THE BEGINNINGS OF UNIVERSITY LIFE
"Si tollis libertatem, tollis dignitatem."--S. COLUMBAN.
"Record we too with just and faithful pen,
That many hooded cænobites there are
Who in their private cells have yet a care
Of public quiet; unambitious men,
Counsellors for the world, of piercing ken;
Whose fervent exhortations from afar
Move princes to their duty, peace or war;
And oft times in the most forbidding den
Of solitude, with love of science strong,
How patiently the yoke of thought they bear ...
By such examples moved to unbought pains
The people work like congregated bees;
Eager to build the quiet fortresses
Where piety, as they believe, obtains
From heaven a general blessing; timely rains
And sunshine; prosperous enterprise and peace and equity."
--WORDSWORTH.
Monastic Origins--Continuity of Learning in Early England--The
School of York--The Venerable Bede--Alcuin and the Schools of
Charles the Great--The Danish Invasions--The Benedictine
Revival--The Monkish Chroniclers--The Coming of the Friars--The
Franciscan and Dominican Houses at Cambridge--The Franciscan
Scholars--Roger Bacon--Bishop Grosseteste--The New Aristotle and
the Scientific Spirit--The Scholastic
Philosophy--Aquinas--Migration of Scholars from Paris to
Cambridge--The term "University"--The Colleges and the Hostels--The
Course of Study--Trivium and Quadrivium--The Four
Faculties--England a Paradise of Clerks--Parable of the Monk's Pen.
In the centuries which preceded the rise of the Universities, the monks
had been the great educators of England, and it is to monastic origins
that we must first turn to find the beginnings of university and
collegiate life at Cambridge.
In the library of Trinity College there is preserved a catalogue of the
books which Augustine and his monks brought with them into England.
"These are the foundation or the beginning of the library of the whole
English Church, A.D. 601," are the words with which this brief catalogue
closes. A Bible in two volumes, a Psalter and a book of the Gospels, a
Martyrology, the Apocryphal Lives of the Apostles, and the exposition of
certain Epistles represented at the commencement of the seventh century
the sum-total of literature which England then possessed. In little more
than fifty years, however, the Latin culture of Augustine and his monks
had spread throughout the land, and before the eighth century closed
England had become the literary centre of Western Europe. Probably never
in the history of any nation had there been so rapid a development of
learning. Certainly few things are more remarkable in the history of the
intellectual development of Europe than that, in little more than a
hundred years after knowledge had first dawned upon this country, an
Anglo-Saxon scholar should be producing books upon literature and
philosophy second to nothing that had been written by any Greek or Roman
author after the third century. But the great writer whom after-ages
called "the Venerable Bede," and who was known to his own contemporaries
as "the wise Saxon," was not the only scholar that the seventh and the
eighth centuries had produced in England. Under the twenty-one years of
the Archiepiscopate of Theodore (669-690), schools and monasteries
rapidly spread throughout the country. In the school established under
the walls of Canterbury, in connection with the Monastery of S. Peter,
better known in after-times as S. Augustine's, and over which his friend
the Abbot Adrian ruled, were trained not a few of the great scholars of
those days--Albinus, the future adviser and assistant of Bede, Tobias of
Rochester, Aldhelm of Sherborne, and John of Beverley. The influence of
these and other scholars sent out from the school at Canterbury soon
made itself felt. In Northumbria, too, the torch of learning had been
kept alight by the Irish monks of Lindisfarne, and of Melrose and of
Iona, "that nest from which," as an old writer playing on its founder S.
Columba's name had said, "the sacred doves had taken their flight to
every quarter."
