Of the English Friar Preachers, to whom St. Richard in heart at least may be said to have belonged, and of their position in the university, something must now be said. It was on the feast of the Assumption 1221, that they first arrived at Oxford, and obtained from the canons of St. Frideswide a settlement in the Jews’ quarter of the town, where it was hoped that their learning and their preaching might win many converts. From Elizabeth Vere, countess of Oxford, they obtained a piece of ground on which they erected their first schools, known as St. Edward’s schools, where the first lecturers were the two friends Robert Bacon and Richard Fishacre, both of them old pupils of St. Edmund, of whom Matthew Paris says that England had no greater men living. The resort of scholars soon obliged them to choose some more commodious site and in 1259 they removed to St. Ebbe’s island in the south suburb, another adjoining island being occupied by the Franciscans. The extraordinary popularity enjoyed by the Dominican Order during the first century of its establishment in England is attested by every historical document. The lower classes loved them for taking the popular side in politics, while the nobles were no less forward in appreciating their merits. It became a coveted privilege to be buried in their churches, and Wood says that even in his day skeletons and hearts encased in lead were continually being disinterred from the ground formerly occupied at Oxford by the Dominican convent, supposed to be those of devout clients of the order. However, in spite of all this, they had their enemies, especially among the secular regents, who were jealous of their privileges, their popularity, and possibly also of their learning. In 1360 Richard, afterwards Archbishop of Armagh, being elected Chancellor of Oxford, was despatched by a certain party of the Oxford doctors to Rome, to lay a formal complaint before the Pope of the alleged delinquencies of the friars. One of his complaints was, oddly enough, their perseverance in collecting libraries; if he was to be believed, no one could now procure any books at Oxford on canon law, arts, or theology; they were all bought up by these insatiable friars, a charge which at least sets them in the light of being favourers of learning. The chancellor’s mission proved utterly fruitless, a result which Ayliffe attributes to the fact that “they had money wherewith to purchase the Pope’s protection.” This last-named writer, in common with most of the Post-Reformation writers, labours hard to affix the stigma of ignorance on the mendicant orders, which he denominates as locusts and caterpillars, who devoured the vital parts of learning, and involved the Oxford students in a fog of darkness but partly dispelled by “the daybreak of Wickliffe’s doctrine.” Even their vast libraries were collected, he assures us, only to lock up the treasures of knowledge from other men, and to become the food of moths and worms. And here is perhaps the place to notice the grave accusations brought against the Christian schoolmen in general, and the mendicants in particular, of bringing in a reign of literary barbarism. Fleury devotes a considerable part of his fifth discourse to this subject, and the German critics, especially Meiners, can never find enough to say condemnatory of the scholastic jargon. Hallam adopts the same line, and assures us that “the return of ignorance was chiefly owing to those worse vermin, the mendicant friars, who filled all Europe with stupid superstition.” Whether this is the best specimen that a man of letters could give of refined and polished diction may be questioned, but he goes on to remark (in a sentence which, considering the zeal of its writer for grammatical accuracy, exhibits a rather remarkable confusion of tenses),—“the writers of the thirteenth century display an incredible ignorance, not only of pure idiom, but of the common grammatical rules. Those who attempted to write verse have lost all prosody, and relapse into Leonine rhymes and barbarous acrostics. The historians use a hybrid jargon intermixed with modern words. The scholastic philosophers wholly neglected their style, and thought it no wrong to enrich the Latin, as in some degree a living language, with terms that seemed to express their meaning.... Duns Scotus and his followers in the next century carried this much further, and introduced a most barbarous and unintelligible terminology, by which the school metaphysics were rendered ridiculous in the revival of literature.”

