In a very
real sense the university of Oxford was a 'republic of letters.
real sense the university of Oxford was a 'republic of letters.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v02
As several of these books and tracts went into
two editions, they were, evidently, in considerable demand with the
general public; but the tinge of utility is upon them, and they have
not the literary interest of the larger works.
As has been observed already, the greater part of Caxton's
output was translated. Tudor prose, like that of the earlier period,
was chiefly fashioned on French models, to which we owe nearly
all the prose masterpieces of the epoch, and a proportionate debt of
gratitude. But Caxton found another quarry in fifteenth century
prose, and in the case of both English and French material he
acted as editor, translating with the same freedom as his prede-
cessors, and 'embellishing the old English' of Trevisa or of The
Golden Legend.
Caxton had lived so long abroad that he probably found more
difficulty than other writers in selecting the most suitable words to
employ; and it is difficult to believe that one hand alone turned
out so large a mass of literature as he did, any more than it
manipulated the printing-press unaided. Nevertheless, his trans-
lations must, like his press, be reckoned as having the stamp of
his authority, though others, probably, helped. A comparison
of his editions of The Golden Legend, Polychronicon and The
Knight of the Tower with the original English versions leaves the
older prose easily first. Again and again, the modern reader will
find the word rejected by Caxton more familiar than its substitute;
again and again, Caxton's curtailments, inversions, or expansions
merely spoil a piece of more vigorous narrative. This is parti-
cularly evident in The Knight of the Tower, which Caxton seems
to have translated entirely afresh, unaware of the older version,
whose superiority is remarkable. And in his original and interest-
ing prefaces we may, perhaps, see how it was he went wrong.
He appears to have been desirous of avoiding the colloquially
simple manner of earlier writers, and to have felt his way towards
the paragraph, working out, in those prefaces for which he had
no French exemplar, a somewhat involved style. He is fond of
relative sentences, and sometimes piles them on the top of each
other without finishing the earlier ones : ‘Which thing when
Gotard had advertised of and that he bare so away the bread, but
he wist not to whom ne whither, whereof he marvelled and so did
all his household? ' He mixes direct and indirect speech; he uses
the redundant which : 'I fynde many of the sayd bookes, whyche
Life of St Rocke, in Golden Legend, No. 154, tr. by Caxton,
## p. 334 (#352) ############################################
334 English Prose in the XVth Century
writers have abrydged it and many thynges left out' Only
when he has plain statements to convey, as in his continuation
of the Chronicle, or an anecdote to relate, such as the tale of the
dean and the poor parson in the epilogue to Aesop, does he become
direct; but then he is, sometimes, almost as vigorous as Latimer
himself. In this power of writing with a naïve vivacity, while
deliberately striving after a more ornate manner, Caxton belongs
to his age. He provides, as it were, a choice of styles for his
readers.
The mannerisms of the Middle Ages are still noticeable in
Caxton's work: in his irrepressible moralising, his quotations
from old authority, his conventional excuse for writing a book
(to keep himself from idleness, which is the nurse of sin), his
arrant inaccuracy as to names, his profession of incapacity 'to
smattre me in suche translacions'; but his definite claim to have
embellished the older authors, his quiet pride in his own author-
ship and the interest taken therein by his noble patrons, his
conscious appreciation of language, are of the new world, not of
the old. The days of anonymous compiling are over; and, hence-
forth, not the substance, alone, but its form will challenge
attention. Prose is no longer to be merely the vehicle of in-
formation, but conscious literature.
Caxton's largest and most popular book, The Golden Legend, is,
also, the most medieval in kind. It may almost be called a
cyclopaedia of traditional sacred lore, comprising not lives of the
saints only, but explanations of the church service and homilies
upon the feast days, as well as a shortened but complete chronicle,
Lombard in origin, to A. D. 1250. The public decidedly preferred
it to Malory or Chaucer, and it went through edition after edition.
For one thing, it was a long recognised classic; for another, it
presented the favourite mixture of morality combined with enter-
tainment. Many of the lives are copies from earlier English
versions, more or less 'mollified' by their editor. Those of French
saints are a new, and often slipshod, translation. Others are
compiled from the three renderings (Latin, English and French)
and from further sources such as Polychronicon and Josephus,
and practically form a new version. With regard to the merit of
these, opinions will differ. It may be true that Caxton's Becket,
for example, presents a more compact story than the original; on
the other hand, the incessant curtailment has spoiled the charming
incident of the Saracen princess. Caxton, moreover, altered the
usual arrangement of the Legend to insert a series of lives of
## p. 335 (#353) ############################################
The Golden Legend 335
Old Testament heroes, and it is a vital question in estimating
his rank as a prose writer whether these lives are to be
reckoned his own or not. They are so far superior to the mere
translations that one of his critics takes it for granted they must
be his own; another, that they must come from an earlier
English version now lost. The MSS of the old version now
remaining to us contain none of these Old Testament lives save
Adam, from which the Caxtonian version differs entirely. The
earlier Adam? , except for the usual legendary interpolations,
is strictly Biblical in language, adhering closely, at first, to the
revised Wyclifite version, afterwards, to the first Wyclifite version;
whereas Caxton's Adam is, in the main, a sermon, and the suc-
ceeding lives, though they follow the Bible closely as to incident,
are much shortened as to wording, and not distinctively reminis-
cent of the Wyclifite versions ; indeed, they afford more points of
resemblance to the later phraseology. If it can be supposed that
Caxton actually rendered them into English himself, his literary
powers here rose to a pitch far higher than he attained at any
other time?
Like The Golden Legend, the Morte – Arthur, the publication
of which holds a chief place in Caxton's work, looks back to the
Middle Ages. Based on translation, a mosaic of adaptations, it is,
nevertheless, a single literary creation such as no work of Caxton's
own can claim to be, and it has exercised a far stronger and longer
literary influence.
If, as is possible, Malory was the knight of Newbold Revell,
he had been a retainer of the last Beauchamp earl of Warwick, he
had seen the splendours of the last efforts of feudalism and had
served in that famous siege of Rouen which so deeply impressed
contemporary imagination. Apparently, he was a loyalist during the
Civil Wars and suffered from Yorkist revenge ; his burial in the
Grey Friars may, possibly, suggest that he even died a prisoner in
i In Lambeth MS, 72.
· The English MSS of The Golden Legend (for which see Pierce Butler, bibliog.
cap. VII), end with a kind of appendix on Adam and Eve and a sermon on the five
wiles of Pharaoh. The Lambeth MS (No. 72) adds a long account of the three kings
of Cologne, probably the legendary history often issued separately. Though this
MS contains only one hundred and sixty-two chapters to compare with the one
hundred and seventy-nine of MS Harl. 4775, it contains several English saints not
included in the latter or the parallel M8 Addit. 11,565. Caxton has not got all of
them: he omits Frideswide, Chadd and Bride, but those he has are nearly all exactly
like the older version, except K. Edmund, which he evidently obtained from some
source we do not know.
## p. 336 (#354) ############################################
336
English Prose in the XV th Century
Newgate. In any case, he must have died before the printing of
his immortal book, which comes to us, therefore, edited by Caxton,
to whom, possibly, are due most of the lacunae, bits of weak
grammar and confusions in names. Nevertheless, the style seals
the Morte d'Arthur as Malory's, not Caxton's. It is as individual
as is the author's mode of dealing with the material he gathered
from his wide field. This material Malory several times says he
found in a French book-the French book_but critics have
discovered a variety of sources. It is in the course of the story
that the multiplicity of sources is at times discernible in the
failure of certain portions to preserve a connecting thread, in the
interruption of the story of Tristram, in the curious doubling of
names, or the confusion of generations—the style reveals no trace
of inharmonious originals. The skilful blending of many ancient
tales, verse and prose, French and English, savage and saintly, into
a connected, if but loosely connected, whole is wrought in a
manner which leaves the Morte, while representative of some of
the nobler traits of Malory's century, in other respects typical
neither of that nor any particular epoch, and this is an element in
its immortality.
If such an ascetic purity and rapt devotion as glows in the
Grail story was practised among the mystics, such a fantastic
chivalry portrayed by Froissart, such a loyalty evinced by a
Bedford or a Fortescue, yet the Morte assumes the recognition
of a loftier standard of justice, purity and unselfishness than its
own century knew. These disinterested heroes, who give away all
they win with the magnanimity of an Audley at Poictiers, these
tireless champions of the helpless, these eternal lovers and their
idealised love, are of no era, any more than the forests in which
they for ever travel. And, if the constant tournaments and battles,
and the castles which seem to be the only places to live in, suggest
a medieval world, the total absence of reference to its basic
agricultural life and insistent commerce detach us from it again,
while the occasional mention of cities endows them with a splendour
and remoteness only to be paralleled in the ancient empire or
in the pictures of Turner.
Medieval stories were, naturally, negligent of causes in a world
where the unaccountable so constantly happened in real life, and
a similar suddenness of adventure may be found in tales much
older than this. Malory, however, on the threshold of an age
which would require dramatic motive or, at least, probability,
saved his book from the fate of the older, unreasoned fiction by
## p. 337 (#355) ############################################
Style of the Morte d'Arthur
337
investing it with an atmosphere, impossible to analyse, which
withdraws his figures to the region of mirage. This indescribable
conviction of magic places Malory's characters outside the sphere
of criticism, since, given the atmosphere, they are consistent
with themselves and their circumstances. Nothing is challenged,
analysed or emphasised ; curiosity as to causation is kept in
abeyance; retribution is worked out, but, apparently, uncon-
sciously. Like children's are the sudden quarrels and hatreds
and as sudden reconciliations. The motive forces are the elemental
passions of love and bravery, jealousy and revenge, never greed, or
lust, or cruelty. Courage and the thirst for adventure are taken
for granted, like the passion for the chase, and, against a brilliant
and moving throng of the brave and fair, a few conceptions are
made to stand forth as exceptional-a Lancelot, a Tristram, or
a Mark. Perhaps most skilful of all is the restraint exercised
in the portrayal of Arthur. As with Shakespeare's Caesar and
Homer's Helen, we realise Arthur by his effect upon his paladins ;
of himself we are not allowed to form a definite image, though
we may surmise justice to be his most distinct attribute. Neither
a hero of hard knocks nor an effective practical monarch, he is not
to be assigned to any known type, but remains the elusive centre
of the magical panorama.
The prose in which is unfolded this scarcely Christianised fairy
tale for the Grail was to Arthurian legend something as the
Crusades to feudalism-is, apparently, of a very simple, almost
childlike, type, with its incessant '80-and-then,' but, unlike mere
simplicity, it never becomes tedious. There is a kind of cadence,
at times almost musical, which bears the narrative on with a
gradual swell and fall proportioned to the importance of the
episodes, while brevity, especially at the close of a long incident,
sometimes approaches to epigram. But the style fits the subject
so perfectly as never to claim attention for itself. A transparent
clarity is of its essence. Too straightforward to be archaic,
idiomatic with a suavity denied to Caxton, Malory, who reaches
one hand to Chaucer and one to Spenser, escaped the stamp of a
particular epoch and bequeathed a prose epic to literature.
1
Tudor prose owes its foundations to three men of affairs who
took to literature late in life. Next to Caxton and Malory stands
Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners. Like Malory, he was an active
soldier, but, unlike him, a well known and prosperous man, a
politician and courtier. He belonged to the influential Bourchier
22
L. L. II.
CH. XIV.
## p. 338 (#356) ############################################
338
English Prose in the XV th Century
clan, Yorkists till the death of Edward IV, and had earned and
experienced the gratitude of Henry VII. But he had the less
good fortune to attract the favour of Henry VIII, and, late in
life, suffered from that monarch's customary harshness. It was
partly to solace his anxieties while captain of Calais, as well as
to eschew idleness, the mother of all the vices,' that he executed
the series of translations which secure to him the credit of a
remarkable threefold achievement. Berners was the first to intro-
duce to our literature the subsequently famous figure of Oberon,
the fairy king; he was the first to attempt in English the ornate
prose style which shortly became fashionable; and he gave to
historians at once a new source-book and a new model in his
famous rendering of the Chronicles of Froissart.
