The
impediments
to its
progress are subsequently considered, and the causes of human
error investigated.
progress are subsequently considered, and the causes of human
error investigated.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v01
Fore-
most of these were Alexander of Hales, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus
and William of Ockham.
Aquinas (c. 1220ne harmonising Alator was the
## p. 201 (#221) ############################################
Alexander of Hales
201
Alexander of Hales, a native of Gloucestershire, studied in
Paris at a time when the Physics and Metaphysics were not yet
translated into Latin, and, also, later, when their study had been
expressly prohibited (1215). This prohibition lasted until the
dispersion of the university in 1229; and (although he may have
been lecturer to the Franciscans at an earlier date) it was not
until the return of the university in 1231 that he actually joined
the order. As one of the leading teachers in Paris, he had a
distinguished career. In his scholastic teaching he was an ex-
ponent of realism. He was entrusted by Innocent IV with the
duty of preparing a comprehensive Summa Theologiae; and the
ponderous work, which remained unfinished at his death in 1245,
was completed by his pupils seven years later. In its general
plan it follows the method of Peter Lombard, being one of the
earliest comments on the Master of the Sentences. It was examined
and approved by seventy divines, and the author became known
as the Irrefragable Doctor; but a still greater Franciscan,
Roger Bacon, who describes the vast work as tamquam pondus
unius equi, declares that it was behind the times in matters of
natural science, and was already being neglected, even by members
of the author's own order? The MS of Alexander's Exposition
of the Apocalypse, in the Cambridge University Library, includes
a portrait of the author, who is represented as reverently kneeling
in the habit of a Franciscan friar?
St Francis himself regarded with suspicion the learning of his
age. He preferred to have his followers poor in heart and under-
standing, as well as in their dress and their other belongings.
Perfect poverty was, however, obviously incompatible with the
purchase of books. A provincial minister of the order, who
happened to possess books of considerable value, was not allowed
to retain them. In the same spirit, on hearing that a great doctor
in Paris had entered the order, St Francis said to his followers :
“I am afraid, my sons, that such doctors will be the destruction,
of my vineyard. " The preaching of the Franciscans among the
common people owed its force less to their learning than to their
practical experience. Their care for the sick, and even for the
leper, gave a new impulse to medical and physical and experi-
mental science; and they gradually devoted themselves to a more
scientific study of theology. In their schools the student was
expected to take notes and to reproduce them in the form of a
i Opus Minus, 326 f.
Reproduced in J. R. Green's Short History, ill. ed. p. 287.
## p. 202 (#222) ############################################
202
Franciscans of Oxford
lecture, and this practice, combined with the disputation between
the teacher and the learner, brought into play readiness, memory
and invention. Speculative theology was, in their hands, modified
by the hard facts of practical life. Their sermons, however, not
unfrequently appealed to the imagination and the feelings, and
did not disdain either the sparkling anecdote or the pleasantly
didactic allegory?
In September 1224, two years before the death of the founder,
a little band of nine Franciscans was ferried across the Channel
by the monks of Fécamp, and found a welcome at the priory
of Canterbury. Some of them pressed forward to London, where
they were received by the Dominicans, while two of them went on
to Oxford. The Dominicans had already settled there in 1221,
when the church of St Edward had been assigned them in the
Jewry, in the very heart of the town, and a school of theology had
been opened under Robert Bacon. For about a week the two
Franciscans “ate in the refectory and slept in the dormitory”
of the Dominicans? ; then they hired a house near St Ebbe's in the
south-west quarter, whence they soon moved to a marshy plot of
ground outside the walls. Part of that plot was known as Paradise.
In 1245, they were followed by the Dominicans, who left the centre
of the town for a suburban spot whose memory is now preserved
in the name of Black Friars road. In olden days, the Trill
mill stream flowed past the Grey Friars mill and beneath the
“Preachers' bridge,” until it reached the two mills of the Black
Friars.
It was probably a migration from Paris that had, meanwhile,
made Oxford a studium generale, or a publicly recognised place
of studious resort. In 1167, John of Salisbury, then in exile
owing to his devotion to the cause of Becket, sent a letter to
Peter the Writer, stating that “the votaries of Mercury were
80 depressed, that France, the mildest and most civilised of
nations, had expelled her alien scholarg8”; and, either in 1165,
or in 1169, at a time when many Masters and Scholars beneficed
in England were studying in Paris, Henry II required all clerks
who possessed revenues in England to return within three months.
It has been reasonably assumed that many of the students, thus
expelled, or recalled, from Paris, migrated to Oxford“. But the
earliest certain reference to the schools of Oxford belongs to
1 Brewer's Preface to Monumenta Franciscana, 1, xxviii-lv.
? Mon. Franc. 1, 5–9; 11, 9.
Ep. 225 (Migne, P. L. CXCIX, 253 A).
• Rashdall's Universities of Europe, 11, 329 f.
## p. 203 (#223) ############################################
Grosseteste and the Franciscans 203
1189, when “all the doctors in the different faculties," and their
more distinguished pupils, and the rest of the scholars, were
(as we have seen) entertained by Giraldus Cambrensis on the
second and third days of his memorable recitation?
The Franciscan friars of 1224 were well received by the
university, and, in those early times, were on excellent terms
with the secular clergy. They were men of cheerful temper, and
possessed the courtesy and charm that come from sympathy.
From Eccleston's account of the coming of the Friars Minor,
we learn that, “as Oxford was the principal place of study in
England, where the whole body (or universitas) of scholars was
wont to congregate, Friar Agnellus (the provincial Head of the
Order) caused a school of sufficiently decent appearance to be
built on the site where the Friars had settled, and induced Robert
Grosseteste of holy memory to lecture to them there ; under him
they made extraordinary progress in sermons, as well as in subtle
moral themes suitable for preaching," and continued to do so until
"he was transferred by Divine Providence from the lecturer's chair
to the episcopal see. ”? He was already interested in them about
12253; and it was, possibly, before 1231 that he was appointed their
lecturer. He was then more than fifty years of age, not a friar,
but a secular priest, and one of the most influential men in Oxford.
To the friars he was much more than a lecturer ; he was their
sympathetic friend and adviser, and, after he had become bishop
of Lincoln in 1235, he repeatedly commended the zeal, piety and
usefulness of their order. About 1238, he wrote in praise of them
to Gregory IX: “Your Holiness may be assured that in England
inestimable benefits have been produced by the Friars; they
illuminate the whole land by their preaching and learning. ”
Grosseteste, a native of Stradbroke in Suffolk, was educated
at Oxford. It is often stated that he also studied in Paris ;
but of this there is no contemporary evidence. It is true that,
as bishop of Lincoln, he writes to the regents in theology
at Oxford, recommending them to abide by the system of
lecturing adopted by the regents in theology in Paris', but
he says nothing of Paris in connection with his own education.
While he was still at Oxford, he held an office corresponding to
that of the chancellor in Paris, but he was not allowed by the
i Giraldus, 1, 72 f. , 410; In, 92, where "Magister Gualterus, magister Oxoniensis,
archidiaconus,” is probably a mistake for "Magister Gualterus Mapus, Oxoniensis
archidiaconus" (op. I, 412).
· Mon. Franc. 1, 87; cf. ib. 64–66.
3 Ep. 2.
• Ep. 58; cf. Epp. 20, 41, 67.
6 Ep. 123.
## p. 204 (#224) ############################################
204
Franciscans of Oxford
v
then bishop of Lincoln to assume any higher title than that of
Magister Scholarum? At Oxford, he prepared commentaries on
some of the logical treatises of Aristotle, and on the Physics,
and a translation of the Ethics, which appeared about 1244, was
known under his name. He himself produced a Latin rendering
of the "middle recension” of the Epistles of Ignatius, besides
commenting on Dionysius the Areopagite, and causing a trans-
lation to be made of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,
the Greek MS of which (now in the Cambridge Library) had been
brought from Athens by his archdeacon, John of Basingstoke.
In his Compendium Scientiarum he classified all the departments
of knowledge recognised in his day. The printed list of his works
extends over twenty-five quarto pagesa ; it includes treatises on
theology, essays on philosophy, a practical work on husbandry.
Perhaps the most interesting of his works is a poem in 1757 lines
in praise of the Virgin and Son, an exquisite allegory called the
Château d Amour, originally written in “romance" for those who
had ne letture ne clergie, and soon translated from French into
Latin, and ultimately into English. Robert de Brunne, in his
translation of the Manuel des Pechiez, tells us of the bishop's love
for the music of the harp.
In the opinion of Luard, the editor of his Letters, "probably
no one has had a greater influence upon English thought and
English literature for the two centuries that followed his age. "
Wyclif ranks him even above Aristotle', and Gower calls him
"the grete clerc*. ” Apart from his important position as a patriot,
a reformer and a statesman, and as a friend of Simon de Montfort,
he gave, in the words of his latest biographer, F. S. Stevenson,
“a powerful impulse to almost every department of intellectual
activity, revived the study of neglected languages, and grasped the
central idea of the unity of knowledge. ” One of the earliest
leaders of thought in Oxford, a promoter of Greek learning, and
an interpreter of Aristotle, he went far beyond his master in the
experimental knowledge of the physical sciences. Roger Bacon
lauds his knowledge of science, and he is probably referring to
Grosseteste, when he says that no lectures on optics “have as yet
been given in Paris, or anywhere else among the Latins, except
twice at Oxford 6. ” Matthew Paris, who resented his zeal for the
· Lincoln Register (Rashdall, 11, 355 n. 2).