That the thirteenth century witnessed a great decay of Latinity is not to be denied, though, as has been before shown, this decay and the neglect of classical studies had set in before the rise of the mendicant orders and is in no way to be attributed to them. Oxford enjoyed the reputation of talking the very worst Latin in Europe, whence arose the proverb, Oxoniensis loquendi mos. Certainly, if the grammatical errors condemned in the visitation articles of John of Peckham, as reported by Wood, were common in the schools, there is not much to be said in their defence. The prevalence of law studies, too, helped on the decline of rhetoric, for the diction of the jurists was, if possible, worse than that of the scholastics; and the inferiority, apparent during the reign of Edward II., in the schools of divinity, philosophy, and arts, is attributed by the learned Dominican, Holcot, to the over-abundance of law lectures. Granting, however, a full share in the corruption of Latinity to have been the work of the schoolmen, it is difficult to understand how they can be said to have committed a “wrong” by “enriching the Latin with terms which seemed to convey their meaning.” It is usually supposed to be the object of language to convey one’s thoughts, and writers who had to express the nice distinctions of Christian theology would have been puzzled had they been bound to confine themselves to the Ciceronian phraseology. They did, therefore, what Cicero himself had done before them, and coined words and idioms to express ideas which were not current in the Augustan age. The writings of the scholastics must be regarded as in some sort scientific works, in which the object was not elegance of style, but accuracy of sense. We are not, therefore, necessarily to conclude that the Latin of Duns Scotus was an example of the best that the age could produce; on the contrary, many instances might be cited to prove that even this unfortunate thirteenth century possessed scholars whose Latin was at least as pure as the English of some of their critics. Thus the Bull of Gregory X. for the canonisation of St. Louis, is cited by M. Artaud, the biographer of Dante, as “a very model of pure Latinity.” Cicero’s Rhetoric was so far from being devoured by the moths, that it was almost the very first work chosen for translation into Italian prose, and appeared in the vulgar idiom in 1257, the translator being Galeotto, the professor of grammar at the university of Bologna. But, putting aside all exceptional cases of those who still studied and imitated the classics, may we not reasonably complain of the narrowness of that criticism which stigmatises as barbarous everything which does not belong to one style, or reflect the phraseology of one arbitrarily chosen period? “It is strange,” observes Rohrbacher, “that every one supposes and repeats that the scholastics and the cloisters of the Middle Ages produced no book capable of pleasing the world and becoming popular; and yet, for centuries past, the world has read and delighted in a book of scholastic morality, composed in the Middle Ages by a monkish superior for the use of his novices, and that this book which has been read, known, and admired by everybody, is especially a popular book; and has been translated into every language, and gone through thousands of editions.” He is speaking of the Following of Christ, which, according to very probable conjectures, appears to have been composed in the thirteenth century, by John Gersen of Cabanaco, abbot of the Benedictine abbey of St. Stephen, at Vercelli.[253]

Again: among the writers who displayed such incredible ignorance as to write Leonine verse were the authors of a sacred poetic literature which will defy all the attacks of time, and which no classic revival can ever render obsolete. The “Dies Iræ,” the “Ave Maris Stella,” the “Stabat Mater,” the “Veni Sancte Spiritus,” the “Hymns of the Blessed Sacrament,” and those innumerable sequences so familiar to every Christian ear, owe nothing of their inspiration to classic sources. It is even possible that they may set at defiance the rules of Latin prosody; but all sense of harmony must be destroyed before we can designate the language in which they are composed as a “hybrid jargon.” And who were the writers of these exquisite compositions, which gave a voice to popular Christian devotion, and still preserve, like some choice balm, not merely the dogmas of the faith, but the very unction of a believing age? They were, for the most part, monks, schoolmen, and friars, the very men who stand charged with a conspiracy against literature and common sense. St. Peter Damian, Adam of St. Victor, Pope Innocent III., the Franciscan Jacopone, the Dominican St. Thomas, and we may add, the gifted and unfortunate Abelard, the very type and representative of the earlier scholastics—these are the barbarians to whom we are indebted for that mediæval lyric poetry, much of which has been incorporated into the office of the Church. In the seventeenth century France grew ashamed of her ancient hymnology, and committed the task of liturgical reform to Santeuil, the half-scholar, half-buffoon, to the Jansenist Coffin, and the Deist De Brienne. The hymns of Fortunatus and St. Ambrose were then exchanged for studied imitations of Horace, from the pen of a writer who boasted that he was ready to be hung up at a lamp-post if he were detected in writing a single bad verse, though one of his Jesuit critics has cruelly enumerated no fewer than a hundred and eight. But whatever be the merit of his poetry, the Catholic sense has long since passed its verdict on the question, and declared the unction of the ancient lyrics to be worth the pure Latinity of a thousand such writers as Jean Baptiste Santeuil.[254]

