In spite of the assertion of Hector Boece that, in
early days, the university excrevit in immensum, the numbers
of no Scottish university in the fifteenth or sixteenth century
exceeded the membership of one of the smaller English colleges,
such, for example, as Peterhouse.
early days, the university excrevit in immensum, the numbers
of no Scottish university in the fifteenth or sixteenth century
exceeded the membership of one of the smaller English colleges,
such, for example, as Peterhouse.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v02
D.
, introduces us, with the persons and descriptions of
the attendants of the earth-born bride of the god, to the seven
liberal arts. Three of these, grammar, logic and rhetoric, con-
stituted the trivium; which formed the course of study of the
medieval undergraduate. The bachelor passed on to the quad-
rivium-arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy-his conquest
of which was denoted by the licence or degree of master of arts.
To these seven arts, the thirteenth century added the three
philosophies---natural, moral and metaphysical.
An Oxford scheme of study of 1426 demands: one year's
## p. 360 (#378) ############################################
360
English Education
reading of grammar, with Priscian as text-book; next, three terms'
study of rhetoric, with Aristotle, Boethius and Tully as teachers,
reinforced by Ovid and Vergil; finally, three terms' reading of logic
with Boethius and Aristotle, Topica and Priora being expressly
enjoined. Of the subjects of the quadrivium, arithmetic and
music require each a year, while geometry and astronomy call
each for two. The three philosophies need each three terms.
Some of these courses were, seemingly, concurrent, the entire
arts curriculum covering, in general, eight years of three terms
each. The Cambridge requirements were, evidently, much the
same. Sir Robert Rede, in 1518, bequeathed £12 per annum for
the payment of three lecturers in logic, rhetoric and philosophy.
Of these three, one, whose style as lector Terentii reveals his
function, was assigned, by statute, to lecture to students of the
first and second year on 'books of humanity’; the second
lecturer read logic to third year undergraduates; the third
lectured to fourth year students and bachelors of arts on books
of philosophy.
The educational methods pursued differed in no small degree
from those at present in use. Of written examinations, the
medieval student knew nothing; his progress was secured by
compulsory reading of set books and enforced attendance on
assigned lectures; by frequent ‘posing' and debate; and, lastly,
by the necessity of himself delivering lectures after attaining
the baccalaureate. He might, indeed, content himself with
‘inception in grammar,' when, on the strength of the delivery
of certain discourses on Priscian and of the certificate of three
posing masters of his minor art, he passed forth qualified to
teach in an elementary school; but, if his ambition soared to
higher flights, he might assume obligations to his university
which represented labour continued during upwards of twenty
years.
The complete arts course was, in general, the necessary pre-
requisite to the study of theology; but students possessed of the
needful permission might pass directly from the trivium to the
pursuit of civil, and then of canon, law. In Oxford, as in Paris,
regents in arts asserted a claim to pre-eminence in the direction
of university reading. In 1252, it was enacted that no scholar
should receive the licence in theology, who had not previously
been regent in arts.
The Cambridge Statuta Antiqua set out regulations which
were in force about 1400 A. D. The five stages of the arts’ student's
## p. 361 (#379) ############################################
University Studies. The Higher Faculties 361
career, therein indicated, were successively represented by: ad-
mission to the question, by which, in his fifth year at earliest, after
previous attendance at scholastic discussion, he was introduced
for formal university testing; determination, a far more serious
ordeal, involving an active share in a long series of public dis-
putations and the duty of summing up in approved fashion the
results of debate; cursory lecturing on the Posteriora; inception,
whereby the scholar acquired the licence of master and was
regularly authorised to teach; and, lastly, regency, a period of
active lecturing ordinarie, as officially appointed instructor, and
of enforced attendance upon various public gatherings for
university business and ceremonial.
No scholar might incept in arts in Cambridge in the fifteenth
century unless : he had previously determined; had, for three
years at least, continuously resided and studied in his proper
faculty; had attended during three years the lectures of his own
master on Aristotle's philosophy, together with any such mathe-
matical lectures as might be given in the schools; had publicly
opposed and responded in his faculty in due form in the schools;
and, finally, unless he was provided with certificates de scientia
from five, and de credulitate vel scientia from other seven, masters
of arts.
Should he proceed, as, if ambitious of promotion, he must, to
the study of theology, of law or of medicine, the master of arts
must pass afresh through certain clearly defined stages:
None shall be admitted to incept in theology, unless he shall have pre-
viously been regent in arts; unless, also, he shall have heard theological
lectures for at least ten years in a university; item, he shall have heard
lectures on the Bible biblice for two years before he incepts; he shall have
lectured on or in some canonical book of the Bible for a year, for at least ten
days in each term; nor shall it be permitted to any to 'enter' the Bible before
the second year after the completion of his lectures on the Sentences; and he
shall have read all the books of the Sentences in that University, and shall
have remained at least three years in an approved University, after the
lecturing on the Sentences, before he shall be licensed. Furthermore, he shall
have preached publicly ad clerum and shall have publicly in all the schools of
his faculty opposed and responded after lecturing upon the Sentences, in such
sort that he may be in very deed of known and approved progress, manners
and learning according to the attestation de scientia by all the masters of
that faculty in the manner aforesaid; and, finally, he shall be admitted when
he has sworn that he has completed this set of requirements? .
Similar detailed provisions guarded the doctorates of canon
law, civil law and of medicine. The 'grace,' which, in later times,
1 Statuta Antiqua, 124; Camb. Doc. I, 377.
## p. 362 (#380) ############################################
362
English Education
6
became the necessary formality for proceeding to a degree, was, in
origin, a privilegium of the masters dispensing with some special
requirement in a particular case?
A comparison of the statutory requirements of the university
with the contents of a medieval college library would appear to
furnish a sufficient basis for judgment as to the extent of the
studies indicated.
Peterhouse is fortunate in still possessing, not only a library
catalogue of 1418, but the majority of the volumes therein
described. It is clear from its arrangement that, unlike the
noble collection vainly bequeathed by Richard of Bury to the
Benedictine house of Durham in Oxford, and the great library
of duke Humphrey of Gloucester, it was a working library.
Making allowances for entries on the roll inserted at a somewhat
later date, the collection of 1418 contains over 300 volumes. These
are divided into two classes, as being either chained in the
library' or 'distributed amongst the fellows. ' They are further
arranged under subject-headings as representing theology, natural
philosophy, metaphysics, moral philosophy, astronomy, ‘Alkenemie,'
‘Arsmetrice' (arithmetic), music, geometry, rhetoric, logic, grammar,
poetry, chronicles, medicine, civil law and canon law. Theological
works occupy the largest space. Canon law and civil law in com-
bination slightly exceed the three philosophies. Of medical
chained books there are fifteen; but, amongst the fellows, for
regular reading, logic, poetry and grammar are in greater request.
Astronomy is studied; though it is in the chained library where
Ptolemy reigns among a company of Arabians and their Jewish
translators, together with Bacon De multiplicatione specierum
cum perspectiva ejusdem and half a dozen recent table-makers,
closing with John Holbroke, who was elected master of the college
in the same year. Of the other subjects of the quadrivium,
music, arithmetic and geometry are, under their several proper
headings, denoted each by a single tome. A second copy of
Euclid, indeed, elsewhere appears, bound up with astronomical
works, as do two other treatises on geometry; and there are
two copies of the Arithmetica of Boethius; but the weakness of
the mathematical element is very marked, as compared with the
overwhelming force of the philosophy of Aristotle.
1 Friars, being prohibited by the rules of their orders from graduation in secular
branches of knowledge, required a dispensation to graduate in theology. The stringent
enforcement against them of university regulations provoked heated altercation and,
as already seen, led to parliamentary and papal interference: ante, p. 351; Rashdall,
11, 379.
## p. 363 (#381) ############################################
The Library of the Medieval Student 363
It is to be remembered that the fellows of Peterhouse
were at least bachelors of arts, whose main studies would be
concerned with cursory lecturing on Posteriora. Of thirteen
works on logic, which the library of 1418 contains, we find,
accordingly, eight distributed amongst the society. The eight
consist entirely of texts of Aristotle, including Posteriora,
Priora, Topica and Elenchi, with texts of Porphyry, various
commentaries and collections of questions on both Aristotle and
Porphyry and the Sophismata of William of Heytesbury (fellow of
Merton, 1330; chancellor of Oxford, 1371). In the chained library,
Boethius joins Porphyry and Aristotle, together with the Philo-
sophia of the great Albert, the Summa of Ockham and com-
mentaries of Kilwardby and St Thomas. A later fifteenth century
hand added to the catalogue the Summa of Peter Hispanus and
the Quaestiones of William Brito (ob. 1356). Under the several
headings of natural philosophy, moral philosophy and metaphysic,
the catalogue of 1418 records no fewer than eighteen volumes of
Aristotelian texts, together with commentaries by Averroes,
Aquinas, Egidius Romanus (ob. 1316), Walter Burley (ob. 1345),
Durandus and Peter de Alvernia, and the Summa of John
Dumbleton (fellow of Queen's, Oxford, 1341). Under the same
class heading Palladius and Columella introduce agriculture and
veterinary medicine; Seneca and Pliny instruct De Animalibus ;
and Capella and Isidore range through all fields in dictionary
fashion.
In the lower educational stages of the trivium we find, for
grammar, authorities in time-honoured Priscian, as edited by
Kilwardby, in the Dictionary of Hugucio (bishop of Ferrara, ob.
1213), the Catholicon of friar John de Janua, the Summa de
expositione verborum Bibliae of William Brito, Bacon De Gram-
matica and the inevitable Doctrinale Puerorum of Alexander.
In rhetoric, Cassiodorus and Tully are supported by Guido delle
Colonne’s History of the Trojan War, Pharaoh's Dream
by John Lemouicensis, and Practica sive Usus Dictaminis,
a 'Complete Letter Writer' by one Master Laurence Aquile-
giensis.
The civilians were, in view of statutory requirements,
necessarily provided with all the books of the corpus juris.
They were furnished, also, with glosses of Accursius and comments
of Bartholus, Odofredus and Peter de Bella Pertica (ob. 1308).
The favourite text-writers were, however, Cinus of Pistoia (ob.
1 M. R. James, Peterhouse MSS.
## p. 364 (#382) ############################################
364 English Education
1336) and Azo (ob. 1200), 'the light of the lawyers,' whom Bologna
was constrained to recall from Montpellier. Of Cynus super
Codicem, as of Parvum Volumen (e. g. the Institutes and Novellae),
Digestum Vetus, Digestum Inforciatum, Digestum Novum and of
Codex, there were three copies, two of each being distributed to
fellows, who borrowed also the Summa and Brocardica Azonis.
