Augusta Theodosia Drane

ENGLISH EDUCATION IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

A.D. 1300 TO 1400.

Although the French wars were hardly less injurious to the cause of polite learning in England than in France, the reigns of Edward III. and his successors are not without a peculiar interest in the history of our popular education. One after another those magnificent foundations were rising at the universities, the commencement of which has been noticed in a previous chapter; and the English collegiate system was taking root and attaining maturity. The threefold pestilence of Lollardism, the Black Death, and a rage for military glory, offered, it is true, some serious checks to the progress of letters; yet in spite of every such disadvantage, this epoch, so brilliant in the annals of chivalry, was hardly less important in those of English literature, which in Chaucer and Mandeville produced its first writers in prose and verse. And, indeed, if the reign of Edward III. was not a splendid literary era the fault is not to be charged to the deficient education of the sovereign. His great natural powers had been cultivated with extraordinary care under the direction of Richard Angervyle, or, as he is commonly called, Richard of Bury. The most learned scholar of his age, Richard was also a very great man as far as dignities could make him so: Archdeacon of Northampton, Prebendary of Lincoln, Salisbury, and Lichfield, Dean of Wells, and finally Bishop of Durham; Lord High Chancellor and Treasurer of the Kingdom, and Envoy Plenipotentiary for concluding the peace with France. Posterity, however, has forgotten his honours, and remembers him rather as the patron of learning, the correspondent of Petrarch, the founder of the Angervyle library at Oxford, and the author of the Philobiblion, a book in the compilation of which he was largely assisted by the learned Dominican Robert Holkot, and in which he gives full expression to that devouring passion for books, wherewith, says Harpsfield, “he was mightily carried away.” His library was the first public one ever founded in England. He bestowed it on Durham college, which he completed and partly endowed, and made the inheritor of his books, of which, says Wood, he had more than all the other bishops of England put together. All his palaces were crammed with them, and the floor of the room where he sat was so strewn with them that it was no easy thing to approach him. He kept three collectors constantly employed for him in France, Germany, and Italy. In his palace a staff of writers, illuminators, and binders were constantly at work under his own eye, and he gives ample details in his work of the incredible pains and expense he was at to complete his collection. It was undertaken in no light or capricious mood, but as a serious and solemn duty. “Moved,” he says, “by Him who alone granteth and perfecteth a good will to man, I diligently inquired what, among all the offices of piety, would most please the Almighty, and most profit the Church militant. Then before the eyes of our mind there came a flock of chosen scholars in whom God, the artificer, and His handmaid Nature, had indeed planted the roots of the best manners and sciences, but whom penury so oppressed that they were dried up and watered by no dew; and so they who might have grown up strong columns of the Church were obliged to renounce their studies. Deprived of the writings and helps of contemplation they return, for the sake of bread, to base mechanical arts. And the result of our meditation was pity for this humble race of men, and the resolution to help them, not only with the means of sustenance, but also with books for the prosecution of their studies; and to this end our intention ever watched before the Lord. And this ecstatic love so moved us that, renouncing all other earthly things, we applied ourselves to collect books.”

In his bibliographical researches the still unplundered monasteries afforded him an inexhaustible mine of literary treasures. Whenever he visited towns where there existed religious houses, his first visit was paid to their libraries; and he was not slow in examining their chests and other repositories where books might lie concealed. Often amid the greatest poverty he found the rarest stores; and the richest in this kind of wealth, as well as the most liberal in dispensing the use of it, were the Friars Preachers. Sometimes, however, he had complaints to make of the carelessness and indifference of those possessed of books, which he often found “turned out of their interior chambers and secure depositories, and given over to destruction for the sake of dogs, birds, and those two-legged beasts called women.”

No catalogue of the Angervyle collection now exists, and at the Reformation it was dispersed, and in great measure destroyed by the Protestant plunderers, who saw a vision of Popery in every illuminated manuscript. But there can be little doubt that it was rich in works of high literary value. For the good bishop was one of those who esteemed the liberal arts above the study of law, and he expressly tells us that he provided his students with Greek and Hebrew grammars. He gave them also very quaint and pithy directions how to use his books. They were to take care how they opened and shut them, not to mark them with their nails, or write alphabets on the margin of the leaves. He criticises the bad habits of indolent and careless youths, who lean both their elbows on their books, put straws and flowers to keep their places, and eat fruit and cheese over the open pages; and he exhorts those into whose hands his treasures may fall, to wash their hands before reading, and to take a little more care of their books than they would of an old shoe.

Several other prelates imitated the laudable example of Richard of Bury, and endeavoured to make provision for the wants of poor scholars by the foundation of public libraries. It is probable, however, that most of these collections were extremely limited in their range. The English universities were at this time almost exclusively resorted to by lawyers and ecclesiastics, or, in other words, by those who had chosen the calling of clerks. They were not, as they afterwards became, and as they continue to be in our day, places of liberal education for the sons of the gentry; and hence the education given in them had a certain professional narrowness; a defect which was further increased at this particular period, by the presence among the students of a very large proportion of beneficed clergymen, who having been appointed from an inferior class to fill up the vacancies caused by the ravages of the Black Death, were often found so ignorant as to render it necessary for their diocesans to require their spending a certain time at the universities, in order to acquire just so much learning as was actually indispensable for their office. Men of this sort, of course, spent little time on polite literature, and the influence of such a class of students was, naturally enough, to pull down the academical studies to a very low standard.

It will occur to every reader to inquire where the sons of the gentry received their education, if they were not as yet in the habit of frequenting the universities and public schools. And to furnish a reply, we must call to mind the habits which prevailed in feudal society, according to which every great baron or prelate presided over a huge household, including, besides his domestic servants and chaplains, a crowd of knights, esquires, and pages, among the last of whom a certain number of noble youths were always admitted, in order to receive the training suited to their rank. Chivalry, it will be remembered, was not an accident, but an institution, and one which was furnished with a rigorous system of graduation. A man who aspired to the profession of arms, had to be trained for it according to fixed rules, and to go through each successive degree with as much precision as the bachelors and masters in the schools. Indeed, the feudal castles may not unfitly be called schools of chivalry, and in them alone could the future knight be instructed in the duties of his state. As page in a baronial household, a youth was able to acquire an education far more suited to his future position in the world, than he could possibly have received at the universities. There he would have been chiefly called on to attend lectures on the Sentences, or on civil and canon law; but as page to a great lord, spiritual or temporal, he learnt how to serve and carve at table, to fly a hawk, manage and dress a horse, bear himself in the tilt-yard, and handle his arms. Noble youths generally began their education at the age of seven, when they were admitted to the service of the ladies of the family, and were styled Damoiseaux. They were under the immediate control of the lady of the house, and learnt from her at once their Christian doctrine and the laws of courtesy.[280] I say, the laws, for the teaching of this virtue was reduced to a science, and had a literature of its own. By the fair virtue of courtesy our forefathers understood something more than the mere outside polish of worldly refinement. The author of the “Lytylle childrene’s lytylle boke” informs us that according to cunning clerks—

“Alle vertues are closide yn curteseye,” he says, “and alle vices in vyllonie;” and he goes on to teach his pupils that they must love God and their neighbours, speak the truth, keep their word, and neither swear, quarrel, nor be idle. They are not to be proud or to scorn the poor, and are to speak honestly whether it be to the lord or to his servants. If his directions how to behave at table are somewhat homely, it cannot be denied that they are much to the point, and Dame Curtesye forgets not to remind her scholars that before eating they should think of the poor, because a full stomach wots little what the hungry ails.

