Augusta Theodosia Drane

ENGLISH SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES.

A.D. 1149 TO 1170.

The paramount importance attaching to the schools of Paris has too long detained us from following the history of scholarship in our own island; and we shall now have to retrace our steps some two hundred years, in order, before speaking of the Oxford schools and scholars of the thirteenth century, to say something of the origin of the university, and to notice the other English schools existing at the same period. It would be little less than audacious to pretend to give any authentic account of the rise of Oxford University, and we may as well at once admit the fact that one of our great national institutions, alive and vigorous in the nineteenth century, dates its beginning from ages whose traditions are purely mythical. However far we go back in the history of Oxford, we are always referred to some date that is yet earlier. From the reign of the Confessor, we glance back to the days of the great Alfred, who allotted one-eighth of his revenue to the support of her schools, and is popularly regarded as her founder. But even Alfred cannot claim to have done more than restore the schools which had existed there before his time, and the history of St. Frideswide carries us back to the eighth century, and tells us how in the reign of her father, Didan, King of Mercia, certain inns were constructed in the vicinity of St. Mary’s Church, diversoria religioni aptissima, which were used as places of education, and grew into a religious house, afterwards dedicated to St. Frideswide. This famous priory was the real nucleus of the university. In 1049 Harold, then Earl of Oxford, placed canons here; then came the Norman Conquest, and in the reign of Henry the Scholar, who had received his early education from the monks of Abingdon, the king handed the priory over to his favourite chaplain Guimond, who established therein a community of Norman canons, and set about building, as none but a Norman prior knew how to build.

From St. Frideswide’s priory let us now turn to the old residence of the Mercian kings, in which Offa resided, which Alfred made a “king’s house,” which had Saxon towers, deemed to be ancient in the days of the Confessor, and which, eight years after the Conquest, was granted to Robert D’Oyley, who added the great keep and other buildings. Within the castle of Oxford thus founded, he and his sworn brother in arms, Robert D’Ivery, raised a church dedicated to St. George, and served by secular canons. This was the second foundation stone of the university; and in 1149 his nephew, Robert D’Oyley the Second, transferred the foundation to his priory of Austin Canons at Osney. I cannot withhold from the curious reader the legend of the foundation of Osney, as it is quaintly related by Leland. After telling us that Robert D’Oyley had married a wife named Edith, and founded a priory of black canons “at Oseney by Oxford, among the isles that Isis river ther makyth,” he continues: “Sum write that this was the occasion of the making of it. Edithe usid to walke out of the Castelle with her gentlewomen to solace, and oftentimes wher yn a certen place in a tre, as often as she cam, a certen Pyes usid to gither to it, and ther to chattre, and as it were, to speke on to her. Edithe much mervelyng at this matter, and was sometyme sore ferid as by a wondre, whereupon she sent for one Radulphe, a Chanon of S. Frediswide’s, a man of a vertuous lyfe, and her confessour, askyng hym counsell: to whom he answerid aftir he had sene the faschion of the Pyes chatteryng only at her cummyng, that she shulde bilde sum chirche or monasterie in that place. Then she entreated her husband to bilde a priorie, which he did, makyng Radulphe first prior of it. The cummynge of Edithe to Oseney, and Radulphe waiting on her, and the tre with the chatteryng Pyes be payntid in the waulle of the arch over Edith’s tumbe in Oseney Priorie.”[243]

The two priories of Osney and St. Frideswide became both of them great houses of study, but the little church of St. George had also its share in the same work. The apartments in the castle formerly occupied by the canons were, after their removal to Osney, made over to certain poor scholars, known as “the wardens and scholars of St. George, within the castle of Oxford.” They formed perhaps the earliest collegiate establishment of the university, being governed by a body of statutes, wherein mention is made of a warden, fellows, scholars, and commoners. The warden was always one of the Osney canons, who came once or twice in the week to see that good order was preserved, and in his absence governed through his deputy. Tanner gives some curious particulars of the customs in use among the fellows, and the ceremonies of their installation, and tells us that Henry V. had intended to have enlarged this college into a splendid royal foundation, but was prevented by death from carrying out his design.

Other inns and halls of a quasi collegiate character gradually clustered round these religious houses. No fewer than forty-two hospitia, or inns for scholars, were inhabited in Robert D’Oyley’s time. So early as 1175, the Benedictines of Winchcombe Abbey had established a studium generale at Oxford, for the use of their monks, and a great number of schools, some attached to religious and collegiate houses, and others presided over by independent masters, very early gave their name to “School Street.” In these buildings there was no attempt at architectural grandeur. They were only distinguished from those devoted to “base mechanic uses” by quaint devices and inscriptions over their doors. Both halls and schools before 1170 were built of timber and thatched with straw, when a great fire destroyed the greater part of the city, and the inhabitants were induced to erect a few stone and slated edifices, the “stramina,” or thatched houses, still appearing in many localities. The schools of Osney Abbey were only rooms over certain shops, and the lectures were read by the masters in their own chambers. The effect of the “Aularian” system, as it has been called, was certainly to multiply the number of the scholars; for many were able to pursue their studies in the wretched accommodation thus afforded them, who could find no place in the richer colleges of later times. To the thousands of native scholars were added those who, after the fashion of the times, resorted to Oxford from other countries, no man being then content with studying at a single academy, or thinking he had qualified himself for the post of doctor till he had passed some years in foreign schools. It was no easy matter to preserve discipline in such a motley society; the chancellor was the only recognised authority, and when his single arm proved insufficient for the task of government, he was assisted by an officer named the Hebdomadarius, now represented by the Hebdomadal Board. The disorders which prevailed here, as at Paris, finally led to the establishment of colleges with regular statutes of discipline; but this change, which had the immediate effect of diminishing the number of students, was not even begun before the reign of Henry III.

