Blood Spilled

University students rioted. They fought each other; they fought and killed the townsmen. More blood has been spilled between the churches of St Mary's and St Martin's at Oxford than on many an English battlefield. When they were threatened with retribution by the authorities, students always claimed the privileges of ecclesiastics. One student at Oxford, who raped a woman and then murdered her father, appeared before the lay authorities. His case was referred to the university chancellor, who made him say a few penitential psalms and as a final punishment sent him to Cambridge. An ordinary layman would undoubtedly have been hanged for the same crime.

After one tremendous riot on St Scholastica's day, the citizens attacked the university and killed scores of students and staff. The university appealed to King Edward III, who reinstated them and made the university chancellor the supreme magistrate of the City of Oxford. For centuries the mayor had to swear fealty to the university in a ceremony every year in St Mary's Church. Students today may wear their hair down to their shoulders instead of having a priestly tonsure, but the idea that in some way they are never subject to the rigour of the law is very ancient. Students have claimed it and everyone else has resented it for centuries. No wonder people are perplexed by the astonishing way it has survived into the 20th century.

Furthermore, the idea that a university is a place of sanctuary, much as ancient church might have been, was all important in medieval times. A felon fleeing from justice would find refuge in an abbey or a church. The law has known nothing of such privileges since the time of the Reformation, but the first major riots at Berkley occurred when the police refused to allow students to use part of their campus for political meetings, and when the police invaded the courtyard of the Sorbonne in May 1968, staff and students fought side by side on the barricades on the very spot where their predecessors fought for the same cause hundreds of years ago, and the whole world applauded them.

Some historical traditions are astonishingly tenacious. After St Thomas had been murdered, the Pope anathematised the King, but, even after Henry had submitted and done penance in public by walking barefoot to À Becket's tomb to be scourged by the cathedral clergy, the tragedy of the martyr and the iniquity of his murder were not forgotten. When the next Pope was consecrated, he took the opportunity to anathematise all four knights who killed St Thomas and all the knights' descendants. This precedent was followed by his successors for hundreds of years. By now almost everyone in England must be descended somehow or other from one of these four men, so that we must all have lived under the anathemas of successive Popes for many a long year.

Pope John XXIII and his successor Pope Paul have been the only pontiffs to be consecrated for nearly 800 years who did not anathematise the murderers of the saint who died, whether he knew it or not, to establish the freedon of undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge from arrest and conviction by the civil power, and their right to kill each other and their fellow citizens without any fear of the consequences, as they did for several hundred years.

Students no longer wear a tonsure to identify themselves, but many of them have adopted curious hair styles, and many of them are certain that they can defy the law and that they are immune to the consequences were they committed by ordinary apprentices.

But, in spite of these privileges which are claimed by students and denounced by their contemporaries, there are signs of slow awakening. Once upon a time, students refused to submit to the civil law, and demanded to be judged by the ecclesiastical courts in their universities. Today they speak of 'double jeopardy'. They fear that they may be subject to the civil law in any event, and that, if they are found guilty, they may be punished both by the courts and their university. This is, of course, a risk to which all professional men are exposed. A doctor who rapes a patient or a solicitor who steals from a client must expect retribution from the courts, and from the fellow members of his profession as well.

In Britain, and even in North America, the idea that a university is a special place, perhaps a sacred place, but certainly a place where the writ of the law does not necessarily run, is part of student folklore. Most people realise that, however weak this case may be in law the memory of man goeth not to a time when students and their universities were subjected to all the rigour of the law and to the discipline of the civil courts as laymen are.

Some universities in South America are avoided by low-flying aircraft because the Students use them for target practice. The University of Havana, Cuba, is dominated by a student president who fought with Castro in the jungle and who carries a gun with him into classes and has 'seen off two or three deans and a couple of presidents. There are universities into which the police can scarcely venture except in a tank. In some places, students have formed an unholy alliance with local criminals for their mutual protection.

To me the most ominous event in the riots in Paris was the entry into the Sorbonne of a body of men who called themselves 'Katangese'; they proposed to use the sanctuary of the Sorbonne and to provide the students with armoured support. To the relief of everyone else, mutual suspicion drove students and gunmen apart, and the Katangese left under police escort.