I must not be tempted to enter on the endless theme of school sports and customs. But it is proper to mention that English schoolboys had their patron saints, of whom St. Gregory the Great was one. So we learn from the—shall I call it poetry?—of the Puritan, Barnaby Googe, who tells us that
St. Gregory lookes to little boyes to teach their a, b, c,
And make them for to love their bookes, and schollers good to be.
On his feast the boys were called into school by certain songs; presents were distributed, to make them love their school, and one of their number was made to represent the bishop. But a yet more universally acknowledged patron was St. Nicholas of Myra, in honour of whom schoolboys of all ranks and conditions elected their boy-bishop, and played pranks in which jest and earnest were strangely blended together. The “childe bishope” preached a sermon, and afterwards received welcome offerings of pence. And this custom was one of those to which the people clung with the greatest tenacity, so that it continued to survive down to the close of Elizabeth’s reign.
The character of the studies followed at this time in the higher English academies, may perhaps be best gathered from an examination of the kind of learning displayed by the poet already so often quoted. If Chaucer is to be taken as in any way a fair representative of an educated Englishman of his time, it is plain that there was, in a certain sense, no want of learning in the English schools, though his critics acknowledged that however varied and extensive his reading may have been, it was loose and inaccurate. In this respect the English were far behind the Italians. I am not aware that Dante has ever been convicted of a blunder in his classical allusions, but in Chaucer such solecisms abound. “All through the poem,” says Craik, in his critical examination of the House of Fame, “there runs the spirit of the strange, barbarous, classical scholarship of the Middle Ages. The Æneid is not wholly unknown to the author, but it may be questioned if his actual acquaintance with the work extended much beyond the opening lines. An abridgment, indeed, of the story of Æneas follows, but that might have been got at second-hand. The same mixture of the Gothic and the classic occurs throughout that is found in all the poetry of the period, whether French, English, or Italian.” He proceeds to quote lines, in which “the harper Orion” is made to do duty for Arion; Mount Cithæron is supposed to figure as the individual “Dan Citherus;” the musician Marsyas, who was flayed alive, appears as “Mersia, that lost her skin,” and so on. However, it is agreed that Chaucer was, in a certain inaccurate way, familiar with the stories of the Latin classics, and possessed of whatever learning was to be acquired in the schools of London and the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris, in all of which, according to Leland, he had “gained great glory.”[289] At the universities, moreover he had learned men for his cronies; his two most familiar college friends were John Gower and Randolph Strode, both of whom, like himself, afterwards attained poetic fame. It is to them that he dedicated his Troilus and Creseide, addressing them as “the philosophical Strode” and “the moral Gower.” The name of Gower is too well known to require any comment, but all readers may not be equally familiar with that of Strode, so we will briefly state that he was a Scotchman by birth, a fellow of Merton, afterwards a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and the author of a poem in the vernacular, entitled “Phantasma,” which critics scruple not to place on a level with Chaucer’s verse. He finally entered the Dominican Order, and greatly distinguished himself in the controversy against Wickliffe, thereby earning the distinguished honour of some very coarse abuse from the pen of Bale.
Chaucer was educated for the law, and Speght records the doubtful tradition that he was at one time a member of the Inner Temple, at which period of his career he is said to have been fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street. At any rate, his education was that of a “clerk,” and the office he eventually filled under the Crown was that of Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidies of wool, skins, and tanned hides in the port of London—an office about as suitable to him as that of gauger was to Robert Burns. He seems to have felt its incongruity with a poet’s sensitiveness, and its necessary “reckonings” are often alluded to in his verses as sad trials of patience. He was perfectly at home in the French tongue, and his familiarity with Italian is stoutly maintained by some, and as vehemently denied by others. Lydgate says that he translated Dante, but no fragment of such a work is known to exist. He was an incessant reader, as he is never weary of letting us know. When he had done his “reckonings,” his manner was to go home to his house and sit at his books, “as dumb as any stone,” and read till he was half blind. Once, he tells us, he spent a whole day reading Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, from the Commentary of Macrobius. He had a great liking for old books, and expresses it sweetly enough—
For out of old fields as men sayth,
Cometh all this new corn from yere to yere,
And out of old books, in good faith,
Cometh all this new lore that men lere.