Previous to that date, it would not be easy to determine with any exactness the system of discipline or of studies that prevailed. We know, however, that in 1133, when Robert Pulleyne came over from Paris and opened his school in Oxford, he found sacred letters had for some years fallen into neglect, and, to restore them, not only read lectures on the Scriptures gratuitously, but obtained the services of other professors at his own expense. He also preached every Sunday to the people, and left no stone unturned to instruct the students in the learned languages. In 1142 he was summoned to Rome by Innocent II., and, becoming Cardinal and Chancellor of the Roman Church, obtained large privileges for the Oxford scholars. In 1149, the very date of the Osney foundation, when England was in the thick of the disturbances of Stephen’s reign, Vacarius, a Bolognese professor, began to deliver lectures on civil law at Oxford, and that with so much success as to throw the schools of arts and theology into the shade. Before the end of the century, the study of canon law was added, and about the same time the lectures on medicine began to attract so much attention that the authorities felt a reasonable alarm lest their university should altogether cease to be a seat of liberal learning. “Physic brings men riches,” they said, “and law leads to honour, while logic is forced to go a-foot.” All the divines of the day, both at home and abroad, agreed in condemning the preference given to law over theology. “What is this?” exclaims St. Bernard, “from morning till night we litigate and hear litigation: day after day uttereth strife, and night after night indicateth malice.” And in the same spirit Stephen Langton reproves his fellow-ecclesiastics for “leaving the true field of Booz, the study of Holy Scripture, in order that they may win the poor honour of being called decretalists.” Arts, indeed, always continued to be regarded theoretically as the proper subject of Oxford University studies, but in their eagerness to acquire the more lucrative branches of learning, the students were too often content with a smattering of polite letters. Hence, according to Wood, they came to be divided into three classes, the Shallow, the Patchy, and the Solid. The first did not study arts at all, the second crammed from convenient abstracts, and the third, a very small minority, laid a good foundation, and thereon built a tolerable superstructure.

The troubles which affected the English Church in the reign of Henry II. affected the university very unfavourably. The persecution directed against St. Thomas and his adherents, created such a general feeling of insecurity that, in 1169, a great number of the Oxford students emigrated in a body to Paris, where they were well received by Louis VII. Indeed, at this time there was no European country in which some English scholars might not be found, who preferred a voluntary exile to the dangers to which they thought themselves exposed at home from the hands of the royal tyrant. This crisis hastened the decay of liberal studies at Oxford. Daniel Merlac, who, about the close of Henry’s reign, travelled into Spain to collect books and perfect himself in mathematics, declares, in the preface to his treatise De Rerum Naturis, that it was his knowledge of the neglect of good learning which prevailed in his own country which induced him to remain so long in exile. He passes a very severe criticism on the ignorance of the professors, not only at Oxford, but at Paris also, agreeing pretty much with the strictures passed by John of Salisbury on the “Cornificians.” In particular, he describes with great disgust the conduct of certain “beasts,” as he calls them, whom he saw occupying seats at the latter university with an air of great importance, having desks set out before them, with huge books adorned with golden letters, wherein, from time to time, they solemnly jotted down a word or two. It was all very well, so long as they kept silence, but as soon as they opened their mouths they betrayed their ignorance. Wood, who complains bitterly of the decay of humane learning caused by the reign of law at Oxford, and of logic in France says that polite letters would never have fallen into such neglect had the monastic schools retained their ascendancy. As it was, he says, “purity of speech decayed, philosophy was neglected, and nothing but Parisian quirks prevailed.”

Oxford revived a little during the reign of the Lion-hearted Richard, who loved the city as his birthplace, and, moreover, was inclined to favour the university, were it only to emulate his great rival, Philip Augustus, who had declared himself the protector of the Paris scholars. His brother John seemed at first disposed to follow his example, and granted the students their first charter, exempting them from the jurisdiction of the Ordinary; but he soon counterbalanced this favour by hanging three clerks—an act so deeply resented by the ecclesiastical authorities that the city was laid under an interdict, and the scholars dispersed to Cambridge, Reading, and Maidstone.

Better days dawned on the Church on the accession of Henry III. The arrival of the mendicant orders in England gave an immense stimulus to the schools, and in 1229 the king took occasion of the quarrel just then raging between the civil and academic authorities at Paris, to invite the discontented masters and scholars over to England. This immigration from France raised Oxford to a high degree of prosperity. The number of her students is said to have risen to 30,000, though Wood admits that the company was not always the most select. “Among these,” he says, “were a set of varlets, who pretended to be scholars, shuffling themselves in, and doing much villany in the university by thieving, quarrelling, &c. They lived under no discipline and had no tutors, but, only for fashion’s sake, would sometimes thrust themselves into the schools at ordinary lectures; and when they went to perform any mischief, then would they be accounted scholars, that so they might free themselves from the jurisdiction of the burghers.”

The presence of so many “varlets” will perhaps account for the frequency of unseemly brawls which disturbed the peace of the city, and brought sad discredit on the university. One instance will suffice to show the semibarbarous state of society in the city of letters at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Cardinal Otho, the cardinal legate, coming to Oxford in 1238, was honourably entertained at Osney Abbey. The scholars sent him a handsome present for his table, and a deputation of them came after dinner to pay their respects. The Italian porter, however, not only refused them admission, but, through the half-open door, loaded them with abuse. This, of course, was not to be endured; the door was forced in a moment, and a lively contest ensued between the English and the Italians. The cardinal’s steward, stung with the derisive epithets lavished on him by the scholars, threw some dirty water in the face of a poor Irish priest, who was patiently waiting at the door for some broken victuals. This was the signal for a call to arms, and one of the party, seizing a bow, shot the unhappy steward dead on the spot. The legate took refuge in the church tower, whence, escaping by night, he joined the king and demanded justice. Thirty scholars were accordingly arrested, the city was laid under another interdict, and all the university exercises suspended. Nor was tranquillity restored till ample satisfaction had been offered by the English bishops, who, says Matthew Paris, were ready to make any sacrifice necessary to preserve “the second school of the Church.”

