The Early History of Oxford 727 1100

d the schools. And it necessarily follows that you must allow also that the University of Oxford was not first of all a University, but a grammar school such as Eton or Winchester. For Asser, in his work " Degestij Alfredi" says he gave the third part of his goods to a School which he had zealously collected together from the boys of his own nation, whether noble by birth or otherwise V With the exception of these few incidental references to the Oxford argument, the first half of his work, which he styles Liber I, is occupied wholly with a defence of the Cambridge story. It consists of over 250 pages of the small size of the edition of 1568. The second book, of about 100 pages in the same edition, consists of an attack upon the arguments put forth for the antiquity of Oxford. The writer does not confine himself to those arguments only which are adduced so briefly by his antagonist in the forty pages of the Asjer'tio, but he goes over many others, and with most praiseworthy industry seems to have searched out all the passages which had been, or might have been, adduced by different controversialists in favour of the Oxford story, only, of course, for the purpose of answering them, or exhibiting their discrepancies one with another, or their general inconsistency with known history. He begins with the unsatisfactory character of the assertion of the Hiftoriola that Oxford was the first and foremost ' of all other Latin Universities of the world/ which fact was ...