Lord Berners was peculiarly well fitted to execute this trans-
lation. He had himself been active at the siege of Terouenne and
on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, where Henry VIII regarded
himself as, in some sort, reviving the glories of old; he had visited
the Spanish court of Charles V and knew something of that of
France. He so thoroughly entered into the spirit of his original
as to make his work rather an adoption than a translation. In
his hands history is still near akin to fiction, but rather to the
heroic romance than to the well worn marvels of ancient chronicles.
If these remind us of Gesta Romanorum or of Sir John Man-
deville, Froissart, in the dress of Berners, may be paralleled
with Malory. Sir John of Hainault champions the cause of queen
Isabel as would a knight of Arthur; and from orthodox romance
comes the fancy picture of Bristol, the well closed city on the good
port of the sea, which beats round its strong castle. While the
old chronicles are wearisome, Berners conveys all the vigour and
freshness of Froissart in his descriptions and conversations. Both
the human interest and the chronicler's personal attitude towards
it are preserved. Berners is in full sympathy with Froissart's
aristocratic spirit, which places the violence of a duke of Britanny
or a count of Foix on a plane above criticism though not beyond
sympathy, and bestows a contemptuous pity on the crestfallen
burghers of Bruges and a lofty disdain on the upstart pride of
Ghent. In language, Berners follows the excellent method of
earlier translators: 'In that I have not followed myne authour
worde by worde yet I trust I have ensewed the true reporte of the
sentence of the mater. ' And he varies his narration pleasantly by
a not unskilful use of inversion.
But the Froissart of Berners taught something further to the
Tudor historians, of the value of well proportioned detail and
## p. 339 (#357) ############################################
Huon of Bordeaux
339
occasional quotation of witness in impressing the sense of actuality.
It can hardly be said that Hall and Holinshed, the most ambitious
of Tudor historians, borrow much from Berners in style; but it is
evident that the new model influenced their aims and methods
quite apart from its value as a new mine of information.
In Arthur of Little Britain and Huon of Bordeaux, Berners
took up the prose tale, or romance, of the ordinary medieval type,
most of the incidents in which are of the wildly absurd order. But
the favourite of the two, Huon, is remarkable for its unusual pair
of heroes. The uncouthness of Charlemagne and his court is in
odd contrast to the conventional pictures of Arthur, and the whole
romance is treated on a different and lower level, whether because it
represents a fourteenth or even thirteenth century story, or because
some folk-tale influence had been at work upon it. Huon himself
is apt to remind us of the ignobly born simpleton heroes of
German peasant story, and he is a bad simpleton. He runs
headlong into danger, not from extravagance of knightly daring
but out of stupidity, or greed, or childish impatience. He com-
plains querulously, tries to deceive his benefactor Auberon and
has no notion of either gratitude or morality. For instance,
Auberon has warned him never to tell a lie, but, so soon as the
paynim porter of Babylon asks whether he be a Saracen, ‘Yea'
replies Huon promptly, and then reflects that Auberon will surely
not be angry at such a lie, ‘sen I did it not wilfully but that
I forgat it ! ' It is only when he has committed some offence
against the fairy that Huon prides himself upon being a Christian :
his Saviour ought to shield him from the wrath of Auberon. And
yet this perjured simpleton is incongruously represented as the
only creature 'sinless' enough to be able to drink from Auberon's
magic horn.
Auberon himself is half-way to being the fairy of poetry ; 'a
dwarf of the fairy' is he, child of a fairy mother, the lady of the
isle' and a mortal father, Julius Caesar (who, in the Middle Ages,
obtained the same magical reputation as Vergil). Auberon, there-
fore, is mortal, he can weep, he falls sick; but he is never of more
stature than a child of three years, and his magical powers are so
absolute that he has only to wish, and his will accomplishes itself.
He knows all that passes afar as he rules in his fairy capital,
Momure, for he is a civilised fairy with a knowledge of politics.
He is a much better Christian than Huon, and, when he dies, his
corpse is buried in an abbey and his soul is carried to heaven
by an innumerable company of angels.
6
22-2
## p. 340 (#358) ############################################
340 English Prose in the XVth Century
Huon of Bordeaux was so popular as to obtain a reissue in
1601, modernised as to wording and adorned as to style'. As
Berners wrote it out, the English is extremely straightforward, and
bears hardly more trace of the graceful fluency of his Froissart
than of the novel experiment its translator was shortly to assay.
To a modern reader, it appears, at first sight, wonderful that the
most popular work of the translator of Froissart should have been
his rendering of a verbose, didactic book by the Spanish secretary
of Charles V, Antonio de Guevara, an author whose involutions of
language rapidly captivated fashionable taste in Spain, France and
England. Berners has the credit of first introducing him and his
style to English readers in The Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius,
which so much delighted the polite world that it went through
fourteen editions in half a century. The substance of this volume
of tedious letters and trite reflections Guevara pretended he had
discovered in an old MS, claiming for himself only the merit of
bestowing ‘style' upon the emperor's writing.
The desire to treat composition as itself an art was beginning
to be felt in England, as in other countries, and Berners must have
already paid attention to that peculiar manner of writing which,
vigorously introduced by translations of which his own was the
earliest specimen, was to receive its distinctive epithet from its
most perfect example, Euphues.
The prefaces of Berners to his Froissart are his first experi-
ments in the ornate, and not much more successful, though more
lavish, than the earlier groping of Caxton. 'As said is'; 'I pray
them that shall default find,' result from his preference of inversion
to direct speech, and relative pronouns are a puzzle to him.
Yet perhaps these elaborate prologues are but a fresh outburst
of the native love of double terms which hampered every prose
writer between Chaucer and Malory. The national bent to cumu-
lative expression must have been a good preparation to the
reception of the new style when it came, by the means of trans-
lated Guevara, in a flood. What was wanting was the art to weave
the customary repetitions of thought, the synonyms, antitheses and
alliterative combinations into a balance and harmony of sentences.
To this, neither Berners nor his nephew and literary disciple
Sir F. Bryan had attained. A comparison of his Golden Book with
North's rendering of it, The Dial of Princes, exhibits the crudity
of the efforts of Berners in this style. He can faithfully reproduce
the repetitions and run the slight idea to death, but the 'sauce of
the said sweet style, as his nephew terms it, lacks savour.
1 Cl. Sidney Lee's list in his edition of Huon, E. E. T. S.
## p. 341 (#359) ############################################
CHAPTER XV
ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH EDUCATION. UNIVERSITIES
AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS TO THE TIME OF COLET
In an age innocent of historical criticism, champions of Oxford
and Cambridge, waging a wordy war for the honour of prior
foundation, referred the establishment of their respective uni-
versities to Alfred and to Sigebert. In these days, the historians
of both are content to look to the twelfth century as the birth
period, not only of the English university, but of the university
of Paris from which English university life drew its early inspiration.
When the twelfth century drew to a close, Paris was the English
academic metropolis. Already, indeed, there were masters and
students in Oxford. What was the attraction which drew them
to a town that had no well based claims to high antiquity, and
was, otherwise, of little consequence, it is impossible now to point
out with certainty. Looking to the history of continental uni-
versities, analogy would seem to demand, as the nucleus of the
concourse, a cathedral or a monastic school. But Oxford was not a
bishop's seat; its diocesan was posted in far distant Lincoln. And,
if monks provided or salaried the first Oxford teachers, they wholly
failed to obtain, or, at any rate, to retain, control over the rising
university; there is not the slightest trace of monastic influence
in the organisation or studies of the earliest Oxford of historic
times. The cloister school of St Frideswide may well have
charged the atmosphere with the first odour of learning ; but
its walls at no time sheltered the university soul.
Certain, however, it is that, in the first half of the twelfth
century, a number of famous names are connected with Oxford
teaching. It may be that if, as Gervase of Canterbury testifies,
Vacarius taught civil law at Oxford, in 1149, he did not lecture as
an Oxford master, but as a member of the train of archbishop
Theobald. But Theobaldus Stampensis, as a recent historiand has
pointed out, in letters written between 1101 and 1117 styles
· Rashdall, Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, II, 333.
## p. 342 (#360) ############################################
342
English Education
himself master in Oxford; Robert Pullen, afterwards cardinal and
the author of Sententiarum Libri Octo, is stated, on good authority,
to have taught in Oxford in 1133; and, when in 1189 Giraldus
Cambrensis read his Topographia Hibernica at Oxford, 'where the
nost learned and famous of the clergy of England were then to be
found,' he entertained ‘all the doctors of the several faculties and
such of their pupils as were of greater fame and repute. '
In the story of this last incident we have clear indications
of an existing and of an organised Oxford university.
Modern research points to the year 1167 as the date of the birth
of Oxford as a studium generale, and offers a chain of circum-
stantial evidence to connect it with an expulsion of alien students
by the Parisian authorities and the contemporary recall by
Henry II, then engaged in the contest with Becket, of all clerks
holding English cures? However this may have been, the last few
years of the twelfth century furnish abundant proof of the presence
in Oxford of students in considerable numbers.
In 1192, Oxford, according to Robert of Devizes, could barely
maintain her clerks. In 1197, the great abbot Samson of Bury
entertained a large company of Oxford masters. When the
troubles of 1209 burst upon the university, scholars to the
number-according to Matthew Paris-of three thousand dis-
persed in various directions.
It is to this last occasion that the Oxford historian” refers the
appearance of Cambridge as a studium generale.
The story is characteristic of the times. An Oxford clerk kills
a woman-accidentally, as it is afterwards said. But the culprit
flees. The town authorities search the dwelling wherein he
lodged, and, in his absence, arrest two or three of his companions,
who are perfectly innocent of the offence, if such it be. King John,
however, is in the middle of his famous quarrel with the pope, and
is ready to wreak his vengeance on any clerk. On the king's
instructions, the innocent prisoners are hanged. In combined
fear and indignation, the Oxford masters proclaim a suspension
of studies; and the scholars scatter. Some merely retreat to
Reading; others migrate further afield. Some go to Paris; some
to Cambridge.
Cambridge, as a town, dates back to the days of the Roman
occupation of Britain, when it represented the intersection of two
great military highways and a consequent guard-post. William I
made it his base for attack upon Ely, and pulled down eighteen of
1 Rashdall, Chap. XII.
3 Ibid. a, 349,
2
## p. 343 (#361) ############################################
Beginnings of Oxford and Cambridge 343
its 387 dwelling-houses to secure a site for a castle which should
command the passage of its important ford. Henry I erected it
into a borough corporate. The establishment of a great fair at
Barnwell about 1103 and the settlement of Jews in 1106 denote a
growth of trade and population. At what date students first found
their way to its narrow streets, and what was the attractive force
compelling them thither, it is, as in the case of Oxford, impossible,
absolutely, to determine. Cambridge, like Oxford, was not a
cathedral city; and the wealthy priory of Barnwell, founded about
1112, lay well away from the district in which the students congre-
gated. A story of early lectures by a party of monks despatched
by Joffred, abbot of Crowland, to his manor of Cottenham is, by
internal evidence, demonstrated to be a late invention. It is
not until the first quarter of the thirteenth century that genuine
history records the presence in Cambridge of a concourse of
clerks; it is in 1231, when the Parisian scholars were returning
to their former quarters after the famous secession of 1229, that
we obtain our first clear proof of the existence in the English
fen town of an organised society of masters and students. In
that year (3 May) a royal writ commands the sheriff of the county
to proclaim and, if need be, take and imprison certain pre-
tended clerks in Cambridge qui sub nullius magistri scholarum
sunt disciplina et tuitione ; he is to expel within fifteen days
any clerk who is not under the control of a responsible master.
At the same time, a second writ addressed to the mayor and
bailiffs recites that Satis constat vobis quod apud villam nostram
Cantebr. studendi causa e diversis partibus tam cismarinis quam
transmarinis scholarium confluit multitudo, and enjoins that the
hostel rents chargeable to scholars shall be fixed secundum con-
suetudinem Universitatis by two masters and two good and lawful
men of the town.
The Oxford suspendium clericorum of 1209 had at least
reinforced the numbers of the Cambridge scholars. In 1229, a
riot in Paris led to a similar migration of students from the
metropolitan university. Henry III issued an invitation to the
migrants to come over into England, and settle 'in what cities,
boroughs and villages they pleased to choose'; and Cambridge
shared with Oxford in the benefits of the Parisian exodus.
Henceforward, Oxford and Cambridge advance on parallel lines,
Oxford enjoying the advantage of a start of fifty years.
The Oxford suspendium came to an end in 1214 under the
terms of a settlement arranged by the papal legate, Nicholas
## p. 344 (#362) ############################################
344
English Education
of Tusculum. A legatine ordinance subjected to penance the
executioners of the unfortunate victims of 1209 and, in true
medieval fashion, imposed a heavy mulct upon the townsmen,
present and future. It further required that a clerk arrested by
townsmen should be forthwith surrendered on the demand of
the bishop of Lincoln, or the archdeacon or his official, or 'the
chancellor or whomsoever the bishop of Lincoln shall depute to the
office. ' And the rents of halls were to be taxed by a joint board
of four burghers and four clerks. Here we have the record of the
beginnings of a privileged academic society. The first task of
an infant university is, necessarily, the organisation of its consti-
tution. That work was begun in Oxford before 1214.
In a very
real sense the university of Oxford was a 'republic of letters. '
The Oxford constitution, as it reveals itself in the course of the
thirteenth century, is, essentially, democratic. The centre of its
organic life is the assembly of masters. For the distribution of
her members into four nations, as at Paris, Oxford substituted a
division into northerners and southerners; Scottish students
combined with English north countrymen to form the boreales,
whilst Welshmen, ‘Marchmen’ and Irishmen were ranked with the
australes. The two proctors were the elected mouthpieces of the
two divisions. The supreme legislative authority was the entire body
of masters of all faculties assembled in the great congregation';
where the proctors brought forward proposed statutes, counted
the votes and announced decisions. A ‘lesser congregation' of
regents, i. e. of actually teaching masters, of all faculties, passed
graces affecting studies or dealt with minor finance; while a
yet narrower assembly of regents in arts supervised the grant of
the magisterial licence to teach, and elected the proctors for the
year.
The titular head of the university was the chancellor. It was
round this officer that the struggle for university liberties was
destined to be waged.
The first antagonists of the scholars were the townsmen.
Grasping burgher householders demanded unconscionable rents
or cheated the students in the sale of supplies; mayor and bailiffs
asserted an eager jurisdiction over peccant clerks. The scholars
had recourse to the ecclesiastical arm; and the legatine ordinance
of 1214 marks their first decisive victory. In the taxors of hostels
they obtained their tribunes against exaction, and, in the chan-
cellor 'or whomsoever the bishop of Lincoln shall depute to the
office,' they secured a resident protector against arbitrary arrest.
## p. 345 (#363) ############################################
Town and Gown
345
The chancellor was, in 1214, apparently, not, as yet, a regularly
appointed officer. Grosseteste, who, at a subsequent date, exer-
cised the functions of the office, was, in style, merely rector
scholarum. When the chancellor appears as the occupant of
a permanent office, it is as the bishop's officer. He was chosen,
indeed, from amongst the masters; but it was the bishop who
appointed. He was, in fact, an ecclesiastical official, who wielded
the weapon of the church's censure, whether for the needful
discipline of the scholars or for their protection against the venom
of the town.
Supported by king and bishop, the chancellor secured, step by
step, his position in and against the town. By successive royal
writs he obtained the confirmation of the system of conjoint
taxation of lodgings; the expulsion of irregular clerks; and the
use of the town prison and of the castle cells for the confinement
of his domestic recalcitrants. By a series of charters he secured
the limitation of the interest chargeable by Jews on the debts
of scholars; his own right of jurisdiction in actions of debt in
which one party was a clerk; and the right to take part in the
assize of bread and beer. In 1255, he laid the foundation of
a more extensive jurisdiction over laymen. In 1275, a royal writ
gave him cognisance of all personal actions wherein either party
was a scholar. When, in 1288, a royal bailiff engaged in altercation
with the chancellor, the indiscreet layman lost his office. In
1290, the jurisdiction of the chancellor was defined by parlia-
ment as covering all crimes committed in Oxford when one of
the parties was a scholar, except pleas of homicide and mayhem.
The ranks of privileged persons included, with clerks proper, their
attendants (familias), and all writers, parchment-makers, illumi-
nators, stationers and other craftsmen who were employed exclu-
sively by scholars.
In the struggles for these liberties the university employed
the weapon forged by the Roman plebs of old. Between 1260
and 1264, seceding masters formed a studium at Northampton,
and, at a later date (1334), a similar concourse at Stamford
threatened the well-being of Oxford.
On St Scholastica's Day 1354, a tavern brawl between innkeeper
and dissatisfied customers gave rise to a fierce three days' 'town
and gown,' wherein countrymen from the outskirts reinforced the
1 So late as the first quarter of the nineteenth century every candidate for an
Oxford degree was required to take an oath not to lecture at Stamford. Rashdall, 11,
398.
## p. 346 (#364) ############################################
346
English Education
-
burghers. The chancellor was shot at; inns and halls were
looted; scholars were slain; books were destroyed. The friars,
coming forth in solemn procession to play the part of peace-
makers, were maltreated. The scholars of Merton alone were able
to resist a siege, thanks to the strength of their walls.
But the blood of scholars became the seed of fresh university
privileges. The university declared a general suspension of studies,
and the town was put under interdict. A royal commission made
short work of its task. Mayor and bailiffs were imprisoned; the
sheriff was dismissed; an annual penance was imposed on the
burghers; and the chancellor's prerogative was increased by the
transfer to him of no inconsiderable share of the local government.
Yet once more, in 1405, the university, in amplification of a
charter of Richard II, secured the right of trial before its own
steward of a privileged person indicted for felony. The victory
over the town was now complete.
At Cambridge, in like fashion, although without the accompani-
ment of serious bloodshed, the university developed its constitution;
and a long series of royal writs and parliamentary enactments
fortified the chancellor against the burghers. A great riot in 1318–
the year of Tyler's insurrection—when the townsmen sacked Bene't
College and burnt charters and title-deeds, was the Cambridge
St Scholastica’s Day. The privileges of the Cambridge chancellor,
though ample and, to the town, sufficiently galling, fell short of the
fulness of those of his Oxonian fellow-officials; and the Cambridge
constitution differed in some details from the Oxford model
Meanwhile, bishop's officer as he was in origin, the chancellor, in
Cambridge, as in Oxford, had, with the episcopal countenance, first
shaken himself free from the control of other episcopal officials; and
then, in alliance with the archbishop and with the pope, successfully
challenged the authority of the diocesan himself. The contest
against minor ecclesiastical officials is best illustrated by the award
issued in 1276 by bishop Hugo de Balsham in the dispute between
the archdeacon of Ely and the Cambridge scholars, who had denied
the jurisdiction of the archidiaconal court, and in a contemporary
discussion between the Cambridge chancellor and the 'Master of
Glomery,' in whom we may recognise the master of local grammar
schools, who was a nominee of the archdeacon. The award is
conceived in the spirit at once of liberal policy and of strict
justice. He adjudges that all disputes in which a 'glomerel’ is
defendant shall be decided by the Magister Glomeriae; he thus
enjoying the same privilege as that possessed by the other masters,
1
## p. 347 (#365) ############################################
University and Bishop
347
of deciding the suits in which his students were involved. But this
minor jurisdiction shall not extend (1) to the taxation of houses, or
(2) to serious offences calling for imprisonment or expulsion from
the university; in which cases the chancellor shall adjudicate.
A scholar plaintiff may appeal to the chancellor from the decision
of the Magister Glomeriae; but in disputes between two glomerels
the chancellor shall have no right of intervention, except in
the two above cited cases. Persons doing services exclusively for
scholars shall enjoy the privileges of scholars, and shall rank
as exempt from the control of the archdeacon. Rectors, vicars,
parish chaplains and others in the service of local churches
shall be held subject to the archdeacon; but clergy residing in
Cambridge merely for the purposes of study shall be exempt.
Hugo concludes by approving and confirming a statute issued
by the chancellor and masters which provides
that no one should receive a scholar who has not had a fixed master within
thirteen days after the said scholar had entered the university, or who had
not taken care that his name had been within the time aforesaid inserted in
the matriculation book of his master, unless the master's absence or legitimate
occupation should have prevented the samel.
It may be that the equity of this decision and the consequent
absence of local friction helped to preserve from attack for a long
period that jurisdiction of the bishop himself, which Hugo clearly
reserved. Moreover, Hugo himself was the founder of Peterhouse,
the oldest Cambridge college ; he, and a long line of his successors
as diocesans, not only took an enlightened interest in the well-being
of the scholars, but were enrolled among their most conspicuous
benefactors; and the propinquity of Cambridge to Ely gave little
opportunity for the unnoted nursing of rebellious projects. Certain
it is that the bishop of Ely continued to exercise a regular juris-
diction over the university down to the date of the Barnwell
Process in 1430. And then the chancellor, John Holbroke, master
of Peterhouse, and his advisers turned against their diocesan and,
at the same time, against his metropolitan, the engine of the
framers of the forged decretals. They submitted to the papal
arbitrators at Barnwell Priory, and secured a favourable verdict
on, a bull of Honorius I and a like asserted document of Sergius I,
which declared the exemption of the university of Cambridge
from all archiepiscopal, episcopal or other ecclesiastical control.
Henceforward, the university was not only a regularly recog-
nised and organised body, orderly, legislative and possessed of
1 Trans, in Mullinger, Vol. 1, p. 226.
## p. 348 (#366) ############################################
348
English Education
peculiar powers--in a word, a privileged corporation ; but it
was independent of other control than that of king, parliament
and pope.
Oxford reached the same end gradually and more rapidly.
Lincoln was far removed from the university town. Between the
university and bishop Grosseteste, a former rector scholarum
and an enthusiastic patron of learning, the relations were of the
most friendly order; but under his immediate successor disputes
began. Prolonged vacancies in the see assisted the scholars in
the establishment of their independence. The position of the
bishop was, indirectly, sapped by the successive royal amplifications
of the rights of the chancellor in the town. In 1280, the privileges
of the chancellor were strongly asserted against bishop Oliver
Sutton, the grant of probates of scholars' wills being, inter alia,
claimed. The contention was boldly put forward that, even in
spiritual matters, the jurisdiction of the diocesan was only 'in
defect of the chancellor,' or by way of appeal in the last resort
(in defectu cancellarii et universitatis). In a provincial synod,
Oliver's episcopal brethren, with their metropolitan, were induced
to side with the university against his lordship of Lincoln. In
future, an appeal was to run from the chancellor's court to the
regent congregation; thence, finally, to the great congregation.
In 1350, an application to the pope resulted in the reduction to
a mere formality of the episcopal confirmation of the Oxford chan-
cellor, and, in 1368, its necessity was, by the same authority, entirely
abrogated. In 1395, a bull of Boniface IX exempted the university
from the jurisdiction of all archbishops, bishops and ordinaries,
and, when, in 1411, archbishop Arundel, in pursuit of his anti-
Lollard crusade, attempted a visitation of Oxford, St Mary's was
fortified against him, and swarms of armed scholars compelled his
retreat. In this instance, the university acted with more legality
than discretion. The king took up the cause of his offended
kinsman; the chancellor and proctors were summoned to London
and compelled to resign; and, when the university decreed a cessa-
tion and boldly re-elected the deposed officers, pope John XXIII
ruined the defences of the scholars by revoking the bull of
Boniface, Parliament confirmed their defeat by a declaration
of the archbishop's right of visitation. It was not until 1479, after
the extirpation of Lollardism, that, by means of a bull of Sixtus IV,
the university recovered the lost ground. Meanwhile, the scholars
had learned a lesson in policy; the chancellorship was erected into
a permanent office and conferred upon a powerful court prelate or
## p. 349 (#367) ############################################
The Coming of the Friars
349
noble; a vice-chancellor annually nominated by the chancellor
assumed the functions of the resident head.
The peace of both universities was, from time to time, disturbed
by serious domestic broils. Irish students raised commotions; the
struggles of north and south well-nigh assumed the proportions
of petty civil wars, and called for the interference of the king.
Disputes, more interesting from the educational standpoint, were
excited by the presence of monks and friars. When the successive
barbarian irruptions burst upon western Europe, learning had taken
refuge in the monasteries. It might have been anticipated that,
on the return of brighter days, scholarship would emerge with the
Benedictines. Within limits this, indeed, had been the case. The
Benedictines never lost their love of letters, and their schools were
long and deservedly in high repute. The Benedictine monasteries
and the episcopal schools together preserved the useful arts of
writing, illuminating and music, and in the Latin tongue held the
avenue to ancient stores of knowledge. But the Benedictine
scheme of education was directed exclusively to the requirements
of the religious life. The Benedictines had their schools in
Oxford and Cambridge before the rise of the two universities;
but it was not until after the coming of the mendicants' that
they were roused to play an active part in English university life.
In 1217, within two years after the foundation of their order,
the Dominicans planted a settlement in Paris; in 1221 they
invaded Oxford; and in 1274 they were in Cambridge. They
were followed at Oxford in 1224 by the Franciscans, who, at the
same time, appeared in Cambridge. Entering in the guise of
mendicants, they speedily became possessed of valuable property,
and, within fifty years of their first appearance, their magnificent
buildings were the envy of the scholars of both universities.
Carmelites, Augustinians and White Canons imitated the example
of the Black and the Grey Friars, and their convents lined the
streets of the two university towns. Franciscans and Dominicans
alike fung themselves with enthusiasm into university life.
In the first quarter of the twelfth century Irnerius, the father
1 Already, in 1278, the Benedictine priory of Durham had begun to despatch clerks
to study in Oxford; and, before the end of the thirteenth century, the site of Durham
Hall was acquired. The Benedictines of St Peter's at Gloucester established in 1283
at Oxford a Hall for the accommodation of thirteen students of their order; and,
eight years later, the numbers of the students of Gloucester Hall were increased by a
combined effort of other southern Benedictine convents. In 1334, a Bull of Benedict
XII required that each Benedictine society should send up one monk in twenty witb a
fixed allowance to pursue higher studies in some university.
## p. 350 (#368) ############################################
350
English Education
of the glossators, had laid the foundations of the fame of Bologna
as a school of civil law. Accursius had emulated him at Florence.
Vacarius, attempting to follow the example at Oxford, was, thanks
to the jealousy of the canonists, silenced by Stephen. In 1144,
the Benedictine Gratian published at Rome the famous Decretum,
in which he provided the students of canon law with a Corpus
Juris worthy to rank with the Pandects of Justinian. At Oxford,
the opposition of the canonists to the civil law was soon exchanged
for ardent pursuit, and doctors graduated as utriusque juris.
Meanwhile (c. 1160) Peter Lombard, archbishop of Paris,
attempted to render to theologians the service which Gratian
had rendered to the canonists. Applying to such subjects
as the Trinity, free will, original sin, the sacraments, the resur-
rection of the dead and final judgment, the methods of a
strict dialectic, he developed a scientific theological system. His
Sententiae became the standard theological text-book of the
Middle Ages. The mendicants, invading the seats of Parisian
teachers, endeavoured to ally with Christian doctrine an Aristo-
telian philosophy which had trickled through the schools of
Jews and Saracens. They thus became the leading exponents of
scholasticism.
At Oxford, the Franciscans Duns Scotus and William of Ockham
emulated the fame won for the Dominicans at Paris by Albertus
Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Grosseteste, before his elevation to
high office, lectured in the Oxonian Franciscan school, where he
had as pupil Adam Marsh, destined to be Hugo de Balsham's com-
petitor for the see of Ely. Friar Bungay became head of the
Franciscan convent in Cambridge, where Humphry Necton, a
Carmelite, took the D. D. degree in 1259. The glory of the Grey
Friars culminated in Roger Bacon (c. 121494). Skilled in all
the recognised studies of his age, he, in opposition to prevailing
ideas, though remaining a schoolman, pointed to the study of
languages and mathematics as affording the true basis for a sound
system of education, and incurred amongst his contemporaries and
succeeding generations the lasting suspicion of tampering with the
illegitimate by leading the way in the pursuit of natural science.
As a rule, the schoolmen did not amass knowledge, but trained
ability; the real value of their discussions lay in their development
of the art of expression, in the fostering of agility of thought and
subtle distinction : in a word, in the development of pure dialectical
skill. Logic
Logic was their contribution to the world's future.
Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenford had 'unto logik longe y-go. '
a
## p. 351 (#369) ############################################
The Fall of the Friars
351
6
It was not their studies but their ambition which lost to the
mendicants the favour of the medieval universities. Starting as
assailants of the abuses of the older orders, within a very few years
they furnished to the world a still more striking spectacle of
moral degradation ; and the barefooted friars rivalled the Cister-
cians as pure epicureans.
I fond there freres, Alle the fouro ordres
Prechynge the peple, For profit of hemselves;
Glosed the gospel, As hem good liked;
For covertise of copes, Construwed it as thei wolde.
So Piers the Plowman, voicing the experience of the nation at large.
In the universities, whilst claiming the rights, the friars strove to
shirk the duties, of the non-professed scholar. 'It was their object
to create an imperium in imperio, and, while availing themselves
of these centres as fields of propagandism, they were really intent
on the creation of a rival if not of a hostile authority. ' A fierce
struggle ensued. Already, in 1300, the chancellor of Cambridge,
Stephen de Haselfield, as the outcome of a brawl, excommunicated
the friars, two of whom were expelled from the university. On
an appeal to the pope, the friars secured the honours of the field;
but the university authorities returned to the fray. In 1336, a
university statute forbade the friars to admit into their orders
any scholar under 18. Two years later, a similar statute was passed
in Oxford. In 1359, the Cambridge houses enacted that two
members of the same convent of mendicants should not incept in
the same year. An appeal to parliament went in their favour, and,
in 1375, the friars actually obtained a papal bull dispensing, in
their case, with the statutory requirement of actual regency in
arts before the assumption of the degree of D. D. The mendicants
in both universities had outstayed their welcome a full century
before Chaucer launched at them the shafts of his humour, the
Piers Plowman poems lashed them with invective, or Wyclif,
himself a distinguished schoolman, poured forth on them the
vials of his vituperation. In the foundations of both Walter de
Merton and Hugo de Balsham, admission into a religious order was
expressly declared incompatible with membership of a college
society. With these two names and with the rise of colleges we
reach a new stage in English university history.
How was the throng of medieval scholars maintained ? Many
of the students could and did support themselves. The lecturers
were for generations maintained by the collectae of their auditors.
The fees levied for graces, the dues collected from the principals
## p. 352 (#370) ############################################
352
English Education
of halls and keepers of acts and various academic contributions
and fines, all predicate a paying clientèle. Not infrequently, as
it would seem, a wealthy scholar defrayed the charges of a
more needy companion. When the colleges began to admit
pensioners, these paid highly for their accommodation, and
in proportion to their rank. Henry Beaufort at Peterhouse, in
1388—9, paid the sum of twenty shillings as pensio camerae,
while a humbler contemporary paid 68. 8d. There were scholars
in both universities who ruffled it after the manner of courtiers;
who affected lovelocks, red hosen and long shoes; who wore rings
‘for vain glorying and jettyng, pernicious example and scandal of
others'; and otherwise in their attire came within the compass of
the sumptuary provincial constitution issued by archbishop Strat-
ford in 1342. But Chaucer's typical clerk was of another mould.
The bulk of the students who thronged the streets of the medieval
university were, undoubtedly, poor. Many were reduced to strange
shifts for daily bread. The bursar's accounts of Peterhouse in
the early fifteenth century show poor scholars engaged in digging
the foundations of buildings, in carrying earth and bricks and
in other unskilled labour. The sizars of the following and many
succeeding centuries were regularly employed in menial tasks.
Favourite medieval stories introduce us to poor students begging
on the highways or singing from door to door. The relief of such
was always ranked as a peculiarly meritorious field for medieval
philanthropy. Noble personages and prelates supported poor
scholars in the universities. Edward II maintained 32 boys under
their master at Cambridge ; and his example was followed by his
successor, who erected for his pensioners a special hall of residence,
the King's Hall. Wealthy religious houses defrayed the charges
of selected students of their orders. Benefactors, even before the
college era, endowed loan-chests from which temporary advances
could be made on security to hard-pressed scholars. Yet more
deserving of university gratitude were the founders of 'exhibitions. '
William de Kilkenny, ninth bishop of Ely, dying in 1256—7,
bequeathed 200 marks to the priory of Barnwell in trust for the
payment of 10 marks annually to two priests studying divinity in
Cambridge. This was the earliest foundation of the type in the
junior university. William of Durham, archbishop-elect of Rouen,
had, seven years earlier, bequeathed to the university of Oxford
310 marks, to be invested for the maintenance of ten or more
masters of arts studying theology.
An all-important step forward was taken by Walter de Merton.
## p. 353 (#371) ############################################
Walter de Merton and Hugo de Balsham 353
a
Scholars not belonging to any religious order had hitherto, neces-
sarily, either lodged with townsmen or in some specially hired
hostel or inn. Of these last, there were many in both universities.
Fuller records the names of thirty-four in Cambridge, several of
which were still standing in his day, although with an altered
character. Oxford claims a far larger number. These halls were
managed by principals recognised by, and usually, though not
necessarily, masters of, the university. Some of them were con-
nected with special faculties, as law, divinity, or the arts. But
they were mere residential inns, neither chartered nor endowed.
In 1263 or 1264, Walter de Merton founded 'the House of the
Scholars of Merton' at Malden, in Surrey, linking it with a com-
pany of scholars resident in Oxford, and there supported on the
produce of the Malden estate. A few years later, the warden was
transferred from Malden to the direct charge of the Oxford group,
and, in 1274, under revised statutes, the college of Merton started
on its long and brilliant history as a permanently settled, chartered
and endowed foundation,
In 1280, Hugo de Balsham, tenth bishop of Ely, imitated in
Cambridge the example of Walter de Merton by planting a settle-
ment of 'studious scholars' among the brethren of the hospital
of St John; in 1284, the severance of the scholars from the
brethren gave rise to the establishment of Peterhouse, the oldest
of Cambridge colleges.
The college, it must be noted, was something more than a hall. In
the hall, with its officially fixed rental, students of all degrees found
some protection against the arbitrary exactions of the townsmen.
They were subjected to certain disciplinary regulations. They paid
for their accommodation. The college, on the other hand, was,
in origin, the endowed home of a limited number of students of a
particular class. Further, the college was not a monastery. It
had a rule, which borrowed something from the principles which
experience had approved in the orders; but it was not monastic.
On the contrary, it was anti-monastic: the scholars of Walter de
Merton and Hugo de Balsham were directly prepared for service
in the world as men of affairs. Finally, the college was not, in the
first instance, a profit-making school. Its doors were not open to
all seekers after knowledge. Its scholars were members of a close
corporation, living on a common stock, men of approved ability
pursuing advanced studies under discipline. The disturbing guest
and the would be perendinant were, alike, repelled.
This conception comes out clearly in the statutes of Merton
a
E. L. II.
CH, XV.
23
## p. 354 (#372) ############################################
354
English Education
and in the earliest Peterhouse statutes, which were avowedly
based upon the Merton rule. The Peterhouse society was to
consist of fifteen scholars, one of whom was, as the master, to be
the business head. A candidate for a vacancy in the body must
be vir honestus, castus, pacificus, humilis et modestus (quatenus
humana fragilitas nostra sinit) et indigens, ac in arte dialectica
Baccalaureus. The field of study for the scholars was determined
as including the arts, the philosophy of Aristotle and theology.
The majority of the scholars must always be engaged in the diligent
pursuit of the liberal arts; only with the express sanction of the
whole body were certain designated fellows to proceed to the
reading of theology. Two, but not more at the same time, might
study the canon or the civil law, one, the medical art. Each
fellow must follow a regular academic course, must prepare him-
self by hearing lectures, reading and discussion, for a career of
activity.
two editions, they were, evidently, in considerable demand with the
general public; but the tinge of utility is upon them, and they have
not the literary interest of the larger works.
As has been observed already, the greater part of Caxton's
output was translated. Tudor prose, like that of the earlier period,
was chiefly fashioned on French models, to which we owe nearly
all the prose masterpieces of the epoch, and a proportionate debt of
gratitude. But Caxton found another quarry in fifteenth century
prose, and in the case of both English and French material he
acted as editor, translating with the same freedom as his prede-
cessors, and 'embellishing the old English' of Trevisa or of The
Golden Legend.
Caxton had lived so long abroad that he probably found more
difficulty than other writers in selecting the most suitable words to
employ; and it is difficult to believe that one hand alone turned
out so large a mass of literature as he did, any more than it
manipulated the printing-press unaided. Nevertheless, his trans-
lations must, like his press, be reckoned as having the stamp of
his authority, though others, probably, helped. A comparison
of his editions of The Golden Legend, Polychronicon and The
Knight of the Tower with the original English versions leaves the
older prose easily first. Again and again, the modern reader will
find the word rejected by Caxton more familiar than its substitute;
again and again, Caxton's curtailments, inversions, or expansions
merely spoil a piece of more vigorous narrative. This is parti-
cularly evident in The Knight of the Tower, which Caxton seems
to have translated entirely afresh, unaware of the older version,
whose superiority is remarkable. And in his original and interest-
ing prefaces we may, perhaps, see how it was he went wrong.
He appears to have been desirous of avoiding the colloquially
simple manner of earlier writers, and to have felt his way towards
the paragraph, working out, in those prefaces for which he had
no French exemplar, a somewhat involved style. He is fond of
relative sentences, and sometimes piles them on the top of each
other without finishing the earlier ones : ‘Which thing when
Gotard had advertised of and that he bare so away the bread, but
he wist not to whom ne whither, whereof he marvelled and so did
all his household? ' He mixes direct and indirect speech; he uses
the redundant which : 'I fynde many of the sayd bookes, whyche
Life of St Rocke, in Golden Legend, No. 154, tr. by Caxton,
## p. 334 (#352) ############################################
334 English Prose in the XVth Century
writers have abrydged it and many thynges left out' Only
when he has plain statements to convey, as in his continuation
of the Chronicle, or an anecdote to relate, such as the tale of the
dean and the poor parson in the epilogue to Aesop, does he become
direct; but then he is, sometimes, almost as vigorous as Latimer
himself. In this power of writing with a naïve vivacity, while
deliberately striving after a more ornate manner, Caxton belongs
to his age. He provides, as it were, a choice of styles for his
readers.
The mannerisms of the Middle Ages are still noticeable in
Caxton's work: in his irrepressible moralising, his quotations
from old authority, his conventional excuse for writing a book
(to keep himself from idleness, which is the nurse of sin), his
arrant inaccuracy as to names, his profession of incapacity 'to
smattre me in suche translacions'; but his definite claim to have
embellished the older authors, his quiet pride in his own author-
ship and the interest taken therein by his noble patrons, his
conscious appreciation of language, are of the new world, not of
the old. The days of anonymous compiling are over; and, hence-
forth, not the substance, alone, but its form will challenge
attention. Prose is no longer to be merely the vehicle of in-
formation, but conscious literature.
Caxton's largest and most popular book, The Golden Legend, is,
also, the most medieval in kind. It may almost be called a
cyclopaedia of traditional sacred lore, comprising not lives of the
saints only, but explanations of the church service and homilies
upon the feast days, as well as a shortened but complete chronicle,
Lombard in origin, to A. D. 1250. The public decidedly preferred
it to Malory or Chaucer, and it went through edition after edition.
For one thing, it was a long recognised classic; for another, it
presented the favourite mixture of morality combined with enter-
tainment. Many of the lives are copies from earlier English
versions, more or less 'mollified' by their editor. Those of French
saints are a new, and often slipshod, translation. Others are
compiled from the three renderings (Latin, English and French)
and from further sources such as Polychronicon and Josephus,
and practically form a new version. With regard to the merit of
these, opinions will differ. It may be true that Caxton's Becket,
for example, presents a more compact story than the original; on
the other hand, the incessant curtailment has spoiled the charming
incident of the Saracen princess. Caxton, moreover, altered the
usual arrangement of the Legend to insert a series of lives of
## p. 335 (#353) ############################################
The Golden Legend 335
Old Testament heroes, and it is a vital question in estimating
his rank as a prose writer whether these lives are to be
reckoned his own or not. They are so far superior to the mere
translations that one of his critics takes it for granted they must
be his own; another, that they must come from an earlier
English version now lost. The MSS of the old version now
remaining to us contain none of these Old Testament lives save
Adam, from which the Caxtonian version differs entirely. The
earlier Adam? , except for the usual legendary interpolations,
is strictly Biblical in language, adhering closely, at first, to the
revised Wyclifite version, afterwards, to the first Wyclifite version;
whereas Caxton's Adam is, in the main, a sermon, and the suc-
ceeding lives, though they follow the Bible closely as to incident,
are much shortened as to wording, and not distinctively reminis-
cent of the Wyclifite versions ; indeed, they afford more points of
resemblance to the later phraseology. If it can be supposed that
Caxton actually rendered them into English himself, his literary
powers here rose to a pitch far higher than he attained at any
other time?
Like The Golden Legend, the Morte – Arthur, the publication
of which holds a chief place in Caxton's work, looks back to the
Middle Ages. Based on translation, a mosaic of adaptations, it is,
nevertheless, a single literary creation such as no work of Caxton's
own can claim to be, and it has exercised a far stronger and longer
literary influence.
If, as is possible, Malory was the knight of Newbold Revell,
he had been a retainer of the last Beauchamp earl of Warwick, he
had seen the splendours of the last efforts of feudalism and had
served in that famous siege of Rouen which so deeply impressed
contemporary imagination. Apparently, he was a loyalist during the
Civil Wars and suffered from Yorkist revenge ; his burial in the
Grey Friars may, possibly, suggest that he even died a prisoner in
i In Lambeth MS, 72.
· The English MSS of The Golden Legend (for which see Pierce Butler, bibliog.
cap. VII), end with a kind of appendix on Adam and Eve and a sermon on the five
wiles of Pharaoh. The Lambeth MS (No. 72) adds a long account of the three kings
of Cologne, probably the legendary history often issued separately. Though this
MS contains only one hundred and sixty-two chapters to compare with the one
hundred and seventy-nine of MS Harl. 4775, it contains several English saints not
included in the latter or the parallel M8 Addit. 11,565. Caxton has not got all of
them: he omits Frideswide, Chadd and Bride, but those he has are nearly all exactly
like the older version, except K. Edmund, which he evidently obtained from some
source we do not know.
## p. 336 (#354) ############################################
336
English Prose in the XV th Century
Newgate. In any case, he must have died before the printing of
his immortal book, which comes to us, therefore, edited by Caxton,
to whom, possibly, are due most of the lacunae, bits of weak
grammar and confusions in names. Nevertheless, the style seals
the Morte d'Arthur as Malory's, not Caxton's. It is as individual
as is the author's mode of dealing with the material he gathered
from his wide field. This material Malory several times says he
found in a French book-the French book_but critics have
discovered a variety of sources. It is in the course of the story
that the multiplicity of sources is at times discernible in the
failure of certain portions to preserve a connecting thread, in the
interruption of the story of Tristram, in the curious doubling of
names, or the confusion of generations—the style reveals no trace
of inharmonious originals. The skilful blending of many ancient
tales, verse and prose, French and English, savage and saintly, into
a connected, if but loosely connected, whole is wrought in a
manner which leaves the Morte, while representative of some of
the nobler traits of Malory's century, in other respects typical
neither of that nor any particular epoch, and this is an element in
its immortality.
If such an ascetic purity and rapt devotion as glows in the
Grail story was practised among the mystics, such a fantastic
chivalry portrayed by Froissart, such a loyalty evinced by a
Bedford or a Fortescue, yet the Morte assumes the recognition
of a loftier standard of justice, purity and unselfishness than its
own century knew. These disinterested heroes, who give away all
they win with the magnanimity of an Audley at Poictiers, these
tireless champions of the helpless, these eternal lovers and their
idealised love, are of no era, any more than the forests in which
they for ever travel. And, if the constant tournaments and battles,
and the castles which seem to be the only places to live in, suggest
a medieval world, the total absence of reference to its basic
agricultural life and insistent commerce detach us from it again,
while the occasional mention of cities endows them with a splendour
and remoteness only to be paralleled in the ancient empire or
in the pictures of Turner.
Medieval stories were, naturally, negligent of causes in a world
where the unaccountable so constantly happened in real life, and
a similar suddenness of adventure may be found in tales much
older than this. Malory, however, on the threshold of an age
which would require dramatic motive or, at least, probability,
saved his book from the fate of the older, unreasoned fiction by
## p. 337 (#355) ############################################
Style of the Morte d'Arthur
337
investing it with an atmosphere, impossible to analyse, which
withdraws his figures to the region of mirage. This indescribable
conviction of magic places Malory's characters outside the sphere
of criticism, since, given the atmosphere, they are consistent
with themselves and their circumstances. Nothing is challenged,
analysed or emphasised ; curiosity as to causation is kept in
abeyance; retribution is worked out, but, apparently, uncon-
sciously. Like children's are the sudden quarrels and hatreds
and as sudden reconciliations. The motive forces are the elemental
passions of love and bravery, jealousy and revenge, never greed, or
lust, or cruelty. Courage and the thirst for adventure are taken
for granted, like the passion for the chase, and, against a brilliant
and moving throng of the brave and fair, a few conceptions are
made to stand forth as exceptional-a Lancelot, a Tristram, or
a Mark. Perhaps most skilful of all is the restraint exercised
in the portrayal of Arthur. As with Shakespeare's Caesar and
Homer's Helen, we realise Arthur by his effect upon his paladins ;
of himself we are not allowed to form a definite image, though
we may surmise justice to be his most distinct attribute. Neither
a hero of hard knocks nor an effective practical monarch, he is not
to be assigned to any known type, but remains the elusive centre
of the magical panorama.
The prose in which is unfolded this scarcely Christianised fairy
tale for the Grail was to Arthurian legend something as the
Crusades to feudalism-is, apparently, of a very simple, almost
childlike, type, with its incessant '80-and-then,' but, unlike mere
simplicity, it never becomes tedious. There is a kind of cadence,
at times almost musical, which bears the narrative on with a
gradual swell and fall proportioned to the importance of the
episodes, while brevity, especially at the close of a long incident,
sometimes approaches to epigram. But the style fits the subject
so perfectly as never to claim attention for itself. A transparent
clarity is of its essence. Too straightforward to be archaic,
idiomatic with a suavity denied to Caxton, Malory, who reaches
one hand to Chaucer and one to Spenser, escaped the stamp of a
particular epoch and bequeathed a prose epic to literature.
1
Tudor prose owes its foundations to three men of affairs who
took to literature late in life. Next to Caxton and Malory stands
Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners. Like Malory, he was an active
soldier, but, unlike him, a well known and prosperous man, a
politician and courtier. He belonged to the influential Bourchier
22
L. L. II.
CH. XIV.
## p. 338 (#356) ############################################
338
English Prose in the XV th Century
clan, Yorkists till the death of Edward IV, and had earned and
experienced the gratitude of Henry VII. But he had the less
good fortune to attract the favour of Henry VIII, and, late in
life, suffered from that monarch's customary harshness. It was
partly to solace his anxieties while captain of Calais, as well as
to eschew idleness, the mother of all the vices,' that he executed
the series of translations which secure to him the credit of a
remarkable threefold achievement. Berners was the first to intro-
duce to our literature the subsequently famous figure of Oberon,
the fairy king; he was the first to attempt in English the ornate
prose style which shortly became fashionable; and he gave to
historians at once a new source-book and a new model in his
famous rendering of the Chronicles of Froissart.
Lord Berners was peculiarly well fitted to execute this trans-
lation. He had himself been active at the siege of Terouenne and
on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, where Henry VIII regarded
himself as, in some sort, reviving the glories of old; he had visited
the Spanish court of Charles V and knew something of that of
France. He so thoroughly entered into the spirit of his original
as to make his work rather an adoption than a translation. In
his hands history is still near akin to fiction, but rather to the
heroic romance than to the well worn marvels of ancient chronicles.
If these remind us of Gesta Romanorum or of Sir John Man-
deville, Froissart, in the dress of Berners, may be paralleled
with Malory. Sir John of Hainault champions the cause of queen
Isabel as would a knight of Arthur; and from orthodox romance
comes the fancy picture of Bristol, the well closed city on the good
port of the sea, which beats round its strong castle. While the
old chronicles are wearisome, Berners conveys all the vigour and
freshness of Froissart in his descriptions and conversations. Both
the human interest and the chronicler's personal attitude towards
it are preserved. Berners is in full sympathy with Froissart's
aristocratic spirit, which places the violence of a duke of Britanny
or a count of Foix on a plane above criticism though not beyond
sympathy, and bestows a contemptuous pity on the crestfallen
burghers of Bruges and a lofty disdain on the upstart pride of
Ghent. In language, Berners follows the excellent method of
earlier translators: 'In that I have not followed myne authour
worde by worde yet I trust I have ensewed the true reporte of the
sentence of the mater. ' And he varies his narration pleasantly by
a not unskilful use of inversion.
But the Froissart of Berners taught something further to the
Tudor historians, of the value of well proportioned detail and
## p. 339 (#357) ############################################
Huon of Bordeaux
339
occasional quotation of witness in impressing the sense of actuality.
It can hardly be said that Hall and Holinshed, the most ambitious
of Tudor historians, borrow much from Berners in style; but it is
evident that the new model influenced their aims and methods
quite apart from its value as a new mine of information.
In Arthur of Little Britain and Huon of Bordeaux, Berners
took up the prose tale, or romance, of the ordinary medieval type,
most of the incidents in which are of the wildly absurd order. But
the favourite of the two, Huon, is remarkable for its unusual pair
of heroes. The uncouthness of Charlemagne and his court is in
odd contrast to the conventional pictures of Arthur, and the whole
romance is treated on a different and lower level, whether because it
represents a fourteenth or even thirteenth century story, or because
some folk-tale influence had been at work upon it. Huon himself
is apt to remind us of the ignobly born simpleton heroes of
German peasant story, and he is a bad simpleton. He runs
headlong into danger, not from extravagance of knightly daring
but out of stupidity, or greed, or childish impatience. He com-
plains querulously, tries to deceive his benefactor Auberon and
has no notion of either gratitude or morality. For instance,
Auberon has warned him never to tell a lie, but, so soon as the
paynim porter of Babylon asks whether he be a Saracen, ‘Yea'
replies Huon promptly, and then reflects that Auberon will surely
not be angry at such a lie, ‘sen I did it not wilfully but that
I forgat it ! ' It is only when he has committed some offence
against the fairy that Huon prides himself upon being a Christian :
his Saviour ought to shield him from the wrath of Auberon. And
yet this perjured simpleton is incongruously represented as the
only creature 'sinless' enough to be able to drink from Auberon's
magic horn.
Auberon himself is half-way to being the fairy of poetry ; 'a
dwarf of the fairy' is he, child of a fairy mother, the lady of the
isle' and a mortal father, Julius Caesar (who, in the Middle Ages,
obtained the same magical reputation as Vergil). Auberon, there-
fore, is mortal, he can weep, he falls sick; but he is never of more
stature than a child of three years, and his magical powers are so
absolute that he has only to wish, and his will accomplishes itself.
He knows all that passes afar as he rules in his fairy capital,
Momure, for he is a civilised fairy with a knowledge of politics.
He is a much better Christian than Huon, and, when he dies, his
corpse is buried in an abbey and his soul is carried to heaven
by an innumerable company of angels.
6
22-2
## p. 340 (#358) ############################################
340 English Prose in the XVth Century
Huon of Bordeaux was so popular as to obtain a reissue in
1601, modernised as to wording and adorned as to style'. As
Berners wrote it out, the English is extremely straightforward, and
bears hardly more trace of the graceful fluency of his Froissart
than of the novel experiment its translator was shortly to assay.
To a modern reader, it appears, at first sight, wonderful that the
most popular work of the translator of Froissart should have been
his rendering of a verbose, didactic book by the Spanish secretary
of Charles V, Antonio de Guevara, an author whose involutions of
language rapidly captivated fashionable taste in Spain, France and
England. Berners has the credit of first introducing him and his
style to English readers in The Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius,
which so much delighted the polite world that it went through
fourteen editions in half a century. The substance of this volume
of tedious letters and trite reflections Guevara pretended he had
discovered in an old MS, claiming for himself only the merit of
bestowing ‘style' upon the emperor's writing.
The desire to treat composition as itself an art was beginning
to be felt in England, as in other countries, and Berners must have
already paid attention to that peculiar manner of writing which,
vigorously introduced by translations of which his own was the
earliest specimen, was to receive its distinctive epithet from its
most perfect example, Euphues.
The prefaces of Berners to his Froissart are his first experi-
ments in the ornate, and not much more successful, though more
lavish, than the earlier groping of Caxton. 'As said is'; 'I pray
them that shall default find,' result from his preference of inversion
to direct speech, and relative pronouns are a puzzle to him.
Yet perhaps these elaborate prologues are but a fresh outburst
of the native love of double terms which hampered every prose
writer between Chaucer and Malory. The national bent to cumu-
lative expression must have been a good preparation to the
reception of the new style when it came, by the means of trans-
lated Guevara, in a flood. What was wanting was the art to weave
the customary repetitions of thought, the synonyms, antitheses and
alliterative combinations into a balance and harmony of sentences.
To this, neither Berners nor his nephew and literary disciple
Sir F. Bryan had attained. A comparison of his Golden Book with
North's rendering of it, The Dial of Princes, exhibits the crudity
of the efforts of Berners in this style. He can faithfully reproduce
the repetitions and run the slight idea to death, but the 'sauce of
the said sweet style, as his nephew terms it, lacks savour.
1 Cl. Sidney Lee's list in his edition of Huon, E. E. T. S.
## p. 341 (#359) ############################################
CHAPTER XV
ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH EDUCATION. UNIVERSITIES
AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS TO THE TIME OF COLET
In an age innocent of historical criticism, champions of Oxford
and Cambridge, waging a wordy war for the honour of prior
foundation, referred the establishment of their respective uni-
versities to Alfred and to Sigebert. In these days, the historians
of both are content to look to the twelfth century as the birth
period, not only of the English university, but of the university
of Paris from which English university life drew its early inspiration.
When the twelfth century drew to a close, Paris was the English
academic metropolis. Already, indeed, there were masters and
students in Oxford. What was the attraction which drew them
to a town that had no well based claims to high antiquity, and
was, otherwise, of little consequence, it is impossible now to point
out with certainty. Looking to the history of continental uni-
versities, analogy would seem to demand, as the nucleus of the
concourse, a cathedral or a monastic school. But Oxford was not a
bishop's seat; its diocesan was posted in far distant Lincoln. And,
if monks provided or salaried the first Oxford teachers, they wholly
failed to obtain, or, at any rate, to retain, control over the rising
university; there is not the slightest trace of monastic influence
in the organisation or studies of the earliest Oxford of historic
times. The cloister school of St Frideswide may well have
charged the atmosphere with the first odour of learning ; but
its walls at no time sheltered the university soul.
Certain, however, it is that, in the first half of the twelfth
century, a number of famous names are connected with Oxford
teaching. It may be that if, as Gervase of Canterbury testifies,
Vacarius taught civil law at Oxford, in 1149, he did not lecture as
an Oxford master, but as a member of the train of archbishop
Theobald. But Theobaldus Stampensis, as a recent historiand has
pointed out, in letters written between 1101 and 1117 styles
· Rashdall, Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, II, 333.
## p. 342 (#360) ############################################
342
English Education
himself master in Oxford; Robert Pullen, afterwards cardinal and
the author of Sententiarum Libri Octo, is stated, on good authority,
to have taught in Oxford in 1133; and, when in 1189 Giraldus
Cambrensis read his Topographia Hibernica at Oxford, 'where the
nost learned and famous of the clergy of England were then to be
found,' he entertained ‘all the doctors of the several faculties and
such of their pupils as were of greater fame and repute. '
In the story of this last incident we have clear indications
of an existing and of an organised Oxford university.
Modern research points to the year 1167 as the date of the birth
of Oxford as a studium generale, and offers a chain of circum-
stantial evidence to connect it with an expulsion of alien students
by the Parisian authorities and the contemporary recall by
Henry II, then engaged in the contest with Becket, of all clerks
holding English cures? However this may have been, the last few
years of the twelfth century furnish abundant proof of the presence
in Oxford of students in considerable numbers.
In 1192, Oxford, according to Robert of Devizes, could barely
maintain her clerks. In 1197, the great abbot Samson of Bury
entertained a large company of Oxford masters. When the
troubles of 1209 burst upon the university, scholars to the
number-according to Matthew Paris-of three thousand dis-
persed in various directions.
It is to this last occasion that the Oxford historian” refers the
appearance of Cambridge as a studium generale.
The story is characteristic of the times. An Oxford clerk kills
a woman-accidentally, as it is afterwards said. But the culprit
flees. The town authorities search the dwelling wherein he
lodged, and, in his absence, arrest two or three of his companions,
who are perfectly innocent of the offence, if such it be. King John,
however, is in the middle of his famous quarrel with the pope, and
is ready to wreak his vengeance on any clerk. On the king's
instructions, the innocent prisoners are hanged. In combined
fear and indignation, the Oxford masters proclaim a suspension
of studies; and the scholars scatter. Some merely retreat to
Reading; others migrate further afield. Some go to Paris; some
to Cambridge.
Cambridge, as a town, dates back to the days of the Roman
occupation of Britain, when it represented the intersection of two
great military highways and a consequent guard-post. William I
made it his base for attack upon Ely, and pulled down eighteen of
1 Rashdall, Chap. XII.
3 Ibid. a, 349,
2
## p. 343 (#361) ############################################
Beginnings of Oxford and Cambridge 343
its 387 dwelling-houses to secure a site for a castle which should
command the passage of its important ford. Henry I erected it
into a borough corporate. The establishment of a great fair at
Barnwell about 1103 and the settlement of Jews in 1106 denote a
growth of trade and population. At what date students first found
their way to its narrow streets, and what was the attractive force
compelling them thither, it is, as in the case of Oxford, impossible,
absolutely, to determine. Cambridge, like Oxford, was not a
cathedral city; and the wealthy priory of Barnwell, founded about
1112, lay well away from the district in which the students congre-
gated. A story of early lectures by a party of monks despatched
by Joffred, abbot of Crowland, to his manor of Cottenham is, by
internal evidence, demonstrated to be a late invention. It is
not until the first quarter of the thirteenth century that genuine
history records the presence in Cambridge of a concourse of
clerks; it is in 1231, when the Parisian scholars were returning
to their former quarters after the famous secession of 1229, that
we obtain our first clear proof of the existence in the English
fen town of an organised society of masters and students. In
that year (3 May) a royal writ commands the sheriff of the county
to proclaim and, if need be, take and imprison certain pre-
tended clerks in Cambridge qui sub nullius magistri scholarum
sunt disciplina et tuitione ; he is to expel within fifteen days
any clerk who is not under the control of a responsible master.
At the same time, a second writ addressed to the mayor and
bailiffs recites that Satis constat vobis quod apud villam nostram
Cantebr. studendi causa e diversis partibus tam cismarinis quam
transmarinis scholarium confluit multitudo, and enjoins that the
hostel rents chargeable to scholars shall be fixed secundum con-
suetudinem Universitatis by two masters and two good and lawful
men of the town.
The Oxford suspendium clericorum of 1209 had at least
reinforced the numbers of the Cambridge scholars. In 1229, a
riot in Paris led to a similar migration of students from the
metropolitan university. Henry III issued an invitation to the
migrants to come over into England, and settle 'in what cities,
boroughs and villages they pleased to choose'; and Cambridge
shared with Oxford in the benefits of the Parisian exodus.
Henceforward, Oxford and Cambridge advance on parallel lines,
Oxford enjoying the advantage of a start of fifty years.
The Oxford suspendium came to an end in 1214 under the
terms of a settlement arranged by the papal legate, Nicholas
## p. 344 (#362) ############################################
344
English Education
of Tusculum. A legatine ordinance subjected to penance the
executioners of the unfortunate victims of 1209 and, in true
medieval fashion, imposed a heavy mulct upon the townsmen,
present and future. It further required that a clerk arrested by
townsmen should be forthwith surrendered on the demand of
the bishop of Lincoln, or the archdeacon or his official, or 'the
chancellor or whomsoever the bishop of Lincoln shall depute to the
office. ' And the rents of halls were to be taxed by a joint board
of four burghers and four clerks. Here we have the record of the
beginnings of a privileged academic society. The first task of
an infant university is, necessarily, the organisation of its consti-
tution. That work was begun in Oxford before 1214.
In a very
real sense the university of Oxford was a 'republic of letters. '
The Oxford constitution, as it reveals itself in the course of the
thirteenth century, is, essentially, democratic. The centre of its
organic life is the assembly of masters. For the distribution of
her members into four nations, as at Paris, Oxford substituted a
division into northerners and southerners; Scottish students
combined with English north countrymen to form the boreales,
whilst Welshmen, ‘Marchmen’ and Irishmen were ranked with the
australes. The two proctors were the elected mouthpieces of the
two divisions. The supreme legislative authority was the entire body
of masters of all faculties assembled in the great congregation';
where the proctors brought forward proposed statutes, counted
the votes and announced decisions. A ‘lesser congregation' of
regents, i. e. of actually teaching masters, of all faculties, passed
graces affecting studies or dealt with minor finance; while a
yet narrower assembly of regents in arts supervised the grant of
the magisterial licence to teach, and elected the proctors for the
year.
The titular head of the university was the chancellor. It was
round this officer that the struggle for university liberties was
destined to be waged.
The first antagonists of the scholars were the townsmen.
Grasping burgher householders demanded unconscionable rents
or cheated the students in the sale of supplies; mayor and bailiffs
asserted an eager jurisdiction over peccant clerks. The scholars
had recourse to the ecclesiastical arm; and the legatine ordinance
of 1214 marks their first decisive victory. In the taxors of hostels
they obtained their tribunes against exaction, and, in the chan-
cellor 'or whomsoever the bishop of Lincoln shall depute to the
office,' they secured a resident protector against arbitrary arrest.
## p. 345 (#363) ############################################
Town and Gown
345
The chancellor was, in 1214, apparently, not, as yet, a regularly
appointed officer. Grosseteste, who, at a subsequent date, exer-
cised the functions of the office, was, in style, merely rector
scholarum. When the chancellor appears as the occupant of
a permanent office, it is as the bishop's officer. He was chosen,
indeed, from amongst the masters; but it was the bishop who
appointed. He was, in fact, an ecclesiastical official, who wielded
the weapon of the church's censure, whether for the needful
discipline of the scholars or for their protection against the venom
of the town.
Supported by king and bishop, the chancellor secured, step by
step, his position in and against the town. By successive royal
writs he obtained the confirmation of the system of conjoint
taxation of lodgings; the expulsion of irregular clerks; and the
use of the town prison and of the castle cells for the confinement
of his domestic recalcitrants. By a series of charters he secured
the limitation of the interest chargeable by Jews on the debts
of scholars; his own right of jurisdiction in actions of debt in
which one party was a clerk; and the right to take part in the
assize of bread and beer. In 1255, he laid the foundation of
a more extensive jurisdiction over laymen. In 1275, a royal writ
gave him cognisance of all personal actions wherein either party
was a scholar. When, in 1288, a royal bailiff engaged in altercation
with the chancellor, the indiscreet layman lost his office. In
1290, the jurisdiction of the chancellor was defined by parlia-
ment as covering all crimes committed in Oxford when one of
the parties was a scholar, except pleas of homicide and mayhem.
The ranks of privileged persons included, with clerks proper, their
attendants (familias), and all writers, parchment-makers, illumi-
nators, stationers and other craftsmen who were employed exclu-
sively by scholars.
In the struggles for these liberties the university employed
the weapon forged by the Roman plebs of old. Between 1260
and 1264, seceding masters formed a studium at Northampton,
and, at a later date (1334), a similar concourse at Stamford
threatened the well-being of Oxford.
On St Scholastica's Day 1354, a tavern brawl between innkeeper
and dissatisfied customers gave rise to a fierce three days' 'town
and gown,' wherein countrymen from the outskirts reinforced the
1 So late as the first quarter of the nineteenth century every candidate for an
Oxford degree was required to take an oath not to lecture at Stamford. Rashdall, 11,
398.
## p. 346 (#364) ############################################
346
English Education
-
burghers. The chancellor was shot at; inns and halls were
looted; scholars were slain; books were destroyed. The friars,
coming forth in solemn procession to play the part of peace-
makers, were maltreated. The scholars of Merton alone were able
to resist a siege, thanks to the strength of their walls.
But the blood of scholars became the seed of fresh university
privileges. The university declared a general suspension of studies,
and the town was put under interdict. A royal commission made
short work of its task. Mayor and bailiffs were imprisoned; the
sheriff was dismissed; an annual penance was imposed on the
burghers; and the chancellor's prerogative was increased by the
transfer to him of no inconsiderable share of the local government.
Yet once more, in 1405, the university, in amplification of a
charter of Richard II, secured the right of trial before its own
steward of a privileged person indicted for felony. The victory
over the town was now complete.
At Cambridge, in like fashion, although without the accompani-
ment of serious bloodshed, the university developed its constitution;
and a long series of royal writs and parliamentary enactments
fortified the chancellor against the burghers. A great riot in 1318–
the year of Tyler's insurrection—when the townsmen sacked Bene't
College and burnt charters and title-deeds, was the Cambridge
St Scholastica’s Day. The privileges of the Cambridge chancellor,
though ample and, to the town, sufficiently galling, fell short of the
fulness of those of his Oxonian fellow-officials; and the Cambridge
constitution differed in some details from the Oxford model
Meanwhile, bishop's officer as he was in origin, the chancellor, in
Cambridge, as in Oxford, had, with the episcopal countenance, first
shaken himself free from the control of other episcopal officials; and
then, in alliance with the archbishop and with the pope, successfully
challenged the authority of the diocesan himself. The contest
against minor ecclesiastical officials is best illustrated by the award
issued in 1276 by bishop Hugo de Balsham in the dispute between
the archdeacon of Ely and the Cambridge scholars, who had denied
the jurisdiction of the archidiaconal court, and in a contemporary
discussion between the Cambridge chancellor and the 'Master of
Glomery,' in whom we may recognise the master of local grammar
schools, who was a nominee of the archdeacon. The award is
conceived in the spirit at once of liberal policy and of strict
justice. He adjudges that all disputes in which a 'glomerel’ is
defendant shall be decided by the Magister Glomeriae; he thus
enjoying the same privilege as that possessed by the other masters,
1
## p. 347 (#365) ############################################
University and Bishop
347
of deciding the suits in which his students were involved. But this
minor jurisdiction shall not extend (1) to the taxation of houses, or
(2) to serious offences calling for imprisonment or expulsion from
the university; in which cases the chancellor shall adjudicate.
A scholar plaintiff may appeal to the chancellor from the decision
of the Magister Glomeriae; but in disputes between two glomerels
the chancellor shall have no right of intervention, except in
the two above cited cases. Persons doing services exclusively for
scholars shall enjoy the privileges of scholars, and shall rank
as exempt from the control of the archdeacon. Rectors, vicars,
parish chaplains and others in the service of local churches
shall be held subject to the archdeacon; but clergy residing in
Cambridge merely for the purposes of study shall be exempt.
Hugo concludes by approving and confirming a statute issued
by the chancellor and masters which provides
that no one should receive a scholar who has not had a fixed master within
thirteen days after the said scholar had entered the university, or who had
not taken care that his name had been within the time aforesaid inserted in
the matriculation book of his master, unless the master's absence or legitimate
occupation should have prevented the samel.
It may be that the equity of this decision and the consequent
absence of local friction helped to preserve from attack for a long
period that jurisdiction of the bishop himself, which Hugo clearly
reserved. Moreover, Hugo himself was the founder of Peterhouse,
the oldest Cambridge college ; he, and a long line of his successors
as diocesans, not only took an enlightened interest in the well-being
of the scholars, but were enrolled among their most conspicuous
benefactors; and the propinquity of Cambridge to Ely gave little
opportunity for the unnoted nursing of rebellious projects. Certain
it is that the bishop of Ely continued to exercise a regular juris-
diction over the university down to the date of the Barnwell
Process in 1430. And then the chancellor, John Holbroke, master
of Peterhouse, and his advisers turned against their diocesan and,
at the same time, against his metropolitan, the engine of the
framers of the forged decretals. They submitted to the papal
arbitrators at Barnwell Priory, and secured a favourable verdict
on, a bull of Honorius I and a like asserted document of Sergius I,
which declared the exemption of the university of Cambridge
from all archiepiscopal, episcopal or other ecclesiastical control.
Henceforward, the university was not only a regularly recog-
nised and organised body, orderly, legislative and possessed of
1 Trans, in Mullinger, Vol. 1, p. 226.
## p. 348 (#366) ############################################
348
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peculiar powers--in a word, a privileged corporation ; but it
was independent of other control than that of king, parliament
and pope.
Oxford reached the same end gradually and more rapidly.
Lincoln was far removed from the university town. Between the
university and bishop Grosseteste, a former rector scholarum
and an enthusiastic patron of learning, the relations were of the
most friendly order; but under his immediate successor disputes
began. Prolonged vacancies in the see assisted the scholars in
the establishment of their independence. The position of the
bishop was, indirectly, sapped by the successive royal amplifications
of the rights of the chancellor in the town. In 1280, the privileges
of the chancellor were strongly asserted against bishop Oliver
Sutton, the grant of probates of scholars' wills being, inter alia,
claimed. The contention was boldly put forward that, even in
spiritual matters, the jurisdiction of the diocesan was only 'in
defect of the chancellor,' or by way of appeal in the last resort
(in defectu cancellarii et universitatis). In a provincial synod,
Oliver's episcopal brethren, with their metropolitan, were induced
to side with the university against his lordship of Lincoln. In
future, an appeal was to run from the chancellor's court to the
regent congregation; thence, finally, to the great congregation.
In 1350, an application to the pope resulted in the reduction to
a mere formality of the episcopal confirmation of the Oxford chan-
cellor, and, in 1368, its necessity was, by the same authority, entirely
abrogated. In 1395, a bull of Boniface IX exempted the university
from the jurisdiction of all archbishops, bishops and ordinaries,
and, when, in 1411, archbishop Arundel, in pursuit of his anti-
Lollard crusade, attempted a visitation of Oxford, St Mary's was
fortified against him, and swarms of armed scholars compelled his
retreat. In this instance, the university acted with more legality
than discretion. The king took up the cause of his offended
kinsman; the chancellor and proctors were summoned to London
and compelled to resign; and, when the university decreed a cessa-
tion and boldly re-elected the deposed officers, pope John XXIII
ruined the defences of the scholars by revoking the bull of
Boniface, Parliament confirmed their defeat by a declaration
of the archbishop's right of visitation. It was not until 1479, after
the extirpation of Lollardism, that, by means of a bull of Sixtus IV,
the university recovered the lost ground. Meanwhile, the scholars
had learned a lesson in policy; the chancellorship was erected into
a permanent office and conferred upon a powerful court prelate or
## p. 349 (#367) ############################################
The Coming of the Friars
349
noble; a vice-chancellor annually nominated by the chancellor
assumed the functions of the resident head.
The peace of both universities was, from time to time, disturbed
by serious domestic broils. Irish students raised commotions; the
struggles of north and south well-nigh assumed the proportions
of petty civil wars, and called for the interference of the king.
Disputes, more interesting from the educational standpoint, were
excited by the presence of monks and friars. When the successive
barbarian irruptions burst upon western Europe, learning had taken
refuge in the monasteries. It might have been anticipated that,
on the return of brighter days, scholarship would emerge with the
Benedictines. Within limits this, indeed, had been the case. The
Benedictines never lost their love of letters, and their schools were
long and deservedly in high repute. The Benedictine monasteries
and the episcopal schools together preserved the useful arts of
writing, illuminating and music, and in the Latin tongue held the
avenue to ancient stores of knowledge. But the Benedictine
scheme of education was directed exclusively to the requirements
of the religious life. The Benedictines had their schools in
Oxford and Cambridge before the rise of the two universities;
but it was not until after the coming of the mendicants' that
they were roused to play an active part in English university life.
In 1217, within two years after the foundation of their order,
the Dominicans planted a settlement in Paris; in 1221 they
invaded Oxford; and in 1274 they were in Cambridge. They
were followed at Oxford in 1224 by the Franciscans, who, at the
same time, appeared in Cambridge. Entering in the guise of
mendicants, they speedily became possessed of valuable property,
and, within fifty years of their first appearance, their magnificent
buildings were the envy of the scholars of both universities.
Carmelites, Augustinians and White Canons imitated the example
of the Black and the Grey Friars, and their convents lined the
streets of the two university towns. Franciscans and Dominicans
alike fung themselves with enthusiasm into university life.
In the first quarter of the twelfth century Irnerius, the father
1 Already, in 1278, the Benedictine priory of Durham had begun to despatch clerks
to study in Oxford; and, before the end of the thirteenth century, the site of Durham
Hall was acquired. The Benedictines of St Peter's at Gloucester established in 1283
at Oxford a Hall for the accommodation of thirteen students of their order; and,
eight years later, the numbers of the students of Gloucester Hall were increased by a
combined effort of other southern Benedictine convents. In 1334, a Bull of Benedict
XII required that each Benedictine society should send up one monk in twenty witb a
fixed allowance to pursue higher studies in some university.
## p. 350 (#368) ############################################
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of the glossators, had laid the foundations of the fame of Bologna
as a school of civil law. Accursius had emulated him at Florence.
Vacarius, attempting to follow the example at Oxford, was, thanks
to the jealousy of the canonists, silenced by Stephen. In 1144,
the Benedictine Gratian published at Rome the famous Decretum,
in which he provided the students of canon law with a Corpus
Juris worthy to rank with the Pandects of Justinian. At Oxford,
the opposition of the canonists to the civil law was soon exchanged
for ardent pursuit, and doctors graduated as utriusque juris.
Meanwhile (c. 1160) Peter Lombard, archbishop of Paris,
attempted to render to theologians the service which Gratian
had rendered to the canonists. Applying to such subjects
as the Trinity, free will, original sin, the sacraments, the resur-
rection of the dead and final judgment, the methods of a
strict dialectic, he developed a scientific theological system. His
Sententiae became the standard theological text-book of the
Middle Ages. The mendicants, invading the seats of Parisian
teachers, endeavoured to ally with Christian doctrine an Aristo-
telian philosophy which had trickled through the schools of
Jews and Saracens. They thus became the leading exponents of
scholasticism.
At Oxford, the Franciscans Duns Scotus and William of Ockham
emulated the fame won for the Dominicans at Paris by Albertus
Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Grosseteste, before his elevation to
high office, lectured in the Oxonian Franciscan school, where he
had as pupil Adam Marsh, destined to be Hugo de Balsham's com-
petitor for the see of Ely. Friar Bungay became head of the
Franciscan convent in Cambridge, where Humphry Necton, a
Carmelite, took the D. D. degree in 1259. The glory of the Grey
Friars culminated in Roger Bacon (c. 121494). Skilled in all
the recognised studies of his age, he, in opposition to prevailing
ideas, though remaining a schoolman, pointed to the study of
languages and mathematics as affording the true basis for a sound
system of education, and incurred amongst his contemporaries and
succeeding generations the lasting suspicion of tampering with the
illegitimate by leading the way in the pursuit of natural science.
As a rule, the schoolmen did not amass knowledge, but trained
ability; the real value of their discussions lay in their development
of the art of expression, in the fostering of agility of thought and
subtle distinction : in a word, in the development of pure dialectical
skill. Logic
Logic was their contribution to the world's future.
Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenford had 'unto logik longe y-go. '
a
## p. 351 (#369) ############################################
The Fall of the Friars
351
6
It was not their studies but their ambition which lost to the
mendicants the favour of the medieval universities. Starting as
assailants of the abuses of the older orders, within a very few years
they furnished to the world a still more striking spectacle of
moral degradation ; and the barefooted friars rivalled the Cister-
cians as pure epicureans.
I fond there freres, Alle the fouro ordres
Prechynge the peple, For profit of hemselves;
Glosed the gospel, As hem good liked;
For covertise of copes, Construwed it as thei wolde.
So Piers the Plowman, voicing the experience of the nation at large.
In the universities, whilst claiming the rights, the friars strove to
shirk the duties, of the non-professed scholar. 'It was their object
to create an imperium in imperio, and, while availing themselves
of these centres as fields of propagandism, they were really intent
on the creation of a rival if not of a hostile authority. ' A fierce
struggle ensued. Already, in 1300, the chancellor of Cambridge,
Stephen de Haselfield, as the outcome of a brawl, excommunicated
the friars, two of whom were expelled from the university. On
an appeal to the pope, the friars secured the honours of the field;
but the university authorities returned to the fray. In 1336, a
university statute forbade the friars to admit into their orders
any scholar under 18. Two years later, a similar statute was passed
in Oxford. In 1359, the Cambridge houses enacted that two
members of the same convent of mendicants should not incept in
the same year. An appeal to parliament went in their favour, and,
in 1375, the friars actually obtained a papal bull dispensing, in
their case, with the statutory requirement of actual regency in
arts before the assumption of the degree of D. D. The mendicants
in both universities had outstayed their welcome a full century
before Chaucer launched at them the shafts of his humour, the
Piers Plowman poems lashed them with invective, or Wyclif,
himself a distinguished schoolman, poured forth on them the
vials of his vituperation. In the foundations of both Walter de
Merton and Hugo de Balsham, admission into a religious order was
expressly declared incompatible with membership of a college
society. With these two names and with the rise of colleges we
reach a new stage in English university history.
How was the throng of medieval scholars maintained ? Many
of the students could and did support themselves. The lecturers
were for generations maintained by the collectae of their auditors.
The fees levied for graces, the dues collected from the principals
## p. 352 (#370) ############################################
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of halls and keepers of acts and various academic contributions
and fines, all predicate a paying clientèle. Not infrequently, as
it would seem, a wealthy scholar defrayed the charges of a
more needy companion. When the colleges began to admit
pensioners, these paid highly for their accommodation, and
in proportion to their rank. Henry Beaufort at Peterhouse, in
1388—9, paid the sum of twenty shillings as pensio camerae,
while a humbler contemporary paid 68. 8d. There were scholars
in both universities who ruffled it after the manner of courtiers;
who affected lovelocks, red hosen and long shoes; who wore rings
‘for vain glorying and jettyng, pernicious example and scandal of
others'; and otherwise in their attire came within the compass of
the sumptuary provincial constitution issued by archbishop Strat-
ford in 1342. But Chaucer's typical clerk was of another mould.
The bulk of the students who thronged the streets of the medieval
university were, undoubtedly, poor. Many were reduced to strange
shifts for daily bread. The bursar's accounts of Peterhouse in
the early fifteenth century show poor scholars engaged in digging
the foundations of buildings, in carrying earth and bricks and
in other unskilled labour. The sizars of the following and many
succeeding centuries were regularly employed in menial tasks.
Favourite medieval stories introduce us to poor students begging
on the highways or singing from door to door. The relief of such
was always ranked as a peculiarly meritorious field for medieval
philanthropy. Noble personages and prelates supported poor
scholars in the universities. Edward II maintained 32 boys under
their master at Cambridge ; and his example was followed by his
successor, who erected for his pensioners a special hall of residence,
the King's Hall. Wealthy religious houses defrayed the charges
of selected students of their orders. Benefactors, even before the
college era, endowed loan-chests from which temporary advances
could be made on security to hard-pressed scholars. Yet more
deserving of university gratitude were the founders of 'exhibitions. '
William de Kilkenny, ninth bishop of Ely, dying in 1256—7,
bequeathed 200 marks to the priory of Barnwell in trust for the
payment of 10 marks annually to two priests studying divinity in
Cambridge. This was the earliest foundation of the type in the
junior university. William of Durham, archbishop-elect of Rouen,
had, seven years earlier, bequeathed to the university of Oxford
310 marks, to be invested for the maintenance of ten or more
masters of arts studying theology.
An all-important step forward was taken by Walter de Merton.
## p. 353 (#371) ############################################
Walter de Merton and Hugo de Balsham 353
a
Scholars not belonging to any religious order had hitherto, neces-
sarily, either lodged with townsmen or in some specially hired
hostel or inn. Of these last, there were many in both universities.
Fuller records the names of thirty-four in Cambridge, several of
which were still standing in his day, although with an altered
character. Oxford claims a far larger number. These halls were
managed by principals recognised by, and usually, though not
necessarily, masters of, the university. Some of them were con-
nected with special faculties, as law, divinity, or the arts. But
they were mere residential inns, neither chartered nor endowed.
In 1263 or 1264, Walter de Merton founded 'the House of the
Scholars of Merton' at Malden, in Surrey, linking it with a com-
pany of scholars resident in Oxford, and there supported on the
produce of the Malden estate. A few years later, the warden was
transferred from Malden to the direct charge of the Oxford group,
and, in 1274, under revised statutes, the college of Merton started
on its long and brilliant history as a permanently settled, chartered
and endowed foundation,
In 1280, Hugo de Balsham, tenth bishop of Ely, imitated in
Cambridge the example of Walter de Merton by planting a settle-
ment of 'studious scholars' among the brethren of the hospital
of St John; in 1284, the severance of the scholars from the
brethren gave rise to the establishment of Peterhouse, the oldest
of Cambridge colleges.
The college, it must be noted, was something more than a hall. In
the hall, with its officially fixed rental, students of all degrees found
some protection against the arbitrary exactions of the townsmen.
They were subjected to certain disciplinary regulations. They paid
for their accommodation. The college, on the other hand, was,
in origin, the endowed home of a limited number of students of a
particular class. Further, the college was not a monastery. It
had a rule, which borrowed something from the principles which
experience had approved in the orders; but it was not monastic.
On the contrary, it was anti-monastic: the scholars of Walter de
Merton and Hugo de Balsham were directly prepared for service
in the world as men of affairs. Finally, the college was not, in the
first instance, a profit-making school. Its doors were not open to
all seekers after knowledge. Its scholars were members of a close
corporation, living on a common stock, men of approved ability
pursuing advanced studies under discipline. The disturbing guest
and the would be perendinant were, alike, repelled.
This conception comes out clearly in the statutes of Merton
a
E. L. II.
CH, XV.
23
## p. 354 (#372) ############################################
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and in the earliest Peterhouse statutes, which were avowedly
based upon the Merton rule. The Peterhouse society was to
consist of fifteen scholars, one of whom was, as the master, to be
the business head. A candidate for a vacancy in the body must
be vir honestus, castus, pacificus, humilis et modestus (quatenus
humana fragilitas nostra sinit) et indigens, ac in arte dialectica
Baccalaureus. The field of study for the scholars was determined
as including the arts, the philosophy of Aristotle and theology.
The majority of the scholars must always be engaged in the diligent
pursuit of the liberal arts; only with the express sanction of the
whole body were certain designated fellows to proceed to the
reading of theology. Two, but not more at the same time, might
study the canon or the civil law, one, the medical art. Each
fellow must follow a regular academic course, must prepare him-
self by hearing lectures, reading and discussion, for a career of
activity.