8 Trial, iv, c. 3.
6 Opera Inedita, 33, 37, 472.
? Life by Pegge (1793).
• Conf. Am. IV, 234.
## p. 205 (#225) ############################################
205
Adam Marsh. Roger Bacon
reform of the monasteries, generously pays the following tribute to
his memory:
Thus the saintly. . . bishop of Lincoln passed away from the exile of this
world, which he never loved. . . . He had been the rebuker of pope and king, the
corrector of bishops, the reformer of monks, the director of priests, the
instructor of clerks, the patron of scholars, the preacher of the people,. . . the
careful student of the Scriptures, the hammer and the contemner of the
Romans. At the table of bodily food, he was liberal, courteous and affable;
at the table of spiritual food, devout, tearful and penitent; as a prelate,
sedulous, venerable and never weary in well-doing?
Grosseteste's friend Adam Marsh, who had been educated
under him at Oxford and had entered the priesthood, joined the
Franciscan order shortly after 1226. The first four lecturers to the
Franciscans in Oxford (beginning with Grosseteste) were seculars ;
the first Franciscan to hold that office was Adam Marsh”, who was
probably appointed for the year 1247—8. Provision was then
made for a regular succession of teachers, and soon there were
fifty Franciscan lectureships in various parts of England. Out of
love for Adam Marsh, Grosseteste left his library to the Oxford
Franciscans? Like Grosseteste, he is a friend and adviser of Simon
de Montfort, and faithfully tells him that "he who can rule his own
temper is better than he who storms a city. " The king and the
archbishop of Canterbury urged his appointment as bishop of Ely;
but Rome decided in favour of Hugo de Balsham (1257), the future
founder of Peterhouse (1284). In his Letters Marsh's style is less -
classical than that of Grosseteste; but the attainments of both of
these lecturers to the Oxford Franciscans are warmly eulogised by
their pupil, Roger Bacon. He mentions them in good company-
immediately after Solomon, Aristotle and Avicenna, describing
both of them as “perfect in divine and human wisdom 5. ” On the
death of Alexander of Hales (1245), Grosseteste was afraid that
Adam Marsh would be captured by Paris to fill the vacant chair.
His Letters, his only surviving work, give him no special claim to
those scholastic qualities of clearness and precision that were
possibly indicated in his traditional title of Doctor illustris.
Roger Bacon, a native of Ilchester, was the most brilliant
representative of the Franciscan order in Oxford. He there
attended the lectures of Edmund Rich of Abingdon, who had
studied in Paris, who could preach in French and who was
possibly himself the French translator of his principal Latin work,
Chronica Majora, V, 407, ed. Luard.
3 Mon. Franc. I, 185.
• Opus Tertium, c. 22 f. , 25.
Mon. Franc. 1, 38.
* Ib. 1, 264.
6 Ep. 334.
## p. 206 (#226) ############################################
206
Franciscans of Oxford
Speculum Ecclesiae. Rich was the first in Roger Bacon's day to
expound the Sophistici Elenchi at Oxford'. It was probably under
the influence of Grosseteste and Marsh that Bacon entered the
Franciscan order, a society which, doubtless, had its attractions for
his studious temperament. He is said to have been ordained in
1233. Before 1245, he left Oxford for Paris. He there distin-
guished himself as a teacher; but he had little sympathy with the
scholasticism of the day, and he accordingly returned to England
about 1250.
In the order of St Francis there was room for freedom of
thought, no less than for mystic devotion ; but, some seven years
later, so soon as the party of the mystics was represented in the
new general of that body, Bacon fell under suspicion for his liberal
opinions, and, by command of the "seraphic" Bonaventura, was
sent to Paris and there kept in strict seclusion for ten years
(1257—67). He probably owed his partial release to the goodwill
of Clement IV, who had heard of the studies of the Franciscan friar
before his own elevation to the papal see, and, by a letter written
at Viterbo on 22 June 1266, drew him from his obscurity and
neglect by pressing him for an account of his researches. There-
upon, in the wonderfully brief space of some eighteen months,
the grateful and enthusiastic student wrote three memorable
works, Opus Majus, Opus Minus and Opus Tertium (1267).
These were followed by his Compendium Studii Philosophiae
(1271–2), and by a Greek Grammar of uncertain date. In his
Compendium, he had attacked the clergy and the monastic orders
and the scholastic pedants of the day; and, by a chapter of the
Franciscans held in Paris in 1278, he was, on these and, doubtless,
other grounds, condemned for "certain suspected novelties” of
opinion. Accordingly, he was once more placed under restraint;
but he had again been released before writing his Compendium
Studii Theologiae (1292). At Oxford he died, and was buried
among the Friars Minor, probably in 1294.
Before entering the order, he had written nothing on science;
and, after his admission, he came under the rule that no friar
should be permitted the use of writing materials, or enjoy the
liberty of publishing his work, without the previous approval of
his superiors. The penalty was the confiscation of the work, with
many days of fasting on bread and water. He had only written a
few “chapters on various subjects at the request of his friends. "
* Comp. Theol. (op. J. E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, 1, 592, ed. 2, 1906).
? Opera Inedita, 13.
## p. 207 (#227) ############################################
Roger Bacon
207
Possibly, he is here referring to the pages on the secret works of
nature and art, on Greek fire, on gunpowder and on the properties
of the magnet', on which he had discoursed in letters addressed
either to William of Auvergne (d. 1248), or to John of Basingstoke
(d. 1252). He was surrounded with difficulties ; he found philo-
sophy and theology neglected in the interests of civil law, and
despised under the delusion that the world knew enough of them
already. He had spent forty years in the study of the sciences
and languages, and, during the first twenty years specially de-
voted by him to the attainment of fuller knowledge (possibly
before joining a mendicant order), he had expended large sums
on his learned pursuits. None would now lend him any money to
meet the expense of preparing his works for the pope, and he
could not persuade any one that there was the slightest use in
science? Thankful, however, for the pope's interest in his studies,
he set to work with enthusiasm and delight, though he was strictly
bound by the vow of poverty, and had now nothing of his own to
spend on his literary and scientific labours.
His principal works, beginning with the three prepared for the
pope, are as follows:
Opus Majus, which remained unknown until its publication
by Samuel Jebb in 1733. It has since been recognised as the
Encyclopédie and the Organon of the thirteenth century. It
is divided into seven parts : (1) the causes of human ignorance ;
(2) the connection between philosophy and theology ; (3) the
study of language ; (4) mathematical science; (5) physics (espe-
cially optics); (6) experimental science; and (7) moral philosophy.
The part on language was preserved in an imperfect form ; that
on moral philosophy was omitted in Jebb's edition.
Opus Minus was first published by John Sherren Brewer
in 1859 (with portions of Opus Tertium and Compendium Studii
Philosophiae). It was written partly to elucidate certain points
in Opus Majus, partly to meet the risk of the earlier treatise
failing to reach its destination. It enters more fully into an
examination of the schoolmen; it exposes the pretensions
of the Franciscan, Alexander of Hales, and of an unnamed
Dominican. It recapitulates the passages in the previous work
which the author deems especially important, and discusses the
six great errors that stand in the way of the studies of Latin
Christendom, namely (1) the subjection of theology to philosophy;
(2) the general ignorance of science ; (3) implicit trust in the dicta of
Opera Inedita, 536 f.
" Ib. 16, 59, 65.
## p. 208 (#228) ############################################
208 Franciscans of Oxford
the earlier schoolmen ; (4) exaggerated respect for the lecturers on
the Sentences, in comparison with the expounders of the text of
the Scriptures ; (5) mistakes in the Vulgate; (6) errors in the
spiritual interpretation of Scripture due to ignorance of Hebrew,
Greek, Latin, archaeology and natural history; and those due to
misunderstanding of the hidden meaning of the Word of God.
After a break, there next follows a comparison between the opinions
of French and English naturalists on the elementary principles
of matter, and, after a second break, an account of the various
metals. Only a fragment, equivalent to some 80 pages of print,
has been preserved in a single MS in the Bodleian.
Opus Tertium, though written later, is intended to serve
as an introduction to the two previous works. In the first
twenty chapters we have an account of the writer's personal
history, his opinions on education, and on the impediments thrown
in its way by the ignorance, prejudice, contempt, carelessness and
indifference of his contemporaries. He next reverts to points that
had been either omitted or inadequately explained in his earlier
writings. After a digression on vacuum, motion and space, he
dwells on the utility of mathematics, geography, chronology and
geometry, adding remarks on accents and aspirates, and on punc-
tuation, metre and rhythm. A subsequent defence of mathe-
matics, with an excursus on the reform of the calendar, leads to a
discourse on chanting and on preaching.
The above three works, even in their incomplete form, fill as
many as 1344 pages of print. It was these three that were com-
pleted in the brief interval of eighteen months.
Compendium Studii Philosophiae, imperfectly preserved in
a single MS in the British Museum, begins with reflections
on the beauty and utility of wisdom.
The impediments to its
progress are subsequently considered, and the causes of human
error investigated. The author criticises the current Latin
grammars and lexicons, and urges the importance of the study of
Hebrew, adding as many as thirteen reasons for the study of Greek,
followed by an introduction to Greek grammar.