While Archbishop Theodore and the Abbot Adrian were organising
Anglo-Latin education in the monasteries of the south, Wilfrith, the
Archbishop of York, and his friend Benedict Biscop were performing a no
less extensive work in the north. The schools of Northumbria gathered in
the harvest of Irish learning, and of the Franco-Gallican schools, which
still preserved a remnant of classical literature, and of Rome itself,
now barbarised. Of Bede, in the book-room of the monastery at Jarrow, we
are told by his disciple and biographer, Cuthbert, that in the intervals
of the regular monastic discipline the great scholar found time to
undertake the direction of the monastic school. "He had many scholars,
all of whom he inspired with an extraordinary love of learning." "It was
always sweet to me," he writes himself, "to learn to teach." At the
conclusion of his "Ecclesiastical History" he has himself given a list
of some thirty-eight books which he had written up to that time. Of
these not a few are of an educational character. Besides a large body of
Scripture commentary, we have from his pen treatises on orthography,
grammar, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. His book on "The Nature of
Things" was the science primer of the Anglo-Saxons for many generations.
He wrote, in fact, to teach. At the school of York, however, was centred
nearly all the wisdom of the West, and its greatest pupil was Alcwyne.
He became essentially the representative schoolmaster of his age. For
fourteen years, attracted by the fame of his scholarship, students not
only from all parts of England and Ireland, but also from France and
Germany, flocked to the monastery school at York. In 782 Alcwyne left
England to join the Court of Charles the Great and to take charge of the
Palatine schools, carrying with him to the Continent the learning which
was about to perish for a time in England, as the result of the internal
dissensions of its kings and the early ravages of the Norsemen.
"Learning," to use the phrase of William of Malmesbury, "was buried in
the grave of Bede for four centuries." The Danish invader, carrying his
ravages now up the Thames and now up the Humber, devastated the east of
England with fire and sword. "Deliver us, O Lord, from the frenzy of the
Northmen!" had been a suffrage of a litany of the time, but it was one
to which the scholars and the bookmen, no less than the monks and nuns
of that age, found no answer. The noble libraries which Theodore and
the Abbots Adrian and Benedict had founded were given to the flames. The
monasteries of the Benedictines, the chief guardians of learning, were
completely broken up. "It is not at all improbable," says Mr. Kemble,
"that in the middle of the tenth century there was not a genuine
Benedictine left in England."
A revival of monastic life--some attempt at a return to the old
Benedictine ideal--came, however, with that century. Under the auspices
of S. Dunstan, the Benedictine Order--renovated at its sources by the
Cluniac reform--was again established, and surviving a second wave of
Danish devastation was, under the patronage of King Cnut and Edward the
Confessor, further strengthened and extended. The strength of this
revival is perhaps best seen in the wonderful galaxy of monastic
chroniclers which sheds its light over that century. Florence of
Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury, Ingulf, Geoffrey
Gaimar, William de Monte, John and Richard of Hexham, Jordan Fantosme,
Simeon of Durham, Thomas and Richard of Ely, Gervase, Giraldus
Cambrensis, William of Newburgh, Richard of Devizes all follow one
another in close succession, while Robert of Gloucester, Roger of
Wendover, and Matthew Paris carry on the line into the next age. But
apart from the Chroniclers, though the monasteries once more flourished
in England, the early Benedictine ideal of learning did not at once
revive. Indeed, the tendency of the monastic reformers of the twelfth
century was distinctly hostile to the more intellectual side of the
monastic ideal. By the end of the century the majority of the
Benedictine convents had sunk into rich corporations of landed
proprietors, whose chief ambition was the aggrandisement of the house to
which they belonged. The new impulse of reform, which in its indirect
results was to give the thirteenth century in England so dominant a
place in the history of her civilisation, came from a quite different
direction. Almost simultaneously, without concert, in different
countries, two great minds, S. Francis and S. Dominic, conceived a
wholly new ideal of monastic perfection. Unlike the older monastic
leaders, deliberately turning their backs upon the haunts of men in town
and village, and seeking in the wilderness seclusion from the world
which they professed to forsake, these new idealists, the followers of
S. Dominic and S. Francis, the mendicant Orders, the Friars' Preachers
and the Friars' Minors, turned to the living world of men. Their object
was no longer the salvation of the individual monk, but the salvation of
others through him. Monastic Christianity was no longer to flee the
world; it must conquer it or win it by gentle violence. The work of the
new Orders, therefore, was from the first among their fellowmen, in
village, in town, in city, in university.
