Metalogicus, in four books, contains a defence of the method
and use of logic, vindicating the claims of "grammar," and
pleading for an intelligent study of logic.
and use of logic, vindicating the claims of "grammar," and
pleading for an intelligent study of logic.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v01
Quite apart, however, from the adventitious im-
portance it has thus gained, Jocelin's account of the deeds of
Abbot Sampson and his community at St Edmundsbury is of unique
historical value for the light it throws upon the organisation of
monastic institutions and of their relations to the social and
industrial life of the common people.
The life and habits of a different section of society have been
illustrated, in an almost equally vivid way, by several of the
scholars who flourished in and around the court of Henry II.
John of Salisbury and Peter of Blois, Gervase of Tilbury
and Nigel Wireker, and, above all, Walter Map and Gerald of
Wales, have left behind them documents which bear, in some
respects, even more of the very “form and pressure” of the time
than the chronicles themselves. The Policraticus of John of
Salisbury, the letters of Peter of Blois, the Otia Imperialia of
Gervase and the poems of Nigel Wireker, throw a flood of light
## p. 177 (#197) ############################################
Giraldus and Map
177
upon the studies and the pastimes, the intrigues and the scandals,
the humours and the passions of those who dwelt in the high
places of both state and church. Of all these writers none
has contrived to blend information and entertainment more
successfully than Giraldus Cambrensis. A scholar trained
at Paris, an insatiably curious student of men and books and
every form of odd lore, a fighter and an intriguer to his
finger-tips, an inveterate gossip, yet a man capable of high
ideals and far-reaching schemes of public policy, the intimate
friend of kings and statesmen, popes and prelates, yet withal
a passionate lover of his own native little Wales-Gerald is
one of the most romantic figures in all medieval literature.
The most stirring episode in his life was the struggle in which
he engaged, "for the honour of Wales? "; and he is still deservedly
beloved among his countrymen as the devoted champion of one
of the most creditable of lost causes and impossible loyalties,
But his enduring title to fame rests upon the writings which,
alike for brilliancy of style and for variety of interest, remain
unsurpassed among the Anglo-Norman literature of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries.
A greater renown, however, in literary history generally has
been enjoyed by Gerald's friend, and, probably, fellow-countryman,
Walter Map? Were it possible to prove to demonstration Map's
authorship of the great Arthurian romances commonly associated
with his name, there could be no question about his claim to
rank as the greatest literary genius who appeared in England
before Chaucer. But the claim made on behalf of Map to
the authorship of these imaginative works rests on very slender
evidence. Even the authenticity of his equally celebrated
Goliardic poems is open to grave question. The De Nugis -
Curialium, or book Of Courtiers' Trifles, is, undoubtedly, his.
It was probably composed by instalments, and forms a sort
of common-place book in which Map seems to have jotted down,
from time to time, both shrewd reflections upon men and things,
and pleasant anecdotes to divert the vacant mind. Of the strictly
historical portions of the work, the most valuable are the accounts, in
the first book, of some of the heretical sects which had sprung up in
the twelfth century, and the reflections, which take up the whole of
the fifth book, upon the character and achievements of the Anglo-
Norman kings. The fourth book includes, in company with some
lively tales, the celebrated letter, well known to the Wife of Bath's
fifth husband, from Valerius to Rufinus, upon the folly of marrying
1 Op. (Rolle Series), 1,129. See also post, chap. 2, p. 196. See post, chap. 2, pp. 188 ff.
E. L. I. CH. IX.
12
## p. 178 (#198) ############################################
178
Latin Chroniclers
a wife. The whole work is a medley of such diverse and curious
ingredients—satire, gossip, fairy-lore, folk-tales and snatches of
serious history—as to make us easily believe that its author was,
as Gerald hints, one of the most versatile and witty talkers in
the court circles of that eager and inquisitive age.
The thirteenth century is, emphatically, the golden age of the
monastic historians. At their head stands Matthew Paris, the
greatest of all our medieval chroniclers; but his work only repre-
sents the crowning literary achievement of an enthusiasm and an
industry that inspired every considerable monastery in the land.
The apnals, most of them nameless, of Burton, of Winchester,
of Waverley, of Dunstable, of Osney, of Worcester-all testify to
the assiduity of monkish scribes in compiling, revising and adding
to the stores of historical material accumulated in their respective
houses. Invaluable, however, as these chronicles are to the student
of political and social history, they possess little interest as
literature.
But, at the powerful monastery of St Albans, there arose
a school of historians as brilliant as that which had, in the
north, closed with Roger of Hoveden. This school produced in
Matthew Paris a writer who, both in his conception of the
historian's art and in the force and picturesqueness of his
style, surpasses all the chroniclers of the twelfth century. The
historians of St Albans possessed exceptional advantages. The
wealth of the abbey, its accommodation and equipment as an
ideal home of learning, its position on Watling Street and its
proximity to the capital, marked it out as the chief centre of
monastic culture in the thirteenth century; and its inmates
kept up a constant intercourse with the great men of the day
as they passed through it on their way to and from London and
the provinces. Nowhere else, perhaps, in the kingdom could
a historian of contemporary events pursue his task at that
time under more favourable conditions. Moreover, in no other
abbey does the writing of history appear to have been so care-
fully organised as at St Albans. Abbot Simon, who died in
1183, established in the monastery a regular office of historio-
grapher. The first occupant of this office whose complete work
has come down to us was Roger of Wendover; but his chronicle
is based upon materials of which an ample wealth already
existed in the abbey. The actual nucleus of the early part
of Roger's Flowers of History is supposed to have been the
compilation of John de Cella, who was abbot of St Albans from
## p. 179 (#199) ############################################
Matthew Paris
179
1195 to 1214. John's work extended down to the year 1188, and
was revised and continued by Roger down to 1235, the year before
his death. Roger claims in his preface to have selected “from
the books of catholic writers worthy of credit, just as flowers of
various colours are gathered from various fields. ” Hence he called
his work Flores Historiarum-a title appropriated in the four-
teenth century to a long compilation by various hands. Begun at
St Albans, and completed at Westminster, it was based upon the
Chronicle of Matthew Paris and continued to the year 1326.
The work was long ascribed to one Matthew of Westminster,
but it is now known that no actual chronicler of that name ever
existed. Roger of Wendover's work is, however, now valued not
so much for what he culled from previous writers as for its full
and lively narrative of contemporary events, from 1216 to 1235.
Although in accuracy, in range and in subtlety and shrewdness
of insight he falls far short of his great successor as historiographer
of St Albans, Roger largely anticipates him in the fearless candour
of his personal and moral judgments.
Matthew Paris became historiographer of St Albans upon the
death of Roger of Wendover in 1236, and proceeded in his famous
Chronica Majora to revise and continue the work of his predecessor.
Matthew Paris's own narrative is an extraordinarily comprehensive
and masterly survey of both English and continental history during
almost an entire quarter of a century. We know little of the
details of the historian's own life. He became a monk of St Albans
in 1217, and tradition ascribes to him not only a high repute for
scholarship, but the possession of varied gifts as an artist. The
most notable incident in his career was his employment by the
pope, in 1248, on a mission of reform to the Benedictine monks
of Holm, in Norway, which kept him away from England for some
eighteen months. He lived, throughout, in close intimacy with
the court, and, notwithstanding his plain-spokenness, enjoyed a
share of royal favour. He died in 1259. Courtier and scholar,
monk and man of the world, Matthew Paris was, both by training
and position, exceptionally well qualified to undertake a history of
his own time. Moreover, he had the instinct, the temper and the
judgment of the born historian. He took immense pains in the
collection and the verification of his facts, and appears to have
been in constant communication with a host of correspondents
both at home and abroad. Indeed, his work reads like a
stately journal of contemporary European events, where every-
thing is marshalled in due order and proportion by a master
12–2
## p. 180 (#200) ############################################
18o
Latin Chroniclers
the king
clonate exeathe nobles
editorial hand. Great events and small follow each other in quick,
though orderly, succession, just as in some modern review of the
world's work. Simon de Montfort's preparations for his crusade;
a dispute between the scholars and citizens of Oxford; the death of
Llywelyn, prince of Wales; the pope's dealings with foreign clerks
in England; a great storm; the decapitation of certain robbers;
war in Flanders; the burning of heretics by the Milanese; the
irruption of the Tartars-such is a brief selection of topics taken
at random from a few consecutive pages of Matthew's Chronicle.
But he is much more than a mere recorder of events. He is
a fearless critic and censor of public men and their doings.
A thoroughly patriotic Englishman, he is severe upon all mis-
government, openly rebuking the king, denouncing the greed
and rapacity of the nobles, protesting indignantly against the
extortionate exactions of the pope. He is not, indeed, altogether
free from the professional bias of his class; and in nothing is this
more apparent than in his obviously prejudiced references to the
mendicant orders. But his criticisms as a whole are animated
by a transparently honest fervour of moral indignation and by
a patriotic jealousy for the honour of England. The pope's
emissaries are “harpies and bloodsuckers, plunderers, who do
not merely shear, but skin, the sheep. " For his complacent
acquiescence in the deeds of the papal legates the king is de-
nounced as having become to the clergy “as it were the stalk of
a reed-on which those who lean in confidence are wounded by
the fragments. ” The king's own extortionate demands for money
from the clergy are no less boldly condemned, while his foolishness
and extravagance are constantly censured. These outspoken anim-
adversions did not, however, blind Henry to Matthew's skill as
a writer, and the chronicler relates how, during the celebration of
the feast of Edward the Confessor, in 1247, the sovereign himself
bade him take a seat near the throne and write a full account of
the proceedings, so that the facts might stand accurately recorded
for ever. Matthew was, indeed, a ready and a picturesque writer.
Though frequently prolix and rhetorical, he is never tedious or
irrelevant. His narrative, as a rule, is wonderfully direct, clear
and nervous, while his instinct for order and literary effect is such
as to give to his Chronicle, as a whole, a unity and a sustained
interest which belong to the work of no other English medieval
historian.
Matthew Paris quite overshadows every other chronicler of
the time of Henry III. But much of the history of Henry's
## p. 181 (#201) ############################################
Minor Chroniclers
181
reign would remain obscure, were Paris's Chronicle not supple-
mented by the monumental work of Henry of Bracton, or Bratton,
on the laws of England. Bracton scarcely belongs to the chroniclers;
but his writings throw sufficient light upon the social conditions
of his time to entitle him to stand side by side with Matthew Paris
as a contributor to the English history of the thirteenth century.
Following in the footsteps of Ranulf de Glanville (or Hubert
Walter), Henry II's great justiciar, Henry of Bracton compiled,
some time between 1250 and 1258, an elaborate treatise on
the laws and customs of England. Bracton was one of the
many ecclesiastics who held high judicial office under Henry III.
