through all the documents of the thirteenth century in the Paris
_Chartularium_. Outside of the great controversies just mentioned the
result is meagre. In 1241 a series of ten errors was examined and
condemned by the chancellor and the professors of theology, a very
abstract series of propositions dealing with the visibility of the
divine essence, angels, and the exact abiding-place of glorified souls
in the next world, whether in the empyrean or the crystalline heaven.
In 1247 it appears that a certain Master Raymond had been imprisoned
for his errors by the advice of the masters of theology, and one
John de Brescain had been deprived of his right to teach because of
certain errors in logic “which seemed to come near Arian heresy,” thus
confusing the subjects of the two faculties, whose bounds had been
set by the fathers. In and about 1255 Paris was in a ferment over the
so-called ‘Eternal Gospel,’ an apocalyptic treatise which foretold a
new era of the Spirit, beginning in 1260, in which the New Testament,
the Pope, and the hierarchy should be superseded. Accepted by certain
advanced Franciscans, these doctrines became the occasion of a long
conflict with the Mendicant orders, but with no very decisive results.
In 1277 Paris received notice of thirty errors in arts condemned at
Oxford, not as heretical but as sufficient to cause the deposition of
the master teaching them; but when we find among them the abolition
of the cases of Latin nouns and the personal endings of verbs (_ego
currit_, _tu currit_, etc.), we are likely to sympathize more with
their unfortunate students than with the deposed masters. One is
reminded of the modern definition of academic freedom as “the right to
say what one thinks without thinking what one says!”
With these as the only notable examples of interference with free
teaching at the storm centre of theological speculation in the most
active period of its history, we must infer that there was a large
amount of actual freedom. Trouble arose almost entirely out of what was
deemed theological heresy, or undue meddling with theological subjects
by those who lacked theological training. Those who stuck to their
job seem generally to have been let alone. As the great jurist Cujas
replied in the sixteenth century when asked whether he was Protestant
or Catholic, _Nihil hoc ad edictum praetoris_. Even within the more
carefully guarded field of theology and philosophy, it is doubtful
whether many found themselves cramped. Accepting the principle of
authority as their starting-point, men did not feel its limitations as
we should feel them now. A fence is no obstacle to those who do not
desire to go outside, and many barriers that would seem intolerable to
a more sceptical age were not felt as barriers by the schoolmen. He is
free who feels himself free.
Furthermore, for those accustomed to the wide diversities of the
modern world, it is easy to form a false impression of the uniformity
and sameness of mediaeval thought. Scholasticism was not one thing
but many, as its historians constantly remind us, and the contests
between different schools and shades of opinion were as keen as
among the Greeks or in our own day. And if the differences often
seem minute or unreal to our distant eye, we can make them modern
enough by turning, for example, to the old question of the nature of
universal conceptions, which divided the Nominalists and Realists
of the Middle Ages. Are universals mere names, or have they a real
existence, independent of their individual embodiments? A bit arid
it all sounds if we make it merely a matter of logic, but exciting
enough as soon as it becomes a question of life. The essence of the
Reformation lies implicit in whether we take a nominalist or a realist
view of the church; the central problem of politics depends largely
upon a nominalist or a realist view of the state. Upon the two sides
of this last question millions of men have “all uncouthly died,” all
unconsciously too, no doubt, in the majority of cases, unaware of the
ultimate issues of political authority for which they fought, but yet
able to comprehend them when expressed in the concrete form of putting
the interest of the state above the interest of its members.
In his own time and his own way the mediaeval professor often dealt
with permanent human interests as he sharpened men’s wits and kept
alive the continuous tradition of learning.
III
THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT
“A University,” it has more than once been remarked by professors,
“would be a very comfortable place were it not for the students.” So
far we have been considering universities from the point of view of
professors; it is now the turn of the students, for whether these be
regarded as a necessary evil or as the main reason for the university’s
existence, they certainly cannot be ignored. A mediaeval university
was no regiment of colonels but “a society of masters _and scholars_,”
and to this second and more numerous element we must now direct our
attention.
The mediaeval student is a more elusive figure than his teachers, for
he is individually less conspicuous and must generally be seen in
the mass. Moreover the mass is much diversified in time and space,
so that generalization is difficult, what is true of one age and one
university being quite untrue of other times and places. Even within
the briefer span of American universities there are wide differences
among the students of, let us say, Harvard in the seventeenth
century, William and Mary in the eighteenth century, California in
the nineteenth century, and Columbia in the twentieth century; and
it would be impossible to make a true picture out of elements drawn
indiscriminately from such disparate sources. Until the conditions
at each university of the Middle Ages shall have been studied
chronologically, no sound account of student life in general can be
written, and this preliminary labor has nowhere been systematically
attempted. At present we can do no more than indicate the principal
sources of our information and the kind of light they throw upon
student life.
