comes refection of the body, which is placed after study hours because
“the imaginative virtue is generally impeded in those who are freshly
sated.” In their talk at luncheon or on the playground “clerks are
apt to fall from the Latin idiom into the mother tongue,” and for
him who speaks German the discretion of the master has invented a
dunce’s symbol called an ass, which the holder tries hard to pass on
to another. “Wer wel ein Griffel kouffe[n]?” “Ich wel ein Griffel
kouffen.” “Tecum sit asinus.” “Ach, quam falsus es tu!” Sometimes
the victim offers to meet his deceiver after vespers, with the usual
schoolboy brag on both sides. As it is forbidden to come to blows in
school, the boys are taught to work off their enmities and formulate
their complaints in Latin dialogue. “You were outside the town after
dark. You played with laymen Sunday. You went swimming Monday. You
stayed away from matins. You slept through mass.” “Reverend master,
he has soiled my book, he shouts after me wherever I go, he calls me
names.” Besides the formal disputations the scholars discuss such
current events as a street fight, a cousin’s wedding, the coming war
with the duke of Saxony, or the means of getting to Erfurt, whither
one of them is going when he is sixteen to study at the university.
The great ordeal of the day was the master’s quiz on Latin grammar,
when every one was questioned in turn (_auditio circuli_). The pupils
rehearse their declensions and conjugations and the idle begin to
tremble as the hour draws near. There is some hope that the master may
not come. “He has guests.” “But they will leave in time.” “He may go to
the baths.” “But it is not yet a whole week since he was there last.”
“There he comes. Name the wolf, and he forthwith appears.” Finally
the shaky scholar falls back on his only hope, a place near one who
promises to prompt him.
“When the recitation is over and the lesson given out, rejoicing
begins among the youth at the approach of the hour for going home,”
and they indulge in much idle talk “which is here omitted, lest it
furnish the means of offending.” Joy is, however, tempered by the
contest which precedes dismissal, “a serious and furious disputation
for the _palmiterium_,” until one secures the prize and another has the
_asinus_ to keep till next day.
After school the boys go to play in the churchyard, the sports
mentioned being hoops, marbles (apparently), ball (during Lent), and a
kind of counting game. The author distinguishes hoops for throwing and
for rolling, spheres of wood and of stone, but the subject soon becomes
too deep for his Latin, and in the midst of this topic the treatise
comes to an abrupt conclusion.
In some of its forms the student manual touches on territory already
occupied by another type of mediaeval handbook, the manual of manners,
which under such titles as “The Book of Urbanity,” “The Courtesies of
the Table,” etc., enjoyed much popularity from the thirteenth century
onward. Such manuals have, however, none of the polish of Castiglione’s
_Courtier_ or the elaborateness of the modern book of etiquette. Those
who have not mastered the use of knife and fork have little use for the
finer points of social intercourse, and the readers of the mediaeval
manuals were still at their a b c’s in the matter of behavior. Wash
your hands in the morning and, if you have time, your face; use your
napkin and handkerchief; eat with three fingers, and don’t gorge;
don’t be boisterous or quarrelsome at table; don’t stare at your
neighbor or his plate; don’t criticise the food; don’t pick your teeth
with your knife--such, with others still more elementary, are the
maxims which meet us in this period, in Latin and French, in English,
German, and Italian, but regularly in verse. Now and then there is a
further touch of the age: scrape bones with your knife but don’t gnaw
them; when you have done with them, put them in a bowl or on the floor!
* * * * *
If the correspondence of mediaeval students were preserved for us in
casual and unaffected detail, nothing could give a more vivid picture
of university conditions. Unfortunately in some respects for us,
the Middle Ages were a period of forms and types in letter-writing
as in other things; and for most men the writing of a letter was
less an expression of individual feeling and experience than it was
the laborious copying of a letter of some one else, altered where
necessary to suit the new conditions. And if something fresh or
individual was produced, there was small chance of preserving it, since
it was on that account all the less likely to be useful to a future
letter-writer--“so careful of the type, so careless of the single”
letter, history seems. The result is that the hundreds of student
letters which have reached us in the manuscripts of the Middle Ages
have come down through the medium of collections of forms or complete
letter-writers, shorn of most of their individuality but for that very
reason reflecting the more faithfully the fundamental and universal
phases of university life.