"Like the great modern Order (of the Jesuists) which, when their
methods had in their turn become antiquated, succeeded to their
influence by a still further departure from the old monastic
routine, the mendicant Orders early perceived the necessity of
getting a hold upon the centres of education. With the Dominicans
indeed this was a primary object: the immediate purpose of their
foundation was resistance to this Albigensian heresy; they aimed at
obtaining influence upon the more educated and more powerful
classes. Hence it was natural that Dominic should have looked to
the universities as the most suitable recruiting ground for his
Order: to secure for his Preachers the highest theological training
that the age afforded was an essential element of the new monastic
ideal.... The Franciscan ideal was a less intellectual one ... but
though the Franciscans laboured largely among the neglected poor of
crowded and pestilential cities, they too found it practically
necessary to go to the universities for recruits and to secure some
theological education for their members."[16]
The Black Friars of S. Dominic arrived in England in 1221. The Grey
Friars of S. Francis in 1224. The Dominicans met with the least success
at first, but this was fully compensated by the rapid progress of the
Franciscans. Very soon after the coming of the Grey Friars they had
formed a settlement at Oxford, under the auspices of the greatest
scholar-bishop of the age, Grosseteste of Lincoln, and had built their
first rude chapel at Cambridge. In the early days, however, the
followers of S. Francis made a hard fight against the taste for
sumptuous buildings and for the greater personal comfort which
characterised the time. "I did not enter into religion to build walls,"
protested an English Provincial of the Order when the brethren begged
for a larger convent. But at Cambridge the first humble house of the
Grey Friars, which had been founded in 1224 in "the old Synagogue," was
shortly removed to a site at the corner of Bridge Street and Jesus
Lane--now occupied by Sidney Sussex College--and that noble church
commenced, which, three centuries later, at the time of the Dissolution,
the University vainly endeavoured to save for itself, having for some
time used it for the ceremony of Commencement.[17] But of this we shall
have to speak later in our account of the Foundation of Sidney College.
But if the Franciscans, in their desire to obey the wishes of their
Founder, found a difficulty in combating the passion of the time for
sumptuous buildings, they had even less success in struggling against
the passion of the time for learning. Their vow of poverty ought to have
denied them the possession even of books. "I am your breviary! I am your
breviary!" S. Francis had cried passionately to the novice who desired a
Psalter. And yet it is a matter of common knowledge that Grosseteste,
the great patron of the Franciscans, brought Greek books to England, and
in conjunction with two other Franciscans, whose names are
known--Nicholas the Greek and John of Basingstoke--gave to the world
Latin versions of certain Greek documents. Foremost among these is the
famous early apocryphal book, _The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs_,
the Greek manuscript of which is still in the Cambridge University
Library. There is no better statement, perhaps, of those gaps in the
knowledge of Western Christendom, which the scholars of the Franciscan
Order did so much to fill, than a passage in the writings of the
greatest of all English Franciscans, Roger Bacon, which runs to this
effect:--
"Numberless portions of the wisdom of God are wanting to us. Many
books of the Sacred Text remain untranslated, as two books of the
Maccabees which I know to exist in Greek: and many other books of
divers Prophets, whereto reference is made in the books of Kings
and Chronicles. Josephus too, in the books of his _Antiquities_, is
altogether falsely rendered as far as concerns the Chronological
side, and without him nothing can be known of the history of the
Sacred Text. Unless he be corrected in a new translation, he is of
no avail, and the Biblical history is lost. Numberless books again
of Hebrew and Greek expositors are wanting to the Latins: as those
of Origen, Basil, Gregory, Nazianzen, Damascene, Dionysius,
Chrysostom, and other most noble Doctors, alike in Hebrew and in
Greek. The Church therefore is slumbering. She does nothing in this
matter, nor hath done these seventy years: save that my Lord
Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, of holy memory did give to the Latins
some part of the writings of S. Dionysius and of Damascene, and
some other holy Doctors. It is an amazing thing this negligence of
the Church; for, from the time of Pope Damasus, there hath not been
any Pope, nor any of less rank, who hath busied himself for the
advantaging of the Church by translations, except the aforesaid
glorious Bishop."[18]
The truth to which Roger Bacon in this passage gave expression, the
scholars of the Franciscan Order set themselves to realise and act upon.