For canonists, with the necessary texts of decrees, decretals, Liber
Sextus, 'Extravagants' and Clementines, there were commentaries
of Paulus, of Joannes Andreae (ob. 1348), of William de Monte
Lauduns (c. 1346), of William de Mandagoto and of Henry of
Susa, cardinal of Ostia (ob. 1271). As English clerks, the Peter-
house fellows had, doubtless, frequent recourse to their several
copies of the Constitutions of Otho and Ottobon, and, it may be sur-
mised, to Liber taxarum omnium beneficiorum Angliae, which lay
in the chained library. But their regularly used manuals of
canon law were, clearly, the famous Summa Ostiensis, which
appears in both sections of the library; the similarly honoured
Rosarium of archdeacon Guido de Baysio, which recalls the
Bologna school of 1300; and the ever popular Speculum Juris,
or Speculum Judiciale, of William Durand (ob. 1296) to whom
Boniface VIII vainly offered the archbishopric of Ravenna. Two
copies of Speculum, with the like number of texts of decretals,
Liber Sextus and Clementines, are lent out to fellows, while
another copy of each remains in the chained library. The law
fellowships of Peterhouse were, evidently, full, the statutes per-
mitting, as has been noted, to not more than two contemporary
fellows, the study of canon, or civil, law.
The one fellow allowed by statute to adopt the medical art
was pursuing in 1418 the regular university course: he had
borrowed Macer, De virtutibus herbarum, and the prescribed texts
of "Johannicius' and of 'Isaac. ' Chaucer recites the qualifica-
tions of his Doctor of Phisyk:
Well knew he the olde Esculapius
And Deiscorides, and eek Rufus,
Old Ypocras, Haly and Galien;
Serapion, Razis and Avicen;
Averrois, Damascien and Constantyn;
Bernard, and Gatesden, and Gilbertyn.
The Peterhouse chained library of 1418 held but thirteen
volumes of medicine; but a brief examination of the contents of
its shelves enables us to identify at least ten of Chaucer's classical
authorities. The ruler of the medieval medical school was, un-
## p. 365 (#383) ############################################
The Library of the Medieval Student 365
doubtedly, Galen, whose commentaries upon Hippocrates must be
twice heard in lecture by the Cambridge would-be medical in-
ceptor. Other prescribed books were the Breviary of Constantine,
commonly known as Viaticus, the Isagoge of Johannicius, a
general introduction to physic, the Antidotarium of Nicholaus,
Theophilus De Urinis and the works of Isaac, a high authority on
dietary and fevers. Amongst additional authors represented on
the Peterhouse shelves, a notable place was claimed by Gerard
of Cremona, an indefatigable translator, and by Richard, the
Englishman, who is identifiable with Richard of Wendover (ob.
1252), canon of St Paul's, the compiler of an encyclopaedic
treatise covering the entire field of Medicine. It is no hard task
to detect the fontes of medieval medical knowledge. Isaac, a
Peterhouse librarian scribe informs us, fuit araabs nacione.
Gerard of Cremona translates one book of Galen in Toledo from
the Arabic into Latin ; another is introduced as ad tutyrum
translato johannici filii ysaac de greco in arabicum et a marcho
toletano de arabico in latinum. Medicine, with astronomy,
passed to western Europe through the hands of the Arabian
and the Jew.
And what, finally, of theology, the crowning study of the
medieval university? There, indeed, the Latin held his own. In
the Peterhouse chained library of 1418 an imperfect Chrysostom
practically monopolises the representation of the eastern church,
with Cyprian as spokesman for the African. A magnificent Latin
Bible, the gift of archbishop Whittlesea, is flanked by a host of
patristic writers of the western church. Augustine, Ambrose and
Jerome are followed by Gregory and Isidore, by Bernard and
Anselm, by Stephen Langton, Lyra and Hugo de St Victor. There
are the inevitable sermons standing behind great names. There
is, too, the Historia Scholastica of Peter Comestor, Magister
Historiarum. But in the list of books distributed amongst the
fellows the true character of the theological studies of the uni-
versity comes out. With four more Bibles, one being specially
assigned for daily reading in hall, a glossed Gospel of St John,
a brief tractate on the epistles of St Paul, two or three books
clearly designed for private meditation and Grosseteste, De
Oculo Morali, there are two additional copies of Magister His-
toriarum, six Psalters, four Latin, one Hebrew and Latin and
one Hebrew and no fewer than nine copies of the Master of the
Sentences, reinforced by the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, the
Quaestiones of his opponent Henry of Ghent (ob. 1293) and
## p. 366 (#384) ############################################
366 English Education
John Bokyngham Super Sententias. The ancient fathers of the
church here appear only in the shape of extracts in the much
used Pharetra, a medieval Familiar Quotations. The working
theology of fifteenth century Peterhouse was the theology of
Peter Lombard.
The education offered to the young scholar in the Middle Ages
was, essentially, utilitarian; he was trained for service in public
functions. A few rules of grammatical expression; some ele-
mentary calculations; geometry, consisting mainly of ill-informed
geography; music sufficient to qualify for the singing of a mass;
and Ptolemaic astronomy, directing to the correct determination of
Easter-these, with much skill in argument derived from long
exercise in the use of dialectic forms, constituted the ripe fruit of
the course in trivium and quadrivium. The disputants in the
schools wasted their energy in a barren philosophy. The few
followers of Roger Bacon in the domain of a progressive natural
science, more than suspected of alliance with the Saracen and the
Evil One, could find legitimate scope for their research only
within the confines of a crude medical science which com-
bined the simples of the herb wife with a barbarous surgery.
Unless caught in the scholastic net of metaphysics, the medieval
student could find substantial mental food only in theology or in
law. And, in a field where to trip was to be denounced as a
heretic, the theology offered was the slavish repetition of re-
ceived glosses, the killing of the literal sense of Scripture in
the drawing out of the so-called allegorical, moral and anagogical
meaning, or, at best, the application of syllogistic methods to the
dicta of ancient fathers.
Of the Humanities as such, the fourteenth century was strangely
innocent. The cataloguer of the Peterhouse library of 1418
assigned a special place to chronicles. He placed under this head
Cassiodorus, Valerius Maximus and Sallust, with Vegetius,
Frontinus, Aimonius of Fleury and the anonymous writer of a
treatise De adventu Normannorum in Angliam et de jure quod
habuit Willelmus bastardus ad regnum Angliae. Quintilian,
Macrobius and Seneca he classed as natural philosophers. Poetry
he conjoined with grammar ; and, with Priscian, Hugucio and
Alexander de Villa Dei he ranked Ovid, Statius and Lucan.
When, with them, they bring the Epistles of Francis Petrarch, we
catch the glimmering light before the dawn. Twenty-two years
later (1440), Robert Alne lent to his old friend John Ottryngham,
master of Michaelhouse, who had been admitted with him as a
## p. 367 (#385) ############################################
The Hour before the Renascence 367
fellow of Peterhouse on 5 October 1400, a copy of Petrarch’s
De Remediis utriusque Fortunae.
It is scarcely thirty years ago, when all that was taught in the university
of Cambridge was Alexander, the Little Logicals (as they call them) and
those old exercises out of Aristotle, and quaestiones taken from Duns Scotus.
As time went on, polite learning was introduced; to this was added a know-
ledge of mathematics; a new, or at least a regenerated Aristotle sprang up;
then came an acquaintance with Greek, and with a host of new authors whose
very names had before been unknown, even to their profoundest doctorsl.
So wrote Erasmus in 1516'.
It was to men well known to Erasmus that the English univer-
sities and English schools owed educational reform. Grocyn and
Linacre brought Greek to Oxford; but it was John Colet who
introduced to that university a sane and natural method of Scripture
exposition, and it was John Colet, too, who took Greek to the
English public school. In 1510, as dean of St Paul's, he founded
a school in the churchyard of his cathedral, where 153 boys, who
could already read and write and were of 'good parts and capaci-
ties,' should be taught good literature, both Greek and Latin, and
be brought up in the knowledge of Christ. "Lift up your little
white hands for me,' he wrote in the preface to the Latin
grammar which he composed for the use of his scholars. The
petition has the ring of the medieval founder; but with the so-
called Lilly's Grammar and with Colet's teaching of the catechism,
the articles and the ten commandments in the vulgar tongue
began the modern period of English middle class education.
Like England, Scotland had long had her monastic schools,
whence ambitious students passed to the university of Paris, or
joined the boreales of Oxford or of Cambridge; but it was not
until the beginning of the fifteenth century that the northern
kingdom saw the establishment of the first university of its own.
At St Andrews, which was destined, in 1472, to be raised to
the dignity of a metropolitan seat, a conventual chapter of
Augustinian canons had superseded an earlier society of Culdees.
In 1411*, Henry Wardlaw, a discreet and learned prelate, himself
a doctor of canon law, who had been, not without hot contention,
raised to the bishopric in 1403, was inspired to found a university
in his cathedral city. He was excited thereto, in part, at any rate,
by the difficulties experienced by such of the Scottish clergy as
• Ibid. p. 616.
i Trans. in Mullinger, Vol. I, pp. 515_6.
8 The foundation charter is dated 27 February 1411.
## p. 368 (#386) ############################################
368
Scottish Education
were 'desirous of being instructed in theology, in canon and civil
law, medicine and the liberal arts' by reason of the dangers by
sea and land, the wars, captivities and obstructions in passing to
and from foreign universities. ' That these dangers were no light
matter was demonstrated by the conspicuous object lesson of king
James I, still in the English captivity, into which he had fallen when
on his way to France, as a young prince fresh from the teaching
of Wardlaw himself. The good bishop secured the hearty con-
currence of his prior, James Haldenstone; and, in 1413, a bull
of Benedict XIII, the anti-pope whom Scotland then acknowledged
and to whom Wardlaw owed his bishopric, recognised the new
foundation as a studium generale. The constitution and discipline
of the university was determined by the bishop's foundation
charter; which, with the charters of the prior and the arch-
deacons of St Andrews and Lothian, was confirmed by king James
in 1432 after his restoration to his kingdom. The founder consti-
.
tuted the bishop of St Andrews for the time being perpetual
chancellor of the university and reserved, likewise, the right of
final determination of disputes arising between the university and
the town, saving the privileges of the prior and chapter and
of the archdeacon of St Andrews. The general government of
the university was remitted to an elected rector, who must be
a graduate in one of the faculties and in holy orders.
The new studium generale had, in the first instance, neither
special buildings nor endowment. In 1430, Wardlaw granted a
tenement for the use of the masters and regents of the faculty
of arts; and other well-wishers, in course of time, came forward
with similar benefactions; but the teachers of the university were,
for a long time, maintained on the fees of their hearers, and on the
profits of benefices which they were authorised to hold under
a general licence of non-residence. The 'auld pedagogy' was, in
fact, an unendowed ecclesiastical seminary, served by beneficed
masters, who found their pupils among youths resident or lodging
in the town. The institution was much encouraged by James I,
who had, during his enforced stay in England, imbibed a taste for
literature in general and for poetry in particular. Under the royal
charter of confirmation, the resident members of the university
were exempted from every species of taxation. As in Oxford and
Cambridge, the privileges of scholars were extended to those who
served them.
In 1458, bishop John Kennedy, an able and worthy prelate,
who was closely connected with the throne, his mother being a
## p. 369 (#387) ############################################
6
St Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen 369
daughter of Robert III, enriched the university with its first
college, that of St Salvator; endowing it with parochial tithes
'as a college for theology and the arts, for divine worship and for
scholastic exercises. ' The numbers of the society were fixed, ad
instar apostolici numeri, at thirteen persons; a provost, a licentiate
in theology, a bachelor in theology, four masters of arts and six
'poor clerks. ' The college set up a claim to confer degrees in-
dependently of the rector of the older foundation, and supported
it by a bull of Pius II, of 1458; but the pretension was speedily
relinquished on the intervention of Patrick Graham, half-brother
of bishop Kennedy, and the first metropolitan of St Andrews. In
1512, John Hepburn, prior of St Andrews, converted for the
purposes of a second college the buildings and property of the
ancient hospital of St Leonard, which had been erected in an
earlier age for the entertainment of the pilgrims who thronged
to worship at the shrine of St Andrews. Hepburn enjoyed the
support, not only of James IV, but of the king's illegitimate son,
the young archbishop, Alexander Stewart, who was destined to
fall with his father, a year later, on the fatal field of Flodden.