Brawls of this sort make up a very large portion of early Oxford history. Here, as at Paris, the division of “nations” was a fruitful source of squabbling. Northerns and Southerns, Welshmen, Englishmen, and Irishmen, fought pitched battles, one with another, on all available opportunities; and the Jews, whose audacity reached an incredible height, did their best to add another element of discord by disturbing the scholars at their prayers. We need not enter into the history of these strange disturbances. The Irish seem to have exhibited the greatest pugnacity, and obliged the magistrates to pass many wholesome laws for their correction and conversion to “more civil walking,” though, as it would seem, with very small success. The chief occasions on which the king’s peace was wont to be broken were the national festivals celebrated in honour of St. George, St. Patrick, and St. David; and at length it became necessary to forbid popular demonstrations on these days, under pain of the greater excommunication.

In this early period of the university history, the schools frequented by the scholars were of two kinds,—the secular schools ruled by masters who rented rooms in the houses and over the shops of the burghers, and the claustral schools, held in the various religious houses. As a general rule, the students were expected to know grammar before matriculating at the university, but in case they entered very young, or that their early education had been neglected, they could make up their deficiencies in the grammar schools, some of which were afterwards attached to colleges, for the benefit of the clerks and choristers connected with those institutions. Wood gives some interesting particulars about these grammar schools. He says they were placed by the chancellor under the supervision of some master of arts, to whom the grammar master promised obedience. He moreover engaged to read nothing with his scholars without license from the chancellor, to instruct them in Latin authors, and make them construe in French as well as English, and not to read certain portions of the Latin poets, which might be considered injurious to good morals. Degrees were at that time granted in grammar, as in other faculties. Thus, in the reign of Edward I., we find Maurice Byrchensaw graduating as bachelor of grammar and rhetoric, and composing, as his customary exercise on that occasion, a hundred verses in praise of the university, and thereupon having his head solemnly crowned with laurel.

Some of the illustrations which Wood has collected as to the state of studies at Oxford in ancient times, are sufficiently amusing. It seems that Lent was generally a time unfavourable to peace, by reason of the unusual amount of logical disputation, indulged in at that season by the scholars who were preparing for their degrees. Hence the king’s peace was very often broken over the discussion of quiddities, and the grammar students showed themselves equally pugnacious over the niceties of Latin syntax. Musical degrees were very often granted, the candidates being required to read the musical books of BoËthius, and on the day of inception to present a mass of their own composition, which was to be sung on the occasion, together with certain antiphons. The masses and antiphons were generally composed in two parts, up to the time of Henry VIII., who, being exceedingly skilful in musical science, was able, not only to sing his part sure, but to compose masses in four, five, and even six parts, which more complicated style of composition thus came into fashion at the university.

The Oxford scholars often complained of the grievance of having to attend the schools on festival days, and presented more than one poetical petition to the ruling powers that they might have a little breathing space, at least on the greater feasts. And certainly, if we may take the account given us at a considerably later period as furnishing any notion of the life of a poor scholar of the thirteenth century, it was one of hard work and little comfort. It occurs in a sermon preached at Cambridge in the middle of the sixteenth century, by Thomas Lever, Fellow of St John’s, and has been preserved by the historian Strype. There is every reason to suppose that the picture which he gives would apply as well to the reign of the First as to that of the Sixth Edward; substituting the hearing of Mass for the attendance of common prayer. “There be divers which rise daily about four or five of the clock in the morning, and from five to six use common prayer in a common chapel; and from six till ten of the clock use ever either private study or common lectures. At ten of the clock they go to dinner, whereat they be content with a penny piece of beef among four, having a few pottage made of the broth of the said beef, with salt and oatmeal, and nothing else. After this slender diet they be either teaching or learning until five of the clock in the evening; whereat they have a supper not much better than their dinner. Immediately after which they go either to reasoning in problems or to some other study until it be nine or ten o’clock; and then, being without fires, they are fain to walk, or run up and down half an hour, to get a heat on their feet when they go to bed.”

At the opening of the thirteenth century, then, we find England possessed of schools and universities, the value of which was felt both at home and abroad, and which had already produced several men of eminence. Among these was Giraldus Cambrensis, the Welsh historian, who received his early education in the school of his uncle, the Bishop of St. David’s; after which he passed on to Paris, which city he twice revisited and lectured there on polite literature. Giraldus was one of those who deeply deplored the preference then given to law and logic over classical studies, and laboured hard to keep alive a better taste among his contemporaries. The second time he went to Paris he assures us the doctors and scholars were never weary of listening to him, being thoroughly bewitched by the sweetness of his voice and the elegance of his language. Henry II. summoned him to court, and appointed him his chaplain and tutor to Prince John, with whom he travelled into Ireland, the result of which expedition was seen in his two works, the “Topography” and the “Conquest” of Ireland. Then he accompanied Archbishop Baldwin in his progress through Wales and the western counties of England, preaching the Crusade, and has given a description of this journey also in his “Itinerary.” It was performed on foot, and its difficulties are described with a graphic, and, sometimes, a poetic pen. We see the weary travellers making their way through the mountain ravines near Bangor, till the poor archbishop is forced at last to sit down and rest on an oak tree torn up by the winds and lying by the wayside. As he converses with his followers, the sweet notes of a bird are heard from an adjoining thicket. Is it a thrush or a nightingale? “The nightingale is never heard in Wales,” observes one. “Is she not? Then she has followed wise counsel never to come into Wales,” replies the archbishop, “whilst we, following unwise counsel, are going right through it.” What an exquisite picture is that which he gives of the Vale of Llanthony, where the monks, as they sit in the cloister of their abbey, have but to raise their eyes from their books in order to behold the pleasant prospect of mountains ascending on all sides to a great height, and may watch the deer peacefully grazing on the verdant slopes. In old times, he adds, a hermitage stood on this spot, with no other ornament than green moss and ivy. One sees in passages like these that artistic love of beauty which is one of the marked characteristics of our early writers.[244] In 1179 we find Giraldus at Oxford, where he recited his “Topography” before the university, dividing it into three parts and assigning a separate day to each. On each day there was a great feast—the first day for the poor, the second for the doctors, the third for the scholars and burghers. The entertainment, he says, was worthy of classic times, and its like had never before been seen in England.