By far the largest element in the correspondence of mediaeval students
consists of requests for money; “a student’s first song is a demand for
money,” says a weary father in an Italian letter-writer, “and there
will never be a letter which does not ask for cash.” How to secure
this fundamental necessity of student life was doubtless one of the
most important problems that confronted the mediaeval scholar, and
many were the models which the rhetoricians placed before him in proof
of the practical advantages of their art. The letters are generally
addressed to parents, sometimes to brothers, uncles, or ecclesiastical
patrons; a much copied exercise contained twenty-two different methods
of approaching an archdeacon on this ever-delicate subject. Commonly
the student announces that he is at such and such a centre of learning,
well and happy but in desperate need of money for books and other
necessary expenses. Here is a specimen from Oxford, somewhat more
individual than the average and written in uncommonly bad Latin:
“B. to his venerable master A., greeting. This is to inform you that
I am studying at Oxford with the greatest diligence, but the matter
of money stands greatly in the way of my promotion, as it is now
two months since I spent the last of what you sent me. The city
is expensive and makes many demands; I have to rent lodgings, buy
necessaries, and provide for many other things which I cannot now
specify. Wherefore I respectfully beg your paternity that by the
promptings of divine pity you may assist me, so that I may be able to
complete what I have well begun. For you must know that without Ceres
and Bacchus Apollo grows cold.”
If the father was close-fisted, there were special reasons to be urged:
the town was dear--as university towns always are!--the price of living
was exceptionally high owing to a hard winter, a siege, a failure of
crops, or an unusual number of scholars; the last messenger had been
robbed or had absconded with the money; the son could borrow no more of
his fellows or of the Jews; and so on. The student’s woes are depicted
in moving language, with many appeals to paternal vanity and affection.
At Bologna we hear of the terrible mud through which the youth must
beg his way from door to door, crying, “O good masters,” and coming
home empty-handed. In an Austrian formulary a scholar writes from the
lowest depths of prison, where the bread is hard and moldy, the drink
water mixed with tears, the darkness so dense that it can actually be
felt. Another lies on straw with no covering, goes without shoes or
shirt, and eats he will not say what--a tale designed to be addressed
to a sister and to bring in response a hundred _sous tournois_, two
pairs of sheets, and ten ells of fine cloth, all sent without her
husband’s knowledge. “We have made little glosses, we owe money,” is
the terse summary of two students at Chartres.
To such requests the proper answer was, of course, an affectionate
letter, commending the young man’s industry and studious habits and
remitting the desired amount. Sometimes the student is cautioned
to moderate his expenses--he might have got on longer with what he
had, he should remember the needs of his sisters, he ought to be
supporting his parents instead of trying to extort money from them,
etc. One father--who quotes Horace!--excuses himself because of the
failure of his vineyards. It often happened, too, that the father or
uncle has heard bad reports of the student, who must then be prepared
to deny indignantly all such aspersions as the unfounded fabrications
of his enemies. Here is an example of paternal reproof taken from an
interesting collection relating to Franche-Comté:
“To his son G. residing at Orleans P. of Besançon sends greetings with
paternal zeal. It is written, ‘He also that is slothful in his work is
brother to him that is a great waster.’ I have recently discovered that
you live dissolutely and slothfully, preferring license to restraint
and play to work and strumming a guitar while the others are at their
studies, whence it happens that you have read but one volume of law
while your more industrious companions have read several. Wherefore I
have decided to exhort you herewith to repent utterly of your dissolute
and careless ways, that you may no longer be called a waster and your
shame may be turned to good repute.”
In the models of Ponce de Provence we find a teacher writing to a
student’s father that while the young man is doing well in his studies,
he is just a trifle wild and would be helped by judicious admonition.