As the boy grew older he came under the training of the seneschal and the chaplain. The first, who was generally some old veteran knight, taught him his martial duties, while the other imbued him with a reasonable amount of book-learning in Latin and Norman-French. The ignorance of French knights in Du Guesclin’s time must not be held to disprove this latter statement, for it is plain that ignorance was opposed to the older traditions of chivalry, and was commented upon as a sign of decay by writers of the time. Knights were certainly expected to know how to read and write, for the youthful aspirant to chivalric honours, who, in the twelfth century, wandered from land to land seeking goodly adventures, was always required to carry tablets, and note down the deeds which he witnessed most worthy of remembrance and imitation. He was required to know something of the tuneful art, whether the plain song of the Church, or the lays of the troubadours, and, as a matter of course, every well bred man was well instructed in the abstruse science of heraldry. Chaucer, in describing his squire, takes care to let us know that besides sitting his horse, carving at table, and jousting in the lists, he could sing, write songs, dance, “and wel pourtraie and write.” The education of his mind, then, was not entirely neglected, and still less was that of his manners. He was “courteous, lowlie, and serviceable;” and elsewhere the same authority informs us, that the young squire was often charged to be wise and equitable, godly in word, and reasonable, to be courteous in salute, and to abstain from all words of ribaldry, “and fro all pride to keep him well.” The last words are worthy of notice, for this eschewing of pride is greatly insisted on by all chivalric writers as one of the special characteristics of a gentleman. It is a point on which Chaucer constantly loves to dwell:—

Exactly in the same spirit does the good king Perceforest in the old romance instruct his knights: “Si me souvient d’une parolle que ung hermite me dist une fois pour moy chastier. Car il me dist que si j’avois autant de possessions comme avoit le roy Alexandre, de sens comme le sage Salomon, et de bravoure comme le preux Hector de Troy, seul orgueil, s’il regnoit en moy, destruieroit tout.” And in a book of instructions on the duties of Chivalry, we find the following: “Louange est reputÉe blÂme en la bouche de celluy qui se loe, mais elle exaulce celluy qui ne se attribue point de louange, mais À Dieu. Si l’ecuyer a vaine gloire de ce qu’il a fait, il n’est pas digne d’Étre chevalier, car vaine gloire est un vice qui destruit les merites de chevalerie.”[282] In the same Treatise the virtues of chivalry are declared to be the three theological and the four cardinal virtues, and a good knight will hold the opposite vices in horror; he must keep himself from villanous thoughts, and be unstained within and without, and must withal be modest, “the first to strike on the battle-field, but the last to speak in the hall.”

Schools in which maxims such as these prevailed, and in which the duties of religion were strictly enforced, must be admitted to fill an important place in the system of Christian education. It may be doubted, too, whether Eton or Rugby could bestow a more careful polish than was inculcated by that minute etiquette which chivalric usage demanded. The grace and manliness, the “pluck” and spirit which Englishmen prize so highly, and purchase at so dear a rate, were certainly not disregarded; but they were tempered with a certain admixture of lowliness which has not retained an equal place in our esteem. Despite all the extravagances of Chivalry, and the exaggerated and injurious effect of some of its maxims, such as those which inculcated a heathenish sensitiveness on the point of honour, it enforced a law of self-restraint, a polite diction and etiquette, and a government of the exterior man, in all which the education of our own day is fatally defective. “One of the essential principles of chivalry,” says Godwin, speaking of the education bestowed on noble youths in these baronial households, “was, that no office was sordid that was performed in aid of a proper object. It was the pride of the candidate for knighthood to attend upon his superiors, and perform for them the most menial services. The dignity of the person assisted raised the employment, and the generous spirit in which it was performed gave it lustre and grace. It was the office of a page or an esquire to spread the table, to carve the meat, to wait upon the guests, to bring them water to wash, and conduct them to their bed-chamber. They cleaned and kept in order the arms of their lord, and assisted him in equipping himself for the field. There is an exquisite beauty in offices like these, not the growth of servitude, not rendered with unwillingness and constraint, but the spontaneous acts of reverence and affection performed by a servant of mind not less free and noble than the honoured master whom he serves.”[283] The truth and justice of this observation will be readily admitted, and we stop and ask ourselves what substitute has our increased civilisation furnished for this beautiful element in the education of the Middle Ages? Where, except among the fags below the fifth form, does a noble youth of our day learn anything of these “lowly and serviceable” courtesies; and are they there performed in that spirit of “spontaneous reverence and affection,” which renders them not sordid, but illustrious? We must leave it to our public schoolmen to reply.

Such an education as has been described above, taught exactly what a secular youth of good birth now goes to the universities to acquire—it taught him to be a gentleman. And it is probable that in these chivalric households he received the culture suited to his position with more safeguards to faith and morals than would have been found in the schools of Paris or Oxford. In those days the government of the family was the active, earnest business of the lord and lady; noble rank was not held to dispense a baron and a baron’s wife from seeing to very homely details with their own eyes; and the everyday habits of their retainers were regulated by them in a way which put into their hands a vast parental power. Doubtless this “wondrous middle age” had plenty of barbarous violence, and was disgraced by much gross immorality; nor do we aim at painting it other than it was. But, whatever were its failings, it had one merit,—the Family Life was then a reality and not a name.[284] Most readers are familiar with the beautiful picture of the household of Sir Thomas More, which all his biographers agree in holding up as a model and pattern, though possibly an exceptional form of excellence. It was exceptional, however, only in its extraordinary cultivation of letters; in every other respect it did but present the old Catholic type, of which we might adduce innumerable specimens both in earlier and later times. Let us see what sort of rules were drawn up by a French earl of the fourteenth century for the regulation of his household, just premising that this is not an exceptional case, but that any acquaintance with mediÆval literature will convince the reader that Elzear de Sabran ruled his family as many a good knight of France and England besides him were doing at the same period. Elzear had the greatest of all blessings, a good mother, whose piety and charity had earned her the golden title of “The Good Countess.” When he was born she took him in her arms and offered him to God, and had him educated by his uncle in the abbey of St. Victor’s at Marseilles. But he did not become a monk or a clerk: on the contrary, he lived as a great baron, fought as a brave soldier, administered justice to his feudal retainers, and was employed as ambassador from the King of Naples to the court of France. He was at the head of the State Council of Naples, and fought two pitched battles against the Emperor Henry VII., so that I think we need have no mistaken notion as to his being a mere pious recluse. Like other nobles of the time, he received a number of youths into his house, among whom was the eldest son of King Robert himself: Duke Charles of Calabria, a circumstance which induces us to think that a certain instruction in letters must have been given to the pages, for this King Robert was the same who acted as examiner to Petrarch, and was used to say that if he must choose between his crown and his studies, the latter should have the preference. Surius tells us that Elzear took great pains with the duke’s education, explaining to him the principles of piety, justice, and clemency, making him frequent the Sacraments, and advising him to keep flatterers at a distance. His wife, Delphina of Glandeves, was worthy of directing a Christian household; she looked to all things with her own eye, banished brawls and tale-bearing, and was honoured by her servants as a mother and a saint. When first they began to keep house at Puy-Michel, in ProvenÇe, Elzear drew up rules for the regulation of his family, of which the following is a short abridgment:—

“Every one in my family shall daily hear Mass. Let no one curse, swear, or blaspheme, under pain of chastisement. Let all persons honour chastity, for no impure word or deed shall go unpunished in the house of Elzear. The men and women shall confess their sins every week, and communicate every month, or at the least at the chief festivals, namely, Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, and on the feasts of our Lady. No one shall be idle, but in the morning, after prayers, let all go to their work, the men abroad, the women at home. The life of the pious woman is not merely to pray, but to ply her work, and take care of her household. Therefore, the ladies shall read and pray in the mornings, and afterwards spend their time in useful work of some kind. Every evening all my family shall assemble for a pious conference, in which they shall hear something said for the salvation of their souls. And let none be absent on pretence of attending to my affairs. I have no affairs so near my heart as the salvation of those who serve me. I will have no playing at dice or games of hazard; there are plenty of innocent diversions, and time passes soon enough without being thrown away: yet I do not wish my castle to be a cloister, nor my people hermits. Therefore, let them be merry, but without offending God. If any quarrel fall out, let not the sun set before it be appeased. And I strictly command all under my jurisdiction to hurt no man in goods, honour, or reputation. I will not have my coffers filled by the emptying of others; we shall be wealthy enough if we fear God.”

The nobles educated in such households are often spoken of in after-life as evincing a certain love of polite letters, such as Count Capranica, whom Petrarch describes as living in his feudal castle, “governing his vassals with justice and love, cultivating the Muses, and seeking the society of the learned.” Ordinarily speaking, however, the merits of the mediÆval system of education for the upper ranks lay less in its intellectual than in its moral training. It is true indeed that all great barons and their wives were not Elzears and Delphinas, but it is probable that the families usually chosen as homes for the young were those which were held in highest repute as virtuous and well-ordered. And in such families we are justified in saying that, as a general rule, the grand Christian traditions were certainly upheld; that children were taught to be subject to parents and governors, and parents were held bound personally to superintend the education of their children; that there was a real parental rule, that priests were had in worshipful honour, the poor regarded as the members of Christ, women treated with respect and courtesy, and elders had in reverence. The domestic virtues were taught after another fashion than among ourselves, and whilst the education of a gentleman aimed at making him brave, clement, courteous, and devout, a high-born lady was trained to a life of vigorous practical utility. She learnt to fill the responsible office of head of the family, which demanded in those days no small capacity of government. She was instructed in a hundred details of domestic life, which ladies are now-a-days content to entrust to their servants. No great variety of accomplishments was of course expected of her; and the author of the “Advice to Ladies,” written in 1371, enumerates reading, church music, embroidery, confectionery, and surgery as among the most useful branches of female education. As to writing, he considers it superfluous, and thinks it better if women “can nought of it.”