He was, in turn, a justice in eyre, a judge of the king's court,
a Devonshire rector and archdeacon of Barnstaple. In addition
to his legal treatise he left behind him a note-book, containing
some two thousand cases taken from the plea rolls of his time,
with comments which “to all appearance came from Bracton's
hand or from Bracton's head'. ” Indebted though he was for the
form and method of his great book to such foreign works as those
of the celebrated Italian lawyer, Azo of Bologna, Bracton's work
is, in substance, thoroughly English, and is a laborious exposition,
illustrated by some hundreds of decisions, of the approved practice
of the king's court in England. Bracton died in 1268, leaving his
work unfinished, although he appears to have been adding to and
annotating it to the very last; but, even as it stands, his treatise
is not only the most authoritative English law-book of his time,
but, in design and matter, "the crown and flower of English
medieval jurisprudence. ” It “both marks and makes a critical
moment in the history of English law, and, therefore, in the essen-
tial history of the English people. ”
The art of the historian proper, however, gradually began to
decline after the death of Matthew Paris. Among the chroniclers
who take us down to the fourteenth century there are few names
worthy of a place in a history of literature. Prominent among
them are Matthew's own followers at St Albans, William Rishanger
and John of Trokelowe; Nicholas Trivet or Trevet, a Dominican
friar, whose works are of considerable historical importance for
the reign of Edward I and of additional literary interest in con-
nection with Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale ; Walter of Heming-
burgh, a canon of the Yorkshire priory of Guisburn, who not
1 Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, ed. 1898, Vol. I, p. 207.
• Ib. p. 206.
• Bracton's Note Book, ed. Maitland, Vol. 1, p. 1.
## p. 182 (#202) ############################################
182
Latin Chroniclers
unworthily continues the work of the northern school; John de
Tayster, or Taxster, a monk of St Edmundsbury, who adds to a
compilation from previous chroniclers what seems to be an
original narrative for the years 1258–65; and Thomas Wykes, a
monk of Osney, whose chronicle extends down to 1289, and is an
authority of the first importance "for the whole history of the
campaign of Lewes and Evesham, and the events immediately
preceding and following them. " But these, and other writers, are
largely subdued to the monastic atmosphere in which they work, and
possess few of the traits of character and style which interest us
in the personality of the greater chroniclers. The impulse of the
revival of learning had been spent, and neither in literary distinction
nor in accuracy and wealth of information are the chroniclers who
wrote during the hundred years after Matthew Paris's death worthy
of comparison with their predecessors of the twelfth and early
thirteenth centuries. The best of them are those who, by their
industry at least, endeavoured down to the end of the fourteenth
century to retain for St Albaus as a historical school the
supreme repute which had been signally established by Matthew
Paris.
* Luard, Annales Monastici, sv (Rolls Series).
## p. 183 (#203) ############################################
CHAPTER X
ENGLISH SCHOLARS OF PARIS AND FRANCISCANS
OF OXFORD
LATIN LITERATURE OF ENGLAND FROM JOHN OF
SALISBURY TO RICHARD OF BURY
THE university of Paris owed its origin to the cathedral school
of Notre-Dame. It was not until the time of William of Cham-
peaux (d. 1121), that this school began to rival the scholastic
fame of Chartres. Early in the thirteenth century the schools of
Paris were connected with three important churches. On the Ile
de la Cité there was the cathedral of Notre-Dame; to the south
of the Seine, on rising ground near the site of the present Pan-
théon, was the collegiate church of Sainte-Geneviève ; and, to the
east of the walls south of the river, the church of Canons Regular
at the abbey of St Victor. The schools of Notre-Dame and
of Sainte-Geneviève were, successively, the scenes of the ever-
memorable lectures of a famous pupil of William of Champeaux,
the eloquent, brilliant, vain, impulsive and self-confident disputant,
Abelard (d. 1142). The fame of his teaching made Paris the resort
of large numbers of scholars, whose presence led to its becoming
the home of the many Masters by whom the university was
ultimately founded. The earliest trace of this university has been
discovered in the passage where Matthew Paris states that his own
preceptor, an abbot of St Albans, had, as a student in Paris, been
admitted into “ the fellowship of the elect Masters ” (c. 1170)? . In
1136, when John of Salisbury went to Paris, the university was
not yet in existence. The first recorded “town and gown” riot,
that of 1200, led to the grant of a charter to the resident body
of Masters; the approximate date of the first statutes, ten years
later, marks the earliest recognition of the university as a legally
constituted corporation, a veritable universitas ; and, about ten
years later still, the Masters of Arts were first organised into
four nations, namely, the French, the Normans, the Picards and
i Gesta Abbatum, 1, 217, ed. 1867.
## p. 184 (#204) ############################################
184
English Scholars of Paris
the English, this last including the Germans and all who came
from the north and the east of Europe. In the thirteenth century
Paris was still the centre of European culture. It is sufficient to
cite as proof a passage from the English encyclopaedist, Bartholo-
mew, who flourished in the middle of that century:
Even as sometime the city of Athens, mother of liberal arts and letters,
nurge of philosophers and fountain of all learning, was the ornament of
Greece; so, in our own day, Paris excelleth in learning and civilisation, not
only France, but also the rest of Europe, and, as the mother of wisdom,
receiveth guests from every part of the world, supplieth all their need and
bringeth all of them beneath her peaceful rule?
The carnival riot of 1229 led to the withdrawal of the resident
Masters and Scholars for two years ; meanwhile, many of them
accepted the invitation of Henry III, and thus reinforced the
rising universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
The first important representative of England in the schools
of Paris was John of Salisbury. He began by becoming a
pupil of Abelard, who had returned to the scene of his early
triumphs, and, at the age of 57, was now lecturing on the hill
of Sainte-Geneviève. That “illustrious and admirable teacher”
was discoursing, as of old, on logic; and “at his feet" John of
Salisbury "acquired the first rudiments of dialectics, greedily
seizing all that fell from his lips. " But his brilliant instructor was
once more opposed, and once more withdrew from Paris; and the
pupil passed into the school of Master Alberic and Robert of
Melun. The first was, “in questions, acute and expansive"; the
second, “in responses, brief and lucid”; and, "if anyone could
have combined the merits of both, he would have been unrivalled
in debate? " Having thus studied logic for two years (1136–8) in
Paris, John of Salisbury spent three years (probably the latter
part of 1138, and a large part of 1139 and 1140) working at
“grammar," or the scholarly study of Latin literature. The place
is not named, but it has, rightly, been identified as the school of
Chartres. In that school the sound and healthy tradition of
Bernard of Chartres was still maintained by his pupils. By John
of Salisbury's time, Bernard had been succeeded as chancellor of the
cathedral school by Gilbert de la Porrée. John of Salisbury learnt
rhetoric from Richard L'Évêque, who was “familiar with almost
every branch of learning, whose knowledge was even greater than
his eloquence, who had more truth than vanity, more virtue than
show. " He had already attended, with less profit, the somewhat
| xv, o. 57.
• Metalogicus, a, 10.
3 Schaarschmidt, Joh. Saresberiensis, p. 22.
4 Metalogicus, loc. cit.
## p. 185 (#205) ############################################
John of Salisbury
185
meagre lectures of Bernard's younger brother, Theodoric, who is
nevertheless described as "a most studious investigator of the
Arts? . " This description was confirmed in 1888, when he was identi-
fied as the author of two large volumes containing a comprehensive
Survey of the Liberal Arts, written in a bold and clear hand, which
may now be seen in the public library of the cathedral town. It
may be added that it was between 1134 and 1150, during the time
when Theodoric was successively "master of the school" and chan-
cellor, that the south doorway of the west front of the cathedral
was adorned with figures of the seven arts, each of them asso-
ciated with the ancient representative of that art, for example,
grammar with Priscian, dialectic with Aristotle and rhetoric with
Cicero.
It was probably early in 1141 that John returned to Paris.
For a short time he attended, not only the lectures of Gilbert, who
had lately ceased to be chancellor of Chartres, but also those of
Robert Pullen, the future cardinal, who had taught at Oxford in
1133. Socially, he saw much of Adam du Petit Pont, who owed
his surname to the school that he had set up on the little bridge
between the Ile de la Cité and the Quartier Latin.
John of Salisbury's student life in Paris, and Chartres, and
again in Paris, probably extended from early in 1136 to late in 1145.
In the spring of 1148, he was present at the council of Rheims.
It was there that he was introduced by Bernard of Clairvaux to
Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, an introduction that had an
important effect on his literary and ecclesiastical career.
About 1150 he returned to England, and resided mainly at
the court of Canterbury, engaged on secretarial and diplomatic
work, which frequently took him to the court of Rome. On the
most celebrated of these visits, during the winter of 1155—6, his
friend the English pope, Hadrian IV, sent Henry II his written
authority to extend his rule over Ireland, together with an emerald
ring in token of his right? . It was probably John of Salisbury's
eager interest in the privileges of the church, while he was still
in the service of Theobald, that led to his soon falling into dis-
favour with the king. During the enforced leisure of 1159, he
revised and completed two of his most extensive works, finishing
Policraticus shortly before, and Metalogicus immediately after,
the death of Hadrian IV (31 August 1159). Both of these were
dedicated to Becket, the warlike chancellor, with whose aid
Henry II was then “fulminating” at the siege of Toulouse. When
i Metalogicus, 1, 5.
16. 11, 42. * Policraticus, VIII, 25.
bishop of Canterbur ecclesiastical career, mainly at
## p. 186 (#206) ############################################
186
English Scholars of Paris
Becket became archbishop in 1162, John of Salisbury entered his
service, and, soon afterwards, composed a Life of archbishop
Anselm with a view to the canonisation which was not conceded
until three centuries later. On the king's return early in 1163,
John of Salisbury found it safest to leave the country, staying for
six or seven years with Peter de la Celle, then abbot of Rheims,
under whose roof he wrote Historia Pontificalis. His exile,
like that of Becket, lasted till late in 1170. On the fatal 29th
of December he was at Canterbury with the archbishop, who
unhappily disregarded the counsels of moderation suggested by
his devoted friend. They entered the cathedral together. In face
of the murderous attack on the archbishop's person, John of Salis-
bury seems to have fled at first, but to have soon returned to the
post of peril. He was probably present at the end. He was
certainly believed by his friend Peter to have been “sprinkled
with the precious blood of the blessed martyr? . "
He immediately urged the inclusion of his master's name in
the calendar of martyrs, wrote his Life, and loyally served his
successor. In 1176, his devotion to the memory of St Thomas and
his friendship with the archbishop of Sens led to John of Salisbury
being made bishop of Chartres. For the last four years of his life
he was the most prominent personage in the place where he had
spent three of the most fruitful years of his youth. In the
necrology of his cathedral church he is described as vir magnae
religionis, totiusque scientiae radiis illustratus.
His Letters give abundant proof of his wide influence as a
sagacious counsellor, an able politician and a zealous ecclesiastic.
They were collected and edited by himself soon after 1170.
