Charles William Stubbs

“Si tollis libertatem, tollis dignitatem.”—S. Columban.

IN the centuries which preceded the rise of the Universities, the monks had been the great educators of England, and it is to monastic origins that we must first turn to find the beginnings of university and collegiate life at Cambridge.

In the library of Trinity College there is preserved a catalogue of the books which Augustine and his monks brought with them into England. “These are the foundation or the beginning of the library of the whole English Church, A.D. 601,” are the words with which this brief catalogue closes. A Bible in two volumes, a Psalter and a book of the Gospels, a Martyrology, the Apocryphal Lives of the Apostles, and the exposition of certain Epistles represented at the commencement of the seventh century the sum-total of literature which England then possessed. In little more than fifty years, however, the Latin culture of Augustine and his monks had spread throughout the land, and before the eighth century closed England had become the literary centre of Western Europe. Probably never in the history of any nation had there been so rapid a development of learning. Certainly few things are more remarkable in the history of the intellectual development of Europe than that, in little more than a hundred years after knowledge had first dawned upon this country, an Anglo-Saxon scholar should be producing books upon literature and philosophy second to nothing that had been written by any Greek or Roman author after the third century. But the great writer whom after-ages called “the Venerable Bede,” and who was known to his own contemporaries as “the wise Saxon,” was not the only scholar that the seventh and the eighth centuries had produced in England. Under the twenty-one years of the Archiepiscopate of Theodore (669-690), schools and monasteries rapidly spread throughout the country. In the school established under the walls of Canterbury, in connection with the Monastery of S. Peter, better known in after-times as S. Augustine’s, and over which his friend the Abbot Adrian ruled, were trained not a few of the great scholars of those days—Albinus, the future adviser and assistant of Bede, Tobias of Rochester, Aldhelm of Sherborne, and John of Beverley. The influence of these and other scholars sent out from the school at Canterbury soon made itself felt. In Northumbria, too, the torch of learning had been kept alight by the Irish monks of Lindisfarne, and of Melrose and of Iona, “that nest from which,” as an old writer playing on its founder S. Columba’s name had said, “the sacred doves had taken their flight to every quarter.”

While Archbishop Theodore and the Abbot Adrian were organising Anglo-Latin education in the monasteries of the south, Wilfrith, the Archbishop of York, and his friend Benedict Biscop were performing a no less extensive work in the north. The schools of Northumbria gathered in the harvest of Irish learning, and of the Franco-Gallican schools, which still preserved a remnant of classical literature, and of Rome itself, now barbarised. Of Bede, in the book-room of the monastery at Jarrow, we are told by his disciple and biographer, Cuthbert, that in the intervals of the regular monastic discipline the great scholar found time to undertake the direction of the monastic school. “He had many scholars, all of whom he inspired with an extraordinary love of learning.” “It was always sweet to me,” he writes himself, “to learn to teach.” At the conclusion of his “Ecclesiastical History” he has himself given a list of some thirty-eight books which he had written up to that time. Of these not a few are of an educational character. Besides a large body of Scripture commentary, we have from his pen treatises on orthography, grammar, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. His book on “The Nature of Things” was the science primer of the Anglo-Saxons for many generations. He wrote, in fact, to teach. At the school of York, however, was centred nearly all the wisdom of the West, and its greatest pupil was Alcwyne. He became essentially the representative schoolmaster of his age. For fourteen years, attracted by the fame of his scholarship, students not only from all parts of England and Ireland, but also from France and Germany, flocked to the monastery school at York. In 782 Alcwyne left England to join the Court of Charles the Great and to take charge of the Palatine schools, carrying with him to the Continent the learning which was about to perish for a time in England, as the result of the internal dissensions of its kings and the early ravages of the Norsemen. “Learning,” to use the phrase of William of Malmesbury, “was buried in the grave of Bede for four centuries.” The Danish invader, carrying his ravages now up the Thames and now up the Humber, devastated the east of England with fire and sword. “Deliver us, O Lord, from the frenzy of the Northmen!” had been a suffrage of a litany of the time, but it was one to which the scholars and the bookmen, no less than the monks and nuns of that age, found no answer. The noble libraries which Theodore and the Abbots Adrian and Benedict had founded were given to the flames. The monasteries of the Benedictines, the chief guardians of learning, were completely broken up. “It is not at all improbable,” says Mr. Kemble, “that in the middle of the tenth century there was not a genuine Benedictine left in England.”

