Among Oxford scholars the son of the noble stood on precisely the same footing with the poorest mendicant.

Wealth, physical strength, skill in arms, pride of ancestry and blood, the very grounds on which feudal society rested, went for nothing in the lecture-room.

The University was a state absolutely self-governed, and whose citizens were admitted by a purely intellectual franchise.

Knowledge made the "master." To know more than one's fellows was a man's sole claim to be a regent or "ruler" in the schools.

And within this intellectual aristocracy all were equal.