The English schools of that period enjoyed the benefit of no other

inspection than that of the parish priest and the archdeacon, “the

eye of the bishop,” as he was called; and if their pupils knew little

about “monocotyledons,” the “crustacea,” or grammatical analysis,

they were able to recite their _Alma Redemptoris_ and their _Dixit

Dominus_ with hearty, intelligent devotion. They knew the order of

the Church service, and could sing its psalms and antiphons in the

language of the Church, and to her ancient tones; and so they did

not, through their ignorance, oblige their pastors to lay aside, as

obsolete, the use of that office so truly called Divine, in order to

substitute in its place English hymns and devotions from any less

inspired source. On this point we hold their education, therefore,

to have been immeasurably superior to our own, nor are we to suppose

that because they learnt Latin prayers and the Church chant, they

learnt nothing besides. Reading and grammar are often named as taught

in parochial schools; and among the humblest class of pupils a good

deal of instruction, both devotional and practical, was conveyed in

English verse, which the pupils committed to memory, much as some

among ourselves have, ere now, learnt to remember the number of

days in each month by means of doggerel rhymes. The traditions of

the Saxon schools, wherein so much use was made of these versified

instructions, was kept up so late as the fifteenth century, when we

shall have occasion to quote some of the methods in popular use for

teaching children the succession of the English kings, the names of

towns and villages, the four quarters of the globe, and the outline

of the Latin accidence. The Commandments of God and the Church, the

Creed, Our Father, and Hail Mary, and other similar portions of

Christian doctrine, were also taught in verse, as they may still be

seen in most French elementary books of religious instruction; and

specimens of the English language, as it existed in the thirteenth,

fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, might very fairly be selected

from the different versified forms of the Hail Mary in use at these

periods. I will give but one, which is supposed to belong to the

early part of the thirteenth century:--

Mary ful off grace, weel thou be,

God of heven be with the,

Over all wimmen bliscedd thou be,

So be the bairn that is boren of the.

It is needless to observe, that in all times a very special

importance has been attached by Catholic teachers to the instruction

of the people in their prayers. In those early times, when the laws

of the State recognised that the people had souls as well as bodies

and purses, this was even made a matter of legislation, as in the

canons of King Edgar the Peaceable, and the statutes of Canute,

wherein every father was commanded to teach his children the Creed

and the Our Father, and every man was required to know them, “if

he desired to be laid in a hallowed grave, or to be thought worthy

of Holy Housel.” The familiar explanation of these prayers, and

of the Sunday Gospels, formed the ordinary subjects of the parish

priest’s sermon; and in almost every collection of Synodal decrees we

find injunctions calling on Christian men and women to learn their

prayers, and say them seven times a day. The Hail Mary was enjoined,

in addition, about the beginning of the thirteenth century, as we

find in the constitutions of St. Richard of Chichester.

Some of the very earliest known specimens of the English, as

distinguished from the Anglo-Saxon language, are fragments of hymns

which appear to have been in popular use in our poor schools. One of

these is commonly known as St. Godric’s hymm, and runs as follows:--

Seinte Marie, clene Virgine

Moder Jhesu Christe Nazarene,

Onfoll, scild, help thin godrich,

Onfangen bring hœle width the in godes riche.

Seinte Marie, Christes bour,

Meiden’s clenhed, Modere’s flour,

Dilie mine sennen, reyne in min mod,

Bring me to winne wit the selfe God.[247]

To understand whence St. Godric derived his poetical inspiration,

we must briefly glance at his history. He lived in the reigns of

Stephen and Henry II., and began life as a Norfolk pedlar, getting

his living by travelling about the country and selling smallwares in

the villages through which he passed. We may fancy him such a one as

Wordsworth’s Wanderer, concealing under a humble speech and garb a

sublime philosophy. Wanderers of the twelfth century, however, had

one advantage over our modern pedlars; they visited not only fairs

and cities, but holy shrines and places of pilgrimage; nay, generally

speaking, the fairs which they attended were assembled round some

holy spot, and took their origin in the devout celebration of a

martyr’s or a founder’s festival. Godric, as he plodded on through

the north country on his way from Scotland, whither he had gone by

sea on a trading expedition, visited Lindisfarne and Durham, and the

Isle of Farne, made sacred by the hermit-life of St. Cuthbert. These

pilgrimages awoke his soul to a new life, and abandoning his trade,

he repaired to Jerusalem, and on his way back visited the holy shrine

of Compostella.

Returning to England, he took service in the family of a Suffolk

gentleman, but disgusted with the profligacy of his fellow-servants,

once more left his country and went to visit the holy places of Rome.

Nevertheless, the scenes where first his heart had been touched by

God drew him back to them by a sweet, irresistible attraction; and

after some years more spent in these devout wanderings, Godric felt

himself moved to return to the north of England, and there seek

out some solitude where he might lead the life of an anchorite. He

entered Durham, therefore, a way worn, ragged pilgrim, and desiring,

before he utterly retired from the world, to acquire a knowledge of

such psalms and devotions as might enable him to sing the praises

of God in his cell, he repaired for that purpose to the school

which, as was often the case, was held, in default of a schoolhouse,

within the church of St. Mary’s.[248] In this school, says Reginald

of Durham, children were taught the first elements of letters, and

here Godric learnt many things of which he was before ignorant, but

which he now acquired “by hearing, reading, and chanting them.”

And those things which he heard the children frequently repeat

became tenaciously fixed in his memory. In a very brief space of

time, therefore, he learnt as many psalms, hymns, and prayers as

sufficed for his purpose, and retired to a lonesome wilderness north

of Carlisle, which he afterwards exchanged for that of Finchdale,

where he died, about the year 1170. William of Newbridge, who often

visited him, describes him as one whose body seemed already dead,

but whose tongue was ever repeating the names of the Three Divine

Persons. The similarity of some of the expressions occurring in St.

Godric’s hymn, to productions of the same kind in popular use in the

following centuries, leads us to believe that it may have been one of

the school hymns he had learnt at Durham, unless indeed we accept as

literally true the legend which represents it as having been taught

him by Our Lady herself. The whole notice of this Durham school is

exceedingly interesting, and not only confirms what has been said as

to the teaching of the Church chant and office, but shows us that

the poor children likewise learnt their letters, and were taught _to

read_--a fact greatly at variance with the vulgar notion of mediæval

ignorance. For that this was only a poor school is certain, from

the fact of the ragged and penniless vagrant being able to find

admission into it. And having begun to speak of the Durham poor

schools, I may take this opportunity of remarking that the city of

St. Cuthbert was remarkably well supplied with them. For besides her

parochial schools, she possessed an excellent monastic poor school,

which continued to flourish down to the time of the Reformation.

The usages of monastic bodies underwent so little alteration in the

lapse of centuries that the description of this school, as it existed

at the time of its suppression, probably gives us a sufficiently

accurate notion of its condition in far earlier times. “There were

certain poor children, called the children of the almery, who were

educated in learning, and relieved with the alms and benevolence of

the whole house, having their meat and drink in a loft on the north

side of the abbey gates. This loft had a long slated porch over the

stairhead, and at each side of the porch were stairs to go up to

the loft, with a stable underneath.... The children went to school

at the Infirmary School, without the abbey gates, which was founded

by the priors of the abbey at the charge of the house. The meat and

drink that the children had was what the monks and novices had left.

It was carried in at a door adjoining the great kitchen window, into

a little vault at the west end of the Frater House, like a pantry,

called the _covie_, kept by a man. Within it was a window, at which

some of the children received the meat from the said man (who was

called the clerk of the covie) out of the covie window, and carried

it to the loft. This clerk waited on them at every meal to preserve

order.” The description given of the Song school attached to Durham

monastery, which, according to the same authority, was built “many

years without memory of man, before the suppression of the house,”

is worth quoting, as showing that the material comfort of the pupils

was not uncared for. It was “very finely boarded round about, a man’s

height about the walls, and had a long desk from one end of the

school to the other for the books to lie on; and all the floor was

boarded under foot _for warmness_, and long forms set in the ground

for the children to sit on. And the place where the master sat and

taught was all close boarded both behind and on either side, _for

warmness_.”[249]

Similar schools for poor scholars were attached to all the great

abbeys, and were of a higher order with respect to learning than the

parochial schools. The pupils reared in them, though of the humblest

origin, often rose to high dignities in Church and State. John of

Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, born of a peasant’s family,

received his early education in the poor school of the Cluniac

monks of Lewes, where, many years later, Dudley, the son of a poor

travelling carpenter, was also received, and sent to Oxford by his

charitable patrons, who little foresaw the kind of renown which their

_protégé_ would achieve, or the evil which his descendants would

bring upon the Church. Alexander of Hales, “the Irrefragable Doctor,”

as he was called, was in like manner a pupil of the Cistercians, who,

says his biographer, “had the heroic charity to teach youth;” and it

is well known that the facilities afforded by the religious houses

to poor scholars were so great as to be regarded with much jealousy

by the feudal lords, whose pride revolted at the promotion to

ecclesiastical dignities of men who had risen from the lowest grades.

There will be occasion to examine our English poor schools more

closely in a future chapter, but at present we must return to Oxford,

where the collegiate system was gradually developing in its grandest

form, and the influx of the mendicant orders was introducing a

splendid era for the schools.

_CHAPTER XVI._

OLD OXFORD.

A.D. 1200 TO 1300.

There are probably few prospects which unite so many forms of

beauty and interest as the distant view of a great city; and none

in which the reality is more thoroughly idealised in the eye of the

spectator. As he gazes at some fair assemblage of ancient towers

gleaming aloft through a framework of green boughs, and hears their

far-off chimes mingling with the nearer music of the thrush’s note,

he forgets “the loud stunning tide of human crime” which surges at

their base, and is ready to cheat himself into the pleasant fancy

that he beholds a sacred city full of venerable shrines. But if this

character of solemn beauty attaches even to our busiest capitals

when seen from a distance, much more does it belong to Oxford, the

ancient “Bellositum,” which finds no rival to compete with her in the

marvellous aspect of her

Majestic towers

Lifting their varied shapes o’er verdant bowers.

Gardens, churches, and palaces shining through a vista of stately

forest trees, surrounded by green meadows and reflected in the waters

of a noble river, make up a picture which may well arrest the eye

of the artist or the poet, and suggest a dream which, if it find no

substantial reality, is yet a form of beauty evoked from the ancient

worship, carrying our thoughts to days when the sanctuaries of Oxford

were first raised for cloistered students, and when St. Edmund and

St. Richard were teaching in her schools.

Yet, if we were suddenly transported back to the beginning of

the thirteenth century, very little of this architectural beauty

would meet our eye. There was the castle indeed, and the spire of

St Frideswide’s priory, but they were surrounded, not as now with

graceful colleges, but with the humble straw-thatched houses of the

citizens, and with those equally humble inns and halls of which we

have already spoken. A great oak forest separated the city from the

village of Abingdon, and was inhabited by wolves and wild boars; and

tradition preserves the story of a certain student who was met in his

walk by a ferocious boar, which he overcame by thrusting Aristotle

down the beast’s throat. The boar, having no taste for such logic,

was choked by it; and his head, borne home in triumph, was no doubt

honourably served up at table with a sprig of rosemary in its mouth.

The stately abbey of Osney, second to none in the kingdom, would

have been seen in those islet meadows, where at present not a stone

remains to mark its former site; and its two grand towers rose among

the trees, musical with the bells which now ring out their tuneful

chimes from the cathedral spire. There were to be seen the stately

quadrangle and the abbot’s house, so often the resort of kings and

papal legates; and pleasant walks under the elm trees wound along the

waterside overlooking the stream which separated the abbey lands from

those other islets where the two orders of mendicant friars had just

established themselves.

The scholars were fond of such shady walks, and had laid out a

certain plot of ground which bore the name of _Campus Martius_,

and was divided into several portions, according to the scholastic

degrees. One of the walks was _non ultra_ walk, and led to a little

hill called Rome, wherein was a cave and a meander, or winding path,

and at the top thereof a cross of stone. Two clear springs were

seen at either end of this scholastic garden, appropriately bearing

the names of Plato and Aristotle. There were many other such wells

in the city, one of which was called Holy Well, over which was

raised a stately cross. Its waters were pure and intensely cold,

and were esteemed for the many cures which were wrought by them on

pious pilgrims. For Oxford drew pilgrims as well as scholars to

her holy shrines. Not only was the tomb of St. Frideswide visited

by thousands, but also her image in that little country church of

Binsey, which she is said to have founded, and which in early days

was surrounded by hawthorn woods, and was a place of recreation for

the nuns of her convent. There you may still see, not the image, but

the empty niche where it formerly stood, and the stone pavement worn

away with many feet and many knees, a relic in itself, which we may

stoop and reverently kiss; for here St. Edmund was wont to pray;

and here on certain festivals the scholars came out with cross and

banners, and wound their way among the flowering hawthorn woods to

pay their homage to the patron saint of Oxford.

