It was not only by the Italian dukes and princes that Petrarch was

cherished; the Popes--Benedict XII., Clement VI., and Urban V.--all

testified their sense of his merit, and enriched him with many

benefices, and Urban is said to have been somewhat influenced in

his determination to revisit Rome by the arguments of the poet. For

whilst Petrarch allowed his pen the most unwarrantable freedoms in

censuring the conduct of the papal court, he had nothing more at

heart than the restoration of the Popes to their ancient capital,

and on this point he shared the sentiments of Dante. Neither were

the middle and lower classes at all behind their betters in the

enthusiasm with which they regarded the great scholar. A certain

grammar-master who had grown half-blind and wholly crippled, hearing

that Petrarch was at Naples, determined to go thither to see him,

and made his son carry him there on his shoulders. By the time they

arrived the poet had departed for Rome. However, the old man declared

himself ready to journey to the Indies if he could only come up

with the object of his search, so they took the road to Rome; again

too late, they proceeded to Parma, and there, to the inexpressible

consolation of the venerable grammarian, he saw “his Petrarch,”

and causing his son to lift him up, he reverently kissed the head

that had conceived so many noble thoughts, and the hand that had

written so much good Latin.[277] In one of his familiar epistles,

Petrarch relates the story of a certain goldsmith of Bergamo who,

having exchanged the pursuits of trade for those of literature, was

possessed with such a passing great admiration of the author of the

“Rime,” that he declared he should not die content unless he were

once suffered to receive him in his house. Petrarch gave him that

satisfaction but the delight of the goldsmith was so excessive, that

his servants feared he would go mad with joy, and his guest had

some difficulty in freeing himself from his troublesome attendance.

Petrarch affected to treat these demonstrations of popular homage

with studied contempt, but whilst he talked and wrote of the charms

of solitude, it was evident that he was not a little intoxicated with

the vapours of gratified vanity. Whatever pains he took to express

his indifference to the world, he lost no opportunity of letting his

friends know that the world was not indifferent to him. “Whenever

I leave my house,” he wrote from Milan, “a thing that happens very

rarely, I bow right and left, and stop to speak to no one. I am more

esteemed here than I deserve, and far more than suits my taste for

quiet. Not only do the prince and his court love and honour me, but

the people respect me far beyond my merits, and love me without so

much as seeing me, for I rarely appear in public.” His letters are

filled with passages of this kind, which sufficiently betray that the

would-be philosopher, who had written long treatises on the Solitary

Life, and on Contempt of the World, was secretly devoured by a hungry

egotism. His notions of the joys of Solitude attained to nothing

more sublime than lying under a tree with a book in one’s hand,

and no one would have been less pleased than he, if his admirers

had taken him at his word and ceased to pester him. Yet the homage

of the world had no power to soothe the restlessness that devoured

him, and in the midst of all his outward successes, fortune failed

not to deal him many a cruel blow. The great plague of 1348, which

desolated all Europe, and which was so powerfully described by the

pen of Bocaccio, carried off Laura de Sade among its first victims,

and Petrarch recorded his sorrow on the blank leaves of his Virgil.

Other losses followed, and in the midst of these private griefs,

Petrarch, who had given his confidence to the celebrated Rienzi and

had dedicated a noble sonnet to one whom he fondly trusted would have

been the restorer of his country’s greatness, felt the fall of the

great Tribune as a personal misfortune. “Some,” he exclaimed, “can

still rejoice in riches, some in intellect, and some in health; but

for me, I see not what anything in the world can henceforth give me,

save tears.” A sad avowal for the greatest scholar of his age, but

a scholar whose character, whatever may be said of his genius, was

utterly hollow and superficial. The mere man of letters--and whatever

may have been his sincere regret for the graver irregularities of

his youth,--we must add, the unworthy ecclesiastic, ever sensible

in the midst of his literary triumphs of a want and a weariness,

is a poor exchange indeed, with all his erudition, for the race of

Christian scholars with whom we have hitherto been engaged. His last

residence was fixed at Arqua, near Padua; and there, on the 18th of

July 1374, he was found dead in his study, with his head leaning on

an open book. He had been struck by epilepsy, and so, as has been

said, passed from the quiet of his library to the quiet of the grave.

He had been the first to inaugurate a vast intellectual revolution,

and the restoration of classical studies, begun by him, was carried

on in the following century by Poggio and his contemporaries. For

Italy, at least, the age of mediæval darkness, had passed away for

ever, and with it passed away also not a few of the old Christian

traditions of thought, art, and taste. The mind of the coming

generations was to be formed on pagan models, and from this time,

as Hallam remarks, it became the main, if not the exclusive, object

of an educated man, to write Latin correctly, to understand the

allusions of the best classic authors, and to learn at least the

rudiments of Greek. That the revived taste for ancient letters did

eventually bring about a certain anti-Christian reaction in art and

literature cannot be denied; and the character of many of those who

became distinguished among the leaders of the Renaissance was such

as scarcely entitled them to be numbered among “Christian Scholars.”

Yet it would be most unfair to include under any sweeping censure

all those who originated, or took part in, the classical revival,

or to suppose that the movement was exclusively favoured by an

irreligious party. The Augustinian friars and the Camaldolese monks

of Florence were among the first encouragers of the new studies;

and one of the earliest institutions of the nature of a literary

academy, was that established in the Augustinian convent of the Holy

Spirit at Florence. This convent adjoined the house where Giannozzo

Manetti, then a mere boy, resided; and he contrived to make a door

through the partition wall, by means of which he was able to enter

the convent whenever he liked, and attend the conferences on literary

subjects held among the brethren; the subjects of which were every

day posted up in some conspicuous part of the cloister. Among the

Camaldolese the same studies were introduced even before the death

of Petrarch, and the monks of St. Mary of the Angels had among them

men like Zenobio Tantino, who corresponded with all the _literati_ of

the day in poetical epistles. So heartily did they take part in the

literary movements of their times that Ambrose Traversari, of whom

Roscoe says that he had the best pretensions of any man of his age to

the character of a polite scholar, was exclusively given up by his

superiors to learned pursuits for the space of thirty years. Some,

indeed, were to be found who dreaded the possible effects of reviving

the study of Gentile writers, and it was scruples such as these which

drew forth a graceful reply from Coluccio Salutati, the friend of

Petrarch and the learned chancellor of Florence, whose achievements

as a Latin poet won him the laurel wreath which was placed, not on

his brow, but on his coffin, and whose unblemished life secured him

a yet nobler reward in the friendship of St. Antoninus of Florence.

He justly protested against the narrowness of supposing that a man

could not be walking in the ways of God because he read the poets,

and argued that in literature, as in all besides, we may find God,

because all Truth and all Beauty is from Him, and to Him alone are

they to be referred. That the restoration of good models, those same

models which, as the historian Socrates informs us,[278] had been

studied by Christians from the very first centuries of the Church for

the sake of grace of elocution and the culture of the mind, was in

itself lawful and desirable, does not appear a point requiring proof.

Nevertheless, it is evident that the revolution effected in the

studies of Christendom by the introduction of this new element, was

one which demanded very powerful safeguards both on the side of faith

and morals; and falling, as it did, under the direction of a race

of captious and greedy professors, it resulted at last in grievous

excesses which threatened little short of an extinction of Christian

ideas altogether.

Already we begin to see the tide of learning dividing its waters

into two streams, running in contrary directions. The close of

the fourteenth century was illustrated, it is true, by a crowd of

saintly men, who endeavoured to establish schools of sacred art and

literature in the convents which they established or reformed. At

Fiesole, St. Antoninus of Florence passed through his noviciate, in

company with Beato Angelico, whilst, contemporary with them were St.

Bernardine of Sienna, and St. John Capestran, the two Franciscan

apostles, the former of whom drew half the Florentine grammar-masters

to listen to his eloquence, while the latter terrified the

fashionable ladies who thronged to his sermons into sacrificing their

perfumes, dice, and false hair, of which he had the satisfaction

of making several bonfires. An attentive study of the monuments,

as well as of the literary history of the times, will, however,

reveal significant tokens of the existence of a very different

element from that which appears in the paintings of Angelico. It is

remarkable that he formed no school, and found none to inherit his

ideas. After his time, Christian art, the faithful exponent of the

popular mind, daily lost something of the chaste severity of former

times; there was a growing disposition in favour of more florid

ornamentation in architecture, of a freer naturalism in painting, and

of a capricious effeminacy even in sacred music, which destroyed the

solemn religious character of the ancient chant. This latter abuse

was severely reprehended by Pope John XXII. in his Bull, entitled

_Docta Sanctorum_, wherein he complains of the innovations introduced

by “certain disciples of a new school, who, employing their whole

attention in marking time, endeavour, by new notes, to express airs

of their own invention to the prejudice of the ancient chants.” In

this, as in everything else, the mischief was chiefly effected by

the professors, who were gradually assuming a sort of dictatorship

in literature and the arts, and who, whether they lectured, sang,

or painted, sought as their main object, not the solid instruction

of their hearers, or the symbolism of divine truths, but merely the

display of their own talents.

The literary movement did not at first extend itself very rapidly

beyond the Alps, and in France particularly many circumstances

combined to check for a time the progress of letters. King Charles V.

had indeed a taste for the sciences, and founded a royal library at

the Louvre containing 900 volumes, and forming what his accomplished

biographer, Christine de Pisa, calls “une belle assemblée de

notables livres moult bien escripts, et richement adornés.” She

was the daughter of his Venetian astronomer, the authoress of

fifteen volumes in prose and verse, and was, as Tiraboschi affirms,

well acquainted with Greek. The king, however, found few among his

courtiers to share his learned tastes. The knights and nobles who

fought at Creçy piqued themselves on their ignorance of letters as

a sign of their gentle blood, and it is no uncommon thing to find a

formula like the following attached to public deeds of the fourteenth

century:--“Lequel a déclaré ne savoir signer, attendu sa qualité

de gentilhomme.” Eustache Deschamps, who wrote during the reigns

of John and Charles V., bitterly complains of the ignorance of the

upper classes as contrasted with those of an earlier generation.

Formerly, he says, nobles studied the liberal arts until their

twentieth year, before receiving knighthood; now they begin their

education on horseback, abandon learning to men of meaner birth, and

give themselves up to gaming and profligacy. He praises the older

days of chivalry, when knights loved truth, virtue, and loyal love,

and were not ashamed of being thought clerks, “car meilleur temps

fut le temps ancien.” Alain Chartier, another writer of the same

period, makes similar complaints. “Gentlemen live now,” he says, “as

if they were only made to eat and drink; and everywhere you hear the

ridiculous saying that it is unbecoming for a nobleman to know how

to read and write. It used not so to be in the days when men held

an ignorant king to be a crowned ass.” Nor are the accounts of the

actual state of the University of Paris much more satisfactory. The

schools were filled with teachers who introduced both philosophical

and theological errors, and the Latinity of the Parisians is said to

have been worse than that of their English neighbours. Discipline too

was beginning to flag, and in 1366 the Faculty of Arts had to publish

a decree of reformation, from which it appears that the regents had

begun to open their schools at a later hour, and to introduce the

hitherto unknown luxury of benches in place of the time-honoured

bundles of straw. With the exception of a few great names, such as

those of Gerson and Nicholas Oresme, this period is a dreary and

barren one in the literary annals of France. And the sterility of her

schools at this precise epoch is a remarkable and significant fact.

It was exactly the period when the peculiar political doctrines of

the Paris doctors appeared to have won their triumph. Adapting the

principles of the old imperial jurisprudence to the circumstances of

Christian Europe, if they did not actually identify the offices of

Emperor and Pontiff, they yet put forth doctrines which virtually

implied a species of royal supremacy. Gerson’s teaching on the same

subject, if less absolute, was not more orthodox, and tended to make

men regard the Pontifical dignity as a human thing which could be

legislated for according to principles of human policy. National

vanity came in to swell the pretensions of the Parisian doctors.

France was the centre of Christendom, and the heart of France was

the University. “Not Rome, but France,” said Nicholas Oresme, in his

oration to Urban V., “is the country beloved by God. Charlemagne

transplanted the liberal sciences from Rome to Paris, whose doctors

may be compared to the stars of the firmament and the voice of many

thunders; and on that _holy soil_, therefore, and not at Rome,

ought the Pope to reside.” This sort of eloquence was continually

reproduced in the treatises on the temporal and spiritual powers

which poured forth from the pens of the Paris legists, who were the

first to adhere to the Antipope, Clement VII., thus involving France

in the guilt of the Great Schism, and whose influence, fifty years

later, at the Schismatical Council of Basle, obtained the pretended

deposition of Eugenius IV., and the election of another Antipope,

Felix V. Nay, so thoroughly was the University of Paris in love

with schism, that when, in 1438, King Charles VIII. ordered all his

subjects to acknowledge the authority of Eugenius, she alone refused

to obey: the Antipope had been a creature of her own fabrication, and

she obstinately clung to his fortunes.