By far the greater number of the literary men, however, who flourished in England at this time were monks, and the pupils of monks. Such were the historians William of Malmsbury, Florence of Worcester, Simeon of Durham, Roger Wendover, Matthew of Westminster, Eadmer of Canterbury, and many more. Some of them indeed had graduated at the universities before assuming the monk’s cowl, like Simeon of Durham, who lectured on natural philosophy at Oxford, “diving into the hidden recesses of nature,” during the reign of Stephen. In England, as elsewhere, not a few of those who in early life had won their doctor’s cap in the schools, grew weary of the vanity which they found there, and took refuge in the cloister. It seems idle to speak of men whose names are now known only to the curious, yet, in their own day, who was more thought of than Robert de Bertune, “the Oxford clerk,” as Gervase calls him, who died Bishop of Hereford, and whose sanctity of life caused some steps to be taken to procure his canonisation? Or Thomas of Marleberg, who, after teaching canon law at Oxford, Paris, and Exeter, retired to Evesham, bringing with him all the books he had used in the schools, and became first prior and then abbot of his monastery. His doctor’s library included one book of Democritus, the Gradual of Constantine, St. Isidore’s Offices, several of the works of Cicero, Lucan, and Juvenal, together with a valuable collection of MS. notes, sermons, and questions on theology. There were, besides, other notes and rules on the art of grammar, and a book concerning accents. During his government he caused a great number of useful books to be copied out and bound, and bought a fine collection of the books of Scripture, with their accompanying gloss. Evesham always retained its character for learning, and there, as well as at Reading, St. Alban’s, Ramsey, and Glastonbury, a great number of excellent scholars were reared. There can be no doubt that the monastic schools of England continued to cultivate humane letters long after they had fallen into neglect at the universities. The Latin poets who flourished in England in the twelfth century are noticed with respect by all critics; and the epic poem of “Antiocheis,” composed by Joseph of Exeter, after his return from the Holy Land, whither he accompanied King Richard I., is declared by Warton to be “a miracle of classic composition.” He also praises the elegant versification of Henry of Huntingdon, Robert of Dunstable, Lawrence of Durham, and others, all of whom were monks. None of these English Latinists condescended to the barbarism of Leonine rhymes, which they probably regarded with much the same feeling that Bede expressed for the “songs of vulgar poets.” One and all did their utmost to uphold the rules of prosody, and rejoiced in the solemn protest put forth by their countryman, Geoffrey de Vinsauf, against the corruption of pure Latinity.

Henry of Huntingdon, named above among our Latin poets, and equally distinguished as an historian, was altogether a scholar of monastic training. He received his education in the school of Ramsey, a monastery which enjoyed the reputation of having none but learned men for its abbots. The library collected by them was the richest in the kingdom. The catalogue may still be seen among the Cottonian MSS., and contains, besides books of more ordinary occurrence, the works of Aristotle, Plato, Sallust, Terrence, Martial, Ovid, Lucan, Horace, Virgil, and Prudentius. There was also a Hebrew Bible, and Hebraic literature was cultivated by many of the monks. When the Jews were banished from England, a great number of their books were sold, and the monks largely possessed themselves of these treasures. A great sale of Rabbinical MSS. took place at Huntingdon and Stamford, when Geoffrey, prior of Ramsey, made large purchases, and used the books he thus procured to such good purpose as to become a great adept in the Hebrew language, and communicate similar tastes to many of his brethren. Even down to the middle of the thirteenth century, notices occur of Hebrew scholars among the monks and librarians of Ramsey, and one of them, Lawrence Holbech by name, is spoken of as compiling a Hebrew Lexicon.

Great work at this time went on in the English scriptoria, and a pleasant sort of barter was practised among the different abbeys, by means of which each was supplied with the goods most to their liking. Thus brother Henry, of Hyde Abbey, wrote out with his own hand the works of BoËthius, Suetonius, Terence, and Claudian, which he exchanged with a prior of St Swithin’s, who had a more classical taste than himself, for four missals and a copy of St. Gregory on the pastoral care. All the monks of Hyde Abbey were good writers and illuminators, and were taught to bind their books with much care. In 1240 the library of Glastonbury contained four hundred books, and among them were the chief Latin classics. At Edmondsbury the scriptorium was endowed with two mills, and at Ely the revenues of two churches were granted to the monks “for the making of books.” At Peterborough Abbey the library at the time of the dissolution contained 1700 manuscripts. And at Tavistock, besides the ordinary school and library, there existed another school in which the Anglo Saxon language was taught, for the purpose of enabling the monks to decipher their own ancient charters. But Tavistock was not the only religious house in which the old English tongue continued to be studied. In the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, is still preserved a Latin Psalter after two versions, each version written in a separate column. Over the lines of one column runs an Anglo-Saxon translation, and over those of the other one in Anglo-Norman. The writing is exquisite, and the whole manuscript is richly illuminated, containing several historical paintings, together with the portrait of Eadmer, the monk of Canterbury, who wrote it out in the reign of Stephen. He holds in his hand a metal pen, and an inscription over his head records his caligraphic skill. He is, moreover, found worthy to be noted in the library catalogue as mighty in the art of transcription, and from his name is considered to have been of Saxon lineage.