Naturally the master does not wish it known that the information came
through him, so the father writes his son:
“I have learned--not from your master, although he ought not to hide
such things from me, but from a certain trustworthy source--that you do
not study in your room or act in the schools as a good student should,
but play and wander about, disobedient to your master and indulging in
sport and in certain other dishonorable practices which I do not now
care to explain by letter.” Then follow the customary exhortations to
reform.
Two boys at Orleans thus describe their arrival at this centre of
learning:
“To their dear and respected parents M. Martre, knight, and M. his
wife, M. and S. their sons send greeting and filial obedience. This is
to inform you that, by divine mercy, we are living in good health in
the city of Orleans and are devoting ourselves wholly to study, mindful
of the words of Cato, ‘To know anything is praiseworthy.’ We occupy a
good dwelling, next door but one to the schools and market-place, so
that we can go to school every day without wetting our feet. We have
also good companions in the house with us, well advanced in their
studies and of excellent habits--an advantage which we well appreciate,
for as the Psalmist says, ‘With an upright man thou wilt show thyself
upright.’”
Such youths were slow to quit academic life. Again and again they ask
permission to have their term of study extended; war might break out,
parents or brothers die, an inheritance have to be divided, but the
student pleads always for delay. He desires to “serve longer in the
camp of Pallas;” in any event he cannot leave before Easter, as his
masters have just begun important courses of lectures. A scholar is
called home from Siena to marry a lady of many attractions; he answers
that he deems it foolish to desert the cause of learning for the sake
of a woman, “for one may always get a wife, but science once lost can
never be recovered.”
The time to leave, however, must come at last, and then the great
problem is money for the expenses of commencement, or, as it was then
called, inception. Thus a student at Paris asks a friend to explain to
his father, “since the simplicity of the lay mind does not understand
such things,” how at length after much study nothing but lack of
money for the inception banquet stands in the way of his graduation.
From Orleans D. Boterel writes to his dear relatives at Tours that he
is laboring over his last volume of law and on its completion will
be able to pass to his licentiate provided they send him a hundred
_livres_ for the necessary expenses. An account of the inception at
Bologna was quoted in the preceding chapter.[12]
* * * * *
Unlike the student letters, which range over the whole of the later
Middle Ages, mediaeval student poetry, or rather the best of it, is
limited to a comparatively short period comprised roughly within the
years 1125 and 1225, and is closely connected with the classical
phase of the twelfth-century renaissance. It is largely the work of
the wandering clerks of the period--students, ex-students, professors
even--moving from town to town in search of learning and still more of
adventure, nominally clerks but leading often very unclerical lives.
“Far from their homes,” says Symonds, “without responsibilities, light
of purse and light of heart, careless and pleasure-seeking, they ran
a free, disreputable course.” “They are wont,” writes a monk of the
twelfth century, “to roam about the world and visit all its cities,
till much learning makes them mad; for in Paris they seek liberal arts,
in Orleans classics, at Salerno medicine, at Toledo magic, but nowhere
manners and morals.” Their chief habitat, however, was northern France,
the center of the new literary renaissance.
Possibly from some obscure allusion to Goliath the Philistine,
these wandering clerks took the name Goliardi and their verse is
generally known as Goliardic poetry. This literature is for the most
part anonymous, though recent research has individualized certain
writers of the group, notably a Master Hugh, canon of Orleans, ca.
1142, styled the Primate, and the so-called Archpoet. The Primate,
mordant, diabolically clever, thoroughly disreputable, became famous
for generations as “an admirable improviser, who if he had but turned
his heart to the love of God would have had a great place in divine
letters and have proved most useful to God’s church.” The Archpoet is
found chiefly in Italy from 1161 to 1165, going “on his own” in spring
and summer but when autumn comes on turning to beg shirt and cloak
from his patron, the archbishop of Cologne. Ordered to compose an epic
for the emperor in a week, he replies he cannot write on an empty
stomach--the quality of his verse depends on the quality of his wine:
Tales versus facio quale vinum bibo.
Good wine he must at times have found, for he composed the masterpiece
of the whole school, the Confession of a Goliard, that unforgettable
description of the burning temptations of Pavia which contains the
famous glorification of the joys of the tavern:
In the public house to die
Is my resolution;
Let wine to my lips be nigh
At life’s dissolution;
That will make the angels cry,
With glad elocution,
“Grant this toper, God on high,
Grace and absolution!”