Both orders of Mendicant Friars gave to the English Church great prelates as well as great scholars; Kilwarby the Dominican and Peckham the Franciscan, two of the grandest of our English primates, may be taken as fair representatives of their respective orders. In the first we see the Oxford and Paris doctor, learned in scriptural and patristic lore, the “great clerk,” as Godwin calls him, who “disputed excellently in divers exercises,” and who, as primate, distinguished himself by his bold, uncompromising resistance to the tyranny of powerful nobles, and his efforts for the advancement of learning and the correction of public morals. After filling the see of Canterbury for six years, “he was obliged to fly from the king’s anger,” says Harpsfield, and, retiring to Rome, resigned the English primacy and became Cardinal Bishop of Porto.[255] His successor was the Franciscan, John of Peckham, appointed like himself by papal provision. How little was there of a worldly spirit in these appointments, so loudly and captiously condemned, when a Pope could put aside so powerful a personage as Robert Burnel, the chancellor of the greatest king of England who had reigned since the Conquest, in order to promote one, by birth a poor Sussex peasant, whose only recommendations were his exquisite scholarship and his saintly life! Peckham’s learned reputation was not indeed of an ordinary kind. He was a doctor both of Paris and Oxford, and a pupil at the latter university of St. Bonaventure; he had made the tour of all the Italian universities, and in the Pope’s own palace had lectured on sacred letters to a crowd of bishops and cardinals, who were proud to call themselves his pupils, and who every day as he passed through their ranks to his pulpit arose from their seats to show him reverence. Wadding speaks of his singularly noble countenance and graceful demeanour, and adds that, besides his other learned acquirements, he was an excellent poet.

His appointment to the primacy being, strange to say, unopposed by the Crown, he began his administration by calling a Provincial Synod, among the acts of which is that memorable one which enjoins every parish priest to explain to his flock the fundamentals of the Faith, laying aside all the niceties of school distinction, and which draws out in admirable and lucid terms what may be called an abridgment of Christian doctrine, under the heads of the Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Two Evangelical Precepts, the Seven Works of Mercy, the Seven Deadly Sins, and those that proceed from them, the Seven Contrary Virtues, and the Seven Sacraments.[256] Moreover, we find him appointing parochial schoolmasters in holy Orders for teaching the children of the poor.

Peckham not only visited his whole diocese, but travelled over the greater part of England, informing himself of the exact state of cathedrals, monasteries, clergy, and people, and making war on pluralism, and every other abuse which be discovered. He also showed himself very active in reforming the disorders that had crept into the universities, and at his visitation, held at Oxford in 1283, condemned a considerable number of false propositions, as well in theology, as in grammar, philosophy, and logic. His fearless independence of character did not shrink from presenting a remonstrance against the tyranny of Edward I., and administering a rebuke to the great Earl of Warren for allowing his deer and cattle to trample down a poor man’s field of corn. The immense list of his works, as given by Pitseus, shows that he was not of the number of those who neglected the arts. Besides his “Concordance of the Scriptures,” and his theological and scholastic works, there are poems, treatises on geometry, optics, and astronomy, others on mystical divinity, others on the pastoral office intended for the use of the parochial clergy, and some apparently drawn up to facilitate the instruction of the poor. Yet this illustrious man, undoubtedly one of the greatest of our English primates, was never in private life anything but the simple Friar Minor. “He was stately in gesture, gait, and outward show,” says Harpsfield, “yet of an exceeding meek, facile, and liberal temper.” At his own table sumptuously furnished for his guests, he ate only the coarsest viands, always travelled on foot, and chose to perform the humblest offices in his cathedral church, such as lighting the waxen tapers on the altar. It is a significant fact, that he always retained a prebend attached to the see of Lyons, in case he might at any time be forced to fly from England; and Godwin tells us, that after his time this benefice continued annexed to the see of Canterbury, in order to provide against the case of the more than probable exile of the Primates.