In the same spirit the good housewife is addressed in the “Menagier de Paris,” and exhorted to take both pains and pleasure in her household duties. She is expected to know something about gardening and tillage, to be able to choose grooms, porters, and other servants, and look after labourers, pastrycooks, bakers, shoemakers, and chambermaids; to see that the sheep and horses are taken care of, and the wines kept clear. Moreover, she must know what to order for dinner and supper, and must understand how to make all manner of ragÔuts, and pottages for the sick. Much account was made of early rising in all the books of instruction addressed to ladies. The “Menagier” humorously complains of those sluggards whose Matins are, “I must sleep a little longer,” and their Lauds, “Is breakfast ready yet?” But in general it was the habit to rise with the lark, and give the early hours, as in Elzear’s household, to prayer and reading. Thus an old French poet describes it—

Such homely duties as those enumerated above might seem to leave but little room for cultivation of letters. Probably the writers of these treatises made the most of their subject, but it is quite clear that the “Valiant women” of olden time were not mere homely housewives, innocent of intellectual culture, and with no ideas beyond their distaffs and their confectioneries; on the contrary, many of them were learned in their way, like the saintly Isabel of France, sister to St. Louis, who was an excellent spinster, but was also well read in St. Augustine. Froissart incidentally lets us know that many of the noble ladies he names in his Chronicle were lovers of learning; such as Mary de Bohun, the first wife of Henry Bolingbroke, who, as he tells us, was well skilled in Latin and Church Divinity. And the character of not a few of those grand heroic women, whose names so beautify the page of history, might be summed up in the words with which Gabrielle de Bourbon is described by the biographer of Bayard. “She was,” he says, “devout, religious, chaste, and charitable; grave without haughtiness, magnanimous without pride, and not ignorant of letters, specially delighting in reading and hearing read the Sacred Scriptures.” The considerable part taken in the foundation of the English Colleges by noble ladies of the fourteenth century shows that they were, at any rate, not indifferent to learning. I have already spoken of Ella LongspÉe and the Lady Devorgilla, and in the following century their noble example was followed by Philippa of Hainault, the foundress of Queen’s College, Oxford, and Mary de St. Pol, the widowed countess of Pembroke, who founded Pembroke College, Cambridge, and was chosen on account of her virtue and learning to direct the education of Queen Philippa’s daughters. No one can study the histories of those times without being frequently struck by the superiority which appears in the characters of their illustrious women. Their education, however slender it may have been in a merely literary sense (and, if less showy, it was perhaps quite as solid as what finds favour among ourselves), evidently fitted them to take an active and intelligent part in domestic and social life. The old chroniclers often allude to the happy influence exerted over their lords by such queens as Eleanor of Castile, and the Good Queen Maud. Not a few English countesses merited the praises bestowed on Ildegard by the historian Donizzo, who calls her docta, gubernatrix, prudens, proba, consiliatrix. The practical mind of Philippa of Hainault was employed in introducing useful arts into England, just as, a few years later, the intelligence and commanding powers of Margaret, “the Great Countess” of Ormonde, were similarly exercised in Ireland, where she planted weavers and other artisans, built schoolhouses, and “was ever showing herself liberal, bountiful, and devout.” They who would understand the character of a true Catholic household, presided over by a wise and intelligent mistress, may find it depicted in countless beautiful pictures, both of history and romance. Thus, in one of the works translated by Caxton, the Knight of the Tower holds up for the imitation of his daughters the example of the Lady Cecily of Balleville, whose daily ordinance was to rise early and say matins with her chaplains, and then to hear High Mass and two low Masses, “saying her service full devoutly.” Then she walked in her garden, and finished her other morning devotions, and betimes she dined. After dinner she visited sick folk, and caused her best meat to be brought to them, and spent her day in other charitable and useful works. After hearing vespers she went to supper, and betimes to bed, making great abstinence, and wearing haircloth on all Wednesdays and Fridays. In the same volume we find that the maxims of courtesy and humility which found place in the training of a gentleman were equally inculcated on noble ladies. The Knight of the Tower reminds his daughters that courtesy is to be shown to persons of low degree as well as those of gentle blood, and even more scrupulously, and he gives his reasons. “Courtesy shewn to those of low estate,” he says, “is more honourable than that shewn to the great, because it the more evidently proceedeth from a frank and gentle heart.” He cites the example of a certain great lady whom he once saw in company with some fine knights and ladies, and who humbled herself to curtsey, as she passed, to a poor tinker; and when her gay companions asked her why she did so, she replied, “I would rather miss shewing such courtesy to a gentleman than to him.” And this, he says, is what all understand and practise who know the laws of true courtesy.

What has been said of the character of domestic life in the Middle Ages will doubtless seem a partial view to those who consider that we ought to gather our notions of the state of society then prevailing from the debased literature of the jongleurs and troubadours, which is universally acknowledged to have been exceedingly bad. It will be remembered, however, that the “goliardi,” as they were called, were a distinct class in society, the dead branches of the universities, men who followed no profession save that of buffoonery, and had gathered just so much education in school as enabled them to give point to a licentious song or story. They wandered about from city to city and from castle to castle; and in days when no places of public amusement existed, there were plenty of knights and nobles ready to receive such guests, and to while away the dulness of a winter’s evening by listening to their narratives. The appetite for recreation in an unregenerate world is hardly less clamorous in its demands than the appetite for food, and the goods which are produced to supply such a demand, are seldom, even in our own more refined age, of the choicest description. But to take the offensive literature produced by a corrupt and excommunicated class, for such the “goliardi” really were,[285] and draw thence any conclusions respecting the manners of the higher classes in ancient times, is about as fair as it would be to judge of the state of society among ourselves by the plot of a “sensation” novel or a French vaudeville. Even allowing the character of their fictions to be taken as evidence of the existence of widespread scandals, at least equal weight must be attached to the bon fide historical descriptions of households such as those of Elzear or Charles the Wise, of whom Christine de Pisa says that he suffered no pernicious book to remain in his palace for a single day; nor any person whose language was not pure and innocent. Mr. Wright expresses his surprise at the inconceivable corruption of a society which could endure the goliardic tales to be recited in its presence. But it would be easy to match the instances which he brings forward with others which show us the domestic circle amusing itself in a very different manner, like that in the castle of Count Charles of Flanders, who entertained three monks, doctors of theology, that they might daily, after supper, read and explain the Scriptures to his family; or like that again, of the good king named above, who always kept readers in his palace to relieve the winter evenings by reading aloud “les belles ystoires de la sainct Escripture, ou des fais des Romains, ou moralitÉes de philosophes, et d’autres sciences;” and examples of this sort are by no means exceptional.

What, however, we are chiefly concerned with, is not so much the practice of this or that individual, as the character of the education by which they were trained. Our inquiry is what were the principles and the standard of morals enforced in the chivalric system of education. And the fact that this standard was far higher than what exists among ourselves, has been acknowledged by writers whose sympathies are all in another direction. Thus, M. Guizot, whose study of European civilisation has certainly not been superficial, expresses his admiration at “the moral notions, so delicate, so elevated, and above all so humane, and so invariably stamped with a religious character,” which are to be found in the oaths and obligations imposed by the laws of chivalry. “Crimes and disorders abounded in the Middle Ages,” he says, “yet men evidently had in their minds lofty desires and pure ideas. Their principles were better than their acts. A certain high moral ideal always soars above the stormy element.” He goes on to remark that this pure tone of morality which prevails in the laws of chivalry must be traced to the influence of the clergy, who, though they did not invent that institution, made it an instrument for civilising society and introducing “a more enlarged and vigorous system of morality in domestic life.” Expressions like these, which are abundantly confirmed by a study of the ancient monuments, justify us in claiming for the mediÆval system of education the merit of at least presenting to the world a lofty standard of right and wrong. That the acts of the pupils often fell far below their principles, is saying no more than that they were men. But it cannot be supposed that society could be permeated with a high moral ideal, and that the strict obligations of that class to which every man of gentle blood belonged, should be redolent of a spirit at once “delicate, scrupulous, and humane,” without effecting some practical results. The young were trained to reverence a whole class of virtues which popular writers declare must be regarded in our own day as “dead.” The system of education which prevailed, presented them with a high ideal of moral excellence, a lofty standard of thoughts and desires, precisely that, the loss of which among ourselves is so bitterly deplored. And what is all education but the formation of such an interior standard? A teacher can do little more than grave on the soul principles which may survive many practical shortcomings, and may eventually recall a wanderer to better things. This is a point which non-Catholic writers can hardly be expected to appreciate as it deserves, bound up as it is with a class of ideas, and even of dogmas, to which they are necessarily strangers. But whilst acknowledging the contrast too frequently observable between the profession and the practice of Christians in the Middle Ages, another remarkable feature in those extraordinary times ought not to be overlooked,—I mean those numerous episodes in history which exhibit its great criminals in the light of great penitents. There had been early impressed on those fierce hearts a fear of God, a sense of sin, and a living faith in the possibility of obtaining pardon; nay, we will add, a certain capacity of self-humiliation, which evoked grand heroic acts of contrition from many whose previous lives had been a tissue of enormities; and thus a man like William LongspÉe needed but the look and the word of a saint to feel all the old teaching reawaken in his soul, and with a rope about his neck “to abhor himself in dust and ashes.”