The above is only the beginning of an encyclopaedic work on
logic, mathematics, physics, metaphysics and ethics. The part on
physics is alone preserved, and extracts from that part have been
printed? .
The Greek Grammar may be conveniently placed after the
above Compendium, and before the next. The author's know-
1 Émile Charles, 369–91.
## p. 209 (#229) ############################################
209
Roger Bacon
ledge of Greek was mainly derived from the Greeks of his own
day, probably from some of the Greek teachers invited to England
by Grossetestel. He invariably adopts the late Byzantine pronun-
ciation; and, in his general treatment of grammar, he follows the
Byzantine tradition. This work was first published by the Cam-
bridge University Press in 1902.
Compendium Studii Theologiae, Bacon's latest work, deals
with causes of error, and also with logic and grammar in reference
to theology. The above parts are extant in an imperfect form,
and only extracts from them have been printed from a MS
in the British Museum? . A "fifth part," on optics, is preserved in
a nearly complete condition in the same library.
Roger Bacon was the earliest of the natural philosophers of
western Europe. In opposition to the physicists of Paris, he
urged that "enquiry should begin with the simplest objects of
science, and rise gradually to the higher and higher,” every obser-
vation being controlled by experiment. In science he was at least
a century in advance of his time; and, in spite of the long and
bitter persecutions that he endured, he was full of hope for the
future. He has been described by Diderot as “one of the most
surprising geniuses that nature had ever produced, and one of the
most unfortunate of men. " He left no disciple. His unknown
grave among the tombs of the Friars Minor was marked by no
monument; a tower, traditionally known as “Friar Bacon's
Study,” stood, until 1779, on the old Grand Pont (the present
Folly bridge) of Oxford. The fact that he had revived the study
of mathematics was recorded by an anonymous writer about
13703. A long passage in his Opus Majus“, on the distance between
the extreme east and west of the habitable globe, inserted (without
mention of its source) in the Imago Mundi of Pierre d'Ailly, was
thence quoted by Columbus in 1498 as one of the authorities that
had prompted him to venture on his great voyages of discovery.
Meanwhile, in popular repute, friar Bacon was regarded only as
an alchemist and a necromancer. During the three centuries
subsequent to his death, only four of his minor works, those on
Alchemy, on the Power of Art and Nature and on the Cure of Old
Age, were published in 1485—1590. Like Vergil, he was reputed
to have used a "glass prospective” of wondrous power, and, like
others in advance of their times, such as Gerbert of Aurillac,
Study," stool of Oxford. The by an anonymo
? Émile Charles, 410—6.
1 Comp. Phil. 434.
3 Little's Grey Friars at Oxford, 195 n.
4 Opus Majus, ed. Bridges, 1, xxxiii, 290.
E. L. I. CH. X.
14
## p. 210 (#230) ############################################
210
Franciscans of Oxford
Albertus Magnus and Grosseteste, to have constructed a “brazen
head” that possessed the faculty of speech. The popular legend
was embodied in The Famous Historie of Fryer Bacon, in Greene's
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1587) and in Terilo's satire
of 1604. At Frankfurt, the parts of Opus Majus dealing with
mathematics and optics were published in 1614; but a hundred
and twenty years passed before a large portion of the remainder
was published in England (1733), and the same interval of time
preceded the first appearance of Opera Inedita (1859). The
seventh part of Opus Majus, that on moral philosophy, was
not printed until 1897. But the rehabilitation of Roger Bacon,
begun by Brewer in 1859, had, happily, meanwhile been indepen-
dently completed by Émile Charles in 1861.
Friar Bacon is associated in legend with friar Bungay, or
Thomas de Bungay in Suffolk), who exemplifies the close con-
nection between the Franciscan order and the eastern counties.
Bungay lectured to the Franciscans at Oxford, and, afterwards, at
Cambridge, where he was placed at the head of the Franciscan
convent. As head of the order in England, he was succeeded
(c. 1275) by John Peckham, who had studied at Paris under
Bonaventura, had joined the Franciscans at Oxford and was arch-
bishop of Canterbury from 1279 to 1292. At Oxford, a number
of grammatical, logical, philosophical and theological doctrines
taught by the Dominicans, and already condemned by the Domi-
nican archbishop, Robert Kilwardby (1276), a Master of Arts of
Paris, famous as a commentator on Priscian, were condemned
once more by the Franciscan archbishop, Peckham (1284). Thomas
Aquinas had held, with Aristotle, that the individualising principle
was not form but matter-an opinion which was regarded as
inconsistent with the medieval theory of the future state. This
opinion, disapproved by Kilwardby, was attacked in 1284 by
William de la Mare, probably an Englishman, possibly an Oxonian,
certainly a Franciscan. Both of them may have owed something
to Roger Bacon. They were certainly among the precursors of the
type of realism represented by Duns Scotus, the Doctor subtilis.
John Duns Scotus was a Franciscan in Oxford in 1300. There
is no satisfactory evidence as to the place of his birth ; a note in
a catalogue at Assisi (1381) simply describes him as de provincia
Hiberniae'. At Oxford he lectured on the Sentences. Late in
1304, he was called to incept as D. D. in Paris, where he probably
1 Little, lib. cit. 219 f. Major, Historia Majoris Britanniae (1740), 170 f. , makes
him a native of Duns, W. of Berwick-on-Tweed.
## p. 211 (#231) ############################################
Duns Scotus
211
BACA
taught until 1307. Among the scholars from Oxford who attended
his lectures, was John Canon (A. 1329), a commentator on Peter
Lombard, and on Aristotle's Physics. Duns Scotus died in 1308,"
at Cologne, where his tomb in the Franciscan church bears the
inscription-Scotia me genuit, Anglia me suscepit, Gallia me
docuit, Colonia me tenet.
The works ascribed to his pen fill twelve folio volumes in the
edition printed at Lyons in 1639. At Oxford, Paris and Cologne,
he constantly opposed the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, thus
founding the philosophical and theological school of the Scotists.
But he was stronger in the criticism of the opinions of others than
in the construction of a system of his own. While the aim of
Aquinas is to bring faith into harmony with reason, Duns Scotus
has less confidence in the power of reason; he accordingly enlarges
the number of doctrines already recognised as capable of being
apprehended by faith alone. In philosophy, his devotion to Aristotle
is less exclusive than that of Aquinas, and he adopts many Platonic
and Neo-Platonic conceptions. “All created things (he holds)
have, besides their form, some species of matter. Not matter, but
form, is the individualising principle; the generic and specific
characters are modified by the individual peculiarity,” by the
haecceitas, or “thisness," of the thing. “The universal essence is
distinct. . . from the individual peculiarity,” but does not exist apart
from it. With the great Dominicans, Albertus Magnus and Thomas
Aquinas, the Franciscan Duns Scotus “agrees in assuming a three-
fold existence of the universal : it is before all things, as form in
the divine mind; in things, as their essence (quidditas); and
after things, as the concept formed by mental abstraction. ” He
claims for the individual a real existence, and he accordingly
condemns nominalism?
But, even in the ranks of the realists, the extravagant realism
of Duns Scotus was followed by a reaction, led by Wyclif, who
(for England at least) is at once "the last of the schoolmen"
and "the first of the reformers. " Later reformers, such as Tindale
(1530), were joined by the humanists in opposing the subtleties
of Scotus. The influence of scholasticism in England ended with
1535, when the idol of the schools was dragged from his pedestal
at Oxford and Cambridge, and when one of Thomas Cromwell's
commissioners wrote to his master from Oxford :
We have set Dance in Bocardo, and have utterly banished him Oxford
for ever, with all his blynd glosses. . . . (At New College) wee fownde all the
1 Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, E. T. I, 453 f.
14—2
## p. 212 (#232) ############################################
212 Franciscans of Oxford
great Quadrant Court full of the leaves of Dunce, the wind blowing them
into every corner1
The teaching of Thomas Aquinas was opposed, not only by the
Franciscan realist, Duns Scotus, but also by another Franciscan,
the great nominalist, William of Ockham Born (c. 1280) in the
little village of that name in Surrey, he became a B. D. of Oxford,
and incepted as D. D. in Paris, where he had a strong influence
over the opponent of the papacy, Marsiglio of Padua. He was
probably present at the chapter of Perugia (1322), and he certainly
took a prominent part in the struggle against pope John XXII.
He was imprisoned at Avignon for seventeen weeks in 1327, but
escaped to Italy and joined the emperor, Lewis of Bavaria, in
1328, accompanying him in 1330 to Bavaria, where he stayed for
the greater part of the remainder of his life, as an inmate of the
Franciscan convent at Munich (d. 1349). He was known to fame
as the Invincible Doctor.
The philosophical and theological writings of his earlier career
included commentaries on the logical treatises of Aristotle and
Porphyry, a treatise on logic (the Caius College MS of which
concludes with a rude portrait of the author), as well as Quaestiones
on the Physics of Aristotle and on the Sentences of Peter Lombard;
the first book of his questions on the latter having been probably
completed before he left Oxford. In the edition of 1495 his work
on the Sentences is followed by his Centilogium theologicum.
The political writings of the last eighteen years of his life include
Opus nonaginta dierum (c. 1330-3), and the Dialogue between
the master and the disciple on the power of the emperor and the
pope (1333—43).
