6. Town vs Gown Was Taken to Extremes in the Middle Ages
Tensions between universities, with their populations of academics and students, and the surrounding community of ordinary folk going about their everyday lives, have been around seemingly forever. Long before universities had even been invented, places known as centers of scholarship, such as ancient Athens or Ptolemaic Alexandria, had often experienced bad blood between the academics who flocked there in scholarly pursuits, and the wider population amongst whom they dwelt. However, relatively few such “town vs gown” tensions have ever boiled over and erupted in as dramatic a fashion as happened in Oxford in 1355.
On February 10th of that year, St. Scholastica Day, two Oxford University students, Roger de Chesterfield and Walter Spryngheuse, were having drinks at the Swindlestock Tavern in Oxford. At some point, they complained to the taverner, John Croidon, about the quality of the drinks. He did not take kindly to their complaints. One thing led to another, heated words were exchanged, and the students ended up throwing the drinks in the tavern keeper’s face, then proceeded to beat him to a bloody pulp. That incident, as seen below, led to medieval England’s biggest town vs gown rumble.