There was another well in St. Clement’s parish, near the old hospital

of St. Bartholomew, which claimed to have been founded by Henry the

Scholar, which was also held in much esteem. It was one of those

spots which our ancestors were wont to designate “Gospel places,”

where, on the Rogation Days, it was the custom to read portions of

the Gospel, by way of invoking a blessing on the corn-fields, and the

streams, and the fountains of water, that they might not be infected

by the power of wicked spirits. The well was in a grove hard by St.

Bartholomew’s chapel; and here came out the students, young and

old, carrying poles adorned with flowers, and singing the canticle

_Benedicite_, wherein they called on the fountains and all the green

things of the earth to bless the Lord. The poor folk of the hospital

made ready for them by strewing the ground with flowers, and adorning

the well itself with green boughs and garlands. Then the Gospel was

read, and the well was blessed, and in later times an anthem, in

three or more parts, was sung by the scholars.

The meadows that lie around the city, through which, to use the words

of brave old Stowe, “the river passeth on to London with a marvellous

quiet course,” were then, as now, highly prized by the scholars

as places of recreation, and are as frequently alluded to in the

university histories, as the famous “Pré aux Clercs” at Paris. But

let us enter within the walls, and take a glance at the streets with

their quaint designations. “School Street” and “Logic Lane” speak for

themselves, but what can have been the origin of the “Street of the

seven deadly Sins”? Here is a very important turning which leads to

the _Schedeyerde_, or _Vicus schediasticorum_. You shudder perhaps,

at the sound of such barbarous Latin; yet had you been an Oxford

scholar of good King Henry’s days, you would very often have bent

your steps hitherward: for here abode the sellers of parchment, the

_schedes_ or sheets of which gave their name to the locality, and

here the transcribers and book merchants carried on their traffic;

and here scholars with long purses obtained their literary wares, and

those with empty ones were fain to look and long. You can tell the

schools by their pithy inscriptions, _Ama scientiam_, _imposturas

fuge_, _litteras disce_, and the like, but you will look in vain for

public schools, or congregation house, or library, or observatory,

or collegiate piles. Churches, indeed, there are in plenty, and

if the tower of St. Martin’s strikes your eye by its strength and

height, you may be surprised to learn that the citizens use it as

a fortalice, and on occasion of quarrels with the students retire

there to shoot at them with stones, and bows, on which account it was

afterwards cut down to its present dumpy proportions by Edward III.

In truth, it must be confessed, the state of things in old Oxford

was anything but orderly. Not only did the northern and southern men

embrace different sides both in philosophy and politics, and fight

out their differences in the public streets, but the townsmen and the

gownsmen stood on much the same terms as those which existed of old

time between Athens and Sparta; there might be a truce between them,

but there was never a peace. The students lived, as yet subject to

no statutes and very little law, and committed many villanies; and,

on the other hand, the burghers preyed on them, provoked them, and

sometimes burnt their books.

We have now to watch the gradual growth into form and order of these

chaotic elements, and will pass over to the other side of the great

oak forest, and make our way to the village of Abingdon, where the

abbey which we saw founded by good St. Ethelwold had been rebuilt by

his Norman successors, and in the early days of the reign of Henry

III. was flourishing in great splendour. In the village that had

gathered round its walls there lived, at that time, a widow, named

Mabel Rich, the mother of four children, whom she brought up in all

holy living. Her husband, before his death, had put on the monk’s

cowl in the neighbouring abbey of Eynsham, whither his eldest son

had followed him; another son retired to the priory of Boxley in

Kent, whilst Mabel, in heart also a religious, remained in the world

to educate her remaining children. Growing up under the shadow of

the old cloister, by the side of a mother who trained him in the

austere practices of ancient piety, Edmund Rich was steeped from

childhood in the spirit of Catholic devotion. He assisted with Mabel

at the midnight office in the abbey, he learnt the Psalter from her

lips; and his soul gradually received that beautiful mould which we

have again and again admired in the scholars of old time, and which

perhaps found in him its most perfect realisation. At twelve years

old he went to Oxford, and it is his own brother, Robert Rich, who

tells us how, at that time, going out into the meadows in order to

withdraw himself from the boisterous play of his companions, the

Child Jesus appeared to him, and saluted him with the words “Hail,

beloved one!” And he, wondering at the beauty of the Child, replied,

“Who are you, for to me you are certainly unknown?” Then said the

Child, “How comes it that I am unknown to thee, seeing that I sit by

thy side at school, and wherever thou art, there also do I accompany

thee? Look in My face and see what is there written.” Edmund looked

and saw the words, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” “This is My

name,” said the Child, “write it on thy forehead every night, and it

shall protect thee from sudden death.” Then He disappeared, on Whom

the Angels desire to look, leaving the other with a sweetness in his

heart passing that of honey.

From Oxford Edmund proceeded to Paris, where we have already seen

something of his manner of life. He seems to have studied more than

once at both universities, and also at Merton abbey, then a great

seat of learning. As soon as he had taken his master’s degree, he

opened a school of his own on the spot now occupied by St. Edmund’s

Hall. The favourite maxim he was accustomed to give to his pupils,

was this: “Study as if you were to live for ever, live as if you were

to die to-morrow.” For himself, he heard Mass daily, attended matins

in the nearest parish church, and recited the canonical hours before

beginning his lectures. And to satisfy his devotion with the greater

convenience, he spent part of his slender patrimony in the erection

of a Lady chapel attached to St. Peter’s church, where he and his

pupils regularly recited the Divine office. It must be remembered,

that at this period Oxford possessed none of those colleges and

collegiate chapels, in which the Church office was afterwards

celebrated with so much splendour; but the custom, introduced for the

first time by St. Edmund, was soon followed by other students. Those

who love the memory of the holy scholar may still visit his chapel,

which looks desolate enough, with its once delicate lancet windows

walled up; yet it is something to know the spots where saints have

prayed.

Did we know St. Edmund only by the records left us of his tender

piety, his singular devotion to our Blessed Lady, and his manifold

austerities, we might picture him as some contemplative saint, whose

thoughts were wholly withdrawn from the world, and fixed on unseen

things. Yet he was a scholar and a teacher; a close logician, and

a great lover of mathematics. Wood says that he was the first who

publicly read some of Aristotle’s Treatises at Oxford, and for six

years after the opening of his school he continued to lecture on

arts. The circumstance which led to his exchanging these studies

for that of theology is thus told by his biographer: “After he had

taught the liberal arts for six years, and was reading geometry with

his pupils, his mother one night appeared to him as he slept, saying:

‘What is it, my son, that you read and teach, and what are those

figures over which you are poring so intently?’ He replied, that they

were the figures of geometry, on which she took his hand in hers, and

drew thereon three circles, at the same time naming the three Divine

Persons--Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Then she added, ‘These are the

figures which you must henceforth study.’” From that time he applied

himself exclusively to the sacred sciences, and that with greater

ardour than he had hitherto bestowed on secular learning. He hardly

gave himself time for sleep and refreshment, but studied night and

day. An ivory crucifix, with the mysteries of our redemption carved

round it, was always on his table when he read, and to it from time

to time he directed his eyes, feeding his heart the while with pious

ejaculations. He never went to bed, but took his scanty rest on the

floor, or in his chair, and was at his books again as soon as the

morning dawned. Does this intense application seem excessive? and

does any reader conceive a distrust of such absorbing studies? Let

them learn that at this very time St. Edmund sold all his books, to

supply the wants of some poor scholars whom he had no other means of

relieving, and seems to have been indebted to a charitable friend for

the gift of a Bible, which afterwards formed his principal study.

After some years, having taken his doctor’s degree, he once more

began to teach; and strange and beautiful were the scenes in that

saintly lecture-room, where the master was often rapt in ecstacy, and

the scholars were fain to shut up their note-books, being too much

blinded with their tears to use them. Wood mentions the tradition,

common at Oxford, that an angel, in the form of a beautiful youth,

was often seen standing by his side while he spoke, a legend which at

least shows in what sort of esteem he was held by his scholars. Among

them were St. Sewall, afterwards Archbishop of York, St. Richard of

Chichester, Stephen Lexington, and Robert Grosteste, all of whom took

part in the great intellectual movement shortly afterwards set on

foot at Oxford by the mendicant friars. He did not make much profit

out of his school, for the money he received from his pupils was

either spent in charity, or suffered to lie loose on his window sill,

where he would strew it over with ashes, saying, “Ashes to ashes,

dust to dust.” Any one might take it who chose, and his friends did

so sometimes, to see what he would say; but he asked no account of

it, and no persuasion would ever induce him to keep it under lock

and key. He was not the mere professor, whose care of his pupils

ceased when they left his lecture-room. He nursed them when they

were sick, and relieved them when they were in want; and they in

their turn loved to gather up each trait of their beloved master,

and handed down to those who came after them the portraiture of the

saint, with his beautiful countenance, the pallor of which became of

a fair shining red when he spoke of God or holy things, in his grey

scholar’s gown, which was poor without meanness, for he was wont to

say that a clerk should remember that his state was an honourable

one, and that his appearance, if simple, should never be abject.

St. Edmund had a real love for the work of teaching, and several

times when he had been persuaded to accept of benefices, he resigned

them in order to return to Oxford. At last, however, we find him

treasurer of Salisbury; and with his habits, a very strange treasurer

he must have made. And in 1234 he became Archbishop of Canterbury.

We need not follow the history of his troublous primacy; he fared

the usual fate of English primates who resisted the tyranny of

Plantagenet kings; and six years later was an exile at Pontigny,

living among the Cistercian monks as one of themselves, writing his

“Mirror of the Church,” and preparing for his end. He did not die at

Pontigny, however, but at Soissy, whither they brought him in hopes

that the cooler air might revive his exhausted strength. His last

days were spent in giving alms to the poor pilgrims who passed that

way, and when he was too feeble to rise from his chair and go to the

gate, he made one of his chaplains take his place, and give to all

who came. His last words are preserved, the words he pronounced with

outstretched hands, when about to receive the Holy Viaticum:--“Lord,

thou art He in whom I have believed, whom I have preached, whom I

have truly taught: and Thou art my witness that while I have been on

earth, I have sought nothing else besides Thee. And as Thou knowest

that I will only what Thou willest, so now I say, Thy will be done.”

“All the rest of that day,” says his biographer, “he was joyful and

even gay; you would not have thought he was suffering from sickness;

and many wondered to see him thus. The tears of devotion were indeed

in his eyes, but his beautiful countenance manifested the serenity

that filled his heart. There was no sign of approaching death; and

at the last moment, neither sigh nor death-rattle was heard; he did

not even sink back on his bed, as dying persons are wont to do, but

remained sitting, and so gently expired, leaning his head upon his

hand.” Pontigny keeps his dust as her most precious treasure, and

even in our own day, such a strange attractive power is possessed

by the sacred relics of the saints, that a newly-founded religious

congregation has selected its desolate church for the site of their

mother house, with the view of obtaining for their apostolic work the

blessing of _Saint Edmé_.

Meanwhile, if England had cast out her holy primate, Oxford had

not forgotten her doctor. The work he had begun in his schools was

carried on by the band of scholars whom he had trained and left

behind him. Five years before he left the university, the two orders

of mendicant friars had been established in the town. The first

colony of the Franciscans was sent thither in 1220, by Brother

Agnellus, who soon after came himself, and caused a decent school to

be built, in which he induced Master Robert Grosteste to deliver his

lectures. Grosteste was at that time the most illustrious doctor of

the university, and soon brought the Franciscan schools into high

repute. Agnellus, though himself unlearned, was most desirous that

the studies of his brethren should be amply provided for, and often

visited the schools to watch their progress. One day, to his great

surprise, he found them disputing on the thesis, “Whether there be

a God.” Whereon he cried out in great distress, “Alas, alas! simple

friars penetrate the heavens, while the learned are disputing if

there be a God.” With these words he left the school “in a chafe,”

says Wood, “to think he had built it for such debates,” but, becoming

a little calmer, sent the sum of ten marks to Rome to buy a correct

copy of the Decretals, charging his friars to apply themselves wholly

to the study thereof, and to lay aside questions of sophistry and

foolish babbling.

