Proctors and Prostitutes: Policing Women at the University of Oxford

“University police officers, called Proctors, who are clergymen, are appointed to prevent, as far as they can, debauchery, gross immorality, and public disturbances. The college windows are barred like those of prisons, to prevent egress and ingress; but ecclesiastical vigilance is not a match for the depravity of the students in general; and thus they hold communication, if no Proctor is in sight, with prostitutes through the iron-barred windows. And it must be fresh in everybody’s recollection, that the young woman who was so inhumanly murdered lately in that city, had just previously to the awful occurrence been drinking brandy, handed to her through the bars of one of the windows of Brazen Nose college. […]

– Thomas Parkin, An Exposure of Religious and Civil Despotism, 1828.