Aberdeen Students 1600–1860 (review)

This book is a fine piece of original historiography. It begins with a survey of the manuscript and other primary sources from which the author has constructed his account, and it is indeed an archivist's account: untheoretical, unargumentative, scientifically wary. But it is also a model of what can be done to turn such sources into something not just accessible and informative, but also consistently enjoyable to read.

McLaren has been Archivist and Librarian at Aberdeen University, and he has organised his material with just that courteous anticipation of a reader's needs and weaknesses that the very best librarians practice. Four chapters cover the periods 1600–39, 1640–1717, 1718–1825, and 1826–60, this last the date of the union of the two Aberdeen colleges, and the point at which R. D. Anderson's The Student Community at Aberdeen (1988) begins. Within each chapter the same aspects of student life are separately treated (and aptly subtitled with contemporary quotations): teaching and learning, religion, sports and other relaxations, discipline, the class-year society, the finances of 'libertines' and bursars, and the sociology of the students' pasts and futures. Each chapter begins with two particular arriving at their colleges, and the careers of these chosen two provide continuity during the chapter, among the variety of other careers more briefly emerging to view from the records.

A final chapter summarises the characterising features and trends of each period. The author warns against generalisations which have to be based on only 127 student careers highlighted by the source data, out of the 15,000 or so which formed the complete history of student life at the Aberdeen colleges, but of course period character does show. First, there is the hard monastic style of life of the opening period, not much softened by the grimly organised games; then the astonishing social disorder, particularly the inter-college hostilities, of the period 1640–1717; next, a period of curricular and other reforms, including the abandonment of regenting and of student residence as the college ideal. The final period, 1826–60, shows the rise of a more self-conscious student culture of societies and magazines, a recognisably modern student scene – associated, no doubt, with the rise in the ordinary matriculating age of the students to something near today's.

Much of what goes on in student life relates of course to other areas of college business, and beyond them to the national life, but McLaren rightly alludes to these outside influences with the strictest economy. For instance, the 1715 rising makes an appearance in some student demonstrations, but the 1745, finding little student response at Aberdeen, passes almost unmentioned. So this is truly a study of a sub-culture, a society governed but not fashioned by the larger community, and having meanwhile its own peculiar and almost self-sufficient folk-ways. Ends of sessions have always been especially productive of such corporate utterances; one such at Marischal was deplored by Principal Leslie in the 1660s as 'that damnable custome of chalking of the schooles', and seems to have involved not just the defacement but actually the near-destruction of the doors and windows and other fittings of the college. Leslie refers to the 'furie of the students' (p. 47). Why was there this fury – and not just in Leslie's time? Mere tradition has an almost religious power in communities of immature humans, and one need perhaps look no further than that. But it must also be said that one insistent feature of the Aberdeen student experience throughout the period of McLaren's account is the harshness of the life. From the sad and symptomatic note on an early page that students 'were discouraged from celebrating their graduation' to the mention, on a late one, of 'the notoriously high rate of sickness and death among bursars', with many instances of hardship in between, motives for the breaking of college property are easy to find. Admittedly, these were conditions which wealthier students...