ABSTRACT
To picture a century of life at England's two great universities would seem like a formidable undertaking. And to be a gentleman commoner at Oxford or a fellow commoner at Cambridge was indeed to live in clover. One Oxford don, for example, used to sit up till two in the morning drinking with an adolescent duke. And if the young men were under no academic orders to study, they had no worldly incentive either. Oxford and Cambridge were in only one particular to the eighteenth century what the monasteries were to the Middle Ages: more than a touch of monastic mustiness, and hieratic formality, adhered to the college walls. At Oxford the statutes of Laud governed the university, unaltered, until 1760. The Cambridge statutes went even farther back, to Elizabethan times. In the matter of progress, however, we must differentiate sharply between Oxford and Cambridge, for the latter surpassed the former in every way.