The archbishop, a pupil of Erasmus, himself took in hand the
conversion of Wardlaw's pedagogium into the college of St Mary;
but his untimely death left the task to be completed, with royal
and papal approval, by his successors, the two Beatons and John
Hamilton (1553). The college of St Mary, which, at least after
1579, was given up entirely to the study of divinity, completed
the three foundations, which remained the constituent colleges of
St Andrews down to 1747; when failing revenues compelled the
amalgamation of St Salvator's with St Leonard's. The historian
John Major, in 1521, himself provost of St Leonard’s, marvelled at
the incuria of Scottish prelates, which had left Scotland without
a university until 1411. The Scottish bishops of the fifteenth
century made ample amends for their supine predecessors.
In January, 1450, William Turnbull, bishop of Glasgow, obtained
from Nicholas V a bull, which recognised the establishment in his
cathedral city of a studium generale. The bull was locally
proclaimed in the following year, when statutes were drawn up and
courses of study prescribed.
Yet again, in 1500, bishop Elphinstone of Aberdeen completed
the erection of King's College, in ‘the granite city,' having obtained
papal authority in 1494. The third university of Scotland was
formed on the model of its predecessors as a combination of con-
ventual rule with the special pursuit of learning. It acquired
24
B. L. II.
OH. XV.
## p. 370 (#388) ############################################
370
Scottish Education
a particular lustre from the person of its first principal. This was
Hector Boece, correspondent of Erasmus and historian, who had
held the appointment of professor of philosophy in the college
of Montaigu at Paris.
The Scottish universities were directly clerical in origin; and
the briefest examination of the statutes of their colleges demon-
strates their thoroughly ecclesiastical character. The Scottish
episcopal founders worked hand in hand not only with monks
but with friars. It is noteworthy that bishop Kennedy founded
a Franciscan convent in St Andrews, where the Dominicans had
been established by one of his early predecessors (1272—9); and
the provincial sub-prior of the Dominicans was, with the minister
of the Franciscans, included among the seven electors to the
provostship of St Mary's. In the result, while the Scottish
university was, in its first days, an ecclesiastical seminary, its
education assumed, with the advent of colleges, the purely con-
ventual type. St Leonard's, which may be selected as a typical
college, was, under its canon regular principal, as a college of
philosophy and theology, a glorified monastic school.
The subjects of instruction comprised grammar, oratory, poetry,
Aristotelian philosophy and the writings of Solomon as preparatory
to the study of divinity. Prior Hepburn forbade the admission
of a student under fifteen years of age; but the university
statutes permitted determination at the age of fourteen.
From mere boys, in the Scotland of the fifteenth century, no
serious preparatory equipment could be demanded. The council
at Edinburgh, in 1549, urged the rectors of the universities to
see to it ne ulli ad scholas Dialectices sive Artium recipiantur
nisi qui Latine et grammatice loquuntur; and called upon the
archdeacon of St Andrews to appoint a grammar school master for
that city? Other indications assist to show the low standard of
the current Latin. There was no professor of the Humanities in
St Andrews, 'the first and principal university' in the sixteenth
century.
A reforming commission, in 1563, complained of the lack of
teaching of sciences and specially they that are maist necessarie,
that is to say the toungis and humanities. ' James Melville testifies
that, in 1571, neither Greek nor Hebrew was to be gottine in the
land. ' When at length, in 1620, a chair of Humanity was endowed
in St Leonard's college, the local grammar master complained that
its occupant drew off his young pupils by teaching the elements
· Herkless and Hannay, The College of St Leonard, p. 160.
## p. 371 (#389) ############################################
Scottish University Studies
371
of Latin grammar. There was no professor of Greek in St Andrews
until 1695. The modern superiority of Scotland in philosophy is
traceable, in fact, to a belated medievalism. The Scottish reforma-
tion caught the universities of the northern kingdom still directly
under church control, the clerical instructors clinging to their
Aristotle and their Peter Lombard. The results were temporarily
disastrous.
In spite of the assertion of Hector Boece that, in
early days, the university excrevit in immensum, the numbers
of no Scottish university in the fifteenth or sixteenth century
exceeded the membership of one of the smaller English colleges,
such, for example, as Peterhouse. In 1557, there were thirty-one
students in the three constituent colleges of St Andrews; in 1558
there were but three. Glasgow and Aberdeen dwindled in like
fashion. Yet the Scottish universities reproduced the Parisian
distribution into four nations under the local quarterings of Fife,
Lothian, Angus and Albany. The description which John Major
gave of his contemporary Glasgow is, with the variation of the
local reference, equally applicable to St Andrews or to Aberdeen:
“The seat of an Archbishop, and of a University poorly endowed
and not rich in scholars; but serviceable to the inhabitants of the
west and south. '
In one particular the northern kingdom advanced beyond her
southern sister. A Scottish act of parliament of 1496 declared
that:
It is statute and ordanit throw all the realme that all barronis and frehaldaris
that ar of substance put thair eldest sonnis and airs to the sculis fra thai
be aucht or nine yeiris of age and till remane at the grammar sculis qahill
thai be competentlie foundit and have perfite latyne. And therefter to
remane thre yers at the soulis of Art and Jure sua that thai may have
knowledge and underst ding of the lawis. Throw the quhilkis Justice may
reigne universalie throw all the realmel.
This enactment was enforceable by a penalty of forty pounds.
That net of compulsory education, with which nineteenth
century England enmeshed her lower orders, was endeavoured
to be thrown over her young nobility and lairds by the Scotland
of that gallant monarch, whose courage disastrously outran his
generalship on the slopes of Branxton Hill.
1 Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, a, 239; Tytler, 1v, 25.
242
## p. 372 (#390) ############################################
CHAPTER XVI
TRANSITION ENGLISH SONG COLLECTIONS
In France, a large number of manuscripts have survived from
the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to testify to the
songs that were sung by the gallant, the monk, the minstrel and
the clerk. English literature has been less fortunate, and yet
there are extant a goodly number of Middle English songs
With the exception of two notable anthologies of love lyrics
and religious poems, these songs were not committed to writing
until the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The inference
is not to be drawn, however, that they were mainly the product
of the late Transition period, since, evidently, they had been
preserved in oral form for a considerable time. This is proved
by the existence of different versions of the same song, by allusions
to historical events earlier than the fifteenth century, by elements
of folk-song embedded in the songs, by the essential likeness of
the love lyrics and religious poems to those in the two thirteenth
century collections, and by the fact that certain songs are of types
which were popular in France in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, and were probably brought to England at the time of
their vogue at home. The songs can therefore be regarded as
more or less representative of the whole Middle English period.
Of the folk-song element, a word may well be said at the outset,
for, though no pure folk-songs have survived, the communal verse
has left its impress upon these collections.
The universal characteristics of folk-poetry are, as to substance,
repetitions, interjections and refrains; and, as to form, a verse
accommodated to the dance. Frequent also is the call to the
dance, question and answer and rustic interchange of satire.
Though no one song illustrates all of these characteristics, they
are all to be found in the songs taken collectively.
The refrain is so generally employed that a song without it
is the exception. In the majority of cases, it is a sentence in Latin
## p. 373 (#391) ############################################
The Folk-song Element
373
or English, which has more or less relation to the theme of the
song, as the refrain:
Now syng we right as it is,
Quod puer natus est nobisi,
which accompanies a carol of the Nativity. Frequently, however,
meaningless interjections are run into such a refrain ; thus:
Hay, hey, hey, hey,
I will have the whetston and I may;
Po, po, po, po,
Loue brane & so do mos,
Such interjections are of great antiquity, and, in a far distant past,
were the sole words of the chorus. Sometimes the interjections
are intelligible words, which, however, have been chosen with an
eye to their choral adequacy, as :
Gay, gay, gay, gay,
Think on drydful domis day.
Nova, nova, ave fit ex Evas.
Some of the songs have preserved refrain, interjection and repe-
tition as well, as in the case of the following poem :
I have XII. oxen that be fayre & brown,
& they go a grasynge down by the town;
With hay, with howe, with hay!
Sawyste you not myn oxen, you litill prety boy?
I have XII. oxen & they be ffayre & whight,
& they go a grasyng down by the dyke;
With hay, with howe, with hay!
Sawyste not you myn oxen, you lytyll prety boy?
I hane XII. oxen & they be fayre & blak,
& they go a grasyng down by the lak;
With hay, with howe, with hay!
Sawyste not you myn oxen, you lytyll prety boy?
I haue XII. oxen & they be fayre & rede,
& they go a grasyng down by the mede;
With hay, with howe, with hay!
Sawiste not you my oxen, you litill prety boy 6?
Presumably this song is the product of a conscious artist, yet
it is representative of that amoebean verse which invariably
results in the evolution of poetry when individual singers detach
1 VS Baliol 354, ff. 2116, 227b-Anglia, xxvi, 264.
3 Ibid. ff. 226 6, 248 6- Anglia, XXVI, 270.
* Bodleian MS, Eng. Poet. E. I. f. 29 6—Percy Society, LXXIII, 42.
* MS Sloane 2593, f. 8a-Warton Club, iv, 10.
6 Bodleian MS, Eng. Poet. E. I. 1. 27 a—Percy Society, LXXIII, 36.
6 MS Balliol 354, f. 178 b-Anglia, XIVI, 197.
## p. 374 (#392) ############################################
374 Transition English Song Collections
1
6
themselves from the chorus, and sing in rivalry. Moreover,
it is representative of the simplest and most universal type of
such verse, the improvising of variations to accompany a popular
initial verse or phrase.
Another common form of the amoebean verse is question and
answer. This is beautifully illustrated by a song of the early
fourteenth century, a stray leaf of which has, fortunately, been
preserved? The song is arranged in recitative, but, relieved of
these repetitions, is as follows:
Maiden in the moor lay
Seven nights full and a day.
'Well, what was her meet? '
"The primrose and the violet. '
•Well, what was her dryng? '
The chill water of (the) well spring. '
"Well, what was her bower? '
"The rede rose and the lilly flour. '
On the same folio is a quaint poem, which has retained the
invitation to the dance :
Ich am of Irlaunde,
Am of the holy londe
Of Irlande;
Good sir, pray I 30,
For of Saynte Charite,
Come ant daunce wyt me in Irlaunde.
The call to the dance is also preserved in several fifteenth and
sixteenth century May poems.
A poem in which the song of a swaying mass is clearly to be
heard' is the familiar repetitionary lyric:
Adam lay ibowndyn,
bowndyn in a bond,
Fowre thowsand wynter
thowt he not to long;
And al was for an appil,
an appil that he tok,
As clerkes fyndyn wretyn
in here book.
Ne hadde the appil take ben,
the appil taken ben,
Ne hadde neuer our lady
a ben Hevene quene.