For a considerable time the Franciscan houses at both Oxford and
Cambridge kept alive the interest of this "new learning" to which Robert
Grosseteste and Roger Bacon opened the way. The work of the Order at
Oxford is fairly well known. And in the Cambridge House of the Order
there was at least one teacher of divinity, Henry of Costessey, who, in
his _Commentary on the Psalms_, set the example of a type of
scholarship, which, in its close insistence on the exact meaning of the
text, in its constant reference to the original Hebrew, and in its
absolute independence of judgment, has, one is proud to think, ever
remained a characteristic of the Cambridge school of textual criticism
down even to our own day.
* * * * *
But if the Franciscans, impelled by their desire to illustrate the
Sacred Text, had thus become intellectual in spite of the ideal of their
Founder, the Dominicans were intellectual from their starting-point.
They had, indeed, been called into being by the necessity of combating
the intellectual doubts and controversies of the south of France. That
they should become a prominent factor in the development of the
universities was but the fulfilment of their original design. With their
activity also is associated one of the greatest intellectual movements
of the thirteenth century--the introduction of the new Philosophy. The
numerous houses of the Order planted by them in the East brought about
an increased intercourse between those regions and Western Europe, and
helped on that knowledge of the new Aristotle, which, as we have said in
a previous chapter, England probably owes largely to the philosophers of
the Synagogue. It is round the University of Paris, however, that the
earlier history, both of the Dominican scholars and of the new
Aristotle, mainly revolves. Here the great system of Scholastic
Philosophy was elaborated, by which the two great Dominican teachers,
Albertus Magnus--"the ape of Aristotle," as he was irreverently and
unjustly called by his Franciscan contemporaries--and his greater pupil,
Thomas Aquinas, "the seraphic Doctor," vindicated the Christian Creed in
terms of Aristotelian logic, and laid at least a solid foundation for
the Christian Theology of the future, in the contention that Religion is
rational, and that Reason is divine, that all knowledge and all truth,
from whatever source they are derived, are capable of being reduced to
harmony and unity, because the name of Christianity is both Wisdom and
Truth.
In the year 1229 there broke out at Paris a feud of more than ordinary
gravity between the students and the citizens, undignified enough in its
cause of origin, but in the event probably marking a distinct step in
the development of Cambridge University. A drunken body of students did
some act of great violence to the citizens. Complaint was made to the
Bishop of Paris and to the Queen Blanche. The members of the University
who had not been guilty of the outrage were violently attacked and
ill-treated by the police of the city. The University teachers suspended
their classes and demanded satisfaction. The demand was refused, and
masters and scholars dispersed. Large numbers, availing themselves of
the invitation of King Henry III. to settle where they pleased in this
country, migrated to the shores of England; and Cambridge, probably from
its proximity to the eastern coast, and as the centre where Prince
Louis, in alliance with the English baronage, but a few years before had
raised the Royal standard, seems to have attracted a large majority of
the students. A Royal writ, issued in the year 1231, for the better
regulation of the University, probably makes reference to this migration
when it speaks of the large number of students, both within the realm
and "from beyond the seas," who had lately settled in Cambridge, and
gives power to the Bishop of Ely "to signify rebellious clerks who would
not be chastised by the Chancellor and Masters," and if necessary to
invoke the aid of the Sheriff in their due punishment. Another Royal
writ of the same reign expressly provides that no student shall remain
in the University unless under the tuition of some Master of Arts--the
earliest trace perhaps of that disciplinary organisation which the
motley and turbulent crowd representing the student community of that
age demanded.[19]
It will be observed that in these Royal writs the term "university"
occurs. But it must not be supposed that the word is used in its more
modern signification, of a community or corporation devoted to learning
and education formally recognised by legal authority. That is a use
which appears for the first time towards the end of the fourteenth
century. In the age of which we are speaking, and in the writs of Henry
III., _universitas magistrorum et discipulorum_ or _scholarium_ simply
means a "community of teachers and scholars." The common designation in
mediæval times of such a body as we now mean by "university" was
_studium generale_, or sometimes _studium_ alone. It is necessary,
moreover, to remember that universities in the earliest times had not
infrequently a very vigorous life as places of learning, long before
they received Royal or legal recognition; and it is equally necessary
not to forget that colleges for the lodging and maintenance and
education of students are by no means an essential feature of the
mediæval conception of a university.
