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religious views.
    (Bridgeman Art Library/National Portrait Gallery)
    Board and lodging were cheap. Undergraduates were housed two or three to a chamber, with cubicles or ‘studyes’ partitioned off for reading, and an individual’s room rent was no more than sixpence a year. His share of commons, the basic food and drink bought each week for members of the hall or college, amounted to less than a penny a day. A contemporary wrote of Oxford dinners as a ‘penye pece of byefe amongst iiii, hauying a few porage made of the brothe of the same byefe with salte and otemell’. Each student provided his own bedding, knives, spoons, candlesticks, a lantern, a pair of bellows and a coffer for his books.
    The chancellor of the university maintained his own court, with powers to deny a student a degree, or to expel, excommunicate or imprison in serious cases. Fines were the most common punishment. They were imposed for climbing in and out of college after the gates were shut, for bringing an unsheathed knife to table, for disorder, drunkenness, gaming and fighting. If blood was shed during a brawl, the fine was doubled. Scholars and fellows sometimes wore distinctive liveries and fur-trimmed cloaks, but undergraduates were required only to wear decent clerical garb, which varied in colour and style and differed little from ordinary dress. It was only later that they were obliged to wear black gowns, as they still do on formal occasions, thus making it possible for the university officers or proctors to distinguish ‘town’ from ‘gown’ in brawls.
    Some one thousand young scholars attended the colleges, semi-monastic institutions of the regular and secular clergy, and the self-governing halls of the university. A small hall like Magdalenmight have no more than twenty students, living in shared chambers with a central hall for meals and disputations. They were up at 5.00 for divine service before the first, 6.00 a.m. lecture. They ate together in commons, with a bell or horn announcing dinner at 10.00 or 11.00 a.m., and supper at 5.00. Before retiring to bed, they chanted the Salve Regina or some such antiphon to the Virgin together. The atmosphere was one of family, as well as church; to this day, colleges refer to themselves as ‘domus’, or ‘house’, as in ‘house and home’.
    Tyndale’s schooling gave him a thorough grounding in Latin. Boys learnt to speak and write elementary Latin in the early forms. Classes then progressed from Aesop and Terence in the third form to Horace’s epistles and Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the seventh, by way of Virgil, Cicero’s letters and Caesar’s history. In the eighth class, the science of grammar was studied in depth. Verse was rendered into prose, and vice versa, translations were made, and, though Ovid’s lascivious De arte amandi was strictly off the menu, Virgil was read out ‘ voce ben sonora to bring out the majesty of his poetry’.
    The Latin diet remained at the university. English had such lowly status that undergraduates were forbidden to speak it within the precincts of the hall, except at feasts and on holidays. It was compulsory for them to use Latin, although French was tolerated as an alternative in some colleges. Tyndale’s love of English – ‘our mother tongue’, he said, ‘which doth correspond with scripture better than ever Latin may’ – was eccentric. It was spoken by only three million people on their foggy island; and the English themselves largely governed, educated and prayed in Latin. A foreign scholar or cleric, such as Erasmus, lived for several years in England, and followed a lively social and academic life, without speaking any English.
    The MA course began with the trivium , the ‘liberall artes’, a trio of grammar, rhetoric and logic. Tyndale will have read the Rhetoric of Aristotle, Boethius’s Topics , Cicero’s Nova Rhetorica and some works of Ovid and Priscian. His insight into rhetoric was greatly to influence his prose. The