Blyssid be the tyme
that appil take was!
Therfore we mown syngyn
Deo gracias
1 MS Rawlinson, D. 913, f. 1. 2 MS Sloane 2593, f. 112-Warton Olub, rv, 32.
## p. 375 (#393) ############################################
Minstrels
375
Many an ecclesiastical denunciation testifies to the prevalence
of this communal singing in medieval England; but so much more
potent are custom and cult than authority that women, dressed in
the borrowed costumes of men, continued to dance and sing
in wild chorus within the very churchyards, in unwitting homage
to the old heathen deities.
Some of the song collections are anthologies taken from the
popular songs of the minstrel, the spiritual hymns of the monk
and the polite verse of the court; others are purely the répertoire
of minstrels; and still others are limited to polite verse.
Of the latter, fortunately, there is preserved the very song-book
that was owned by king Henry VIII, containing the lyrics of love
and good comradeship that he composed when a young man; and
there are, in addition, the books which were in part compiled, and
in part composed, by the authorised musicians of the courts of
Henry VII and Henry VIII These have preserved types of
chivalric verse based upon French models, as well as songs in
honour of the royal family, and songs composed for the revels and
pageants which were a brilliant feature of the court life in the
early decades of the sixteenth century.
The collections of minstrels' songs are especially rich. The
minstrel no longer confined himself to songs of rude and humble
ancestry, but encroached both on the devotional verse of the
monk, and on the songs of the gallant. This readily explains
itself, if one is mindful to identify these minstrels with that class
of men who had more and more usurped the prerogatives of
minstrelsy, the scolares vagantes, those irresponsible college
graduates and light-hearted vagabonds, who were equally at home
in ale-house, in hall, in market-place or in cloister, and who could
sing with equal spirit a ribald and saucy love song, a convivial
glee, a Christmas carol, a hymn to the Virgin, or a doleful lay
on the instability of life or the fickleness of riches. Most of them
were men who had taken minor orders, and who, therefore, knew
missal, breviary and hymnal; their life at the university had given
them some acquaintance with books, their wayside intercourse
with the minstrel had given them his ballads and his jargon of
washed-out romantic tales and their homely contact with the
people had taught them the songs of the street and of the folk-
festival ; they were, therefore, the main intermediaries between
the learned and the vernacular letters of the day, and they tended
to reduce all to a common level. If they compelled the rude
folk-song to conform to the metres of the Latin hymns, they
## p. 376 (#394) ############################################
376 Transition English Song Collections
compensated for this by reducing to these same simple metres
the artistically fashioned stanzas of highly wrought spiritual songs,
as well as by introducing the popular refrain into lyrics of every
kind. When they sang of the joys of Mary, of the righteousness
of a saint, or of a prince renowned for his deeds, they received the
approbation of bishop or abbot ; when they satirised his cupidity,
or sang wanton songs at banquets, they called down the bishop's
indignation; but, bishop or no bishop, they never lacked an
audience.
As the ability to read became more general, and as taste was
refined by the possession of books of real poetic merit, the minstrel,
even if one who had tarried in the schools, found his audience more
and more limited to the common folk; but, even in the fifteenth
century, though his wretched copies of the old romances, with their
sing-song monotony, might be the laughing-stock of people of taste,
his Christmas carols would still gain him admission to the halls of
the nobility.
As the minstrel thus trespassed upon the provinces of religious
and polite poets, so each of these in turn invaded the fields of
others, with the result that the monk adopted the formulary of
amatory address for his love songs to the Virgin, and the gallant
introduced elements from the folk-poetry into his embroidered
lays.
Considering this confusion, for purposes of discussion it is more
satisfactory to classify the songs with reference to types than with
reference to authorship. Romances and tales have been dealt with
elsewhere: though they are to be found in the collections, and
were, probably, chanted in humdrum fashion to the accompani-
ment of a harp, they are narratives, and not at all lyrical.
The carol was brought to England from France at an early
date, and there are extant Norman carols that were sung in
England in the late twelfth century. In essentials, there is little
difference between these carols and some of those that were sung
in England three centuries later. They observe the refrain, which
is most commonly a repetition of the word 'noel'; they open
with an invocation to those present,
Seignors ore entendez a nus,
De loinz sumes venuz @ vous,
Pur quere Noell;
and their theme is the Nativity and the attendant gladness.
· Sandys, Festive Songs, 6.
## p. 377 (#395) ############################################
Carols
377
It is probable that the composition of carols was widely
cultivated in the thirteenth century, for most of the carols are in
simple Latin metres, and Latin lines are employed either as refrain,
or as an integral part of the stanzas. Such a tradition must
look back to a period when the English composer felt the need of
relying upon the support of Latin metres, and it was in the
thirteenth century, as extant religious poems demonstrate, that
English metres were thus being conformed to the models of Latin
hymns?
The metre most commonly employed is the simplest, a one-
rime tercet of iambic tetrameters, followed by a refrain, usually
Latin. Thus:
Gabriell that angell bryst,
Bryster than the sonne is lyzt,
Fro hevyn to erth he (too)k hys flygt,
Regina celi letare?
Sometimes the Latin verse rimes with the English, making a
quatrain, or a Latin line may be introduced into the tercet itself.
The quatrain with alternate rimes is also used, though less
frequently. Other popular metres are the rimed couplet, and the
ballade stanza, which, however, is confined to the longer narrative
carols. Occasional carols are composed in the highly wrought
French metres, but they seem exotic.
The Latin lines in the carols are familiar verses from the
hymns, canticles, sequences, graduales and other parts of the
service in missal or breviary, relating to the Christmas season; and
practically all can be found in the Sarum Use.
Of the refrain there are various types. Sometimes it is a
stanza or verse from a Latin hymn, as :
Ihesus autem hodie
Egressus est de virgines;
sometimes an English verse and a Latin verse combined :
Be mery all, that be present,
Omnes de Saba venient";
sometimes merely the word 'nowel' or 'noel’ in recitative; and
sometimes an invocation to be merry:
Make we mery in hall & bowr,
Thys tyme was born owr savyowr5.
* Cf. Morris, Old English Misc. , E. E. T. S. XLII, 1872.
• Bodleian MS, Eng. Poet. E. I. f. 26 a–Percy Society, LXXIII, 33.
: MS Balliol 354, f. 178 a—Anglia, xxvi, 196.
• Ibid. f. 165 6Anglia, xxvi, 176.
• Ibid. f. 220 a-Anglia, XXVI, 231.
## p. 378 (#396) ############################################
378 Transition English Song Collections
There is also a very pretty introduction of the shepherd's pipe in
certain carols that sing of the shepherds watching their flocks by
night; thus,
Tyrly tirlow, tirly tirlow;
So merrily the shepherds began to blow1
As the Christmas season was a time for festivities and merry-
making as well as for worship, it was natural that some of the
carols should deal with sacred themes, and others with secular
themes ; indeed that some carols should confuse the two types.
The services within the church gave ample warrant for such a
confusion. Moreover, as Christmas theoretically supplanted a
pagan festival, but practically compromised with it, it was natural
that elements of pre-Christian rites should be reflected in carols.
Religious carols are, for the most part, narrative in content
The Nativity is, of course, the dominant theme, but, as the festival
season lasted from the Nativity to Epiphany, or even until
Candlemas, the events of Holy Week, and the lives of the saints
whose days occur at this season, furnish many of the themes.
It may be that carols were written to divert interest from
those pagan songs, with their wild dances, which, even as late as the
fifteenth century, made Christmas a trying and dangerous period
for the church? . Certainly, the folk-song element in carols
suggests the probability that at one time they were accompanied
by dancing
But, whatever the origin of carols may have been, it is clear
that they were much influenced by those dramatic elements,
which, prior to the advent of the mystery plays, were a popular
part of the Christmas services in the church ; for the episodes
dramatised in the services are the ones that most often figure in
carols. It seems not a little strange that carols were not more
often introduced into mystery plays of the Nativity. One of the
shepherd carols, however, is like the mystery in spirit. It intro-
duces the character of Wat, and, with it, homely, half-humorous
touches such as are characteristic of the plays :
Whan Wat to Bedlem cum was,
He swet, he had gon faster than a pace;
Lull well Ihesu in thy lape,
& farewell Ioseph, with thy rownd cape 3.
1 MS Balliol 354, f. 222 a-Anglia, XXVI, 237; Bodleian MS, Eng. Poet. E. I. f. 60 a
-Percy Society, LXXIII, 95.
2 Cf. Robert of Brunne, Handlyng Synne, 8987 ff. , Chron. Vilod. 1022.
3 MS Balliol 354, 1. 224 2- Anglia, XIVI, 243.
## p. 379 (#397) ############################################
Carols
379
The themes of secular carols are the feasting and sports of Yule-
tide, customs that were inseparable from the great hall of the
nobleman's residence, where the whole community was wont to
assemble for the Christmas festivities. To be sure, these carols
were sometimes sung at other seasons, for did not the Green
Knight entertain Sir Gawain with
Many athel songez,
As conndutes of Kryst-masse, and carolez newe,
With all the manerly merthe that mon may of telle 1 ?
but Christmas week in hall was the proper setting. Several carols
relate to the custom of bringing in the boar's head. The classical
example is the familiar carol,
The boar's head in hand bring I,
Caput apri differos,
but others, though less well known, possess equal interest. In one,
the minstrel relates how, in 'wilderness,' he was pursued by a
wyld bor,' 'a brymly best. ' In the encounter that followed, he
succeeded in refting both life and limb from the beast, in testimony
of which he brings the head into the hall. Then he bids the
company add bread and mustard, and be joyful. In another,
warning is given that no one need seek to enter the ball, be he
groom, page, or marshal, unless he bring some sport with him".
In still another, the minstrel speaks in the character of Sir
Christmas, and takes leave of
kyng & knyght,
& erle, baron & lady bryghts,
but not without a fond wish that he may be with them again the
following year. He hears Lent calling, and obeys the call : a
lugubrious summons indeed to the luckless wanderer who must
turn his back on this genial hospitality for eleven months to come,
and depend on the fortuitous goodwill of the ale-house.
Charming, also, are the songs of ivy and holly, which were
sung in connection with some little ceremony of the season. In all
the songs, ivy and holly appear as rivals; and, whatever the
ceremony may have been, it certainly was a survival of those
festival games in connection with the worship of the spirit of
fertility, in which lads invariably championed the cause of holly,
1 E. E. T. S. f. 484 ff.
Of. MS Balliol 354, f. 212 - Anglia, IXV, 257.
3 Bodleian MS, Eng. Lit. E. I. f. 23 a—Percy Society, LXIII, 25. .
• MS Balliol 354, f. 223 – Anglia, XXVI, 241.
• Ibid. 1. 208 6- Anglia, XXVI, 245.
## p. 380 (#398) ############################################
380
Transition English Song Collections
and lasses that of ivy? We can fancy young men entering the
hall with branches of holly? :
Here commys holly, that is so gent,
To pleasse all men is his entent, etc. ;
singing the praises of the shrub, and warning their hearers not to
speak lightly of its ; while young women enter from an opposite
direction, and go through a similar performance with the ivy.
