conclusions, but also in y^e Optikes and Catoptikes, that he was able by
Perspectiue Glasses, duely seituate upon conuenient angles, in such sort
to discouer every particularitie of the country round about, wheresoeuer
the Sunne beames might pearse: as sithence Archimedes (Bakon of Oxford
onely excepted) I have not read of any in action euer able by means
natural to perform the like. Which partly grew by the aid he had by one
old written book of the same Bakon's Experiments, that by strange
aduenture, or rather Destinie, came to his hands, though chiefely by
conioyning continuall laborious Practise with his Mathematicall
Studies."
And the same Thomas Digges, in his 'Pantometria,' London, 1571, Preface
(republished in 1591), had previously given the same story, with more
detail, omitting, however, all mention of Bacon. He says that his
father--"sundrie times hath by proportionall Glasses duely situate in
conuenient angles, not onely discouered things farre off, read letters,
numbred peeces of money with the very coyne and superscription thereof,
cast by some of his freends of purpose upon Downes in open Fields, but
also seuen miles off declared what hath beene doone at that instant in
priuate places. There are yet living diuerse (of these his dooings)
_Oculati Testes_."
The question has been agitated whether the invention of spectacles is
due to Bacon, or whether they had been introduced just before he wrote.
He certainly describes them, and explains why a plane convex glass
magnifies. But he seems to us to speak of them as already in use. "Hence
this instrument is useful to old persons and those who have weak eyes."
The 'Opus Majus' begins with a book on the necessity of advancing
knowledge, and a dissertation on the use of philosophy in theology. It
is followed by books on the utility of grammar and mathematics; in the
latter of which he runs through the various sciences of astronomy,
chronology, geography, and music. The account of the inhabited world is
long and curious, and though frequently based on that of Ptolemy, or the
writings of Pliny, contains many new facts from travellers of his own
and preceding times. His account of the defects in the calendar was
variously cited in the discussions which took place on the subject two
centuries after. The remainder of the work consists of a treatise on
optics and on experimental philosophy, insisting on the peculiar
advantages of the latter. The explanation of the phenomena of the
rainbow, though very imperfect, was an original effort of a character
altogether foreign to the philosophy of his day. He attributes it to the
reflection of the sun's rays from the cloud; and the chief merit of his
theory is in the clear and philosophical manner in which he proves that
the phenomenon is an appearance, and not a reality. Between the two
last-mentioned books is a treatise, 'De Multiplicatione Specierum,'
entirely filled with discussions somewhat metaphysical upon the
connexion and causes of phenomena.
Our limits will not allow us to enter further into details: nor could
we, in any moderate space, do justice to the varied learning of the
author, or distinctly mark even the chief of the numerous singular and
now exploded notions which are introduced; nor, as far as we know, does
there exist any full account of the contents to which we can refer the
reader.
The following amusing extract will show the sort of reputation which
Roger Bacon acquired:--
"How Friar Bacon made a brazen head to speak, by the which he would have
walled England about with brass.
"Friar Bacon reading one day of the many conquests of England,
bethought himself how he might keep it hereafter from the like
conquests, and to make himself famous hereafter to all posterities. This
(after great study) he found could be no way so well done as one; which
was to make a head of brass, and if he could make this head to speak
(and hear it when it speaks) then might he be able to wall all England
about with brass. To this purpose he got one Friar Bungey to assist him,
who was a great scholar and a magician (but not to be compared to Friar
Bacon), these two, with great pains, so framed a head of brass that in
the inward parts thereof there was all things like as in a natural man's
head: this being done, they were as far from perfection of the work as
they were before, for they knew not how to give those parts that they
had made motion, without which it was impossible that it should speak.
Many books they read, but yet could not find out any hope of what they
sought, that at the last they concluded to raise a spirit, and to know
of him that which they could not attain to by their own studies. To do
this they prepared all things ready, and went one evening to a wood
thereby, and, after many ceremonies used, they spake the words of
conjuration, which the devil straight obeyed, and appeared unto them,
asking what they would. Know, said Friar Bacon, that we have made an
artificial head of brass, which we would have to speak, to the
furtherance of which we have raised thee, and, being raised, we will
here keep thee, unless thou tell to us the way and manner how to make
this head to speak. The devil told him that he had not that power of
himself. Beginner of lies, said Friar Bacon, I know that thou dost
dissemble, and therefore tell it us quickly, or else we will here bind
thee to remain during our pleasures. At these threatenings the devil
consented to do it, and told them, that with a continual fume of the six
hottest simples it should have motion, and in one month's space speak,
the time of the month or day he knew not: also he told them, that if
they heard it not before it had done speaking all their labour should be
lost; they, being satisfied, licensed the spirit for to depart.