Though written in Latin, the Goliardic verse has abandoned the ancient
metrical system for the rhyme and accent of modern poetry, but even the
best of modern versions, such as those of John Addington Symonds, from
which I am quoting, fail to render the swing, the lilt, the rhythmical
flow of the original. Its authors are familiar with classical mythology
and especially with the writings of Ovid, whose precepts, copied even
in severe Cluny, were freely followed. Most of all is this poetry
classical in its frankly pagan view of life. Its gods are Venus and
Bacchus, also Decius, the god of dice. Love and wine and spring, life
on the open road and under the blue sky, these are the common subjects;
the spirit is that of an intense delight in the world that is, a joy in
mere living, such as one finds in the Greek and Roman poets or in that
sonorous song of a later age which the academic world still cherishes,
Gaudeamus igitur iuvenes dum sumus.
In general the Goliardic poetry is of an impersonal sort, giving us
few details from any particular place, but reflecting the gayer,
more jovial, less reputable side of the life of mediaeval clerks.
The worshipful order of vagrants is described, open to men of every
condition and every clime, with its rules which are no rules,
late-risers, gamesters, roysterers, proud that none of its members has
more than one coat to his back, begging their way from town to town
with requests for money which sound like students’ letters in verse:
I, a wandering scholar lad,
Born for toil and sadness,
Oftentimes am driven by
Poverty to madness.
Literature and knowledge I
Fain would still be earning,
Were it not that want of pelf
Makes me cease from learning.
These torn clothes that cover me
Are too thin and rotten;
Oft I have to suffer cold,
By the warmth forgotten.
Scarce I can attend at church,
Sing God’s praises duly;
Mass and vespers both I miss,
Though I love them truly.
Oh, thou pride of N----,
By thy worth I pray thee
Give the suppliant help in need,
Heaven will sure repay thee.
Take a mind unto thee now
Like unto St. Martin;
Clothe the pilgrim’s nakedness,
Wish him well at parting.
So may God translate your soul
Into peace eternal,
And the bliss of saints be yours
In His realm supernal.
The brethren greet each other at wayside taverns with songs like this:
We in our wandering,
Blithesome and squandering,
Tara, tantara, teino!
Eat to satiety,
Drink with propriety;
Tara, tantara, teino!
Laugh till our sides we split,
Rags on our hides we fit;
Tara, tantara, teino!
Jesting eternally,
Quaffing infernally:
Tara, tantara, teino!
etc.
The assembled topers are described in another poem:
Some are gaming, some are drinking,
Some are living without thinking;
And of those who make the racket,
Some are stripped of coat and jacket;
Some get clothes of finer feather,
Some are cleaned out altogether;
No one there dreads death’s invasion,
But all drink in emulation.
Then they sacrilegiously drink once for all prisoners and captives,
three times for the living, a fourth time for the whole body of
Christians, a fifth for those departed in the faith, and so on to
the thirteenth for those who travel by land or water, and a final
and unlimited potation for king and Pope. Such poetry is plainly the
expression of a ‘wet’ age.
Often bibulous and erotic, the Goliardic verse contains a large amount
of parody and satire. Appealing to a public familiar with scripture and
liturgy, its authors parody anything--the Bible, hymns to the Virgin,
the canon of the mass, as in the “Drinkers’ Mass” and the “Office for
Gamblers.” One of the best-known pieces is a satire on the Papacy under
the caption of “The Gospel according to Mark-s of silver.” This is only
one of many bitter attacks on Rome, while the pride, hardness, and
greed of the higher clergy are portrayed in “Golias the Bishop.” The
point of view in general is that of the lower clergy, especially the
looser, wandering, undisciplined element which frequented the schools
and the roads, the _jongleurs_ of the clerical world, familiar subjects
of ecclesiastical legislation since the ninth century.
Poetry of this sort is so contrary to conventional conceptions of the
Middle Ages that some writers have denied its mediaeval character.
