The elder men, and
they who had consciences and hearts, shook their heads, and asked
what could be done? For a long time the principle of _laissez
faire_ prevailed: the young fellows were left to the tender
mercies of the townsfolk. There was no grandmotherly legislation in
those days. Gradually a kind of joint-stock arrangement came into
vogue. Worthy people seemed to have hired a house which they called a
_hostel_ or hall, and sub-let the rooms to the young fellows;
the arrangement appears to have been clumsily managed, and led to
dissensions between town and gown; the townsmen soon discovered that
the gownsmen were gainers by the new plan, and they themselves were
losers. They grumbled, protested, quarrelled. But it was a move in
the right direction, and a beginning of some moral discipline was
made, and that could not but be well. These _hostels_ were set
up at Cambridge certainly at the beginning of the thirteenth century,
and how long before we cannot tell; but it was at Oxford that the
first _college_, as we understand the term, rose into being. It
was Walter de Merton, Chancellor of England, who was the father of
the collegiate system in England. So far from embarking upon a new
experiment without careful deliberation, he spent twelve years of his
life in working out his ideas and in elaborating the famous _Rule
of Merton_, of which it is not at all too much to say that its
publication constituted an era in the history of education and
learning in England.
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