A revival of monastic life—some attempt at a return to the old Benedictine ideal—came, however, with that century. Under the auspices of S. Dunstan, the Benedictine Order—renovated at its sources by the Cluniac reform—was again established, and surviving a second wave of Danish devastation was, under the patronage of King Cnut and Edward the Confessor, further strengthened and extended. The strength of this revival is perhaps best seen in the wonderful galaxy of monastic chroniclers which sheds its light over that century. Florence of Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury, Ingulf, Geoffrey Gaimar, William de Monte, John and Richard of Hexham, Jordan Fantosme, Simeon of Durham, Thomas and Richard of Ely, Gervase, Giraldus Cambrensis, William of Newburgh, Richard of Devizes all follow one another in close succession, while Robert of Gloucester, Roger of Wendover, and Matthew Paris carry on the line into the next age. But apart from the Chroniclers, though the monasteries once more flourished in England, the early Benedictine ideal of learning did not at once revive. Indeed, the tendency of the monastic reformers of the twelfth century was distinctly hostile to the more intellectual side of the monastic ideal. By the end of the century the majority of the Benedictine convents had sunk into rich corporations of landed proprietors, whose chief ambition was the aggrandisement of the house to which they belonged. The new impulse of reform, which in its indirect results was to give the thirteenth century in England so dominant a place in the history of her civilisation, came from a quite different direction. Almost simultaneously, without concert, in different countries, two great minds, S. Francis and S. Dominic, conceived a wholly new ideal of monastic perfection. Unlike the older monastic leaders, deliberately turning their backs upon the haunts of men in town and village, and seeking in the wilderness seclusion from the world which they professed to forsake, these new idealists, the followers of S. Dominic and S. Francis, the mendicant Orders, the Friars’ Preachers and the Friars’ Minors, turned to the living world of men. Their object was no longer the salvation of the individual monk, but the salvation of others through him. Monastic Christianity was no longer to flee the world; it must conquer it or win it by gentle violence. The work of the new Orders, therefore, was from the first among their fellowmen, in village, in town, in city, in university.

The Black Friars of S. Dominic arrived in England in 1221. The Grey Friars of S. Francis in 1224. The Dominicans met with the least success at first, but this was fully compensated by the rapid progress of the Franciscans. Very soon after the coming of the Grey Friars they had formed a settlement at Oxford, under the auspices of the greatest scholar-bishop of the age, Grosseteste of Lincoln, and had built their first rude chapel at Cambridge. In the early days, however, the followers of S. Francis made a hard fight against the taste for sumptuous buildings and for the greater personal comfort which characterised the time. “I did not enter into religion to build walls,” protested an English Provincial of the Order when the brethren begged for a larger convent. But at Cambridge the first humble house of the Grey Friars, which had been founded in 1224 in “the old Synagogue,” was shortly removed to a site at the corner of Bridge Street and Jesus Lane—now occupied by Sidney Sussex College—and that noble church commenced, which, three centuries later, at the time of the Dissolution, the University vainly endeavoured to save for itself, having for some time used it for the ceremony of Commencement.[17] But of this we shall have to speak later in our account of the Foundation of Sidney College.

But if the Franciscans, in their desire to obey the wishes of their Founder, found a difficulty in combating the passion of the time for sumptuous buildings, they had even less success in struggling against the passion of the time for learning. Their vow of poverty ought to have denied them the possession even of books. “I am your breviary! I am your breviary!” S. Francis had cried passionately to the novice who desired a Psalter. And yet it is a matter of common knowledge that Grosseteste, the great patron of the Franciscans, brought Greek books to England, and in conjunction with two other Franciscans, whose names are known—Nicholas the Greek and John of Basingstoke—gave to the world Latin versions of certain Greek documents. Foremost among these is the famous early apocryphal book, The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Greek manuscript of which is still in the Cambridge University Library. There is no better statement, perhaps, of those gaps in the knowledge of Western Christendom, which the scholars of the Franciscan Order did so much to fill, than a passage in the writings of the greatest of all English Franciscans, Roger Bacon, which runs to this effect:—