Some of the larger of our English abbeys had not only schools within their own precincts, but others dependent on them in the neighbouring towns. Thus the school of Dunstable was dependent on the abbey of St. Alban’s, and in 1180 was governed by a pupil of that abbey, who in every way deserves mention as one of the most remarkable scholars of his time. Alexander Neckham was foster-brother to Richard I., and educated in the claustral school of St. Alban’s. Being appointed regent of the Dunstable school, he taught there for some time with considerable success, and thence proceeded to Paris, where he studied and professed for seven years. At the end of that time he returned to England, and resumed his former functions at Dunstable. At last, wishing to enter the monastic state, he is said to have applied for admission to the abbot of St. Alban’s, in an epistle commencing with the words, “Si vis, veniam,” to which the abbot, who loved a joke, replied, “Si bonus es, venias,—si nequam nequaquam.” The pun on his name (Neckam) appears to have disgusted him; at any rate, instead of a Benedictine, he became an Augustinian, and took the habit in the priory of Cirencester, about the year 1187. He was a universal scholar, a proficient in canon law, medicine, and theology, the best Latin poet of his age, and remarkable for the purity of his style. Like a true scholastic, he was a great lover of grammar, and wrote several works on the subject, which are still preserved in MS., some at Oxford, some at Cambridge, and some in the British Museum. He was also the author of a set of tracts, common enough in later times, for teaching scholars the Latin names of different articles by connecting them in a sort of descriptive narrative. To this work he gives the title of De nominibus Utensilibus, in which he describes every apartment of a house, from the kitchen to the bedrooms, with the furniture, dress, &c., in use in the twelfth century. An interlinear version is given in French, and at the end are grammatical notes and comments. He has also left a poem on the monastic character, another on science, in which he treats with some sublimity of the creation of the angels, stars, and elements; of the birds, fishes, rivers, and principal towns in England; of the earth, with her metals, plants, fruits, and animals; and of the seven liberal arts. His remarks on natural history are original and sagacious, specially those contained in his treatise De Rerum Naturis. In his poems he praises his country with its pastures, cornfields, and running streams, and celebrates the good qualities of its sons. “The feathered birds of Lybia, and pheasants,” he says, “often enrich thy tables, O Anglia. Nowhere are there more joyous countenances at the festive board, more gracious hosts, more profuse hospitality. The adornment of the table could not be more exquisite, or the service more prompt and cheerful. The Englishman, by nature and from his boyhood, gives gifts worthy to be given; and no age is too old to give.” After adding much on the liberality of his countrymen, he observes, that they are fond of hunting, and that they have a very subtle genius for mechanics, as well as for the liberal arts.

The character here bestowed on our countrymen corresponds well enough with the more satirical portraiture of Nigel Wireker, who, in his Speculum Stultorum, whilst lashing the follies of the world in general, and the universities in particular, describes the English students at Paris, as “noble in look and manner, full of strong sense brightened with wit, lavish with their money, and haters of everything sordid, whilst their tables groan with dishes, and the drinking knows no laws.”

The students who frequented the English seminaries were seldom of the nobler class. So late as the reign of Henry II., the Anglo-Norman barons preferred sending their sons to French schools and universities, out of a nervous dread lest their Norman speech should be barbarised by any admixture of the English accent. Even in the English schools for the higher orders, the native tongue was never used. Children were taught the French tongue from their cradle; and this custom, introduced at the Conquest, continued to prevail down to the reign of Edward III. However, it was not easy to preserve the Norman dialect pure from Saxon adulteration in a Saxon land, and hence the sly allusions which Chaucer throws out to the difference between the French of Paris and that of the school of “Stratford atte Bowe.” Robert of Gloucester, who felt the absurdity of the system, and was one of the first writers after the Conquest who ventured to use the English language for literary purposes, after telling us that the Norman spoke nothing but French, and “their children did teche,” observes that, unless a man know French, men talk of him but little, and that none but “low men” now hold to their national speech—a thing not to be found in any other country. “But I wot well,” he continues, “that it is well to know both, for the more a man knoweth, the more worth he is.”

Besides the great monastic and cathedral schools, there existed in London and other large towns certain public schools, of which Fitz Stephen has given a lively description, doubtless familiar to the reader. “On holidays,” he says, “it is usual for these schools to hold public assemblies in the church, in which the scholars engage in logical disputations, some using enthymems, and others perfect syllogisms; some aiming at nothing but to gain the victory, and make an ostentatious display of their acuteness; while others have in view the investigation of truth. Artful sophists on these occasions acquire great applause, some by a prodigious inundation of words, and others by their specious but fallacious arguments. After the disputation, other scholars deliver rhetorical declamations, in which they observe all the rules of art, and neglect no topic of persuasion. Even the younger boys in the different schools contend against each other about the principles of grammar, and the preterites and supines of verbs. There are some who, in epigrams, rhymes, and verses, use that trivial raillery so much practised by the ancients, freely attacking their companions with Fescennine license, but suppressing the names, touching with Socratic wit the failings of their school-fellows, or even of greater personages, or biting them more keenly with a Theonine tooth.”[245] It was in one of these London schools that St. Thomas of Canterbury received his early education, after leaving the school of the Canons Regular at Merton, and before proceeding to the university. The masters were generally some of those professors whom Oxford and Paris sent forth at this time in such abundance that not only cities, but villages also, had their learned teachers, as Roger Bacon testifies. They were, of course, skilled in the disputatious sciences of the day, and extremely well fitted to train a generation of “artful sophists.”