To return from this digression, which is yet intimately connected with our subject, let us proceed to examine a little more closely the actual schools for rich and poor existing in England in the fourteenth century. Besides the universities and monastic schools, there were, as we have already seen, others presided over by independent masters. Schools of greater or less pretension were attached to most parish churches, and the scholars assembled either in the church, or the porch, or “parvis.” Thus in 1300 we read of children being taught to sing and read in the “parvis” of St. Martin’s, Norwich. Endowed schools in connection with hospitals and colleges were also springing up, of which we shall speak more fully in another chapter, and in all these schools, as well as in the universities, the studies, up to the latter part of the reign of Edward III., were carried on in Latin and French. Ralph Higden, a monk of Chester, who wrote his Polychronicon somewhere about the year 1357, informs us that in his day French was the only language which schoolboys were allowed to use, except Latin. The passage as translated by John de Trevisa in 1387 is as follows: “Children in scoles agenst the usage and maner of all other nations beeth compelled for to leve thir own language, and for to construe thir lessons and thinges in Frenche. Also gentylmen children beeth taught to speke Frenche, from the time that they beeth rokked in thir cradel. And uplondish men (i.e. country people) will lyken hymself to gentylmen and soundeth with gret besynesse for to speke Frenche to be told of.” When Ralph was protesting against this custom its knell was about to sound. In 1362 the celebrated statute was passed which ordained that all pleadings in the Royal courts should now be made in English instead of French, a change for which we stand indebted to the spirit of nationality called forth by the continental wars. By the time therefore that John of Trevisa wrote his translation of the Polychronicon, a great revolution had taken place, so that he thought it necessary to introduce this correction into the body of his work: “This maner (the use of the French language) is now som dele ychaungide: for John Cornwaile, a maister of gramer, chaungide the lore in gramer scole and construction of Frensch, into Englisch, and Richard Pencriche lerned that maner of teching of him, and other men of Pencriche; so that now the yere of oure Lord a thousand thre hundred foure score and fyve, of the secunde king Rychard after the conquest, in alle the gramer scoles of England, children leveth Frensch, and construeth and lerneth in Englisch, and haveth therby avauntage in one side and desavauntage in another. Ther avauntage is, that thei lerneth ther gramer in lasse tyme than children were wont to do; desavauntage is, that now children of gramer scole knoweth no more Frensch than knows thir left heele; and that is harm to them, if thei schul passe the see and travaile in strange londes, and in many other places also: also gentylmen haveth now myche ylefte for to teche thir children Frensch.” It is evident that John of Cornwaile and Richard Pencriche, were, like the author himself, Cornish men. John of Trevisa was a Cornish priest, one of the earliest students at Exeter College, or, as it was called at that time, Stapleton Hall, Canon of Westbury in Wiltshire, and Vicar of Berkeley. His translation of the Polychronicon was undertaken at the request of his Patron, Thomas Lord Berkeley, and was afterwards modernised and continued by Caxton. At the request of the same noble friend he is said to have undertaken an English translation of the Old and New Testaments. Warton, and after him Craik, have stated that no account of this work is known to exist, and doubts have even been raised whether it were ever really written. One antiquarian, quoted by Lewis in his History of the Translations of the Bible, assures a “learned friend” that Trevisa translated no more of the Scriptures than certain sentences painted on the walls of Berkeley Castle, which sentences turn out to have been painted in Latin and French. But the existence of the translation is uniformly alluded to by early writers as a well-known fact, and Dr. Ingram informs us in a note appended to his Memorials of Oxford that in 1808 he was actually presented with a copy of the work.[286]

There was the less excuse for the English gentry having eschewed the use of the national tongue, from the fact that the language had long since been redeemed from the character of a barbarous idiom by the labours of the monks. Their rhyming chronicles and a vast quantity of beautiful and pathetic poetry, attributed by critics to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, must be regarded as the real first-fruits of English literature; and the adherence to what Chaucer lets us know was exceedingly bad French, in preference to good English, was simply a remnant of Anglo-Norman pride. Chaucer himself had to apologise for his use of the vulgar idiom, and in the prologue to one of his prose treatises, he protests against the speaking of “poesy matter” in French which, in the ears of Frenchmen, is about as agreeable as a Frenchman’s English. “Let Frenchmen endite their quaint terms in French,” he says, “for it is kindly to their mouths; but let us show our fantasies in such words as we learned of our dames’ tongues.” His example, of course, had great influence; yet such was the force of this sentiment of gentility, that at the universities the Oxonian and Cantabrian French (which was not much better than that spoken at “Stratford-atte-Bowe”) held its ground for some years; but in the primary schools the English tongue asserted its supremacy, and primers and grammars began to be divested of their foreign clothing. A great many fragments of English school literature exist belonging to the fourteenth century, some of which may furnish amusement to the reader. All perhaps may not have a very clear idea of what an ancient Primer really was. It was something very different from the school books to which we ordinarily give the name. For in the dames schools, of which Chaucer speaks, children were provided with few literary luxuries and had to learn their letters off a scrap of parchment nailed on a board, and in most cases covered with a thin transparent sheet of horn to protect the precious manuscript. Hence the term “horn-book” applied to the elementary books in use by children. Prefixed to the alphabet, of course, was the holy sign of the Cross; and so firm a hold does an old custom get on the popular mind that down to the commencement of the present century alphabets continued to preserve their ancient heading, and derived from this circumstance their customary appellation of “the Christ-cross row,” a term so thoroughly established as still to find its place in our dictionaries. The mediÆval primer is, however, best described in the language of the fourteenth century itself. The following passage occurs in the introduction to a MS. poem of 300 lines, still preserved in the British Museum, each portion of which begins with a separate letter of the alphabet:—

After the difficulties of the primer had been overcome, a great deal of elementary knowledge was taught to the children, as in Saxon times, through the vehicle of verse. For instance, we find a versified geography of the fourteenth century, of which the two following verses may serve as a specimen, though it must be owned the second is not very creditable to our mediÆval geographers:—

The following grammar rules are of rather later date, and belong to the fifteenth century:—

There is something in this last fragment very suggestive of the rod. What would have been the fate of the unhappy grammarian, if in spite of this solemn counsel he had failed to have his ablative case in his mind, we dare not conjecture. Our forefathers had strict views on the subject of sparing the rod and spoiling the child. Thus one old writer observes of children in general:—

Yet the strictness was mingled, as of old, with paternal tenderness, and children appear to have treated their masters with a singular mixture of familiarity and reverence. And it is pleasant to find among the same collection of school fragments a little distich which speaks of peacemaking:—

There is good reason for believing that schoolboys of the fourteenth century were much what they are in the nineteenth, and fully possessed of that love of robbing orchards, which seems peculiar to the race. Chaucer has something to say on this head, but Lydgate’s confessions are exceedingly pitiful:—

I must, however, add a few school pictures of a graver and sweeter character. Chaucer, who painted English society as he saw it with his own eyes, has not forgotten to describe the village school where “an hepe of children comen of Christen blood,” acquired as much learning as was suitable to their age and condition:—

And among these children he describes one, “a widewe’s lytel sone,” whom his pious mother had taught whenever he saw an image of Christ’s Mother, to kneel down and say an Ave Maria; and he goes on to tell us how

He was too young, however, to understand the meaning of the words, though, be it observed, his elder schoolfellows were more erudite than himself:—

And when “his felow which elder was than he,” had expounded the sense of the words, and made him understand that it was sung in reverence of Christ’s Mother, the little scholar makes known his resolve to do his diligence to con it all by Christmas, in honour of Our Lady.