Thereupon, both young men and young women enter upon some
kind of a dance, which resolves itself into a contest in which the
boys drive the girls from the hall:
Holy with his mery men they can daunce in hall;
Ivy & her ientyl women can not daunce at all,
But lyke a meyny of bullokes in a water fall,
Or on a whot somer's day whan they be mad all.
Nay, nay, ive, it may not be iwis;
For holy must haue the mastry, as the maner is.
the attendants of the earth-born bride of the god, to the seven
liberal arts. Three of these, grammar, logic and rhetoric, con-
stituted the trivium; which formed the course of study of the
medieval undergraduate. The bachelor passed on to the quad-
rivium-arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy-his conquest
of which was denoted by the licence or degree of master of arts.
To these seven arts, the thirteenth century added the three
philosophies---natural, moral and metaphysical.
An Oxford scheme of study of 1426 demands: one year's
## p. 360 (#378) ############################################
360
English Education
reading of grammar, with Priscian as text-book; next, three terms'
study of rhetoric, with Aristotle, Boethius and Tully as teachers,
reinforced by Ovid and Vergil; finally, three terms' reading of logic
with Boethius and Aristotle, Topica and Priora being expressly
enjoined. Of the subjects of the quadrivium, arithmetic and
music require each a year, while geometry and astronomy call
each for two. The three philosophies need each three terms.
Some of these courses were, seemingly, concurrent, the entire
arts curriculum covering, in general, eight years of three terms
each. The Cambridge requirements were, evidently, much the
same. Sir Robert Rede, in 1518, bequeathed £12 per annum for
the payment of three lecturers in logic, rhetoric and philosophy.
Of these three, one, whose style as lector Terentii reveals his
function, was assigned, by statute, to lecture to students of the
first and second year on 'books of humanity’; the second
lecturer read logic to third year undergraduates; the third
lectured to fourth year students and bachelors of arts on books
of philosophy.
The educational methods pursued differed in no small degree
from those at present in use. Of written examinations, the
medieval student knew nothing; his progress was secured by
compulsory reading of set books and enforced attendance on
assigned lectures; by frequent ‘posing' and debate; and, lastly,
by the necessity of himself delivering lectures after attaining
the baccalaureate. He might, indeed, content himself with
‘inception in grammar,' when, on the strength of the delivery
of certain discourses on Priscian and of the certificate of three
posing masters of his minor art, he passed forth qualified to
teach in an elementary school; but, if his ambition soared to
higher flights, he might assume obligations to his university
which represented labour continued during upwards of twenty
years.
The complete arts course was, in general, the necessary pre-
requisite to the study of theology; but students possessed of the
needful permission might pass directly from the trivium to the
pursuit of civil, and then of canon, law. In Oxford, as in Paris,
regents in arts asserted a claim to pre-eminence in the direction
of university reading. In 1252, it was enacted that no scholar
should receive the licence in theology, who had not previously
been regent in arts.
The Cambridge Statuta Antiqua set out regulations which
were in force about 1400 A. D. The five stages of the arts’ student's
## p. 361 (#379) ############################################
University Studies. The Higher Faculties 361
career, therein indicated, were successively represented by: ad-
mission to the question, by which, in his fifth year at earliest, after
previous attendance at scholastic discussion, he was introduced
for formal university testing; determination, a far more serious
ordeal, involving an active share in a long series of public dis-
putations and the duty of summing up in approved fashion the
results of debate; cursory lecturing on the Posteriora; inception,
whereby the scholar acquired the licence of master and was
regularly authorised to teach; and, lastly, regency, a period of
active lecturing ordinarie, as officially appointed instructor, and
of enforced attendance upon various public gatherings for
university business and ceremonial.
No scholar might incept in arts in Cambridge in the fifteenth
century unless : he had previously determined; had, for three
years at least, continuously resided and studied in his proper
faculty; had attended during three years the lectures of his own
master on Aristotle's philosophy, together with any such mathe-
matical lectures as might be given in the schools; had publicly
opposed and responded in his faculty in due form in the schools;
and, finally, unless he was provided with certificates de scientia
from five, and de credulitate vel scientia from other seven, masters
of arts.
Should he proceed, as, if ambitious of promotion, he must, to
the study of theology, of law or of medicine, the master of arts
must pass afresh through certain clearly defined stages:
None shall be admitted to incept in theology, unless he shall have pre-
viously been regent in arts; unless, also, he shall have heard theological
lectures for at least ten years in a university; item, he shall have heard
lectures on the Bible biblice for two years before he incepts; he shall have
lectured on or in some canonical book of the Bible for a year, for at least ten
days in each term; nor shall it be permitted to any to 'enter' the Bible before
the second year after the completion of his lectures on the Sentences; and he
shall have read all the books of the Sentences in that University, and shall
have remained at least three years in an approved University, after the
lecturing on the Sentences, before he shall be licensed. Furthermore, he shall
have preached publicly ad clerum and shall have publicly in all the schools of
his faculty opposed and responded after lecturing upon the Sentences, in such
sort that he may be in very deed of known and approved progress, manners
and learning according to the attestation de scientia by all the masters of
that faculty in the manner aforesaid; and, finally, he shall be admitted when
he has sworn that he has completed this set of requirements? .
Similar detailed provisions guarded the doctorates of canon
law, civil law and of medicine. The 'grace,' which, in later times,
1 Statuta Antiqua, 124; Camb. Doc. I, 377.
## p. 362 (#380) ############################################
362
English Education
6
became the necessary formality for proceeding to a degree, was, in
origin, a privilegium of the masters dispensing with some special
requirement in a particular case?
A comparison of the statutory requirements of the university
with the contents of a medieval college library would appear to
furnish a sufficient basis for judgment as to the extent of the
studies indicated.
Peterhouse is fortunate in still possessing, not only a library
catalogue of 1418, but the majority of the volumes therein
described. It is clear from its arrangement that, unlike the
noble collection vainly bequeathed by Richard of Bury to the
Benedictine house of Durham in Oxford, and the great library
of duke Humphrey of Gloucester, it was a working library.
Making allowances for entries on the roll inserted at a somewhat
later date, the collection of 1418 contains over 300 volumes. These
are divided into two classes, as being either chained in the
library' or 'distributed amongst the fellows. ' They are further
arranged under subject-headings as representing theology, natural
philosophy, metaphysics, moral philosophy, astronomy, ‘Alkenemie,'
‘Arsmetrice' (arithmetic), music, geometry, rhetoric, logic, grammar,
poetry, chronicles, medicine, civil law and canon law. Theological
works occupy the largest space. Canon law and civil law in com-
bination slightly exceed the three philosophies. Of medical
chained books there are fifteen; but, amongst the fellows, for
regular reading, logic, poetry and grammar are in greater request.
Astronomy is studied; though it is in the chained library where
Ptolemy reigns among a company of Arabians and their Jewish
translators, together with Bacon De multiplicatione specierum
cum perspectiva ejusdem and half a dozen recent table-makers,
closing with John Holbroke, who was elected master of the college
in the same year. Of the other subjects of the quadrivium,
music, arithmetic and geometry are, under their several proper
headings, denoted each by a single tome. A second copy of
Euclid, indeed, elsewhere appears, bound up with astronomical
works, as do two other treatises on geometry; and there are
two copies of the Arithmetica of Boethius; but the weakness of
the mathematical element is very marked, as compared with the
overwhelming force of the philosophy of Aristotle.
1 Friars, being prohibited by the rules of their orders from graduation in secular
branches of knowledge, required a dispensation to graduate in theology. The stringent
enforcement against them of university regulations provoked heated altercation and,
as already seen, led to parliamentary and papal interference: ante, p. 351; Rashdall,
11, 379.
## p. 363 (#381) ############################################
The Library of the Medieval Student 363
It is to be remembered that the fellows of Peterhouse
were at least bachelors of arts, whose main studies would be
concerned with cursory lecturing on Posteriora. Of thirteen
works on logic, which the library of 1418 contains, we find,
accordingly, eight distributed amongst the society. The eight
consist entirely of texts of Aristotle, including Posteriora,
Priora, Topica and Elenchi, with texts of Porphyry, various
commentaries and collections of questions on both Aristotle and
Porphyry and the Sophismata of William of Heytesbury (fellow of
Merton, 1330; chancellor of Oxford, 1371). In the chained library,
Boethius joins Porphyry and Aristotle, together with the Philo-
sophia of the great Albert, the Summa of Ockham and com-
mentaries of Kilwardby and St Thomas. A later fifteenth century
hand added to the catalogue the Summa of Peter Hispanus and
the Quaestiones of William Brito (ob. 1356). Under the several
headings of natural philosophy, moral philosophy and metaphysic,
the catalogue of 1418 records no fewer than eighteen volumes of
Aristotelian texts, together with commentaries by Averroes,
Aquinas, Egidius Romanus (ob. 1316), Walter Burley (ob. 1345),
Durandus and Peter de Alvernia, and the Summa of John
Dumbleton (fellow of Queen's, Oxford, 1341). Under the same
class heading Palladius and Columella introduce agriculture and
veterinary medicine; Seneca and Pliny instruct De Animalibus ;
and Capella and Isidore range through all fields in dictionary
fashion.
In the lower educational stages of the trivium we find, for
grammar, authorities in time-honoured Priscian, as edited by
Kilwardby, in the Dictionary of Hugucio (bishop of Ferrara, ob.
1213), the Catholicon of friar John de Janua, the Summa de
expositione verborum Bibliae of William Brito, Bacon De Gram-
matica and the inevitable Doctrinale Puerorum of Alexander.
In rhetoric, Cassiodorus and Tully are supported by Guido delle
Colonne’s History of the Trojan War, Pharaoh's Dream
by John Lemouicensis, and Practica sive Usus Dictaminis,
a 'Complete Letter Writer' by one Master Laurence Aquile-
giensis.
The civilians were, in view of statutory requirements,
necessarily provided with all the books of the corpus juris.
They were furnished, also, with glosses of Accursius and comments
of Bartholus, Odofredus and Peter de Bella Pertica (ob. 1308).
The favourite text-writers were, however, Cinus of Pistoia (ob.
1 M. R. James, Peterhouse MSS.
## p. 364 (#382) ############################################
364 English Education
1336) and Azo (ob. 1200), 'the light of the lawyers,' whom Bologna
was constrained to recall from Montpellier. Of Cynus super
Codicem, as of Parvum Volumen (e. g. the Institutes and Novellae),
Digestum Vetus, Digestum Inforciatum, Digestum Novum and of
Codex, there were three copies, two of each being distributed to
fellows, who borrowed also the Summa and Brocardica Azonis.
For canonists, with the necessary texts of decrees, decretals, Liber
Sextus, 'Extravagants' and Clementines, there were commentaries
of Paulus, of Joannes Andreae (ob. 1348), of William de Monte
Lauduns (c. 1346), of William de Mandagoto and of Henry of
Susa, cardinal of Ostia (ob. 1271). As English clerks, the Peter-
house fellows had, doubtless, frequent recourse to their several
copies of the Constitutions of Otho and Ottobon, and, it may be sur-
mised, to Liber taxarum omnium beneficiorum Angliae, which lay
in the chained library. But their regularly used manuals of
canon law were, clearly, the famous Summa Ostiensis, which
appears in both sections of the library; the similarly honoured
Rosarium of archdeacon Guido de Baysio, which recalls the
Bologna school of 1300; and the ever popular Speculum Juris,
or Speculum Judiciale, of William Durand (ob. 1296) to whom
Boniface VIII vainly offered the archbishopric of Ravenna. Two
copies of Speculum, with the like number of texts of decretals,
Liber Sextus and Clementines, are lent out to fellows, while
another copy of each remains in the chained library. The law
fellowships of Peterhouse were, evidently, full, the statutes per-
mitting, as has been noted, to not more than two contemporary
fellows, the study of canon, or civil, law.
