15. Desilio, desilis, desilii or desiliui: middle syllable
short in trisyllables in the present; meaning, de aliquo salire
siue descendere festinanter.
21. clauus, masc., claui: meaning, acutum ferrum, malleus,
masc., mallei: meaning, martellus.
tempus, neut.: meaning, pars capitis, for which some people say
timpus.
For Daniel vi, the story of Daniel in the lions' den, the commentary
is even briefer:
6. surripuerunt: meaning, falso suggesserunt. Surripio,
surripis, surrepsi(!): meaning, latenter rapere, subtrahere,
furari.
10. comperisset; meaning, cognouisset. Comperio, comperis,
comperi: fourth conjugation.
20. affatus: meaning, allocutus. From affor, affaris; and
governs the accusative.
We must not exalt ourselves above the author. He is very humble. 'Let
any imperfections in the book', says his preface, 'be attributed to
me: and if there is anything good, let it be thought to have come from
God.' He gave them of his best, explaining away such as he could of
the difficulties which had confronted him. But one can imagine the
disgust of even a moderate scholar if, wishing to study the Bible more
carefully, he could obtain access to nothing better than
Mammotrectus.
Though Erasmus has not much to tell us of his time at Deventer, a
fuller account of the school may be found in the autobiography of John
Butzbach (_c._ 1478-1526), who for the last nineteen years of his life
was Prior of Laach.[12] Indeed, his narrative is so detailed and so
illustrative of the age that it may well detain us here. He was the
son of a weaver in the town of Miltenberg (hence Piemontanus) on the
Maine, above Aschaffenburg. At the age of six he was put to school and
already began to learn Latin; one of his nightly exercises that he
brought home with him being to get by heart a number of Latin words
for vocabulary. After a few years he came into trouble with his master
for laziness and truancy, and received a severe beating; his mother
intervened and got the master dismissed from his post, and Butzbach
was removed from the school.
[12] Butzbach's manuscripts from Laach are now in the
University Library at Bonn, but have never been printed.
I have used a German translation by D.J. Becker, Regensburg,
1869.
An opportunity then offered for him to get a wider education. The son
of a neighbour who had commenced scholar, returned home for a time,
and offered to take Butzbach with him when he went off again to pursue
his courses for his degree. The consent of his parents was obtained;
and the scholar having received a liberal contribution towards
expenses, and Butzbach being equipped with new clothes, the pair set
out together. The boy was now ten, and looked forward hopefully to the
future; but the scholar quickly showed himself in his true colours.
He treated Butzbach as a fag, made him trudge behind carrying the
larger share of their bundles, and when they came to an inn feasted
royally himself off the money given to him for the boy, leaving him to
the charity of the innkeepers. At the end of two months the money was
spent, and they had found no place of settlement. Henceforward
Butzbach was set to beg, going from house to house in the villages
they passed, asking for food; and when this failed to produce enough,
he was required to steal. The scholar treated him shamefully and beat
him often; and as it was a well-known practice for fags, when begging,
to eat up delicacies at once, instead of bringing them in, Butzbach
was sometimes subjected to the regular test, being required to fill
his mouth with water and then spit it out into a basin for his master
to examine whether there were traces of fat.
The scholar's aim was to find some school, having attached to it a
Bursa or hostel, in which they could obtain quarters; apparently he
was not yet qualified for a university. They made their way to
Bamberg, but there was no room for them in the Bursa. So on they went
into Bohemia, where at the town of Kaaden the rector of the school was
able to allot them a room--just a bare, unfurnished chamber, in which
they were permitted to settle. Such teaching as Butzbach received was
spasmodic and ineffectual, and after two years of this bondage he ran
away. For the next five years he was in Bohemia in private service,
longing for home, hating his durance among the heathen, as he called
the Bohemians for following John Hus, but lacking courage to make his
escape from masters who could send horsemen to scour the countryside
for fugitive servants and string them up to trees when caught.
However, at length the opportunity came, and after varying fortunes,
Butzbach made his way home to Miltenberg, to find his father dead and
his mother married again.
For the substantial accuracy of Butzbach's narrative his character is
sufficient warranty. He was a pious, honest man, and at the time when
he wrote his autobiography at the request of his half-brother Philip,
he was already a monk at Laach. But the picture of a young student's
sufferings under an elder's cruelty can be paralleled with surprising
closeness from the autobiography of Thomas Platter, mentioned above;
the wandering from one school to another, the maltreatment, the
begging, the enforced stealing, all these are reproduced with just the
difference of surroundings.