In these parochial schools, as we have elsewhere seen, children of the lower orders, even from St Dunstan’s time, were taught grammar and church music gratuitously. It has been very constantly affirmed that the education here spoken of was exclusively given to those intended for the monastic and ecclesiastical states. But there is direct evidence, that the parochial schools were frequented by the children of the peasantry indiscriminately, and by those of the very lowest and poorest condition. The proof of this is to be found in the statutes of the realm. About the year 1406 a law was passed, wherein, after complaint being made that in opposition to certain ancient statutes, a vast number of the children of husbandmen, who laboured with cart and plough and had no lands, were apprenticed to handicraft trades, and thereby induced a great scarcity of husbandmen and labourers in many parts of the country, it was enacted that henceforth no one should be allowed so to apprentice his child to any trade, unless he rented land to the annual value of twenty shillings. The object of this blundering and tyrannical piece of legislation was, of course, to keep down the lower orders from endeavouring to raise themselves in the scale of society, and to oppose that upward movement which had been one of the results of the enfranchisement of so large a number of feudal serfs in the reign of Edward III. But whilst decreeing that day-labourers with the cart and plough should thus be kept back from advancing, or helping their children to advance, in point of station and wealth, the very same statute encourages them to send their children to school. “Every man or woman, of whatever state or condition they be, shall be at liberty to send their son or daughter to take learning in any kind of school that pleaseth them within the realm.” This clause seems to have had reference to a petition which had been presented to parliament by certain lords in the reign of Richard II., to the effect that children of serfs and the lower sort might not be sent to school, and particularly to the schools of monasteries, wherein many were trained as ecclesiastics, and thence rose to dignities in the State. The statute aimed at appeasing the jealous pride of the nobles, who regarded with dismay the prospect of bondsmen and husbandmen emerging from their state of servitude; whilst at the same time, the influence of the ecclesiastical body was strong enough to preserve for the lower classes their hitherto undisputed right of receiving such education as circumstances placed within their reach. I need not pause to comment on the light which such a passage of history sheds on the supposed solicitude of monks and clergy to check the spread of learning for the furtherance of selfish ends. But it is clear that the permission formally granted by this statute would have been a simple mockery, unless schools existed adapted to the class in question; and it may satisfy us of the fact that village schools, in Chaucer’s time, were really frequented by much the same class of scholars as in our own; and that not merely in special and more populated localities, but in remote rural districts. William Caxton, who was born about the time of the passing of this statute, tells us that he learned his English in the Weald of Kent, a tract of country which, fertile as it now is, was, even a century later than Caxton’s time, a waste wilderness, thinly inhabited, save by herds of deer and hogs, and a few adventurous men who undertook to clear the forest and break up the land with the plough.[287] Yet in this wild country Caxton learnt his English, “a broad and rude English, as is anywhere spoken in England.” And in after-life, apologising to his readers for the plain unadorned style which his “simple cunning” uses, he speaks of his early education, “whereof I humbly and heartily thank God, and am bounden to pray for my father’s and mother’s souls, who in my youth sent me to school.” His education, we know, was carried on in London at a later date, but it must have been begun in some very primitive parochial school of Kent, where his companions could only have been rustics. The teaching in such schools was, doubtless, simple enough, but however small may have been the amount of secular learning acquired by the scholars, all received instruction in Christian doctrine, and learnt their prayers; the duty of providing such instruction for the poorer members of their flocks being earnestly pressed on the parish priests in the visitation articles and synodal decrees of John of Peckham and other English prelates.

Prayers and instructions, both secular and religious, were often taught to those who could not read, in a versified form, as had been the custom in Saxon times. Thus there is a curious poem of this period addressed to “Those who gete their lyvynge by the onest craft of masonry,” in which the young mason is instructed, rather minutely, how to behave himself when he comes to the house of God. Wherever he works, he is to come to Mass when he hears the bell. Before entering church he must take holy water, and is to understand that in doing so devoutly, he quenches venial sin. Then he must put back his hood, that is, uncover his head, and as he enters the church, look to the great Rood, and kneeling down on both knees “pull up his herte to Christe anon!” He must stand and bless himself at the Gospel, and avoid carelessly leaning against the wall; and when he hears the bell ring for the “holy sakerynge,”—

Versified instructions of this kind were capable of being remembered by many who never learnt to read, and were evidently in very common use. We find them in all languages and on all subjects. Thus the old French treatise entitled “Stans puer ad mensam,” selected by Caxton for one of his translations, and another called “Les contenances de la table,” which exists in a great variety of forms, give excellent rules for behaving at table and saying grace:—

After dinner he is reminded to pray for the dead:—

And the child is thus gently warned against the bad habit of noisy disputes at table:—

Teaching of some sort the peasantry certainly received, whatever means may have been used to convey it; they probably knew little of grammatical analysis, or the relative lengths of the European rivers, but it may be doubted whether, with all our cumbrous machinery of State education, we have hit on any system which is likely to form the Christian character so successfully in the hearts of our people as that which existed in the days of St. Anselm or Chaucer. “The majority of husbandmen are saved,” writes the former, “because they live with simplicity, and feed the people of God with their hands; and therefore they are blessed.”[288] And the poet who never paints a fancy picture, thus portrays from the life the character of his poor ploughman:—

Have we not a right to say that such a character had somewhere and by some means received a thoroughly Christian education, even though he may never have learnt to read or write, and were wholly innocent of grammar?

I must not be tempted to enter on the endless theme of school sports and customs. But it is proper to mention that English schoolboys had their patron saints, of whom St. Gregory the Great was one. So we learn from the—shall I call it poetry?—of the Puritan, Barnaby Googe, who tells us that

On his feast the boys were called into school by certain songs; presents were distributed, to make them love their school, and one of their number was made to represent the bishop. But a yet more universally acknowledged patron was St. Nicholas of Myra, in honour of whom schoolboys of all ranks and conditions elected their boy-bishop, and played pranks in which jest and earnest were strangely blended together. The “childe bishope” preached a sermon, and afterwards received welcome offerings of pence. And this custom was one of those to which the people clung with the greatest tenacity, so that it continued to survive down to the close of Elizabeth’s reign.

The character of the studies followed at this time in the higher English academies, may perhaps be best gathered from an examination of the kind of learning displayed by the poet already so often quoted. If Chaucer is to be taken as in any way a fair representative of an educated Englishman of his time, it is plain that there was, in a certain sense, no want of learning in the English schools, though his critics acknowledged that however varied and extensive his reading may have been, it was loose and inaccurate. In this respect the English were far behind the Italians. I am not aware that Dante has ever been convicted of a blunder in his classical allusions, but in Chaucer such solecisms abound. “All through the poem,” says Craik, in his critical examination of the House of Fame, “there runs the spirit of the strange, barbarous, classical scholarship of the Middle Ages. The Æneid is not wholly unknown to the author, but it may be questioned if his actual acquaintance with the work extended much beyond the opening lines. An abridgment, indeed, of the story of Æneas follows, but that might have been got at second-hand. The same mixture of the Gothic and the classic occurs throughout that is found in all the poetry of the period, whether French, English, or Italian.” He proceeds to quote lines, in which “the harper Orion” is made to do duty for Arion; Mount CithÆron is supposed to figure as the individual “Dan Citherus;” the musician Marsyas, who was flayed alive, appears as “Mersia, that lost her skin,” and so on. However, it is agreed that Chaucer was, in a certain inaccurate way, familiar with the stories of the Latin classics, and possessed of whatever learning was to be acquired in the schools of London and the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris, in all of which, according to Leland, he had “gained great glory.”[289] At the universities, moreover he had learned men for his cronies; his two most familiar college friends were John Gower and Randolph Strode, both of whom, like himself, afterwards attained poetic fame. It is to them that he dedicated his Troilus and Creseide, addressing them as “the philosophical Strode” and “the moral Gower.” The name of Gower is too well known to require any comment, but all readers may not be equally familiar with that of Strode, so we will briefly state that he was a Scotchman by birth, a fellow of Merton, afterwards a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and the author of a poem in the vernacular, entitled “Phantasma,” which critics scruple not to place on a level with Chaucer’s verse. He finally entered the Dominican Order, and greatly distinguished himself in the controversy against Wickliffe, thereby earning the distinguished honour of some very coarse abuse from the pen of Bale.