Of the 326 comprised in the modern editions, some were
written after the above date, and some by other writers. His
Entheticus, an elegiac poem of no less than 1852 lines, was,
apparently, intended as an introduction to Policraticus, which
is now preceded by a short set of verses bearing the same title as
the above poem. In both of these poems, which are written in a
strong and solid but not particularly elegant style, Becket is
warmly eulogised. He is the king's right hand, the embodiment
of all excellence, the refuge of the oppressed, the light of the
church, the glory of the nation?
Policraticus is a work in eight books. The primary title
has led to its being regarded as a "statesman's handbook. ” The
alternative title, De Nugis Curialium, et Vestigiis Philosophorum,
1 Petrus Cellensis, Ep. 117.
• Migne, P. L. cxcix, 379, 993.
## p. 187 (#207) ############################################
John of Salisbury.
Peter of Blois 187
is suggestive of a satire on the vanities of courtiers, followed by a
set treatise on morals ; but the latter half deals with the prin-
ciples of government, and with matters of philosophy and learning,
interspersed with many digressions. It is, in fact, an “encyclopaedia
of miscellanies," reflecting the cultivated thought of the middle
of the twelfth century. It includes an interesting chapter on
Aristotle', and a satirical account of the scholastic controversies
of the age.
Metalogicus, in four books, contains a defence of the method
and use of logic, vindicating the claims of "grammar," and
pleading for an intelligent study of logic. It includes an analysis
of the whole series of Aristotle's treatises on that subject, being, in
fact, the earliest work in the Middle Ages in which every part of
Organon is turned to account.
Historia Pontificalis is only preserved in an incomplete form
in a single manuscript at Bern; it was not printed until 1868,
and was not identified as the work of John of Salisbury until
1873. It gives an account of the ecclesiastical history of the years
1148 to 1152, but is really as much a satire as a history.
In his attitude towards the ancient classics, John of Salisbury
is far from regarding Aristotle as infallible; he is opposed to
Plato, though he is fully conscious of Plato's greatness. His
favourite author is Cicero, and the purity of his own Latin prose
has been justly praised. Caesar and Tacitus he knows solely by
name; but, in all the literature accessible to him, he is obviously
the best-read scholar of his time. A humanist two centuries in
advance of his age, he is eager to give the widest possible interpre-
tation to “whatsoever things were written aforetime for our
learning"?
In his day the first period in the medieval study of logic was
drawing towards its close, and with the degenerate type of the
professional dialectician he has no sympathy. The earliest of all
the medieval theories on the nature and the functions of the
state is due to John of Salisbury. He is the first of modern
writers on the philosophy of politics, and he founds his own theory
on the records of the Old Testament and on the annals of the
ancient Roman empire.
As a representative of literature and learning, Peter of Blois
is only a pale reflection of John of Salisbury. Born at Blois,
he was probably educated at Tours; he learnt and taught at
Bologua and Paris, settled in England about 1175 as secretary
1 yu, C.
• Cf. prologue to Policraticus, vu.
## p. 188 (#208) ############################################
188
English Scholars of Paris
to Richard of Dover, archbishop of Canterbury, and was suc-
cessively archdeacon of Bath (c. 1177) and of London (C. 1204).
He was repeatedly entrusted with diplomatic duties by Henry II,
and the Letters ascribed to him purport to have been originally
collected at the request of the king. But some of them—for
example, those on the capture of Damietta in 1219—could not
possibly have been written during the life of the king, who died in
1189, or during that of Peter of Blois, who died in or before 1212.
Peter of Blois, on his appointment as secretary to the archbishop
in 1175, obviously made a diligent study of the Letters of John of
Salisbury, who had edited his Letters soon after 1170, while Peter
did not begin to edit his own until 1181, the year after John of
Salisbury's death. Many of Peter's Letters are enriched with
quotations from the classics, but most of those quotations are
borrowed from John of Salisbury. Thus, in a letter to the arch-
deacon of Nantes, we have a list of ancient grammarians, and a
second list of ancient historians? . Both of these are borrowed from
John of Salisbury? ; but, while John of Salisbury modestly refers
his readers to Tacitus, without professing to have read that author,
Peter of Blois pretends to have “frequently looked into” Tacitus,
-an author never mentioned by such well-informed contempo-
raries as Giraldus Cambrensis and Ralph of Diceto. Criticised
for his constant quotations, he defends a manner of composition
which places him “like a dwarf on the shoulders of giants"); but
this very comparison is tacitly taken from John of Salisbury, who
honestly quotes it from Bernard of Chartrest. It is improbable
that Peter was ever an actual pupil of the scholar to whom he
owed much of his borrowed erudition; but, curiously enough,
he held preferment at Chartres, and also at Salisbury. His brief
Sermons call for no comment. Of his few poems the longest deals
with the sacraments in twenty-six chapters of riming hexameters;
while two others, written in a different metre, have for their
themes the life of the clergy, and the conflict between the flesh
and the spirit.
Walter Map', who was born about 1137 on the marches of
Wales, and, accordingly, called England his mother, and the Welsh
his fellow-countrymen, studied in Paris from about 1154 to 1160.
He returned to England before 1162, was frequently one of the
king's itinerant judges and, after holding other preferment, was
appointed archdeacon of Oxford in 1197. About 1209, when
1 Ep. 101.
? Policraticus, viii, 18.
: Ep. 92.
• Metalogicus, III, 4. See ante, Chapter 1x, pp. 177 il.
## p. 189 (#209) ############################################
Walter Map
189
Giraldus published the second edition of his Conquest of Ireland",
Walter Map was no longer living.
Map was the author of an entertaining miscellany in Latin prose,
De Nugis Curialium, a work in a far lighter vein than that of John
of Salisbury, who had adopted this as an alternative title of his
Policraticus. But, even in this lighter vein, Map has often a grave
moral purpose. Stories of the follies and crimes of courts, and a
lament over the fall of Jerusalem, are here followed by an account
of the origin of the Carthusians, the Templars and the Hospitallers,
with reflections on their growing corruption, and a violent attack
on the Cistercians, together with notices of heretics and of hermits.
In the second book, we have anecdotes of the Welsh, with a col-
lection of fairy-tales; in the third, a series of highly romantic
stories; in the fourth, the "Epistle of Valerius dissuading from
marriage the philosopher Rufinus” (sometimes erroneously ascribed
to St Jerome); and, in the fifth, an invaluable sketch of the history
of the English court from William Rufus to Henry II. Walter
Map's "courtly jests” are mentioned by Giraldus Cambrensis, who,
in his latest work, describes Map as a person of distinction, endued
with literary skill and with the wit of a courtier, and as having
spent his youth (and more than his youth) in reading and writing
poetry? Giraldus sends his friend a set of Latin elegiacs, with a
present of a walking-stick, and he has fortunately preserved the
twelve lines of his friend's reply in the same metres. This reply is
almost the only certainly genuine product of Map's muse that
has survived. Of his poems against the Cistercian monks, only
a single line is left: Lancea Longini, gresc albus, ordo nefandus“.
His notorious antipathy to the Cistercian order has led to his
being regarded as the author of another poem entitled Discipulus
Goliae episcopi de grisis monachis. The worldly, and worse than
worldly, bishop Golias is the theme of other poems, in accentual
riming metres, ascribed to Map, notably the Apocalypse, the
Confession and the Metamorphosis of Golias. The Apocalypse
is first assigned to him in a Bodleian manuscript of the fourteenth
century. Here there is no attempt to dramatise the character of
Golias; we have simply an apocalyptic vision of the corruptions
of the church set forth in 110 riming quatrains of accentual
dactyls in lines of the type: Omnis a clericis fluit enormitas.
In the accentual trochaics of the Confession, the bishop is
dramatically represented as remembering “the tavern that he
has never scorned, nor ever will scorn until the angels sing his
* v, 410. . iv, 140. 1, 363. • Latin Poems, p. xxxv. 6 Ib. p. 54.
## p. 190 (#210) ############################################
190
English Scholars of Paris
requiem. ” Then follow the four lines, which are better known
and more misunderstood than any in the poem :
Meum est propositum in taberna mori:
Vinum sit appositum morientis ori,
Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori,
“Deus sit propitius huic potatori! ”
These lines, with part of the subsequent context, were at an early
date extracted from their setting and made into a drinking-song;
but it cannot be too clearly stated that they were originally
meant for a dramatic representation of the character of the
degenerate “bishop. ” It is a mistake to regard them as reflecting
in any way the habits of the reputed author, who has been
erroneously described as the "jovial archdeacon,” and the “Ana-
creon of his age. " Giraldus, in the very same work in which he
lauds the literary skill and the wit of his friend, quotes for repro-
bation, and not for imitation, a series of calumnious passages,
including the above lines with their immediately previous context!
He is clearly quite innocent of ascribing these lines to his friend.
The whole of the Confession is also preserved in the celebrated
thirteenth century Munich MS of Carmina Burana, formerly
belonging to the Benedictine monastery of Benedictbeuern in
the Bavarian highlands. It forms part of the vast number of
anonymous Latin rimes known from 1227 onwards by the name
of Goliardi. The character of bishop Golias may possibly have
assumed dramatic form in the age of Walter Map, but the name
was certainly three centuries older. As early as the time of
Gautier, archbishop of Sens (d. 923), a sentence of condemnation
is passed on the clerici ribaldi, maxime qui vulgo dicuntur de
familia Goliae.
Map is credited in certain MSS with the authorship of the
"original” Latin of the great prose romance of Lancelot du Lac,
including the Quest of the Holy Grail and the Death of Arthur ;
but no such “Latin original” has yet been found. A version of
the Quest in French prose is assigned to “Maistres Gualters Map,"
and is described as “written by him for the love of his lord, King
Henry, who caused it to be translated from Latin into French. "
In certain manuscripts, all the four parts of the romance of
Lancelot are ascribed to Map; and Hue de Rotelande (c. 1185), &
near neighbour and a contemporary of Map, after describing in his
Ipomedon a tournament, which is also an incident in Lancelot,
excuses his romance-writing in the words : “I am not the only
1 2v, 293.
· Labbé's Concilia, 1671, ix, 678.
## p. 191 (#211) ############################################
Other writers of Latin
191
man who knows the art of lying; Walter Map knows well his
part of it"? Such is the evidence, slight as it is, for ascribing
to Map any share in the great cycle of romance surveyed in
other chapters? We have already seen that there is very little
reason for accepting him as the author of any part of the large
body of accentual Latin poetry which passes under his name.
The only thirteen lines of Latin verse which are certainly genuine
products of his pen are written in hexameters and pentameters
of the strictly classical type.