Fortunately, out of the scattered remains of mediaeval times, there
has come down to us a considerable body of material which deals, more
or less directly, with student affairs. There are, for one thing, the
records of the courts of law, which, amid the monotonous detail of
petty disorders and oft-repeated offences, preserve now and then a
vivid bit of mediaeval life--like the case of the Bolognese student who
was attacked with a cutlass in a class-room, to the great damage and
loss of those assembled to hear the lecture of a noble and egregious
doctor of laws; or the student in 1289 who was set upon in the street
in front of a lecture-room by a certain scribe, “who wounded him on
the head with a stone, so that much blood gushed forth,” while two
companions gave aid and counsel, saying, “Give it to him, hit him,”
and when the offence had been committed ran away. So the coroners’
rolls of Oxford record many a fatal issue of town and gown riots, while
a recently published register of 1265 and 1266 shows the students
of Bologna actively engaged in raising money by loans and by the
sale of textbooks. There are of course the university and college
statutes, with their prohibitions and fines, regulating the subjects
of conversation, the shape and color of caps and gowns, that academic
dress which looks to us so mediaeval and is, especially in its American
form, so very modern; careful also of the weightier matters of the law,
like the enactment of New College against throwing stones in chapel, or
the graded penalties at Leipzig for him who picks up a missile to throw
at a professor, him who throws and misses, and him who accomplishes
his fell purpose to the master’s hurt. The chroniclers, too, sometimes
interrupt their narrative of the affairs of kings and princes to tell
of students and their doings, although their attention, like that
of their modern successors, the newspapers, is apt to be caught by
outbreaks of student lawlessness rather than by the wholesome routine
of academic life.
Then we have the preachers of the time, many of them also professors,
whose sermons contain frequent allusions to student customs; indeed
if further evidence were needed to dispel the illusion that the
mediaeval university was devoted to biblical study and religious
nurture, the Paris preachers of the period would offer sufficient
proof. “The student’s heart is in the mire,” says one of them, “fixed
on prebends and things temporal and how to satisfy his desires.” “They
are so litigious and quarrelsome that there is no peace with them;
wherever they go, be it Paris or Orleans, they disturb the country,
their associates, even the whole university.” Many of them go about
the streets armed, attacking the citizens, breaking into houses, and
abusing women. They quarrel among themselves over dogs, women, or
what-not, slashing off one another’s fingers with their swords, or,
with only knives in their hands and nothing to protect their tonsured
pates, rush into conflicts from which armed knights would hold back.
Their compatriots come to their aid, and soon whole nations of
students may be involved in the fray. These Paris preachers take us
into the very atmosphere of the Latin quarter and show us much of its
varied activity. We hear the cries and songs of the streets--
Li tens s’en veit,
Et je n’ei riens fait;
Li tens revient,
Et je ne fais riens--
the students’ tambourines and guitars, their “light and scurrilous
words,” their hisses and handclappings and loud shouts of applause at
sermons and disputations. We watch them as they mock a neighbor for her
false hair or stick out their tongues and make faces at the passers-by.
We see the student studying by his window, talking over his future with
his room-mate, receiving visits from his parents, nursed by friends
when he is ill, singing psalms at a student’s funeral, or visiting a
fellow-student and asking him to visit him--“I have been to see you,
now come to our hospice.”
All types are represented. There is the poor student, with no friend
but St. Nicholas, seeking such charity as he can find or earning a
pittance by carrying holy water or copying for others, in a fair but
none too accurate hand, sometimes too poor to buy books or afford
the expense of a course in theology, yet usually surpassing his more
prosperous fellows who have an abundance of books at which they never
look. There is the well-to-do student, who besides his books and desk
will be sure to have a candle in his room and a comfortable bed with a
soft mattress and luxurious coverings, and will be tempted to indulge
the mediaeval fondness for fine raiment beyond the gown and hood and
simple wardrobe prescribed by the statutes. Then there are the idle
and aimless, drifting about from master to master and from school to
school, and never hearing full courses or regular lectures. Some, who
care only for the name of scholar and the income which they receive
while attending the university, go to class but once or twice a week,
choosing by preference the lectures on canon law, which leave them
plenty of time for sleep in the morning. Many eat cakes when they
ought to be at study, or go to sleep in the class-rooms, spending the
rest of their time drinking in taverns or building castles in Spain
(_castella in Hispania_); and when it is time to leave Paris, in order
to make some show of learning such students get together huge volumes
of calfskin, with wide margins and fine red bindings, and so with wise
sack and empty mind they go back to their parents. “What knowledge
is this,” asks the preacher, “which thieves may steal, mice or moths
eat up, fire or water destroy?” and he cites an instance where the
student’s horse fell into a river, carrying all his books with him.
