II.

At the same time as the monasteries, and under the shadow of their walls, schools and libraries multiplied. The Latin education of the nation is resumed with an energy and perseverance hitherto unknown, and this time there will be no relapse into ignorance; protected by the French conquest, the Latin conquest is now definitive.

Not only are religious books in Latin, psalters, missals and decretals copied and collected in monasteries, but also the ancient classics. They are liked, they are known by heart, quoted in writings, and even in conversation. An English chronicler of the twelfth century declares he would blush to compile annals after the fashion of the Anglo-Saxons; this barbarous manner is to be avoided; he will use Roman salt as a condiment: "et exarata barbarice romano sale condire."[233] Another, of the same period, has the classic ideal so much before his eyes that he makes William deliver, on the day of Hastings, a speech beginning: "O mortalium validissimi!"[234]

A prelate who had been the tutor of the heir to the throne, and died bishop palatine of Durham, Richard de Bury,[235] collects books with a passion equal to that which will be later displayed at the court of the Medici. He has emissaries who travel all over England, France, and Italy to secure manuscripts for him; with a book one can obtain anything from him; the abbot of St. Albans, as a propitiatory offering sends him a Terence, a Virgil, and a Quinctilian. His bedchamber is so encumbered with books that one can hardly move in it.[236] Towards the end of his life, never having had but one passion, he undertook to describe it, and, retired into his manor of Auckland, he wrote in Latin prose his "Philobiblon."[237] In this short treatise he defends books, Greek and Roman antiquity, poetry, too, with touching emotion; he is seized with indignation when he thinks of the crimes of high treason against manuscripts, daily committed by pupils who in spring dry flowers in their books; and of the ingratitude of wicked clerks, who admit into the library dogs, or falcons, or worse still, a two-legged animal, "bestia bipedalis," more dangerous "than the basilisk, or aspic," who, discovering the volumes "insufficiently concealed by the protecting web of a dead spider," condemns them to be sold, and converted for her own use into silken hoods and furred gowns.[238] Eve's descendants continue, thinks the bishop, to wrongfully meddle with the tree of knowledge.

What painful commiseration did he not experience on penetrating into an ill-kept convent library! "Then we ordered the book-presses, chests, and bags of the noble monasteries to be opened; and, astonished at beholding again the light of day, the volumes came out of their sepulchres and their prolonged sleep.... Some of them, which had ranked among the daintiest, lay for ever spoilt, in all the horror of decay, covered by filth left by the rats; they who had once been robed in purple and fine linen now lay on ashes, covered with a cilice."[239] The worthy bishop looks upon letters with a religious veneration, worthy of the ancients themselves; his enthusiasm recalls that of Cicero; no one at the Renaissance, not even the illustrious Bessarion, has praised old manuscripts with a more touching fervour, or more nearly attained to the eloquence of the great Latin orator when he speaks of books in his "Pro Archia": "Thanks to books," says the prelate, "the dead appear to me as though they still lived.... Everything decays and falls into dust, by the force of Time; Saturn is never weary of devouring his children, and the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, had not God as a remedy conferred on mortal man the benefit of books.... Books are the masters that instruct us without rods or ferulas, without reprimands or anger, without the solemnity of the gown or the expense of lessons. Go to them, you will not find them asleep; question them, they will not refuse to answer; if you err, no scoldings on their part; if you are ignorant, no mocking laughter."[240]

These teachings and these examples bore fruit; in renovated England, Latin-speaking clerks swarmed. It is often difficult while reading their works to discover whether they are of native or of foreign extraction; hates with them are less strong than with the rest of their compatriots; most of them have studied not only in England but in Paris; science has made of them cosmopolitans; they belong, above all, to the Latin country, and the Latin country has not suffered.

The Latin country had two capitals, a religious capital which was Rome, and a literary capital which was Paris. "In the same manner as the city of Athens shone in former days as the mother of liberal arts and the nurse of philosophers, ... so in our times Paris has raised the standard of learning and civilisation, not only in France but in all the rest of Europe, and, as the mother of wisdom, she welcomes guests from all parts of the world, supplies all their wants, and submits them all to her pacific rule."[241] So said Bartholomew the Englishman in the thirteenth century. "What a flood of joy swept over my heart," wrote in the following century another Englishman, that same Richard de Bury, "every time I was able to visit that paradise of the world, Paris! My stay there always seemed brief to me, so great was my passion. There were libraries of perfume more delicious than caskets of spices, orchards of science ever green...."[242] The University of Paris held without contest the first rank during the Middle Ages; it counted among its students, kings, saints, popes, statesmen, poets, learned men of all sorts come from all countries, Italians like Dante, Englishmen like Stephen Langton.