The truth to which Roger Bacon in this passage gave expression, the scholars of the Franciscan Order set themselves to realise and act upon. For a considerable time the Franciscan houses at both Oxford and Cambridge kept alive the interest of this “new learning” to which Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon opened the way. The work of the Order at Oxford is fairly well known. And in the Cambridge House of the Order there was at least one teacher of divinity, Henry of Costessey, who, in his Commentary on the Psalms, set the example of a type of scholarship, which, in its close insistence on the exact meaning of the text, in its constant reference to the original Hebrew, and in its absolute independence of judgment, has, one is proud to think, ever remained a characteristic of the Cambridge school of textual criticism down even to our own day.

But if the Franciscans, impelled by their desire to illustrate the Sacred Text, had thus become intellectual in spite of the ideal of their Founder, the Dominicans were intellectual from their starting-point. They had, indeed, been called into being by the necessity of combating the intellectual doubts and controversies of the south of France. That they should become a prominent factor in the development of the universities was but the fulfilment of their original design. With their activity also is associated one of the greatest intellectual movements of the thirteenth century—the introduction of the new Philosophy. The numerous houses of the Order planted by them in the East brought about an increased intercourse between those regions and Western Europe, and helped on that knowledge of the new Aristotle, which, as we have said in a previous chapter, England probably owes largely to the philosophers of the Synagogue. It is round the University of Paris, however, that the earlier history, both of the Dominican scholars and of the new Aristotle, mainly revolves. Here the great system of Scholastic Philosophy was elaborated, by which the two great Dominican teachers, Albertus Magnus—“the ape of Aristotle,” as he was irreverently and unjustly called by his Franciscan contemporaries—and his greater pupil, Thomas Aquinas, “the seraphic Doctor,” vindicated the Christian Creed in terms of Aristotelian logic, and laid at least a solid foundation for the Christian Theology of the future, in the contention that Religion is rational, and that Reason is divine, that all knowledge and all truth, from whatever source they are derived, are capable of being reduced to harmony and unity, because the name of Christianity is both Wisdom and Truth.

In the year 1229 there broke out at Paris a feud of more than ordinary gravity between the students and the citizens, undignified enough in its cause of origin, but in the event probably marking a distinct step in the development of Cambridge University. A drunken body of students did some act of great violence to the citizens. Complaint was made to the Bishop of Paris and to the Queen Blanche. The members of the University who had not been guilty of the outrage were violently attacked and ill-treated by the police of the city. The University teachers suspended their classes and demanded satisfaction. The demand was refused, and masters and scholars dispersed. Large numbers, availing themselves of the invitation of King Henry III. to settle where they pleased in this country, migrated to the shores of England; and Cambridge, probably from its proximity to the eastern coast, and as the centre where Prince Louis, in alliance with the English baronage, but a few years before had raised the Royal standard, seems to have attracted a large majority of the students. A Royal writ, issued in the year 1231, for the better regulation of the University, probably makes reference to this migration when it speaks of the large number of students, both within the realm and “from beyond the seas,” who had lately settled in Cambridge, and gives power to the Bishop of Ely “to signify rebellious clerks who would not be chastised by the Chancellor and Masters,” and if necessary to invoke the aid of the Sheriff in their due punishment. Another Royal writ of the same reign expressly provides that no student shall remain in the University unless under the tuition of some Master of Arts—the earliest trace perhaps of that disciplinary organisation which the motley and turbulent crowd representing the student community of that age demanded.[19]

It will be observed that in these Royal writs the term “university” occurs. But it must not be supposed that the word is used in its more modern signification, of a community or corporation devoted to learning and education formally recognised by legal authority. That is a use which appears for the first time towards the end of the fourteenth century. In the age of which we are speaking, and in the writs of Henry III., universitas magistrorum et discipulorum or scholarium simply means a “community of teachers and scholars.” The common designation in mediÆval times of such a body as we now mean by “university” was studium generale, or sometimes studium alone. It is necessary, moreover, to remember that universities in the earliest times had not infrequently a very vigorous life as places of learning, long before they received Royal or legal recognition; and it is equally necessary not to forget that colleges for the lodging and maintenance and education of students are by no means an essential feature of the mediÆval conception of a university.