On schools which had thus deliberately cut themselves off from the

source of benediction the blessing of fertility could not rest.[279]

No dew fell on them, and it was as if the clouds had been commanded

that they should rain no rain upon them. Moreover, the frightful

wars that desolated France for 150 years were adverse to the spread

of letters. In them even Protestant historians have recognised the

marked and terrible retribution of sacrilegious crime. The long

struggle between Philip le Bel and Pope Boniface VIII. terminated,

in 1303, in what seemed the complete triumph of the Crown. Not only

had Philip firmly asserted the independence of the temporal power,

but to secure his victory he had calumniated the Vicar of Christ by

accusing him before all Europe as a sorcerer, a heretic, an infidel,

and a simonist. His two infamous satellites, William de Nogaret

and Sciarra Colonna, had entered Anagni with the banner of France

displayed, crying aloud, “Death to the Pope, and long live the King

of France!” They seized the venerable old man of eighty-six, as he

sat awaiting them, with passive courage, on his throne, with the

cross in his hand and the tiara on his brow, and treated him with

indignities which hastened, if they did not actually cause, his

death. And then the seat of the Popes was transferred from Rome to

Avignon, a calamitous event which weakened their independent power,

and eventually plunged the Church into schism. Respect for the

authority of the Sovereign Pontiff declined apace in the schools of

France, and it became fashionable for her lawyers and doctors to

discuss the question how far that authority extended, and to affix

limits to it of their own devising. All this was doubtless a great

victory, and seemed to be something very like the triumph of the

secular over the spiritual power. But it was a triumph terribly

avenged. At the time when these fancied successes crowned the daring

policy of Philip le Bel, he was in the flower of his age, surrounded

by his three sons, all inheritors of their father’s beauty, and

promising to carry on the glories of his race to distant generations.

But the King, in the forty-seventh year of his age, was killed by a

wild boar; his sons, one by one, followed each other, heirless, to

the tomb; at one and the same time the disgraceful crimes of their

three wives were published to the world; and the crown passed from

his family--and _to whom?_ To the son of Charles de Valois, the

friend and captain-general of Boniface VIII., who had refused to

take part in his brother’s crimes, and always remained loyal to the

injured Pontiff. But this was not all. A daughter of Philip le Bel

still survived, the she-wolf of France, who, after dyeing her hands

in the blood of her husband, King Edward II. of England, left to her

son, Edward III., those fatal claims which brought upon France the

outpouring of the cup of vengeance. Those golden fleurs-de-lys, which

Dante had beheld borne in triumph through the gates of Anagni, were

rolled and trampled in the dust for a century and a half by English

descendants of that very king who had fondly thought to establish

his royal power on the humiliation of the Vicar of Christ. France

was brought to the very lowest abyss of ignominy, and had to witness

the coronation in her capital of an English conqueror, who quartered

those same dishonoured lilies on his shield. What more need be said?

History teaches many lessons, but there is one which she repeats

through all ages with unvarying fidelity. It is vain for the kings of

the earth to stand up against the Lord and against His Christ. It is

idle for them in their mad presumption to dash themselves against the

Rock of Peter; for “whoso falls on that Rock shall be broken, but on

whomsoever it shall fall, it shall grind him to powder.”

_CHAPTER XVIII._

ENGLISH EDUCATION IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

A.D. 1300 TO 1400.

Although the French wars were hardly less injurious to the cause

of polite learning in England than in France, the reigns of Edward

III. and his successors are not without a peculiar interest in the

history of our popular education. One after another those magnificent

foundations were rising at the universities, the commencement of

which has been noticed in a previous chapter; and the English

collegiate system was taking root and attaining maturity. The

threefold pestilence of Lollardism, the Black Death, and a rage

for military glory, offered, it is true, some serious checks to

the progress of letters; yet in spite of every such disadvantage,

this epoch, so brilliant in the annals of chivalry, was hardly

less important in those of English literature, which in Chaucer

and Mandeville produced its first writers in prose and verse. And,

indeed, if the reign of Edward III. was not a splendid literary

era the fault is not to be charged to the deficient education of

the sovereign. His great natural powers had been cultivated with

extraordinary care under the direction of Richard Angervyle, or, as

he is commonly called, Richard of Bury. The most learned scholar

of his age, Richard was also a very great man as far as dignities

could make him so: Archdeacon of Northampton, Prebendary of Lincoln,

Salisbury, and Lichfield, Dean of Wells, and finally Bishop of

Durham; Lord High Chancellor and Treasurer of the Kingdom, and Envoy

Plenipotentiary for concluding the peace with France. Posterity,

however, has forgotten his honours, and remembers him rather as the

patron of learning, the correspondent of Petrarch, the founder of the

Angervyle library at Oxford, and the author of the _Philobiblion_,

a book in the compilation of which he was largely assisted by

the learned Dominican Robert Holkot, and in which he gives full

expression to that devouring passion for books, wherewith, says

Harpsfield, “he was mightily carried away.” His library was the first

public one ever founded in England. He bestowed it on Durham college,

which he completed and partly endowed, and made the inheritor of his

books, of which, says Wood, he had more than all the other bishops of

England put together. All his palaces were crammed with them, and the

floor of the room where he sat was so strewn with them that it was

no easy thing to approach him. He kept three collectors constantly

employed for him in France, Germany, and Italy. In his palace a

staff of writers, illuminators, and binders were constantly at work

under his own eye, and he gives ample details in his work of the

incredible pains and expense he was at to complete his collection.

It was undertaken in no light or capricious mood, but as a serious

and solemn duty. “Moved,” he says, “by Him who alone granteth and

perfecteth a good will to man, I diligently inquired what, among

all the offices of piety, would most please the Almighty, and most

profit the Church militant. Then before the eyes of our mind there

came a flock of chosen scholars in whom God, the artificer, and His

handmaid Nature, had indeed planted the roots of the best manners and

sciences, but whom penury so oppressed that they were dried up and

watered by no dew; and so they who might have grown up strong columns

of the Church were obliged to renounce their studies. Deprived of

the writings and helps of contemplation they return, for the sake of

bread, to base mechanical arts. And the result of our meditation was

pity for this humble race of men, and the resolution to help them,

not only with the means of sustenance, but also with books for the

prosecution of their studies; and to this end our intention ever

watched before the Lord. And this ecstatic love so moved us that,

renouncing all other earthly things, we applied ourselves to collect

books.”

In his bibliographical researches the still unplundered monasteries

afforded him an inexhaustible mine of literary treasures. Whenever he

visited towns where there existed religious houses, his first visit

was paid to their libraries; and he was not slow in examining their

chests and other repositories where books might lie concealed. Often

amid the greatest poverty he found the rarest stores; and the richest

in this kind of wealth, as well as the most liberal in dispensing

the use of it, were the Friars Preachers. Sometimes, however, he

had complaints to make of the carelessness and indifference of

those possessed of books, which he often found “turned out of

their interior chambers and secure depositories, and given over to

destruction for the sake of dogs, birds, and those two-legged beasts

called women.”

No catalogue of the Angervyle collection now exists, and at the

Reformation it was dispersed, and in great measure destroyed by

the Protestant plunderers, who saw a vision of Popery in every

illuminated manuscript. But there can be little doubt that it was

rich in works of high literary value. For the good bishop was one

of those who esteemed the liberal arts above the study of law, and

he expressly tells us that he provided his students with Greek and

Hebrew grammars. He gave them also very quaint and pithy directions

how to use his books. They were to take care how they opened and

shut them, not to mark them with their nails, or write alphabets on

the margin of the leaves. He criticises the bad habits of indolent

and careless youths, who lean both their elbows on their books, put

straws and flowers to keep their places, and eat fruit and cheese

over the open pages; and he exhorts those into whose hands his

treasures may fall, to wash their hands before reading, and to take a

little more care of their books than they would of an old shoe.

Several other prelates imitated the laudable example of Richard

of Bury, and endeavoured to make provision for the wants of poor

scholars by the foundation of public libraries. It is probable,

however, that most of these collections were extremely limited in

their range. The English universities were at this time almost

exclusively resorted to by lawyers and ecclesiastics, or, in other

words, by those who had chosen the calling of _clerks_. They were

not, as they afterwards became, and as they continue to be in

our day, places of liberal education for the sons of the gentry;

and hence the education given in them had a certain professional

narrowness; a defect which was further increased at this particular

period, by the presence among the students of a very large proportion

of beneficed clergymen, who having been appointed from an inferior

class to fill up the vacancies caused by the ravages of the Black

Death, were often found so ignorant as to render it necessary for

their diocesans to require their spending a certain time at the

universities, in order to acquire just so much learning as was

actually indispensable for their office. Men of this sort, of course,

spent little time on polite literature, and the influence of such a

class of students was, naturally enough, to pull down the academical

studies to a very low standard.

It will occur to every reader to inquire where the sons of the gentry

received their education, if they were not as yet in the habit of

frequenting the universities and public schools. And to furnish a

reply, we must call to mind the habits which prevailed in feudal

society, according to which every great baron or prelate presided

over a huge household, including, besides his domestic servants and

chaplains, a crowd of knights, esquires, and pages, among the last of

whom a certain number of noble youths were always admitted, in order

to receive the training suited to their rank. Chivalry, it will be

remembered, was not an accident, but an institution, and one which

was furnished with a rigorous system of graduation. A man who aspired

to the profession of arms, had to be trained for it according to

fixed rules, and to go through each successive degree with as much

precision as the bachelors and masters in the schools. Indeed, the

feudal castles may not unfitly be called schools of chivalry, and

in them alone could the future knight be instructed in the duties

of his state. As page in a baronial household, a youth was able to

acquire an education far more suited to his future position in the

world, than he could possibly have received at the universities.

There he would have been chiefly called on to attend lectures on the

Sentences, or on civil and canon law; but as page to a great lord,

spiritual or temporal, he learnt how to serve and carve at table, to

fly a hawk, manage and dress a horse, bear himself in the tilt-yard,

and handle his arms. Noble youths generally began their education

at the age of seven, when they were admitted to the service of the

ladies of the family, and were styled _Damoiseaux_. They were under

the immediate control of the lady of the house, and learnt from her

at once their Christian doctrine and the laws of courtesy.[280] I

say, the _laws_, for the teaching of this virtue was reduced to a

science, and had a literature of its own. By the fair virtue of

courtesy our forefathers understood something more than the mere

outside polish of worldly refinement. The author of the “Lytylle

childrene’s lytylle boke” informs us that according to cunning

clerks--

“Curtesye from hevyn come,

Whan Gabryelle our Ladye greete,

And Elizabeth with Mary mette.”

“Alle vertues are closide yn curteseye,” he says, “and alle vices in

vyllonie;” and he goes on to teach his pupils that they must love God

and their neighbours, speak the truth, keep their word, and neither

swear, quarrel, nor be idle. They are not to be proud or to scorn

the poor, and are to speak honestly whether it be to the lord or to

his servants. If his directions how to behave at table are somewhat

homely, it cannot be denied that they are much to the point, and Dame

Curtesye forgets not to remind her scholars that before eating they

should think of the poor, because a full stomach wots little what the

hungry ails.

As the boy grew older he came under the training of the seneschal and

the chaplain. The first, who was generally some old veteran knight,

taught him his martial duties, while the other imbued him with a

reasonable amount of book-learning in Latin and Norman-French. The

ignorance of French knights in Du Guesclin’s time must not be held to

disprove this latter statement, for it is plain that ignorance was

opposed to the older traditions of chivalry, and was commented upon

as a sign of decay by writers of the time. Knights were certainly

expected to know how to read and write, for the youthful aspirant to

chivalric honours, who, in the twelfth century, wandered from land to

land seeking goodly adventures, was always required to carry tablets,

and note down the deeds which he witnessed most worthy of remembrance

and imitation. He was required to know something of the tuneful art,

whether the plain song of the Church, or the lays of the troubadours,

and, as a matter of course, every well bred man was well instructed

in the abstruse science of heraldry. Chaucer, in describing his

squire, takes care to let us know that besides sitting his horse,

carving at table, and jousting in the lists, he could sing, write

songs, dance, “and wel pourtraie and write.” The education of his

mind, then, was not entirely neglected, and still less was that

of his manners. He was “courteous, lowlie, and serviceable;” and

elsewhere the same authority informs us, that the young squire

was often charged to be wise and equitable, godly in word, and

reasonable, to be courteous in salute, and to abstain from all words

of ribaldry, “and fro all pride to keep him well.” The last words are

worthy of notice, for this eschewing of pride is greatly insisted on

by all chivalric writers as one of the special characteristics of a

gentleman. It is a point on which Chaucer constantly loves to dwell:--

But understand to thine intent,

That this is not mine intendment,

To clepen no wight in no age,

Only gentyl for his lineage;

But whoso that is virtuous,

And in his port not outrageous:

When such one thou seest thee beforne

Tho he be not gentyl yborne,

Thou mayst wel seem in sooth,

That he is gentyl because he doth

As longeth to a gentyl man,

Of him, none other, deme I can.[281]

Exactly in the same spirit does the good king Perceforest in the old

romance instruct his knights: “Si me souvient d’une parolle que ung

hermite me dist une fois pour moy chastier. Car il me dist que si

j’avois autant de possessions comme avoit le roy Alexandre, de sens

comme le sage Salomon, et de bravoure comme le preux Hector de Troy,

seul orgueil, s’il regnoit en moy, destruieroit tout.” And in a book

of instructions on the duties of Chivalry, we find the following:

“Louange est reputée blâme en la bouche de celluy qui se loe, mais

elle exaulce celluy qui ne se attribue point de louange, mais à

Dieu. Si l’ecuyer a vaine gloire de ce qu’il a fait, il n’est pas

digne d’étre chevalier, car vaine gloire est un vice qui destruit

les merites de chevalerie.”[282] In the same Treatise the virtues

of chivalry are declared to be the three theological and the four

cardinal virtues, and a good knight will hold the opposite vices

in horror; he must keep himself from villanous thoughts, and be

unstained within and without, and must withal be modest, “the first

to strike on the battle-field, but the last to speak in the hall.”

