It’s 10 February, which can only mean one thing. YES, OF COURSE! It’s the 668th anniversary of the townsfolk and students of Oxford marking Saint Scholastica’s day by… er, hammering shit out of each other until over 90 people were dead.
To be strictly accurate, it might be the 669th anniversary, because no-one seems to know whether it happened in 1354 or 1355, but we shouldn’t allow that to distract us from this vital piece of history.
It all kicked off when some students in the Swindlestock Tavern were apparently served ‘bad wine’. According to the antiquarian Anthony Wood “several snappish words passed” between them and the landlord.
That might have been it, had said landlord not also subjected the students to “stubborn and saucy language”. One of them, clergyman(!) Roger de Chesterfield, threw his drink in the landlord’s face and may then also have twatted him one with the wooden drinking vessel.
It quickly developed into a three-day riot involving
armed gangs coming in from the countryside to assist the townspeople. University halls and students’ accommodation [being] raided and the inhabitants murdered … some reports of clerics being scalped
It wasn’t the first time relations between town and gown had got out of hand. The University of Cambridge was founded in 1209 by scholars who left Oxford after three of their number were hanged for the death of a woman, without the ecclesiastical authorities being consulted.
So, it may be that the Bullingdon Club besmirches the city of dreaming spires, or it may be that its reputation has always taken hits, because humans are idiots.
When things had died down in 1355 (or 4), Edward III made the townspeople do penance each year on St Scholastica’s Day, attending a mass and paying a penny fine for every student killed, a tradition which continued until 1825.
And after all that excitement, I’m afraid we have to end on the very prosaic note that there’s now a bank on the site of the pub.
Yes, sorry.
