All this went to paying subscribers in June…
In 1827 University of Oxford decided to review the written rules and regulations which governed life in the city of dreaming spires.1 By then the university was 731 years old, and some of its statutes had stood unchanged for centuries.
That explained the strange thing those reformers encountered when they came to consider the oath that holders of Bachelor of Arts degrees had to swear to become Master of Arts.
The oddity was not, as one might imagine, simply that you could simply mutter a sort of incantation to magically transform your BA into something that sounds like a postgrad degree2, but was something else entirely. Here’s archivist Alice Millea for the Bodleian Library blog:
As well as being required to swear that they would observe the University’s statutes, privileges, liberties and customs, as you might expect; and not to lecture elsewhere, or resume their bachelor studies after getting their MA, the Bachelors of Arts also had to swear that they would never agree to the reconciliation of Henry Symeonis.
Here’s the full oath, from the Corpus Statutorum (Statute Tit VII section 1):
Magister, tu jurabis quod nunquam consenties in reconciliationem Henrici Simeonis, nec statum Baccalaurei iterum tibi assumes.
Master, you shall swear that you will never consent to the reconciliation of Henry Simeonis, nor will you assume again the status of Bachelor.
The shift from “Symeonis” to “Simeonis” isn’t a typo: it’s a mark of the fact this statute had been in place so long it predates standardised spelling.
If you’re feeling shamed by your ignorance of who Henry Symeonis was and what he had done, rest assured that the men running the University of Oxford in 1827 had no more idea than you did. Worse: it soon transpired that no one had known for literally centuries.
In 1608 Brian Twyne, the first keeper of the University archives, had suggested that Symeonis had fraudulently claimed he had a BA in order to obtain admission to a foreign monastery; he gave no evidence of where he got that or why he thought it was true, which is why it almost certainly wasn’t. As far back as the 1650s there was talk of removing the oath, but permission was refused. “Even by that time,” notes Millea, “one suspects that the oath was of such antiquity that no-one knew anything about it and it was thought best to leave it be.”
It was only in 1912 that another keeper of the university archives, Reginald Lane Poole, managed to shine some light. In an article for the English Historical Review he identified one Henry, son of Henry, son of Simeon. (Symeonis was a patronymic; the 13th century, when these men lived, was also when surnames were starting to settle down.) The Symeonises were a rich local family, of whom the younger Henry was presumed to be the scion.
The long-standing tension between town and gown, between those who study in Oxford and those who have to live among them, persists to this day, as any Radiohead could tell you, but the 13th century version seems to have been more extreme. In 1242, Henry Symeonsis was one of a number of local men who’d murdered a student. They’d been fined £80, which may not sound much but is equivalent to over £120,000 today. They’d also been ordered by the crown to leave Oxford, and to reside no closer than Northampton.
Records, though, are patchy, and those we have are biased, so why Symeonis specifically was named in the centuries’ old oath is quite hard to pin down. Property transactions suggest that he was back in Oxford as soon as the following year, and tensions between university and townspeople clearly persisted. In April 1264 King Henry III pardoned Syneonis; said he was allowed to reside in the city, just so long as he behaved himself; and that the university should leave him be, and also that it should not withdraw from the town just because a bloke who killed one of their students was now living in it. That seems fair enough. It had been 22 years, right?
All this, though, is hard to reconcile with the fact that a handful of weeks earlier the same king had suspended the university on the grounds its scholars weren’t safe there: many of them had left to join a new university in Northampton, which is why the king felt the need to call them back. In 1912, Reginald Poole blamed their departure on Symeonis’ pardon. But that, Alice Millea noted in 2023, doesn’t fit the sequence of events – it would be eccentric to leave Oxford in protest of a pardon that wouldn’t be issued for several more weeks – and is also hard to reconcile with the fact Symeonis seems to have been hanging around as far back as 1243.
It’s little clearer how any of this fits with the abortive attempt to start a third English university. There had been scholars in Oxford as early as 1097, and Cambridge was founded by a breakaway faction in 1209. In 1261, the burgesses of Northampton had won permission from the king to start another institution.