Chaucer was educated for the law, and Speght records the doubtful tradition that he was at one time a member of the Inner Temple, at which period of his career he is said to have been fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street. At any rate, his education was that of a “clerk,” and the office he eventually filled under the Crown was that of Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidies of wool, skins, and tanned hides in the port of London—an office about as suitable to him as that of gauger was to Robert Burns. He seems to have felt its incongruity with a poet’s sensitiveness, and its necessary “reckonings” are often alluded to in his verses as sad trials of patience. He was perfectly at home in the French tongue, and his familiarity with Italian is stoutly maintained by some, and as vehemently denied by others. Lydgate says that he translated Dante, but no fragment of such a work is known to exist. He was an incessant reader, as he is never weary of letting us know. When he had done his “reckonings,” his manner was to go home to his house and sit at his books, “as dumb as any stone,” and read till he was half blind. Once, he tells us, he spent a whole day reading Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, from the Commentary of Macrobius. He had a great liking for old books, and expresses it sweetly enough—

He seems to have had a decided taste for mathematical and scientific pursuits. The writings and example of Roger Bacon had given a great stimulus to these pursuits in England, and Hallam mentions the names of several Englishmen of the fourteenth century who distinguished themselves as mathematicians, such as Archbishop Bradwardine, the profound Doctor, as he was called. Among Chaucer’s prose works is a Treatise on the Astrolabe, written for the instruction of his youngest son, Lewis, who was studying at Oxford under a tutor. He dedicates the work to his boy in the following words:—

“Lytel Lewis, my sonne, I perceive well by certaine evidences thine abilitie to learne sciences touching numbers and proportions, and also wel consider I thy busie prayer in especiall to learne the Treatise of the Astrolabie ... therefore I have given thee a sufficient Astrolabie for an orizont, compounded after the latitude of Oxenford.” He has compiled it, he adds, because the charts of the Astrolabe that he has seen were “too hard for thy tender age of ten yeares to conceive,” and he has written it in English, “for Latine ne canst thou nat yet but smal, my lytel sonne.”

In one of his poems he gives an exposition of the theory of gravitation, and appeals to Aristotle and “Dan Plato” in confirmation of his philosophy. He also explains the propagation of sound, which he declares to be produced by a series of undulations of air like those that appear when you throw a stone into the water. He was familiar with the jargon of the astrologers and alchemists, and his commentators assure us that he displays a very considerable knowledge of the real science of chemistry as well as of its quackery, which last does not escape his lash. For quacks of all sorts indeed he has no indulgence, and spends his humour on the doctor of physic, whom he describes as “well grounded in astronomy,” able to help his patients by his knowledge of magic, no great reader of his Bible, which was not a very fashionable study with the followers of Averrhoes and Avicenna, but on excellent terms with his apothecary, and ready to help him to get rid of plenty of drugs and electuaries. It will be remembered that at the time when Chaucer wrote, the “Doctor of Physic,” though a graduate of the universities, and a very important person in his way, had no great claims to the character of a man of science. John Gaddesden, a fellow of Merton, and court physician to Edward, wrote a book called the “Rosa Anglica,” on his great and successful method of treating patients for the smallpox, which consisted in hanging their rooms and enveloping their persons in scarlet cloth! He informs us that, with the blessing of God, he purposes writing another book on Chiromancy, or fortune-telling by the hand, condescends to give directions to the court ladies for preparing their perfumes, washes, and hair-dyes, and interlards his quack recipes with scraps of original verse.

In his treatment of religious subjects Chaucer represents the tone of feeling which prevailed among a very large class of Englishmen in his day. He was a political partisan of John of Gaunt, and therefore gave the Lollards a certain kind of support. To a man of free life and coarse humour it was both tempting and easy to exercise his wit on fat monks and lazy friars, and to grumble like a true Englishman at their demands on his purse. Doubtless there were plenty of unworthy representatives of both professions to stand as the originals of his poetical caricatures, and broadly enough did he paint their unseemly features. But that was all; and his biographer, Godwin, admits that, so far from sharing any of the heretical opinions of the Lollards, his poems unmistakably prove his adherence to the Catholic dogmas, especially those which they most malignantly attacked, namely, the Sacraments of Penance and the Holy Eucharist; while his devotion to the Blessed Virgin is expressed in a thousand passages, such as the following:—

Occleve, his disciple, himself no mean poet, bears testimony to the fact that his lamented master was a devout client of the Queen of Heaven:—

Contemporary with Chaucer, the father of our poetry, was Sir John Mandeville, who commonly enjoys the credit of being the father of English prose, and whose travels let into the popular mind a glimmering light as to the whereabouts of Tartary, Persia, Armenia, Lybia, Chaldea, and Ethiopia, all which he visited, besides some Eastern lands that he calls by the name of “Amazoyn,” “Ind the Less and the More,” and “many isles that be abouten Ind.” In his “Itinerary” he describes his visit to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, apologising for possible inaccuracies by reminding the indulgent reader that “thynges passed out of long time from a man’s mynd turnen soon into forgetting; because that the mynd of man ne may not be comprehended ne withholden for the freelty of mankind.” The “Itinerary” was written in Latin, and translated by the author first into French, and from thence into English, and enjoyed great popularity. And the publication of these travels, together with those of Marco Polo, stimulated an interest in the study of geography, so that we begin to find more frequent mention in the catalogues of monastic libraries of maps and charts. The whole science of map-drawing, it may be observed, had developed in the cloister; the German monks showing themselves indefatigable in improving this branch of science. About the year 1370 Prior Nicholas Hereford of Evesham Abbey, after collecting a fine assortment of books, caused a great map of the world to be executed, at the cost of six marks, for the use of his convent. And a certain Camaldolese monk, named Fra Mauro, made use of the information derived from the writings of Marco Polo, and produced a grand Mappamondo, wherein he depicts the sea rolling round the southern extremity of Africa. On the margin of his map appear some learned notes, referring the phenomena of the tides to the moon’s attraction—a piece of natural philosophy, however, which, as we have seen, was not unknown to Bede.

It has been already said that during the reign of Edward III. the English universities had to sustain the twofold attack of Lollardism and the Black Death, by the united effects of which they were reduced to so low a condition, as at one time to have ceased to be regarded as seats of learning. Nine tenths of the English clergy are said to have been swept away by the terrible plague, together with the population of entire cities, and the necessity of the case obliged the bishops to fill the vacant benefices with men of inferior education, a practice which for the moment told severely on the state of the schools. But the effects of the pestilence were less fatally disastrous than those caused by the heresy of Wickliffe. When in 1361, that celebrated man, then master of Baliol College, Oxford, first made himself notorious by his attacks on the mendicant orders, he seems to have done little more than repeat the old threadbare calumnies of William de St. Amour and Richard Fitz Ralph. His views were of course exceedingly relished by the secular doctors, and his reputed talents induced the primate, Simon Islip, to offer him the wardenship of Canterbury Hall, then newly founded, partly for secular and partly for monastic students. In order to make room for him, the former warden, Woodhal, a Canterbury monk, had to retire, and three other monastic students who held scholarships in the college were at the same time removed. Langham, the successor of Islip, pronounced these proceedings irregular, and restored Woodhal to his post. The matter was referred to the decision of Pope Urban V., who decided in favour of Woodhal, and from that day Wickliffe became the deadly enemy of the papal power. The university, or rather the secular regents of the university, immediately took part with him against the Pope and the Friars, and in 1372, to mark their adherence to his cause, elected him Professor of Divinity. He succeeded, moreover, in obtaining the powerful support of John of Gaunt, and on occasion of a congress, held at Bruges, to settle various points in dispute between the English Government and the Holy See, the name of John Wickliffe appears in the list of Royal Commissioners. All this time there had been no whisper of heresy, nor was it until after his return to England, when he was promoted to a prebend in the collegiate church of Westbury, and a little later was presented by John of Gaunt to the rectory of Lutterworth, that he began to disseminate his pernicious doctrines. Besides his peculiar views regarding the possession of property, he had started views on the subject of predestination, analogous to those afterwards embraced by Calvin, and attacked the supremacy of the Pope, and the doctrines of penance, indulgences, the worship of the saints and of holy images, and prayer for the dead. He and his followers propagated their opinions by a sort of popular preaching suited to the tastes of the common people, and accompanied by a certain low buffoonery, in all ages specially attractive to rude audiences of the Anglo-Saxon race. The coarse invectives levelled against the clergy found eager reception among such hearers; for there is perhaps to most men an irresistible fascination in doctrines which aim at bringing down any dominant class of society to a lower level. The English commons were at this period seething in a chronic state of insurrection, and the Lollard denunciations of the priests and land-holders were extremely to the taste of the Socialists of the fourteenth century. It is therefore quite easy to understand how it was that Hob Miller and Colin Lout should have thought it an excellent joke to ridicule and despise their betters; but that Wickliffe should have found warm supporters in the university of Oxford is a fact that may well surprise and startle us. But Lollardism had a double aspect, its theological heresies were at first as little relished at Oxford as at Rome, but its enmity to the religious orders happened to chime in with the views of the secular faction, and therefore they gave it their support. An appeal had already been made, not to Rome, but to Parliament, for a law to prohibit any member of the university joining a religious order before his eighteenth year, and the Oxonian divines were not ashamed to accept, together with the desired statute, a prohibition to carry the matter to Rome. They next established the rule that no religious, whether monk or friar, should be admitted to graduate in arts, while at the same time, by the university statutes, no one could fill a theological professorship without so graduating. The monks appealed to the Holy See, and obtained a dispensation from this unjust law, and thus increased the ill-will of their thwarted and malicious adversaries. The struggle was at its height when Wickliffe raised his cry against the mendicant orders, whom he declared to be Antichrist, and proctors of Satan; and he at once found plenty of grave divines who were willing to regard him as a useful ally, and forgive both his heresies and his nonsense for the support he furnished to their side of the quarrel. Hence, in 1377, when Gregory XI. sent Bulls to the Archbishop of Canterbury the Bishop of London, and the university of Oxford, calling on them to take active measures for the condemnation of the heresiarch, we are assured by Walsingham that the heads of the university deliberated whether or no they should receive the Bull, nor does it appear certain that it ever was received. At last, however, in 1381, Wickliffe startled even his Oxford allies by his attack on the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, and a decree was drawn up, and signed by William de Burton, the chancellor, and twelve of the chief divines, condemning his errors, and forbidding them to be promulgated in the university. Hereupon Wickliffe scrupled not to appeal to the Crown and Parliament, but the English people were not yet quite prepared for such a step, and the act caused general scandal. Even John of Gaunt, who had hitherto, from political motives, given him his countenance, now withdrew his protection, and declared his teaching on the Sacrament of the Altar to be a “doctrine of devils.”