Its lustre dates from the twelfth century. At that time a fusion took place between the theological school of Notre-Dame, where shone, towards the beginning of the century, Guillaume de Champeaux, and the schools of logic that Abelard's teaching gave birth to on St. Genevieve's Mount. This state of things was not created, but consecrated by Pope Innocent III., a former student at Paris, who by his bulls of 1208 and 1209 formed the masters and students into one association, _universitas_.[243]

According to a mediaeval custom, which has been perpetuated in the East, and is still found for instance at the great University of El Azhar at Cairo, the students were divided into nations: France, Normandy, Picardy, England. It was a division by races, and not by countries; the idea of mother countries politically divided being excluded, in theory at least, from the Latin realm. Thus the Italians were included in the French nation, and the Germans in the English one. Of all these foreigners the English were the most numerous; they had in Paris six colleges for theology alone.

The faculties were four in number: theology, law, medicine, arts. The latter, though least in rank, was the most important from the number of its pupils, and was a preparation for the others. The student of arts was about fifteen years of age; he passed a first degree called "determinance" or bachelorship; then a second one, the licence, after which, in a solemn ceremony termed _inceptio_, the corporation of masters invested him with the cap, the badge of mastership. He had then, according to his pledge, to dispute for forty successive days with every comer; then, still very youthful, and frequently beardless, he himself began to teach. A master who taught was called a Regent, _Magister regens_.

The principal schools were situated in the "rue du Fouarre" (straw, litter), "vico degli Strami," says Dante, a street that still exists under the same name, but the ancient houses of which are gradually disappearing. In this formerly dark and narrow street, surrounded by lanes with names carrying us far back into the past ("rue de la Parcheminerie," &c), the most illustrious masters taught, and the most singular disorders arose. The students come from the four corners of Europe without a farthing, having, in consequence, nothing to lose, and to whom ample privileges had been granted, did not shine by their discipline. Neither was the population of the quarter an exemplary one.[244] We gather from the royal ordinances that the rue du Fouarre, "vicus ultra parvum pontem, vocatus gallice la rue du Feurre," had to be closed at night by barriers and chains, because of individuals who had the wicked habit of establishing themselves at night, with their _ribaudes_, "mulieres immundae!" in the lecture-rooms, and leaving, on their departure, by way of a joke, the professor's chair covered with "horrible" filth. Far from feeling any awe, these evil-doers found, on the contrary, a special amusement in the idea of perpetrating their jokes in the _sanctum_ of philosophers, who, says the ordinance of the wise king Charles V., "should be clean and honest, and inhabit clean, decent, and honest places."[245]

Teaching, the principal object of which was logic, consisted in the reading and interpreting of such books as were considered authorities. "The method in expounding is always the same. The commentator discusses in a prologue some general questions relating to the work he is about to lecture upon, and he usually treats of its material, formal, final, and efficient causes. He points out the principal divisions, takes the first member of the division, subdivides it, divides the first member of this subdivision, and thus by a series of divisions, each being successively cleft into two, he reaches a division which only comprises the first chapter. He applies to each part of the work the same process as to its whole. He continues these divisions until he comes to having before him only one phrase including one single complete idea."

Another not less important part of the instruction given consisted in oratorical jousts; the masters disputed among themselves, and the pupils did likewise. In a time when paper was scarce and parchment precious, disputes replaced our written exercises. The weapons employed in these jousts were blunt ones; but as in real tournaments where "armes courtoises" were used, disputants were sometimes carried away by passion, and the result was a true battle: "They scream themselves hoarse, they lavish unmannerly expressions, abuse, threats, upon each other. They even take to cuffing, kicking, and biting."[246]