It must not be supposed from this story that the learning encouraged

at the university by Grosteste was entirely of that disputatious and

empty kind which had become fashionable in the schools since the time

of Abelard. Grosteste, if he exercised the friars in such scholastic

disputations, was himself a decided advocate of the older learning,

and may be regarded as, in the main, a disciple of the school of St.

Victor. When chancellor of the university, he used his influence

to promote the study of positive theology, and of that Biblical

learning in which he was himself a proficient. One of his modern

biographers has candidly admitted that “his wonderful knowledge of

Scripture might probably be worthy of remark in our day, though in

his own not more than was possessed by all theological students.”

But Grosteste had largeness of mind enough to appreciate the value

of the scholastic method at the same time that he laboured to prevent

the study of the Scriptures and the liberal arts from falling into

decay; and he probably found means of satisfying Brother Agnellus on

this point, for whatever use was made of the copy of the Decretals,

it is quite certain that the friars did not “apply themselves wholly”

to them, or lay aside their scholastic exercises. On the contrary,

Fuller tells us that they soon beat all their competitors in school

divinity, “out of all distance;” and Wood adds to his narrative as

given above, that Grosteste was not superficial in his performances,

and that under him the friars made extraordinary advances both in

disputation and preaching.

The great esteem in which Grosteste held the Franciscans led him,

not only to teach in their schools, but to persuade other first-rate

regents to do the same; besides which, he induced several of his own

personal friends to enter the order, among whom was Adam Marsh, the

parish priest of Wearmouth, better known by his Italian name of Adam

de Marisco, who is reckoned as the first regular professor of the

order at Oxford, and was known as “the Illustrious Doctor,” and Roger

Bacon, the wonder of his age, and the greatest natural philosopher

who appeared in England before the time of Newton. Besides these,

the Franciscans were joined by a crowd of other illustrious novices,

such as John Wallis, surnamed the “Tree of Life,” Alexander of Hales,

Haymo of Feversham, and more than one Benedictine and Augustinian

abbot, which latter circumstance has greatly excited the spleen of

Matthew Paris.

Grosteste, after for some time filling the office of chancellor,

became Bishop of Lincoln in 1235, in which capacity he was still _ex

officio_ head of the university, and continued to keep up an active

interest in its affairs. Among his letters is one addressed to the

regents of Oxford, in which he gives them much useful advice as to

the regulation of their studies. “Let the foundation-stones be well

laid,” he says, “on them the whole building rests. The morning is the

best time for study, and the good old Paris custom should be observed

of reserving those early hours for the lectures on Scripture, giving

the later part of the day to other subjects.” Even when treating of

questions altogether unconnected with natural science, his love of it

peeps out in spite of himself, as in the passage where he gracefully

compares the difference between direct and delegated authority to the

different powers of the sun’s rays when falling direct, or reflected

from a mirror. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest men of his

time, a universal genius, and revered by his countrymen as a saint.

After his death, the university united with the king in petitioning

for his canonisation, and sent a document to Rome, in which it is

declared “that the said Robert never left undone any good action

pertaining to his state and office for fear of any man, but was

rather prepared for martyrdom should the sword of the assassin have

fallen upon him. Likewise, the university certifieth of his splendid

learning, and that he most admirably governed Oxford, in his degree

of doctor of holy theology, and was illustrious for many miracles

after his death, wherefore he is named by the mouth of all men,

‘Holy Robert.’” He may, in fact, be regarded as, in his own time,

the representative of the university, and hence it is of particular

importance to ascertain what the studies were which he followed and

promoted. As a theologian, he belonged rather to the mystic than

the speculative school, and as a scholar he was a warm upholder of

the liberal arts, doing his utmost to encourage the study, not only

of the Latin classics, but also of Greek and Hebrew. He translated

the works of St. Dionysius the Areopagite, and, to facilitate the

study of Greek, is also said to have translated the Lexicon of

Suidas. He promoted two ecclesiastics who are likewise known to

have been Greek scholars: John Basing, archdeacon of St. Alban’s,

who in 1240 returned from Athens laden with Greek manuscripts, and

Nicholas, chaplain to the abbot of St. Alban’s, surnamed _Græcus_,

who assisted the bishop in some of his translations. He is also said

to have been acquainted with Hebrew. But his skill in the learned

tongues formed but a small part of Grosteste’s acquirements. He was a

mathematician, a poet, a musician, and a philosopher. Among the two

hundred treatises of various kinds which he left behind him are to

be found, besides his theological writings, works on the sphere, on

physical science, husbandry, political economy, medicine, and music;

commentaries on Aristotle and Boëthius, and Norman-French poems. Of

these last, one is entitled the “Château d’Amour,” a name he bestows

on the Blessed Virgin, and consists of a religious romance on the

fall and redemption of man. This, together with his “Manuel des

Péchés,” was translated in the following reign into English verse,

by Robert Manning, who, in the prologue to his poem, alludes to the

bishop’s well-known love of music, and tells us that--.

He loved moche to here the harpe,

For mannys witte yt maketh sharpe.

Next his chaumber besyde hys stody

Hys harper’s chaumber was fast thereby

And many tymes by nyghtes and dayys

He had solace of notes and layys.

Most readers are aware that Grosteste is commonly represented as

an enemy to papal supremacy, and is rather favourably treated, in

consequence, by some historians who find great consolation in the

thought that he died excommunicate. That he opposed the nomination

of foreigners to English benefices, and that in very bold language,

is quite certain, but the rest of the story belongs to our mediæval

myths. It is supposed to have been conjured out of the anathemas

attached to the Bull of provisors, the execution of which he

resisted. It is scarcely necessary to observe that petitions would

hardly have been presented to the Holy See in the next reign for

the canonisation of one who had died under the censures of the

Church, and in these petitions there is not to be found the smallest

allusion to his having even incurred any sort of disgrace. More than

this, Wood tells us that just before the death of Innocent IV.,

that Pontiff granted to the university four new Bulls containing

great privileges, which had been procured _through the interest of

Grosteste_. In point of fact, however bold and uncompromising he

may have been in resisting what he deemed a practical abuse, there

was no English Divine who ever expressed himself with more hearty

loyalty towards the chair of St. Peter than “Holy Robert.” He plainly

declared that to refuse obedience to the Supreme Pastor was “as the

sin of witchcraft and idolatry,” and even Mr. Berington is forced to

allow that his language regarding the authority of the Holy See is so

“adulatory,” that the attempt to rank him among its enemies must be

deemed a total failure.

It would carry us too far to attempt anything like a particular

account of the Franciscan scholars, who flourished at Oxford during

the time of Grosteste. One among them, it need hardly be said, towers

above all the rest, his celebrity having survived undiminished to

our own day. Roger Bacon, a west countryman by birth, and a pupil of

St. Edmund’s, had passed from Oxford to Paris, where he received his

doctor’s degree, and then returning to the English university, spent

forty years of his life in studying and lecturing upon the sciences.

He had acquired the Greek, Hebrew, and Oriental languages in Paris,

and wrote grammars of the two first-named tongues which are said to

be preserved in MS. at St. Peter’s College, Cambridge. But it was

as a natural philosopher that he chiefly distinguished himself above

his contemporaries, and anticipated the discoveries of later science.

At this time the physical sciences were chiefly cultivated by the

Arabians, who presented them in a mystic and fanciful shape, which

did not render them less acceptable to mediæval students. The study

of physics was understood to include mathematics, alchemy, astrology,

medicine, and mechanics, each of which received its own colouring of

romance. Thus a certain Arabian physician put forth the theory that

medicines could only be properly mixed according to the principles of

music, and no one ventured to doubt the connection of astronomy with

the medical science. Bacon was certainly not less credulous than his

contemporaries, but he was more experimental, and hence, though he

does not seem to have done much towards establishing truer scientific

principles, he obtained many brilliant results. The long list of his

writings includes treatises on Optics (then called Perspective),

Mathematics, Chemistry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, the Tides, and the

Reformation of the Calendar; and, as is well known, he was familiar

with the properties of mirrors, and appears to have been acquainted

with the principle both of the microscope and the telescope, and with

the powers of steam and of gunpowder. It is not to be doubted that he

was greatly in advance of his age in scientific knowledge, and it was

probably his skill in the use of optical and mechanical instruments,

which earned for him the vulgar reputation of dealing in magic.

Charges of this sort are commonly enough explained as arising out

of the ignorance of the multitudes, who thought every man who could

read Greek to be possessed of unlawful knowledge. But besides the

awe with which a semibarbarous age naturally regarded one possessed

of secrets not revealed to the vulgar herd, it must be remembered

that Bacon’s science sometimes clothed itself in very suspicious

language. He declared that his wonderful tube possessed the power of

beholding, not _distant objects_ only, but _future events_; and his

enthusiastic language in praise of his favourite science may read to

us as simple nonsense, but was understood in his own day to imply

something very like a magic art. He was not a whit less disposed than

his contemporaries to credit the wildest theories of the alchemists,

but believed in the possibility of contriving lamps that should burn

for ever, magic crystals, the elixir of life, and the philosopher’s

stone, and wrote treatises on the two last-named subjects. It is

plain, indeed, that he only expected to realise these schemes

by an application of the secret powers of nature, and not by any

forbidden arts. Yet it sounded startling to simple ears to hear of

schemes whereby one man might draw a thousand to himself, might raise

himself into the air and fly, or manage a ship with his single arm;

not to speak of his boastful offer to teach any man Hebrew in three

days, Greek in another three, and the whole course of arithmetic and

geometry in a week.[250] Unfavourable rumours having reached the ears

of Jerome of Ascoli, then general of his order, he was prohibited

from teaching, and for a time imprisoned; but in 1264, Cardinal

Fulcodi, formerly legate in England, becoming Pope under the title of

Clement IV., Bacon despatched to Rome his favourite disciple, John of

London, who placed in the Pontiff’s hands all his master’s books and

instruments, an examination of which appears to have justified him

in the opinion of his judges. Clement bestowed great marks of favour

both on the master and scholar, and it was at his suggestion that

Bacon made that collection of his chief philosophical views which

is known as the _Opus Majus_. When Jerome of Ascoli himself became

Pope Nicholas IV., Bacon was again imprisoned, but as Wood shows,

the assertion that he died in confinement during the pontificate of

Nicholas is clearly an error, for his death did not take place till

1292, he having survived the Pope four years, and having before his

death recovered his liberty, and published several theological works.

The only other Oxford Franciscan who must be mentioned in this

place, is Nicholas de Lyra, whose claim to be regarded as a native

of this country is not, indeed, undisputed, though it rests on the

respectable authority of Trithemius, Sixtus of Sienna, and a majority

of writers. The Flemings assert that he was born at Lyre in Brabant,

the French as peremptorily declare him a native of Lyra in Normandy,

and the English author of the _Collectanea Anglo-Minoritica_, will

have it that his real name was _Harper_, Latinised after the fashion

of the day into _Lyra_. Equal uncertainty rests on the point whether

he were by birth a Christian or a Jew, the common belief inclining

to the view that he was the son of Jewish parents, though this fact

is hard to reconcile with the assertion of his biographers, that

he only began the study of Hebrew at an advanced age. But whatever

doubt hangs over his origin, none exists as to the position he held

among the scholars of the day. Biblical learning and the study of the

Scriptural tongues had not quite fallen into decay, when the age

could produce the author of the “Scholastic Postils,” a commentary

upon every part of the Sacred Volume, which was the first commentary

on the Scripture ever printed. Nicholas de Lyra had studied at the

Universities of Paris and Oxford, and if it be true, as is asserted,

that he did not apply himself to Greek and Hebrew learning until

after his entrance into the Franciscan Order, we must allow his

erudition to have been gained in the university schools. Whether

himself a Jewish convert or not, his labours are said to have been

undertaken in the first instance with a view to the conversion of

that unhappy people, a work which, in the thirteenth century, engaged

the attention of the most illustrious divines. By his writings,

disputations, and sermons, Nicholas is said to have converted six

thousand Jews to the faith. But his great work was far from being

exclusively intended for their instruction; it became the Text Book

of Biblical students, an indispensable part of every cathedral and

monastic library, and laid down rules for the safe interpretation of

Scripture based upon the right intelligence of the literal sense.