The one fellow allowed by statute to adopt the medical art
was pursuing in 1418 the regular university course: he had
borrowed Macer, De virtutibus herbarum, and the prescribed texts
of "Johannicius' and of 'Isaac. ' Chaucer recites the qualifica-
tions of his Doctor of Phisyk:
Well knew he the olde Esculapius
And Deiscorides, and eek Rufus,
Old Ypocras, Haly and Galien;
Serapion, Razis and Avicen;
Averrois, Damascien and Constantyn;
Bernard, and Gatesden, and Gilbertyn.
The Peterhouse chained library of 1418 held but thirteen
volumes of medicine; but a brief examination of the contents of
its shelves enables us to identify at least ten of Chaucer's classical
authorities. The ruler of the medieval medical school was, un-
## p. 365 (#383) ############################################
The Library of the Medieval Student 365
doubtedly, Galen, whose commentaries upon Hippocrates must be
twice heard in lecture by the Cambridge would-be medical in-
ceptor. Other prescribed books were the Breviary of Constantine,
commonly known as Viaticus, the Isagoge of Johannicius, a
general introduction to physic, the Antidotarium of Nicholaus,
Theophilus De Urinis and the works of Isaac, a high authority on
dietary and fevers. Amongst additional authors represented on
the Peterhouse shelves, a notable place was claimed by Gerard
of Cremona, an indefatigable translator, and by Richard, the
Englishman, who is identifiable with Richard of Wendover (ob.
1252), canon of St Paul's, the compiler of an encyclopaedic
treatise covering the entire field of Medicine. It is no hard task
to detect the fontes of medieval medical knowledge. Isaac, a
Peterhouse librarian scribe informs us, fuit araabs nacione.
Gerard of Cremona translates one book of Galen in Toledo from
the Arabic into Latin ; another is introduced as ad tutyrum
translato johannici filii ysaac de greco in arabicum et a marcho
toletano de arabico in latinum. Medicine, with astronomy,
passed to western Europe through the hands of the Arabian
and the Jew.
And what, finally, of theology, the crowning study of the
medieval university? There, indeed, the Latin held his own. In
the Peterhouse chained library of 1418 an imperfect Chrysostom
practically monopolises the representation of the eastern church,
with Cyprian as spokesman for the African. A magnificent Latin
Bible, the gift of archbishop Whittlesea, is flanked by a host of
patristic writers of the western church. Augustine, Ambrose and
Jerome are followed by Gregory and Isidore, by Bernard and
Anselm, by Stephen Langton, Lyra and Hugo de St Victor. There
are the inevitable sermons standing behind great names. There
is, too, the Historia Scholastica of Peter Comestor, Magister
Historiarum. But in the list of books distributed amongst the
fellows the true character of the theological studies of the uni-
versity comes out. With four more Bibles, one being specially
assigned for daily reading in hall, a glossed Gospel of St John,
a brief tractate on the epistles of St Paul, two or three books
clearly designed for private meditation and Grosseteste, De
Oculo Morali, there are two additional copies of Magister His-
toriarum, six Psalters, four Latin, one Hebrew and Latin and
one Hebrew and no fewer than nine copies of the Master of the
Sentences, reinforced by the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, the
Quaestiones of his opponent Henry of Ghent (ob. 1293) and
## p. 366 (#384) ############################################
366 English Education
John Bokyngham Super Sententias. The ancient fathers of the
church here appear only in the shape of extracts in the much
used Pharetra, a medieval Familiar Quotations. The working
theology of fifteenth century Peterhouse was the theology of
Peter Lombard.
The education offered to the young scholar in the Middle Ages
was, essentially, utilitarian; he was trained for service in public
functions. A few rules of grammatical expression; some ele-
mentary calculations; geometry, consisting mainly of ill-informed
geography; music sufficient to qualify for the singing of a mass;
and Ptolemaic astronomy, directing to the correct determination of
Easter-these, with much skill in argument derived from long
exercise in the use of dialectic forms, constituted the ripe fruit of
the course in trivium and quadrivium. The disputants in the
schools wasted their energy in a barren philosophy. The few
followers of Roger Bacon in the domain of a progressive natural
science, more than suspected of alliance with the Saracen and the
Evil One, could find legitimate scope for their research only
within the confines of a crude medical science which com-
bined the simples of the herb wife with a barbarous surgery.
Unless caught in the scholastic net of metaphysics, the medieval
student could find substantial mental food only in theology or in
law. And, in a field where to trip was to be denounced as a
heretic, the theology offered was the slavish repetition of re-
ceived glosses, the killing of the literal sense of Scripture in
the drawing out of the so-called allegorical, moral and anagogical
meaning, or, at best, the application of syllogistic methods to the
dicta of ancient fathers.
Of the Humanities as such, the fourteenth century was strangely
innocent. The cataloguer of the Peterhouse library of 1418
assigned a special place to chronicles. He placed under this head
Cassiodorus, Valerius Maximus and Sallust, with Vegetius,
Frontinus, Aimonius of Fleury and the anonymous writer of a
treatise De adventu Normannorum in Angliam et de jure quod
habuit Willelmus bastardus ad regnum Angliae. Quintilian,
Macrobius and Seneca he classed as natural philosophers. Poetry
he conjoined with grammar ; and, with Priscian, Hugucio and
Alexander de Villa Dei he ranked Ovid, Statius and Lucan.
When, with them, they bring the Epistles of Francis Petrarch, we
catch the glimmering light before the dawn. Twenty-two years
later (1440), Robert Alne lent to his old friend John Ottryngham,
master of Michaelhouse, who had been admitted with him as a
## p. 367 (#385) ############################################
The Hour before the Renascence 367
fellow of Peterhouse on 5 October 1400, a copy of Petrarch’s
De Remediis utriusque Fortunae.
It is scarcely thirty years ago, when all that was taught in the university
of Cambridge was Alexander, the Little Logicals (as they call them) and
those old exercises out of Aristotle, and quaestiones taken from Duns Scotus.
As time went on, polite learning was introduced; to this was added a know-
ledge of mathematics; a new, or at least a regenerated Aristotle sprang up;
then came an acquaintance with Greek, and with a host of new authors whose
very names had before been unknown, even to their profoundest doctorsl.
So wrote Erasmus in 1516'.
It was to men well known to Erasmus that the English univer-
sities and English schools owed educational reform. Grocyn and
Linacre brought Greek to Oxford; but it was John Colet who
introduced to that university a sane and natural method of Scripture
exposition, and it was John Colet, too, who took Greek to the
English public school. In 1510, as dean of St Paul's, he founded
a school in the churchyard of his cathedral, where 153 boys, who
could already read and write and were of 'good parts and capaci-
ties,' should be taught good literature, both Greek and Latin, and
be brought up in the knowledge of Christ. "Lift up your little
white hands for me,' he wrote in the preface to the Latin
grammar which he composed for the use of his scholars. The
petition has the ring of the medieval founder; but with the so-
called Lilly's Grammar and with Colet's teaching of the catechism,
the articles and the ten commandments in the vulgar tongue
began the modern period of English middle class education.
Like England, Scotland had long had her monastic schools,
whence ambitious students passed to the university of Paris, or
joined the boreales of Oxford or of Cambridge; but it was not
until the beginning of the fifteenth century that the northern
kingdom saw the establishment of the first university of its own.
At St Andrews, which was destined, in 1472, to be raised to
the dignity of a metropolitan seat, a conventual chapter of
Augustinian canons had superseded an earlier society of Culdees.
In 1411*, Henry Wardlaw, a discreet and learned prelate, himself
a doctor of canon law, who had been, not without hot contention,
raised to the bishopric in 1403, was inspired to found a university
in his cathedral city. He was excited thereto, in part, at any rate,
by the difficulties experienced by such of the Scottish clergy as
• Ibid. p. 616.
i Trans. in Mullinger, Vol. I, pp. 515_6.
8 The foundation charter is dated 27 February 1411.
## p. 368 (#386) ############################################
368
Scottish Education
were 'desirous of being instructed in theology, in canon and civil
law, medicine and the liberal arts' by reason of the dangers by
sea and land, the wars, captivities and obstructions in passing to
and from foreign universities. ' That these dangers were no light
matter was demonstrated by the conspicuous object lesson of king
James I, still in the English captivity, into which he had fallen when
on his way to France, as a young prince fresh from the teaching
of Wardlaw himself. The good bishop secured the hearty con-
currence of his prior, James Haldenstone; and, in 1413, a bull
of Benedict XIII, the anti-pope whom Scotland then acknowledged
and to whom Wardlaw owed his bishopric, recognised the new
foundation as a studium generale. The constitution and discipline
of the university was determined by the bishop's foundation
charter; which, with the charters of the prior and the arch-
deacons of St Andrews and Lothian, was confirmed by king James
in 1432 after his restoration to his kingdom. The founder consti-
.
tuted the bishop of St Andrews for the time being perpetual
chancellor of the university and reserved, likewise, the right of
final determination of disputes arising between the university and
the town, saving the privileges of the prior and chapter and
of the archdeacon of St Andrews. The general government of
the university was remitted to an elected rector, who must be
a graduate in one of the faculties and in holy orders.
The new studium generale had, in the first instance, neither
special buildings nor endowment. In 1430, Wardlaw granted a
tenement for the use of the masters and regents of the faculty
of arts; and other well-wishers, in course of time, came forward
with similar benefactions; but the teachers of the university were,
for a long time, maintained on the fees of their hearers, and on the
profits of benefices which they were authorised to hold under
a general licence of non-residence. The 'auld pedagogy' was, in
fact, an unendowed ecclesiastical seminary, served by beneficed
masters, who found their pupils among youths resident or lodging
in the town. The institution was much encouraged by James I,
who had, during his enforced stay in England, imbibed a taste for
literature in general and for poetry in particular. Under the royal
charter of confirmation, the resident members of the university
were exempted from every species of taxation. As in Oxford and
Cambridge, the privileges of scholars were extended to those who
served them.
In 1458, bishop John Kennedy, an able and worthy prelate,
who was closely connected with the throne, his mother being a
## p. 369 (#387) ############################################
6
St Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen 369
daughter of Robert III, enriched the university with its first
college, that of St Salvator; endowing it with parochial tithes
'as a college for theology and the arts, for divine worship and for
scholastic exercises. ' The numbers of the society were fixed, ad
instar apostolici numeri, at thirteen persons; a provost, a licentiate
in theology, a bachelor in theology, four masters of arts and six
'poor clerks. ' The college set up a claim to confer degrees in-
dependently of the rector of the older foundation, and supported
it by a bull of Pius II, of 1458; but the pretension was speedily
relinquished on the intervention of Patrick Graham, half-brother
of bishop Kennedy, and the first metropolitan of St Andrews. In
1512, John Hepburn, prior of St Andrews, converted for the
purposes of a second college the buildings and property of the
ancient hospital of St Leonard, which had been erected in an
earlier age for the entertainment of the pilgrims who thronged
to worship at the shrine of St Andrews. Hepburn enjoyed the
support, not only of James IV, but of the king's illegitimate son,
the young archbishop, Alexander Stewart, who was destined to
fall with his father, a year later, on the fatal field of Flodden.
