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Browsing named entities in Cambridge sketches (ed. Estelle M. H. Merrill). You can also browse the collection for Tom Brown or search for Tom Brown in all documents.

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Cambridge sketches (ed. Estelle M. H. Merrill), Town and Gown. (search)
Town and Gown. Edmund A. Whitman. Readers of Tom Brown at Oxford or of Verdant green will find this title a familiar one. To them it will recall encounters between students and townsmen ending, not infrequently, with broken heads. A party of students, after some merrymaking perhaps, commits an unprovoked assault on some passing townsman; he at once raises a cry of Town! Town! and a rescuing party joins in the fray only to meet a larger body of students summoned by the cry of Gown! The fight grows hotter until the approach of the town watch or of college proctors causes the contending parties to slip away, to continue battle on some more favorable occasion. These contests probably owed their origin to the attempts, in earlier times, of the college authorities to extend a civil control over the towns-people of Oxford and to impose taxes upon them. In our own Cambridge, however, the college has always been deferential to the town authorities. As early as 1659 the corpora