It must be added, to the honour of English scholarship, that this

important work, which fills five folio volumes, was first published

at the expense of a private London citizen, and that the money paid

for copying it amounted to 670 florins. Its composition occupied the

author thirty-seven years, for, as he himself declares, it was begun

in 1293, and not completed until 1330.

Let us now turn to an Oxford scholar of a different stamp, whose

name, inseparably united to that of St. Edmund, almost closes the

catalogue of our English Saints. Born of respectable parents, who

owned the lands of Burford, near the little town of Wyche, in

Worcestershire, Richard had very early given evidence of a scholar’s

tastes, and the first fact which his biographer, Ralph Bocking,[251]

records regarding him, is his determined refusal to be drawn away

from his books to join in any of the village dances and revelries.

But a hard fortune left him little hopes of being able to devote

his life to books and learning. The death of his father, and the

mismanagement of the guardians to whose care he and his brothers were

consigned, reduced the family to extreme poverty. And Richard, with

generous self-devotion, gave up all his own cherished plans, and

entered his elder brother’s service in order, by a life of vigorous

labour, to put the affairs of the family on a better footing. “He

served him,” says Bocking, “in poverty and abjection, and that for

many years; working, now with the plough and now with the cart, and

enduring many other kinds of hard and humble toil, patiently and

modestly.” Richard’s memory was long preserved and revered in his

native place, and even down to the time of the great Rebellion,

the Droitwich peasantry put on their best clothes on St. Richard’s

day, and went to decorate with boughs and flowers a certain well

dedicated to the Worcestershire saint. Aubrey, who notices this

circumstance,[252] informs us that St. Richard was a person of good

estate, and “a brisk young fellow that would ride over hedge and

ditch;” a description which, quaint as it is, expresses well enough

one feature in his thoroughly English character. He was not a dreamer

or a bookworm; he did nothing by halves, and his strong, manly nature

loved the practical side of everything. As a Worcestershire farmer he

was just as ready to ride over hedge and ditch when that was needed,

as he was, when bishop, to do his pastoral work in the guise of a

poor beggar. The future chancellor of Oxford began life, in short,

as a simple yeoman. His energy and perseverance had their reward,

and in a few years his brother’s lands, well tilled and managed,

began to yield an ample revenue. But when a prosperous fortune

seemed opening before him, he refused every offer made him by his

kinsfolk, and as soon as his self-imposed task was over, he bade

farewell to his Worcestershire home, and betook himself to Oxford,

whence, after a time, he passed on to Paris. In both universities

he led the hard and mortified life of a poor scholar. For it must

be remembered that this was before the time of colleges; it was the

golden age when Oxford numbered her thirty thousand scholars, most

of whom had scanty means of subsistence. Some were supported by the

alms of private individuals, others by the great abbeys of Eynsham

and Osney, which on certain festival days, bound themselves to regale

the poor scholars with “honest refection.” Others went about begging

and singing the “Salve Regina” at the doors of the citizens, well

content to receive by way of payment a dish of broken meat from the

rich man’s table. Every one will remember the picture drawn, many

years later, by Chaucer, who describes the clerke of Oxenforde in his

threadbare doublet, who would rather have

At his beddes hed

Twenty bokes clothed in blake or red

Of Aristotle and his philosophie

Than robes riche, fidel or sautrie,

For al be that he was a philosopher

Yet hadde he but litel gold in coffor,

And all that he might of his frendes hente

On bokes and on learning he it spente,

And besily gan for the soules praie

Of them that gave him wherewith to scholaie.

The account that Bocking gives of St. Richard’s student life is

hardly less graphic. Like the poor Cambridge scholar before spoken

of, who had to run about to keep his feet warm, Richard never saw

a fire. But, unlike him, he was seldom able to afford himself

the luxury of _beef_ or even _mutton_, then reckoned as ordinary

“scholar’s fare.” “So entirely,” says Bocking, “was he carried away

with the love of learning, that he gave but little thought to the

necessities of the body. For, as he used afterwards to relate, having

two companions with him in his poor chamber, the three had but one

tunic each, and one hooded gown between them. One of them at a time,

therefore, put on the gown and went to hear the lectures, leaving the

other two in their lodgings, after which they in their turn put on

the gown and so went to lecture. Their food was bread, with a very

little wine, and salad, or other such poor sort of viands. For then

poverty did not allow them to eat flesh or fish except on Sundays

and high days, or when any friends were their guests. Nevertheless,

the saint was wont to affirm that no period of his life had ever

been more joyful and delightful.” His love of Oxford induced him

to return thither a second time, instead of taking his master’s

degree at Paris; and for some years after graduating at the English

university he taught in his own school, “liberally dispensing to

others what he had himself acquired.” After a while he repaired to

Bologna, and there spent seven years in the study of the canon law.

And in 1235 we find him once more at Oxford, where he was unanimously

chosen Chancellor of the University. He does not seem to have filled

this office for any great length of time, for Robert Grosteste and

St. Edmund of Canterbury were both anxious to draw him to their

respective dioceses, St. Edmund succeeded, and appointed him his

chancellor, and a close friendship sprang up between the two saints,

which is thus eloquently described by Bocking:--“In all things,” he

says, “Richard had an eye to the peace and quiet of his lord and

archbishop, who, as he knew, had chosen Mary’s better part. And the

archbishop exceedingly rejoiced that by the discreet affection and

loving discretion of his chancellor he was saved from the tumult of

outward business; while the chancellor was in like manner glad to

learn from the holy and heavenly conversation of his prelate. Each

leaned on each, the saint on the saint, the master on the disciple,

the disciple on the master, the father on the son, and the son on the

father. To one who looked on them religiously, they seemed like the

two cherubim stretching their wings over the ark of the Lord--the

church of Canterbury; each with holy eye gazing on the other, and

touching each other with the wings of holy love; their faces, that

is, their wills, ever turned towards the Mercy-seat.”

Richard followed his friend into exile, and was with him both at

Pontigny and at Soissy, where he died. Up to that time St. Richard

had not given much time to the study of theology, and had only

received minor orders on his appointment to the Chancellorship of

Canterbury. He had made himself known rather as a man of practical

sense than of profound intellect, and the tie that bound him to St.

Edmund drew something of its strength from the very contrast of their

natural characters. But the snapping of that bond was the heart wound

destined to draw St. Richard to yet more excellent things. The tree

must be pierced to give out its most precious balm, the leaf must

be bruised to yield its fragrant odours. The strong, manly heart of

the Worcestershire yeoman was bowed in anguish over Edmund’s grave;

but the anguish softened, refined, and elevated his nature; it drew

heaven nearer to him, and him nearer to heaven; so that, conceiving

a distaste for all secular studies, he retired to Orleans, and set

himself to study theology in the convent of Dominican Friars.

This was not his first acquaintance with the Friar Preachers, who

had established themselves in the Jews’ quarter of Oxford before St.

Richard’s residence there as Chancellor. The excellence of their

theological schools was therefore well known to him; and after

studying with them for two or three years, and receiving ordination

as a priest from the hands of the Bishop of Orleans, he returned to

England, and for some time exercised the office of parish priest

of Deal. Boniface of Savoy, the successor of St. Edmund in the

primacy, soon found him out, and compelled him to resume the office

of chancellor; but, before doing so, Richard, whose desire was to

lead a poor and apostolic life, took a vow to join the Dominican

Order, trusting that such an obligation would stand in the way of

his retaining any public dignity. He was never able actually to

fulfil this vow; yet, as Bocking remarks, the after circumstances of

his life may be regarded as a sort of virtual accomplishment of it,

“inasmuch as for many years he led the life of a true Friar Preacher,

preaching Jesus Christ in poverty, and labouring for the salvation of

souls, stripped of all worldly possessions.”

In 1244 the unwelcome news reached him that he was elected Bishop of

Chichester; but king Henry III., enraged that the canons had rejected

his own unworthy minister and nominee, Robert Passelew, revenged

himself by seizing the temporalities of the see; and when an appeal

to Rome resulted in the confirmation of St. Richard’s election, the

new bishop, compelled by obedience to accept the weighty charge, and

consecrated at Rome by the Pope’s own hand, returned to England to

find his manors confiscated and an edict published forbidding any man

to assist him even with a loan. This may be taken as a fair specimen

of the system steadily pursued by the English kings against the

Church, from the Conquest to the Reformation; and if such examples

may be adduced from the policy of him who was avowedly the most pious

and least ferocious of the Plantagenets, we may judge what sort of

measure was dealt to English prelates by sovereigns of more tyrannic

temper. In his younger days St. Richard might probably have repelled

the royal injustice with the bold courage of St. Thomas; he preferred

now to meet it in the spirit of patient endurance, and taking up his

residence with a poor priest of his diocese, gave England an example

no less sublime than that of her martyred primate. Utterly penniless,

and as dependent on the alms of the faithful as the poorest beggar,

St. Richard did not on that account neglect his flock. Like a true

apostle he journeyed on foot over the downs of Sussex, visiting

in turns every remote village, and exercising the Pastoral office

with a vigorous hand that stood in no need of courtly splendour to

enforce its authority. A poor priest of Ferring, named Simon, gave

him hospitality, and there, in the intervals of his toilsome journeys

the bishop recreated himself with gardening, and displayed the skill

in budding and grafting which he had acquired during his yeoman’s

life in Worcestershire. Simon regarded the plants which the bishop

tended as sacred relics, and was greatly distressed when one of

the grafts was destroyed by a beast which broke through the garden

fence. The next time that Richard visited Ferring he good-naturedly

consoled his host by putting in another graft, which that same year

bore flowers and fruit. It was during this time of outlawry and

humiliation that he published his Constitutions for the reform of his

diocese, in which he made special provision for the instruction of

the poor. At last, about 1247, king Henry was forced by the threat

of excommunication, to restore the temporalities, and Richard was

joyfully welcomed to his Cathedral city. But his private habits

underwent no change. He adhered to his old Oxford fare of bread and

a little wine; he seldom touched flesh, and if delicacies, such as

lambs or young chickens were placed on his table, would exclaim,

“Poor innocents; what have ye done to deserve death! Could ye but

speak, ye would surely blame our gluttony!” He rose with the lark, to

say his office in the silent early hours; and if it so fell out that

the birds had begun their matin-song before him, it mortified him:

“Shame on me!” he would say, “that I have allowed these irrational

creatures to be beforehand with me in singing God’s praises!” His

hand was ever open to poor scholars, and he would take the silver

goblets off his table to supply their needs. His whole life presents

us with a succession of beautiful, homely, and pathetic scenes, which

display to us a character wherein pastoral firmness, scholarlike

acuteness, and rustic simplicity are blended together, all bound

and beautified by the spirit of patience, humility, and prayer. At

one time we find him baptizing a Jew whom he has converted by his

learning; at another, preaching the Crusade on the Sussex sea-coast

to the rough sailors who flock to hear his simple, energetic

eloquence. It was whilst engaged in this last work that he was called

to his reward. He died in 1252 at St. Mary’s Hospital at Dover, where

he had just consecrated a church in honour of St. Edmund. In his last

moments his thoughts wandered back to the Convent of Orleans, and

with his parting breath he repeated the invocation, which he had so

often heard repeated by the white-robed Friars:

Maria, Mater gratiæ,

Mater misericordiæ,

Tu nos ab hoste protege,

Et hora mortis suscipe.

Of the English Friar Preachers, to whom St. Richard in heart at

least may be said to have belonged, and of their position in the

university, something must now be said. It was on the feast of the

Assumption 1221, that they first arrived at Oxford, and obtained from

the canons of St. Frideswide a settlement in the Jews’ quarter of

the town, where it was hoped that their learning and their preaching

might win many converts. From Elizabeth Vere, countess of Oxford,

they obtained a piece of ground on which they erected their first

schools, known as St. Edward’s schools, where the first lecturers

were the two friends Robert Bacon and Richard Fishacre, both of them

old pupils of St. Edmund, of whom Matthew Paris says that England

had no greater men living. The resort of scholars soon obliged them

to choose some more commodious site and in 1259 they removed to St.