There was one private school of this period of which we must give a more particular notice, associated as it is with the history of St. Gilbert of Sempringham, the founder of the only religious order which we can claim as strictly of English growth. He was the son of a Norman knight of Lincolnshire and a Saxon mother, inheriting more of the Saxon than the Norman temperament. In youth he showed no taste for the chase or the tilt-yard, and gave no promise of intellectual superiority to make up for his deficiency in manly accomplishments. But as he grew in years a studious disposition began to manifest itself, in consequence of which his father sent him to study at Paris, where he remained until he had received his master’s degree, and, with it, license to open a school. The school of Sempringham very soon became famous. It received pupils of both sexes, who were trained not merely in the rudiments of learning, but also in a holy life; for, says the biographer of the Saint, the scholars, though they wore a secular garb, lived under a kind of monastic discipline. They were not allowed to play and wander about like other children, but were obliged to keep silence in the church and in the dormitory, where the boys all slept together, and were only supposed to speak in certain appointed places. They had, moreover, set hours for study and prayer, and, in a word, were trained in the rules of strict discipline. “For, from his childish years, it had been the one thought of Gilbert how he could best win souls to God, and profit them by word and example; wherefore, keeping himself unspotted from the world, he occupied himself incessantly in holy and spiritual things.”

After a time, two churches were founded on his father’s manor, and Gilbert was instituted rector of the parishes of Sempringham and Torington; although, not being at that time in holy orders, he was obliged to appoint a chaplain to serve the church in his stead. However, he acted as rector in so far as regarded the government of his parish and his school. He catechised and instructed his parishioners, and that with such success that we are told the greater number of those who heard him served God as if under regular monastic discipline, although remaining seculars: he was earnest in his endeavours to withdraw them from the revelries so attractive to their class, and to accustom them to the practice of the works of mercy; he particularly made it his aim to instruct them in the ritual and ceremonies of the Church; and at length it came to be said that you might tell a parishioner of Sempringham by his way of entering church, the humility of his attitude, and the devotion he exhibited in prayer.

The young rector himself resided in a little house which he built for himself in the churchyard, and spent most of his day in the church. After a time, however, his reputation reaching the ears of Robert Bloet, Bishop of Lincoln, he was summoned to the Episcopal Palace, and, having received minor orders, was appointed to an office in the bishop’s household, which he retained under his successor, Alexander. By the latter he was ordained priest, and promoted to the post of Penitentiary to the diocese. Greater dignities were offered to him; but Gilbert longed to return to his rustic parishioners, and, in 1130, he escaped from his court life, and with a glad heart made his way back to Sempringham. He had conceived the idea of attaching a religious house of some sort to his church, and among his former pupils he selected seven young women, for whom he built a small monastery adjoining the north wall of the church of St. Andrew. We are told that the nuns retained the learned tastes they had acquired in the founder’s school, so that at last it was found necessary to forbid them to speak Latin to one another, unless occasion should oblige them. A very considerable portion of their time was given to reading and meditation, and minute rules were given as to their manner of behaving as they read in the cloister, where they were to sit one behind another, and all looking one way, unless two chanced to be reading out of the same book. The same rule enjoined that they should ever preserve a sweet and cheerful countenance, and never exhibit signs of anger. To provide for the temporal necessities of his nuns, Gilbert appointed first a community of lay sisters, and then of lay brothers, and he conceived the idea of establishing a certain sort of religious rule among all the labourers on his paternal estate, to which, by the death of his father, he had now succeeded, and making his various farms dependent, in some sort, on the monastery, at the same time that they supplied the temporal necessities of the nuns.

Gilbert’s aim in this singular experiment was the amelioration of the lower orders; for the expressions used in speaking of those whom he selected show that they were of the very humblest class. Some were those whom he had known from childhood, the hinds and peasants attached to the manor; others were runaway serfs, for whom he obtained freedom by giving them the religious habit; and others, again, were very poor beggars. In fact, like the servant in the Gospel, he went out into the highways and hedges, and wherever he found the poor and the despised, he invited them into the house of the Lord. He did not attempt to teach these lay brethren letters, only requiring them to learn the Pater, Credo, and Miserere in Latin, but he trained them in obedience, humility, and temperance. They had constitutions of their own, admirably fitted for their state, and for giving religious discipline to a community made up of shepherds, herdsmen, and farm-labourers, who were to discharge the humble duties of their several callings under the religious garb. Some of the rules show plainly enough the kind of men for whom Gilbert was legislating; they were Saxon rustics, whose besetting sin was a love of the alehouse, and whom Gilbert accordingly forbids to drink wine, unless it be well watered, and prohibits, under any pretext, from selling anything to seculars, or from opening any house for the sale of liquor, seu, ut lingua Teutonica dicitur, tappam. It was a strange experiment this, of converting a gross rustic population into a religious community, and for a time it seemed blessed with perfect success. The institute spread rapidly, till at last Gilbert felt the necessity of providing for its more regular government, and for this purpose he applied to the Cistercians, in order that it might be grafted into their family. The request was, however, declined, and Gilbert had no other course open than to found another order of canons, who might take the spiritual direction of his convents of nuns. The foundation of this third branch of the institute did not take place till nearly twenty years after the establishment of the first convent. The first canons, like the first nuns, were chosen from Gilbert’s own scholars; seven were attached to every priory of the religious sisters, besides which, some houses were founded exclusively for the canons, and before he died Gilbert saw himself the spiritual father of fifteen hundred nuns and seven hundred canons, besides a vast number of lay brethren, whom he had rescued from their life of abject serfdom, but from whose turbulent conduct he had unhappily much to suffer. The order, in fact, declined rapidly after the death of its founder, who lived to extreme old age, being upwards of a hundred at the time of his death. Its weak point was the attempt made to unite so many forms of religious life under one government, and perhaps the hope of long preserving an austere religious discipline among an association of rural labourers savoured somewhat of a scholar’s Utopian dream.