Under this training, rudimentary though it was, superior minds became sharpened, they got accustomed to think, to weigh the pros and cons, to investigate freely; a taste for intellectual things was kept up in them. The greatest geniuses who had come to study Aristotle on St. Genevieve's Mount were always proud to call themselves pupils of Paris. But narrow minds grew there more narrow; they remained, as Rabelais will say later, foolish and silly, dreaming, stultified things, "tout niais, tout reveux et rassotes." John of Salisbury, a brilliant scholar of Paris in the twelfth century, had the curiosity to come, after a long absence, and see his old companions "that dialectics still detained on St. Genevieve's Mount." "I found them," he tells us, "just as I had left them, and at the same point; they had not advanced one step in the art of solving our ancient questions, nor added to their science the smallest proposition.... I then clearly saw, what it is easy to discover, that the study of dialectics, fruitful if employed as a means to reach the sciences, remain inert and barren if taken as being itself the object of study."[247]

During this time were developing, on the borders of the Isis and the Cam, the Universities, so famous since, of Oxford and Cambridge; but their celebrity was chiefly local, and they never reached the international reputation of the one at Paris. Both towns had flourishing schools in the twelfth century; in the thirteenth, these schools were constituted into a University, on the model of Paris; they were granted privileges, and the Pope, who would not let slip this opportunity of intervening, confirmed them.[248]

The rules of discipline, the teaching, and the degrees are the same as at Paris. The turbulence is just as great; there are incessant battles; battles between the students of the North and those of the South, "boreales et australes," between the English and Irish, between the clerks and the laity. In 1214 some clerks are hung by the citizens of the town; the Pope's legate instantly makes the power of Rome felt, and avenges the insult sustained by privileged persons belonging to the Latin country. During ten years the inhabitants of Oxford shall remit the students half their rent; they shall pay down fifty-two shillings each year on St. Nicholas' day, in favour of indigent students; and they shall give a banquet to a hundred poor students. Even the bill of fare is settled by the Roman authority: bread, ale, soup, a dish of fish or of meat; and this for ever. The perpetrators of the hanging shall come barefooted, without girdle, cloak or hat, to remove their victims from their temporary resting-place, and, followed by all the citizens, bury them with their own hands in the place assigned to them in consecrated ground.

In 1252 the Irish and "Northerners" begin to fight in St. Mary's Church. They are obliged by authority to appoint twelve delegates, who negotiate a treaty of peace. In 1313 a prohibition is proclaimed against bearing names of nations, these distinctions being a constant source of quarrels. In 1334 such numbers of "Surrois" and "Norrois" clerks are imprisoned in Oxford Castle after a battle, that the sheriff declares escapes are sure to occur.[249] In 1354 a student, seated in a tavern, "in taberna vini," pours a jug of wine over the tavern-keeper's head, and breaks the jug upon it. Unfortunately the head is broken as well; the "laity" take the part of the victim, pursue the clerks, kill twenty of them, and fling their bodies "in latrinas"; they even betake themselves to the books of the students, and "slice them with knives and hatchets." During that term "oh! woe! no degrees in Logic were taken at the University of Oxford."[250] In 1364 war breaks out again between the citizens and students, "commissum fuit bellum," and lasts four days.

Regulations, frequently renewed, show the nature of the principal abuses. These laws pronounce: excommunication against the belligerents; exclusion from the University against those students who harboured "little women" (_mulierculas_) in their lodgings, major excommunication and imprisonment against those who amuse themselves by celebrating bacchanals in churches, masked, disguised, and crowned "with leaves or flowers"; all this about 1250. The statutes of University Hall, 1292, prohibit the fellows from fighting, from holding immodest conversations together, from telling each other love tales, "fubulas de amasiis," and from singing improper songs.[251]

The lectures bore on Aristotle, Boethius, Priscian, and Donatus; Latin and French were studied; the fellows were bound to converse together in Latin; a regulation also prescribed that the scholars should be taught Latin prosody, and accustomed to write epistles "in decent language, without emphasis or hyperbole, ... and as much as possible full of sense."[252] Objectionable passages are to be avoided; Ovid's "Art of Love" and the book of love by Pamphilus are prohibited.

From the thirteenth century foundations increase in number, both at Oxford and Cambridge. Now "chests" are created, a kind of pawnbroking institution for the benefit of scholars; now a college is created like University College, the most ancient of all, founded by William of Durham, who died in 1249, or New College, established by the illustrious Chancellor of Edward III. William of Wykeham. Sometimes books are bequeathed, as by Richard de Bury and Thomas de Cobham in the fourteenth century, or by Humphrey of Gloucester, in the fifteenth.[253] The journey to Paris continues a title to respect, but it is no longer indispensable.