Ebbe’s island in the south suburb, another adjoining island being

occupied by the Franciscans. The extraordinary popularity enjoyed by

the Dominican Order during the first century of its establishment

in England is attested by every historical document. The lower

classes loved them for taking the popular side in politics, while

the nobles were no less forward in appreciating their merits. It

became a coveted privilege to be buried in their churches, and Wood

says that even in his day skeletons and hearts encased in lead were

continually being disinterred from the ground formerly occupied at

Oxford by the Dominican convent, supposed to be those of devout

clients of the order. However, in spite of all this, they had their

enemies, especially among the secular regents, who were jealous

of their privileges, their popularity, and possibly also of their

learning. In 1360 Richard, afterwards Archbishop of Armagh, being

elected Chancellor of Oxford, was despatched by a certain party of

the Oxford doctors to Rome, to lay a formal complaint before the Pope

of the alleged delinquencies of the friars. One of his complaints

was, oddly enough, their perseverance in collecting libraries; if

he was to be believed, no one could now procure any books at Oxford

on canon law, arts, or theology; they were all bought up by these

insatiable friars, a charge which at least sets them in the light

of being favourers of learning. The chancellor’s mission proved

utterly fruitless, a result which Ayliffe attributes to the fact

that “they had money wherewith to purchase the Pope’s protection.”

This last-named writer, in common with most of the Post-Reformation

writers, labours hard to affix the stigma of ignorance on the

mendicant orders, which he denominates as locusts and caterpillars,

who devoured the vital parts of learning, and involved the Oxford

students in a fog of darkness but partly dispelled by “the daybreak

of Wickliffe’s doctrine.” Even their vast libraries were collected,

he assures us, only to lock up the treasures of knowledge from

other men, and to become the food of moths and worms. And here is

perhaps the place to notice the grave accusations brought against the

Christian schoolmen in general, and the mendicants in particular,

of bringing in a reign of literary barbarism. Fleury devotes a

considerable part of his fifth discourse to this subject, and the

German critics, especially Meiners, can never find enough to say

condemnatory of the scholastic jargon. Hallam adopts the same line,

and assures us that “the return of ignorance was chiefly owing to

those worse vermin, the mendicant friars, who filled all Europe with

stupid superstition.” Whether this is the best specimen that a man of

letters could give of refined and polished diction may be questioned,

but he goes on to remark (in a sentence which, considering the zeal

of its writer for grammatical accuracy, exhibits a rather remarkable

confusion of tenses),--“the writers of the thirteenth century

display an incredible ignorance, not only of pure idiom, but of the

common grammatical rules. Those who _attempted_ to write verse _have

lost_ all prosody, and _relapse_ into Leonine rhymes and barbarous

acrostics. The historians use a hybrid jargon intermixed with modern

words. The scholastic philosophers wholly neglected their style,

and thought it no wrong to enrich the Latin, as in some degree a

living language, with terms that seemed to express their meaning....

Duns Scotus and his followers in the next century carried this

much further, and introduced a most barbarous and unintelligible

terminology, by which the school metaphysics were rendered ridiculous

in the revival of literature.”

That the thirteenth century witnessed a great decay of Latinity is

not to be denied, though, as has been before shown, this decay and

the neglect of classical studies had set in before the rise of the

mendicant orders and is in no way to be attributed to them. Oxford

enjoyed the reputation of talking the very worst Latin in Europe,

whence arose the proverb, _Oxoniensis loquendi mos_. Certainly,

if the grammatical errors condemned in the visitation articles of

John of Peckham, as reported by Wood, were common in the schools,

there is not much to be said in their defence. The prevalence of law

studies, too, helped on the decline of rhetoric, for the diction of

the jurists was, if possible, worse than that of the scholastics;

and the inferiority, apparent during the reign of Edward II., in

the schools of divinity, philosophy, and arts, is attributed by the

learned Dominican, Holcot, to the over-abundance of law lectures.

Granting, however, a full share in the corruption of Latinity to

have been the work of the schoolmen, it is difficult to understand

how they can be said to have committed a “wrong” by “enriching the

Latin with terms which seemed to convey their meaning.” It is usually

supposed to be the object of language to convey one’s thoughts,

and writers who had to express the nice distinctions of Christian

theology would have been puzzled had they been bound to confine

themselves to the Ciceronian phraseology. They did, therefore,

what Cicero himself had done before them, and coined words and

idioms to express ideas which were not current in the Augustan age.

The writings of the scholastics must be regarded as in some sort

scientific works, in which the object was not elegance of style, but

accuracy of sense. We are not, therefore, necessarily to conclude

that the Latin of Duns Scotus was an example of the best that the

age could produce; on the contrary, many instances might be cited

to prove that even this unfortunate thirteenth century possessed

scholars whose Latin was at least as pure as the English of some of

their critics. Thus the Bull of Gregory X. for the canonisation of

St. Louis, is cited by M. Artaud, the biographer of Dante, as “a very

model of pure Latinity.” Cicero’s Rhetoric was so far from being

devoured by the moths, that it was almost the very first work chosen

for translation into Italian prose, and appeared in the vulgar idiom

in 1257, the translator being Galeotto, the professor of grammar

at the university of Bologna. But, putting aside all exceptional

cases of those who still studied and imitated the classics, may we

not reasonably complain of the narrowness of that criticism which

stigmatises as barbarous everything which does not belong to one

style, or reflect the phraseology of one arbitrarily chosen period?

“It is strange,” observes Rohrbacher, “that every one supposes and

repeats that the scholastics and the cloisters of the Middle Ages

produced no book capable of pleasing the world and becoming popular;

and yet, for centuries past, the world has read and delighted in a

book of scholastic morality, composed in the Middle Ages by a monkish

superior for the use of his novices, and that this book which has

been read, known, and admired by everybody, is especially a popular

book; and has been translated into every language, and gone through

thousands of editions.” He is speaking of the _Following of Christ_,

which, according to very probable conjectures, appears to have been

composed in the thirteenth century, by John Gersen of Cabanaco, abbot

of the Benedictine abbey of St. Stephen, at Vercelli.[253]

Again: among the writers who displayed such incredible ignorance as

to write Leonine verse were the authors of a sacred poetic literature

which will defy all the attacks of time, and which no classic revival

can ever render obsolete. The “Dies Iræ,” the “Ave Maris Stella,”

the “Stabat Mater,” the “Veni Sancte Spiritus,” the “Hymns of the

Blessed Sacrament,” and those innumerable sequences so familiar to

every Christian ear, owe nothing of their inspiration to classic

sources. It is even possible that they may set at defiance the

rules of Latin prosody; but all sense of harmony must be destroyed

before we can designate the language in which they are composed

as a “hybrid jargon.” And who were the writers of these exquisite

compositions, which gave a voice to popular Christian devotion, and

still preserve, like some choice balm, not merely the dogmas of the

faith, but the very unction of a believing age? They were, for the

most part, monks, schoolmen, and friars, the very men who stand

charged with a conspiracy against literature and common sense. St.

Peter Damian, Adam of St. Victor, Pope Innocent III., the Franciscan

Jacopone, the Dominican St. Thomas, and we may add, the gifted and

unfortunate Abelard, the very type and representative of the earlier

scholastics--these are the barbarians to whom we are indebted for

that mediæval lyric poetry, much of which has been incorporated

into the office of the Church. In the seventeenth century France

grew ashamed of her ancient hymnology, and committed the task of

liturgical reform to Santeuil, the half-scholar, half-buffoon, to the

Jansenist Coffin, and the Deist De Brienne. The hymns of Fortunatus

and St. Ambrose were then exchanged for studied imitations of Horace,

from the pen of a writer who boasted that he was ready to be hung up

at a lamp-post if he were detected in writing a single bad verse,

though one of his Jesuit critics has cruelly enumerated no fewer than

a hundred and eight. But whatever be the merit of his poetry, the

Catholic sense has long since passed its verdict on the question,

and declared the unction of the ancient lyrics to be worth the pure

Latinity of a thousand such writers as Jean Baptiste Santeuil.[254]

Both orders of Mendicant Friars gave to the English Church great

prelates as well as great scholars; Kilwarby the Dominican and

Peckham the Franciscan, two of the grandest of our English primates,

may be taken as fair representatives of their respective orders. In

the first we see the Oxford and Paris doctor, learned in scriptural

and patristic lore, the “great clerk,” as Godwin calls him, who

“disputed excellently in divers exercises,” and who, as primate,

distinguished himself by his bold, uncompromising resistance to the

tyranny of powerful nobles, and his efforts for the advancement of

learning and the correction of public morals. After filling the see

of Canterbury for six years, “he was obliged to fly from the king’s

anger,” says Harpsfield, and, retiring to Rome, resigned the English

primacy and became Cardinal Bishop of Porto.[255] His successor

was the Franciscan, John of Peckham, appointed like himself by

papal provision. How little was there of a worldly spirit in these

appointments, so loudly and captiously condemned, when a Pope could

put aside so powerful a personage as Robert Burnel, the chancellor

of the greatest king of England who had reigned since the Conquest,

in order to promote one, by birth a poor Sussex peasant, whose only

recommendations were his exquisite scholarship and his saintly

life! Peckham’s learned reputation was not indeed of an ordinary

kind. He was a doctor both of Paris and Oxford, and a pupil at the

latter university of St. Bonaventure; he had made the tour of all

the Italian universities, and in the Pope’s own palace had lectured

on sacred letters to a crowd of bishops and cardinals, who were

proud to call themselves his pupils, and who every day as he passed

through their ranks to his pulpit arose from their seats to show

him reverence. Wadding speaks of his singularly noble countenance

and graceful demeanour, and adds that, besides his other learned

acquirements, he was an excellent poet.

His appointment to the primacy being, strange to say, unopposed by

the Crown, he began his administration by calling a Provincial Synod,

among the acts of which is that memorable one which enjoins every

parish priest to explain to his flock the fundamentals of the Faith,

laying aside all the niceties of school distinction, and which draws

out in admirable and lucid terms what may be called an abridgment

of Christian doctrine, under the heads of the Creed, the Ten

Commandments, the Two Evangelical Precepts, the Seven Works of Mercy,

the Seven Deadly Sins, and those that proceed from them, the Seven

Contrary Virtues, and the Seven Sacraments.[256] Moreover, we find

him appointing parochial schoolmasters in holy Orders for teaching

the children of the poor.

Peckham not only visited his whole diocese, but travelled over

the greater part of England, informing himself of the exact state

of cathedrals, monasteries, clergy, and people, and making war

on pluralism, and every other abuse which be discovered. He also

showed himself very active in reforming the disorders that had

crept into the universities, and at his visitation, held at Oxford

in 1283, condemned a considerable number of false propositions,

as well in theology, as in grammar, philosophy, and logic. His

fearless independence of character did not shrink from presenting

a remonstrance against the tyranny of Edward I., and administering

a rebuke to the great Earl of Warren for allowing his deer and

cattle to trample down a poor man’s field of corn. The immense list

of his works, as given by Pitseus, shows that he was not of the

number of those who neglected the arts. Besides his “Concordance of

the Scriptures,” and his theological and scholastic works, there

are poems, treatises on geometry, optics, and astronomy, others on

mystical divinity, others on the pastoral office intended for the use

of the parochial clergy, and some apparently drawn up to facilitate

the instruction of the poor. Yet this illustrious man, undoubtedly

one of the greatest of our English primates, was never in private

life anything but the simple Friar Minor. “He was stately in gesture,

gait, and outward show,” says Harpsfield, “yet of an exceeding meek,

facile, and liberal temper.” At his own table sumptuously furnished

for his guests, he ate only the coarsest viands, always travelled

on foot, and chose to perform the humblest offices in his cathedral

church, such as lighting the waxen tapers on the altar. It is a

significant fact, that he always retained a prebend attached to the

see of Lyons, in case he might at any time be forced to fly from

England; and Godwin tells us, that after his time this benefice

continued annexed to the see of Canterbury, in order to provide

against the case of the more than probable exile of the Primates.

Our last specimen of an Oxford Don of the thirteenth century shall

be taken from a different class; no Worcestershire yeoman, or

Sussex peasant boy, but the son of the greatest and noblest of the

English barons, Cantilupe, Earl of Pembroke, marshal and protector

of the realm during the stormy minority of Henry III. Thomas

Cantilupe, his eldest son, was educated first at court, and then

at the universities of Oxford, Paris, and Orleans; and whether at

court or in the schools, he displayed the same piety and delicacy

of conscience. Deeply learned both in canon and civil law, he was

raised by king Henry to the post of Lord Chancellor, and was also

elected Chancellor of the University of Oxford. But on the accession

of Edward I. he obtained leave to resign his dignities, and retired

to Oxford, where he trusted he might spend the rest of his life in

the practice of study and devotion. He took his degree of Doctor of

Divinity in the church of the Dominicans, on which occasion his old

master and spiritual director, Robert Kilwarby, then Archbishop of

Canterbury, was present, and scrupled not publicly to declare his

belief that he had never forfeited his baptismal innocence. He was

then fifty-four years of age. “So help me God,” were the archbishop’s

words, “I believe him to be this day as pure from all actual sin as

on the day of his birth. And if any man ask, let him know that from

his childhood I have heard his confessions, and read his life and

conscience as clearly as a man may read an open book.”[257]

After attending the second Council of Lyons, he was elected Bishop

of Hereford, and in the government of his diocese found himself,

singularly enough, opposed to his saintly metropolitan, John of

Peckham, who, as he conceived, overstrained his authority as

Primate. Yet though he staunchly defended the rights of his Church,

and was constantly engaged in vexatious disputes with some of the

great barons, no one ever dreamt of charging him with a haughty or

ambitious spirit. The speciality of his sanctity was charity, and it

was said of him that he was never seen angry, save when a whisper of

detraction met his ear.