Schools in which maxims such as these prevailed, and in which the

duties of religion were strictly enforced, must be admitted to fill

an important place in the system of Christian education. It may be

doubted, too, whether Eton or Rugby could bestow a more careful

polish than was inculcated by that minute etiquette which chivalric

usage demanded. The grace and manliness, the “pluck” and spirit

which Englishmen prize so highly, and purchase at so dear a rate,

were certainly not disregarded; but they were tempered with a

certain admixture of lowliness which has not retained an equal place

in our esteem. Despite all the extravagances of Chivalry, and the

exaggerated and injurious effect of some of its maxims, such as those

which inculcated a heathenish sensitiveness on the point of honour,

it enforced a law of self-restraint, a polite diction and etiquette,

and a government of the exterior man, in all which the education of

our own day is fatally defective. “One of the essential principles

of chivalry,” says Godwin, speaking of the education bestowed on

noble youths in these baronial households, “was, that no office was

sordid that was performed in aid of a proper object. It was the pride

of the candidate for knighthood to attend upon his superiors, and

perform for them the most menial services. The dignity of the person

assisted raised the employment, and the generous spirit in which it

was performed gave it lustre and grace. It was the office of a page

or an esquire to spread the table, to carve the meat, to wait upon

the guests, to bring them water to wash, and conduct them to their

bed-chamber. They cleaned and kept in order the arms of their lord,

and assisted him in equipping himself for the field. There is an

exquisite beauty in offices like these, not the growth of servitude,

not rendered with unwillingness and constraint, but the spontaneous

acts of reverence and affection performed by a servant of mind not

less free and noble than the honoured master whom he serves.”[283]

The truth and justice of this observation will be readily admitted,

and we stop and ask ourselves what substitute has our increased

civilisation furnished for this beautiful element in the education of

the Middle Ages? Where, except among the fags below the fifth form,

does a noble youth of our day learn anything of these “lowly and

serviceable” courtesies; and are they there performed in that spirit

of “spontaneous reverence and affection,” which renders them not

sordid, but illustrious? We must leave it to our public schoolmen to

reply.

Such an education as has been described above, taught exactly what

a secular youth of good birth now goes to the universities to

acquire--it taught him to be a gentleman. And it is probable that

in these chivalric households he received the culture suited to his

position with more safeguards to faith and morals than would have

been found in the schools of Paris or Oxford. In those days the

government of the family was the active, earnest business of the lord

and lady; noble rank was not held to dispense a baron and a baron’s

wife from seeing to very homely details with their own eyes; and

the everyday habits of their retainers were regulated by them in

a way which put into their hands a vast parental power. Doubtless

this “wondrous middle age” had plenty of barbarous violence, and

was disgraced by much gross immorality; nor do we aim at painting

it other than it was. But, whatever were its failings, it had one

merit,--the Family Life was then a reality and not a name.[284] Most

readers are familiar with the beautiful picture of the household of

Sir Thomas More, which all his biographers agree in holding up as a

model and pattern, though possibly an exceptional form of excellence.

It was exceptional, however, only in its extraordinary cultivation of

letters; in every other respect it did but present the old Catholic

type, of which we might adduce innumerable specimens both in earlier

and later times. Let us see what sort of rules were drawn up by a

French earl of the fourteenth century for the regulation of his

household, just premising that this is not an exceptional case, but

that any acquaintance with mediæval literature will convince the

reader that Elzear de Sabran ruled his family as many a good knight

of France and England besides him were doing at the same period.

Elzear had the greatest of all blessings, a good mother, whose piety

and charity had earned her the golden title of “The Good Countess.”

When he was born she took him in her arms and offered him to God,

and had him educated by his uncle in the abbey of St. Victor’s at

Marseilles. But he did not become a monk or a clerk: on the contrary,

he lived as a great baron, fought as a brave soldier, administered

justice to his feudal retainers, and was employed as ambassador from

the King of Naples to the court of France. He was at the head of

the State Council of Naples, and fought two pitched battles against

the Emperor Henry VII., so that I think we need have no mistaken

notion as to his being a mere pious recluse. Like other nobles of

the time, he received a number of youths into his house, among whom

was the eldest son of King Robert himself: Duke Charles of Calabria,

a circumstance which induces us to think that a certain instruction

in letters must have been given to the pages, for this King Robert

was the same who acted as examiner to Petrarch, and was used to say

that if he must choose between his crown and his studies, the latter

should have the preference. Surius tells us that Elzear took great

pains with the duke’s education, explaining to him the principles of

piety, justice, and clemency, making him frequent the Sacraments, and

advising him to keep flatterers at a distance. His wife, Delphina of

Glandeves, was worthy of directing a Christian household; she looked

to all things with her own eye, banished brawls and tale-bearing, and

was honoured by her servants as a mother and a saint. When first they

began to keep house at Puy-Michel, in Provençe, Elzear drew up rules

for the regulation of his family, of which the following is a short

abridgment:--

“Every one in my family shall daily hear Mass. Let no one curse,

swear, or blaspheme, under pain of chastisement. Let all persons

honour chastity, for no impure word or deed shall go unpunished in

the house of Elzear. The men and women shall confess their sins every

week, and communicate every month, or at the least at the chief

festivals, namely, Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, and on the

feasts of our Lady. No one shall be idle, but in the morning, after

prayers, let all go to their work, the men abroad, the women at home.

The life of the pious woman is not merely to pray, but to ply her

work, and take care of her household. Therefore, the ladies shall

read and pray in the mornings, and afterwards spend their time in

useful work of some kind. Every evening all my family shall assemble

for a pious conference, in which they shall hear something said for

the salvation of their souls. And let none be absent on pretence of

attending to my affairs. I have no affairs so near my heart as the

salvation of those who serve me. I will have no playing at dice or

games of hazard; there are plenty of innocent diversions, and time

passes soon enough without being thrown away: yet I do not wish my

castle to be a cloister, nor my people hermits. Therefore, let them

be merry, but without offending God. If any quarrel fall out, let not

the sun set before it be appeased. And I strictly command all under

my jurisdiction to hurt no man in goods, honour, or reputation. I

will not have my coffers filled by the emptying of others; we shall

be wealthy enough if we fear God.”

The nobles educated in such households are often spoken of in

after-life as evincing a certain love of polite letters, such as

Count Capranica, whom Petrarch describes as living in his feudal

castle, “governing his vassals with justice and love, cultivating the

Muses, and seeking the society of the learned.” Ordinarily speaking,

however, the merits of the mediæval system of education for the upper

ranks lay less in its intellectual than in its moral training. It is

true indeed that all great barons and their wives were not Elzears

and Delphinas, but it is probable that the families usually chosen as

homes for the young were those which were held in highest repute as

virtuous and well-ordered. And in such families we are justified in

saying that, as a general rule, the grand Christian traditions were

certainly upheld; that children were taught to be subject to parents

and governors, and parents were held bound personally to superintend

the education of their children; that there was a real parental

rule, that priests were had in worshipful honour, the poor regarded

as the members of Christ, women treated with respect and courtesy,

and elders had in reverence. The domestic virtues were taught after

another fashion than among ourselves, and whilst the education of a

gentleman aimed at making him brave, clement, courteous, and devout,

a high-born lady was trained to a life of vigorous practical utility.

She learnt to fill the responsible office of head of the family,

which demanded in those days no small capacity of government. She was

instructed in a hundred details of domestic life, which ladies are

now-a-days content to entrust to their servants. No great variety

of accomplishments was of course expected of her; and the author of

the “Advice to Ladies,” written in 1371, enumerates reading, church

music, embroidery, confectionery, and surgery as among the most

useful branches of female education. As to writing, he considers it

superfluous, and thinks it better if women “can nought of it.”

In the same spirit the good housewife is addressed in the “Menagier

de Paris,” and exhorted to take both pains and pleasure in her

household duties. She is expected to know something about gardening

and tillage, to be able to choose grooms, porters, and other

servants, and look after labourers, pastrycooks, bakers, shoemakers,

and chambermaids; to see that the sheep and horses are taken care

of, and the wines kept clear. Moreover, she must know what to order

for dinner and supper, and must understand how to make all manner

of ragôuts, and pottages for the sick. Much account was made of

early rising in all the books of instruction addressed to ladies.

The “Menagier” humorously complains of those sluggards whose Matins

are, “I must sleep a little longer,” and their Lauds, “Is breakfast

ready yet?” But in general it was the habit to rise with the lark,

and give the early hours, as in Elzear’s household, to prayer and

reading. Thus an old French poet describes it--

Le matin se donne à l’estude,

Chacun demeure en solitude,

Après avoir dedans les cieux

Fait monter l’offre de ses vœux.

Such homely duties as those enumerated above might seem to leave but

little room for cultivation of letters. Probably the writers of these

treatises made the most of their subject, but it is quite clear that

the “Valiant women” of olden time were not mere homely housewives,

innocent of intellectual culture, and with no ideas beyond their

distaffs and their confectioneries; on the contrary, many of them

were learned in their way, like the saintly Isabel of France, sister

to St. Louis, who was an excellent spinster, but was also well read

in St. Augustine. Froissart incidentally lets us know that many of

the noble ladies he names in his Chronicle were lovers of learning;

such as Mary de Bohun, the first wife of Henry Bolingbroke, who, as

he tells us, was well skilled in Latin and Church Divinity. And the

character of not a few of those grand heroic women, whose names so

beautify the page of history, might be summed up in the words with

which Gabrielle de Bourbon is described by the biographer of Bayard.

“She was,” he says, “devout, religious, chaste, and charitable; grave

without haughtiness, magnanimous without pride, and not ignorant of

letters, specially delighting in reading and hearing read the Sacred

Scriptures.” The considerable part taken in the foundation of the

English Colleges by noble ladies of the fourteenth century shows

that they were, at any rate, not indifferent to learning. I have

already spoken of Ella Longspée and the Lady Devorgilla, and in the

following century their noble example was followed by Philippa of

Hainault, the foundress of Queen’s College, Oxford, and Mary de St.

Pol, the widowed countess of Pembroke, who founded Pembroke College,

Cambridge, and was chosen on account of her virtue and learning to

direct the education of Queen Philippa’s daughters. No one can study

the histories of those times without being frequently struck by the

superiority which appears in the characters of their illustrious

women. Their education, however slender it may have been in a merely

literary sense (and, if less showy, it was perhaps quite as solid as

what finds favour among ourselves), evidently fitted them to take an

active and intelligent part in domestic and social life. The old

chroniclers often allude to the happy influence exerted over their

lords by such queens as Eleanor of Castile, and the Good Queen Maud.

Not a few English countesses merited the praises bestowed on Ildegard

by the historian Donizzo, who calls her _docta, gubernatrix, prudens,

proba, consiliatrix_. The practical mind of Philippa of Hainault was

employed in introducing useful arts into England, just as, a few

years later, the intelligence and commanding powers of Margaret, “the

Great Countess” of Ormonde, were similarly exercised in Ireland,

where she planted weavers and other artisans, built schoolhouses, and

“was ever showing herself liberal, bountiful, and devout.” They who

would understand the character of a true Catholic household, presided

over by a wise and intelligent mistress, may find it depicted in

countless beautiful pictures, both of history and romance. Thus, in

one of the works translated by Caxton, the Knight of the Tower holds

up for the imitation of his daughters the example of the Lady Cecily

of Balleville, whose daily ordinance was to rise early and say matins

with her chaplains, and then to hear High Mass and two low Masses,

“saying her service full devoutly.” Then she walked in her garden,

and finished her other morning devotions, and betimes she dined.

After dinner she visited sick folk, and caused her best meat to be

brought to them, and spent her day in other charitable and useful

works. After hearing vespers she went to supper, and betimes to bed,

making great abstinence, and wearing haircloth on all Wednesdays

and Fridays. In the same volume we find that the maxims of courtesy

and humility which found place in the training of a gentleman were

equally inculcated on noble ladies. The Knight of the Tower reminds

his daughters that courtesy is to be shown to persons of low degree

as well as those of gentle blood, and even more scrupulously, and he

gives his reasons. “Courtesy shewn to those of low estate,” he says,

“is more honourable than that shewn to the great, because it the

more evidently proceedeth from a frank and gentle heart.” He cites

the example of a certain great lady whom he once saw in company with

some fine knights and ladies, and who humbled herself to curtsey,

as she passed, to a poor tinker; and when her gay companions asked

her why she did so, she replied, “I would rather miss shewing such

courtesy to a gentleman than to him.” And this, he says, is what all

understand and practise who know the laws of true courtesy.