"The University of the Middle Ages was a corporation of learned
men, associated for the purposes of teaching, and possessing the
privilege that no one should be allowed to teach within their
dominions unless he had received their sanction, which could only
be granted after trial of his ability. The test applied consisted
of examinations and public disputations; the sanction assumed the
form of a public ceremony and the name of a degree; and the
teachers or doctors so elected or created carried out their office
of instruction by lecturing in the public schools to the students,
who, desirous of hearing them, took up their residence in the place
wherein the University was located. The degree was, in fact, merely
a license to teach. The teacher so licensed became a member of the
ruling body. The University, as a body, does not concern itself
with the food and lodging of the students, beyond the exercise of a
superintending power over the rents and regulations of the houses
in which they are lodged, in order to protect them from exaction;
and it also assumes the care of public morals. The only buildings
required by such a corporation in the first instance were a place
to hold meetings and ceremonies, a library, and schools for
teaching, or, as we should call them, lecture rooms. A college, on
the other hand, in its primitive form, is a foundation erected and
endowed by private munificence solely for the lodging and
maintenance of deserving students, whose lack of means rendered
them unable to pursue the university course without some extraneous
assistance."[20]
It must be remembered, moreover, that when a mediæval benefactor founded
a college his intentions were very different from those which would
actuate a similar person at the present day. His object was to provide
board and lodging and a small stipend, _not for students, but for
teachers_. As for the taught, they lodged where they could, like
students at a Scottish or a Continental university to-day; and it was
not until the sixteenth century was well advanced that they were
admitted within the precincts of the colleges on the payment of a small
annual rent or "pension"--whence the modern name of "pensioner" for the
undergraduate or pupil members of the college. Indeed, the term
"college" (_collegium_), as applied to a building, is a modern use of
the word. In the old days the term "college" was strictly and accurately
applied to the persons who formed the community of scholars, not to the
building which housed them. For that building the correct term always
used in mediæval times was "domus" (house), or "aula" (hall). Sometimes,
indeed, the two names were combined. Thus, in an old document we find
the earliest of the colleges--Peterhouse--entitled, _Domus Sancti Petri,
sive Aula Scholarium Episcopi Eliensis_--The House of S. Peter, or the
Hall of the Scholars of the Bishop of Ely.
In all probability the University in early days took no cognisance
whatever of the way in which students obtained lodgings. It was the
inconvenience and discomfort of this system, no doubt, which led to the
establishment of what were afterwards termed "Hostels," apparently by
voluntary action on the part of the students themselves. In the first
half of the sixteenth century there seem to have been about twenty of
these hostels,[21] but at the end of the century there appears to have
been only about nine left. There is an interesting passage in a sermon
by Lever at Paul's Cross, preached in 1550, which throws light upon this
desertion of the hostels, where he speaks of those scholars who, "havyng
rych frendes or beyng benefyced men dyd lyve of themselves in Ostles and
Inns, be eyther gon awaye, or elles fayne to crepe into colleges, and
put poore men from bare lyvynges."
The University then, or, more strictly speaking, the _Studium Generale_,
existed as an institution long before the organisation of the
residential college or hall; and as a consequence, for many a year it
had an organisation quite independent of its colleges. The University of
Cambridge, like the University of Oxford, was modelled mainly on the
University of Paris. Its course of study followed the old classical
tradition of the division of the seven liberal sciences--grammar, logic,
rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy--into two classes,
the _Trivium_ and _Quadrivium_, a system of teaching which had been
handed down by the monastic schools in a series of text-books, jejune
and meagre, which were mainly compilations and abridgments from the
older classical sources. One such treatise, perhaps the most popular in
the monastery schools, was a book by Martianus Capella, a teacher of
rhetoric at Carthage, in the fifth century. The treatise is cast in
allegorical form, and represents the espousals of Mercury and Philology,
in which Philology is represented as a goddess, and the seven liberal
arts as handmaidens presented by Mercury to his bride. The humour of
this allegory is not altogether spiritless, if at times somewhat coarse.