Such were some of the Oxford doctors and chancellors of this period,

and such the prelates chosen from their ranks. Not indeed that we

would be thought desirous of representing our ancient universities

as exclusively schools of saints; the slightest acquaintance with

the academic annals suffices to show that they were disgraced by

many scandals, and were too often the scenes of lawless outrages

and contentions, which, in our days of higher civilisation, must

naturally excite both wonder and disgust. Moreover, the halls of

Oxford were haunted by a spirit very different from that which

pervaded the cloisters of Jarrow. The world had entered there, with

all its false maxims, and scholars were not ashamed to squabble for

benefices, and often, on the motive of self-interest, to take part

with the Crown against the Church. Still, when all has been said

that impartial candour demands, we cannot doubt that many precious

traditions must have been preserved in the university schools,

and that they moulded many a poor scholar in the old saintly and

beautiful type. Moreover, we are approaching the time when the most

flagrant evils of the universities were about to receive a partial

remedy by the establishment of the collegiate system, which soon

became tacitly accepted as _the_ educational system of England.

It aimed, and to a great degree successfully, at combining the

discipline of the old monastic schools with the larger intellectual

advantages of the universities. The reputed priority is ordinarily

assigned to University College, which, on the ground of its supposed

foundation by Alfred, claims to be the first in point of antiquity

of the Oxford foundations. But its real existence as a college

dates only from the time of William, Archdeacon of Durham, by whose

will a sum of money was assigned for the maintenance of a body of

masters, who, in 1280, were required to live together in one house,

and receive a body of statutes. But Merton College had already

received its royal charter in 1264, and one year previously to that

date, John Baliol, father to the unfortunate Scottish King, had

taken some steps towards the foundation of the college which bears

his name. His intentions were carried into effect by his widow,

the Lady Devorgilla, who, at the instigation of her Franciscan

confessor, Richard Stickbury, founded the college in honour of the

Holy Trinity, Our Lady, and St. Catherine the Martyr. It would be

pleasant to present to the reader the heiress of the ancient princes

of Galloway, as she appears in semi-monastic costume, in her Oxford

portrait, or to reproduce those exquisitely engrossed statutes, which

provide that the students of Baliol shall be present at the divine

offices on Sundays and holidays, and shall on other days frequent

the schools; that they shall always speak Latin in common, and if

they neglect to do so, shall be served last at table; that a sophism

shall be disputed among them once a week, and that they be allowed

a penny a day for their sustenance, and two pence on Sundays! But

as our object is only to notice those collegiate foundations which

in a marked way influenced the system of education, we shall pass

on to Merton, avowedly the first English college incorporated by

charter, and the model on which most of the subsequent foundations,

both of Oxford and Cambridge were raised. Its founder, Walter de

Merton, Bishop of Rochester and Chancellor of the realm, may be,

in fact regarded as the originator of the collegiate system, and

is designated in his monumental inscription _unius exemplo, omnium

quotquot extant collegiorum Fundator, maximorumque Europæ totius

ingeniorum felicissimus parens_. The immense evils of the university

system, which was practically no system at all, early attracted his

attention, and determined him on making the experiment of gathering a

certain number of scholars from the halls and hostels where they now

congregated subject to a merely nominal discipline, and placing them

under the control of masters and tutors in a spacious building under

semi-monastic rules. What was designed with so much sagacity was

executed with corresponding magnificence, and the _Domus Scholarium

de Merton_ became the curiosity of its age. Architectural splendour

was not at first considered any necessary part of a collegiate

foundation, but the various tenements purchased by Bishop Merton

were reduced to a regular quadrangular form, and a college chapel

was included in the original design, two chaplains being appointed

for “the ministration of Divine service.” In 1265, the parish church

of St. John Baptist was made over to the founder by the monks of

Reading, and granted to the perpetual use of the scholars. Their

studies appear to have differed in no way from those of the other

Oxonians, but Wood considers the appointment of a grammar-master to

indicate that Bishop Merton designed to put some check on the decay

of arts.

Among the early benefactresses to this college was one who might

almost be called its co-foundress, Ella Longspée, Countess of

Warwick, and daughter to that other Ella, Countess of Salisbury,

who had obtained the conversion of her ferocious husband, Longspée,

through the instrumentality of St. Edmund.[258] The friendship of

the elder Ella with the saintly archbishop appears to have inspired

both her daughters with a singular goodwill towards Oxford, and Ella

in particular made large donations of lands and endowments to the

Merton scholars. Such was the success of the new foundation that the

king himself recommended it to Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely, as

a model for his proposed Cambridge College of Peterhouse; and the

example once set, was soon taken up by others. The Benedictines had

possessed houses of studies in Oxford from a very early period, but

the proposal was now made to found a regular college, intended, in

the first instance, exclusively for students from Gloucester Abbey,

but the benefits of which were afterwards extended to those of St.

Alban’s, Glastonbury, Tavistock, Chertsey, Coventry, Evesham, St.

Edmundsbury, Winchcombe, and Malmsbury, all of which contributed to

the expense of rearing the necessary buildings. The real founder of

Gloucester College, however, was not an abbot, but a baron, John

Giffard, Lord of Brimesfield, and husband of Maud Longspée, whose

persuasions doubtless had great share in promoting his munificence.

In 1291, a general chapter was held at Abingdon of the monks of the

province of Canterbury, and a tax imposed on all the Benedictine

houses of the province, to raise the necessary funds.

The result was the erection of a grand and commodious pile of

buildings, some of which remain to this day, and form a part of the

modern Worcester College. The apartments occupied by the students

of the different religious houses were separate one from another,

and distinguished by their arms or rebusses. Thus, we see the

cross-keys for St. Peter’s of Gloucester, a comb and a ton, with

the letter W, for Winchcombe, and so of the rest. Each abbey sent

a certain number of students at a time, who were governed by a

prior, elected by themselves, called the “Prior Studentium,” and who

had a rule adapted to suit their peculiar requirements. They were

enjoined not to mix familiarly with the secular students, to have

divinity disputations once a week, and to practise preaching, both

in Latin and English. A chair of theology was afterwards founded

for their special instruction. In short, Gloucester College was a

true religious seminary, and continued to enjoy a high character for

learning down to the time of the general suppression of religious

houses. Wood gives many interesting particulars of the college,

and the good scholars whom it produced. Whethamstede, abbot of St.

Alban’s in the reign of Henry VI., of whom we shall have hereafter

to speak more at length, was at one time the “Prior Studentium,”

and afterwards bestowed such large benefactions on the house as to

be called its second founder. He put in the five painted windows

of the chapel, built a vestiary and a library, and presented many

books. Moreover, he adorned the images of the Crucifix and the Saints

with “deprecatory rhymes.” His dear and learned friend, Humphrey

of Gloucester, likewise enriched the library with several valuable

manuscripts. The first Benedictine of this college who took his

doctor’s degree was William Brok, who graduated in divinity in 1298.

The inception of a university doctor was in those days a stately

ceremony, and on this occasion the Benedictines thought it well to

celebrate the auspicious event with more than ordinary splendour. Six

abbots of the order, therefore, attended the customary procession

on horseback, besides “monks, priors, obedientiaries, and claustral

clerks, a hundred noblemen and esquires,” and most of the Benedictine

bishops of the province of Canterbury. The Durham monks were not

long before they provided themselves with a similar seminary, and

in 1286 obtained lands for the erection of their college from Dame

Mabel Wafte, abbess of Godstow. The endowments of this establishment

were intended half for lay and half for religious students. They also

had their “Prior Studentium,” and the good repute of their learning

induced Richard of Bury, the celebrated Bishop of Durham, to leave

them his magnificent library of books. The site of this foundation is

now occupied by the more modern Trinity College.

These religious establishments, it is not to be doubted, had a

considerable share in promoting the extension of the collegiate

system now fairly introduced into Oxford. The Merton scholars soon

attracted notice; of whom the most famous was Duns Scotus, who

after leaving the university entered among the Franciscan friars

of Newcastle, and returning to Oxford to study a second time under

the doctors of his own order, won perhaps the highest renown which

attaches to the name of any English divine since the days of

Bede.[259] The reign of Edward II. witnessed the foundation of two

more colleges. Oriel claims as its founder that unfortunate monarch

himself, who, whatever may have been his faults, was an undoubted

patron of letters. It is probable, however, that he had little more

than a nominal share in the foundation, which was the real work of

his almoner, Adam de Brom. Exeter owes its name to its founder,

Walter Stapleton, Bishop of Exeter, and both these were, more or

less, in their statutes and general spirit, copies of Merton. The

effects of the changes thus introduced into the university system are

differently estimated by different writers. By many the diminution

in the number of students which became apparent in the fourteenth

century, is attributed to the increase of colleges. These of course

could only accommodate a limited number, whereas any amount of

students might swarm in the hostels and lodging-houses which were

formerly their only resort. However, if the old adage, that quality

is to be preferred to quantity, is to be held of any force, this can

hardly be said to be a disadvantage. Six thousand students living

under regular discipline were perhaps better than thirty thousand,

containing a large proportion of “varlets;” and although in our

days the collegiate system may be regarded as having a tendency to

aristocratical exclusiveness, this was far from being its intention

or result in the early period of its institution. The endowments

were for poor scholars, and by poor scholars they were mostly

enjoyed. It appears probable also that the successive pestilences

which desolated Oxford in the reign of Edward III., and the troubles

occasioned by Wickliffe and his followers, had a great deal to do

with the decrease of the scholars. Besides which, it must be borne

in mind that the rage for scholastic learning which characterised

the thirteenth century, gave place in England during the fourteenth

to a rage for French conquests. So completely did the brilliant

successes achieved by the two Edwards root this passion in the

English mind, that the cultivation of letters was little regarded,

and perhaps after Wickliffe’s time it was looked on by some with a

not unnatural suspicion. Many of the colleges had become tainted with

Lollardism, and remained under a cloud; the tide of popular favour

had set in for the showy chivalry of the day, and clerks and scholars

went somewhat out of fashion. The close tie which had hitherto knit

together the schools of Oxford and Paris was henceforth totally

sundered, nor is it easy to estimate the injury thus accruing to

the English university, which in the thirteenth century enjoyed the

freest intercommunion with the French and Italian academies. The

narrow insular spirit which thus sprang up, and which was nourished

by the anti-Roman tendencies of English legislation, was fatal to

intellectual progress. Hence the learned renown of our universities

certainly declined, but so far was this from being the result of

the collegiate system that it is evident the noble foundations

of Wykeham, Waynflete, Fleming, Chicheley, and Henry VI., were

undertaken with the view of supplying a remedy to the existing evils,

and as a means of effecting a revival of learning among the English

clergy.

The history of these foundations belongs however to a later date.

For the present we must leave our semibarbarous island (for so,

under favour, must baronial England doubtless have been regarded

by dwellers south of the Alps), and see what kind of scholarship

was flourishing in the more classic atmosphere of Italy at the very

time when the first stones were being laid of our ancient Oxford

cloisters.

_CHAPTER XVII._

DANTE AND PETRARCH.

A.D. 1300 TO 1400.

In what has hitherto been said of the universities, which in the

thirteenth century had fairly established themselves as the great

organs of education, it has not been possible to convey any just or

satisfactory notion of the exact nature of those studies fostered

within their schools. The reader will perhaps have gathered a general

idea that a great change had been gradually effected since the days

of St. Anselm; that humane letters were becoming neglected, and

that scholastic philosophy and canon law had even threatened at

one time to discourage the cultivation of Scriptural and patristic

studies; that theology, on the other hand, had become digested into a

scientific system by the great scholastic doctors, who had reinstated

the study of the Scriptures and the Biblical tongues, but who had not

done much to restore polite letters; and finally, that the physical

sciences had made a certain sensible advance. This general statement

has in it a fair amount of truth; nevertheless, general statements

are such unsatisfactory things, that the desire rises to one’s

mind that some scholar of our old universities could be put on his

examination before a Royal Commission, and tell us with his own lips

what he did, and what he did not, learn from his mediæval teachers.