What has been said of the character of domestic life in the Middle

Ages will doubtless seem a partial view to those who consider that we

ought to gather our notions of the state of society then prevailing

from the debased literature of the jongleurs and troubadours, which

is universally acknowledged to have been exceedingly bad. It will be

remembered, however, that the “goliardi,” as they were called, were a

distinct class in society, the dead branches of the universities, men

who followed no profession save that of buffoonery, and had gathered

just so much education in school as enabled them to give point to a

licentious song or story. They wandered about from city to city and

from castle to castle; and in days when no places of public amusement

existed, there were plenty of knights and nobles ready to receive

such guests, and to while away the dulness of a winter’s evening

by listening to their narratives. The appetite for recreation in

an unregenerate world is hardly less clamorous in its demands than

the appetite for food, and the goods which are produced to supply

such a demand, are seldom, even in our own more refined age, of the

choicest description. But to take the offensive literature produced

by a corrupt and excommunicated class, for such the “goliardi” really

were,[285] and draw thence any conclusions respecting the manners of

the higher classes in ancient times, is about as fair as it would

be to judge of the state of society among ourselves by the plot

of a “sensation” novel or a French vaudeville. Even allowing the

character of their fictions to be taken as evidence of the existence

of widespread scandals, at least equal weight must be attached to the

_bonâ fide_ historical descriptions of households such as those of

Elzear or Charles the Wise, of whom Christine de Pisa says that he

suffered no pernicious book to remain in his palace for a single day;

nor any person whose language was not pure and innocent. Mr. Wright

expresses his surprise at the inconceivable corruption of a society

which could endure the goliardic tales to be recited in its presence.

But it would be easy to match the instances which he brings forward

with others which show us the domestic circle amusing itself in a

very different manner, like that in the castle of Count Charles of

Flanders, who entertained three monks, doctors of theology, that they

might daily, after supper, read and explain the Scriptures to his

family; or like that again, of the good king named above, who always

kept readers in his palace to relieve the winter evenings by reading

aloud “les belles ystoires de la sainct Escripture, ou des fais des

Romains, ou moralitées de philosophes, et d’autres sciences;” and

examples of this sort are by no means exceptional.

What, however, we are chiefly concerned with, is not so much the

practice of this or that individual, as the character of the

education by which they were trained. Our inquiry is what were the

principles and the standard of morals enforced in the chivalric

system of education. And the fact that this standard was far higher

than what exists among ourselves, has been acknowledged by writers

whose sympathies are all in another direction. Thus, M. Guizot, whose

study of European civilisation has certainly not been superficial,

expresses his admiration at “the moral notions, so delicate, so

elevated, and above all so humane, and so invariably stamped with

a religious character,” which are to be found in the oaths and

obligations imposed by the laws of chivalry. “Crimes and disorders

abounded in the Middle Ages,” he says, “yet men evidently had in

their minds lofty desires and pure ideas. Their principles were

better than their acts. A certain high moral ideal always soars

above the stormy element.” He goes on to remark that this pure tone

of morality which prevails in the laws of chivalry must be traced

to the influence of the clergy, who, though they did not invent

that institution, made it an instrument for civilising society

and introducing “a more enlarged and vigorous system of morality

in domestic life.” Expressions like these, which are abundantly

confirmed by a study of the ancient monuments, justify us in claiming

for the mediæval system of education the merit of at least presenting

to the world a lofty standard of right and wrong. That the acts of

the pupils often fell far below their principles, is saying no more

than that they were men. But it cannot be supposed that society could

be permeated with a high moral ideal, and that the strict obligations

of that class to which every man of gentle blood belonged, should

be redolent of a spirit at once “delicate, scrupulous, and humane,”

without effecting some practical results. The young were trained to

reverence a whole class of virtues which popular writers declare must

be regarded in our own day as “dead.” The system of education which

prevailed, presented them with a high ideal of moral excellence, a

lofty standard of thoughts and desires, precisely that, the loss

of which among ourselves is so bitterly deplored. And what is

all education but the formation of such an interior standard? A

teacher can do little more than grave on the soul principles which

may survive many practical shortcomings, and may eventually recall

a wanderer to better things. This is a point which non-Catholic

writers can hardly be expected to appreciate as it deserves, bound

up as it is with a class of ideas, and even of dogmas, to which they

are necessarily strangers. But whilst acknowledging the contrast

too frequently observable between the profession and the practice

of Christians in the Middle Ages, another remarkable feature in

those extraordinary times ought not to be overlooked,--I mean those

numerous episodes in history which exhibit its great criminals in

the light of great penitents. There had been early impressed on

those fierce hearts a fear of God, a sense of sin, and a living

faith in the possibility of obtaining pardon; nay, we will add, a

certain capacity of self-humiliation, which evoked grand heroic acts

of contrition from many whose previous lives had been a tissue of

enormities; and thus a man like William Longspée needed but the look

and the word of a saint to feel all the old teaching reawaken in his

soul, and with a rope about his neck “to abhor himself in dust and

ashes.”

To return from this digression, which is yet intimately connected

with our subject, let us proceed to examine a little more closely

the actual schools for rich and poor existing in England in the

fourteenth century. Besides the universities and monastic schools,

there were, as we have already seen, others presided over by

independent masters. Schools of greater or less pretension were

attached to most parish churches, and the scholars assembled either

in the church, or the porch, or “parvis.” Thus in 1300 we read

of children being taught to sing and read in the “parvis” of St.

Martin’s, Norwich. Endowed schools in connection with hospitals and

colleges were also springing up, of which we shall speak more fully

in another chapter, and in all these schools, as well as in the

universities, the studies, up to the latter part of the reign of

Edward III., were carried on in Latin and French. Ralph Higden, a

monk of Chester, who wrote his _Polychronicon_ somewhere about the

year 1357, informs us that in his day French was the only language

which schoolboys were allowed to use, except Latin. The passage

as translated by John de Trevisa in 1387 is as follows: “Children

in scoles agenst the usage and maner of all other nations beeth

compelled for to leve thir own language, and for to construe thir

lessons and thinges in Frenche. Also gentylmen children beeth taught

to speke Frenche, from the time that they beeth rokked in thir

cradel. And uplondish men (_i.e._ country people) will lyken hymself

to gentylmen and soundeth with gret besynesse for to speke Frenche to

be told of.” When Ralph was protesting against this custom its knell

was about to sound. In 1362 the celebrated statute was passed which

ordained that all pleadings in the Royal courts should now be made

in English instead of French, a change for which we stand indebted

to the spirit of nationality called forth by the continental wars.

By the time therefore that John of Trevisa wrote his translation of

the _Polychronicon_, a great revolution had taken place, so that he

thought it necessary to introduce this correction into the body of

his work: “This maner (the use of the French language) is now som

dele ychaungide: for John Cornwaile, a maister of gramer, chaungide

the lore in gramer scole and construction of Frensch, into Englisch,

and Richard Pencriche lerned that maner of teching of him, and other

men of Pencriche; so that now the yere of oure Lord a thousand thre

hundred foure score and fyve, of the secunde king Rychard after the

conquest, in alle the gramer scoles of England, children leveth

Frensch, and construeth and lerneth in Englisch, and haveth therby

avauntage in one side and desavauntage in another. Ther avauntage is,

that thei lerneth ther gramer in lasse tyme than children were wont

to do; desavauntage is, that now children of gramer scole knoweth no

more Frensch than knows thir left heele; and that is harm to them,

if thei schul passe the see and travaile in strange londes, and in

many other places also: also gentylmen haveth now myche ylefte for to

teche thir children Frensch.” It is evident that John of Cornwaile

and Richard Pencriche, were, like the author himself, Cornish men.

John of Trevisa was a Cornish priest, one of the earliest students

at Exeter College, or, as it was called at that time, Stapleton

Hall, Canon of Westbury in Wiltshire, and Vicar of Berkeley. His

translation of the _Polychronicon_ was undertaken at the request of

his Patron, Thomas Lord Berkeley, and was afterwards modernised and

continued by Caxton. At the request of the same noble friend he is

said to have undertaken an English translation of the Old and New

Testaments. Warton, and after him Craik, have stated that no account

of this work is known to exist, and doubts have even been raised

whether it were ever really written. One antiquarian, quoted by Lewis

in his History of the Translations of the Bible, assures a “learned

friend” that Trevisa translated no more of the Scriptures than

certain sentences painted on the walls of Berkeley Castle, which

sentences turn out to have been painted in Latin and French. But the

existence of the translation is uniformly alluded to by early writers

as a well-known fact, and Dr. Ingram informs us in a note appended to

his _Memorials of Oxford_ that in 1808 he was actually presented with

a copy of the work.[286]

There was the less excuse for the English gentry having eschewed

the use of the national tongue, from the fact that the language had

long since been redeemed from the character of a barbarous idiom

by the labours of the monks. Their rhyming chronicles and a vast

quantity of beautiful and pathetic poetry, attributed by critics to

the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, must be regarded as the

real first-fruits of English literature; and the adherence to what

Chaucer lets us know was exceedingly bad French, in preference to

good English, was simply a remnant of Anglo-Norman pride. Chaucer

himself had to apologise for his use of the vulgar idiom, and in

the prologue to one of his prose treatises, he protests against the

speaking of “poesy matter” in French which, in the ears of Frenchmen,

is about as agreeable as a Frenchman’s English. “Let Frenchmen endite

their quaint terms in French,” he says, “for it is kindly to their

mouths; but let us show our fantasies in such words as we learned of

our dames’ tongues.” His example, of course, had great influence;

yet such was the force of this sentiment of gentility, that at the

universities the Oxonian and Cantabrian French (which was not much

better than that spoken at “Stratford-atte-Bowe”) held its ground for

some years; but in the primary schools the English tongue asserted

its supremacy, and primers and grammars began to be divested of

their foreign clothing. A great many fragments of English school

literature exist belonging to the fourteenth century, some of which

may furnish amusement to the reader. All perhaps may not have a very

clear idea of what an ancient _Primer_ really was. It was something

very different from the school books to which we ordinarily give the

name. For in the dames schools, of which Chaucer speaks, children

were provided with few literary luxuries and had to learn their

letters off a scrap of parchment nailed on a board, and in most cases

covered with a thin transparent sheet of horn to protect the precious

manuscript. Hence the term “horn-book” applied to the elementary

books in use by children. Prefixed to the alphabet, of course, was

the holy sign of the Cross; and so firm a hold does an old custom

get on the popular mind that down to the commencement of the present

century alphabets continued to preserve their ancient heading, and

derived from this circumstance their customary appellation of “the

Christ-cross row,” a term so thoroughly established as still to find

its place in our dictionaries. The mediæval primer is, however, best

described in the language of the fourteenth century itself. The

following passage occurs in the introduction to a MS. poem of 300

lines, still preserved in the British Museum, each portion of which

begins with a separate letter of the alphabet:--

In place as men may se

When a childe to schole shal sette be

A Bok is hym ybrought,

Naylyd on a bord of tre,

That men cal an A, B, C,

Wrought is on the bok without.

V paraffys grete and stoute,

Rolyd in rose red.

That is set, withouten doute,

In token of Christes ded.

Red letter in parchymyn,

Makyth a childe good and fyn

Lettres to loke and see,

By this bok men may devyne,

That Christe’s body was ful of pyne,

That dyed on wod tree.

After the difficulties of the primer had been overcome, a great

deal of elementary knowledge was taught to the children, as in

Saxon times, through the vehicle of verse. For instance, we find

a versified geography of the fourteenth century, of which the two

following verses may serve as a specimen, though it must be owned

the second is not very creditable to our mediæval geographers:--

This world is delyd (divided), al on thre,

Asie, Affrike, and Eu-ro-pe.

Wol ye now here of A-si-e,

How mony londes ther inne be?

The lond of Macedonie,

Egypte the lesse and Ethiope,

Syria, and the land Judia,

_These ben all in Asya_.

The following grammar rules are of rather later date, and belong to

the fifteenth century:--

Mi lefe chyld, I kownsel the

To forme thi vi tens, thou avise the,

And have mind of thi clensoune

Both of noune and of pronoun,

And ilk case in plurele

How thou sal end, avise the well;

And the participyls forget thou not,

And the comparison be in thi thought,

The ablative case be in thi minde,

That he be saved in hys kind, &c.

There is something in this last fragment very suggestive of the rod.

What would have been the fate of the unhappy grammarian, if in spite

of this solemn counsel he had failed to have his ablative case in his

mind, we dare not conjecture. Our forefathers had strict views on

the subject of sparing the rod and spoiling the child. Thus one old

writer observes of children in general:--

To thir pleyntes mak no grete credence,

A rodd reformeth thir insolence;

In thir corage no anger doth abyde,

Who spareth the rodd all virtue sette asyde

Yet the strictness was mingled, as of old, with paternal tenderness,

and children appear to have treated their masters with a singular

mixture of familiarity and reverence. And it is pleasant to find

among the same collection of school fragments a little distich which

speaks of peacemaking:--

Wrath of children son be over gon.

With an apple parties be made at one.

There is good reason for believing that schoolboys of the fourteenth

century were much what they are in the nineteenth, and fully

possessed of that love of robbing orchards, which seems peculiar to

the race. Chaucer has something to say on this head, but Lydgate’s

confessions are exceedingly pitiful:--

Ran into gardens, applys there I stol,

To gadre frutys sparyd kegg nor wall,

To plukke grapys in other mennys vynes,

Was more ready than for to seyne matynes,

Rediere chir stooney (cherry stones) for to tell,

Than gon to chirche or heere the sacry belle.