A century before the time of Map, Godfrey, a native of Cam-
brai, and prior of St Swithin's, Winchester (d. 1107), had written
Latin epigrams after the manner of Martial. He is, in fact, re-
peatedly quoted as “Marcial ” by Gower. The 238 ordinary epi-
grams of his first book are followed by nineteen others, which
have a historic interest, in so far as they refer to royal or
ecclesiastical persons of the day. The Anglo-Norman poet
Reginald, a monk of St Augustine's, Canterbury (A. 1112), wrote a
lengthy poem in leonine hexameters on the life of the Syrian
hermit St Malchus. In the next half-century, Lawrence, the
Benedictine monk who became prior and bishop of Durham
(d. 1154), composed a popular summary of Scripture history in
nine books of elegiac verse. Henry of Huntingdon (d. 1155) has
preserved, in the eleventh book of his Historia Anglorum, the
Latin epigrams and other minor poems that he had learnt to
compose as a pupil of the monks of Ramsey. A little later,
Hilarius, who is supposed to have been an Englishman, and was
a pupil of Abelard about 1125, wrote in France three Latin plays
on sacred themes, the earliest of their kind. The “raising of
Lazarus" and the “image of St Nicholas” are partly written in
French; the “story of Daniel,” in Latin only. He is also the
author of twelve interesting sets of riming lyrics, in Latin inter-
spersed with a few lines of French, the most graceful poem in the
series being addressed to an English maiden bearing the name
of Rose. About the same time the Cistercian monk, Henry of
Saltrey (A. 1150), wrote a Latin prose version of the legend of the
Purgatory of St Patrick. A life of Becket, now only known
through the Icelandic Thomas Saga, was written by Robert of
Cricklade, chancellor of Oxford (1159) and prior of St Frides-
wide's, who dedicated to Henry II his nine books of Flores from
the Natural History of the elder Pliny.
· H. L. D. Ward's Catalogue of Romances, I, 734–41.
• See especially post, Chapter xn.
## p. 192 (#212) ############################################
192 English Scholars of Paris
One of Map's younger contemporaries, Gervase, the author
of Otia Imperialia, a native of Tilbury on the coast of Essex,
was brought up in Rome; he lectured on law at Bologna, and
probably died in England. The above work was written about
1211 to amuse the leisure hours of the German emperor, Otto IV.
It is a miscellaneous collection of legendary tales and super-
stitions. The theme of the first three books and many of the
quotations are borrowed, without acknowledgment, from the
Historia Scholastica of that omnivorous compiler, Petrus Co-
mestor. The third book tells us of werewolves and lamias and
barnacle-geese and other marvels, and also of the enchantments
ascribed to Vergil at Naples.
Another of Map's contemporaries, Nigel Wireker, precentor
of Christ Church, Canterbury (d. 1200), was the witty author
of Speculum Stultorum, a long elegiac poem on the adventures
of the donkey “Burnellus,” or “Brunellus," a diminutive of
“Brown" (just as “donkey” is a diminutive of “dun"). The name
is borrowed from the scholastic logic of the day, in which it repre-
sents any particular horse or ass, as opposed to the abstract
idea of either of those animals? .
The author himself explains that the ass of his satire is a monk
who, discontented with his condition, wants to get rid of his old
stump of a tail, and obtain a new and longer appendage by
becoming a prior or an abbot. Brunellus, then, finding his tail
too short, consults Galen on his malady, and is, ultimately, sent off
to Salerno with a satirical prescription, which he is to bring back
in glass bottles, typical of the vanity and frailty of all human
things. On his way there and back, he is attacked by merchants
and monks and mastiffs, and is thus robbed of all his scanty goods,
and of half his diminutive tail. Ashamed to return home, and
having an immense capacity for patient labour, he resolves on
becoming a member of the English school in the university of
Paris. Then follows a satire on the idleness and extravagance of
some of the English students at that seat of learning. After
spending seven years in studying the liberal arts and thus
“completing” his education, he finds on leaving Paris that he has
even forgotten the name of the place. However, he succeeds in
recalling one syllable, but that is enough, for he has learnt in his
time that “the part may stand for the whole. " Passing from the
liberal arts to theology, the hero of the story tries all the
monastic orders in their turn, and ends in resolving to found an
1 Immanuel Weber, De Nigello Wirekero, Leipzig Dissertation, 1679.
## p. 193 (#213) ############################################
Nigel Wireker. Alexander Neckam 193
order of his own. Meeting Galen once more, he begins discussing
the state of the church and the general condition of society, and
urges Galen to join his new order, when, suddenly, his old master,
Bernard, appears on the scene, and compels him to return to his
first allegiance as an ordinary monk. Chaucer, in The Nonne
Preestes Tale, recalls one of the stories he had “rad in daun
Burnel the Asse? ,"
The Architrenius or “Arch-Mourner” of the Norman satirist,
Jean de Hauteville (A. 1184), who was born near Rouen and
passed part of his life in England, has only a slight connection with
our present subject. The pilgrim of that satire pays a visit to
Paris, and describes the hardships of the students and the fruit-
lessness of their studies; he afterwards arrives at the hill of
Presumption, which is the haunt of all manner of monks and
ecclesiastics, as well as the great scholastic doctors and professors.
The seven liberal arts are elaborately described in the Anti-
Claudianus of the Universal Doctor, Alain de Lille (1114-1203).
This fine poem, and the mingled prose and verse of De Planctu
Naturae, were familiar to Chaucer. Alain probably passed some
time in England with the Cistercians at Waverley in Surrey (1128),
and he is the reputed author of a commentary on the prophecies
of Merlin,
Alain's contemporary, Geoffrey de Vinsauf (A. 1200), who was
educated at St Frideswide's, Oxford, and travelled in France and
Italy, dedicated to Innocent III his Poëtria Nova, an Art of
Poetry founded partly on Horace, and recommending the ancient
metres in preference to the modern rimes, with examples of the
various kinds of composition. In the same period, Alexander
Neckam, of St Albans, distinguished himself in Paris in 1180,
and, late in life, became abbot of Cirencester. He is the author
of an amusing treatise De Naturis Rerum, with many anecdotes
of animals, and with an attack on the method of teaching logic
in the university of Paris. In his lengthy elegiac poem De
Laudibus Divinae Sapientiae he traverses much of the same
ground. He further describes the chief seats of learning in his
day, summing up in a single couplet the four faculties in the
university of Paris, the paradisus deliciarum :
Hic florent artes; coelestis pagina regnat ;
Stant leges; lucet jus; medicina viget 3.
Joannes de Garlandia, who studied at Oxford and Paris (1204),
· Canterbury Tales, 16318.
E. L. I. CH. X.
? p. 453 ed. Wright, in Rolls Series, 1863,
13
## p. 194 (#214) ############################################
194 English Scholars of Paris
was an Englishman by birth, but regarded France as the land of
his adoption. His two principal poems, De Mysteriis and De
Triumphis Ecclesiae, are earlier than 1252. His Ars Rhythmica
quotes whole poems as examples of the rules of rhythm. His prose
works include three Vocabularies, one of which, with its interlinear
French glosses and its reference to the tricks played by Parisian
glovers on inexperienced students, was clearly written for use in
the university of Paris.
· Later in the same century, a chaplain of Eleanor of Provence,
queen of Henry III, named John Hoveden (d. 1275), wrote a
number of poems in riming quatrains. The longest of these
consists of nearly 4000 lines of meditation on the life of Christ.
This was translated into French. His most popular poem, that
beginning with the line Philomela, praevia temporis amoeni, was
translated into German and Spanish and, about 1460, into English.
Latin verse was one of the early amusements of the keen and
active Norman-Welshman, Giraldus Cambrensis, who was born
at the castle of Manorbier, which he dutifully describes as
“the sweetest spot in Wales? . " The grandson, on his mother's
side, of Nest, “the Helen of Wales," he celebrated the exploits
of her heroic descendants, the Geraldines, in one of his earliest
works, the Conquest of Ireland. He had himself inherited some
of Nest's beauty; he tells us that, in his youthful days, an
abbot of the Cistercian order once said of him in the presence of
Baldwin, then bishop of Worcester : “Is it possible that Youth,
which is so fair, can ever die ? ? " He received his early education
from two of the chaplains of his uncle, the bishop of St David's.
After continuing his studies at St Peter's abbey, Gloucester, he
paid three visits to Paris, spending three periods of several years
in its schools, and giving special attention to rhetoric. We have
his own authority for the fact that, when his lecturers desired
to point out a model scholar, they mentioned Gerald the
Welshman.
As archdeacon of Brecon (1175—1203) he was an ardent
reformer of ecclesiastical abuses in his native land, and his great
disappointment in life was that he never became (like his uncle)
bishop of St David's. On the first of several occasions when he
was thus disappointed, he returned to Paris, and there studied for
three years, besides lecturing with great success on canon law
(1177—80). Visits to Ireland followed in 1183 and 1185, when he
was in attendance on prince John. After the prince's return,
I vi, 98. See also the present work, ante, Chapter 1x, p. 177.
? 1v, 104.
31, 23.
## p. 195 (#215) ############################################
Giraldus Cambrensis
195
Gerald stayed till Easter, 1186, collecting materials for his two
works on Ireland. The Topography was completed in 1188. .
In the following year, he resolved on reciting it publicly at Oxford,
“where the most learned and famous of the English clergy were
then to be found. ” He read one of the three divisions of the work
on each of three successive days. “On the first ſhe informs us] he
received and entertained at his lodgings all the poor of the town;
on the next, all the doctors of the different faculties, and such of
their pupils as were of fame and note; and, on the third, the rest
of the scholars with the soldiers and the townsmen. ” He com-
placently assures us that “it was a costly and a noble act; a
revival of the bygone ages of poetry"; and (he proudly adds)
“neither present nor past time could furnish any record of such
a solemnity having ever taken place in Englandı. "
Meanwhile in 1188, Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury, had
been sent to Wales to preach the coming crusade. Riding in full
armour at the head of the procession, with the white cross gleaming
on his breastplate, he was accompanied by Ranulf de Glanville,
chief justiciar of England, and attended by a young man of
slender figure, delicate features and beetling eyebrows, a man of
learning and wit, and with no small share of self-conceit, “the
leader of the clergy of St David's, the scion of the blood-royal of
Wales. " The archbishop's exhortations produced little effect on
the common people, until he prompted Gerald to take up the
preaching. At Haverford, Gerald discoursed in Latin and also
in French. Although the crowd understood neither language,
they were moved to tears by the magic of his eloquence, and no
less than two hundred joined the standard of the cross? . It was
pleasantly remarked soon afterwards that, if Gerald had only
discoursed in Welsh, not a single soldier would have failed to
follow that banner. Three thousand recruits were enrolled ; the
archbishop and the chief justiciar had taken the cross at Radnor;
both of them kept their vow and died in 1190 in the course of the
crusade. Gerald, meanwhile, had been appointed to write its
history in Latin prose, and the archbishop's nephew, Joseph of
Exeter, to write it in verse. Joseph had already composed an
epic on the Trojan war, England's solitary Latin epic, which was
long attributed to Cornelius Nepos, notwithstanding its dedication
to the archbishop of Canterbury. He celebrated the crusade in
his Antiocheis, now represented by a solitary fragment on the
Flos Regum Arthurus. Gerald, however, neither went on the
11, pp. xlvii, 72 f.
