Happy Birthday, Town v. Gown Rioting

Like most people, I take a pointless interest in historical things that occurred on my birthday, 10 February. Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840, New Delhi became the capital of India in 1931 and the ‘Deep Blue’ computer beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1996. It is also the birthday of Boris Pasternak, Harold Macmillan, Bertolt Brecht, Robert Wagner, Roberta Flack, Laura Dern, Keeley Hawes and newsreader Nicholas ‘Silver Fox’ Owen. Aleksandr Pushkin, Joseph Lister, Arthur Miller and Roy Scheider died on this day.

It is also, as you are doubtless aware, the feast day of Saint Scholastica, the patron saint of convulsive children and nuns (Christ, they were scraping the barrel with that one). On 10 February 1355, a terrible riot broke out in the (aptly scholastic) city of Oxford, at the Swindlestock Tavern. A group of boozy students complained to the pub landlord about their wine; he, responding in a manner described by witnesses as ‘saucy’, was smashed over the head with a wine flagon. This was enough to stir up pre-existing ‘town v. gown’ rivalries, and the two factions raced off to ring the bells of the City Church and the University Church, apparently the done thing in those days if one wanted to raise an angry mob.

The ensuing three days of what became known as the Saint Scholastica Day Riot saw sixty students and thirty townspeople slain in the streets of Oxford. Somehow, this whole debacle was deemed by the king to have been the fault of the townspeople, and for the next 470 years, the mayor and city officials had to attend an annual service of penitence at the University Church. It wasn’t until an incoming mayor said he’d have nothing to do with this nonsense that the tradition came to an end.

Bloody students.