The philosophical school which he founded is nearly indifferent
to the doctrines of the church, but does not deny the church's
authority. While Scotus had reduced the number of doctrines
demonstrable by pure reason, Ockham declared that such doctrines
only existed as articles of faith. He opposes the real existence
of universals, founding his negation of realism on his favourite
principle that “entities must not be unnecessarily multiplied. ”
Realism, which had been shaken, more than two centuries before,
by Roscellinus, was, to all appearance, shattered by William of
Ockham, who is the last of the greater schoolmen.
An intermediate position between the realism of Duns Scotus
and the nominalism of William of Ockham was assumed by a pupil
of the former and a fellow-student of the latter, named Walter
1 Layton in Strype's Ecclesiastical Memorials, Bk. I, ch. XXIX, sub finem.
## p. 213 (#233) ############################################
Thomas Bradwardine 213
Burleigh, who studied at Paris and taught at Oxford. He was the
first in modern times who attempted to write a history of ancient
philosophy. He knew no Greek; but he, nevertheless, wrote 130
treatises on Aristotle alone, dedicating his commentary on the
Ethics and Politics to Richard of Bury.
Among the opponents of the mendicant orders at Oxford,
about 1321, was a scholar of Paris and Oxford, and a precursor of
Wyclif, named John Baconthorpe (d. 1346), a man of exceedingly
diminutive stature, who is known as the Resolute Doctor, and as
the great glory of the Carmelites. A voluminous writer of
theological and scholastic treatises (including commentaries on
Aristotle), he was long regarded as the prince of the Averroists,
and, nearly three centuries after his death, his works were still
studied in Padua.
Scholasticism survived in the person of Thomas Bradwardine,
who was consecrated archbishop of Canterbury, shortly before his
death in 1349. Educated at Merton College, Oxford, he expanded
his college lectures on theology into a treatise that gained him
the title of Doctor profundus. He is respectfully mentioned by
Chaucer in company with St Augustine and Boethius :
But I ne can not bulte it to the bren,
As can the holy doctour Augustyn,
Or Boëce, or the bishop Bradwardyni.
In the favourable opinion of his editor, Sir Henry Savile (1618),
he derived his philosophy from Aristotle and Plato. His pages
abound with quotations from Seneca, Ptolemy, Boethius and
Cassiodorus; but there is reason to believe that all this learning
was gleaned from the library of his friend, Richard of Bury, to
whom he was chaplain in 1335.
Richard of Bury was the son of Sir Richard Aungerville. -
Born within sight of the Benedictine abbey of Bury St Edmunds,
he is sometimes said to have subsequently entered the Bene-
dictine convent at Durham. In the meantime, he bad certainly
distinguished himself in philosophy and theology at Oxford.
From his academic studies he was called to be tutor to prince
Edward, the future king Edward III. The literary interests
with which he inspired the prince may well have led to Edward's
patronage of Chaucer and of Froissart. In 1330 and 1333,
he was sent as envoy to the pope at Avignon; and it was in
recognition of these diplomatic services that he was made dean
of Wells, and bishop of Durham.
i Canterbury Tales, 15,248.
## p. 214 (#234) ############################################
214
Scholars of Oxford
He lives in literature as the author of the Philobiblon,
which was completed on his 58th birthday, 24 January 1345;
and, in the same year, on 14 April, at his manor of Auck-
land, Dominus Ricardus de Bury migravit ad Dominum. In
seven of the thirty-five manuscripts of Philobiblon, it is ascribed
to Robert Holkot, the Dominican (d. 1349). But the evidence
is inconclusive, and the style of Holkot's Moralitates is different
from that of Philobiblon. Holkot, who was one of the bishop's
chaplains, may well have acted as his amanuensis during the
last year of his life, and have thus been wrongly credited with
having "composed” or “compiled” the work. The distinctly
autobiographical character of the volume is in favour of its having
been written by Richard of Bury himself.
The author of Philobiblon is more of a bibliophile than a
scholar. He has only the slightest knowledge of Greek; but he
is fully conscious of the debt of the language of Rome to that
of Greece, and he longs to remedy the prevailing ignorance by
supplying students with grammars of Greek as well as Hebrew,
His library is not limited to works on theology; he places liberal
studies above the study of law, and sanctions the reading of the
poets. His love of letters breathes in every page of his work.
He prefers manuscripts to money, and even “slender pamphlets?
to pampered palfreys. " He confesses with a charming candour:
"we are reported to burn with such a desire for books, and
especially old ones, that it was more easy for any man to gain
our favour by means of books than by means of money"; but
"justice," he hastens to assure us, “suffered no detriment? . " In
inditing this passage, he doubtless remembered that an abbot
of St Albansonce ingratiated himself with the future bishop of
Durham by presenting him with four volumes from the abbey
library, besides selling him thirty volumes from the same collec-
tion, including a large folio MS of the works of John of Salisbury,
which is now in the British Museum.
In the old monastic libraries, Richard of Bury, like Boccaccio
at Monte Cassino, not unfrequently lighted on manuscripts lying
in a wretched state of neglect, murium foetibus cooperti et ver-
mium morsibus terebrati“. But, in those of the new mendicant
orders, he often “found heaped up, amid the utmost poverty,
the utmost riches of wisdoms. " He looks back with regret on
? g 123 (the earliest known example of the word), panfletos exiguos.
• 8$ 119, 122.
8 Gesta Abbatum, II, 200.
* $ 120.
og 135.
## p. 215 (#235) ############################################
Richard of Bury
215
the ages when the monks used to copy manuscripts “between the
hours of prayer? . " He also presents us with a vivid picture of his
own eagerness in collecting books with the aid of the stationarii
and librarii of France, Germany and Italy. For some of his
purchases he sends to Rome, while he dwells with rapture on his
visits to Paris, "the paradise of the world,” “where the days
seemed ever few for the greatness of our love. There are the
delightful libraries, more aromatic than stores of spicery; there,
the verdant pleasure-gardens of all varieties of volumes ? . " He
adds that, in his own manors, he always employed a large number
of copyists, as well as binders and illuminators8; and he pays an
eloquent tribute to his beloved books:
Trath, that triumphs over all things, seems to endure more usefully, and
to fructify with greater profit in books. The meaning of the voice perishes
with the sound; truth latent in the mind is only a hidden wisdom, a buried
treasure; but truth that shines forth from books is eager to manifest itself to
all our senses. It commends itself to the sight, when it is read; to the hearing,
when it is heard; and even to the touch, when it suffers itself to be transcribed,
bound, corrected, and preserved. . . . What pleasantness of teaching there is in
books, how easy, how secret! How safely and how frankly do we disclose to
books our human poverty of mind! They are masters who instruct us without
rod or ferule. . . . If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you inquire of
them, they do not withdraw themselves; they never chide, when you make
mistakes; they never laugh, if you are ignorants.
Towards the close, he confides to us the fact that he had “long
cherished the fixed resolve of founding in perpetual charity a
hall in the revered university of Oxford, the chief nursing-mother
of all liberal arts, and of endowing it with the necessary revenues,
for the maintenance of a number of scholars, and, moreover, to
furnish the ball with the treasures of our books. " He gives rules
for the management of the library, rules founded in part on those
adopted in Paris for the library of the Sorbonne. He contem-
plated the permanent endowment of the Benedictine house of
Durham College in the university of Oxford, and bequeathed
to that college the precious volumes he had collected at Bishop
Auckland. The ancient monastic house was dissolved, and Trinity
College rose on its ruins; but the library, built to contain the
bishop's books, still remains, though the books are lost, and even
the catalogue has vanished. His tomb in Durbam cathedral,
marked by “a faire marble stone, whereon his owne ymage was
most curiously and artificially ingraven in brass 8” has been,
1874.
? g 126.
8 g 143.
• 8$ 23, 26.
5 & 232.
• Description of Monuments (1593), Surtees Society, p. 2.
## p. 216 (#236) ############################################
216
Scholars of Oxford
unfortunately, destroyed; but he lives in literature as the author
of Philobiblon, his sole surviving memorial. One who was in-
spired with the same love of books has justly said of the author
_“His fame will never die? . "
Like the early humanists of Italy, he was one of the new
literary fraternity of Europe-men who foresaw the possibilities
of learning, and were eager to encourage it. On the first of his
missions to the pope at Avignon, he had met Petrarch, who
describes him as vir ardentis ingenii, nec litterarum inscius;
he adds that he had absolutely failed to interest the Englishman
in determining the site of the ancient Thule. But they were
kindred spirits at heart. For, in the same vein as Richard of
Bury, Petrarch tells his brother, that he “cannot be sated with
books"; that, in comparison with books, even gold and silver,
gems and purple, marble halls and richly caparisoned steeds, only
afford a superficial delight; and, finally, he urges that brother to
find trusty men to search for manuscripts in Italy, even as he
himself had sent like messages to his friends in Spain and France
and Englands.
In the course of this brief survey, we have noticed, during
the early part of the twelfth century, the revival of intellectual
interests in the age of Abelard, which resulted in the birth of
the university of Paris. We have watched the first faint traces
of the spirit of humanism in the days when John of Salisbury was
studying Latin literature in the classic calm of Chartres. Two
centuries later, Richard of Bury marks for England the time of
transition between the scholastic era and the revival of learning.
The Oxford of his day was still the “beautiful city, spreading her
gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last
enchantments of the Middle Age.
most of these were Alexander of Hales, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus
and William of Ockham.
Aquinas (c. 1220ne harmonising Alator was the
## p. 201 (#221) ############################################
Alexander of Hales
201
Alexander of Hales, a native of Gloucestershire, studied in
Paris at a time when the Physics and Metaphysics were not yet
translated into Latin, and, also, later, when their study had been
expressly prohibited (1215). This prohibition lasted until the
dispersion of the university in 1229; and (although he may have
been lecturer to the Franciscans at an earlier date) it was not
until the return of the university in 1231 that he actually joined
the order. As one of the leading teachers in Paris, he had a
distinguished career. In his scholastic teaching he was an ex-
ponent of realism. He was entrusted by Innocent IV with the
duty of preparing a comprehensive Summa Theologiae; and the
ponderous work, which remained unfinished at his death in 1245,
was completed by his pupils seven years later. In its general
plan it follows the method of Peter Lombard, being one of the
earliest comments on the Master of the Sentences. It was examined
and approved by seventy divines, and the author became known
as the Irrefragable Doctor; but a still greater Franciscan,
Roger Bacon, who describes the vast work as tamquam pondus
unius equi, declares that it was behind the times in matters of
natural science, and was already being neglected, even by members
of the author's own order? The MS of Alexander's Exposition
of the Apocalypse, in the Cambridge University Library, includes
a portrait of the author, who is represented as reverently kneeling
in the habit of a Franciscan friar?
St Francis himself regarded with suspicion the learning of his
age. He preferred to have his followers poor in heart and under-
standing, as well as in their dress and their other belongings.
Perfect poverty was, however, obviously incompatible with the
purchase of books. A provincial minister of the order, who
happened to possess books of considerable value, was not allowed
to retain them. In the same spirit, on hearing that a great doctor
in Paris had entered the order, St Francis said to his followers :
“I am afraid, my sons, that such doctors will be the destruction,
of my vineyard. " The preaching of the Franciscans among the
common people owed its force less to their learning than to their
practical experience. Their care for the sick, and even for the
leper, gave a new impulse to medical and physical and experi-
mental science; and they gradually devoted themselves to a more
scientific study of theology. In their schools the student was
expected to take notes and to reproduce them in the form of a
i Opus Minus, 326 f.
Reproduced in J. R. Green's Short History, ill. ed. p. 287.
## p. 202 (#222) ############################################
202
Franciscans of Oxford
lecture, and this practice, combined with the disputation between
the teacher and the learner, brought into play readiness, memory
and invention. Speculative theology was, in their hands, modified
by the hard facts of practical life. Their sermons, however, not
unfrequently appealed to the imagination and the feelings, and
did not disdain either the sparkling anecdote or the pleasantly
didactic allegory?
In September 1224, two years before the death of the founder,
a little band of nine Franciscans was ferried across the Channel
by the monks of Fécamp, and found a welcome at the priory
of Canterbury. Some of them pressed forward to London, where
they were received by the Dominicans, while two of them went on
to Oxford. The Dominicans had already settled there in 1221,
when the church of St Edward had been assigned them in the
Jewry, in the very heart of the town, and a school of theology had
been opened under Robert Bacon. For about a week the two
Franciscans “ate in the refectory and slept in the dormitory”
of the Dominicans? ; then they hired a house near St Ebbe's in the
south-west quarter, whence they soon moved to a marshy plot of
ground outside the walls. Part of that plot was known as Paradise.
In 1245, they were followed by the Dominicans, who left the centre
of the town for a suburban spot whose memory is now preserved
in the name of Black Friars road. In olden days, the Trill
mill stream flowed past the Grey Friars mill and beneath the
“Preachers' bridge,” until it reached the two mills of the Black
Friars.
It was probably a migration from Paris that had, meanwhile,
made Oxford a studium generale, or a publicly recognised place
of studious resort. In 1167, John of Salisbury, then in exile
owing to his devotion to the cause of Becket, sent a letter to
Peter the Writer, stating that “the votaries of Mercury were
80 depressed, that France, the mildest and most civilised of
nations, had expelled her alien scholarg8”; and, either in 1165,
or in 1169, at a time when many Masters and Scholars beneficed
in England were studying in Paris, Henry II required all clerks
who possessed revenues in England to return within three months.
It has been reasonably assumed that many of the students, thus
expelled, or recalled, from Paris, migrated to Oxford“. But the
earliest certain reference to the schools of Oxford belongs to
1 Brewer's Preface to Monumenta Franciscana, 1, xxviii-lv.
? Mon. Franc. 1, 5–9; 11, 9.
Ep. 225 (Migne, P. L. CXCIX, 253 A).
• Rashdall's Universities of Europe, 11, 329 f.
## p. 203 (#223) ############################################
Grosseteste and the Franciscans 203
1189, when “all the doctors in the different faculties," and their
more distinguished pupils, and the rest of the scholars, were
(as we have seen) entertained by Giraldus Cambrensis on the
second and third days of his memorable recitation?
The Franciscan friars of 1224 were well received by the
university, and, in those early times, were on excellent terms
with the secular clergy. They were men of cheerful temper, and
possessed the courtesy and charm that come from sympathy.
From Eccleston's account of the coming of the Friars Minor,
we learn that, “as Oxford was the principal place of study in
England, where the whole body (or universitas) of scholars was
wont to congregate, Friar Agnellus (the provincial Head of the
Order) caused a school of sufficiently decent appearance to be
built on the site where the Friars had settled, and induced Robert
Grosseteste of holy memory to lecture to them there ; under him
they made extraordinary progress in sermons, as well as in subtle
moral themes suitable for preaching," and continued to do so until
"he was transferred by Divine Providence from the lecturer's chair
to the episcopal see. ”? He was already interested in them about
12253; and it was, possibly, before 1231 that he was appointed their
lecturer. He was then more than fifty years of age, not a friar,
but a secular priest, and one of the most influential men in Oxford.
To the friars he was much more than a lecturer ; he was their
sympathetic friend and adviser, and, after he had become bishop
of Lincoln in 1235, he repeatedly commended the zeal, piety and
usefulness of their order. About 1238, he wrote in praise of them
to Gregory IX: “Your Holiness may be assured that in England
inestimable benefits have been produced by the Friars; they
illuminate the whole land by their preaching and learning. ”
Grosseteste, a native of Stradbroke in Suffolk, was educated
at Oxford. It is often stated that he also studied in Paris ;
but of this there is no contemporary evidence. It is true that,
as bishop of Lincoln, he writes to the regents in theology
at Oxford, recommending them to abide by the system of
lecturing adopted by the regents in theology in Paris', but
he says nothing of Paris in connection with his own education.
While he was still at Oxford, he held an office corresponding to
that of the chancellor in Paris, but he was not allowed by the
i Giraldus, 1, 72 f. , 410; In, 92, where "Magister Gualterus, magister Oxoniensis,
archidiaconus,” is probably a mistake for "Magister Gualterus Mapus, Oxoniensis
archidiaconus" (op. I, 412).
· Mon. Franc. 1, 87; cf. ib. 64–66.
3 Ep. 2.
• Ep. 58; cf. Epp. 20, 41, 67.
6 Ep. 123.
## p. 204 (#224) ############################################
204
Franciscans of Oxford
v
then bishop of Lincoln to assume any higher title than that of
Magister Scholarum? At Oxford, he prepared commentaries on
some of the logical treatises of Aristotle, and on the Physics,
and a translation of the Ethics, which appeared about 1244, was
known under his name. He himself produced a Latin rendering
of the "middle recension” of the Epistles of Ignatius, besides
commenting on Dionysius the Areopagite, and causing a trans-
lation to be made of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,
the Greek MS of which (now in the Cambridge Library) had been
brought from Athens by his archdeacon, John of Basingstoke.
In his Compendium Scientiarum he classified all the departments
of knowledge recognised in his day. The printed list of his works
extends over twenty-five quarto pagesa ; it includes treatises on
theology, essays on philosophy, a practical work on husbandry.
Perhaps the most interesting of his works is a poem in 1757 lines
in praise of the Virgin and Son, an exquisite allegory called the
Château d Amour, originally written in “romance" for those who
had ne letture ne clergie, and soon translated from French into
Latin, and ultimately into English. Robert de Brunne, in his
translation of the Manuel des Pechiez, tells us of the bishop's love
for the music of the harp.
In the opinion of Luard, the editor of his Letters, "probably
no one has had a greater influence upon English thought and
English literature for the two centuries that followed his age. "
Wyclif ranks him even above Aristotle', and Gower calls him
"the grete clerc*. ” Apart from his important position as a patriot,
a reformer and a statesman, and as a friend of Simon de Montfort,
he gave, in the words of his latest biographer, F. S. Stevenson,
“a powerful impulse to almost every department of intellectual
activity, revived the study of neglected languages, and grasped the
central idea of the unity of knowledge. ” One of the earliest
leaders of thought in Oxford, a promoter of Greek learning, and
an interpreter of Aristotle, he went far beyond his master in the
experimental knowledge of the physical sciences. Roger Bacon
lauds his knowledge of science, and he is probably referring to
Grosseteste, when he says that no lectures on optics “have as yet
been given in Paris, or anywhere else among the Latins, except
twice at Oxford 6. ” Matthew Paris, who resented his zeal for the
· Lincoln Register (Rashdall, 11, 355 n. 2).
8 Trial, iv, c. 3.
6 Opera Inedita, 33, 37, 472.
? Life by Pegge (1793).
• Conf. Am. IV, 234.
## p. 205 (#225) ############################################
205
Adam Marsh. Roger Bacon
reform of the monasteries, generously pays the following tribute to
his memory:
Thus the saintly. . . bishop of Lincoln passed away from the exile of this
world, which he never loved. . . . He had been the rebuker of pope and king, the
corrector of bishops, the reformer of monks, the director of priests, the
instructor of clerks, the patron of scholars, the preacher of the people,. . . the
careful student of the Scriptures, the hammer and the contemner of the
Romans. At the table of bodily food, he was liberal, courteous and affable;
at the table of spiritual food, devout, tearful and penitent; as a prelate,
sedulous, venerable and never weary in well-doing?
Grosseteste's friend Adam Marsh, who had been educated
under him at Oxford and had entered the priesthood, joined the
Franciscan order shortly after 1226. The first four lecturers to the
Franciscans in Oxford (beginning with Grosseteste) were seculars ;
the first Franciscan to hold that office was Adam Marsh”, who was
probably appointed for the year 1247—8. Provision was then
made for a regular succession of teachers, and soon there were
fifty Franciscan lectureships in various parts of England. Out of
love for Adam Marsh, Grosseteste left his library to the Oxford
Franciscans? Like Grosseteste, he is a friend and adviser of Simon
de Montfort, and faithfully tells him that "he who can rule his own
temper is better than he who storms a city. " The king and the
archbishop of Canterbury urged his appointment as bishop of Ely;
but Rome decided in favour of Hugo de Balsham (1257), the future
founder of Peterhouse (1284). In his Letters Marsh's style is less -
classical than that of Grosseteste; but the attainments of both of
these lecturers to the Oxford Franciscans are warmly eulogised by
their pupil, Roger Bacon. He mentions them in good company-
immediately after Solomon, Aristotle and Avicenna, describing
both of them as “perfect in divine and human wisdom 5. ” On the
death of Alexander of Hales (1245), Grosseteste was afraid that
Adam Marsh would be captured by Paris to fill the vacant chair.
His Letters, his only surviving work, give him no special claim to
those scholastic qualities of clearness and precision that were
possibly indicated in his traditional title of Doctor illustris.
Roger Bacon, a native of Ilchester, was the most brilliant
representative of the Franciscan order in Oxford. He there
attended the lectures of Edmund Rich of Abingdon, who had
studied in Paris, who could preach in French and who was
possibly himself the French translator of his principal Latin work,
Chronica Majora, V, 407, ed. Luard.
3 Mon. Franc. I, 185.
• Opus Tertium, c. 22 f. , 25.
Mon. Franc. 1, 38.
* Ib. 1, 264.
6 Ep. 334.
## p. 206 (#226) ############################################
206
Franciscans of Oxford
Speculum Ecclesiae. Rich was the first in Roger Bacon's day to
expound the Sophistici Elenchi at Oxford'. It was probably under
the influence of Grosseteste and Marsh that Bacon entered the
Franciscan order, a society which, doubtless, had its attractions for
his studious temperament. He is said to have been ordained in
1233. Before 1245, he left Oxford for Paris. He there distin-
guished himself as a teacher; but he had little sympathy with the
scholasticism of the day, and he accordingly returned to England
about 1250.
In the order of St Francis there was room for freedom of
thought, no less than for mystic devotion ; but, some seven years
later, so soon as the party of the mystics was represented in the
new general of that body, Bacon fell under suspicion for his liberal
opinions, and, by command of the "seraphic" Bonaventura, was
sent to Paris and there kept in strict seclusion for ten years
(1257—67). He probably owed his partial release to the goodwill
of Clement IV, who had heard of the studies of the Franciscan friar
before his own elevation to the papal see, and, by a letter written
at Viterbo on 22 June 1266, drew him from his obscurity and
neglect by pressing him for an account of his researches. There-
upon, in the wonderfully brief space of some eighteen months,
the grateful and enthusiastic student wrote three memorable
works, Opus Majus, Opus Minus and Opus Tertium (1267).
These were followed by his Compendium Studii Philosophiae
(1271–2), and by a Greek Grammar of uncertain date. In his
Compendium, he had attacked the clergy and the monastic orders
and the scholastic pedants of the day; and, by a chapter of the
Franciscans held in Paris in 1278, he was, on these and, doubtless,
other grounds, condemned for "certain suspected novelties” of
opinion. Accordingly, he was once more placed under restraint;
but he had again been released before writing his Compendium
Studii Theologiae (1292). At Oxford he died, and was buried
among the Friars Minor, probably in 1294.
Before entering the order, he had written nothing on science;
and, after his admission, he came under the rule that no friar
should be permitted the use of writing materials, or enjoy the
liberty of publishing his work, without the previous approval of
his superiors. The penalty was the confiscation of the work, with
many days of fasting on bread and water. He had only written a
few “chapters on various subjects at the request of his friends. "
* Comp. Theol. (op. J. E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, 1, 592, ed. 2, 1906).
? Opera Inedita, 13.
## p. 207 (#227) ############################################
Roger Bacon
207
Possibly, he is here referring to the pages on the secret works of
nature and art, on Greek fire, on gunpowder and on the properties
of the magnet', on which he had discoursed in letters addressed
either to William of Auvergne (d. 1248), or to John of Basingstoke
(d. 1252). He was surrounded with difficulties ; he found philo-
sophy and theology neglected in the interests of civil law, and
despised under the delusion that the world knew enough of them
already. He had spent forty years in the study of the sciences
and languages, and, during the first twenty years specially de-
voted by him to the attainment of fuller knowledge (possibly
before joining a mendicant order), he had expended large sums
on his learned pursuits. None would now lend him any money to
meet the expense of preparing his works for the pope, and he
could not persuade any one that there was the slightest use in
science? Thankful, however, for the pope's interest in his studies,
he set to work with enthusiasm and delight, though he was strictly
bound by the vow of poverty, and had now nothing of his own to
spend on his literary and scientific labours.
His principal works, beginning with the three prepared for the
pope, are as follows:
Opus Majus, which remained unknown until its publication
by Samuel Jebb in 1733. It has since been recognised as the
Encyclopédie and the Organon of the thirteenth century. It
is divided into seven parts : (1) the causes of human ignorance ;
(2) the connection between philosophy and theology ; (3) the
study of language ; (4) mathematical science; (5) physics (espe-
cially optics); (6) experimental science; and (7) moral philosophy.
The part on language was preserved in an imperfect form ; that
on moral philosophy was omitted in Jebb's edition.
Opus Minus was first published by John Sherren Brewer
in 1859 (with portions of Opus Tertium and Compendium Studii
Philosophiae). It was written partly to elucidate certain points
in Opus Majus, partly to meet the risk of the earlier treatise
failing to reach its destination. It enters more fully into an
examination of the schoolmen; it exposes the pretensions
of the Franciscan, Alexander of Hales, and of an unnamed
Dominican. It recapitulates the passages in the previous work
which the author deems especially important, and discusses the
six great errors that stand in the way of the studies of Latin
Christendom, namely (1) the subjection of theology to philosophy;
(2) the general ignorance of science ; (3) implicit trust in the dicta of
Opera Inedita, 536 f.
" Ib. 16, 59, 65.
## p. 208 (#228) ############################################
208 Franciscans of Oxford
the earlier schoolmen ; (4) exaggerated respect for the lecturers on
the Sentences, in comparison with the expounders of the text of
the Scriptures ; (5) mistakes in the Vulgate; (6) errors in the
spiritual interpretation of Scripture due to ignorance of Hebrew,
Greek, Latin, archaeology and natural history; and those due to
misunderstanding of the hidden meaning of the Word of God.
After a break, there next follows a comparison between the opinions
of French and English naturalists on the elementary principles
of matter, and, after a second break, an account of the various
metals. Only a fragment, equivalent to some 80 pages of print,
has been preserved in a single MS in the Bodleian.
Opus Tertium, though written later, is intended to serve
as an introduction to the two previous works. In the first
twenty chapters we have an account of the writer's personal
history, his opinions on education, and on the impediments thrown
in its way by the ignorance, prejudice, contempt, carelessness and
indifference of his contemporaries. He next reverts to points that
had been either omitted or inadequately explained in his earlier
writings. After a digression on vacuum, motion and space, he
dwells on the utility of mathematics, geography, chronology and
geometry, adding remarks on accents and aspirates, and on punc-
tuation, metre and rhythm. A subsequent defence of mathe-
matics, with an excursus on the reform of the calendar, leads to a
discourse on chanting and on preaching.
The above three works, even in their incomplete form, fill as
many as 1344 pages of print. It was these three that were com-
pleted in the brief interval of eighteen months.
Compendium Studii Philosophiae, imperfectly preserved in
a single MS in the British Museum, begins with reflections
on the beauty and utility of wisdom.
The impediments to its
progress are subsequently considered, and the causes of human
error investigated. The author criticises the current Latin
grammars and lexicons, and urges the importance of the study of
Hebrew, adding as many as thirteen reasons for the study of Greek,
followed by an introduction to Greek grammar.
The above is only the beginning of an encyclopaedic work on
logic, mathematics, physics, metaphysics and ethics. The part on
physics is alone preserved, and extracts from that part have been
printed? .
The Greek Grammar may be conveniently placed after the
above Compendium, and before the next. The author's know-
1 Émile Charles, 369–91.
## p. 209 (#229) ############################################
209
Roger Bacon
ledge of Greek was mainly derived from the Greeks of his own
day, probably from some of the Greek teachers invited to England
by Grossetestel. He invariably adopts the late Byzantine pronun-
ciation; and, in his general treatment of grammar, he follows the
Byzantine tradition. This work was first published by the Cam-
bridge University Press in 1902.
Compendium Studii Theologiae, Bacon's latest work, deals
with causes of error, and also with logic and grammar in reference
to theology. The above parts are extant in an imperfect form,
and only extracts from them have been printed from a MS
in the British Museum? . A "fifth part," on optics, is preserved in
a nearly complete condition in the same library.
Roger Bacon was the earliest of the natural philosophers of
western Europe. In opposition to the physicists of Paris, he
urged that "enquiry should begin with the simplest objects of
science, and rise gradually to the higher and higher,” every obser-
vation being controlled by experiment. In science he was at least
a century in advance of his time; and, in spite of the long and
bitter persecutions that he endured, he was full of hope for the
future. He has been described by Diderot as “one of the most
surprising geniuses that nature had ever produced, and one of the
most unfortunate of men. " He left no disciple. His unknown
grave among the tombs of the Friars Minor was marked by no
monument; a tower, traditionally known as “Friar Bacon's
Study,” stood, until 1779, on the old Grand Pont (the present
Folly bridge) of Oxford. The fact that he had revived the study
of mathematics was recorded by an anonymous writer about
13703. A long passage in his Opus Majus“, on the distance between
the extreme east and west of the habitable globe, inserted (without
mention of its source) in the Imago Mundi of Pierre d'Ailly, was
thence quoted by Columbus in 1498 as one of the authorities that
had prompted him to venture on his great voyages of discovery.
Meanwhile, in popular repute, friar Bacon was regarded only as
an alchemist and a necromancer. During the three centuries
subsequent to his death, only four of his minor works, those on
Alchemy, on the Power of Art and Nature and on the Cure of Old
Age, were published in 1485—1590. Like Vergil, he was reputed
to have used a "glass prospective” of wondrous power, and, like
others in advance of their times, such as Gerbert of Aurillac,
Study," stool of Oxford. The by an anonymo
? Émile Charles, 410—6.
1 Comp. Phil. 434.
3 Little's Grey Friars at Oxford, 195 n.
4 Opus Majus, ed. Bridges, 1, xxxiii, 290.
E. L. I. CH. X.
14
## p. 210 (#230) ############################################
210
Franciscans of Oxford
Albertus Magnus and Grosseteste, to have constructed a “brazen
head” that possessed the faculty of speech. The popular legend
was embodied in The Famous Historie of Fryer Bacon, in Greene's
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1587) and in Terilo's satire
of 1604. At Frankfurt, the parts of Opus Majus dealing with
mathematics and optics were published in 1614; but a hundred
and twenty years passed before a large portion of the remainder
was published in England (1733), and the same interval of time
preceded the first appearance of Opera Inedita (1859). The
seventh part of Opus Majus, that on moral philosophy, was
not printed until 1897. But the rehabilitation of Roger Bacon,
begun by Brewer in 1859, had, happily, meanwhile been indepen-
dently completed by Émile Charles in 1861.
Friar Bacon is associated in legend with friar Bungay, or
Thomas de Bungay in Suffolk), who exemplifies the close con-
nection between the Franciscan order and the eastern counties.
Bungay lectured to the Franciscans at Oxford, and, afterwards, at
Cambridge, where he was placed at the head of the Franciscan
convent. As head of the order in England, he was succeeded
(c. 1275) by John Peckham, who had studied at Paris under
Bonaventura, had joined the Franciscans at Oxford and was arch-
bishop of Canterbury from 1279 to 1292. At Oxford, a number
of grammatical, logical, philosophical and theological doctrines
taught by the Dominicans, and already condemned by the Domi-
nican archbishop, Robert Kilwardby (1276), a Master of Arts of
Paris, famous as a commentator on Priscian, were condemned
once more by the Franciscan archbishop, Peckham (1284). Thomas
Aquinas had held, with Aristotle, that the individualising principle
was not form but matter-an opinion which was regarded as
inconsistent with the medieval theory of the future state. This
opinion, disapproved by Kilwardby, was attacked in 1284 by
William de la Mare, probably an Englishman, possibly an Oxonian,
certainly a Franciscan. Both of them may have owed something
to Roger Bacon. They were certainly among the precursors of the
type of realism represented by Duns Scotus, the Doctor subtilis.
John Duns Scotus was a Franciscan in Oxford in 1300. There
is no satisfactory evidence as to the place of his birth ; a note in
a catalogue at Assisi (1381) simply describes him as de provincia
Hiberniae'. At Oxford he lectured on the Sentences. Late in
1304, he was called to incept as D. D. in Paris, where he probably
1 Little, lib. cit. 219 f. Major, Historia Majoris Britanniae (1740), 170 f. , makes
him a native of Duns, W. of Berwick-on-Tweed.
## p. 211 (#231) ############################################
Duns Scotus
211
BACA
taught until 1307. Among the scholars from Oxford who attended
his lectures, was John Canon (A. 1329), a commentator on Peter
Lombard, and on Aristotle's Physics. Duns Scotus died in 1308,"
at Cologne, where his tomb in the Franciscan church bears the
inscription-Scotia me genuit, Anglia me suscepit, Gallia me
docuit, Colonia me tenet.
The works ascribed to his pen fill twelve folio volumes in the
edition printed at Lyons in 1639. At Oxford, Paris and Cologne,
he constantly opposed the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, thus
founding the philosophical and theological school of the Scotists.
But he was stronger in the criticism of the opinions of others than
in the construction of a system of his own. While the aim of
Aquinas is to bring faith into harmony with reason, Duns Scotus
has less confidence in the power of reason; he accordingly enlarges
the number of doctrines already recognised as capable of being
apprehended by faith alone. In philosophy, his devotion to Aristotle
is less exclusive than that of Aquinas, and he adopts many Platonic
and Neo-Platonic conceptions. “All created things (he holds)
have, besides their form, some species of matter. Not matter, but
form, is the individualising principle; the generic and specific
characters are modified by the individual peculiarity,” by the
haecceitas, or “thisness," of the thing. “The universal essence is
distinct. . . from the individual peculiarity,” but does not exist apart
from it. With the great Dominicans, Albertus Magnus and Thomas
Aquinas, the Franciscan Duns Scotus “agrees in assuming a three-
fold existence of the universal : it is before all things, as form in
the divine mind; in things, as their essence (quidditas); and
after things, as the concept formed by mental abstraction. ” He
claims for the individual a real existence, and he accordingly
condemns nominalism?
But, even in the ranks of the realists, the extravagant realism
of Duns Scotus was followed by a reaction, led by Wyclif, who
(for England at least) is at once "the last of the schoolmen"
and "the first of the reformers. " Later reformers, such as Tindale
(1530), were joined by the humanists in opposing the subtleties
of Scotus. The influence of scholasticism in England ended with
1535, when the idol of the schools was dragged from his pedestal
at Oxford and Cambridge, and when one of Thomas Cromwell's
commissioners wrote to his master from Oxford :
We have set Dance in Bocardo, and have utterly banished him Oxford
for ever, with all his blynd glosses. . . . (At New College) wee fownde all the
1 Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, E. T. I, 453 f.
14—2
## p. 212 (#232) ############################################
212 Franciscans of Oxford
great Quadrant Court full of the leaves of Dunce, the wind blowing them
into every corner1
The teaching of Thomas Aquinas was opposed, not only by the
Franciscan realist, Duns Scotus, but also by another Franciscan,
the great nominalist, William of Ockham Born (c. 1280) in the
little village of that name in Surrey, he became a B. D. of Oxford,
and incepted as D. D. in Paris, where he had a strong influence
over the opponent of the papacy, Marsiglio of Padua. He was
probably present at the chapter of Perugia (1322), and he certainly
took a prominent part in the struggle against pope John XXII.
He was imprisoned at Avignon for seventeen weeks in 1327, but
escaped to Italy and joined the emperor, Lewis of Bavaria, in
1328, accompanying him in 1330 to Bavaria, where he stayed for
the greater part of the remainder of his life, as an inmate of the
Franciscan convent at Munich (d. 1349). He was known to fame
as the Invincible Doctor.
The philosophical and theological writings of his earlier career
included commentaries on the logical treatises of Aristotle and
Porphyry, a treatise on logic (the Caius College MS of which
concludes with a rude portrait of the author), as well as Quaestiones
on the Physics of Aristotle and on the Sentences of Peter Lombard;
the first book of his questions on the latter having been probably
completed before he left Oxford. In the edition of 1495 his work
on the Sentences is followed by his Centilogium theologicum.
The political writings of the last eighteen years of his life include
Opus nonaginta dierum (c. 1330-3), and the Dialogue between
the master and the disciple on the power of the emperor and the
pope (1333—43).
The philosophical school which he founded is nearly indifferent
to the doctrines of the church, but does not deny the church's
authority. While Scotus had reduced the number of doctrines
demonstrable by pure reason, Ockham declared that such doctrines
only existed as articles of faith. He opposes the real existence
of universals, founding his negation of realism on his favourite
principle that “entities must not be unnecessarily multiplied. ”
Realism, which had been shaken, more than two centuries before,
by Roscellinus, was, to all appearance, shattered by William of
Ockham, who is the last of the greater schoolmen.
An intermediate position between the realism of Duns Scotus
and the nominalism of William of Ockham was assumed by a pupil
of the former and a fellow-student of the latter, named Walter
1 Layton in Strype's Ecclesiastical Memorials, Bk. I, ch. XXIX, sub finem.
## p. 213 (#233) ############################################
Thomas Bradwardine 213
Burleigh, who studied at Paris and taught at Oxford. He was the
first in modern times who attempted to write a history of ancient
philosophy. He knew no Greek; but he, nevertheless, wrote 130
treatises on Aristotle alone, dedicating his commentary on the
Ethics and Politics to Richard of Bury.
Among the opponents of the mendicant orders at Oxford,
about 1321, was a scholar of Paris and Oxford, and a precursor of
Wyclif, named John Baconthorpe (d. 1346), a man of exceedingly
diminutive stature, who is known as the Resolute Doctor, and as
the great glory of the Carmelites. A voluminous writer of
theological and scholastic treatises (including commentaries on
Aristotle), he was long regarded as the prince of the Averroists,
and, nearly three centuries after his death, his works were still
studied in Padua.
Scholasticism survived in the person of Thomas Bradwardine,
who was consecrated archbishop of Canterbury, shortly before his
death in 1349. Educated at Merton College, Oxford, he expanded
his college lectures on theology into a treatise that gained him
the title of Doctor profundus. He is respectfully mentioned by
Chaucer in company with St Augustine and Boethius :
But I ne can not bulte it to the bren,
As can the holy doctour Augustyn,
Or Boëce, or the bishop Bradwardyni.
In the favourable opinion of his editor, Sir Henry Savile (1618),
he derived his philosophy from Aristotle and Plato. His pages
abound with quotations from Seneca, Ptolemy, Boethius and
Cassiodorus; but there is reason to believe that all this learning
was gleaned from the library of his friend, Richard of Bury, to
whom he was chaplain in 1335.
Richard of Bury was the son of Sir Richard Aungerville. -
Born within sight of the Benedictine abbey of Bury St Edmunds,
he is sometimes said to have subsequently entered the Bene-
dictine convent at Durham. In the meantime, he bad certainly
distinguished himself in philosophy and theology at Oxford.
From his academic studies he was called to be tutor to prince
Edward, the future king Edward III. The literary interests
with which he inspired the prince may well have led to Edward's
patronage of Chaucer and of Froissart. In 1330 and 1333,
he was sent as envoy to the pope at Avignon; and it was in
recognition of these diplomatic services that he was made dean
of Wells, and bishop of Durham.
i Canterbury Tales, 15,248.
## p. 214 (#234) ############################################
214
Scholars of Oxford
He lives in literature as the author of the Philobiblon,
which was completed on his 58th birthday, 24 January 1345;
and, in the same year, on 14 April, at his manor of Auck-
land, Dominus Ricardus de Bury migravit ad Dominum. In
seven of the thirty-five manuscripts of Philobiblon, it is ascribed
to Robert Holkot, the Dominican (d. 1349). But the evidence
is inconclusive, and the style of Holkot's Moralitates is different
from that of Philobiblon. Holkot, who was one of the bishop's
chaplains, may well have acted as his amanuensis during the
last year of his life, and have thus been wrongly credited with
having "composed” or “compiled” the work. The distinctly
autobiographical character of the volume is in favour of its having
been written by Richard of Bury himself.
The author of Philobiblon is more of a bibliophile than a
scholar. He has only the slightest knowledge of Greek; but he
is fully conscious of the debt of the language of Rome to that
of Greece, and he longs to remedy the prevailing ignorance by
supplying students with grammars of Greek as well as Hebrew,
His library is not limited to works on theology; he places liberal
studies above the study of law, and sanctions the reading of the
poets. His love of letters breathes in every page of his work.
He prefers manuscripts to money, and even “slender pamphlets?
to pampered palfreys. " He confesses with a charming candour:
"we are reported to burn with such a desire for books, and
especially old ones, that it was more easy for any man to gain
our favour by means of books than by means of money"; but
"justice," he hastens to assure us, “suffered no detriment? . " In
inditing this passage, he doubtless remembered that an abbot
of St Albansonce ingratiated himself with the future bishop of
Durham by presenting him with four volumes from the abbey
library, besides selling him thirty volumes from the same collec-
tion, including a large folio MS of the works of John of Salisbury,
which is now in the British Museum.
In the old monastic libraries, Richard of Bury, like Boccaccio
at Monte Cassino, not unfrequently lighted on manuscripts lying
in a wretched state of neglect, murium foetibus cooperti et ver-
mium morsibus terebrati“. But, in those of the new mendicant
orders, he often “found heaped up, amid the utmost poverty,
the utmost riches of wisdoms. " He looks back with regret on
? g 123 (the earliest known example of the word), panfletos exiguos.
• 8$ 119, 122.
8 Gesta Abbatum, II, 200.
* $ 120.
og 135.
## p. 215 (#235) ############################################
Richard of Bury
215
the ages when the monks used to copy manuscripts “between the
hours of prayer? . " He also presents us with a vivid picture of his
own eagerness in collecting books with the aid of the stationarii
and librarii of France, Germany and Italy. For some of his
purchases he sends to Rome, while he dwells with rapture on his
visits to Paris, "the paradise of the world,” “where the days
seemed ever few for the greatness of our love. There are the
delightful libraries, more aromatic than stores of spicery; there,
the verdant pleasure-gardens of all varieties of volumes ? . " He
adds that, in his own manors, he always employed a large number
of copyists, as well as binders and illuminators8; and he pays an
eloquent tribute to his beloved books:
Trath, that triumphs over all things, seems to endure more usefully, and
to fructify with greater profit in books. The meaning of the voice perishes
with the sound; truth latent in the mind is only a hidden wisdom, a buried
treasure; but truth that shines forth from books is eager to manifest itself to
all our senses. It commends itself to the sight, when it is read; to the hearing,
when it is heard; and even to the touch, when it suffers itself to be transcribed,
bound, corrected, and preserved. . . . What pleasantness of teaching there is in
books, how easy, how secret! How safely and how frankly do we disclose to
books our human poverty of mind! They are masters who instruct us without
rod or ferule. . . . If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you inquire of
them, they do not withdraw themselves; they never chide, when you make
mistakes; they never laugh, if you are ignorants.
Towards the close, he confides to us the fact that he had “long
cherished the fixed resolve of founding in perpetual charity a
hall in the revered university of Oxford, the chief nursing-mother
of all liberal arts, and of endowing it with the necessary revenues,
for the maintenance of a number of scholars, and, moreover, to
furnish the ball with the treasures of our books. " He gives rules
for the management of the library, rules founded in part on those
adopted in Paris for the library of the Sorbonne. He contem-
plated the permanent endowment of the Benedictine house of
Durham College in the university of Oxford, and bequeathed
to that college the precious volumes he had collected at Bishop
Auckland. The ancient monastic house was dissolved, and Trinity
College rose on its ruins; but the library, built to contain the
bishop's books, still remains, though the books are lost, and even
the catalogue has vanished. His tomb in Durbam cathedral,
marked by “a faire marble stone, whereon his owne ymage was
most curiously and artificially ingraven in brass 8” has been,
1874.
? g 126.
8 g 143.
• 8$ 23, 26.
5 & 232.
• Description of Monuments (1593), Surtees Society, p. 2.
## p. 216 (#236) ############################################
216
Scholars of Oxford
unfortunately, destroyed; but he lives in literature as the author
of Philobiblon, his sole surviving memorial. One who was in-
spired with the same love of books has justly said of the author
_“His fame will never die? . "
Like the early humanists of Italy, he was one of the new
literary fraternity of Europe-men who foresaw the possibilities
of learning, and were eager to encourage it. On the first of his
missions to the pope at Avignon, he had met Petrarch, who
describes him as vir ardentis ingenii, nec litterarum inscius;
he adds that he had absolutely failed to interest the Englishman
in determining the site of the ancient Thule. But they were
kindred spirits at heart. For, in the same vein as Richard of
Bury, Petrarch tells his brother, that he “cannot be sated with
books"; that, in comparison with books, even gold and silver,
gems and purple, marble halls and richly caparisoned steeds, only
afford a superficial delight; and, finally, he urges that brother to
find trusty men to search for manuscripts in Italy, even as he
himself had sent like messages to his friends in Spain and France
and Englands.
In the course of this brief survey, we have noticed, during
the early part of the twelfth century, the revival of intellectual
interests in the age of Abelard, which resulted in the birth of
the university of Paris. We have watched the first faint traces
of the spirit of humanism in the days when John of Salisbury was
studying Latin literature in the classic calm of Chartres. Two
centuries later, Richard of Bury marks for England the time of
transition between the scholastic era and the revival of learning.
The Oxford of his day was still the “beautiful city, spreading her
gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last
enchantments of the Middle Age.