* I, pp. xlix, 76.
portance it has thus gained, Jocelin's account of the deeds of
Abbot Sampson and his community at St Edmundsbury is of unique
historical value for the light it throws upon the organisation of
monastic institutions and of their relations to the social and
industrial life of the common people.
The life and habits of a different section of society have been
illustrated, in an almost equally vivid way, by several of the
scholars who flourished in and around the court of Henry II.
John of Salisbury and Peter of Blois, Gervase of Tilbury
and Nigel Wireker, and, above all, Walter Map and Gerald of
Wales, have left behind them documents which bear, in some
respects, even more of the very “form and pressure” of the time
than the chronicles themselves. The Policraticus of John of
Salisbury, the letters of Peter of Blois, the Otia Imperialia of
Gervase and the poems of Nigel Wireker, throw a flood of light
## p. 177 (#197) ############################################
Giraldus and Map
177
upon the studies and the pastimes, the intrigues and the scandals,
the humours and the passions of those who dwelt in the high
places of both state and church. Of all these writers none
has contrived to blend information and entertainment more
successfully than Giraldus Cambrensis. A scholar trained
at Paris, an insatiably curious student of men and books and
every form of odd lore, a fighter and an intriguer to his
finger-tips, an inveterate gossip, yet a man capable of high
ideals and far-reaching schemes of public policy, the intimate
friend of kings and statesmen, popes and prelates, yet withal
a passionate lover of his own native little Wales-Gerald is
one of the most romantic figures in all medieval literature.
The most stirring episode in his life was the struggle in which
he engaged, "for the honour of Wales? "; and he is still deservedly
beloved among his countrymen as the devoted champion of one
of the most creditable of lost causes and impossible loyalties,
But his enduring title to fame rests upon the writings which,
alike for brilliancy of style and for variety of interest, remain
unsurpassed among the Anglo-Norman literature of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries.
A greater renown, however, in literary history generally has
been enjoyed by Gerald's friend, and, probably, fellow-countryman,
Walter Map? Were it possible to prove to demonstration Map's
authorship of the great Arthurian romances commonly associated
with his name, there could be no question about his claim to
rank as the greatest literary genius who appeared in England
before Chaucer. But the claim made on behalf of Map to
the authorship of these imaginative works rests on very slender
evidence. Even the authenticity of his equally celebrated
Goliardic poems is open to grave question. The De Nugis -
Curialium, or book Of Courtiers' Trifles, is, undoubtedly, his.
It was probably composed by instalments, and forms a sort
of common-place book in which Map seems to have jotted down,
from time to time, both shrewd reflections upon men and things,
and pleasant anecdotes to divert the vacant mind. Of the strictly
historical portions of the work, the most valuable are the accounts, in
the first book, of some of the heretical sects which had sprung up in
the twelfth century, and the reflections, which take up the whole of
the fifth book, upon the character and achievements of the Anglo-
Norman kings. The fourth book includes, in company with some
lively tales, the celebrated letter, well known to the Wife of Bath's
fifth husband, from Valerius to Rufinus, upon the folly of marrying
1 Op. (Rolle Series), 1,129. See also post, chap. 2, p. 196. See post, chap. 2, pp. 188 ff.
E. L. I. CH. IX.
12
## p. 178 (#198) ############################################
178
Latin Chroniclers
a wife. The whole work is a medley of such diverse and curious
ingredients—satire, gossip, fairy-lore, folk-tales and snatches of
serious history—as to make us easily believe that its author was,
as Gerald hints, one of the most versatile and witty talkers in
the court circles of that eager and inquisitive age.
The thirteenth century is, emphatically, the golden age of the
monastic historians. At their head stands Matthew Paris, the
greatest of all our medieval chroniclers; but his work only repre-
sents the crowning literary achievement of an enthusiasm and an
industry that inspired every considerable monastery in the land.
The apnals, most of them nameless, of Burton, of Winchester,
of Waverley, of Dunstable, of Osney, of Worcester-all testify to
the assiduity of monkish scribes in compiling, revising and adding
to the stores of historical material accumulated in their respective
houses. Invaluable, however, as these chronicles are to the student
of political and social history, they possess little interest as
literature.
But, at the powerful monastery of St Albans, there arose
a school of historians as brilliant as that which had, in the
north, closed with Roger of Hoveden. This school produced in
Matthew Paris a writer who, both in his conception of the
historian's art and in the force and picturesqueness of his
style, surpasses all the chroniclers of the twelfth century. The
historians of St Albans possessed exceptional advantages. The
wealth of the abbey, its accommodation and equipment as an
ideal home of learning, its position on Watling Street and its
proximity to the capital, marked it out as the chief centre of
monastic culture in the thirteenth century; and its inmates
kept up a constant intercourse with the great men of the day
as they passed through it on their way to and from London and
the provinces. Nowhere else, perhaps, in the kingdom could
a historian of contemporary events pursue his task at that
time under more favourable conditions. Moreover, in no other
abbey does the writing of history appear to have been so care-
fully organised as at St Albans. Abbot Simon, who died in
1183, established in the monastery a regular office of historio-
grapher. The first occupant of this office whose complete work
has come down to us was Roger of Wendover; but his chronicle
is based upon materials of which an ample wealth already
existed in the abbey. The actual nucleus of the early part
of Roger's Flowers of History is supposed to have been the
compilation of John de Cella, who was abbot of St Albans from
## p. 179 (#199) ############################################
Matthew Paris
179
1195 to 1214. John's work extended down to the year 1188, and
was revised and continued by Roger down to 1235, the year before
his death. Roger claims in his preface to have selected “from
the books of catholic writers worthy of credit, just as flowers of
various colours are gathered from various fields. ” Hence he called
his work Flores Historiarum-a title appropriated in the four-
teenth century to a long compilation by various hands. Begun at
St Albans, and completed at Westminster, it was based upon the
Chronicle of Matthew Paris and continued to the year 1326.
The work was long ascribed to one Matthew of Westminster,
but it is now known that no actual chronicler of that name ever
existed. Roger of Wendover's work is, however, now valued not
so much for what he culled from previous writers as for its full
and lively narrative of contemporary events, from 1216 to 1235.
Although in accuracy, in range and in subtlety and shrewdness
of insight he falls far short of his great successor as historiographer
of St Albans, Roger largely anticipates him in the fearless candour
of his personal and moral judgments.
Matthew Paris became historiographer of St Albans upon the
death of Roger of Wendover in 1236, and proceeded in his famous
Chronica Majora to revise and continue the work of his predecessor.
Matthew Paris's own narrative is an extraordinarily comprehensive
and masterly survey of both English and continental history during
almost an entire quarter of a century. We know little of the
details of the historian's own life. He became a monk of St Albans
in 1217, and tradition ascribes to him not only a high repute for
scholarship, but the possession of varied gifts as an artist. The
most notable incident in his career was his employment by the
pope, in 1248, on a mission of reform to the Benedictine monks
of Holm, in Norway, which kept him away from England for some
eighteen months. He lived, throughout, in close intimacy with
the court, and, notwithstanding his plain-spokenness, enjoyed a
share of royal favour. He died in 1259. Courtier and scholar,
monk and man of the world, Matthew Paris was, both by training
and position, exceptionally well qualified to undertake a history of
his own time. Moreover, he had the instinct, the temper and the
judgment of the born historian. He took immense pains in the
collection and the verification of his facts, and appears to have
been in constant communication with a host of correspondents
both at home and abroad. Indeed, his work reads like a
stately journal of contemporary European events, where every-
thing is marshalled in due order and proportion by a master
12–2
## p. 180 (#200) ############################################
18o
Latin Chroniclers
the king
clonate exeathe nobles
editorial hand. Great events and small follow each other in quick,
though orderly, succession, just as in some modern review of the
world's work. Simon de Montfort's preparations for his crusade;
a dispute between the scholars and citizens of Oxford; the death of
Llywelyn, prince of Wales; the pope's dealings with foreign clerks
in England; a great storm; the decapitation of certain robbers;
war in Flanders; the burning of heretics by the Milanese; the
irruption of the Tartars-such is a brief selection of topics taken
at random from a few consecutive pages of Matthew's Chronicle.
But he is much more than a mere recorder of events. He is
a fearless critic and censor of public men and their doings.
A thoroughly patriotic Englishman, he is severe upon all mis-
government, openly rebuking the king, denouncing the greed
and rapacity of the nobles, protesting indignantly against the
extortionate exactions of the pope. He is not, indeed, altogether
free from the professional bias of his class; and in nothing is this
more apparent than in his obviously prejudiced references to the
mendicant orders. But his criticisms as a whole are animated
by a transparently honest fervour of moral indignation and by
a patriotic jealousy for the honour of England. The pope's
emissaries are “harpies and bloodsuckers, plunderers, who do
not merely shear, but skin, the sheep. " For his complacent
acquiescence in the deeds of the papal legates the king is de-
nounced as having become to the clergy “as it were the stalk of
a reed-on which those who lean in confidence are wounded by
the fragments. ” The king's own extortionate demands for money
from the clergy are no less boldly condemned, while his foolishness
and extravagance are constantly censured. These outspoken anim-
adversions did not, however, blind Henry to Matthew's skill as
a writer, and the chronicler relates how, during the celebration of
the feast of Edward the Confessor, in 1247, the sovereign himself
bade him take a seat near the throne and write a full account of
the proceedings, so that the facts might stand accurately recorded
for ever. Matthew was, indeed, a ready and a picturesque writer.
Though frequently prolix and rhetorical, he is never tedious or
irrelevant. His narrative, as a rule, is wonderfully direct, clear
and nervous, while his instinct for order and literary effect is such
as to give to his Chronicle, as a whole, a unity and a sustained
interest which belong to the work of no other English medieval
historian.
Matthew Paris quite overshadows every other chronicler of
the time of Henry III. But much of the history of Henry's
## p. 181 (#201) ############################################
Minor Chroniclers
181
reign would remain obscure, were Paris's Chronicle not supple-
mented by the monumental work of Henry of Bracton, or Bratton,
on the laws of England. Bracton scarcely belongs to the chroniclers;
but his writings throw sufficient light upon the social conditions
of his time to entitle him to stand side by side with Matthew Paris
as a contributor to the English history of the thirteenth century.
Following in the footsteps of Ranulf de Glanville (or Hubert
Walter), Henry II's great justiciar, Henry of Bracton compiled,
some time between 1250 and 1258, an elaborate treatise on
the laws and customs of England. Bracton was one of the
many ecclesiastics who held high judicial office under Henry III.
