town and gown

Language: en

Meaning: (chieflyUK,idiomatic,sometimescapitalized)On the one hand, the members of thecity,borough, or similarcommunitynear auniversityand, on the other hand, thestudentsandfacultyof the university itself, especially when understood asrivalsin a state oftensionorconflict.1856,William Makepeace Thackeray, “Codlingsby”, inBurlesques:[H]owls, curses, flights of brickbats, stones shivering windows, groans of wounded men, cries of frightened females, cheers of either contending party as it charged the enemy from Carfax to Trumpington Street, proclaimed that the battle was at its height. In Berlin they would have said it was a revolution, and the cuirassiers would have been charging, sabre in hand, amidst that infuriate mob. In France they would have brought down artillery, and played on it with twenty-four pounders. In Cambridge nobody heeded the disturbance—it was aTown and Gownrow.1919,Booth Tarkington, chapter 14, inRamsey Milholland:Everybody was quiet now, bothtown and gown; the students were at their dinners and so were the burghers.1920,Arthur Quiller-Couch,On The Art of Reading, Lecture V—"On Reading for Examinations":[T]he first archives of this University were burned in the ‘Town and Gown’ riots of 1381 by the Townsmen.

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Sourced from Wiktionary