YOUR starter for 10 on University Challenge: what links poet John Milton, explorer Sir Richard Burton and playwright Oscar Wilde? The answer? All three were rusticated. To the uninitiated, that may sound like something to make a chap's eyes water, but, in fact, it's the practice at Oxford, Cambridge and Durham Universities of temporarily suspending students, banning them from all facilities and sending them out as the name suggests'into the countryside'. Rustication is a lesser punishment than being 'sent down' (straight expulsion), but both are fates suffered by students who went on to achieve fame or notoriety-and, in some cases, both.
Today, an intemperate outburst on social media might be enough to see a student handed their wellies and a stout stick, but, in the past, university authorities took a more laissez-faire attitude to discipline. There was toleration of a good deal of horseplay, sometimes quite literally involving horsesleaving a nag in a tutor's bedroom was considered a terribly amusing jape by Regency bucks such as John 'Mad Jack' Mytton, who arrived at Cambridge in 1816, together with 2,000 bottles of Port 'to see him through his studies', got bored and left before they were finished. As a result, some of the most notorious scoundrels in British history have made it through our finest universities without a blot on their copybooks.
Take notorious Elizabethan rakehell the 2nd Earl of Rochester, who entered Wadham College, Oxford in 1660 and quickly 'grew debauched' (despite being only 13 at the time), but was awarded an honorary MA a year later.
Denne historien er fra February 28, 2024-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra February 28, 2024-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