The Gilbertine canons, however, continued for many years to cherish a love of letters, and had the chief part in the foundation of that pseudo-university of Stamford which threatened at one time to draw away the north country students from Oxford, the Stamford schools taking their rise in a Gilbertine house of studies. Among the first writers who condescended to make use of the English vernacular tongue was a Gilbertine canon named Robert Manning, who, about the beginning of the thirteenth century, considering in his heart that the “lewd,” as well as the “learned,” ought to know something of the history of their own country, and to be familiar with the deeds of kings,

composed his metrical chronicle, in which, desiring to lay a good foundation, and to begin from the beginning, he commences his story,

In the reign of Henry II., however, the English tongue (as distinguished from the Anglo-Saxon) had not yet assumed a literary shape. In all higher schools, public or private, the French and Latin languages were exclusively used. The Saxon or Teutonic dialect, referred to in the Gilbertine rule, was considered only fit for peasants, and even they had a certain comprehension of Latin. This is clear from many circumstances. Thus, Giraldus tells us that when Archbishop Baldwin journeyed through Wales for the purpose of preaching the Crusade, he was never so successful as when he preached in Latin. The populace, as we know, do not always measure their appreciation of a discourse by the degree in which they understand it, yet it is difficult to think that these effective sermons can have been delivered in an altogether unknown tongue. But the fact is that, in one respect, the rude ignorant peasantry of the Middle Ages were a great deal more learned than the pupils of our model schools. In a certain sort of way, every child was rendered familiar with the language of the Church. From infancy they were taught to recite their prayers, the antiphons, and many parts of the ritual of the Church, in Latin, and to understand the meaning of what they learnt, and hence they became familiar with a great number of Latin words; so that a Latin discourse would sound far less strange in their ears than in those of a more educated audience of the same class in the present day.

In many cases, indeed, the children who were taught in the priest’s, or parochial school, learnt grammar, that is, the Latin language; but all were required to learn the Church chant and a considerable number of Latin prayers, and hymns, and psalms. This point of poor school education deserves more than a passing notice. Its result was, that the lower classes were able thoroughly to understand, and heartily to take part in, the rites and offices of Holy Church. The faith rooted itself in their hearts with a tenacity which was not easily destroyed, even by penal laws, because they imbibed it from its fountain source—the Church herself. She taught her children out of her own ritual and by her own voice, and made them believers after a different fashion from those much more highly educated Catholics of the same class who, in our day, often grow up almost as much strangers to the liturgical language of the Church as the mass of unbelievers outside the fold. Can there be any incongruity more grievous than to enter a Catholic school, rich in every appliance of education, and to find that, in spite of the time, money, and method lavished on its support, its pupils are unable to understand and recite the Church offices, and are untrained to take part in Church Psalmody? The language of the Church has, therefore, in a very literal sense, become a dead language to them, and it is from other, and far inferior, sources that they derive their religious instruction. Thus they are ignorant of a large branch of school education, in which the children of a ruder and darker age were thoroughly trained; no doubt, on the other hand, they know a great many things of which children in the Middle Ages were altogether ignorant, and the question is simply to determine which method of instruction has most practical utility in it. Without dogmatising on this point, we may be permitted to regret that through any defect in the system of our parochial schools, Catholic congregations should in our own days be deprived of the solemn and thorough celebration of those sacred offices which in themselves comprise a body of unequalled religious instruction; and that in an age which makes so much of the theory of education, we should have to confess our inability to teach our children to pray and sing the prayers of the Church, as the children of Catholic peasants prayed and sang them six hundred years ago.[246]

The English schools of that period enjoyed the benefit of no other inspection than that of the parish priest and the archdeacon, “the eye of the bishop,” as he was called; and if their pupils knew little about “monocotyledons,” the “crustacea,” or grammatical analysis, they were able to recite their Alma Redemptoris and their Dixit Dominus with hearty, intelligent devotion. They knew the order of the Church service, and could sing its psalms and antiphons in the language of the Church, and to her ancient tones; and so they did not, through their ignorance, oblige their pastors to lay aside, as obsolete, the use of that office so truly called Divine, in order to substitute in its place English hymns and devotions from any less inspired source. On this point we hold their education, therefore, to have been immeasurably superior to our own, nor are we to suppose that because they learnt Latin prayers and the Church chant, they learnt nothing besides. Reading and grammar are often named as taught in parochial schools; and among the humblest class of pupils a good deal of instruction, both devotional and practical, was conveyed in English verse, which the pupils committed to memory, much as some among ourselves have, ere now, learnt to remember the number of days in each month by means of doggerel rhymes. The traditions of the Saxon schools, wherein so much use was made of these versified instructions, was kept up so late as the fifteenth century, when we shall have occasion to quote some of the methods in popular use for teaching children the succession of the English kings, the names of towns and villages, the four quarters of the globe, and the outline of the Latin accidence. The Commandments of God and the Church, the Creed, Our Father, and Hail Mary, and other similar portions of Christian doctrine, were also taught in verse, as they may still be seen in most French elementary books of religious instruction; and specimens of the English language, as it existed in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, might very fairly be selected from the different versified forms of the Hail Mary in use at these periods. I will give but one, which is supposed to belong to the early part of the thirteenth century:—

It is needless to observe, that in all times a very special importance has been attached by Catholic teachers to the instruction of the people in their prayers. In those early times, when the laws of the State recognised that the people had souls as well as bodies and purses, this was even made a matter of legislation, as in the canons of King Edgar the Peaceable, and the statutes of Canute, wherein every father was commanded to teach his children the Creed and the Our Father, and every man was required to know them, “if he desired to be laid in a hallowed grave, or to be thought worthy of Holy Housel.” The familiar explanation of these prayers, and of the Sunday Gospels, formed the ordinary subjects of the parish priest’s sermon; and in almost every collection of Synodal decrees we find injunctions calling on Christian men and women to learn their prayers, and say them seven times a day. The Hail Mary was enjoined, in addition, about the beginning of the thirteenth century, as we find in the constitutions of St. Richard of Chichester.