"Then went these two learned friars home again, and prepared the simples
ready, and made the fumes, and with continual watching attended when
this brazen head would speak. Thus watched they for three weeks without
any rest, so that they were so weary and sleepy that they could not any
longer refrain from rest. Then called Friar Bacon his man Miles, and
told him that it was not unknown to him what pains Friar Bungey and
himself had taken for three weeks' space, only to make and to hear the
brazen head speak, which, if they did not, then had they lost all their
labour, and all England had a great loss thereby: therefore he intreated
Miles that he would watch whilst that they slept, and call them if the
head speak."
Miles then begins his watch, and keeps himself from sleeping by merrily
singing.
After some noise the head spake these two words, _Time is_. Miles,
hearing it to speak no more, thought his master would be angry if he
waked him for that, and therefore he let them both sleep, and began to
mock the head . . . . After half an hour had passed, the head did speak
again two words, which were these, _Time was_. Miles respected these
words as little as he did the former, and would not wake them, but still
scoffed at the brazen head, that it had learned no better words, and
have such a tutor as his master . . . . Miles talked and sung till
another half hour was gone, then the brazen head spake again these
words, _Time is past_, and therewith fell down, and presently followed a
terrible noise, with strange flashes of fire, so that Miles was half
dead with fear. At this noise the two friars awaked, and wondered to see
the whole room so full of smoke; but that being vanished they might
perceive the brazen head broken and lying on the ground. At this sight
they grieved, and called Miles to know how this came. Miles, half dead
with fear, said that it fell down of itself, and that, with the noise
and fire that followed, he was almost frighted out of his wits. Friar
Bacon asked if he did not speak? Yes, quoth Miles, it spake, but to no
purpose; I'll have a parrot speak better in that time that you have been
teaching this brazen head. Out on thee, villain, said Friar Bacon, thou
hast undone us both: hadst thou but called us when it did speak, all
England had been walled round about with brass, to its glory and our
eternal fames. What were the words it spake? Very few, said Miles; and
those were none of the wisest that I have heard, neither. First he said,
Time is. Hadst thou called us then, said Friar Bacon, we had been made
for ever. Then, said Miles, half an hour after it spake again, and said,
Time was. And wouldst thou not call us then? said Bungey. Alas, said
Miles, I thought he would have told me some long tale, and then I
purposed to have called you: then after an hour after he cried, Time is
past, and made such a noise that he hath waked you himself, methinks. At
this Friar Bacon was in such a rage that he would have beaten his man,
but he was restrained by Bungey; but, nevertheless, for his punishment
he, with his art, struck him dumb for one whole month's space. Thus the
great work of these learned friars was overthrown, to their great
griefs, by this simple fellow."--From 'The Famous Historie of Fryer
Bacon.'
EDWARD III.
Henry II. was succeeded on the English throne by his eldest surviving
son, Richard I.; he by his younger brother John; he by his son Henry
III.; he by his son the first and greatest of the Edwards. The reigns of
these four kings fill the whole of the thirteenth century, with a few
years of the end of the twelfth, and a few of the beginning of the
fourteenth: Richard I. having reigned from 1189 to 1199; John from 1199
to 1216; Henry III. from 1216 to 1272; Edward I. from 1272 to 1307. Old
Froissart observes that it was an opinion commonly entertained by
Englishmen, and the truth of which had been often exemplified from the
days of King Arthur, that between every two valiant kings of England
there was most commonly one of less sufficiency both of wit and of
prowess. How far this rule may have obtained in more antient times we
shall not stop to inquire, but from the Norman Conquest it may be said
to have held good, with but slight exception, for nearly four centuries
and through a succession of more than a dozen sovereigns. From the
Conqueror to Henry IV. inclusive, the only interruption to such a
regular alternation of the good and the bad, or at least of the strong
and the weak, had been the coming together of Henry II. and his son
Richard I., followed by that of John and his son Henry III. Even here
there was the balance of the two valiant kings against the two of less
prowess and wisdom.
At any rate there can be no question about the old notion having proved
true in the case of the first and second Edwards; for, as Froissart
says, "the good King Edward the First was right valiant, sage, wise, and
hardy, adventurous and fortunate in all feats of war, and had much ado
against the Scots, and conquered them three or four times; for the Scots
could never have victory nor endure against him: and after his decease
his son of his first wife was crowned king and called Edward the Second,
who resembled nothing to his father in wit nor in prowess, but governed
and kept his realm right wildly, and ruled himself by sinister counsel
of certain persons, whereby at length he had no profit nor laud; for,
anon after he was crowned, Robert Bruce, King of Scotland, who had often
before given much ado to the said good King Edward the First, conquered
again all Scotland, and brent and wasted a great part of the realm of
England, a four or five days' journey within the realm, at two times,
and discomfited the king and all the barons of England at a place in
Scotland called Stirling, by battle arranged the day of St. John
Baptist, in the year of our Lord 1314." And many other were the
disasters and disgraces of Edward of Carnarvon's unhappy twenty years'
reign, besides the loss of Scotland and the defeat and rout of
Bannockburn.