But by February 1265 – less than a year after the row detailed above – the king ordered it shut down again under pressure from Oxford. This is why the ancient colleges of Northampton are just as familiar to you as the crimes of Henry Symeonis: the city didn’t get a university until 2005, not quite three quarters of a millennium later. Attempts by more breakaway Oxford scholars to establish a university in Lincolnshire the following century went little better: something else scholars were expected to swear until 1827 was that they would not, under any circumstances, attend lectures in Stamford, where there had not been a university since Edward III closed it down in the 1330s.3
At any rate, the relationship between Symeonis’ crimes, varsity politics, and the extensive civil wars of the 13th century remains murky. “Further research is needed,” notes Millea. Well, yes. All we can say with certainty is that
a) laws and traditions in ancient institutions can persist long past the point of relevance, usefulness or even comprehensibility, just so long as no one thinks to change them, and
b) committing a horrible crime is sometimes a way of getting your name in the history books. Even if nobody can remember how it ended up there.
This is not a recommendation.
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Animal of the Week: Not, in fact, a wombat
I was talking about writing books with an old friend the other week when he told me a secret. “I make sure to use the same word somewhere in every book I write,” he said, conspiratorially. “Numbat.”
“You mean ‘wombat’?” I asked, but he didn’t. Turns out a “numbat” is also a type of marsupial, native to Australia. Here’s one now.
You’d probably assume, based on the similarity of names, that numbats and wombats are quite closely related. They’re not. Wombats descend from the largely herbivorous order Diprotodontia, while numbats are insectivore members of the order Dasyuromorphia, both of them part of the class we call mammals. “Marsupials” turn out to be a level of the classification hierarchy called an “infraclass”, of which our own equivalent is placentalia. That, best I can tell, means that numbats are about as closely related to wombats as I am to a pangolin, or Henry Scampi.
But at least the two names have similar roots, right? You’d think, but no. Both come from aboriginal languages, but “numbat” comes from those spoken by the people east of Perth, “wombat” from the extinct Darug language once spoken by those living in the Sydney basin over 2,000 miles away. I suppose it’s possible that the “bat” part has the same root, even though that’s roughly the same distance that separates London from Cairo, but it doesn’t seem terribly likely.
I digress, you want some facts about numbats. They’re unusual among marsupials in that they’re diurnal (active during the day, rather than at night or in twilight). They’re a similar size to squirrels – 20-29cm long, with a bushy tail trailing behind, and weigh well under a kilogram. They nest underground, or in hollow logs. And they have a distinctive pattern of black and white stripes – helps with camouflage, apparently – although during mating season the boy ones exude an oily substance which turns their fur red.
Which is one way of letting partners know you’re up for it, I suppose.
The stripes give them one of their other names: “banded ant-eater”, which someone latinised to make the scientific name Myrmecobius fasciatus. That’s not quite right: while they do sometimes eat ants by accident, it’s termites they’re really into. They can eat up to 20,000 of the things a day – enough that they don’t need other sources of water – and use their long snouts and tongues to hunt them. This diet also means they also don’t need proper teeth: instead they just have sort of pegs.
Numbats once lived right across southern Australia, but are today restricted to a couple of patches of woodland. The problem seems to be the predators like cats and foxes, who first arrived in Australia with the Europeans in the late 18th century. Attempts to exclude feral cats from numbat habitats have meant some improvement in numbers in recent years but even so, they’re classed as endangered – not critically, yet, but there are thought to be fewer than 1,000 left in the wild. This is obviously sad for any animal, but especially so when they look like this:
The friend, incidentally, is Londonist editor-at-large Matt Brown, whose books include the Atlas of Imagined Cities and Everything You Know About Animals Is Wrong. Apparently to get it into his last book, The Boroughs of London, he had to acknowledge in the ‘About the author’ section that this was the first book he hadn’t managed to do so. Clever stuff.
Buy one of Matt’s books and go hunting for numbats today.
Also if you’re in the market for books, 31 Inventions That Built Our World is available now. (The North American edition is published next month.) If you’re in the UK and subscribe to this thing for a year I’ll send you a free one.
Actually, no one would call it that for another generation: Matthew Arnold coined the phrase in his 1865 poem, Thyrsis. But I needed a second mention.
This happened to me too, as it happens, but mine’s from Cambridge so it actually counts.
Stamford never had any luck: it was also the only one of the early medieval “five boroughs” not to become a county town. The others were Nottingham, Leicester, Derby and Lincoln, under whose aegis Stamford found itself.