Our last specimen of an Oxford Don of the thirteenth century shall be taken from a different class; no Worcestershire yeoman, or Sussex peasant boy, but the son of the greatest and noblest of the English barons, Cantilupe, Earl of Pembroke, marshal and protector of the realm during the stormy minority of Henry III. Thomas Cantilupe, his eldest son, was educated first at court, and then at the universities of Oxford, Paris, and Orleans; and whether at court or in the schools, he displayed the same piety and delicacy of conscience. Deeply learned both in canon and civil law, he was raised by king Henry to the post of Lord Chancellor, and was also elected Chancellor of the University of Oxford. But on the accession of Edward I. he obtained leave to resign his dignities, and retired to Oxford, where he trusted he might spend the rest of his life in the practice of study and devotion. He took his degree of Doctor of Divinity in the church of the Dominicans, on which occasion his old master and spiritual director, Robert Kilwarby, then Archbishop of Canterbury, was present, and scrupled not publicly to declare his belief that he had never forfeited his baptismal innocence. He was then fifty-four years of age. “So help me God,” were the archbishop’s words, “I believe him to be this day as pure from all actual sin as on the day of his birth. And if any man ask, let him know that from his childhood I have heard his confessions, and read his life and conscience as clearly as a man may read an open book.”[257]

After attending the second Council of Lyons, he was elected Bishop of Hereford, and in the government of his diocese found himself, singularly enough, opposed to his saintly metropolitan, John of Peckham, who, as he conceived, overstrained his authority as Primate. Yet though he staunchly defended the rights of his Church, and was constantly engaged in vexatious disputes with some of the great barons, no one ever dreamt of charging him with a haughty or ambitious spirit. The speciality of his sanctity was charity, and it was said of him that he was never seen angry, save when a whisper of detraction met his ear.

Such were some of the Oxford doctors and chancellors of this period, and such the prelates chosen from their ranks. Not indeed that we would be thought desirous of representing our ancient universities as exclusively schools of saints; the slightest acquaintance with the academic annals suffices to show that they were disgraced by many scandals, and were too often the scenes of lawless outrages and contentions, which, in our days of higher civilisation, must naturally excite both wonder and disgust. Moreover, the halls of Oxford were haunted by a spirit very different from that which pervaded the cloisters of Jarrow. The world had entered there, with all its false maxims, and scholars were not ashamed to squabble for benefices, and often, on the motive of self-interest, to take part with the Crown against the Church. Still, when all has been said that impartial candour demands, we cannot doubt that many precious traditions must have been preserved in the university schools, and that they moulded many a poor scholar in the old saintly and beautiful type. Moreover, we are approaching the time when the most flagrant evils of the universities were about to receive a partial remedy by the establishment of the collegiate system, which soon became tacitly accepted as the educational system of England. It aimed, and to a great degree successfully, at combining the discipline of the old monastic schools with the larger intellectual advantages of the universities. The reputed priority is ordinarily assigned to University College, which, on the ground of its supposed foundation by Alfred, claims to be the first in point of antiquity of the Oxford foundations. But its real existence as a college dates only from the time of William, Archdeacon of Durham, by whose will a sum of money was assigned for the maintenance of a body of masters, who, in 1280, were required to live together in one house, and receive a body of statutes. But Merton College had already received its royal charter in 1264, and one year previously to that date, John Baliol, father to the unfortunate Scottish King, had taken some steps towards the foundation of the college which bears his name. His intentions were carried into effect by his widow, the Lady Devorgilla, who, at the instigation of her Franciscan confessor, Richard Stickbury, founded the college in honour of the Holy Trinity, Our Lady, and St. Catherine the Martyr. It would be pleasant to present to the reader the heiress of the ancient princes of Galloway, as she appears in semi-monastic costume, in her Oxford portrait, or to reproduce those exquisitely engrossed statutes, which provide that the students of Baliol shall be present at the divine offices on Sundays and holidays, and shall on other days frequent the schools; that they shall always speak Latin in common, and if they neglect to do so, shall be served last at table; that a sophism shall be disputed among them once a week, and that they be allowed a penny a day for their sustenance, and two pence on Sundays! But as our object is only to notice those collegiate foundations which in a marked way influenced the system of education, we shall pass on to Merton, avowedly the first English college incorporated by charter, and the model on which most of the subsequent foundations, both of Oxford and Cambridge were raised. Its founder, Walter de Merton, Bishop of Rochester and Chancellor of the realm, may be, in fact regarded as the originator of the collegiate system, and is designated in his monumental inscription unius exemplo, omnium quotquot extant collegiorum Fundator, maximorumque Europæ totius ingeniorum felicissimus parens. The immense evils of the university system, which was practically no system at all, early attracted his attention, and determined him on making the experiment of gathering a certain number of scholars from the halls and hostels where they now congregated subject to a merely nominal discipline, and placing them under the control of masters and tutors in a spacious building under semi-monastic rules. What was designed with so much sagacity was executed with corresponding magnificence, and the Domus Scholarium de Merton became the curiosity of its age. Architectural splendour was not at first considered any necessary part of a collegiate foundation, but the various tenements purchased by Bishop Merton were reduced to a regular quadrangular form, and a college chapel was included in the original design, two chaplains being appointed for “the ministration of Divine service.” In 1265, the parish church of St. John Baptist was made over to the founder by the monks of Reading, and granted to the perpetual use of the scholars. Their studies appear to have differed in no way from those of the other Oxonians, but Wood considers the appointment of a grammar-master to indicate that Bishop Merton designed to put some check on the decay of arts.