The wish is not so extravagant as it might appear. Fortunately for

our purpose, one scholar existed who gathered in himself the learning

of Padua, Bologna, Paris, and Oxford Universities, for he studied

successively at them all, and has left the result in writings, which

for six centuries have been submitted to close critical examination,

and are still in our hands. A glance through their pages promises,

therefore, to give us some information on the point in question.

It was probably some time in the reign of Edward I., that among the

30,000 students who crowded the inns and hostels of old Oxford,

there appeared an Italian of middle age, of whose previous career at

other universities we know no more, than that at Padua and Bologna

he had addicted himself to moral and natural philosophy; that at

Paris he was held to be a first-rate theologian; and that returning

thither a second time, after political troubles had driven him into

exile, he had held a disputation against fourteen opponents, had

taken his bachelor’s degree, and was only prevented by an empty

purse from graduating as master; and finally, that both at Paris

and elsewhere he had evinced a marked predilection for the mystical

interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. These are all the traces that

he has left behind him in the schools, and yet how well we know him!

The countenances of Shakespeare or Byron, or Sir Walter Scott, are

not more familiar to us than the grand and melancholy features of

Dante Alighieri, whom we claim as an Oxford student, on the authority

of John de Serraville, Bishop of Fermo, a writer who, as he lived

only a century later than the poet, may be supposed to have derived

his information from contemporary sources.[260] Plain in dress,

temperate in his habits, polished and dignified in his manners, which

were, however, dashed with more than a touch of sarcasm,--a man of

few words, given to long fits of abstraction, his form a little

stooping, his sight early impaired by excessive application to his

books; something of an artist, and such a lover of music that, as

he tells us, it had power to soothe him even in the worst of times,

an exquisite caligrapher, as they attest who have seen his writing,

and describe it as _magra e lunga, e molto corretta_, a close and

curious observer of nature, and above all, of the phenomena of the

starry heavens, a perfect scholar, yet, withal, a soldier too, well

skilled in all the martial exercises that became his rank--such was

he whom we have ventured to select as the representative man of the

Catholic universities as they existed before that new era of taste

and literature which was ushered in by his countryman Petrarch.

Dante is acknowledged by all critics to have been the most learned

of the poets, not excepting Milton, the character of whose genius so

closely resembles his own. His learning was characteristic of his

age: the extraordinary prominence given in his poem to the scholastic

theology and philosophy tells us at once in what century it was

composed. Aristotle, Christianised and interpreted by St. Thomas,

is the master whom he follows;[261] yet perhaps he is not quite so

exclusive an Aristotelian as most scholastics of his time, for it

is evident that he had studied Plato with almost equal attention,

specially the Timæus of that philosopher, to which he frequently

refers. He, however, invariably gives the preference to Aristotle,

whom he calls, “the master among the wise;” whereas Petrarch assigns

the first place to Plato. But “Dante the Theologian,” as he is

called in his epitaph, had other masters besides the Greeks. He

who had won his bachelor’s degree in fair fight against fourteen

opponents, a reminiscence to which he refers in his poem, had to be

furnished with arms from the scholastic arsenal. Accordingly, when

he describes himself as undergoing the questioning of the Apostles

on the subject of Faith, Hope, and Charity, he gives his answers in

the language of the Master of the Sentences, as well as of St. Denys

the Areopagite, and St. Augustine. His diction is thickly sown with

the phraseology of the schools, with “quiddities,” “syllogisms,”

“propositions,” “demonstrations,” and the like; yet when he comes to

make his profession of faith, how sublimely does he rise above these

technicalities, and declare that his belief rests neither on physical

nor metaphysical proof, but on the testimony of the Holy Ghost, on

Moses, the Prophets, the Psalms, and the Gospels.[262] Elsewhere he

appeals to the teaching of St. Jerome, St. Isidore, St. Gregory, St.

Bernard, and most of the other Latin Fathers, and names with loving

reverence not a few of those monastics and schoolmen with whom we

have made acquaintance in the foregoing pages, such as Bede and

Rabanus, St. Peter Damian, Peter Comestor, Hugh and Richard of St.

Victor, and Albert the Great. But above all these appear St. Thomas

and St. Buonaventura, the former of whom is, beyond all doubt, the

guide of Dante in philosophy and theology, and whom he introduces in

the thirteenth canto of the Paradiso, speaking in his own person, and

using the scientific phraseology of the schools.

The political opinions set forth by Dante are no less characteristic

of the mediæval university student than his theological views. Born

of a family attached to a party of the Guelphs, he himself kept aloof

for some time from either faction, and, as Chief Prior of Florence,

aimed at holding an even balance between them. This line of conduct

gave little satisfaction to the Neri, as the Florentine Guelphs were

called; and they accused him, as it would seem not without cause,

of concealing, under the show of impartiality, a secret leaning

towards the Ghibellines. On occasion of a popular insurrection, the

Priors agreed to banish the leaders of both parties; on this the

Guelphs leagued to call in the assistance of Charles of Valois,

Captain-General to Pope Boniface VIII. This appeal to the protection

of the hated lilies of France moved Dante to an act of severity

which proved his own ruin. The banished chiefs of the Bianchi were

recalled, while those of the Neri remained in exile. Driven to

extremity, the Guelphs despatched an envoy to Rome, entreating the

Pope to put the pacification of Florence into the hands of Charles

of Valois. Dante hastened to Rome to oppose this demand, but in his

absence another popular _émeute_ broke out, the Neri triumphed,

their exiles were recalled, and in their turn decreed banishment and

loss of goods against their enemies. The original document is still

preserved, in which, to the sentence of confiscation is added that of

_burning alive_, decreed against Dante and fourteen other citizens,

should they ever again set foot in Florence.[263]

It must be admitted that if the writings of Dante exhibit after this

time all the bitterness of “Ghibelline bile,” there was some excuse

to be made for him. Almost against his own will he had been thrown

from his position of theoretic impartiality into the arms of the

Ghibelline faction. Not that he ever entirely embraced their cause;

he had good sense enough to admit that truth is seldom to be found

in the ranks of party, and owned in after years that it was hard to

say whether Guelph or Ghibelline were most to be blamed for the evils

which their animosities had brought upon Italy.[264] He felt for the

sufferings of his country scarcely less than for his own; and the

only remedy which he saw for the miseries resulting from the rage

of factions was the establishment of a firm monarchical government,

such as was presented in the theory of the Holy Roman Empire. This

fancy he dwelt on and idealised till he came to believe that Empire a

thing of divine institution, applying to it the words of the Apostle,

“There is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.” The extravagances

into which he suffered himself to be led on this subject are not

entirely to be referred to the influence of his university studies,

yet it is certain that the principles current in all the great

academies offered nothing to correct the absolutism of his political

creed. Bologna had received her “Habita” from the Emperor Frederic

II., in reward for the good services which her lawyers had rendered

him in supporting his claims against the Italian Communi. Paris was

on the very eve of supporting the sacrilegious enormities of Philip

le Bel. At Oxford, the greatest law school north of the Alps, the

imperial jurisprudence formed the favourite study; and though, with

that happy _inconsequence_ which is the national characteristic, the

English would none of it for practical purposes, yet they learnt

enough from their law studies to induce them to support a course of

legislation, the ultimate result of which was the establishment of a

royal supremacy.

In all these academies the supremacy of the temporal power was, in

one form or other, the favourite political dogma, and the tendency

of their teaching was, perhaps, more directly anti-Papal than

that of the Italian poet, for Dante’s Ghibellinism, bitter and

resentful as it was, never clouded the instincts of his faith. He

regarded Boniface VIII. as his personal enemy, and attributed to

his intervention the revolution that had driven him into exile.

With the terrible anger of his silent nature which suppressed every

outward demonstration of passion, he pursued and made war upon him

with his pen; yet the hatred he felt for the man never blinded him

as to the character of his office. When he comes to speak of the

outrages committed against him at the instigation of Philip le Bel,

he forgets that it is his enemy who is being thus dealt with, and

gives expression to the deep religious sense of a child of Holy

Church in lines for ever memorable. He beholds Christ once more

mocked and derided in the person of His Vicar, he sees the gall and

vinegar renewed, execrates the cruelty of the new Pilate and the new

thieves, and weeps over the sufferings of the Church, whose woes are

now, he says, the theme of every prayer.[265] Indeed, in all save

his politics, Dante reflects the spirit of the ages of faith. The

grim grotesqueness which mingles with his most terrible pictures

breathes the identical character to be found in the illuminations

and sculptures of the same period, evincing an intense sense of

certain grave realities which the mediæval artists never shrank

from picturing to the mind and eye. The liturgical spirit, too, is

there, reminding us almost at every page that we are reading the

words of one who lived when the office of the Church was still the

Prayer Book of the faithful, and when university students, like St.

Edmund, or Jordan of Saxony, were accustomed to rise at midnight

and attend the singing of Matins in their parish church.[266] Some

of the most exquisite passages of his poem owe their beauty to the

skill with which he has woven into his verse passages and phrases

from the Psalms, the Breviary Hymns, and other devotions of the

Church. Yet Dante was very far from being exclusively a theologian

and a scholastic. His writings offer sufficient evidence that the

scholars of the thirteenth century were familiar with other Latin

than that of Duns Scotus. He had closely studied all the Latin poets,

and sometimes translates or paraphrases entire lines from Virgil. His

mind was so steeped in the history and mythology of the ancients,

that many of his pages, if translated, might be taken for quotations

from Milton; for like him he possessed the art of stringing together

a series of classic names and allusions, the melody of which makes

us willing to pardon their pedantry. One example may suffice, which

shall be given in its English dress, the better to convey the

resemblance which it bears to kindred Miltonic passages. It is the

poet Virgil who is speaking to Statius, and describing the state of

the good heathen in limbo:--

There oft times,

We of that mount hold converse, on whose top

For aye our nurses live. We have the bard

Of Pella, and the Teian; Agatho,

Simonides, and many a Grecian else

Ingarlanded with laurel. Of thy train

Antigone is there, and Deïphile,

Argia, and, as sorrowful as erst,

Ismene, and who showed Langia’s wave;

Deidamia with her sisters there,

And blind Tiresias’ daughter, and the bride,

Sea-born of Peleus.[267]

Every one of the names here named are Greek, and it is clear that

Dante was well acquainted with the stories of the Greek poets; but

was he also acquainted with their language? This is a question

fiercely debated by his commentators, and considered to be still

an unresolved problem. In his prose work, the “Convito,” he has

criticised an erroneous translation from Aristotle, and in one of

the finest passages of the “Purgatorio” introduces a Greek word,

which alone has furnished matter for a voluminous controversy.[268]