Some of the very earliest known specimens of the English, as distinguished from the Anglo-Saxon language, are fragments of hymns which appear to have been in popular use in our poor schools. One of these is commonly known as St. Godric’s hymm, and runs as follows:—

To understand whence St. Godric derived his poetical inspiration, we must briefly glance at his history. He lived in the reigns of Stephen and Henry II., and began life as a Norfolk pedlar, getting his living by travelling about the country and selling smallwares in the villages through which he passed. We may fancy him such a one as Wordsworth’s Wanderer, concealing under a humble speech and garb a sublime philosophy. Wanderers of the twelfth century, however, had one advantage over our modern pedlars; they visited not only fairs and cities, but holy shrines and places of pilgrimage; nay, generally speaking, the fairs which they attended were assembled round some holy spot, and took their origin in the devout celebration of a martyr’s or a founder’s festival. Godric, as he plodded on through the north country on his way from Scotland, whither he had gone by sea on a trading expedition, visited Lindisfarne and Durham, and the Isle of Farne, made sacred by the hermit-life of St. Cuthbert. These pilgrimages awoke his soul to a new life, and abandoning his trade, he repaired to Jerusalem, and on his way back visited the holy shrine of Compostella.

Returning to England, he took service in the family of a Suffolk gentleman, but disgusted with the profligacy of his fellow-servants, once more left his country and went to visit the holy places of Rome. Nevertheless, the scenes where first his heart had been touched by God drew him back to them by a sweet, irresistible attraction; and after some years more spent in these devout wanderings, Godric felt himself moved to return to the north of England, and there seek out some solitude where he might lead the life of an anchorite. He entered Durham, therefore, a way worn, ragged pilgrim, and desiring, before he utterly retired from the world, to acquire a knowledge of such psalms and devotions as might enable him to sing the praises of God in his cell, he repaired for that purpose to the school which, as was often the case, was held, in default of a schoolhouse, within the church of St. Mary’s.[248] In this school, says Reginald of Durham, children were taught the first elements of letters, and here Godric learnt many things of which he was before ignorant, but which he now acquired “by hearing, reading, and chanting them.” And those things which he heard the children frequently repeat became tenaciously fixed in his memory. In a very brief space of time, therefore, he learnt as many psalms, hymns, and prayers as sufficed for his purpose, and retired to a lonesome wilderness north of Carlisle, which he afterwards exchanged for that of Finchdale, where he died, about the year 1170. William of Newbridge, who often visited him, describes him as one whose body seemed already dead, but whose tongue was ever repeating the names of the Three Divine Persons. The similarity of some of the expressions occurring in St. Godric’s hymn, to productions of the same kind in popular use in the following centuries, leads us to believe that it may have been one of the school hymns he had learnt at Durham, unless indeed we accept as literally true the legend which represents it as having been taught him by Our Lady herself. The whole notice of this Durham school is exceedingly interesting, and not only confirms what has been said as to the teaching of the Church chant and office, but shows us that the poor children likewise learnt their letters, and were taught to read—a fact greatly at variance with the vulgar notion of mediÆval ignorance. For that this was only a poor school is certain, from the fact of the ragged and penniless vagrant being able to find admission into it. And having begun to speak of the Durham poor schools, I may take this opportunity of remarking that the city of St. Cuthbert was remarkably well supplied with them. For besides her parochial schools, she possessed an excellent monastic poor school, which continued to flourish down to the time of the Reformation. The usages of monastic bodies underwent so little alteration in the lapse of centuries that the description of this school, as it existed at the time of its suppression, probably gives us a sufficiently accurate notion of its condition in far earlier times. “There were certain poor children, called the children of the almery, who were educated in learning, and relieved with the alms and benevolence of the whole house, having their meat and drink in a loft on the north side of the abbey gates. This loft had a long slated porch over the stairhead, and at each side of the porch were stairs to go up to the loft, with a stable underneath.... The children went to school at the Infirmary School, without the abbey gates, which was founded by the priors of the abbey at the charge of the house. The meat and drink that the children had was what the monks and novices had left. It was carried in at a door adjoining the great kitchen window, into a little vault at the west end of the Frater House, like a pantry, called the covie, kept by a man. Within it was a window, at which some of the children received the meat from the said man (who was called the clerk of the covie) out of the covie window, and carried it to the loft. This clerk waited on them at every meal to preserve order.” The description given of the Song school attached to Durham monastery, which, according to the same authority, was built “many years without memory of man, before the suppression of the house,” is worth quoting, as showing that the material comfort of the pupils was not uncared for. It was “very finely boarded round about, a man’s height about the walls, and had a long desk from one end of the school to the other for the books to lie on; and all the floor was boarded under foot for warmness, and long forms set in the ground for the children to sit on. And the place where the master sat and taught was all close boarded both behind and on either side, for warmness.”[249]

Similar schools for poor scholars were attached to all the great abbeys, and were of a higher order with respect to learning than the parochial schools. The pupils reared in them, though of the humblest origin, often rose to high dignities in Church and State. John of Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, born of a peasant’s family, received his early education in the poor school of the Cluniac monks of Lewes, where, many years later, Dudley, the son of a poor travelling carpenter, was also received, and sent to Oxford by his charitable patrons, who little foresaw the kind of renown which their protÉgÉ would achieve, or the evil which his descendants would bring upon the Church. Alexander of Hales, “the Irrefragable Doctor,” as he was called, was in like manner a pupil of the Cistercians, who, says his biographer, “had the heroic charity to teach youth;” and it is well known that the facilities afforded by the religious houses to poor scholars were so great as to be regarded with much jealousy by the feudal lords, whose pride revolted at the promotion to ecclesiastical dignities of men who had risen from the lowest grades.

There will be occasion to examine our English poor schools more closely in a future chapter, but at present we must return to Oxford, where the collegiate system was gradually developing in its grandest form, and the influx of the mendicant orders was introducing a splendid era for the schools.