On the 24th of January, 1308, about six months after his accession,
Edward II. was married at Boulogne to Isabella, daughter of the French
king, Philip IV. (surnamed le Bel, or the Fair); five kings in all, and
four queens, including the bride and bridegroom, being present at the
ceremony. Edward was in his twenty-fourth year; the French princess was
only in her thirteenth, but was already famous as the greatest beauty in
Europe. "One of the fairest ladies of the world," Froissart calls her.
In tradition and history, however, she lives as little less than a
beautiful demon. Never has beauty, never has a marriage been more fatal
than hers was to herself, to her husband, to both their native lands.
The radiant girl who now gave Edward her hand was in the end to deprive
him of his crown and of his life; a long imprisonment of eight and
twenty years was to be the dower of her own widowhood; and from their
union was to spring a quarrel between their two countries, which it was
to take nearly a century of bloodshed and desolation to fight out:--
"Mark the year, and mark the night,
When Severn shall re-echo with affright
The shrieks of death through Berkeley's roofs that ring;
Shrieks of an agonizing king!
She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs,
That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate,
From thee be born who o'er thy country hangs
The scourge of heaven!
He who was thus to prove "the scourge of heaven," to his mother's land
and race was her eldest son Edward, born at Windsor Castle on Monday the
13th of December, 1312. Young Edward appears to have been known till
near the end of his father's reign as Earl of Chester; he was summoned
to parliament by that title in 1320, and in each of the four following
years. In May, 1325, Isabella proceeded to France on the pretence of
negotiating a treaty of peace between her husband and her brother
Charles IV., the new king of that country; and in September following
she was joined there by her son Edward, who with his father's consent
set sail, splendidly attended, to be invested by the French king with
the dutchy of Guienne and the earldom of Ponthieu, which his father had
consented to resign to him. He did homage for the two fiefs, and
received investiture; but, although he had promised his father to hasten
his return, he remained abroad till the 24th of September of the next
year, when he landed at Orwell in Suffolk with his mother, come, with
her paramour Mortimer, to make open war upon her husband. The last
instrument issued in the name of Edward II. was on the 20th of January,
1327; on the next day he is understood to have formally resigned his
crown in the castle of Kenilworth to commissioners sent to him by the
parliament; his son was proclaimed as Edward the Third on Saturday the
24th. His reign, however, for some reason which is not known, was
reckoned as having commenced on the 25th. His father is supposed to have
been murdered in his dungeon in Berkeley Castle on the 21st of
September.
The new king, a boy of fourteen when he was thus raised to the throne,
was of course at first king only in name, and all power and authority
were in the hands of his mother and Mortimer. He was marvellously alert,
however, in assuming manhood in various ways. If he was not allowed any
share in the government of the country, he was thought already old
enough both to rule an army and to rule a wife. Within a few months
after his accession, he put himself at the head of a great force, and
went forth to fight the Scots; and in the beginning of the next year he
was married at York to Philippa, the second daughter of William Count of
Hainault, to whom he had been contracted by his mother shortly before
their return from the continent.
Edward's first campaign, however, must detain us for a little; for the
incidents were both remarkable in themselves, and they have been
recorded in much detail by the writer to whom we must be principally
indebted throughout our sketch. Froissart, indeed, is not so much a
great historian as a great historical painter--the greatest that ever
painted in words. He is extremely inaccurate in dates and names, and
other such prosaic matters, and even in his own proper line he may be
suspected of having sometimes intermixed a little fancy with his facts;
yet he may be always trusted, better than almost any other writer, for
what is after all the most important truth, the characteristic spirit or
inner life of what he describes; and even in this part of his chronicle,
which relates to events that happened before he was born, and in which
therefore he writes to a greater extent than in the latter portions of
it from report, he has thrown in much of what he had actually seen along
with what he had only heard, and, if the sketching be in so far a copy,
the colouring at least is his own. The account of the demonstration (for
it was hardly more) which Edward made on the northern border is a great
deal too long to be extracted in full; but we will select some of the
more striking incidents, or those in which the young English king
figures the most conspicuously. As we abridge the narrative, we will
retain as much as possible of our author's style and manner, adhering
for the most part to the excellent old English translation by Lord
Berners.