The resemblance between the servitor and the Ruskin Hall man is apparent when due allowance has been made for modern improvements. The modern conception of Oxford is curiously akin to that of the eighteenth century. The education to be received still has a very high reputation. The present day working classes, however, possess a greater ambition than their antecedents showed. They are no longer content to snatch education in the intervals of earning their keep. Ruskin Hall has been built for their especial benefit. There they may win scholarships to their heart’s content. Their kinship with the humble servitor lies in the fact that they do their own menial work instead of having to do it for others; that they have no social intercourse with the Undergraduates of other colleges except at the weekly debates of the Union Society in which they distinguish themselves by their fluent Socialistic doctrines; and that they take no part in the athletic and collegiate life of the university.
One of the earliest references to servitors in the eighteenth century records is contained in a comedy entitled “An Act at Oxford.” The play was written in 1704 by a dramatist named Baker.
One of the characters was a servitor named Chum. His father was a chimney-sweep and his mother a poor ginger-bread seller at Cow Cross. Chum was established in Brazen-Nose College, and his duties consisted in waiting “upon Gentleman-Commoners, to dress and clean their shoes and make out their exercises.” His “fortune,” which was “soon told,” consisted apparently of “two Raggs call’d shirts, a dog’s eared Grammer, and a piece of _Ovid de Tristibus_.” For having materially assisted his master, a Smart, to win the hand and heart of a fair damsel known as Berynthia, he was rewarded, in the play, with the sum of five hundred guineas--an occurrence which would be the height of improbability in real life, as the servitor was jeered at and made a kind of Aunt Sally by all and sundry.
In 1709 one of those poor miserable wretches sat him down--where he procured pen and paper is still shrouded in mystery--and wrote a poem on his own doleful condition. Its title is “Servitour,” and it was printed by “H. Hills in Black-Fryars, near the water side.” He pictured himself to be coming out of a Skittle Yard in his “rusty round cap.”