I must, however, add a few school pictures of a graver and sweeter

character. Chaucer, who painted English society as he saw it with his

own eyes, has not forgotten to describe the village school where “an

hepe of children comen of Christen blood,” acquired as much learning

as was suitable to their age and condition:--

That is to sey, to singen and to rede,

As smal children do in thir childhede.

And among these children he describes one, “a widewe’s lytel sone,”

whom his pious mother had taught whenever he saw an image of Christ’s

Mother, to kneel down and say an Ave Maria; and he goes on to tell us

how

This lytel childe, his litel boke lerning,

As he sate in the scole at his primere,

He Alma Redemptoris herde sing,

As children lerned the Antiphonere;

And as he derst, he drew him nere and nere

And herkened ay the wordes, and eke the note

Til he the first verse coulde al by rote.

He was too young, however, to understand the meaning of the words,

though, be it observed, his elder schoolfellows were more erudite

than himself:--

Nought wist he what this Latin was to say,

For he so yong and tender was of age,

But on a day his felow gan to pray,

To expounden him this song in his langage,

Or tell him why this song was in usage.

And when “his felow which elder was than he,” had expounded the sense

of the words, and made him understand that it was sung in reverence

of Christ’s Mother, the little scholar makes known his resolve to do

his diligence to con it all by Christmas, in honour of Our Lady.

In these parochial schools, as we have elsewhere seen, children of

the lower orders, even from St Dunstan’s time, were taught grammar

and church music gratuitously. It has been very constantly affirmed

that the education here spoken of was exclusively given to those

intended for the monastic and ecclesiastical states. But there is

direct evidence, that the parochial schools were frequented by the

children of the peasantry indiscriminately, and by those of the very

lowest and poorest condition. The proof of this is to be found in

the statutes of the realm. About the year 1406 a law was passed,

wherein, after complaint being made that in opposition to certain

ancient statutes, a vast number of the children of husbandmen, _who

laboured with cart and plough and had no lands_, were apprenticed to

handicraft trades, and thereby induced a great scarcity of husbandmen

and labourers in many parts of the country, it was enacted that

henceforth no one should be allowed so to apprentice his child to any

trade, unless he rented land to the annual value of twenty shillings.

The object of this blundering and tyrannical piece of legislation

was, of course, to keep down the lower orders from endeavouring to

raise themselves in the scale of society, and to oppose that upward

movement which had been one of the results of the enfranchisement

of so large a number of feudal serfs in the reign of Edward III.

But whilst decreeing that day-labourers _with the cart and plough_

should thus be kept back from advancing, or helping their children

to advance, in point of station and wealth, the very same statute

encourages them to _send their children to school_. “Every man or

woman, of whatever state or condition they be, shall be at liberty

to send their son or daughter to take learning in any kind of school

that pleaseth them within the realm.” This clause seems to have

had reference to a petition which had been presented to parliament

by certain lords in the reign of Richard II., to the effect that

children of serfs and the lower sort might not be sent to school,

and particularly to the schools of monasteries, wherein many were

trained as ecclesiastics, and thence rose to dignities in the State.

The statute aimed at appeasing the jealous pride of the nobles,

who regarded with dismay the prospect of bondsmen and husbandmen

emerging from their state of servitude; whilst at the same time, the

influence of the ecclesiastical body was strong enough to preserve

for the lower classes their hitherto undisputed right of receiving

such education as circumstances placed within their reach. I need

not pause to comment on the light which such a passage of history

sheds on the supposed solicitude of monks and clergy to check the

spread of learning for the furtherance of selfish ends. But it is

clear that the permission formally granted by this statute would have

been a simple mockery, unless schools existed adapted to the class

in question; and it may satisfy us of the fact that village schools,

in Chaucer’s time, were really frequented by much the same class

of scholars as in our own; and that not merely in special and more

populated localities, but in remote rural districts. William Caxton,

who was born about the time of the passing of this statute, tells us

that he learned his English in the Weald of Kent, a tract of country

which, fertile as it now is, was, even a century later than Caxton’s

time, a waste wilderness, thinly inhabited, save by herds of deer and

hogs, and a few adventurous men who undertook to clear the forest

and break up the land with the plough.[287] Yet in this wild country

Caxton learnt his English, “a broad and rude English, as is anywhere

spoken in England.” And in after-life, apologising to his readers

for the plain unadorned style which his “simple cunning” uses, he

speaks of his early education, “whereof I humbly and heartily thank

God, and am bounden to pray for my father’s and mother’s souls, who

in my youth sent me to school.” His education, we know, was carried

on in London at a later date, but it must have been begun in some

very primitive parochial school of Kent, where his companions could

only have been rustics. The teaching in such schools was, doubtless,

simple enough, but however small may have been the amount of secular

learning acquired by the scholars, all received instruction in

Christian doctrine, and learnt their prayers; the duty of providing

such instruction for the poorer members of their flocks being

earnestly pressed on the parish priests in the visitation articles

and synodal decrees of John of Peckham and other English prelates.

Prayers and instructions, both secular and religious, were often

taught to those who could not read, in a versified form, as had been

the custom in Saxon times. Thus there is a curious poem of this

period addressed to “Those who gete their lyvynge by the onest craft

of masonry,” in which the young mason is instructed, rather minutely,

how to behave himself when he comes to the house of God. Wherever he

works, he is to come to Mass when he hears the bell. Before entering

church he must take holy water, and is to understand that in doing

so devoutly, he quenches venial sin. Then he must put back his hood,

that is, uncover his head, and as he enters the church, look to the

great Rood, and kneeling down on both knees “pull up his herte to

Christe anon!” He must stand and bless himself at the Gospel, and

avoid carelessly leaning against the wall; and when he hears the bell

ring for the “holy sakerynge,”--

Knele ye most both ynge and olde,

And both yer hondes fayr upholde,

And say thenne yn thys manere,

Fayre and softe withouten bere;

Jhesu, Lord, welcome Thou be

Yn forme of bred as y The se;

Now Jhesu for Thyn holy name,

Schulde Thou me from synne and schame.

Schryff and hosel, grant me bo,

Ere that y schall hennus go.

Versified instructions of this kind were capable of being remembered

by many who never learnt to read, and were evidently in very common

use. We find them in all languages and on all subjects. Thus the old

French treatise entitled “_Stans puer ad mensam_,” selected by Caxton

for one of his translations, and another called “_Les contenances de

la table_,” which exists in a great variety of forms, give excellent

rules for behaving at table and saying grace:--

A viande melz main ne mette,

Jusques la beneisson soit faitte,

Enfant, dy benedicite

Et fait le signe de la croix.

After dinner he is reminded to pray for the dead:--

Prie Dieu pour les trespassez,

Et te souviengne en pitié

Qui de ce monde sont passez,

Ainsi que tu es obleigez,

Prier Dieu pour les trespassez

And the child is thus gently warned against the bad habit of noisy

disputes at table:--

Enfant, soyes toujours paisible,

Doulx, courtois, bening, aimable,

Entre ceulx qui sierront à table,

Et te garde d’estre noysible.

Il est conseillé en la Bible

Entre les gens estre paisible.

Teaching of some sort the peasantry certainly received, whatever

means may have been used to convey it; they probably knew little of

grammatical analysis, or the relative lengths of the European rivers,

but it may be doubted whether, with all our cumbrous machinery of

State education, we have hit on any system which is likely to form

the Christian character so successfully in the hearts of our people

as that which existed in the days of St. Anselm or Chaucer. “The

majority of husbandmen are saved,” writes the former, “because they

live with simplicity, and feed the people of God with their hands;

and therefore they are blessed.”[288] And the poet who never paints a

fancy picture, thus portrays from the life the character of his poor

ploughman:--

A true worker and a good was he,

Living in peace and perfect charity;

God loved he best, and that with alle his herte,

At alle times, were it gain or smart;

And then his neighbour right as himselve.

He wolde thresh, and thereto dyke and delve

For Christe’s sake, for every poor wight

Withouten hire, if it lay in his might.

His tithes paid he full fair and well,

Both of his proper work, and his cattel.

Have we not a right to say that such a character had somewhere and by

some means received a thoroughly Christian education, even though he

may never have learnt to read or write, and were wholly innocent of

grammar?

I must not be tempted to enter on the endless theme of school sports

and customs. But it is proper to mention that English schoolboys

had their patron saints, of whom St. Gregory the Great was one. So

we learn from the--shall I call it poetry?--of the Puritan, Barnaby

Googe, who tells us that

St. Gregory lookes to little boyes to teach their a, b, c,

And make them for to love their bookes, and schollers good to be.

On his feast the boys were called into school by certain songs;

presents were distributed, to make them love their school, and

one of their number was made to represent the bishop. But a yet

more universally acknowledged patron was St. Nicholas of Myra,

in honour of whom schoolboys of all ranks and conditions elected

their boy-bishop, and played pranks in which jest and earnest were

strangely blended together. The “childe bishope” preached a sermon,

and afterwards received welcome offerings of pence. And this

custom was one of those to which the people clung with the greatest

tenacity, so that it continued to survive down to the close of

Elizabeth’s reign.

The character of the studies followed at this time in the higher

English academies, may perhaps be best gathered from an examination

of the kind of learning displayed by the poet already so often

quoted. If Chaucer is to be taken as in any way a fair representative

of an educated Englishman of his time, it is plain that there was,

in a certain sense, no want of learning in the English schools,

though his critics acknowledged that however varied and extensive his

reading may have been, it was loose and inaccurate. In this respect

the English were far behind the Italians. I am not aware that Dante

has ever been convicted of a blunder in his classical allusions, but

in Chaucer such solecisms abound. “All through the poem,” says Craik,

in his critical examination of the _House of Fame_, “there runs

the spirit of the strange, barbarous, classical scholarship of the

Middle Ages. The Æneid is not wholly unknown to the author, but it

may be questioned if his actual acquaintance with the work extended

much beyond the opening lines. An abridgment, indeed, of the story

of Æneas follows, but that might have been got at second-hand. The

same mixture of the Gothic and the classic occurs throughout that is

found in all the poetry of the period, whether French, English, or

Italian.” He proceeds to quote lines, in which “the harper _Orion_”

is made to do duty for _Arion_; Mount Cithæron is supposed to figure

as the individual “Dan Citherus;” the musician Marsyas, who was

flayed alive, appears as “Mersia, that lost _her_ skin,” and so on.

However, it is agreed that Chaucer was, in a certain inaccurate

way, familiar with the stories of the Latin classics, and possessed

of whatever learning was to be acquired in the schools of London

and the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris, in all of

which, according to Leland, he had “gained great glory.”[289] At the

universities, moreover he had learned men for his cronies; his two

most familiar college friends were John Gower and Randolph Strode,

both of whom, like himself, afterwards attained poetic fame. It is to

them that he dedicated his _Troilus and Creseide_, addressing them as

“the philosophical Strode” and “the moral Gower.” The name of Gower

is too well known to require any comment, but all readers may not

be equally familiar with that of Strode, so we will briefly state

that he was a Scotchman by birth, a fellow of Merton, afterwards a

pilgrim to the Holy Land, and the author of a poem in the vernacular,

entitled “Phantasma,” which critics scruple not to place on a level

with Chaucer’s verse. He finally entered the Dominican Order, and

greatly distinguished himself in the controversy against Wickliffe,

thereby earning the distinguished honour of some very coarse abuse

from the pen of Bale.

Chaucer was educated for the law, and Speght records the doubtful

tradition that he was at one time a member of the Inner Temple,

at which period of his career he is said to have been fined two

shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street. At any

rate, his education was that of a “clerk,” and the office he

eventually filled under the Crown was that of Comptroller of the

Customs and Subsidies of wool, skins, and tanned hides in the port

of London--an office about as suitable to him as that of gauger was

to Robert Burns. He seems to have felt its incongruity with a poet’s

sensitiveness, and its necessary “reckonings” are often alluded to in

his verses as sad trials of patience. He was perfectly at home in the

French tongue, and his familiarity with Italian is stoutly maintained

by some, and as vehemently denied by others. Lydgate says that he

translated Dante, but no fragment of such a work is known to exist.

He was an incessant reader, as he is never weary of letting us know.

When he had done his “reckonings,” his manner was to go home to his

house and sit at his books, “as dumb as any stone,” and read till

he was half blind. Once, he tells us, he spent a whole day reading

Cicero’s _Somnium Scipionis_, from the Commentary of Macrobius. He

had a great liking for old books, and expresses it sweetly enough--

For out of old fields as men sayth,

Cometh all this new corn from yere to yere,

And out of old books, in good faith,

Cometh all this new lore that men lere.