The archbishop, a pupil of Erasmus, himself took in hand the
conversion of Wardlaw's pedagogium into the college of St Mary;
but his untimely death left the task to be completed, with royal
and papal approval, by his successors, the two Beatons and John
Hamilton (1553). The college of St Mary, which, at least after
1579, was given up entirely to the study of divinity, completed
the three foundations, which remained the constituent colleges of
St Andrews down to 1747; when failing revenues compelled the
amalgamation of St Salvator's with St Leonard's. The historian
John Major, in 1521, himself provost of St Leonard’s, marvelled at
the incuria of Scottish prelates, which had left Scotland without
a university until 1411. The Scottish bishops of the fifteenth
century made ample amends for their supine predecessors.
In January, 1450, William Turnbull, bishop of Glasgow, obtained
from Nicholas V a bull, which recognised the establishment in his
cathedral city of a studium generale. The bull was locally
proclaimed in the following year, when statutes were drawn up and
courses of study prescribed.
Yet again, in 1500, bishop Elphinstone of Aberdeen completed
the erection of King's College, in ‘the granite city,' having obtained
papal authority in 1494. The third university of Scotland was
formed on the model of its predecessors as a combination of con-
ventual rule with the special pursuit of learning. It acquired
24
B. L. II.
OH. XV.
## p. 370 (#388) ############################################
370
Scottish Education
a particular lustre from the person of its first principal. This was
Hector Boece, correspondent of Erasmus and historian, who had
held the appointment of professor of philosophy in the college
of Montaigu at Paris.
The Scottish universities were directly clerical in origin; and
the briefest examination of the statutes of their colleges demon-
strates their thoroughly ecclesiastical character. The Scottish
episcopal founders worked hand in hand not only with monks
but with friars. It is noteworthy that bishop Kennedy founded
a Franciscan convent in St Andrews, where the Dominicans had
been established by one of his early predecessors (1272—9); and
the provincial sub-prior of the Dominicans was, with the minister
of the Franciscans, included among the seven electors to the
provostship of St Mary's. In the result, while the Scottish
university was, in its first days, an ecclesiastical seminary, its
education assumed, with the advent of colleges, the purely con-
ventual type. St Leonard's, which may be selected as a typical
college, was, under its canon regular principal, as a college of
philosophy and theology, a glorified monastic school.
The subjects of instruction comprised grammar, oratory, poetry,
Aristotelian philosophy and the writings of Solomon as preparatory
to the study of divinity. Prior Hepburn forbade the admission
of a student under fifteen years of age; but the university
statutes permitted determination at the age of fourteen.
From mere boys, in the Scotland of the fifteenth century, no
serious preparatory equipment could be demanded. The council
at Edinburgh, in 1549, urged the rectors of the universities to
see to it ne ulli ad scholas Dialectices sive Artium recipiantur
nisi qui Latine et grammatice loquuntur; and called upon the
archdeacon of St Andrews to appoint a grammar school master for
that city? Other indications assist to show the low standard of
the current Latin. There was no professor of the Humanities in
St Andrews, 'the first and principal university' in the sixteenth
century.
A reforming commission, in 1563, complained of the lack of
teaching of sciences and specially they that are maist necessarie,
that is to say the toungis and humanities. ' James Melville testifies
that, in 1571, neither Greek nor Hebrew was to be gottine in the
land. ' When at length, in 1620, a chair of Humanity was endowed
in St Leonard's college, the local grammar master complained that
its occupant drew off his young pupils by teaching the elements
· Herkless and Hannay, The College of St Leonard, p. 160.
## p. 371 (#389) ############################################
Scottish University Studies
371
of Latin grammar. There was no professor of Greek in St Andrews
until 1695. The modern superiority of Scotland in philosophy is
traceable, in fact, to a belated medievalism. The Scottish reforma-
tion caught the universities of the northern kingdom still directly
under church control, the clerical instructors clinging to their
Aristotle and their Peter Lombard. The results were temporarily
disastrous.
In spite of the assertion of Hector Boece that, in
early days, the university excrevit in immensum, the numbers
of no Scottish university in the fifteenth or sixteenth century
exceeded the membership of one of the smaller English colleges,
such, for example, as Peterhouse. In 1557, there were thirty-one
students in the three constituent colleges of St Andrews; in 1558
there were but three. Glasgow and Aberdeen dwindled in like
fashion. Yet the Scottish universities reproduced the Parisian
distribution into four nations under the local quarterings of Fife,
Lothian, Angus and Albany. The description which John Major
gave of his contemporary Glasgow is, with the variation of the
local reference, equally applicable to St Andrews or to Aberdeen:
“The seat of an Archbishop, and of a University poorly endowed
and not rich in scholars; but serviceable to the inhabitants of the
west and south. '
In one particular the northern kingdom advanced beyond her
southern sister. A Scottish act of parliament of 1496 declared
that:
It is statute and ordanit throw all the realme that all barronis and frehaldaris
that ar of substance put thair eldest sonnis and airs to the sculis fra thai
be aucht or nine yeiris of age and till remane at the grammar sculis qahill
thai be competentlie foundit and have perfite latyne. And therefter to
remane thre yers at the soulis of Art and Jure sua that thai may have
knowledge and underst ding of the lawis. Throw the quhilkis Justice may
reigne universalie throw all the realmel.
This enactment was enforceable by a penalty of forty pounds.
That net of compulsory education, with which nineteenth
century England enmeshed her lower orders, was endeavoured
to be thrown over her young nobility and lairds by the Scotland
of that gallant monarch, whose courage disastrously outran his
generalship on the slopes of Branxton Hill.
1 Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, a, 239; Tytler, 1v, 25.
242
## p. 372 (#390) ############################################
CHAPTER XVI
TRANSITION ENGLISH SONG COLLECTIONS
In France, a large number of manuscripts have survived from
the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to testify to the
songs that were sung by the gallant, the monk, the minstrel and
the clerk. English literature has been less fortunate, and yet
there are extant a goodly number of Middle English songs
With the exception of two notable anthologies of love lyrics
and religious poems, these songs were not committed to writing
until the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The inference
is not to be drawn, however, that they were mainly the product
of the late Transition period, since, evidently, they had been
preserved in oral form for a considerable time. This is proved
by the existence of different versions of the same song, by allusions
to historical events earlier than the fifteenth century, by elements
of folk-song embedded in the songs, by the essential likeness of
the love lyrics and religious poems to those in the two thirteenth
century collections, and by the fact that certain songs are of types
which were popular in France in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, and were probably brought to England at the time of
their vogue at home. The songs can therefore be regarded as
more or less representative of the whole Middle English period.
Of the folk-song element, a word may well be said at the outset,
for, though no pure folk-songs have survived, the communal verse
has left its impress upon these collections.
The universal characteristics of folk-poetry are, as to substance,
repetitions, interjections and refrains; and, as to form, a verse
accommodated to the dance. Frequent also is the call to the
dance, question and answer and rustic interchange of satire.
Though no one song illustrates all of these characteristics, they
are all to be found in the songs taken collectively.
The refrain is so generally employed that a song without it
is the exception. In the majority of cases, it is a sentence in Latin
## p. 373 (#391) ############################################
The Folk-song Element
373
or English, which has more or less relation to the theme of the
song, as the refrain:
Now syng we right as it is,
Quod puer natus est nobisi,
which accompanies a carol of the Nativity. Frequently, however,
meaningless interjections are run into such a refrain ; thus:
Hay, hey, hey, hey,
I will have the whetston and I may;
Po, po, po, po,
Loue brane & so do mos,
Such interjections are of great antiquity, and, in a far distant past,
were the sole words of the chorus. Sometimes the interjections
are intelligible words, which, however, have been chosen with an
eye to their choral adequacy, as :
Gay, gay, gay, gay,
Think on drydful domis day.
Nova, nova, ave fit ex Evas.
Some of the songs have preserved refrain, interjection and repe-
tition as well, as in the case of the following poem :
I have XII. oxen that be fayre & brown,
& they go a grasynge down by the town;
With hay, with howe, with hay!
Sawyste you not myn oxen, you litill prety boy?
I have XII. oxen & they be ffayre & whight,
& they go a grasyng down by the dyke;
With hay, with howe, with hay!
Sawyste not you myn oxen, you lytyll prety boy?
I hane XII. oxen & they be fayre & blak,
& they go a grasyng down by the lak;
With hay, with howe, with hay!
Sawyste not you myn oxen, you lytyll prety boy?
I haue XII. oxen & they be fayre & rede,
& they go a grasyng down by the mede;
With hay, with howe, with hay!
Sawiste not you my oxen, you litill prety boy 6?
Presumably this song is the product of a conscious artist, yet
it is representative of that amoebean verse which invariably
results in the evolution of poetry when individual singers detach
1 VS Baliol 354, ff. 2116, 227b-Anglia, xxvi, 264.
3 Ibid. ff. 226 6, 248 6- Anglia, XXVI, 270.
* Bodleian MS, Eng. Poet. E. I. f. 29 6—Percy Society, LXXIII, 42.
* MS Sloane 2593, f. 8a-Warton Club, iv, 10.
6 Bodleian MS, Eng. Poet. E. I. 1. 27 a—Percy Society, LXXIII, 36.
6 MS Balliol 354, f. 178 b-Anglia, XIVI, 197.
## p. 374 (#392) ############################################
374 Transition English Song Collections
1
6
themselves from the chorus, and sing in rivalry. Moreover,
it is representative of the simplest and most universal type of
such verse, the improvising of variations to accompany a popular
initial verse or phrase.
Another common form of the amoebean verse is question and
answer. This is beautifully illustrated by a song of the early
fourteenth century, a stray leaf of which has, fortunately, been
preserved? The song is arranged in recitative, but, relieved of
these repetitions, is as follows:
Maiden in the moor lay
Seven nights full and a day.
'Well, what was her meet? '
"The primrose and the violet. '
•Well, what was her dryng? '
The chill water of (the) well spring. '
"Well, what was her bower? '
"The rede rose and the lilly flour. '
On the same folio is a quaint poem, which has retained the
invitation to the dance :
Ich am of Irlaunde,
Am of the holy londe
Of Irlande;
Good sir, pray I 30,
For of Saynte Charite,
Come ant daunce wyt me in Irlaunde.
The call to the dance is also preserved in several fifteenth and
sixteenth century May poems.
A poem in which the song of a swaying mass is clearly to be
heard' is the familiar repetitionary lyric:
Adam lay ibowndyn,
bowndyn in a bond,
Fowre thowsand wynter
thowt he not to long;
And al was for an appil,
an appil that he tok,
As clerkes fyndyn wretyn
in here book.
Ne hadde the appil take ben,
the appil taken ben,
Ne hadde neuer our lady
a ben Hevene quene.
Blyssid be the tyme
that appil take was!
