paradise Regained."
The antiquity of Oxford as a seat of learning is undisputed. It is so referred to by Giraldus Cambrensis, in 1180, more than seven hundred years ago. Vacarius, a Lombard, lectured here on civil law, about the year 1149. The first use of the word University (_universitas_), in this sense, appears in a statute of King John in 1201. It was applied to similar institutions in Paris, in an ordinance of Pope Innocent III., bearing date 1215. The place was so recognized as a desirable resort for persons of education, that Wood, its principal historian, says: "At one time there were within its precincts thirty thousand persons claiming to be scholars, though of course not all belonging to the university." Its first charter was granted by Henry III. in 1244.
On the 10th of February, 1355, a disturbance occurred,--or what in our day would be designated a rebellion,--which ended in an edict from the Bishop of Lincoln, whose diocese included Oxford, that thereafter there should be annually celebrated in St. Mary's Church a mass for the souls of those who were killed, and that the mayor, two bailiffs, and sixty of the principal citizens should be present and offer a penny each at the great altar, in default of which they were to pay one hundred marks yearly to the University. The penance was afterwards mitigated, but was not abolished till 1825; so that, in some form, it remained for nearly five hundred years.