Oxford, however, had not yet entirely given up his cause. In 1382, when Courtenay, Archbishop of Canterbury, set on foot vigorous measures for the eradication of the new heresies, he met with stout resistance from Rigge, who had succeeded De Burton in the office of chancellor of the university, and who flatly refused to silence a Lollard professor. Courtenay at last obtained a royal mandate, in virtue of which Wickliffe and his most obstinate adherents were expelled the university, a good number of professors purchasing immunity, however by a ready recantation of their errors, for few evinced any desire of becoming martyrs in the cause.

The steps taken by Courtenay vindicated the authority of the Church but they were far from being sufficient to purge the university from the heretical leaven, or remedy the evils caused by these internal troubles. So far is Ayliffe’s statement that the Wickliffites restored sound learning at Oxford, from possessing a shadow of truth, that the period when this heresy was rampant among her doctors was precisely that when her schools had confessedly sunk to their very lowest state of decay. The authorities were themselves perfectly aware of the fact, and represented it as one of the unhappy effects produced by papal provisions. But the statutes of Provisors, passed in the reign of Edward III., by which all such provisions were forbidden under severe penalties, instead of applying a remedy to this evil, only hastened the decline of learning. It was found that the Crown was far less disposed to promote men of learning than the Popes had been; and, to quote the words of Lingard, “experience showed that the statutes in question operated to the depression of learning and the deterioration of the universities.” Accordingly in the year 1399 petitions were presented to Convocation from Oxford and Cambridge, setting forth that while the Popes were permitted to bestow benefices by provision, the preference had always been given to men of talent and industry, and that the effect of such preference had been to quicken the application and increase the number of the students; but that since the passing of the Act against Provisors, their members had been neglected by the patrons of livings, the students had disappeared, and the schools were nearly abandoned.[290] Sixteen years later the House of Commons awoke to a sense of the suicidal character of their own policy, and petitioned King Henry V. that, to save the universities from destruction, he would suffer the statutes against Provisors to be repealed. The King referred the matter to the bishops, who, however, had no wish at all to interfere with the existing legislation, and contented themselves with passing a law in convocation obliging every patron of a benefice for the next ten years to present a graduate of one of the universities.

These facts may serve as sufficient reply to the vaunted “restoration of learning” achieved by the Lollards. The effect of their influence in the universities, coupled with that of an anti-Roman course of legislation, had been to bring those institutions to the very verge of ruin, and that in spite of the extraordinary efforts which were being made by private munificence to enlarge and perfect the collegiate system of education. Indeed, though Wickliffe himself was a man of undoubted ability, the attempt to convert him into a restorer of humane letters, savours of the absurd.[291] His learning was precisely the same which, when found in the possession of friars and other scholastics, earns for them such bitter taunts and gibes as “locusts,” who devoured all the green things in the land, and darkened it with bad Latin and captious logic. Wickliffe’s Latin was not better than that of his adversaries, and his logic was of that true Oxonian temper which Wood qualifies as “frivolous sophistry whereby scholars could at any time be for or against anything proposed.” The well-known ballad in which an Oxford student puzzles his simple-minded parent by proving a pigeon and an eel pie to be convertible terms, seems hardly a caricature when we read the shifts, or, as Wood terms them, the “screws” by which the Lollard chief sought to prove that he meant the precise contrary of what he had been convicted of saying. “He so qualified his doctrines with conditions,” says Lingard, “and explained them away by distinctions, as to give an appearance of innocence to tenets the most mischievous. On the subject of the Holy Eucharist he intrenched himself behind unintelligible distinctions, the meaning of which it would have puzzled the most acute logician to detect.”[292] And Rohrbacher observes that instead of appealing to the Scriptures explained by the Fathers, he took refuge in “arguments and dialectic subtleties, wrapped up in an obscure and barbarous phraseology;” in other words, he exhibited precisely the same description of learning, the display of which has earned so many hard epithets for the academic “locusts.”

Wickliffe’s literary fame rests chiefly on his translation of the Bible into the vulgar tongue, often incorrectly spoken of as the earliest English version. It is not clear that he himself ever translated more than the Gospels, for of the various manuscripts which bear his name, some are now admitted to have been the production of later Lollard writers. His English is declared by Mr. Craik to be “coarse and slovenly,” and far more harsh and obscure than that of Mandeville or Chaucer. His version was made the vehicle for conveying his peculiar tenets, by means of corruptions of the Sacred Text, and was accompanied by certain Prologues or Glosses, explaining it in an heretical sense. On this account it was enacted by Archbishop Arundel, in a Provincial Synod held in 1408, that “no one should hereafter translate any text of Holy Scripture into English by way of a book, and that no such book, composed lately, in the time of Wickliffe, or since his death, shall be read.” This decree has been erroneously interpreted as a prohibition to the laity to read the Scriptures. But its real meaning is very clearly explained by the Canonist Lyndwood,[293] a contemporary of Arundel’s, as being, first, a prohibition to any private person to translate the Scriptures into English without authority; and secondly, a prohibition to use or read any such unauthorised and incorrect versions. And he expressly adds that from the terms “newly composed, in the time of Wickliffe, or since his death,” it is evident that the Lollard versions only are prohibited, but that every one is still at liberty to read those formerly translated from the text of Scripture into English or any other modern idiom. Lyndwood died in 1446, and was living when the decree in question was first published. His testimony as to its meaning as then understood and interpreted, as well as to the fact that other earlier versions did exist at that time, cannot therefore be called in question. Moreover, Fox the Protestant martyrologist, tells us, on the authority of Polydore Vergil, that this same Archbishop Arundel, who is so often accused of prohibiting the reading of the Scriptures, preached the funeral sermon of Queen Anne of Bohemia, and mentioned among other things in her praise that she was a diligent reader of the Four Gospels written in Bohemian, English, and Latin, with divers expositions, which book she had sent to him to be viewed and examined.

If this account be correct, it equally vindicates Arundel from the charge of prohibiting the Scriptures, and Queen Anne from that of Lollardism on the ground of reading them, for it will be observed the copy she used had been first submitted to the archbishop’s approval, and his formal permission had been obtained. We have also another interesting testimony to the existence of these earlier versions, and an explanation of the decree against those of the Lollards, in the words of Sir Thomas More, who, in his Dialogue, notices the prohibitory Constitution of Arundel in the following terms:—

“Ye shall understand that the great arch-heretic, Wickliffe (whereas the Holy Bible was long before his time by virtuous and well-learned men translated into the English tongue, and by good and godly people, with devotion and soberness, well and reverently read) took upon him, of a malicious purpose, to translate it anew. In which translation he purposely corrupted the Holy Text, maliciously planting therein such words as might in the reader’s ears serve to the proof of such heresies as he went about to sow; which he not only set forth in his own translation of the Bible, but also in certain prologues or glosses, which he made hereupon. So that after it was perceived what harm the people took by the translations, prologues, and glosses of Wickliffe’s, and also of some others who after him helped to set forth his sect, then, for that cause, it was at a council holden at Oxford provided, upon great pain, that no man should henceforth translate the Scriptures into the English tongue upon his own authority by way of book or treatise, nor no man should read such books as were newly made in the time of Wickliffe, or since, or that should be made any time after, till the same translation were by the Diocesan or Provincial Council approved. But that it neither forbade the translations to be read that were already well done of old before Wickliffe’s time, nor condemned his because it was new, but because it was naught, nor prohibited new to be made, but only provided that they shall not be read if they be made amiss, till by good examination they be amended; except they be such translations as those of Wickliffe and Tindal, which the malicious mind of the translator hath so handled that it were lost labour to go about to mend them.”