Some never go home, but continue to enjoy in idleness the fruits of
their benefices. Even in vacation time, when the rich ride off with
their servants and the poor trudge home under the burning sun, many
idlers remain in Paris to their own and the city’s harm. Mediaeval
Paris, we should remember, was not only the incomparable “parent of
the sciences,” but also a place of good cheer and good fellowship and
varied delights, a favorite resort not only of the studious but of
country priests on a holiday; and it would not be strange if sometimes
scholars prolonged their stay unduly and lamented their departure in
phrases which are something more than rhetorical commonplace.
Then the student is not unknown to the poets of the period, among whom
Rutebeuf gives a picture of thirteenth-century Paris not unlike that
of the sermonizers, while in the preceding century Jean de Hauteville
shows the misery of the poor and diligent scholar falling asleep over
his books, and Nigel “Wireker” satirizes the English students at Paris
in the person of an ass, Brunellus,--“Daun Burnell” in Chaucer--who
studies there seven years without learning a word, braying at the end
as at the beginning of his course, and leaving at last with the resolve
to become a monk or a bishop. Best of all is Chaucer’s incomparable
portrait of the clerk of Oxenford, hollow, threadbare, unworldly--
For him was lever have at his beddes heed
Twenty bokes, clad in blak or reed,
Of Aristotle and his philosophye,
Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrye.
* * * * *
Souninge in moral vertu was his speche,
And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.
But after all, no one knows so much about student life as the students
themselves, and it is particularly from what was written by and for
them, the student literature of the Middle Ages, that I wish to draw
more at length. Such remains of the academic past fall into three chief
classes: student manuals, student letters, and student poetry. Let us
consider them in this order.
The manuals of general advice and counsel addressed to the mediaeval
scholar do not call for extended consideration. Formal treatises on the
whole duty of students are characteristic of the didactic habit of mind
of the Middle Ages, but the advice which they contain is apt to be of a
very general sort, applicable to one age as well as another and lacking
in those concrete illustrations which enliven the sermons of the period
into useful sources for university life.
A more interesting type of student manual, the student dictionary,
owes its existence to the position of Latin as the universal language
of mediaeval education. Textbooks were in Latin, lectures were in
Latin, and, what is more, the use of Latin was compulsory in all forms
of student intercourse. This rule may have been designed as a check
on conversation, as well as an incentive to learning, but it was
enforced by penalties and informers (called wolves), and the freshman,
or yellow-beak, as he was termed in mediaeval parlance, might find
himself but ill equipped for making himself understood in his new
community. For his convenience a master in the University of Paris
in the thirteenth century, John of Garlande, prepared a descriptive
vocabulary, topically arranged and devoting a large amount of space
to the objects to be seen in the course of a walk through the streets
of Paris. The reader is conducted from quarter to quarter and from
trade to trade, from the book-stalls of the Parvis Notre-Dame and the
fowl-market of the adjoining Rue Neuve to the money-changers’ tables
and goldsmiths’ shops on the Grand-Pont and the bow-makers of the Porte
S.-Lazare, not omitting the classes of _ouvrières_ whose acquaintance
the student was most likely to make. Saddlers and glovers, furriers,
cobblers, and apothecaries, the clerk might have use for the wares of
all of them, as well as the desk and candle and writing-materials which
were the special tools of his calling; but his most frequent relations
were with the purveyors of food and drink, whose agents plied their
trade vigorously through the streets and lanes of the Latin quarter and
worked off their poorer goods on scholars and their servants. There
were the hawkers of wine, crying their samples of different qualities
from the taverns; the fruit-sellers, deceiving clerks with lettuce and
cress, cherries, pears, and green apples; and at night the vendors of
light pastry, with their carefully covered baskets of wafers, waffles,
and rissoles--a frequent stake at the games of dice among students,
who had a custom of hanging from their windows the baskets gained by
lucky throws of the six. The _pâtissiers_ had also more substantial
wares suited to the clerical taste, tarts filled with eggs and cheese
and well-peppered pies of pork, chicken, and eels. To the _rôtissiers_
scholars’ servants resorted, not only for the pigeons, geese, and
other fowl roasted on their spits, but also for uncooked beef, pork,
and mutton, seasoned with garlic and other strong sauces. Such fare,
however, was not for the poorer students, whose slender purses limited
them to tripe and various kinds of sausage, over which a quarrel
might easily arise and “the butchers be themselves butchered by angry
scholars.”