Among the early benefactresses to this college was one who might almost be called its co-foundress, Ella Longspée, Countess of Warwick, and daughter to that other Ella, Countess of Salisbury, who had obtained the conversion of her ferocious husband, Longspée, through the instrumentality of St. Edmund.[258] The friendship of the elder Ella with the saintly archbishop appears to have inspired both her daughters with a singular goodwill towards Oxford, and Ella in particular made large donations of lands and endowments to the Merton scholars. Such was the success of the new foundation that the king himself recommended it to Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely, as a model for his proposed Cambridge College of Peterhouse; and the example once set, was soon taken up by others. The Benedictines had possessed houses of studies in Oxford from a very early period, but the proposal was now made to found a regular college, intended, in the first instance, exclusively for students from Gloucester Abbey, but the benefits of which were afterwards extended to those of St. Alban’s, Glastonbury, Tavistock, Chertsey, Coventry, Evesham, St. Edmundsbury, Winchcombe, and Malmsbury, all of which contributed to the expense of rearing the necessary buildings. The real founder of Gloucester College, however, was not an abbot, but a baron, John Giffard, Lord of Brimesfield, and husband of Maud Longspée, whose persuasions doubtless had great share in promoting his munificence. In 1291, a general chapter was held at Abingdon of the monks of the province of Canterbury, and a tax imposed on all the Benedictine houses of the province, to raise the necessary funds.

The result was the erection of a grand and commodious pile of buildings, some of which remain to this day, and form a part of the modern Worcester College. The apartments occupied by the students of the different religious houses were separate one from another, and distinguished by their arms or rebusses. Thus, we see the cross-keys for St. Peter’s of Gloucester, a comb and a ton, with the letter W, for Winchcombe, and so of the rest. Each abbey sent a certain number of students at a time, who were governed by a prior, elected by themselves, called the “Prior Studentium,” and who had a rule adapted to suit their peculiar requirements. They were enjoined not to mix familiarly with the secular students, to have divinity disputations once a week, and to practise preaching, both in Latin and English. A chair of theology was afterwards founded for their special instruction. In short, Gloucester College was a true religious seminary, and continued to enjoy a high character for learning down to the time of the general suppression of religious houses. Wood gives many interesting particulars of the college, and the good scholars whom it produced. Whethamstede, abbot of St. Alban’s in the reign of Henry VI., of whom we shall have hereafter to speak more at length, was at one time the “Prior Studentium,” and afterwards bestowed such large benefactions on the house as to be called its second founder. He put in the five painted windows of the chapel, built a vestiary and a library, and presented many books. Moreover, he adorned the images of the Crucifix and the Saints with “deprecatory rhymes.” His dear and learned friend, Humphrey of Gloucester, likewise enriched the library with several valuable manuscripts. The first Benedictine of this college who took his doctor’s degree was William Brok, who graduated in divinity in 1298. The inception of a university doctor was in those days a stately ceremony, and on this occasion the Benedictines thought it well to celebrate the auspicious event with more than ordinary splendour. Six abbots of the order, therefore, attended the customary procession on horseback, besides “monks, priors, obedientiaries, and claustral clerks, a hundred noblemen and esquires,” and most of the Benedictine bishops of the province of Canterbury. The Durham monks were not long before they provided themselves with a similar seminary, and in 1286 obtained lands for the erection of their college from Dame Mabel Wafte, abbess of Godstow. The endowments of this establishment were intended half for lay and half for religious students. They also had their “Prior Studentium,” and the good repute of their learning induced Richard of Bury, the celebrated Bishop of Durham, to leave them his magnificent library of books. The site of this foundation is now occupied by the more modern Trinity College.