“It is,” says one, “mediaeval only in the chronological sense,” while
others find in it close affinities with the spirit of the Renaissance
or of the Reformation. It would be more consonant with the spirit of
history to enlarge our ideas of the Middle Ages so as to correspond to
the facts of mediaeval life. The Goliardi were neither humanists before
the Renaissance nor reformers before the Reformation; they were simply
men of the Middle Ages who wrote for their own time. If the writings of
these northern and chiefly French clerks seem to anticipate the Italian
Renaissance, it may be that the Renaissance began earlier and was less
specifically Italian than has been supposed. If the authors are more
secular, even more earthy, than we should expect clerks to be, we must
learn to expect something different. In lyric poetry, as in the epic
and the drama, we are now learning more of the close interpenetration
of the lay and ecclesiastical worlds, no longer separated by the
air-tight partitions which the imagination of a later day interposed.
And whether their spirit was lay or ecclesiastical, the Goliardi were
certainly human; they saw and felt life keenly, and they wrote of what
they knew.
* * * * *
It is time to redress the balance with a word about a less obtrusive
element, the good student. “The life of the virtuous student,” says
Dean Rashdall, “has no annals,”[13] and in all ages he has been less
conspicuous than his more dashing fellows. Thus the ideal scholar
of the sermons is a bit colorless but obedient, respectful, eager
to learn, assiduous at lectures, and bold in debate, pondering his
lessons even during his evening promenades by the river. The ideal
student of the manuals is he who practices their precepts. The typical
student of the letters has already described himself as devoted wholly
to study, though somewhat short of money. The good student of the
poems--there is no such person! Student poetry was “not all bacchic
or erotic or profane,”[14] but much of it was, and we must not look
here for the more serious side of academic life. Jean de Hauteville’s
account of the poor and industrious scholar is representative of a
large class of students but not of a large body of poetry. The good
student’s occupations are best reflected in the course of study, his
assiduity best seen in his note-books and disputations. The documents
which concern the educational side of the university are also a source
for student life! It has been observed that the alumni reunions of our
own day are often more prolific in recollections of student escapades
than of the daily performance of the allotted task. The studious lad
of today never breaks into the headlines as such, and no one has seen
fit to produce a play or a film “featuring the good student.” Yet
everyone familiar with contemporary universities knows that the serious
student exists in large numbers, and it has been shown conclusively
that the distinction he there achieves reflects itself in his later
life. So it was in the Middle Ages. The law students of Bologna
insisted on their money’s worth of teaching from their professors.
The examinations described by Robert de Sorbon required serious
preparation. Not only was the vocational motive a strong incentive to
study in the mediaeval university, but there was much enthusiasm for
knowledge and much discussion of intellectual subjects. The greater
universities, at least, were intellectually very much alive, with
something of that ‘religion of learning’ which had earlier called
Abelard’s pupils into the wilderness, there to build themselves huts
that they might feed upon his words. The books of the age were in large
measure written by its professors, and the students had the advantage
of seeing them in the making and thus drinking of learning at its
fountain-head. Then as now, the moral quality of a university depended
on the intensity and seriousness of its intellectual life.
If we consider the body of student literature as a whole, its most
striking, and its most disappointing, characteristic is its lack of
individuality. The _Manuale Scholarium_ is written for the use of all
scholars who propose to attend universities of students. The letters
are made as general as possible in order to fit the need of any student
who wants money, clothes, or books. Even the poems, where we have
some right to expect personal expression of feeling, have the generic
character of most mediaeval poetry; they are for the most part the
voice of a class, not of individuals.
At the same time it must be remembered that this characteristic of the
student productions, if it robs them of something of their interest,
increases their historical value. The historian deals with the general
rather than the particular, and his knowledge must be built up by a
painful collection and comparison of individual facts, which are often
too few or too unlike to admit of sound generalization. In the case of
these student records, however, that labor has already been performed
for him; in the form in which they come down to us they have lost,
at the hands of the students themselves, what is local and peculiar
and exceptional, and have become, what in view of the nature of our
information no historian could hope to make them, the generalized
experience of centuries of student life.