[31] The author of Piers Ploughman criticizes the education given by the clerics of his day. “Grammar that ground is of all” was neglected so that no one could now either “versify fair” or construe what the poets wrote.
“Doctors of degree and of divinity masters
That should the seven arts conne and assoil ad quodlibet,
But they fail in philosophy, an philosophers lived
And would well examine them, wonder me thinketh!”
—Passus xviii. 107-118.
[32] The “alphabet and the humanities” did not imply culture in anything like our sense of the word, nor yet Latin from the literary point of view, but the old ecclesiastical discipline, which included above all things logic, and which ultimately led, if the pupil advanced far enough, to the scholastic philosophy. Thus for example in the Epistolæ obscurorum virorum one of the (priestly) correspondents is made to protest against the introduction of the study of Vergil and other new-fangled writers.
[33] Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 281-2.
[34] Hist. MSS. Com. x. part 4, 425-6.
[35] Nottingham Records, i. 246, 263.
[36] Ordinances for Dame Agnes Meller’s School, Nott. Rec. iii. 453-6. The Mayor of Chester had the payment of the master at Farneworth, Lancashire. (Hist. MSS. Com. viii. 370.) In Coventry the corporation (i.e., the Trinity Guild) paid the master.
[37] Ibid. iv. 191.
[38] Nott. Rec., iv. 214.