Platter's account of his life at Breslau is worth quoting. 'I was ill
three times in one winter, so that they were obliged to bring me into
the hospital; for the travelling scholars had a particular hospital
and physicians for themselves. Care was taken of the patients, and
they had good beds, only the vermin were so abundant that, like many
others, I lay much rather upon the floor than in the beds. Through the
winter the fags lay upon the floor in the school, but the Bacchants in
small chambers, of which at St. Elizabeth's there were several
hundreds. But in summer, when it was hot, we lay in the church-yard,
collected together grass such as is spread in summer on Saturdays in
the gentlemen's streets before the doors, and lay in it like pigs in
the straw. When it rained, we ran into the school, and when there was
thunder, we sang the whole night with the Subcantor, responses and
other sacred music. Now and then after supper in summer we went into
the beerhouses to beg for beer. The drunken Polish peasants would give
us so much that I often could not find my way to the school again,
though only a stone's throw from it.' Platter wrote his autobiography
at the age of 73, when his memories of his youth must have been
growing dim; but though on this account we must not press him in
details, his main outlines are doubtless correct.
On his return, Butzbach was apprenticed to Aschaffenburg, to learn the
trade of tailoring; and having mastered this, he procured for himself,
in 1496, the position of a lay-brother in the Benedictine Abbey of
Johannisberg in the Rheingau, opposite Bingen. His duties were
manifold. Besides doing the tailoring of the community, he was
expected to make himself generally useful: to carry water and fetch
supplies, to look after guests, to attend the Abbot when he rode
abroad (on one occasion he was thrown thus into the company of Abbot
Trithemius of Sponheim, whose work on the Ecclesiastical writers of
his time he afterwards attempted to carry on), to help in the hay
harvest, and in gathering the grapes. Before a year was out he grew
tired of these humble duties, and bethought him anew of his father's
wish that he should become a professed monk. He had omens too. One
morning his father appeared to him as he was dressing, and smiled upon
him. Another day he was sitting at his work and talking about his wish
with an old monk who was sick and under his care. On the wall in front
of his table he had fastened a piece of bread, to be a reminder of the
host and of Christ's sufferings. Suddenly this fell to the ground. The
old man started up from his place by the stove, and steadying his
tottering limbs cried out aloud that this was a sign that the wish was
granted. He had the reputation among his fellows of being a prophet
and had foretold the day of his own death. Butzbach accepted the omen,
and obtained leave to go to school again.
His choice was Deventer. One of the brethren wrote him an elegant
letter to Hegius applying for admission; and though, as he says, he
answered no questions in his entrance examination (which appears to
have been oral), on the strength of the letter he was admitted and
placed in the seventh class, a young man of twenty amongst the little
boys who were making a beginning at grammar. But he had no means of
support except occasional jobs of tailor's work, and hunger drove him
back to Johannisberg. There he might have continued, had not a chance
meeting with his mother, when he had ridden over to Frankfort with the
Abbot, given him a new spur. She could not bear to think of his
remaining a Lollhard, that is a lay-brother, all his days; and
pressing money privily into his hands, she besought the Abbot to let
him return to Deventer. In August 1498 he was there again, was
examined by Hegius, and was placed this time in the lowest class, the
eighth, in company with a number of stolid louts, who had fled to
school to escape being forced to serve as soldiers. There was reason
in their fears. The Duke of Gueldres was at war with the Bishop of
Utrecht. A hundred prisoners had been executed in the three days
before Butzbach's return, and as he strode into Deventer to take up
his books again, he may have seen their scarce-cold bodies swinging on
gibbets against the summer sunset. The schoolboy of to-day works in
happier surroundings.
Butzbach's career henceforward was fortunate. He was taken up by a
good and pious woman, Gutta Kortenhorff, who without regular vows had
devoted herself to a life of abstinence and self-sacrifice; taking
special pleasure in helping young men who were preparing for the
Franciscan or the reformed Benedictine Orders. For nine months
Butzbach lived in her house, doubtless out of gratitude rendering such
service as he could to his kind patroness. From the eighth class he
passed direct into the sixth, and at Easter 1499 he was promoted into
the fifth. This entitled him to admission to the Domus Pauperum
maintained by the Brethren of the Common Life for boys who were
intending to become monks; and so he transferred himself thither for
the remainder of his course. But he suffered much from illness, and
five several times made up his mind to give up and return home--once
indeed this was only averted by a swelling of his feet, which for a
prolonged period made it impossible for him to walk. After six months
in the fifth, and a year in the fourth class, he was moved up into the
third, thus traversing in little over two years what had occupied
Erasmus for something like nine.