Here is a specimen. The plaudits that follow upon the discourse
delivered by Arithmetica are supposed to be interrupted by laughter,
occasioned by the loud snores of Silenus asleep under the influence of
his deep potations. The kiss wherewith Rhetorica salutes Philologia is
heard throughout the assembly--_nihil enim silens, ac si cuperet,
faciebat_. So popular did this mythological medley become, that in the
tenth century we find certain learned monks embroidering the subject of
the poem on their Church vestments. A _memoria technica_ in hexameter
lines has also come down to us, showing how the monastic scholar was
assisted to remember that grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric belonged to
the first division of the sciences called the _Trivium_, and that the
four other sciences belonged to the _Quadrivium_:--
"_Gram._: loquitur; _Dia._: vera docet; _Rhet._: verba colorat,
_Mus._: canit; _Ar._: numerat; _Geo._: ponderat; _Ast._: colit astra."
In a further classification given by another scholar of the end of the
twelfth century, Alexander Neckham, we have enumerated the four
Faculties recognised by the mediæval University: Arts, Theology, Law,
Medicine.
"Hic florent Artes, Coelestis Pagina regnat,
Stant Leges, lucet Jus: Medicina viget."
Such, then, was the cycle of mediæval study. And the student whose
ambition it was to become a master of this cycle--a _magister_ or
_doctor_ (for in early days the two titles were synonymous)
_facultatis_--must attain to it through a seven years' course. In the
school attached to a monastery or a cathedral, or from the priest of his
native parish, we may suppose that the student has learnt some modicum
of Latin, "the scholar's vernacular," or failing that, that the first
stage of the _Trivium_--_Grammatica_--has been learnt on his arrival at
the University. For this purpose, if he is a Cambridge student at least,
he is placed under the charge of a special teacher, called by a
mysterious name, _Magister Glomeriæ_, and he himself becomes a
"glomerel," giving allegiance oddly enough during this state of
pupilage, not to the Chancellor, the head of his University, but to the
Archdeacon of Ely. Of the actual books read in the grammar course it is
difficult to give an account. They may have been few or many. Indeed, at
this period when the works of Aristotle were coming so much into vogue,
it would seem as if the old Grammar course gave way at an early period
to Philosophy. In a curious old French fabliau of the thirteenth
century, entitled "The Battle of the Seven Arts,"[22] there is evidence
of this innovation; incidentally also, a list of the books more properly
belonging to the Grammar course is also given.
"Savez por qui est la descorde?
Qu'il ne sont pas d'une science:
Car Logique, qui toz jors tence,
Claime les auctors autoriaus
Et les clers d'Orliens _glomeriaus_.
Si vaut bien chascuns iiii Omers,
Quar il boivent à granz gomers,
Et sevent bien versefier
Que d'une fueille d'un figuier
Vous ferent-il le vers.
* * * * *
Aristote, qui fu à pié,
Si fist chéoir Gramaire enverse,
Lors i a point Mesire Perse
Dant Juvénal et dant Orasce,
Virgile, Lucain, et Elasce,
Et Sedule, Propre, Prudence,
Arator, Omer, et Térence:
Tuit chaplèrent sor Aristote,
Qui fu fers com chastel sor mote."
"Do you know the reason of the discord?
'Tis because they are not for the same science,
For Logic, who is always disputing,
Claims the ancient authors,
And the glomerel clerks of Orleans,
Each of them is quite equal to four Homers,
For they drink by great draughts
And know so well how to make verse,
That about a single fig leaf
They would make you fifty verses.
* * * * *
Aristotle who was on foot
Knocked Grammar down flat.
Then there rode up Master Persius,
Dan Juvenal and Dan Horace,
Virgil, Lucan, and Statius,
And Sedulius, Prosper, Prudentius,
Arator, Homer, and Terence:
They all fell upon Aristotle
Who was as bold as a castle upon a hill."
