ABSTRACT
The development of the study of economics at Oxford during, roughly, the last third of the nineteenth century, was largely determined by its association with the School of Modern History. The School of Law and Modern History had been founded in 1853, on the basis of the 1850 statutes. It was then established that, while an honours degree in arts could only be obtained by reading Literae Humaniores (Greats), students were offered the option of an additional school. The new schools-mathematics and physics, natural science, and law and modern history, although not yet fully fledged honours schools, were generally regarded as a means of rounding off an Oxford education with additional evidence of scholarly attainment. This had later led to the custom amongst the more ambitious arts students to sit for more than one honours school, the one remaining Greats,1 the prestige of which survived unchallenged. A first in Greats, according to James E. Thorold Rogers, who had obtained his in 1846,
represented the highest general distinction which the university can give. It deserves all that can be awarded to it by public opinion, and even more, since it implies vastly more than the highest honours which are put in paralleled columns to it. It denotes years of laborious study, with the possession of extraordinary mental powers. It searches to exhaustion the stores of accumulated labour, the patient drilling of schools, and the voluntary acquisition of painstaking research.2