He seems to have had a decided taste for mathematical and scientific

pursuits. The writings and example of Roger Bacon had given a great

stimulus to these pursuits in England, and Hallam mentions the names

of several Englishmen of the fourteenth century who distinguished

themselves as mathematicians, such as Archbishop Bradwardine, the

profound Doctor, as he was called. Among Chaucer’s prose works is

a Treatise on the Astrolabe, written for the instruction of his

youngest son, Lewis, who was studying at Oxford under a tutor. He

dedicates the work to his boy in the following words:--

“Lytel Lewis, my sonne, I perceive well by certaine evidences thine

abilitie to learne sciences touching numbers and proportions,

and also wel consider I thy busie prayer in especiall to learne

the Treatise of the Astrolabie ... therefore I have given thee a

sufficient Astrolabie for an orizont, compounded after the latitude

of Oxenford.” He has compiled it, he adds, because the charts of the

Astrolabe that he has seen were “too hard for thy tender age of ten

yeares to conceive,” and he has written it in English, “for Latine ne

canst thou nat yet but smal, my lytel sonne.”

In one of his poems he gives an exposition of the theory of

gravitation, and appeals to Aristotle and “Dan Plato” in confirmation

of his philosophy. He also explains the propagation of sound, which

he declares to be produced by a series of undulations of air like

those that appear when you throw a stone into the water. He was

familiar with the jargon of the astrologers and alchemists, and his

commentators assure us that he displays a very considerable knowledge

of the real science of chemistry as well as of its quackery, which

last does not escape his lash. For quacks of all sorts indeed he has

no indulgence, and spends his humour on the doctor of physic, whom he

describes as “well grounded in astronomy,” able to help his patients

by his knowledge of magic, no great reader of his Bible, which was

not a very fashionable study with the followers of Averrhoes and

Avicenna, but on excellent terms with his apothecary, and ready to

help him to get rid of plenty of drugs and electuaries. It will

be remembered that at the time when Chaucer wrote, the “Doctor of

Physic,” though a graduate of the universities, and a very important

person in his way, had no great claims to the character of a man of

science. John Gaddesden, a fellow of Merton, and court physician

to Edward, wrote a book called the “Rosa Anglica,” on his great

and successful method of treating patients for the smallpox, which

consisted in hanging their rooms and enveloping their persons in

_scarlet cloth_! He informs us that, with the blessing of God, he

purposes writing another book on Chiromancy, or fortune-telling by

the hand, condescends to give directions to the court ladies for

preparing their perfumes, washes, and hair-dyes, and interlards his

quack recipes with scraps of original verse.

In his treatment of religious subjects Chaucer represents the tone of

feeling which prevailed among a very large class of Englishmen in his

day. He was a political partisan of John of Gaunt, and therefore gave

the Lollards a certain kind of support. To a man of free life and

coarse humour it was both tempting and easy to exercise his wit on

fat monks and lazy friars, and to grumble like a true Englishman at

their demands on his purse. Doubtless there were plenty of unworthy

representatives of both professions to stand as the originals of his

poetical caricatures, and broadly enough did he paint their unseemly

features. But that was all; and his biographer, Godwin, admits that,

so far from sharing any of the heretical opinions of the Lollards,

his poems unmistakably prove his adherence to the Catholic dogmas,

especially those which they most malignantly attacked, namely, the

Sacraments of Penance and the Holy Eucharist; while his devotion to

the Blessed Virgin is expressed in a thousand passages, such as the

following:--

Lady, when men pray to the,

Thou goest before of thy benignitie,

And getest us the light of thi prayere

To giden us to thi Sonne so dere.

Occleve, his disciple, himself no mean poet, bears testimony to the

fact that his lamented master was a devout client of the Queen of

Heaven:--

As thou wel knowest, O blessed Virgyne,

With lovynge hert and high devocion,

In thyne honour he wroot many a lyne,

For he thi servant was, mayden Marie,

And let his love floure and fructifie.

Contemporary with Chaucer, the father of our poetry, was Sir John

Mandeville, who commonly enjoys the credit of being the father

of English prose, and whose travels let into the popular mind a

glimmering light as to the whereabouts of Tartary, Persia, Armenia,

Lybia, Chaldea, and Ethiopia, all which he visited, besides some

Eastern lands that he calls by the name of “Amazoyn,” “Ind the

Less and the More,” and “many isles that be abouten Ind.” In his

“Itinerary” he describes his visit to Jerusalem and the Holy Land,

apologising for possible inaccuracies by reminding the indulgent

reader that “thynges passed out of long time from a man’s mynd

turnen soon into forgetting; because that the mynd of man ne may

not be comprehended ne withholden for the freelty of mankind.” The

“Itinerary” was written in Latin, and translated by the author

first into French, and from thence into English, and enjoyed great

popularity. And the publication of these travels, together with those

of Marco Polo, stimulated an interest in the study of geography,

so that we begin to find more frequent mention in the catalogues

of monastic libraries of maps and charts. The whole science of

map-drawing, it may be observed, had developed in the cloister; the

German monks showing themselves indefatigable in improving this

branch of science. About the year 1370 Prior Nicholas Hereford of

Evesham Abbey, after collecting a fine assortment of books, caused a

great map of the world to be executed, at the cost of six marks, for

the use of his convent. And a certain Camaldolese monk, named Fra

Mauro, made use of the information derived from the writings of Marco

Polo, and produced a grand Mappamondo, wherein he depicts the sea

rolling round the southern extremity of Africa. On the margin of his

map appear some learned notes, referring the phenomena of the tides

to the moon’s attraction--a piece of natural philosophy, however,

which, as we have seen, was not unknown to Bede.

It has been already said that during the reign of Edward III. the

English universities had to sustain the twofold attack of Lollardism

and the Black Death, by the united effects of which they were reduced

to so low a condition, as at one time to have ceased to be regarded

as seats of learning. Nine tenths of the English clergy are said

to have been swept away by the terrible plague, together with the

population of entire cities, and the necessity of the case obliged

the bishops to fill the vacant benefices with men of inferior

education, a practice which for the moment told severely on the state

of the schools. But the effects of the pestilence were less fatally

disastrous than those caused by the heresy of Wickliffe. When in

1361, that celebrated man, then master of Baliol College, Oxford,

first made himself notorious by his attacks on the mendicant orders,

he seems to have done little more than repeat the old threadbare

calumnies of William de St. Amour and Richard Fitz Ralph. His views

were of course exceedingly relished by the secular doctors, and his

reputed talents induced the primate, Simon Islip, to offer him the

wardenship of Canterbury Hall, then newly founded, partly for secular

and partly for monastic students. In order to make room for him, the

former warden, Woodhal, a Canterbury monk, had to retire, and three

other monastic students who held scholarships in the college were at

the same time removed. Langham, the successor of Islip, pronounced

these proceedings irregular, and restored Woodhal to his post. The

matter was referred to the decision of Pope Urban V., who decided

in favour of Woodhal, and from that day Wickliffe became the deadly

enemy of the papal power. The university, or rather the secular

regents of the university, immediately took part with him against

the Pope and the Friars, and in 1372, to mark their adherence to his

cause, elected him Professor of Divinity. He succeeded, moreover, in

obtaining the powerful support of John of Gaunt, and on occasion of a

congress, held at Bruges, to settle various points in dispute between

the English Government and the Holy See, the name of John Wickliffe

appears in the list of Royal Commissioners. All this time there had

been no whisper of heresy, nor was it until after his return to

England, when he was promoted to a prebend in the collegiate church

of Westbury, and a little later was presented by John of Gaunt to the

rectory of Lutterworth, that he began to disseminate his pernicious

doctrines. Besides his peculiar views regarding the possession of

property, he had started views on the subject of predestination,

analogous to those afterwards embraced by Calvin, and attacked the

supremacy of the Pope, and the doctrines of penance, indulgences, the

worship of the saints and of holy images, and prayer for the dead.

He and his followers propagated their opinions by a sort of popular

preaching suited to the tastes of the common people, and accompanied

by a certain low buffoonery, in all ages specially attractive to

rude audiences of the Anglo-Saxon race. The coarse invectives

levelled against the clergy found eager reception among such hearers;

for there is perhaps to most men an irresistible fascination in

doctrines which aim at bringing down any dominant class of society

to a lower level. The English commons were at this period seething

in a chronic state of insurrection, and the Lollard denunciations

of the priests and land-holders were extremely to the taste of the

Socialists of the fourteenth century. It is therefore quite easy

to understand how it was that Hob Miller and Colin Lout should

have thought it an excellent joke to ridicule and despise their

betters; but that Wickliffe should have found warm supporters in the

university of Oxford is a fact that may well surprise and startle us.

But Lollardism had a double aspect, its theological heresies were

at first as little relished at Oxford as at Rome, but its enmity

to the religious orders happened to chime in with the views of the

secular faction, and therefore they gave it their support. An appeal

had already been made, not to Rome, but to Parliament, for a law

to prohibit any member of the university joining a religious order

before his eighteenth year, and the Oxonian divines were not ashamed

to accept, together with the desired statute, a prohibition to carry

the matter to Rome. They next established the rule that no religious,

whether monk or friar, should be admitted to graduate in arts, while

at the same time, by the university statutes, no one could fill a

theological professorship without so graduating. The monks appealed

to the Holy See, and obtained a dispensation from this unjust law,

and thus increased the ill-will of their thwarted and malicious

adversaries. The struggle was at its height when Wickliffe raised his

cry against the mendicant orders, whom he declared to be Antichrist,

and proctors of Satan; and he at once found plenty of grave divines

who were willing to regard him as a useful ally, and forgive both his

heresies and his nonsense for the support he furnished to their side

of the quarrel. Hence, in 1377, when Gregory XI. sent Bulls to the

Archbishop of Canterbury the Bishop of London, and the university of

Oxford, calling on them to take active measures for the condemnation

of the heresiarch, we are assured by Walsingham that the heads of

the university deliberated whether or no they should receive the

Bull, nor does it appear certain that it ever was received. At last,

however, in 1381, Wickliffe startled even his Oxford allies by his

attack on the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, and a decree was drawn

up, and signed by William de Burton, the chancellor, and twelve of

the chief divines, condemning his errors, and forbidding them to

be promulgated in the university. Hereupon Wickliffe scrupled not

to appeal to the Crown and Parliament, but the English people were

not yet quite prepared for such a step, and the act caused general

scandal. Even John of Gaunt, who had hitherto, from political

motives, given him his countenance, now withdrew his protection, and

declared his teaching on the Sacrament of the Altar to be a “doctrine

of devils.”

Oxford, however, had not yet entirely given up his cause. In 1382,

when Courtenay, Archbishop of Canterbury, set on foot vigorous

measures for the eradication of the new heresies, he met with stout

resistance from Rigge, who had succeeded De Burton in the office

of chancellor of the university, and who flatly refused to silence

a Lollard professor. Courtenay at last obtained a royal mandate,

in virtue of which Wickliffe and his most obstinate adherents were

expelled the university, a good number of professors purchasing

immunity, however by a ready recantation of their errors, for few

evinced any desire of becoming martyrs in the cause.

The steps taken by Courtenay vindicated the authority of the Church

but they were far from being sufficient to purge the university from

the heretical leaven, or remedy the evils caused by these internal

troubles. So far is Ayliffe’s statement that the Wickliffites

restored sound learning at Oxford, from possessing a shadow of truth,

that the period when this heresy was rampant among her doctors was

precisely that when her schools had confessedly sunk to their very

lowest state of decay. The authorities were themselves perfectly

aware of the fact, and represented it as one of the unhappy effects

produced by papal provisions. But the statutes of Provisors, passed

in the reign of Edward III., by which all such provisions were

forbidden under severe penalties, instead of applying a remedy to

this evil, only hastened the decline of learning. It was found that

the Crown was far less disposed to promote men of learning than the

Popes had been; and, to quote the words of Lingard, “experience

showed that the statutes in question operated to the depression of

learning and the deterioration of the universities.” Accordingly in

the year 1399 petitions were presented to Convocation from Oxford

and Cambridge, setting forth that _while the Popes were permitted

to bestow benefices by provision, the preference had always been

given to men of talent and industry_, and that the effect of such

preference had been to quicken the application and increase the

number of the students; but that since the passing of the Act against

Provisors, their members had been neglected by the patrons of

livings, the _students had disappeared_, and the schools were nearly

abandoned.[290] Sixteen years later the House of Commons awoke to a

sense of the suicidal character of their own policy, and petitioned

King Henry V. that, _to save the universities from destruction_,

he would suffer the statutes against Provisors to be repealed. The

King referred the matter to the bishops, who, however, had no wish

at all to interfere with the existing legislation, and contented

themselves with passing a law in convocation obliging every patron of

a benefice for the next ten years to present a graduate of one of the

universities.

These facts may serve as sufficient reply to the vaunted “restoration

of learning” achieved by the Lollards. The effect of their influence

in the universities, coupled with that of an anti-Roman course

of legislation, had been to bring those institutions to the very

verge of ruin, and that in spite of the extraordinary efforts which

were being made by private munificence to enlarge and perfect the

collegiate system of education. Indeed, though Wickliffe himself

was a man of undoubted ability, the attempt to convert him into a

restorer of humane letters, savours of the absurd.[291] His learning

was precisely the same which, when found in the possession of friars

and other scholastics, earns for them such bitter taunts and gibes

as “locusts,” who devoured all the green things in the land, and

darkened it with bad Latin and captious logic. Wickliffe’s Latin was

not better than that of his adversaries, and his logic was of that

true Oxonian temper which Wood qualifies as “frivolous sophistry

whereby scholars could at any time be for or against anything

proposed.” The well-known ballad in which an Oxford student puzzles

his simple-minded parent by proving a pigeon and an eel pie to

be convertible terms, seems hardly a caricature when we read the

shifts, or, as Wood terms them, the “screws” by which the Lollard

chief sought to prove that he meant the precise contrary of what he

had been convicted of saying. “He so qualified his doctrines with

conditions,” says Lingard, “and explained them away by distinctions,

as to give an appearance of innocence to tenets the most mischievous.