And so for the Cambridge "glomerel," if Aristotle held his own against
the classics, Dan Homer, and the rest, in the second year of his
university course the student would find himself a "sophister," or
disputant in the Logic school. To Logic succeeded Rhetoric, which also
meant Aristotle, and so the "trivial" arts were at an end, and the
"incepting" or "commencing" bachelor of arts began his apprenticeship to
a "Master of Faculty." In the next four years he passed through the
successive stages of the _Quadrivium_, and at the end received the
certificate of his professor, was admitted to the degree of Master of
Arts, and thereby was admitted also to the brotherhood of teachers, and
himself became an authorised lecturer. A post-graduate course might
follow in Theology or Canon or Civil Law, involving another five or six
years of university life. In the course for the Canon Law the candidate
for a doctor's degree was required to have heard lectures on the civil
law for three years, and on the Decretals for another three years; he
must, too, have attended cursory lectures on the Bible for at least two
years, and must himself have lectured "cursorily" on one of four
treatises, and on some one book of the Decretals.
Obviously, if this statutory course was strictly observed in those days,
the scarlet hood could never grace the shoulders of one who was nothing
more than a dexterous logician, or the honoured title of Doctor be
conferred on one who had never taught. _Disce docendo_ was indeed the
motto of the University of Cambridge in the thirteenth century.
The great constitutional historian of our country, the late Bishop
Stubbs, in one of the wisest and wittiest of his statutable lectures at
Oxford,[23] speaks of England in this age as "the paradise of clerks."
He illustrates the truth of his characterisation by drawing an imaginary
picture of a foreign scholar making an _Iter Anglicum_ with the object
of collecting materials for a history of the learning and literature of
England. The Bishop is able readily to crowd his canvas with the figures
of eminent Englishmen drawn from centres of learning in every part of
the land, from Dover, from Canterbury, from London, from Rochester, from
Chichester, from Winchester, from Devizes, from Salisbury, from Exeter,
from S. Albans, from Ely, from Peterborough, from Lincoln, from Howden,
from York, from Durham, from Hexham, from Melrose; scholars, historians,
chroniclers, poets, philosophers, logicians, theologians, canonists,
lawyers, all going to prove by the glimpse they give us into circles of
scholastic activity, monastic for the most part, how comparatively wide
was the extent of English learning and English education in the
thirteenth century--an age which it has usually been the fashion to
regard as barbarous and obscure--and how germinant of institutions,
intellectual as well as political, which have since become vital
portions of our national existence.
From the point of view of a later age there is doubtless something to be
said on the other side. _Disce docendo_ remained perhaps the academic
motto, but the learning and the teaching was still under the domination
of monasticism, and the monastic scholar, however patient and laborious
he might be and certainly was, was also for the most part absolutely
uncritical. He cultivated formal logic to perfection; he reasoned from
his premise with most admirable subtlety, but he had usually commenced
by assuming his premise with unfaltering, because unreasoning, faith. We
shall see, however, as we proceed with our history of the collegiate
life of the University, in the succeeding centuries, that the critical
spirit which gave force to the genius of the great Franciscan teachers,
Roger Bacon and Bishop Grosseteste, in resisting the tendencies of their
age, which found practical application also in the textual
interpretation of Holy Writ in such writings as those of Henry of
Costessey, or in the sagacious "Treatise on the Laws and Customs of
England"--the oldest of our legal classics--by Ranulf Glanville, or in
the "Historia Rerum Anglicanum," of the inquisitive and
independent-minded Yorkshire scholar, William of Newburgh, was a factor
not to be ignored in the heritage of learning bequeathed by the great
men of the thirteenth century to their more enlightened and liberal
successors, the theologians, the lawyers, and the historians of the
future.
There is a mediæval legend of a certain monkish writer, whose tomb was
opened twenty years or so after his death, to reveal the fact, that
although the remainder of his body had crumbled to dust the hand that
had held the pen remained flexible and undecayed. The legend is a
parable. Some of the lessons of that parable we may expect to find
interpreted in the academic history of Cambridge in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries.