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LEARNING AND EDUCATION 523
highways. Masters might well have expected to receive eiv
couragement there from the religious houses of the town, St.
Frideswide's priory and the
collegiate chapel of St. GeorgeV
in/the'casde, both notable in the middle years of the twelfth
century for canons ofconsiderable reputation. Moreover, close
by there were two royal residences. Beaumont, outside the
north gate, and Woodstock manor about eight miles away.
With the exception of King John, medieval English kings
were to prove powerful protectors of Oxford as a seat of
learning.
In these circumstances a sequence of notable lecturers at
Oxford from the early years of the is century explicable: by
1117 Theobald of tampes, who boasted of having an audi*
ence offrom 60 to 100 clerks; in 1 1 3 3 Robert Pullen, a leading
theologian and later a cardinal; in 1 149 Vacarius, a Lombard
jurist ofrepute. This auspicious beginning may have received
fresh impulse from scholars returning from Paris, when, about
1 167, Henry II, as a measure against Becket, then sheltering in
France, banned Englishmen from studying abroad. Gerald of
Wales, in recounting his visit in 1184 to give public readings
of his Topograpbia Hibemica, describes Oxford as the place
where the clergy in England 'flourished and excelled in clerk'
ship*, and records that on the second day he read his work to 'all
the doctors ofdifferent faculties and such oftheir
pupils
as were
ofgreater note*. Evidence is forthcoming from other sources to
confirm the conclusion that in Oxford a studium generale was
already forming. A charter executed in 1201 preserves the
name of the first graduate known to have presided over its
schools: MagisterJ. Grim magister scolarum Oxonie. 1
3. Growth of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge
For a long time the future ofthe Oxford schools remained pre^
carious as one crisis followed another. In consequence of grave
trouble with the townspeople in which King John sided with
the town, masters and scholars dispersed in 1209 for four years.
1
Stupe's Formkry, %Tc. (Ox Hist. Soc.), p. 309.