He goes on to say that he has seen, and, if necessary, could show, copies of English Bibles, “fair and old,” approved by the Diocesans, which have been left with lay men and women, and used by Catholic folk with soberness and devotion, and that the clergy never kept any Bibles from the laity save those that were “naught,” and not so approved; that is, those in which heretical corruptions of the text had been introduced, or to which were attached the pernicious Lollard glosses. And he explains how it was that no printer had yet ventured to print an English Bible, a great and expensive undertaking, which might, after all, have been unsaleable, through the question which might have been raised whether it were printed from a version made before or since the days of Wickliffe. The whole passage is sufficiently explicit, both as to the fact of approved English versions of the Scriptures existing before the time of Wickliffe, and also as to the received interpretation of Arundel’s decree. We have the very explicit testimony of Cranmer to the same effect. “It is not much above a hundred years,” he writes, “since Scripture hath not been accustomed to be read in the vulgar tongue within this realm; many hundred years before that it was translated and read in the Saxon tongue, and when that language waxed old and out of common usage, because folks should not lack the fruit of reading it, it was translated again into the newer language.”[294] It is, however, by no means easy in all cases to distinguish these early versions from their later imitations. All the translations of the Scriptures preserved in manuscript in the Oxford libraries have been commonly assigned to Wickliffe, although Dr. Thomas James is of opinion that a close examination of some of them would show them to be of much more ancient date. He is also disposed to think that one of the prologues ordinarily assigned to one of Wickliffe’s disciples belongs to an earlier translation. Lewis, in his “History of the English Translations of the Bible,” supposes this prologue to have been written in 1396 by John Purvey, one of Wickliffe’s most learned followers; but its allusions to the care taken to consult St. Jerome, and the gloss of Nicholas de Lyra, do not seem to harmonise very well with this theory. Dr. James considers that the copies preserved in the Bodleian Library, and in Christ Church Library, are of ancient Catholic versions, that in Queen’s College Library alone being properly assigned to Wickliffe. Lewis opposes this view, yet he admits that the Bodleian and Queen’s College versions are different from that of Christ Church. Warton claims one of these for John of Trevisa, and Weever assigns one to the Venerable Richard of Hampole, an Austin hermit, who lived about the year 1349, near the Monastery of Hampole in Yorkshire, and, according to Camden, wrote many books full of “heavenly unction,” and whose translation of the Psalter is still preserved. Whatever may be the real history of these three versions (and it is evident that critics are by no means unanimous as to their authorship), several fragments exist of different books of Scripture which are admitted to be of ancient date. In the library of Bennet College, Cambridge, a translation is preserved of two of the Gospels and St. Paul’s Epistles, with a gloss, written in the English spoken after the Conquest. In Sydney Sussex College are portions of the Old Testament commented on in like manner. A translation of the Psalter, with a gloss, is in the Harleian Library, besides the Psalter of Richard of Hampole, mentioned above, to which is prefixed a prologue, in which the author explains that he has sought no strange English, but only that which was commonest and easiest, and has been careful to consult the holy doctors. There are also, according to Lewis, other translations extant of the Psalter, the New Testament, and the Church Lessons and Hymns, all made before the time of Wickliffe. It must be borne in mind that the manuscripts preserved in our libraries are mere fragments accidentally saved from destruction, and can scarcely be taken as evidence of what existed in England before the Reformation. The pious visitors of Edward VI., in their zeal to purify the university of Popish service books, destroyed every manuscript they could lay hands on, which exhibited illuminations or other ornaments, without the slightest reference to its contents. Whole libraries were then sold for waste paper, and bought by bakers to feed their ovens, or for other base purposes. But among the scanty relics that escaped the hands of these worse than Vandals, stray leaves are to be found of sermons, treatises, and mutilated hymns, many of which are in the vernacular English of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. One of these interesting fragments has been printed by Messrs Wright and Halliwell in the ReliquiÆ AntiquÆ, and is assigned by them to the fourteenth century. The preacher appears to have been familiar with some English version of the Canticle of Canticles, and introduces a passage which may be quoted as a beautiful specimen of our ancient English idiom:—“Behold my derlyng speketh to me; arys, come nerre my beautiful, now wynter is passid; that is, the coulde wynd of worldly covertise that mad me hard y-froze as yse: the floures scheweth them on erth, the voys of the tortel is herd in our herber; that is, the soule that the kyng of heven has y-lad to his vyne celler, syngeth chast songes of mornyng for hir sinnes and for deth of Christ hir mate: she will no more sette on grene bows lovynge worldlye things, bote fedeth hir with love of Christ, the clene white corne, and fleeth up to the holes of His five woundes, lookyng with sympel eyne into the cler waters of holie writ.”

From what has been said, it may be gathered that before the time of Wickliffe, the Scriptures were in no sense shut up from the laity; that considerable portions of them were rendered into English, and are known to have been actually in the possession of lay persons, and that it was not until the corrupt versions and glosses of the Lollards were made instruments of disseminating pernicious errors, that any decrees were made on the subject. Even then the restrictions were not prohibitions: the laity were still allowed to read approved Catholic versions: though it is very probable, that at a time when so large a portion of the population was infected with Lollardism, and when there was a disposition to make the Sacred Text, interpreted by each man’s whim, the rule of each man’s belief, the private reading of the English Scriptures by lay persons was not greatly encouraged. In fact, prohibitions or restrictions of this sort were never promulgated by the ecclesiastical authorities, until rendered necessary by the perverse misuse of the Sacred Volume by heretics. Thus, in France no such restrictions existed until 1229 when the extravagant doctrines which the Albigenses pretended to adduce from Scripture, obliged the Council of Toulouse to forbid the translation of the Sacred Books, the use of which had, up to that time, been freely permitted. In no case was the Latin Bible withdrawn from the laity,[295] and it must be remembered that in those days the majority of those who could read at all, could read Latin. Lewis, indeed, would have us believe that before Wickliffe’s time, even the Latin Bible was not allowed in common use; and gravely assures us, that the monks and friars collected copies and laid them up in their libraries, not (as one might suppose) for the obvious purpose of reading them, but “to imprison them from the curates and secular priests, and so prevent them from preaching the Word of God to the people.” Nonsense of this sort is scarcely worth refuting, though it finds a place in very grave writers, and by certain readers is often enough believed. Bibles were, of course, comparatively rare and expensive books, and not within reach of every poor curate’s purse. But so far from any conspiracy existing to make them rarer, it was a common devotion among those who possessed such a treasure, to bequeath it by will to some public church, there to be set up and chained, ad usum communem. This practice is often supposed to have originated with the Reformers, and a modern artist has depicted, with great skill, the grey-haired peasant approaching the chained Bible set forth by order of his sacred majesty king Edward VI., and turning over its pages with pious awe. It was, however, a good thought stolen from the ancients, as there is abundant evidence to show. Thus, in 1378 a Bible and Concordance were left by will by Thomas Farnylaw, to be set up and chained in the north aisle of St. Nicholas’ Church, Newcastle; and in 1385, a Bible and Concordance were to be found chained in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor.

These Bibles were, of course, copies of the Latin Vulgate, for it is not pretended that any effort was made to place a version of the Scriptures, in the vulgar tongue, at the command of the unlettered laity. The Catholic system of education did not aim at enabling every poor man to read his Bible, but rather at making him know his faith. Nevertheless, so true is it that a strong Scriptural element has always predominated in the teaching of the Church, that the first attempts to provide the poor with cheap literature of any sort were called Biblia Pauperum, or the Bibles of the poor. They were rude engravings of Scriptural subjects, or stories of the saints, taken off carved wooden blocks, and accompanied with texts of Scripture, or pious verses. These were known as block-books, and were reproduced at a much cheaper rate than books written out by hand. Of course they were not Bibles, but they show that even in the age most tainted by the Lollard heresy, there was a disposition on the part of Catholic teachers to supply the people with instruction into which a certain Biblical element had been infused. The block-books were likewise used to strike off small school manuals of grammar, and a book of this sort was technically called a “Donatus.” If the grammars were welcome boons to schoolboys, the Bibles of the poor were not less convenient for the use of preachers, who could not carry so cumbrous a volume as a whole Bible into the pulpit, and were often glad to help their memory by a selection of suitable texts. Specimens of these block-books are preserved as curiosities by modern bibliopolists, and the contrivance seems to have been the immediate forerunner of the more important invention of printing. But in mentioning them we are somewhat departing from the order of time, as they can hardly be assigned an earlier date than the beginning of the fifteenth century.