Student Experience

Abstract

The annals of Cambridge explain how in 1217 clerks loyal to the son of the King of France were excommunicated and expelled.¹ In Oxford Robert of Ireland, arrested in the 1240s for burglary, was only one of the Irish who got themselves a reputation for violence and disorder.² Sadly, but characteristically, the records give us only the English side of the stories. For many centuries we hear about the experience of foreign students through the writings of their hosts so that they are actors on the university stage with muffled voices coming from a part written for them and not by them. Almost all the voices are male although there were also always parts played by women.