It must be remembered, moreover, that when a mediÆval benefactor founded a college his intentions were very different from those which would actuate a similar person at the present day. His object was to provide board and lodging and a small stipend, not for students, but for teachers. As for the taught, they lodged where they could, like students at a Scottish or a Continental university to-day; and it was not until the sixteenth century was well advanced that they were admitted within the precincts of the colleges on the payment of a small annual rent or “pension”—whence the modern name of “pensioner” for the undergraduate or pupil members of the college. Indeed, the term “college” (collegium), as applied to a building, is a modern use of the word. In the old days the term “college” was strictly and accurately applied to the persons who formed the community of scholars, not to the building which housed them. For that building the correct term always used in mediÆval times was “domus” (house), or “aula” (hall). Sometimes, indeed, the two names were combined. Thus, in an old document we find the earliest of the colleges—Peterhouse—entitled, Domus Sancti Petri, sive Aula Scholarium Episcopi Eliensis—The House of S. Peter, or the Hall of the Scholars of the Bishop of Ely.In all probability the University in early days took no cognisance whatever of the way in which students obtained lodgings. It was the inconvenience and discomfort of this system, no doubt, which led to the establishment of what were afterwards termed “Hostels,” apparently by voluntary action on the part of the students themselves. In the first half of the sixteenth century there seem to have been about twenty of these hostels,[21] but at the end of the century there appears to have been only about nine left. There is an interesting passage in a sermon by Lever at Paul’s Cross, preached in 1550, which throws light upon this desertion of the hostels, where he speaks of those scholars who, “havyng rych frendes or beyng benefyced men dyd lyve of themselves in Ostles and Inns, be eyther gon awaye, or elles fayne to crepe into colleges, and put poore men from bare lyvynges.”

The University then, or, more strictly speaking, the Studium Generale, existed as an institution long before the organisation of the residential college or hall; and as a consequence, for many a year it had an organisation quite independent of its colleges. The University of Cambridge, like the University of Oxford, was modelled mainly on the University of Paris. Its course of study followed the old classical tradition of the division of the seven liberal sciences—grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy—into two classes, the Trivium and Quadrivium, a system of teaching which had been handed down by the monastic schools in a series of text-books, jejune and meagre, which were mainly compilations and abridgments from the older classical sources. One such treatise, perhaps the most popular in the monastery schools, was a book by Martianus Capella, a teacher of rhetoric at Carthage, in the fifth century. The treatise is cast in allegorical form, and represents the espousals of Mercury and Philology, in which Philology is represented as a goddess, and the seven liberal arts as handmaidens presented by Mercury to his bride. The humour of this allegory is not altogether spiritless, if at times somewhat coarse. Here is a specimen. The plaudits that follow upon the discourse delivered by Arithmetica are supposed to be interrupted by laughter, occasioned by the loud snores of Silenus asleep under the influence of his deep potations. The kiss wherewith Rhetorica salutes Philologia is heard throughout the assembly—nihil enim silens, ac si cuperet, faciebat. So popular did this mythological medley become, that in the tenth century we find certain learned monks embroidering the subject of the poem on their Church vestments. A memoria technica in hexameter lines has also come down to us, showing how the monastic scholar was assisted to remember that grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric belonged to the first division of the sciences called the Trivium, and that the four other sciences belonged to the Quadrivium:—

In a further classification given by another scholar of the end of the twelfth century, Alexander Neckham, we have enumerated the four Faculties recognised by the mediÆval University: Arts, Theology, Law, Medicine.

Such, then, was the cycle of mediÆval study. And the student whose ambition it was to become a master of this cycle—a magister or doctor (for in early days the two titles were synonymous) facultatis—must attain to it through a seven years’ course. In the school attached to a monastery or a cathedral, or from the priest of his native parish, we may suppose that the student has learnt some modicum of Latin, “the scholar’s vernacular,” or failing that, that the first stage of the Trivium—Grammatica—has been learnt on his arrival at the University. For this purpose, if he is a Cambridge student at least, he is placed under the charge of a special teacher, called by a mysterious name, Magister GlomeriÆ, and he himself becomes a “glomerel,” giving allegiance oddly enough during this state of pupilage, not to the Chancellor, the head of his University, but to the Archdeacon of Ely. Of the actual books read in the grammar course it is difficult to give an account. They may have been few or many. Indeed, at this period when the works of Aristotle were coming so much into vogue, it would seem as if the old Grammar course gave way at an early period to Philosophy. In a curious old French fabliau of the thirteenth century, entitled “The Battle of the Seven Arts,”[22] there is evidence of this innovation; incidentally also, a list of the books more properly belonging to the Grammar course is also given.