Therfore we mown syngyn
Deo gracias
1 MS Rawlinson, D. 913, f. 1. 2 MS Sloane 2593, f. 112-Warton Olub, rv, 32.
## p. 375 (#393) ############################################
Minstrels
375
Many an ecclesiastical denunciation testifies to the prevalence
of this communal singing in medieval England; but so much more
potent are custom and cult than authority that women, dressed in
the borrowed costumes of men, continued to dance and sing
in wild chorus within the very churchyards, in unwitting homage
to the old heathen deities.
Some of the song collections are anthologies taken from the
popular songs of the minstrel, the spiritual hymns of the monk
and the polite verse of the court; others are purely the répertoire
of minstrels; and still others are limited to polite verse.
Of the latter, fortunately, there is preserved the very song-book
that was owned by king Henry VIII, containing the lyrics of love
and good comradeship that he composed when a young man; and
there are, in addition, the books which were in part compiled, and
in part composed, by the authorised musicians of the courts of
Henry VII and Henry VIII These have preserved types of
chivalric verse based upon French models, as well as songs in
honour of the royal family, and songs composed for the revels and
pageants which were a brilliant feature of the court life in the
early decades of the sixteenth century.
The collections of minstrels' songs are especially rich. The
minstrel no longer confined himself to songs of rude and humble
ancestry, but encroached both on the devotional verse of the
monk, and on the songs of the gallant. This readily explains
itself, if one is mindful to identify these minstrels with that class
of men who had more and more usurped the prerogatives of
minstrelsy, the scolares vagantes, those irresponsible college
graduates and light-hearted vagabonds, who were equally at home
in ale-house, in hall, in market-place or in cloister, and who could
sing with equal spirit a ribald and saucy love song, a convivial
glee, a Christmas carol, a hymn to the Virgin, or a doleful lay
on the instability of life or the fickleness of riches. Most of them
were men who had taken minor orders, and who, therefore, knew
missal, breviary and hymnal; their life at the university had given
them some acquaintance with books, their wayside intercourse
with the minstrel had given them his ballads and his jargon of
washed-out romantic tales and their homely contact with the
people had taught them the songs of the street and of the folk-
festival ; they were, therefore, the main intermediaries between
the learned and the vernacular letters of the day, and they tended
to reduce all to a common level. If they compelled the rude
folk-song to conform to the metres of the Latin hymns, they
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376 Transition English Song Collections
compensated for this by reducing to these same simple metres
the artistically fashioned stanzas of highly wrought spiritual songs,
as well as by introducing the popular refrain into lyrics of every
kind. When they sang of the joys of Mary, of the righteousness
of a saint, or of a prince renowned for his deeds, they received the
approbation of bishop or abbot ; when they satirised his cupidity,
or sang wanton songs at banquets, they called down the bishop's
indignation; but, bishop or no bishop, they never lacked an
audience.
As the ability to read became more general, and as taste was
refined by the possession of books of real poetic merit, the minstrel,
even if one who had tarried in the schools, found his audience more
and more limited to the common folk; but, even in the fifteenth
century, though his wretched copies of the old romances, with their
sing-song monotony, might be the laughing-stock of people of taste,
his Christmas carols would still gain him admission to the halls of
the nobility.
As the minstrel thus trespassed upon the provinces of religious
and polite poets, so each of these in turn invaded the fields of
others, with the result that the monk adopted the formulary of
amatory address for his love songs to the Virgin, and the gallant
introduced elements from the folk-poetry into his embroidered
lays.
Considering this confusion, for purposes of discussion it is more
satisfactory to classify the songs with reference to types than with
reference to authorship. Romances and tales have been dealt with
elsewhere: though they are to be found in the collections, and
were, probably, chanted in humdrum fashion to the accompani-
ment of a harp, they are narratives, and not at all lyrical.
The carol was brought to England from France at an early
date, and there are extant Norman carols that were sung in
England in the late twelfth century. In essentials, there is little
difference between these carols and some of those that were sung
in England three centuries later. They observe the refrain, which
is most commonly a repetition of the word 'noel'; they open
with an invocation to those present,
Seignors ore entendez a nus,
De loinz sumes venuz @ vous,
Pur quere Noell;
and their theme is the Nativity and the attendant gladness.
· Sandys, Festive Songs, 6.
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Carols
377
It is probable that the composition of carols was widely
cultivated in the thirteenth century, for most of the carols are in
simple Latin metres, and Latin lines are employed either as refrain,
or as an integral part of the stanzas. Such a tradition must
look back to a period when the English composer felt the need of
relying upon the support of Latin metres, and it was in the
thirteenth century, as extant religious poems demonstrate, that
English metres were thus being conformed to the models of Latin
hymns?
The metre most commonly employed is the simplest, a one-
rime tercet of iambic tetrameters, followed by a refrain, usually
Latin. Thus:
Gabriell that angell bryst,
Bryster than the sonne is lyzt,
Fro hevyn to erth he (too)k hys flygt,
Regina celi letare?
Sometimes the Latin verse rimes with the English, making a
quatrain, or a Latin line may be introduced into the tercet itself.
The quatrain with alternate rimes is also used, though less
frequently. Other popular metres are the rimed couplet, and the
ballade stanza, which, however, is confined to the longer narrative
carols. Occasional carols are composed in the highly wrought
French metres, but they seem exotic.
The Latin lines in the carols are familiar verses from the
hymns, canticles, sequences, graduales and other parts of the
service in missal or breviary, relating to the Christmas season; and
practically all can be found in the Sarum Use.
Of the refrain there are various types. Sometimes it is a
stanza or verse from a Latin hymn, as :
Ihesus autem hodie
Egressus est de virgines;
sometimes an English verse and a Latin verse combined :
Be mery all, that be present,
Omnes de Saba venient";
sometimes merely the word 'nowel' or 'noel’ in recitative; and
sometimes an invocation to be merry:
Make we mery in hall & bowr,
Thys tyme was born owr savyowr5.
* Cf. Morris, Old English Misc. , E. E. T. S. XLII, 1872.
• Bodleian MS, Eng. Poet. E. I. f. 26 a–Percy Society, LXXIII, 33.
: MS Balliol 354, f. 178 a—Anglia, xxvi, 196.
• Ibid. f. 165 6Anglia, xxvi, 176.
• Ibid. f. 220 a-Anglia, XXVI, 231.
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378 Transition English Song Collections
There is also a very pretty introduction of the shepherd's pipe in
certain carols that sing of the shepherds watching their flocks by
night; thus,
Tyrly tirlow, tirly tirlow;
So merrily the shepherds began to blow1
As the Christmas season was a time for festivities and merry-
making as well as for worship, it was natural that some of the
carols should deal with sacred themes, and others with secular
themes ; indeed that some carols should confuse the two types.
The services within the church gave ample warrant for such a
confusion. Moreover, as Christmas theoretically supplanted a
pagan festival, but practically compromised with it, it was natural
that elements of pre-Christian rites should be reflected in carols.
Religious carols are, for the most part, narrative in content
The Nativity is, of course, the dominant theme, but, as the festival
season lasted from the Nativity to Epiphany, or even until
Candlemas, the events of Holy Week, and the lives of the saints
whose days occur at this season, furnish many of the themes.
It may be that carols were written to divert interest from
those pagan songs, with their wild dances, which, even as late as the
fifteenth century, made Christmas a trying and dangerous period
for the church? . Certainly, the folk-song element in carols
suggests the probability that at one time they were accompanied
by dancing
But, whatever the origin of carols may have been, it is clear
that they were much influenced by those dramatic elements,
which, prior to the advent of the mystery plays, were a popular
part of the Christmas services in the church ; for the episodes
dramatised in the services are the ones that most often figure in
carols. It seems not a little strange that carols were not more
often introduced into mystery plays of the Nativity. One of the
shepherd carols, however, is like the mystery in spirit. It intro-
duces the character of Wat, and, with it, homely, half-humorous
touches such as are characteristic of the plays :
Whan Wat to Bedlem cum was,
He swet, he had gon faster than a pace;
Lull well Ihesu in thy lape,
& farewell Ioseph, with thy rownd cape 3.
1 MS Balliol 354, f. 222 a-Anglia, XXVI, 237; Bodleian MS, Eng. Poet. E. I. f. 60 a
-Percy Society, LXXIII, 95.
2 Cf. Robert of Brunne, Handlyng Synne, 8987 ff. , Chron. Vilod. 1022.
3 MS Balliol 354, 1. 224 2- Anglia, XIVI, 243.
## p. 379 (#397) ############################################
Carols
379
The themes of secular carols are the feasting and sports of Yule-
tide, customs that were inseparable from the great hall of the
nobleman's residence, where the whole community was wont to
assemble for the Christmas festivities. To be sure, these carols
were sometimes sung at other seasons, for did not the Green
Knight entertain Sir Gawain with
Many athel songez,
As conndutes of Kryst-masse, and carolez newe,
With all the manerly merthe that mon may of telle 1 ?
but Christmas week in hall was the proper setting. Several carols
relate to the custom of bringing in the boar's head. The classical
example is the familiar carol,
The boar's head in hand bring I,
Caput apri differos,
but others, though less well known, possess equal interest. In one,
the minstrel relates how, in 'wilderness,' he was pursued by a
wyld bor,' 'a brymly best. ' In the encounter that followed, he
succeeded in refting both life and limb from the beast, in testimony
of which he brings the head into the hall. Then he bids the
company add bread and mustard, and be joyful. In another,
warning is given that no one need seek to enter the ball, be he
groom, page, or marshal, unless he bring some sport with him".
In still another, the minstrel speaks in the character of Sir
Christmas, and takes leave of
kyng & knyght,
& erle, baron & lady bryghts,
but not without a fond wish that he may be with them again the
following year. He hears Lent calling, and obeys the call : a
lugubrious summons indeed to the luckless wanderer who must
turn his back on this genial hospitality for eleven months to come,
and depend on the fortuitous goodwill of the ale-house.
Charming, also, are the songs of ivy and holly, which were
sung in connection with some little ceremony of the season. In all
the songs, ivy and holly appear as rivals; and, whatever the
ceremony may have been, it certainly was a survival of those
festival games in connection with the worship of the spirit of
fertility, in which lads invariably championed the cause of holly,
1 E. E. T. S. f. 484 ff.
Of. MS Balliol 354, f. 212 - Anglia, IXV, 257.
3 Bodleian MS, Eng. Lit. E. I. f. 23 a—Percy Society, LXIII, 25. .
• MS Balliol 354, f. 223 – Anglia, XXVI, 241.
• Ibid. 1. 208 6- Anglia, XXVI, 245.
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Transition English Song Collections
and lasses that of ivy? We can fancy young men entering the
hall with branches of holly? :
Here commys holly, that is so gent,
To pleasse all men is his entent, etc. ;
singing the praises of the shrub, and warning their hearers not to
speak lightly of its ; while young women enter from an opposite
direction, and go through a similar performance with the ivy.
Thereupon, both young men and young women enter upon some
kind of a dance, which resolves itself into a contest in which the
boys drive the girls from the hall:
Holy with his mery men they can daunce in hall;
Ivy & her ientyl women can not daunce at all,
But lyke a meyny of bullokes in a water fall,
Or on a whot somer's day whan they be mad all.
Nay, nay, ive, it may not be iwis;
For holy must haue the mastry, as the maner is.