Butzbach was by temperament inclined to glorify the past; in the
present he himself had a share, and therefore in his humility he
thought little of it. In consequence we must not take him too
literally in his account of the condition of the school; but it is too
interesting to pass over. 'In the old days', he says, 'Deventer was a
nursery for the Reformed Orders; they drew better boys, more suited to
religion, out of the fifth class, than they do now out of the second
or first, although now much better authors are read there. Formerly
there was nothing but the Parables of Alan <of Lille, _fl._ 1200>, the
moral distichs of Cato, Aesop's Fables, and a few others, whom the
moderns despise; but the boys worked hard, and made their own way over
difficulties. Now when even in small schools the choicest authors are
read, ancient and modern, prose and poetry, there is not the same
profit; for virtue and industry are declining. With the decay of that
school, religion also is decaying, especially in our Order, which drew
so many good men from there. And yet it is not a hundred years since
our reformation.'
He does not indicate how far back he was turning his regretful gaze;
whether to the early years of the fifteenth century when Nicholas of
Cues was a scholar at Deventer, or to the more recent times of
Erasmus, who was about three school-generations ahead of him. But of
the books used there in the last quarter of the fifteenth century we
can form a clear notion from the productions of the Deventer printers,
Richard Paffraet and Jacobus of Breda. School-books then as now were
profitable undertakings, if printed cheap enough for the needy
student; and Paffraet, with Hegius living in his house, must have had
plenty of opportunities for anticipating the school's requirements.
Between 1477 and 1499 he printed Virgil's Eclogues, Cicero's _De
Senectute_ and _De Amicitia_, Horace's _Ars Poetica_, the _Axiochus_
in Agricola's translation, Cyprian's Epistles, Prudentius' poems,
Juvencus' _Historia Euangelica_, and the _Legenda Aurea_: also the
grammar of Alexander with the commentary of Synthius and Hegius,
Agostino Dato's _Ars scribendi epistolas_, Aesop's Fables, and the
_Dialogus Creaturarum_, the latter two being moralized in a way which
must surely have pleased Butzbach. Jacobus of Breda, who began
printing at Deventer in 1486, produced Virgil's Eclogues, Cicero's _De
Senectute_ and _De Officiis_, Boethius' _De consolatione philosophiae_
and _De disciplina scholarium_, Aesop, a poem by Baptista Mantuanus,
the 'Christian Virgil', Alan of Lille's _Parabolae_, Alexander, two
grammatical treatises by Synthius and the _Epistola mythologica_ of
Bartholomew of Cologne.
This last, as being the work of a master in the school, deserves
attention; and also for its intrinsic interest. As its title implies,
it is cast in the form of a letter, addressed to a friend Pancratius;
and it is dated from Deventer 10 July 1489--nine years before Butzbach
entered the school. It opens with the customary apologies, and after
some ordinary topics the writer, Bartholomew, says that he is sending
back some books borrowed from Pancratius, including a Sidonius which
he has had on loan for three years. At this point there is a
transformation. Sidonius is personified and becomes the centre of a
series of semi-comic incidents, which afford an opportunity for
introducing various words for the common objects of everyday life; and
a glossary explains many of these with precision. There is a long and
vivid account of the waking of Sidonius from his three years' slumber.
The door has to be broken open, and Sidonius is found lying to all
appearances dead. A feather burnt under his nose produces slight signs
of life; and when a good beating with the bar of the door is
threatened, he at length rouses himself. Servants come in, and their
different duties are described. They fall to quarrelling and become
uproarious; and in the scuffle Sidonius is hurt. A lotion is prepared
for his bruises, and he is offered diet suitable for an invalid:
boiled sturgeon, washed down with wine or beer, the latter being from
Bremen or Hamburg.
Afterwards the room is cleared up, and thus an opportunity is given to
describe it. Then a table is spread for the rest of the party, and
the various requisites are specified--tablecloth and napkins, pewter
plates, earthenware mugs, a salt-cellar and two brass stands for the
dishes. Bread is put round to each place, chairs are brought up with
cushions; and jugs of wine and beer placed in the centre of the table.
Finally a basin is brought with ewer and towel for the guests to wash
their hands, and as one o'clock strikes, dinner appears, and all sit
down together, including the servants. After the meal a dice-box and
board are produced; but one of the guests demurs, and it is put aside.
In the conversation that ensues it is arranged that Sidonius shall go
back to his master next morning after breakfast. The servant who is to
accompany him asks that they may go in a carriage; but this is
overruled, because of a recent accident in which one had been upset,
and it is determined that a Spanish palfrey of easy paces shall be
provided for Sidonius. At six supper is served; and then the curtain
falls, the letter relapsing into normal matters--inquiries for a
Euclid, regrets at being unable to send to Pancratius Hyginus and the
_Astronomica_ of Manilius.
It is clear that the object of the book, which is of no great length,
was to give boys correct Latin words for the material objects of their
daily life: something like Bekker's _Gallus_ and _Charicles_ on a
small scale. In carrying out this idea Bartholomew of Cologne has
provided us with a sketch of the world that he knew.