He was, in turn, a justice in eyre, a judge of the king's court,
a Devonshire rector and archdeacon of Barnstaple. In addition
to his legal treatise he left behind him a note-book, containing
some two thousand cases taken from the plea rolls of his time,
with comments which “to all appearance came from Bracton's
hand or from Bracton's head'. ” Indebted though he was for the
form and method of his great book to such foreign works as those
of the celebrated Italian lawyer, Azo of Bologna, Bracton's work
is, in substance, thoroughly English, and is a laborious exposition,
illustrated by some hundreds of decisions, of the approved practice
of the king's court in England. Bracton died in 1268, leaving his
work unfinished, although he appears to have been adding to and
annotating it to the very last; but, even as it stands, his treatise
is not only the most authoritative English law-book of his time,
but, in design and matter, "the crown and flower of English
medieval jurisprudence. ” It “both marks and makes a critical
moment in the history of English law, and, therefore, in the essen-
tial history of the English people. ”
The art of the historian proper, however, gradually began to
decline after the death of Matthew Paris. Among the chroniclers
who take us down to the fourteenth century there are few names
worthy of a place in a history of literature. Prominent among
them are Matthew's own followers at St Albans, William Rishanger
and John of Trokelowe; Nicholas Trivet or Trevet, a Dominican
friar, whose works are of considerable historical importance for
the reign of Edward I and of additional literary interest in con-
nection with Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale ; Walter of Heming-
burgh, a canon of the Yorkshire priory of Guisburn, who not
1 Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, ed. 1898, Vol. I, p. 207.
• Ib. p. 206.
• Bracton's Note Book, ed. Maitland, Vol. 1, p. 1.
## p. 182 (#202) ############################################
182
Latin Chroniclers
unworthily continues the work of the northern school; John de
Tayster, or Taxster, a monk of St Edmundsbury, who adds to a
compilation from previous chroniclers what seems to be an
original narrative for the years 1258–65; and Thomas Wykes, a
monk of Osney, whose chronicle extends down to 1289, and is an
authority of the first importance "for the whole history of the
campaign of Lewes and Evesham, and the events immediately
preceding and following them. " But these, and other writers, are
largely subdued to the monastic atmosphere in which they work, and
possess few of the traits of character and style which interest us
in the personality of the greater chroniclers. The impulse of the
revival of learning had been spent, and neither in literary distinction
nor in accuracy and wealth of information are the chroniclers who
wrote during the hundred years after Matthew Paris's death worthy
of comparison with their predecessors of the twelfth and early
thirteenth centuries. The best of them are those who, by their
industry at least, endeavoured down to the end of the fourteenth
century to retain for St Albaus as a historical school the
supreme repute which had been signally established by Matthew
Paris.
* Luard, Annales Monastici, sv (Rolls Series).
## p. 183 (#203) ############################################
CHAPTER X
ENGLISH SCHOLARS OF PARIS AND FRANCISCANS
OF OXFORD
LATIN LITERATURE OF ENGLAND FROM JOHN OF
SALISBURY TO RICHARD OF BURY
THE university of Paris owed its origin to the cathedral school
of Notre-Dame. It was not until the time of William of Cham-
peaux (d. 1121), that this school began to rival the scholastic
fame of Chartres. Early in the thirteenth century the schools of
Paris were connected with three important churches. On the Ile
de la Cité there was the cathedral of Notre-Dame; to the south
of the Seine, on rising ground near the site of the present Pan-
théon, was the collegiate church of Sainte-Geneviève ; and, to the
east of the walls south of the river, the church of Canons Regular
at the abbey of St Victor. The schools of Notre-Dame and
of Sainte-Geneviève were, successively, the scenes of the ever-
memorable lectures of a famous pupil of William of Champeaux,
the eloquent, brilliant, vain, impulsive and self-confident disputant,
Abelard (d. 1142). The fame of his teaching made Paris the resort
of large numbers of scholars, whose presence led to its becoming
the home of the many Masters by whom the university was
ultimately founded. The earliest trace of this university has been
discovered in the passage where Matthew Paris states that his own
preceptor, an abbot of St Albans, had, as a student in Paris, been
admitted into “ the fellowship of the elect Masters ” (c. 1170)? . In
1136, when John of Salisbury went to Paris, the university was
not yet in existence. The first recorded “town and gown” riot,
that of 1200, led to the grant of a charter to the resident body
of Masters; the approximate date of the first statutes, ten years
later, marks the earliest recognition of the university as a legally
constituted corporation, a veritable universitas ; and, about ten
years later still, the Masters of Arts were first organised into
four nations, namely, the French, the Normans, the Picards and
i Gesta Abbatum, 1, 217, ed. 1867.
## p. 184 (#204) ############################################
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English Scholars of Paris
the English, this last including the Germans and all who came
from the north and the east of Europe. In the thirteenth century
Paris was still the centre of European culture. It is sufficient to
cite as proof a passage from the English encyclopaedist, Bartholo-
mew, who flourished in the middle of that century:
Even as sometime the city of Athens, mother of liberal arts and letters,
nurge of philosophers and fountain of all learning, was the ornament of
Greece; so, in our own day, Paris excelleth in learning and civilisation, not
only France, but also the rest of Europe, and, as the mother of wisdom,
receiveth guests from every part of the world, supplieth all their need and
bringeth all of them beneath her peaceful rule?
The carnival riot of 1229 led to the withdrawal of the resident
Masters and Scholars for two years ; meanwhile, many of them
accepted the invitation of Henry III, and thus reinforced the
rising universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
The first important representative of England in the schools
of Paris was John of Salisbury. He began by becoming a
pupil of Abelard, who had returned to the scene of his early
triumphs, and, at the age of 57, was now lecturing on the hill
of Sainte-Geneviève. That “illustrious and admirable teacher”
was discoursing, as of old, on logic; and “at his feet" John of
Salisbury "acquired the first rudiments of dialectics, greedily
seizing all that fell from his lips. " But his brilliant instructor was
once more opposed, and once more withdrew from Paris; and the
pupil passed into the school of Master Alberic and Robert of
Melun. The first was, “in questions, acute and expansive"; the
second, “in responses, brief and lucid”; and, "if anyone could
have combined the merits of both, he would have been unrivalled
in debate? " Having thus studied logic for two years (1136–8) in
Paris, John of Salisbury spent three years (probably the latter
part of 1138, and a large part of 1139 and 1140) working at
“grammar," or the scholarly study of Latin literature. The place
is not named, but it has, rightly, been identified as the school of
Chartres. In that school the sound and healthy tradition of
Bernard of Chartres was still maintained by his pupils. By John
of Salisbury's time, Bernard had been succeeded as chancellor of the
cathedral school by Gilbert de la Porrée. John of Salisbury learnt
rhetoric from Richard L'Évêque, who was “familiar with almost
every branch of learning, whose knowledge was even greater than
his eloquence, who had more truth than vanity, more virtue than
show. " He had already attended, with less profit, the somewhat
| xv, o. 57.
• Metalogicus, a, 10.
3 Schaarschmidt, Joh. Saresberiensis, p. 22.
4 Metalogicus, loc. cit.
## p. 185 (#205) ############################################
John of Salisbury
185
meagre lectures of Bernard's younger brother, Theodoric, who is
nevertheless described as "a most studious investigator of the
Arts? . " This description was confirmed in 1888, when he was identi-
fied as the author of two large volumes containing a comprehensive
Survey of the Liberal Arts, written in a bold and clear hand, which
may now be seen in the public library of the cathedral town. It
may be added that it was between 1134 and 1150, during the time
when Theodoric was successively "master of the school" and chan-
cellor, that the south doorway of the west front of the cathedral
was adorned with figures of the seven arts, each of them asso-
ciated with the ancient representative of that art, for example,
grammar with Priscian, dialectic with Aristotle and rhetoric with
Cicero.
It was probably early in 1141 that John returned to Paris.
For a short time he attended, not only the lectures of Gilbert, who
had lately ceased to be chancellor of Chartres, but also those of
Robert Pullen, the future cardinal, who had taught at Oxford in
1133. Socially, he saw much of Adam du Petit Pont, who owed
his surname to the school that he had set up on the little bridge
between the Ile de la Cité and the Quartier Latin.
John of Salisbury's student life in Paris, and Chartres, and
again in Paris, probably extended from early in 1136 to late in 1145.
In the spring of 1148, he was present at the council of Rheims.
It was there that he was introduced by Bernard of Clairvaux to
Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, an introduction that had an
important effect on his literary and ecclesiastical career.
About 1150 he returned to England, and resided mainly at
the court of Canterbury, engaged on secretarial and diplomatic
work, which frequently took him to the court of Rome. On the
most celebrated of these visits, during the winter of 1155—6, his
friend the English pope, Hadrian IV, sent Henry II his written
authority to extend his rule over Ireland, together with an emerald
ring in token of his right? . It was probably John of Salisbury's
eager interest in the privileges of the church, while he was still
in the service of Theobald, that led to his soon falling into dis-
favour with the king. During the enforced leisure of 1159, he
revised and completed two of his most extensive works, finishing
Policraticus shortly before, and Metalogicus immediately after,
the death of Hadrian IV (31 August 1159). Both of these were
dedicated to Becket, the warlike chancellor, with whose aid
Henry II was then “fulminating” at the siege of Toulouse. When
i Metalogicus, 1, 5.
16. 11, 42. * Policraticus, VIII, 25.
bishop of Canterbur ecclesiastical career, mainly at
## p. 186 (#206) ############################################
186
English Scholars of Paris
Becket became archbishop in 1162, John of Salisbury entered his
service, and, soon afterwards, composed a Life of archbishop
Anselm with a view to the canonisation which was not conceded
until three centuries later. On the king's return early in 1163,
John of Salisbury found it safest to leave the country, staying for
six or seven years with Peter de la Celle, then abbot of Rheims,
under whose roof he wrote Historia Pontificalis. His exile,
like that of Becket, lasted till late in 1170. On the fatal 29th
of December he was at Canterbury with the archbishop, who
unhappily disregarded the counsels of moderation suggested by
his devoted friend. They entered the cathedral together. In face
of the murderous attack on the archbishop's person, John of Salis-
bury seems to have fled at first, but to have soon returned to the
post of peril. He was probably present at the end. He was
certainly believed by his friend Peter to have been “sprinkled
with the precious blood of the blessed martyr? . "
He immediately urged the inclusion of his master's name in
the calendar of martyrs, wrote his Life, and loyally served his
successor. In 1176, his devotion to the memory of St Thomas and
his friendship with the archbishop of Sens led to John of Salisbury
being made bishop of Chartres. For the last four years of his life
he was the most prominent personage in the place where he had
spent three of the most fruitful years of his youth. In the
necrology of his cathedral church he is described as vir magnae
religionis, totiusque scientiae radiis illustratus.
His Letters give abundant proof of his wide influence as a
sagacious counsellor, an able politician and a zealous ecclesiastic.
They were collected and edited by himself soon after 1170.
