VI. The Mendicant Orders and Education.
Reference must also be made to the part played in education by the Mendicant Orders. St. Francis of Assisi was a devout and earnest believer in Christianity. Impelled by a force working in him, he renounced all material and worldly possessions, and accepted for himself the task of building up the Church, through the conversion of the souls of men. In 1207 he received formal recognition from Pope Innocent III.; a band of enthusiastic converts soon gathered around him, with the single aim of preaching and ministering to the poor. “To the poor by the poor. Those masses, those dreadful masses, crawling, sweltering in the foul hovels, in many a southern town with never a roof to cover them, huddling in groups under a dry arch alive with vermin; gibbering cretins with the ghastly wens; lepers too shocking for mothers to gaze at and therefore driven to curse and howl in the lazar house outside the walls, there stretching out their bony hands to clutch the frightened almsgiver’s dole, or, failing that, to pick up shreds of offal from the heaps of garbage—to those, St. Francis came.”[571]
The Franciscan movement was originally a movement of piety only, and did not contain within itself any intellectual elements. In fact, learning was distinctly discouraged. “Must I part with my books?” said the scholar with a sinking heart. “Carry nothing with you for your journey” was the inexorable answer. “Not a Breviary? Not even the Psalms of David?” “Get them in your heart of hearts, and provide yourself with a treasure in the heavens. Whoever heard of Christ reading books save when He opened the book in the synagogue and then closed it and went forth to teach the world for ever.”[572]
Almost simultaneously with the founding of the Franciscan movement, St. Dominic realised the necessity of bringing about a moral reformation. His method, however, differed appreciably from that adopted by St. Francis. To St. Dominic, ignorance and vice were the great evils to be contended against: hence, he formed a community whose purpose it was to instruct the unlearned and to confute the heretic, through the agency of the pulpit.[573] To this community, Innocent III. gave his formal sanction in 1215.
Study was not regarded in the same way by the Friar as it was by the monk. To the monk, study or labour was enjoined as a means for bringing about a subjugation of human passions, or as an occupation for hours that would otherwise be spent in idleness; the extent to which they became teachers arose out of the exigencies of the times. “Officium monachi non docentis sed plangentis.” The aim of the monk was simply the salvation of his own soul; for the outside world he disclaimed duty or responsibility. Seclusion and separation from all but the members of his own community, were regarded as the great instruments by which his object was to be achieved. To the friar christianity appeared as a means by which the regeneration of society could be effected. Hence the cause of the difference in the attitude towards education. It was not an occupation for idle hours, or a prophylactic against temptation, but a means by which a power to influence the minds of men could be acquired. Particularly was this true of the Dominicans. The immediate purpose of their Order was resistance to the Albigensian heresy. “Hence it was natural that Dominic should have looked to the universities as the most suitable recruiting ground for his Order; to secure for his preachers the highest theological training that the age afforded, was an essential element of the new monastic ideal.”[574] It was not, however, long before the Franciscans also found it necessary to go to the universities for additions to their ranks. Within thirty-five years of the death of their founder, the Franciscans had become as conspicuous for intellectual activity as the Dominicans, and, for the next two hundred years, the intellectual history of Europe is bound up with the divergent views of these great Orders.
In 1224 the Franciscans opened a school at Oxford, which served as a centre from which teachers went all over England; in the following year, they also opened a school at Cambridge. It is stated that, prior to the Reformation, there were sixty-seven Franciscan professors at Oxford, and seventy-three at Cambridge.[575]
Mr. A. G. Little has investigated the educational organisation of the Mendicant Friars in this country.[576] He points out that the absence of authentic materials will probably make it for ever impossible accurately to give the history of the Mendicant Orders in England. The available sources consist only of “a few chronicles, a few letters, the general constitution of the Orders, the Acts of the General Chapters, the registers of the general masters, and the Acts of the provincial chapters of other provinces.”[577]
The general system of education in vogue among the Mendicant Orders was developed before 1305.[578] This was established in England in 1335, when the General Chapter held at London in that year decreed that provincial priors and chapters in their respective provinces should provide “de studiis theologie, philosophie, naturalium et artium.”[579]
At the basis of the educational organisation of these Orders would be the grammar schools. Novices were not accepted unless they had attained to a certain standard of education. The Dominican statutes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries required candidates to be examined “in moribus et scientia,” and they were rejected if they were deficient in either.[580] Consequently, the instruction to be given by the master of the novices was mainly moral.[581]
For the next grades of instruction, the convents were combined into groups. Common schools for special studies were established in one or more convents of each group.[582]