352 EDUCATION AND SCIENCE
became the governing board. Similarly much of the freedom
that formerly prevailed was replaced by cast-iron rules. The
lectures to be delivered by the various professors and the readers,
and the members the university required to listen to them., were
all prescribed; it was even stipulated that the lectures should
be taken down by students who had not yet attained a master's
degree. The disputations that had formed so important a
feature in the life of a medieval student were still retained, but
with diminished importance, and were supplemented by more
regular examinations.
The history of Cambridge is less eventful. Apparently licen-
tiousness and intellectual sterility were as prevalent here as at
Oxford. The statutes of 1570 had clone for her very much what
the Laudian code had for Oxford. They had greatly strengthened
the powers of heads of houses, who chose the vice-chancellor and
his advisory board, the caput. The heads also fixed the times
and subjects of lectures, and had veto over the elections of
fellows, scholars, and other officers in their own colleges. In
fact the former liberal constitution of the university was re-
placed by an oligarchical rule.
Both universities were very different institutions, under the
early Stuarts, from what they had been a hundred years before.
They were far less democratic, politically and socially. The
heads of colleges had become a distinct body, and the fellows
were often divided into seniors and juniors and were at logger-
heads ; they were now sharply differentiated from the resident
bachelors and masters of arts and even more so from under-
graduates. The bachelors wishing to become masters were no
longer encouraged to reside at the university, and their absence
removed a strong link between the governing bodies and the
students. This division was the more serious for the under-
graduates, since they were often very young.x Consequently
these lads, surrounded by a multitude of rules, as if they had
been schoolboys, seem to have delighted in breaking them
with more or less impunity. Apparently the only efficient check
upon them came from their tutor, who was expected to be a
kind of guardian as well as instructor. The undergraduate
spent his first year on rhetoric and the second and third on
logic. Thus there appears to be good ground for Milton's
1 The average age at which undergraduates entered Cambridge was about 16.
(J. B. Mullinger, The University of Cambridge [1884], "• 39&0