On the subject of the Holy Eucharist he intrenched himself behind

unintelligible distinctions, the meaning of which it would have

puzzled the most acute logician to detect.”[292] And Rohrbacher

observes that instead of appealing to the Scriptures explained by

the Fathers, he took refuge in “arguments and dialectic subtleties,

wrapped up in an obscure and barbarous phraseology;” in other words,

he exhibited precisely the same description of learning, the display

of which has earned so many hard epithets for the academic “locusts.”

Wickliffe’s literary fame rests chiefly on his translation of the

Bible into the vulgar tongue, often incorrectly spoken of as the

earliest English version. It is not clear that he himself ever

translated more than the Gospels, for of the various manuscripts

which bear his name, some are now admitted to have been the

production of later Lollard writers. His English is declared by Mr.

Craik to be “coarse and slovenly,” and far more harsh and obscure

than that of Mandeville or Chaucer. His version was made the vehicle

for conveying his peculiar tenets, by means of corruptions of the

Sacred Text, and was accompanied by certain Prologues or Glosses,

explaining it in an heretical sense. On this account it was enacted

by Archbishop Arundel, in a Provincial Synod held in 1408, that

“no one should hereafter translate any text of Holy Scripture into

English by way of a book, and that no such book, _composed lately,

in the time of Wickliffe, or since his death_, shall be read.” This

decree has been erroneously interpreted as a prohibition to the

laity to read the Scriptures. But its real meaning is very clearly

explained by the Canonist Lyndwood,[293] a contemporary of Arundel’s,

as being, first, a prohibition to any private person to translate

the Scriptures into English without authority; and secondly, a

prohibition to use or read any such unauthorised and incorrect

versions. And he expressly adds that from the terms “newly composed,

in the time of Wickliffe, or since his death,” it is evident that

the Lollard versions only are prohibited, but that every one is

still at liberty to read those formerly translated from the text of

Scripture into English or any other modern idiom. Lyndwood died in

1446, and was living when the decree in question was first published.

His testimony as to its meaning as then understood and interpreted,

as well as to the fact that other earlier versions did exist at that

time, cannot therefore be called in question. Moreover, Fox the

Protestant martyrologist, tells us, on the authority of Polydore

Vergil, that this same Archbishop Arundel, who is so often accused

of prohibiting the reading of the Scriptures, preached the funeral

sermon of Queen Anne of Bohemia, and mentioned among other things in

her praise that she was a diligent reader of the Four Gospels written

in Bohemian, English, and Latin, with divers expositions, which book

she had sent to him to be viewed and examined.

If this account be correct, it equally vindicates Arundel from the

charge of prohibiting the Scriptures, and Queen Anne from that of

Lollardism on the ground of reading them, for it will be observed the

copy she used had been first submitted to the archbishop’s approval,

and his formal permission had been obtained. We have also another

interesting testimony to the existence of these earlier versions,

and an explanation of the decree against those of the Lollards, in

the words of Sir Thomas More, who, in his Dialogue, notices the

prohibitory Constitution of Arundel in the following terms:--

“Ye shall understand that the great arch-heretic, Wickliffe (whereas

the Holy Bible was long before his time by virtuous and well-learned

men translated into the English tongue, and by good and godly people,

with devotion and soberness, well and reverently read) took upon him,

of a malicious purpose, to translate it anew. In which translation

he purposely corrupted the Holy Text, maliciously planting therein

such words as might in the reader’s ears serve to the proof of such

heresies as he went about to sow; which he not only set forth in

his own translation of the Bible, but also in certain prologues or

glosses, which he made hereupon. So that after it was perceived what

harm the people took by the translations, prologues, and glosses of

Wickliffe’s, and also of some others who after him helped to set

forth his sect, then, for that cause, it was at a council holden

at Oxford provided, upon great pain, that no man should henceforth

translate the Scriptures into the English tongue _upon his own

authority_ by way of book or treatise, nor no man should read such

books as were newly made in the time of Wickliffe, or since, or that

should be made any time after, _till the same translation were by

the Diocesan or Provincial Council approved_. But that it neither

forbade the translations to be read that were already well done of

old before Wickliffe’s time, nor condemned his because it was _new_,

but because it was _naught_, nor prohibited new to be made, but only

provided that they shall not be read if they be made amiss, till by

good examination they be amended; except they be such translations

as those of Wickliffe and Tindal, which the malicious mind of the

translator hath so handled that it were lost labour to go about to

mend them.”

He goes on to say that he has seen, and, if necessary, could show,

copies of English Bibles, “fair and old,” approved by the Diocesans,

which have been left with lay men and women, and used by Catholic

folk with soberness and devotion, and that the clergy never kept

any Bibles from the laity save those that were “naught,” and not

so approved; that is, those in which heretical corruptions of the

text had been introduced, or to which were attached the pernicious

Lollard glosses. And he explains how it was that no printer had

yet ventured to print an English Bible, a great and expensive

undertaking, which might, after all, have been unsaleable, through

the question which might have been raised whether it were printed

from a version made before or since the days of Wickliffe. The whole

passage is sufficiently explicit, both as to the fact of approved

English versions of the Scriptures existing before the time of

Wickliffe, and also as to the received interpretation of Arundel’s

decree. We have the very explicit testimony of Cranmer to the same

effect. “It is not much above a hundred years,” he writes, “since

Scripture hath not been accustomed to be read in the vulgar tongue

within this realm; many hundred years before that it was translated

and read in the Saxon tongue, and when that language waxed old and

out of common usage, because folks should not lack the fruit of

reading it, it was translated again into the newer language.”[294]

It is, however, by no means easy in all cases to distinguish these

early versions from their later imitations. All the translations

of the Scriptures preserved in manuscript in the Oxford libraries

have been commonly assigned to Wickliffe, although Dr. Thomas James

is of opinion that a close examination of some of them would show

them to be of much more ancient date. He is also disposed to think

that one of the prologues ordinarily assigned to one of Wickliffe’s

disciples belongs to an earlier translation. Lewis, in his “History

of the English Translations of the Bible,” supposes this prologue to

have been written in 1396 by John Purvey, one of Wickliffe’s most

learned followers; but its allusions to the care taken to consult St.

Jerome, and the gloss of Nicholas de Lyra, do not seem to harmonise

very well with this theory. Dr. James considers that the copies

preserved in the Bodleian Library, and in Christ Church Library, are

of ancient Catholic versions, that in Queen’s College Library alone

being properly assigned to Wickliffe. Lewis opposes this view, yet he

admits that the Bodleian and Queen’s College versions are different

from that of Christ Church. Warton claims one of these for John of

Trevisa, and Weever assigns one to the Venerable Richard of Hampole,

an Austin hermit, who lived about the year 1349, near the Monastery

of Hampole in Yorkshire, and, according to Camden, wrote many books

full of “heavenly unction,” and whose translation of the Psalter

is still preserved. Whatever may be the real history of these three

versions (and it is evident that critics are by no means unanimous

as to their authorship), several fragments exist of different books

of Scripture which are admitted to be of ancient date. In the

library of Bennet College, Cambridge, a translation is preserved of

two of the Gospels and St. Paul’s Epistles, with a gloss, written

in the English spoken after the Conquest. In Sydney Sussex College

are portions of the Old Testament commented on in like manner. A

translation of the Psalter, with a gloss, is in the Harleian Library,

besides the Psalter of Richard of Hampole, mentioned above, to

which is prefixed a prologue, in which the author explains that he

has sought no strange English, but only that which was commonest

and easiest, and has been careful to consult the holy doctors.

There are also, according to Lewis, other translations extant of

the Psalter, the New Testament, and the Church Lessons and Hymns,

all made before the time of Wickliffe. It must be borne in mind

that the manuscripts preserved in our libraries are mere fragments

accidentally saved from destruction, and can scarcely be taken as

evidence of what existed in England before the Reformation. The

pious visitors of Edward VI., in their zeal to purify the university

of Popish service books, destroyed every manuscript they could lay

hands on, which exhibited illuminations or other ornaments, without

the slightest reference to its contents. Whole libraries were then

sold for waste paper, and bought by bakers to feed their ovens, or

for other base purposes. But among the scanty relics that escaped

the hands of these worse than Vandals, stray leaves are to be found

of sermons, treatises, and mutilated hymns, many of which are in the

vernacular English of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. One

of these interesting fragments has been printed by Messrs Wright and

Halliwell in the _Reliquiæ Antiquæ_, and is assigned by them to the

fourteenth century. The preacher appears to have been familiar with

some English version of the Canticle of Canticles, and introduces a

passage which may be quoted as a beautiful specimen of our ancient

English idiom:--“Behold my derlyng speketh to me; arys, come nerre my

beautiful, now wynter is passid; that is, the coulde wynd of worldly

covertise that mad me hard y-froze as yse: the floures scheweth them

on erth, the voys of the tortel is herd in our herber; that is, the

soule that the kyng of heven has y-lad to his vyne celler, syngeth

chast songes of mornyng for hir sinnes and for deth of Christ hir

mate: she will no more sette on grene bows lovynge worldlye things,

bote fedeth hir with love of Christ, the clene white corne, and

fleeth up to the holes of His five woundes, lookyng with sympel eyne

into the cler waters of holie writ.”

From what has been said, it may be gathered that before the time of

Wickliffe, the Scriptures were in no sense shut up from the laity;

that considerable portions of them were rendered into English, and

are known to have been actually in the possession of lay persons,

and that it was not until the corrupt versions and glosses of the

Lollards were made instruments of disseminating pernicious errors,

that any decrees were made on the subject. Even then the restrictions

were not prohibitions: the laity were still allowed to read approved

Catholic versions: though it is very probable, that at a time when

so large a portion of the population was infected with Lollardism,

and when there was a disposition to make the Sacred Text, interpreted

by each man’s whim, the rule of each man’s belief, the private

reading of the English Scriptures by lay persons was not greatly

encouraged. In fact, prohibitions or restrictions of this sort were

never promulgated by the ecclesiastical authorities, until rendered

necessary by the perverse misuse of the Sacred Volume by heretics.

Thus, in France no such restrictions existed until 1229 when the

extravagant doctrines which the Albigenses pretended to adduce from

Scripture, obliged the Council of Toulouse to forbid the translation

of the Sacred Books, the use of which had, up to that time, been

freely permitted. In no case was the _Latin_ Bible withdrawn from

the laity,[295] and it must be remembered that in those days the

majority of those who could read at all, could read Latin. Lewis,

indeed, would have us believe that before Wickliffe’s time, even

the Latin Bible was not allowed in common use; and gravely assures

us, that the monks and friars collected copies and laid them up in

their libraries, not (as one might suppose) for the obvious purpose

of reading them, but “to imprison them from the curates and secular

priests, and so prevent them from preaching the Word of God to the

people.” Nonsense of this sort is scarcely worth refuting, though

it finds a place in very grave writers, and by certain readers is

often enough believed. Bibles were, of course, comparatively rare

and expensive books, and not within reach of every poor curate’s

purse. But so far from any conspiracy existing to make them rarer,

it was a common devotion among those who possessed such a treasure,

to bequeath it by will to some public church, there to be set up and

chained, _ad usum communem_. This practice is often supposed to have

originated with the Reformers, and a modern artist has depicted, with

great skill, the grey-haired peasant approaching the chained Bible

set forth by order of his sacred majesty king Edward VI., and turning

over its pages with pious awe. It was, however, a good thought stolen

from the ancients, as there is abundant evidence to show. Thus, in

1378 a Bible and Concordance were left by will by Thomas Farnylaw,

to be set up and chained in the north aisle of St. Nicholas’ Church,

Newcastle; and in 1385, a Bible and Concordance were to be found

chained in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor.

These Bibles were, of course, copies of the Latin Vulgate, for it

is not pretended that any effort was made to place a version of the

Scriptures, in the vulgar tongue, at the command of the unlettered

laity. The Catholic system of education did not aim at enabling every

poor man to read his Bible, but rather at making him know his faith.

Nevertheless, so true is it that a strong Scriptural element has

always predominated in the teaching of the Church, that the first

attempts to provide the poor with cheap literature of any sort were

called _Biblia Pauperum_, or the Bibles of the poor. They were rude

engravings of Scriptural subjects, or stories of the saints, taken

off carved wooden blocks, and accompanied with texts of Scripture, or

pious verses. These were known as block-books, and were reproduced at

a much cheaper rate than books written out by hand. Of course they

were not Bibles, but they show that even in the age most tainted by

the Lollard heresy, there was a disposition on the part of Catholic

teachers to supply the people with instruction into which a certain

Biblical element had been infused. The block-books were likewise used

to strike off small school manuals of grammar, and a book of this

sort was technically called a “Donatus.” If the grammars were welcome

boons to schoolboys, the Bibles of the poor were not less convenient

for the use of preachers, who could not carry so cumbrous a volume

as a whole Bible into the pulpit, and were often glad to help

their memory by a selection of suitable texts. Specimens of these

block-books are preserved as curiosities by modern bibliopolists,

and the contrivance seems to have been the immediate forerunner of

the more important invention of printing. But in mentioning them we

are somewhat departing from the order of time, as they can hardly be

assigned an earlier date than the beginning of the fifteenth century.