These religious establishments, it is not to be doubted, had a considerable share in promoting the extension of the collegiate system now fairly introduced into Oxford. The Merton scholars soon attracted notice; of whom the most famous was Duns Scotus, who after leaving the university entered among the Franciscan friars of Newcastle, and returning to Oxford to study a second time under the doctors of his own order, won perhaps the highest renown which attaches to the name of any English divine since the days of Bede.[259] The reign of Edward II. witnessed the foundation of two more colleges. Oriel claims as its founder that unfortunate monarch himself, who, whatever may have been his faults, was an undoubted patron of letters. It is probable, however, that he had little more than a nominal share in the foundation, which was the real work of his almoner, Adam de Brom. Exeter owes its name to its founder, Walter Stapleton, Bishop of Exeter, and both these were, more or less, in their statutes and general spirit, copies of Merton. The effects of the changes thus introduced into the university system are differently estimated by different writers. By many the diminution in the number of students which became apparent in the fourteenth century, is attributed to the increase of colleges. These of course could only accommodate a limited number, whereas any amount of students might swarm in the hostels and lodging-houses which were formerly their only resort. However, if the old adage, that quality is to be preferred to quantity, is to be held of any force, this can hardly be said to be a disadvantage. Six thousand students living under regular discipline were perhaps better than thirty thousand, containing a large proportion of “varlets;” and although in our days the collegiate system may be regarded as having a tendency to aristocratical exclusiveness, this was far from being its intention or result in the early period of its institution. The endowments were for poor scholars, and by poor scholars they were mostly enjoyed. It appears probable also that the successive pestilences which desolated Oxford in the reign of Edward III., and the troubles occasioned by Wickliffe and his followers, had a great deal to do with the decrease of the scholars. Besides which, it must be borne in mind that the rage for scholastic learning which characterised the thirteenth century, gave place in England during the fourteenth to a rage for French conquests. So completely did the brilliant successes achieved by the two Edwards root this passion in the English mind, that the cultivation of letters was little regarded, and perhaps after Wickliffe’s time it was looked on by some with a not unnatural suspicion. Many of the colleges had become tainted with Lollardism, and remained under a cloud; the tide of popular favour had set in for the showy chivalry of the day, and clerks and scholars went somewhat out of fashion. The close tie which had hitherto knit together the schools of Oxford and Paris was henceforth totally sundered, nor is it easy to estimate the injury thus accruing to the English university, which in the thirteenth century enjoyed the freest intercommunion with the French and Italian academies. The narrow insular spirit which thus sprang up, and which was nourished by the anti-Roman tendencies of English legislation, was fatal to intellectual progress. Hence the learned renown of our universities certainly declined, but so far was this from being the result of the collegiate system that it is evident the noble foundations of Wykeham, Waynflete, Fleming, Chicheley, and Henry VI., were undertaken with the view of supplying a remedy to the existing evils, and as a means of effecting a revival of learning among the English clergy.

The history of these foundations belongs however to a later date. For the present we must leave our semibarbarous island (for so, under favour, must baronial England doubtless have been regarded by dwellers south of the Alps), and see what kind of scholarship was flourishing in the more classic atmosphere of Italy at the very time when the first stones were being laid of our ancient Oxford cloisters.