Of the 326 comprised in the modern editions, some were
written after the above date, and some by other writers. His
Entheticus, an elegiac poem of no less than 1852 lines, was,
apparently, intended as an introduction to Policraticus, which
is now preceded by a short set of verses bearing the same title as
the above poem. In both of these poems, which are written in a
strong and solid but not particularly elegant style, Becket is
warmly eulogised. He is the king's right hand, the embodiment
of all excellence, the refuge of the oppressed, the light of the
church, the glory of the nation?
Policraticus is a work in eight books. The primary title
has led to its being regarded as a "statesman's handbook. ” The
alternative title, De Nugis Curialium, et Vestigiis Philosophorum,
1 Petrus Cellensis, Ep. 117.
• Migne, P. L. cxcix, 379, 993.
## p. 187 (#207) ############################################
John of Salisbury.
Peter of Blois 187
is suggestive of a satire on the vanities of courtiers, followed by a
set treatise on morals ; but the latter half deals with the prin-
ciples of government, and with matters of philosophy and learning,
interspersed with many digressions. It is, in fact, an “encyclopaedia
of miscellanies," reflecting the cultivated thought of the middle
of the twelfth century. It includes an interesting chapter on
Aristotle', and a satirical account of the scholastic controversies
of the age.
Metalogicus, in four books, contains a defence of the method
and use of logic, vindicating the claims of "grammar," and
pleading for an intelligent study of logic. It includes an analysis
of the whole series of Aristotle's treatises on that subject, being, in
fact, the earliest work in the Middle Ages in which every part of
Organon is turned to account.
Historia Pontificalis is only preserved in an incomplete form
in a single manuscript at Bern; it was not printed until 1868,
and was not identified as the work of John of Salisbury until
1873. It gives an account of the ecclesiastical history of the years
1148 to 1152, but is really as much a satire as a history.
In his attitude towards the ancient classics, John of Salisbury
is far from regarding Aristotle as infallible; he is opposed to
Plato, though he is fully conscious of Plato's greatness. His
favourite author is Cicero, and the purity of his own Latin prose
has been justly praised. Caesar and Tacitus he knows solely by
name; but, in all the literature accessible to him, he is obviously
the best-read scholar of his time. A humanist two centuries in
advance of his age, he is eager to give the widest possible interpre-
tation to “whatsoever things were written aforetime for our
learning"?
In his day the first period in the medieval study of logic was
drawing towards its close, and with the degenerate type of the
professional dialectician he has no sympathy. The earliest of all
the medieval theories on the nature and the functions of the
state is due to John of Salisbury. He is the first of modern
writers on the philosophy of politics, and he founds his own theory
on the records of the Old Testament and on the annals of the
ancient Roman empire.
As a representative of literature and learning, Peter of Blois
is only a pale reflection of John of Salisbury. Born at Blois,
he was probably educated at Tours; he learnt and taught at
Bologua and Paris, settled in England about 1175 as secretary
1 yu, C.
• Cf. prologue to Policraticus, vu.
## p. 188 (#208) ############################################
188
English Scholars of Paris
to Richard of Dover, archbishop of Canterbury, and was suc-
cessively archdeacon of Bath (c. 1177) and of London (C. 1204).
He was repeatedly entrusted with diplomatic duties by Henry II,
and the Letters ascribed to him purport to have been originally
collected at the request of the king. But some of them—for
example, those on the capture of Damietta in 1219—could not
possibly have been written during the life of the king, who died in
1189, or during that of Peter of Blois, who died in or before 1212.
Peter of Blois, on his appointment as secretary to the archbishop
in 1175, obviously made a diligent study of the Letters of John of
Salisbury, who had edited his Letters soon after 1170, while Peter
did not begin to edit his own until 1181, the year after John of
Salisbury's death. Many of Peter's Letters are enriched with
quotations from the classics, but most of those quotations are
borrowed from John of Salisbury. Thus, in a letter to the arch-
deacon of Nantes, we have a list of ancient grammarians, and a
second list of ancient historians? . Both of these are borrowed from
John of Salisbury? ; but, while John of Salisbury modestly refers
his readers to Tacitus, without professing to have read that author,
Peter of Blois pretends to have “frequently looked into” Tacitus,
-an author never mentioned by such well-informed contempo-
raries as Giraldus Cambrensis and Ralph of Diceto. Criticised
for his constant quotations, he defends a manner of composition
which places him “like a dwarf on the shoulders of giants"); but
this very comparison is tacitly taken from John of Salisbury, who
honestly quotes it from Bernard of Chartrest. It is improbable
that Peter was ever an actual pupil of the scholar to whom he
owed much of his borrowed erudition; but, curiously enough,
he held preferment at Chartres, and also at Salisbury. His brief
Sermons call for no comment. Of his few poems the longest deals
with the sacraments in twenty-six chapters of riming hexameters;
while two others, written in a different metre, have for their
themes the life of the clergy, and the conflict between the flesh
and the spirit.
Walter Map', who was born about 1137 on the marches of
Wales, and, accordingly, called England his mother, and the Welsh
his fellow-countrymen, studied in Paris from about 1154 to 1160.
He returned to England before 1162, was frequently one of the
king's itinerant judges and, after holding other preferment, was
appointed archdeacon of Oxford in 1197. About 1209, when
1 Ep. 101.
? Policraticus, viii, 18.
: Ep. 92.
• Metalogicus, III, 4. See ante, Chapter 1x, pp. 177 il.
## p. 189 (#209) ############################################
Walter Map
189
Giraldus published the second edition of his Conquest of Ireland",
Walter Map was no longer living.
Map was the author of an entertaining miscellany in Latin prose,
De Nugis Curialium, a work in a far lighter vein than that of John
of Salisbury, who had adopted this as an alternative title of his
Policraticus. But, even in this lighter vein, Map has often a grave
moral purpose. Stories of the follies and crimes of courts, and a
lament over the fall of Jerusalem, are here followed by an account
of the origin of the Carthusians, the Templars and the Hospitallers,
with reflections on their growing corruption, and a violent attack
on the Cistercians, together with notices of heretics and of hermits.
In the second book, we have anecdotes of the Welsh, with a col-
lection of fairy-tales; in the third, a series of highly romantic
stories; in the fourth, the "Epistle of Valerius dissuading from
marriage the philosopher Rufinus” (sometimes erroneously ascribed
to St Jerome); and, in the fifth, an invaluable sketch of the history
of the English court from William Rufus to Henry II. Walter
Map's "courtly jests” are mentioned by Giraldus Cambrensis, who,
in his latest work, describes Map as a person of distinction, endued
with literary skill and with the wit of a courtier, and as having
spent his youth (and more than his youth) in reading and writing
poetry? Giraldus sends his friend a set of Latin elegiacs, with a
present of a walking-stick, and he has fortunately preserved the
twelve lines of his friend's reply in the same metres. This reply is
almost the only certainly genuine product of Map's muse that
has survived. Of his poems against the Cistercian monks, only
a single line is left: Lancea Longini, gresc albus, ordo nefandus“.
His notorious antipathy to the Cistercian order has led to his
being regarded as the author of another poem entitled Discipulus
Goliae episcopi de grisis monachis. The worldly, and worse than
worldly, bishop Golias is the theme of other poems, in accentual
riming metres, ascribed to Map, notably the Apocalypse, the
Confession and the Metamorphosis of Golias. The Apocalypse
is first assigned to him in a Bodleian manuscript of the fourteenth
century. Here there is no attempt to dramatise the character of
Golias; we have simply an apocalyptic vision of the corruptions
of the church set forth in 110 riming quatrains of accentual
dactyls in lines of the type: Omnis a clericis fluit enormitas.
In the accentual trochaics of the Confession, the bishop is
dramatically represented as remembering “the tavern that he
has never scorned, nor ever will scorn until the angels sing his
* v, 410. . iv, 140. 1, 363. • Latin Poems, p. xxxv. 6 Ib. p. 54.
## p. 190 (#210) ############################################
190
English Scholars of Paris
requiem. ” Then follow the four lines, which are better known
and more misunderstood than any in the poem :
Meum est propositum in taberna mori:
Vinum sit appositum morientis ori,
Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori,
“Deus sit propitius huic potatori! ”
These lines, with part of the subsequent context, were at an early
date extracted from their setting and made into a drinking-song;
but it cannot be too clearly stated that they were originally
meant for a dramatic representation of the character of the
degenerate “bishop. ” It is a mistake to regard them as reflecting
in any way the habits of the reputed author, who has been
erroneously described as the "jovial archdeacon,” and the “Ana-
creon of his age. " Giraldus, in the very same work in which he
lauds the literary skill and the wit of his friend, quotes for repro-
bation, and not for imitation, a series of calumnious passages,
including the above lines with their immediately previous context!
He is clearly quite innocent of ascribing these lines to his friend.
The whole of the Confession is also preserved in the celebrated
thirteenth century Munich MS of Carmina Burana, formerly
belonging to the Benedictine monastery of Benedictbeuern in
the Bavarian highlands. It forms part of the vast number of
anonymous Latin rimes known from 1227 onwards by the name
of Goliardi. The character of bishop Golias may possibly have
assumed dramatic form in the age of Walter Map, but the name
was certainly three centuries older. As early as the time of
Gautier, archbishop of Sens (d. 923), a sentence of condemnation
is passed on the clerici ribaldi, maxime qui vulgo dicuntur de
familia Goliae.
Map is credited in certain MSS with the authorship of the
"original” Latin of the great prose romance of Lancelot du Lac,
including the Quest of the Holy Grail and the Death of Arthur ;
but no such “Latin original” has yet been found. A version of
the Quest in French prose is assigned to “Maistres Gualters Map,"
and is described as “written by him for the love of his lord, King
Henry, who caused it to be translated from Latin into French. "
In certain manuscripts, all the four parts of the romance of
Lancelot are ascribed to Map; and Hue de Rotelande (c. 1185), &
near neighbour and a contemporary of Map, after describing in his
Ipomedon a tournament, which is also an incident in Lancelot,
excuses his romance-writing in the words : “I am not the only
1 2v, 293.
· Labbé's Concilia, 1671, ix, 678.
## p. 191 (#211) ############################################
Other writers of Latin
191
man who knows the art of lying; Walter Map knows well his
part of it"? Such is the evidence, slight as it is, for ascribing
to Map any share in the great cycle of romance surveyed in
other chapters? We have already seen that there is very little
reason for accepting him as the author of any part of the large
body of accentual Latin poetry which passes under his name.
The only thirteen lines of Latin verse which are certainly genuine
products of his pen are written in hexameters and pentameters
of the strictly classical type.