_CHAPTER XIX._

THE RED AND WHITE ROSES.

A.D. 1386 TO 1494.

The close of the fourteenth century witnessed the establishment in

England of two new schools, the importance of which caused them to be

regarded as models for all subsequent foundations of a similar kind

in this country. These were William of Wykeham’s twin colleges at

Oxford and Winchester the first of which, opened in 1386, may be said

to have perfected the collegiate system of our universities, while

the second, which was not completed till seven years later, laid the

foundation of another system, more peculiarly national--that of our

English public schools. The object of these two institutions was to

furnish a complete course of free education to two hundred scholars,

who were to be led from the lowest class of grammatical learning, to

the highest degrees of the various faculties. And at the same time

that their intellectual training was thus amply provided for, they

were subjected to a strict rule of discipline, and the religious

element of education was given a much larger development than it

had received in any collegiate foundations which had yet appeared.

Chapels had, indeed, in some cases been attached to colleges before

the time of Wykeham, though they do not seem to have been regarded as

any essential portion of such institutions; but now the choral office

and the magnificent celebration of ecclesiastical rites were provided

for with no less scrupulous care than the advancement of studies; and

thus the founder set his seal to one great principle of the earlier

monastic education, namely, that habits of devotion, and those too of

a certain liturgical character, ought to be infused into the training

which is given to the children of Holy Church. And in many ways these

foundations reflected the spirit of more ancient times, in what

regarded discipline. When the universities began to be frequented

in place of those monastic and cathedral schools, which up to the

twelth century had been the chief academies resorted to by students,

clerical or lay, no provision at all had been made for the government

of the scholars; a fact which sufficiently explains the scandals and

disorders which fill up the early history of Paris and Oxford. Nor

need the want of such provision excite any surprise, if we bear in

mind that the first universities were not institutions, founded at

any particular period according to some sagacious scheme; but that

they sprang up of themselves out of small beginnings, and developed,

like the grain of mustard seed, into a mighty tree. Scholars and

professors came first, and it was not till they had insensibly

grown into a population, and had committed the excesses of which

most lawless populations would be guilty, that authority stepped

in with statutes and decrees, and endeavoured to give shape and

method to the unwieldy mass. The collegiate system, as we have seen,

semi-monastic in its character, and undoubtedly formed in partial

imitation of the religious houses of study, was called into being in

order to struggle with the monster evils which had arisen out of the

university system; it was an attempt to return, in some measure, to

the ancient paths, and to reassert the principle that intellectual

education, when separated from moral and religious training, is no

education at all. Wykeham adopted this principle in all its fulness,

and herein lay the special value of his work. But with an admirable

discretion he contrived so to adapt it to the wants, the feelings,

and the habits of his age, that it assumed the appearance, not of a

retrogression but of an advance: nay more, he managed so thoroughly

to root his system in the English mind that it stood the brunt of

many revolutions, and even in our own day obtains a traditionary kind

of honour, encrusted as our old foundations have become with the

overgrowth of three Protestant centuries.

The Wykehamist colleges were not only the most splendid academies

of learning founded at this time, but they opened the way to other

foundations of a similar description; and a kind of fashion set in

for founding schools and colleges, which, during the reigns of our

Lancastrian kings, multiplied over the land. The alarm excited by

the spread of Lollardism had something to do with this movement,

and it is remarkable that one Oxford college, that of Lincoln, was

founded by a prelate, Richard Fleming, who at an earlier period

had taken part with Wickliffe, but who, thoroughly startled out of

his partisanship, hastened to make amends for his fault by raising

what he hoped would become a nursery of learned divines, who

should confute the errors of the wily heresiarch. That Fleming was

thoroughly in earnest in his change of views was manifested at the

Council of Constance, when we find him distinguishing himself by

a very able opposition to the Hussites.[296] His kinsman, Robert

Fleming, travelled into Italy, and there studied in the school of the

young Guarini. He was one of the earliest English scholars who took

part in the revival of classical learning, and during his foreign

travels collected great store of books for Lincoln College, some of

which he transcribed and illuminated with his own hand, being in

fact a very skilful limner. He was the author of a Greek and Latin

dictionary, as well as of a Latin poem entitled, “Lucubrationes

Tiburtinæ.” In 1438, Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had

already shown himself a patron of learning by the erection of a free

school at Higham Ferrars, and of St. Bernard’s College at Oxford

for the use of the Cistercian students, laid the foundation of his

noble college of All Souls, most liberally endowed, and furnished

with books, chapel furniture, and every requisite for the use of the

students. And in 1448 William of Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester,

obtained the royal grant empowering him to erect his college of

Magdalene, in which the collegiate system was more perfectly carried

out than in any previous or subsequent foundation.

Besides these Oxford colleges, those of Eton, and King’s at

Cambridge, owed their foundation to the zeal of Henry VI., being in

avowed imitation of the plan, already adopted by Wykeham, of uniting

a public school to a house of higher studies at the university, thus

providing an entire course of instruction for elder and younger

scholars.

Having elsewhere[297] given a more particular account than space

will here admit of the foundations of Wykeham, Waynflete, and Henry

VI., so important in the history of English education, it will not

be necessary to dwell on them more at length in this place; but it

should be remembered that these, if the most splendid, were very

far from being the only educational institutions of the period.

Our ancient school-system had ramifications which extended into

every grade of society and we are, generally speaking, but little

familiar with the method by which that system was worked, because we

are equally unaccustomed to study the grand system of our ancient

Catholic charities. A class of magnificent foundations formerly

existed in England, of which there only remain such scanty ruins as

escaped the rapacity of Henry VIII. and the Protector, Somerset,

but the multitude and real nature of which is hardly appreciated. I

refer, of course, to the hospitals and collegiate establishments,

which administered a vast revenue, voluntarily made over by private

charity, for the discharge of all the works of mercy.

Some amongst my readers may be able to look back to early days, whose

first associations are blended with the thought of a venerable pile,

which seemed altogether out of proportion in size and magnificence

to the purposes of a simple parish church. On Sunday afternoons

when the psalm has been unusually long, or the preacher unusually

drowsy, their childish fancies have, it may be, been busy, among the

bosses of the fretted roof, speculating as to the possible meaning

of its wondrous embellishments, and perplexed to account for the

fact that they should be summoned week after week to worship in what

had the outward grandeur of a cathedral, whereas the town or village

clustered round the minster walls seemed wholly undeserving of such

a dignity. Attached to the church there is probably a school, as at

Ottery, or Southwell, or Crediton, or Doncaster, or Shrewsbury; and

if tourists come that way to inspect the encaustic pavement, or to

take rubbings of the fine old brasses, and wonder to find so huge a

building in so insignificant a locality, they are content to receive

the information given them by their guide book, that “the church was

once collegiate.” How vast a meaning may be enclosed in a simple

phrase! “The church was once collegiate!” Yes: it was attached to one

of those creations of Catholic piety which did the work of almshouse,

schoolhouse, workhouse, hospital, and parish church, or rather,

which did a great deal more than any or all of those put together,

and did it with a magnificent profuseness of liberality, which

strikes one dumb with astonishment and admiration. Thus, the great

Lancastrian College at Leicester, known as the Newark, or College

of St. Mary’s the Greater, the remains of which still cover many

acres of ground, was originally founded for a dean, twelve secular

canons, twelve vicars, three clerks, six choristers, fifty poor men,

as many poor women, ten nurses, and other officers and attendants,

all plentifully provided for. It had, according to Leland, an

exceedingly fair “college church, large and fair cloisters, some

pretty houses for the prebendaries in the college area, and stately

walls and gates,” much of all which is still standing. That of

St. Cross at Winchester was founded by Henry de Blois, Bishop of

Winchester, for the maintenance of thirteen poor men, and the daily

feeding of a hundred others, who were to enjoy their loaf of good

wheaten bread, weighing three pounds, their three quarts of good

small beer, and two messes either of fish or flesh, as the day should

require, in the Hundred-mennes-hall; and as the allowance was more

than any ordinary capacity could dispose of at table, the statutes

judiciously permitted them to carry home what they could not eat.

Cardinal Beaufort enlarged this noble foundation by providing for

the maintenance of thirty-five additional brethren, and appointing

three religious sisters to attend the sick, and bestowed on it the

beautiful title of the “Almshouse of Noble Poverty.” Here, too,

we find a grand collegiate church, with a warden, four chaplains,

thirteen clerks, and seven choristers, for whose instruction

provision was made by keeping up a school. Sometimes the school

appears as the chief object of the foundation, as in the College

of Ottery St. Mary’s in Devonshire, which Bishop Grandison erected

in 1337, for a warden, eight prebendaries, ten vicars, a master of

music, a grammar-master, two parish priests, eight secondaries,

eight choristers, and two clerks. Sometimes the corporal and

spiritual works of mercy were blended together, as at the hospital

of St. Leonard’s at York, which maintained a master, thirteen poor

brethren, four secular priests, eight sisters, thirty choristers, two

schoolmasters, two hundred and six bedesmen, and six servitors. The

whole was governed by semi-monastic statutes under the rule of St.

Austin. Most of the smaller hospitals of York had likewise schools

attached to them.

Sometimes, again, as at Beverley and Ripon, the magnificent

collegiate establishments seem principally designed for the

celebration of the divine offices with a splendour which could

not be carried out in parochial churches; and the schools and

other charities attached to these foundations were not the primary

idea. The same seems to have been the case in the great college

of Stoke-by-Clare, the statutes of which are so very precise and

rigorous as to the quality of the plain chant to be sung in choir;

but here, too, there was a school in which boys were to be taught

“grammar, singing, and good manners.” The endowments are not always

on so sumptuous a scale as in these last-named colleges; yet often

in very remote villages and rural parishes we find a modest hospital

designed for the support of a few bedesmen of honest life, and a

grammar-school, wherein, as in St. Gabriel’s Hospital at Brough, in

Westmoreland, the chaplain was required to teach grammar and singing

to the children of the place. Thus, too, at Ewelme, in Oxfordshire,

De la Pole and his duchess had founded an almshouse, called God’s

House, wherein a priest was appointed as schoolmaster to teach their

grammar to the children of the Ewelme tenantry; and a very similar

foundation existed at Bentley, in Derbyshire, where the family of

Mountjoy erected a small college for seven old servants of the

lordship, who were to have pasture for seven cows, wood from the

lord’s manor, and a new gown and hood every third year, on condition

of their saying our Lady’s Psalter twice a day for the founder in the

chapel of the hospital. This last item in the constitutions sealed

its fate at the time of the Reformation, and it was abolished, as

being mixed up with “superstitious observances.” In foundations of

this sort, which were exceedingly numerous, the great proprietors

educated the children of their own tenantry at the same time that

they provided for their superannuated servants.

There is much in the character of these ancient institutions that

is suggestive and instructive to ourselves. What a vast machinery,

what an enormous disbursement for, comparatively speaking, small

results! Surely thirteen poor brethren could be fed and clothed

without its being necessary for Dame Isabel Penbridge to found that

great college of Tonge, in Shropshire, with its establishment of

clerks, and chaplains, and choristers, and to supply them with that

body of solemn statutes which regulates their community life and

choral office with the exactness of a religious rule! Turn again

to St. Giles’ Hospital at Norwich, and reckon what endowments it

must have taken[298] to support a master, deacon, and subdeacon,

eight chaplains, wearing the habit of St. Austin’s canons, four lay

brothers, and seven choristers, who were to be scholars likewise;

together with four religious sisters, in order to take care of eight

infirm folk and a few poor superannuated priests, and daily to

entertain thirteen non-resident poor at the common table. A liberal

foundation, it may be said, for a few insignificant paupers; but it

is clear the founder had in his mind the celebration of High Mass

and the choral office; and that providing for the celebration of

holy rites with becoming solemnity was reckoned then a good work as

pleasing to God as the feeding of the poor.

Again, in what a beautiful light were the poor themselves

regarded. They were not “paupers,” but “brethren.” They were not

kept alive with water gruel, but fed with meat and ale, and good

“mostrell.”[299] They were not assigned a narrow bench in a distant

corner of those grand collegiate churches, but often enough had

stalls like so many canons. Such stalls are still to be seen, or at

least were so a few years since, in St. Mary’s Hospital, Chichester,

and, I am glad to say, were still occupied by their lawful

owners--the thirteen poor brethren. The church was _their_ church;

its numerous staff of clerks and choristers were assembled there to

sing the divine office for _them_; they were honoured, not despised;

and in their turn they felt an honest pride in wearing that reverend

garb--the black gown or overcoat, with its red, white, or silver

cross--such as may still be seen in the hospitals of Winchester or

Worcester.

And, as to the schools attached to such foundations, what must have

been the effect produced on the mind of the scholars whose earliest

and most abiding lesson was, that nothing was too great or too good

to give to God or the poor! For God, the stately minister, the

magnificent vestments, and the solemn chant, which made up the daily

business of a whole college of priests, clerks, and choristers.