A dictionary of this sort easily passes into another type of treatise,
the manual of conversation. This method of studying foreign languages
is old, as survivals from ancient Egypt testify, and it still spreads
its snares for the unwary traveller who prepares to conquer Europe _à
la_ Ollendorff. To the writers of the later Middle Ages it seemed to
offer an exceptional opportunity for combining Instruction in Latin
with sound academic discipline, and from both school and university
it left its monuments for our perusal. The most interesting of these
handbooks is entitled a “Manual of Scholars who propose to attend
universities of students and to profit therein,” and while in its
most common form it is designed for the students of Heidelberg about
the year 1480, it could be adapted with slight changes to any of the
German universities. “Rollo at Heidelberg,” we might call it. Its
eighteen chapters conduct the student from his matriculation to his
degree, and inform him by the way on many subjects quite unnecessary
for either. When the young man arrives he registers from Ulm; his
parents are in moderate circumstances; he has come to study. He is
then duly hazed after the German fashion, which treats the candidate
as an unclean beast with horns and tusks which must be removed by
officious fellow-students, who also hear his confession of sin and
fix as the penance a good dinner for the crowd. He begins his studies
by attending three lectures a day, and learns to champion nominalism
against realism and the comedies of Terence against the law, and to
discuss the advantages of various universities and the price of food
and the quality of the beer in university towns. Then we find him and
his room-mate quarrelling over a mislaid book; rushing at the first
sound of the bell to dinner, where they debate the relative merits of
veal and beans; or walking in the fields beyond the Neckar, perhaps by
the famous Philosophers’ Road which has charmed so many generations
of Heidelberg youth, and exchanging Latin remarks on the birds and
fish as they go. Then there are shorter dialogues: the scholar breaks
the statutes; he borrows money, and gets it back; he falls in love
and recovers; he goes to hear a fat Italian monk preach or to see the
jugglers and the jousting in the market-place; he knows the dog-days
are coming--he can feel them in his head! Finally our student is told
by his parents that it is high time for him to take his degree and
come home. At this he is much disturbed; he has gone to few lectures,
and he will have to swear that he has attended regularly; he has not
worked much and has incurred the enmity of many professors; his master
discourages him from trying the examination; he fears the disgrace of
failure. But his interlocutor reassures him by a pertinent quotation
from Ovid and suggests that a judicious distribution of gifts may do
much--a few florins will win him the favor of all. Let him write home
for more money and give a great feast for his professors; if he treats
them well, he need not fear the outcome. This advice throws a curious
light upon the educational standards of the time; it appears to have
been followed, for the manual closes with a set of forms inviting the
masters to the banquet and the free bath by which it was preceded.
If university students had need of such elementary compends of morals
and manners, there was obviously plenty of room for them in the lower
schools as well, where they were apt to take the form of Latin couplets
which could be readily impressed upon the pupil’s memory. Such _statuta
vel precepta scolarium_ seem to have been especially popular in
the later fifteenth century in those city schools of Germany whose
importance has been so clearly brought out by recent historians of
secondary education. Wandering often from town to town, like the roving
scholars of an earlier age, these German boys had good need to observe
the moral maxims thus purveyed. The beginning of wisdom was to remember
God and obey the master, but the student had also to watch his behavior
in church and lift up his voice in the choir--compulsory attendance
at church and singing in the choir being a regular feature of these
schools--keep his books clean, and pay his school bills promptly. Face
and hands should be washed in the morning, but the baths should not be
visited without permission, nor should boys run on the ice or throw
snowballs. Sunday was the day for play, but this could be only in the
churchyard, where boys must be careful not to play with dice or break
stones from the wall or throw anything over the church. And whether at
play or at home, Latin should always be spoken.
More systematic is a manual of the fifteenth century preserved in a
manuscript of the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris.[11] “Since by reason
of imbecility youths cannot advance to a knowledge of the Latin tongue
by theory alone,” the author has for their assistance prepared a set
of forms which contain the expressions most frequently employed by
clerks. Beginning with the courtesies of school life, for obedience
and due reverence for the master are the beginning of wisdom, the
boy learns how to greet his master and to take leave, how to excuse
himself for wrong-doing, how to invite the master to dine or sup with
his parents--there are half a dozen forms for this! He is also taught
how to give proper answers to those who seek to test his knowledge,
“that he may not appear an idiot in the sight of his parents.” “If the
master asks, ‘Where have you been so long?’” he must be ready, not
only to plead the inevitable headache or failure to wake up, but also
to express the causes of delay well known to any village boy. He had
to look after the house or feed the cattle or water the horse; he was
detained by a wedding, by picking grapes, or making out bills, or--for
these were German boys--by helping with the brew, fetching beer, or
serving drink to guests.