And so for the Cambridge “glomerel,” if Aristotle held his own against the classics, Dan Homer, and the rest, in the second year of his university course the student would find himself a “sophister,” or disputant in the Logic school. To Logic succeeded Rhetoric, which also meant Aristotle, and so the “trivial” arts were at an end, and the “incepting” or “commencing” bachelor of arts began his apprenticeship to a “Master of Faculty.” In the next four years he passed through the successive stages of the Quadrivium, and at the end received the certificate of his professor, was admitted to the degree of Master of Arts, and thereby was admitted also to the brotherhood of teachers, and himself became an authorised lecturer. A post-graduate course might follow in Theology or Canon or Civil Law, involving another five or six years of university life. In the course for the Canon Law the candidate for a doctor’s degree was required to have heard lectures on the civil law for three years, and on the Decretals for another three years; he must, too, have attended cursory lectures on the Bible for at least two years, and must himself have lectured “cursorily” on one of four treatises, and on some one book of the Decretals.

Obviously, if this statutory course was strictly observed in those days, the scarlet hood could never grace the shoulders of one who was nothing more than a dexterous logician, or the honoured title of Doctor be conferred on one who had never taught. Disce docendo was indeed the motto of the University of Cambridge in the thirteenth century.

The great constitutional historian of our country, the late Bishop Stubbs, in one of the wisest and wittiest of his statutable lectures at Oxford,[23] speaks of England in this age as “the paradise of clerks.” He illustrates the truth of his characterisation by drawing an imaginary picture of a foreign scholar making an Iter Anglicum with the object of collecting materials for a history of the learning and literature of England. The Bishop is able readily to crowd his canvas with the figures of eminent Englishmen drawn from centres of learning in every part of the land, from Dover, from Canterbury, from London, from Rochester, from Chichester, from Winchester, from Devizes, from Salisbury, from Exeter, from S. Albans, from Ely, from Peterborough, from Lincoln, from Howden, from York, from Durham, from Hexham, from Melrose; scholars, historians, chroniclers, poets, philosophers, logicians, theologians, canonists, lawyers, all going to prove by the glimpse they give us into circles of scholastic activity, monastic for the most part, how comparatively wide was the extent of English learning and English education in the thirteenth century—an age which it has usually been the fashion to regard as barbarous and obscure—and how germinant of institutions, intellectual as well as political, which have since become vital portions of our national existence.

From the point of view of a later age there is doubtless something to be said on the other side. Disce docendo remained perhaps the academic motto, but the learning and the teaching was still under the domination of monasticism, and the monastic scholar, however patient and laborious he might be and certainly was, was also for the most part absolutely uncritical. He cultivated formal logic to perfection; he reasoned from his premise with most admirable subtlety, but he had usually commenced by assuming his premise with unfaltering, because unreasoning, faith. We shall see, however, as we proceed with our history of the collegiate life of the University, in the succeeding centuries, that the critical spirit which gave force to the genius of the great Franciscan teachers, Roger Bacon and Bishop Grosseteste, in resisting the tendencies of their age, which found practical application also in the textual interpretation of Holy Writ in such writings as those of Henry of Costessey, or in the sagacious “Treatise on the Laws and Customs of England”—the oldest of our legal classics—by Ranulf Glanville, or in the “Historia Rerum Anglicanum,” of the inquisitive and independent-minded Yorkshire scholar, William of Newburgh, was a factor not to be ignored in the heritage of learning bequeathed by the great men of the thirteenth century to their more enlightened and liberal successors, the theologians, the lawyers, and the historians of the future.

There is a mediÆval legend of a certain monkish writer, whose tomb was opened twenty years or so after his death, to reveal the fact, that although the remainder of his body had crumbled to dust the hand that had held the pen remained flexible and undecayed. The legend is a parable. Some of the lessons of that parable we may expect to find interpreted in the academic history of Cambridge in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.