These and other passages have led many to give him credit for being

possessed of Greek scholarship. The point is not decided, but the

probability appears to be that his knowledge of the language was at

any rate not very profound. In the same way he may be said to have

been not totally unacquainted with Hebrew and Arabic, for several

explanations of Hebrew words occur in his works, and the mysterious

words which he places with so tremendous and dramatic an effect in

the mouth of Nimrod,[269] are declared by one critic to be Arabic,

and by another to be Syriac; but are more probably, as Bianchi

observes, a jumble of sounds chosen from the Oriental dialects,

and intended to convey a notion of the confusion of tongues, and

to startle the ear with their uncouth cabalistic sound. Without

claiming for our poet the merit of Hebrew and Oriental learning, we

may at least gather from such passages that he had studied in schools

where these tongues were not entirely unknown, where the decree of

Clement V. was probably carried out, and professors were to be found

who could furnish him with enough of Eastern erudition to serve

his purpose. On other points his acquirements were, however, far

less superficial. The trivium and quadrivium in all their branches

are easy enough to be traced through his writings. He is known to

have been a proficient in music. He refers to the quadrature of the

circle and other problems of geometry, but astronomy was evidently

his science of predilection, and occupies a very considerable place

in his poem. He wrote at a time when the Pythagorean system was the

only accepted theory, and his scientific allusions can of course

only be explained according to its supposed laws. But he did not

draw all his ideas from the books of the ancients. In his “Convito,”

after giving the various explanations of the Milky-way furnished by

Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, and others, some of them sufficiently absurd,

he decides in favour of the opinion that there is a multitude of

fixed stars in that part of the heavens, so small (or, as we should

now say, so distant), that we cannot separately distinguish them,

but which cause the appearance of whiteness. The other views, he

observes, seem devoid of reason. The astronomer, Ideler, was the

first to point out that Dante’s description in the opening canto of

the “Purgatorio” of the four stars,[270] which he makes symbolic of

the four cardinal virtues, betrays a knowledge of the constellation

of the Southern Cross, of which he may have heard from the Genoese

and Pisan mariners who had visited Cape Comorin, and which he may

even have seen depicted on that curious globe constructed by the

Arabs in 1225, where it was distinctly marked. He had attentively

studied geography, and notices many such points as find a place in

our manuals of the globes, such as the intersection of the great

circles, as they are exhibited on the armillary sphere; and reminds

us that within the torrid zone at certain seasons no shadows fall,

on account of the sun being then directly overhead.[271] Tiraboschi

gives him credit for anticipating a supposed discovery of Galileo’s,

that wine is nothing but the heat of the sun mingled with the juice

of the grape; and Maffei comments on the “marvellous felicity” with

which he expresses his scientific ideas. The theory of the attraction

of gravitation[272] is stated as distinctly in his pages as in those

of Vincent de Beauvais; and his allusions to the nature of plants and

the habits of animals, and particularly of birds, seem to evince,

not merely a familiarity with the works of Albert the Great, but

the observant eye of a real naturalist.[273] His artistic feeling

appears in a thousand passages, which were afterwards given a visible

shape by Orcagna, and so many other painters of the early Florentine

school; as well as in some wonderful landscape-painting in words,

which, as Humboldt says, “manifest profound sensibility to the aspect

of external nature.” Such is his description, imitated by so many

later Italian poets, of the birds beginning their morning songs in

the pine forest of Chiassi, of the dawning light trembling on the

distant sea, of the goatherd watching his flocks among the hills,

and of the flowery meadow illuminated by a sudden ray of sunlight

darting through the broken clouds.[274] He never directly alludes

to those grand creations of Christian art, the cathedrals, most of

which were coeval in their rise with the European universities.

Yet he continually reminds us that he lived when religious artists

were carving the sacred sculptures on their walls, or filling

their windows with a mystic splendour, and that he had felt the

power of those vaulted aisles, which he had, perhaps, visited as a

pilgrim.[275]

Enough has been said to indicate the nature of Dante’s learning,

which was undoubtedly the learning of his time. It differed from

that of his contemporaries in degree, but not in kind. When Mr.

Berington gives expression to his delight at having at last found

a man who could admire Virgil, he shows not only a very imperfect

appreciation of the acquirements of mediæval scholars, but even of

the poet whom he condescends to praise. Dante’s aim was avowedly to

write a _popular_ poem; he desired to be read, not merely by the

learned, but by the mass of his countrymen; and it was with this

object that he sacrificed his first intention of writing in Latin

verse, and chose the rude Italian vernacular, not without a certain

regret, but with the design of being more widely intelligible, for,

to use his own words, “we must not give meat to sucklings.” We may

safely dare to affirm that had not the Latin classics been freely

admitted into the Christian schools of the thirteenth century, Dante

would never have ventured to have chosen Virgil as his representative

of Moral Philosophy. And if the world to which he addressed himself

had not known something--perhaps a good deal--of classical history

and poetry, his poem could not have achieved the popularity at which

he successfully aimed. But it is probable that on this point things

were not greatly changed from what they had been in the days of his

ancestor Cacciaguida, when, as he tells us, the ladies of Florence,

as they sat with their maidens,

Drawing off

The tresses from the distaff, lectured them

Old tales of Troy, and Fesole, and Rome.[276]

Certain it is that the erudition of the “Divina Commedia” proved

no obstacle to its popularity. There is nothing in the history

of literature that can be at all compared with the instantaneous

conquest which it achieved over the Italian public. Within thirty

years of the poet’s death an Archbishop of Milan appointed a

carefully-chosen commission of learned men to write a commentary on

the poem; Florence, which had cast him out of her walls when living,

now founded a public lecture to explain his works; and in 1373,

called on Bocaccio to deliver this lecture in the Church of St.

Stefano, at the annual salary of a hundred florins.

We are not, however, concerned with the literary history of Dante,

who is only here spoken of as the representative scholar of his

times. His profound learning has never been disputed; yet it is

worthy of remark that if it be good criticism to measure a man’s

scholarship solely by the style of his Latin compositions, we should

have to number the author of the “Divina Commedia” among the other

writers whose “incredible ignorance” disgraced their age. His prose

treatises, _De Monarchia_ and _De Vulgari Eloquio_, in substance

learned and full of acute observation, are declared to be rude and

unclassical in style; a fact which suggests doubts how far this

standard of criticism is a just one. It was fortunate indeed that he

abandoned his first purpose of writing his poem in the Latin tongue,

and chose rather that vernacular idiom which he raised to the dignity

of a language. How he dealt with it is the real marvel; he built up

his verse, much as the Athenians constructed their walls in the days

of Themistocles, laying hold of any material that came in his way,

quarrying words and phrases out of the Latin at his pleasure, filling

up chinks and vacancies with verbs and adjectives which, whatever

may have been their plebeian origin, became ennobled by his use; and

creating many a good strong word of mighty meaning which it would

have been well if his countrymen could have persuaded themselves to

retain. After his time the formation of the Italian language rapidly

developed, and the majestic mass which had been hewn into shape by

Dante, received a finer and softer polish from Bocaccio and Petrarch.

Of the latter poet we now have to speak; for any sketch of mediæval

scholarship would be imperfect without some notice of him who is

commonly regarded as the restorer of polite letters. The father

of Petrarch had been banished from Florence at the same time with

Dante; and when a child, he himself had once beheld the great poet,

whose fame he was in some respects destined to surpass. When he was

nine years old his parents removed to Avignon in France, where the

establishment of the papal court drew many Italians. There for four

years he learnt as much grammar, logic, and rhetoric as the schools

of Avignon and Carpentras could teach, and that does not appear to

have been much. However, even at this age his classic tastes betrayed

themselves. Whilst his comrades were still reading Æsop’s fables

and the verses of Prosper, he studied the works of Cicero, which

delighted his ear long before he understood their sense. Then came

another four years at Montpelier, after which he went to Bologna,

and there studied civil law for three years more. But as soon as he

found himself removed from his father’s watchful eye the study of

jurisprudence somewhat languished. “It was thus,” he says, “that I

spent, or rather wasted, seven years; and if I must say the truth,

disgusted with my legal studies, I spent my time mostly in reading

Cicero, Virgil, and the other poets. My father learnt this, and one

day he unexpectedly appeared before me. Guessing at once the object

of his coming, I hastily hid the great Latins, but he drew them from

their hiding-place, and threw them into the fire, as if they had been

books of heresy. At this sight I cried out as though I myself had

been burnt. My father, seeing my affliction, drew out two volumes

half-scorched with the flames, and holding one in his left and the

other in his right hand, he said, “Here, this is Virgil, take it, and

it will comfort your soul a little--and here is Cicero, you may have

him too, for he will teach you how to plead.” Somewhat consoled by

this, I ceased my lamentations.”

But a lawyer Petrarch was determined never to become. In 1327,

having lost both his parents, he returned to Avignon, put on the

ecclesiastical dress, and received the tonsure; but he had no

more serious intention of following the clerical than the legal

profession. He cared only for a life of literary ease, and the

“graceful indolence” which has been declared to form one of the

charms of his verses, was the predominant feature in his character.

It was at this time that he formed that attachment to Laura de Sade

which inspired the 400 sonnets, and other “Rime,” which have made the

celebrity of their author. At once to soothe his grief and to satisfy

his curiosity, he undertook a voyage through France and Germany. He

visited Paris, and describes its University as “a basket filled with

the rarest fruits of every land.” The French, he says, are “gay of

humour, fond of society, and pleasant in conversation; they make war

on care by diversion, singing, laughing, eating, and drinking.”

He visited Toulouse, and was introduced to the famous academy of

the _Gaie Science_, established in 1324, of which Laura de Sade was

herself a member. Seven poets, with a chancellor at their head, held

their meetings in a palace surrounded by beautiful gardens, and

solemnly granted the degrees of bachelor or doctor to the candidates

for Parnassian honours, the prize for the best poem produced at the

floral games of the month of May being a golden violet. At last he

returned to Avignon, and, retiring to a country house in the solitude

of Vaucluse, composed, amid its woods and fountains, some of his

sweetest Italian sonnets, some Latin prose treatises, and his heroic

Latin poem of “Africa,” on which he bestowed immense labour. Great,

indeed, would have been his own surprise could he have foreseen

that posterity would have cared nothing at all for the classical

imitations which procured him his laurel crown from the hands of

the Roman Senate, and that his immortality as a poet would rest on

those careless rhymes which he calls the unpremeditated songs of his

juvenile sorrows, and which, being written in the despised vernacular

tongue, he counted as of little merit. It was as a Latin writer that

he desired to be remembered, and it was the fame of his “Africa” that

induced the Senate of Rome and the University of Paris to offer him

their honours on the same day. Petrarch’s classic predilections, and

his intense love of his native country, determined him to give the

preference to Rome; and after a three days’ examination, which was

presided over by the learned King Robert of Naples, he was crowned on

the Capitol, on Easter-day, 1341, and hung up his laurel wreath in

the Basilica of the Apostles.

The rest of his life was chiefly spent in Italy, where the reigning

princes of the Visconti, the Este, the Scaligeri, and the Gonzaga

vied one with another in doing him honour. He devoted himself with a

sort of passionate eagerness to the enterprise of seeking out copies

of the neglected classics, and his correspondents in all parts of

Europe assisted him in his labours. Cicero was his literary idol, and

when the strangers who crowded round him asked him what presents they

could send him from their distant lands, his reply was ever, “Nothing

but the works of Cicero.” He rescued from oblivion some of the

epistles of his favourite author, and was once possessed of a copy

of his treatise _De Gloria_, now lost to the world. He had almost an

equal zeal in collecting and preserving medals and ancient monuments

of art, and severely reprehended the practice, so common among the

Romans, of destroying the venerable remains of antiquity, in order

to procure building materials at an easy rate. Though never able to

master the Greek language, he had the consolation of witnessing the

first steps which ushered in the revival of that study. In 1339,

Barlaam, a Calabrian monk who had for many years been a resident

in Greece, was despatched to Avignon on a mission to Pope Benedict

XII., from the Emperor Cantacuzenus. Petrarch took some lessons in

Greek from him, but had too little perseverance to profit much from

his master’s lessons. Barlaam is declared by Bocaccio to have been a

treasury of every kind of learning, and superior to any other scholar

of the time. He wrote on theology, astronomy, and mathematics,

and was well acquainted with the ancient Greek poetry. And so,

after all, the Greek literature was restored to Europe through the

instrumentality of a _monk_! For it was one of Barlaam’s disciples,

by name Leontius Pilate, also a Calabrian, who afterwards visited

Petrarch at Venice, and from whom Bocaccio acquired a knowledge of

Greek. The latter scholar persuaded the Florentine magistrates to

appoint Leontius Greek professor in their city, and in 1361 the first

Greek chair was erected in the West, and curious crowds flocked to

listen to lectures on the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” delivered from

the lips of one whose outward appearance was that of an uncouth

savage. He wore the philosopher’s, or rather the beggar’s, mantle,

his countenance was hideous, his beard long and uncombed, his manners

rude, and his temper gloomy. He remained at Florence three years, and

then returned to the East to search for manuscripts; but such was

his overbearing insolence that, in spite of his treasures of classic

erudition, Petrarch would have nothing to say to him when he proposed

a second visit to Italy. Leontius, however, embarked on board a

vessel with the intention of returning to Florence, but was overtaken

by a tempest, and struck dead by lightning. Petrarch was concerned

at his loss, and yet more so by the fear that his books had perished

with him. “Inquire, I beseech you,” he wrote to Bocaccio, “whether

there were not a Euripides or a Sophocles among them, or some other

of the books he promised to bring me.” He had already procured from

Nicholas Sigeros a Greek Homer, which he prized, though unable to

read it. “Your Homer,” he writes, “is dumb to me, and I am deaf to

it; nevertheless, the sight of it consoles me, and I often kiss its

cover. I beg of you send me Hesiod, send me Euripides.”