A century before the time of Map, Godfrey, a native of Cam-
brai, and prior of St Swithin's, Winchester (d. 1107), had written
Latin epigrams after the manner of Martial. He is, in fact, re-
peatedly quoted as “Marcial ” by Gower. The 238 ordinary epi-
grams of his first book are followed by nineteen others, which
have a historic interest, in so far as they refer to royal or
ecclesiastical persons of the day. The Anglo-Norman poet
Reginald, a monk of St Augustine's, Canterbury (A. 1112), wrote a
lengthy poem in leonine hexameters on the life of the Syrian
hermit St Malchus. In the next half-century, Lawrence, the
Benedictine monk who became prior and bishop of Durham
(d. 1154), composed a popular summary of Scripture history in
nine books of elegiac verse. Henry of Huntingdon (d. 1155) has
preserved, in the eleventh book of his Historia Anglorum, the
Latin epigrams and other minor poems that he had learnt to
compose as a pupil of the monks of Ramsey. A little later,
Hilarius, who is supposed to have been an Englishman, and was
a pupil of Abelard about 1125, wrote in France three Latin plays
on sacred themes, the earliest of their kind. The “raising of
Lazarus" and the “image of St Nicholas” are partly written in
French; the “story of Daniel,” in Latin only. He is also the
author of twelve interesting sets of riming lyrics, in Latin inter-
spersed with a few lines of French, the most graceful poem in the
series being addressed to an English maiden bearing the name
of Rose. About the same time the Cistercian monk, Henry of
Saltrey (A. 1150), wrote a Latin prose version of the legend of the
Purgatory of St Patrick. A life of Becket, now only known
through the Icelandic Thomas Saga, was written by Robert of
Cricklade, chancellor of Oxford (1159) and prior of St Frides-
wide's, who dedicated to Henry II his nine books of Flores from
the Natural History of the elder Pliny.
· H. L. D. Ward's Catalogue of Romances, I, 734–41.
• See especially post, Chapter xn.
## p. 192 (#212) ############################################
192 English Scholars of Paris
One of Map's younger contemporaries, Gervase, the author
of Otia Imperialia, a native of Tilbury on the coast of Essex,
was brought up in Rome; he lectured on law at Bologna, and
probably died in England. The above work was written about
1211 to amuse the leisure hours of the German emperor, Otto IV.
It is a miscellaneous collection of legendary tales and super-
stitions. The theme of the first three books and many of the
quotations are borrowed, without acknowledgment, from the
Historia Scholastica of that omnivorous compiler, Petrus Co-
mestor. The third book tells us of werewolves and lamias and
barnacle-geese and other marvels, and also of the enchantments
ascribed to Vergil at Naples.
Another of Map's contemporaries, Nigel Wireker, precentor
of Christ Church, Canterbury (d. 1200), was the witty author
of Speculum Stultorum, a long elegiac poem on the adventures
of the donkey “Burnellus,” or “Brunellus," a diminutive of
“Brown" (just as “donkey” is a diminutive of “dun"). The name
is borrowed from the scholastic logic of the day, in which it repre-
sents any particular horse or ass, as opposed to the abstract
idea of either of those animals? .
The author himself explains that the ass of his satire is a monk
who, discontented with his condition, wants to get rid of his old
stump of a tail, and obtain a new and longer appendage by
becoming a prior or an abbot. Brunellus, then, finding his tail
too short, consults Galen on his malady, and is, ultimately, sent off
to Salerno with a satirical prescription, which he is to bring back
in glass bottles, typical of the vanity and frailty of all human
things. On his way there and back, he is attacked by merchants
and monks and mastiffs, and is thus robbed of all his scanty goods,
and of half his diminutive tail. Ashamed to return home, and
having an immense capacity for patient labour, he resolves on
becoming a member of the English school in the university of
Paris. Then follows a satire on the idleness and extravagance of
some of the English students at that seat of learning. After
spending seven years in studying the liberal arts and thus
“completing” his education, he finds on leaving Paris that he has
even forgotten the name of the place. However, he succeeds in
recalling one syllable, but that is enough, for he has learnt in his
time that “the part may stand for the whole. " Passing from the
liberal arts to theology, the hero of the story tries all the
monastic orders in their turn, and ends in resolving to found an
1 Immanuel Weber, De Nigello Wirekero, Leipzig Dissertation, 1679.
## p. 193 (#213) ############################################
Nigel Wireker. Alexander Neckam 193
order of his own. Meeting Galen once more, he begins discussing
the state of the church and the general condition of society, and
urges Galen to join his new order, when, suddenly, his old master,
Bernard, appears on the scene, and compels him to return to his
first allegiance as an ordinary monk. Chaucer, in The Nonne
Preestes Tale, recalls one of the stories he had “rad in daun
Burnel the Asse? ,"
The Architrenius or “Arch-Mourner” of the Norman satirist,
Jean de Hauteville (A. 1184), who was born near Rouen and
passed part of his life in England, has only a slight connection with
our present subject. The pilgrim of that satire pays a visit to
Paris, and describes the hardships of the students and the fruit-
lessness of their studies; he afterwards arrives at the hill of
Presumption, which is the haunt of all manner of monks and
ecclesiastics, as well as the great scholastic doctors and professors.
The seven liberal arts are elaborately described in the Anti-
Claudianus of the Universal Doctor, Alain de Lille (1114-1203).
This fine poem, and the mingled prose and verse of De Planctu
Naturae, were familiar to Chaucer. Alain probably passed some
time in England with the Cistercians at Waverley in Surrey (1128),
and he is the reputed author of a commentary on the prophecies
of Merlin,
Alain's contemporary, Geoffrey de Vinsauf (A. 1200), who was
educated at St Frideswide's, Oxford, and travelled in France and
Italy, dedicated to Innocent III his Poëtria Nova, an Art of
Poetry founded partly on Horace, and recommending the ancient
metres in preference to the modern rimes, with examples of the
various kinds of composition. In the same period, Alexander
Neckam, of St Albans, distinguished himself in Paris in 1180,
and, late in life, became abbot of Cirencester. He is the author
of an amusing treatise De Naturis Rerum, with many anecdotes
of animals, and with an attack on the method of teaching logic
in the university of Paris. In his lengthy elegiac poem De
Laudibus Divinae Sapientiae he traverses much of the same
ground. He further describes the chief seats of learning in his
day, summing up in a single couplet the four faculties in the
university of Paris, the paradisus deliciarum :
Hic florent artes; coelestis pagina regnat ;
Stant leges; lucet jus; medicina viget 3.
Joannes de Garlandia, who studied at Oxford and Paris (1204),
· Canterbury Tales, 16318.
E. L. I. CH. X.
? p. 453 ed. Wright, in Rolls Series, 1863,
13
## p. 194 (#214) ############################################
194 English Scholars of Paris
was an Englishman by birth, but regarded France as the land of
his adoption. His two principal poems, De Mysteriis and De
Triumphis Ecclesiae, are earlier than 1252. His Ars Rhythmica
quotes whole poems as examples of the rules of rhythm. His prose
works include three Vocabularies, one of which, with its interlinear
French glosses and its reference to the tricks played by Parisian
glovers on inexperienced students, was clearly written for use in
the university of Paris.
· Later in the same century, a chaplain of Eleanor of Provence,
queen of Henry III, named John Hoveden (d. 1275), wrote a
number of poems in riming quatrains. The longest of these
consists of nearly 4000 lines of meditation on the life of Christ.
This was translated into French. His most popular poem, that
beginning with the line Philomela, praevia temporis amoeni, was
translated into German and Spanish and, about 1460, into English.
Latin verse was one of the early amusements of the keen and
active Norman-Welshman, Giraldus Cambrensis, who was born
at the castle of Manorbier, which he dutifully describes as
“the sweetest spot in Wales? . " The grandson, on his mother's
side, of Nest, “the Helen of Wales," he celebrated the exploits
of her heroic descendants, the Geraldines, in one of his earliest
works, the Conquest of Ireland. He had himself inherited some
of Nest's beauty; he tells us that, in his youthful days, an
abbot of the Cistercian order once said of him in the presence of
Baldwin, then bishop of Worcester : “Is it possible that Youth,
which is so fair, can ever die ? ? " He received his early education
from two of the chaplains of his uncle, the bishop of St David's.
After continuing his studies at St Peter's abbey, Gloucester, he
paid three visits to Paris, spending three periods of several years
in its schools, and giving special attention to rhetoric. We have
his own authority for the fact that, when his lecturers desired
to point out a model scholar, they mentioned Gerald the
Welshman.
As archdeacon of Brecon (1175—1203) he was an ardent
reformer of ecclesiastical abuses in his native land, and his great
disappointment in life was that he never became (like his uncle)
bishop of St David's. On the first of several occasions when he
was thus disappointed, he returned to Paris, and there studied for
three years, besides lecturing with great success on canon law
(1177—80). Visits to Ireland followed in 1183 and 1185, when he
was in attendance on prince John. After the prince's return,
I vi, 98. See also the present work, ante, Chapter 1x, p. 177.
? 1v, 104.
31, 23.
## p. 195 (#215) ############################################
Giraldus Cambrensis
195
Gerald stayed till Easter, 1186, collecting materials for his two
works on Ireland. The Topography was completed in 1188. .
In the following year, he resolved on reciting it publicly at Oxford,
“where the most learned and famous of the English clergy were
then to be found. ” He read one of the three divisions of the work
on each of three successive days. “On the first ſhe informs us] he
received and entertained at his lodgings all the poor of the town;
on the next, all the doctors of the different faculties, and such of
their pupils as were of fame and note; and, on the third, the rest
of the scholars with the soldiers and the townsmen. ” He com-
placently assures us that “it was a costly and a noble act; a
revival of the bygone ages of poetry"; and (he proudly adds)
“neither present nor past time could furnish any record of such
a solemnity having ever taken place in Englandı. "
Meanwhile in 1188, Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury, had
been sent to Wales to preach the coming crusade. Riding in full
armour at the head of the procession, with the white cross gleaming
on his breastplate, he was accompanied by Ranulf de Glanville,
chief justiciar of England, and attended by a young man of
slender figure, delicate features and beetling eyebrows, a man of
learning and wit, and with no small share of self-conceit, “the
leader of the clergy of St David's, the scion of the blood-royal of
Wales. " The archbishop's exhortations produced little effect on
the common people, until he prompted Gerald to take up the
preaching. At Haverford, Gerald discoursed in Latin and also
in French. Although the crowd understood neither language,
they were moved to tears by the magic of his eloquence, and no
less than two hundred joined the standard of the cross? . It was
pleasantly remarked soon afterwards that, if Gerald had only
discoursed in Welsh, not a single soldier would have failed to
follow that banner. Three thousand recruits were enrolled ; the
archbishop and the chief justiciar had taken the cross at Radnor;
both of them kept their vow and died in 1190 in the course of the
crusade. Gerald, meanwhile, had been appointed to write its
history in Latin prose, and the archbishop's nephew, Joseph of
Exeter, to write it in verse. Joseph had already composed an
epic on the Trojan war, England's solitary Latin epic, which was
long attributed to Cornelius Nepos, notwithstanding its dedication
to the archbishop of Canterbury. He celebrated the crusade in
his Antiocheis, now represented by a solitary fragment on the
Flos Regum Arthurus. Gerald, however, neither went on the
11, pp. xlvii, 72 f.
* I, pp. xlix, 76.
