When Thou suffredst deth for me.
A great number of the Church hymns and other devotions are also to be found translated in a versified form for the use of the laity, such as the Veni Creator, the Popule mi, quid feci? and other portions of the Holy Week office. These fragments, which are mere indications of the rich stores of religious literature possessed by our ancestors, must not be lost sight of when studying the subject of popular education. Were we to credit the majority of writers on ancient manners, the poetry of the Middle Ages was exclusively furnished by the profane and licentious jongleurs, whose productions have been very diligently sought out and republished for the edification of the curious, whilst the very existence of a vast body of popular religious poetry is systematically ignored. Yet the one class of writings is surely as characteristic of the age to which it belongs as the other; and we are bound not to condemn the morals of our forefathers from the study of that portion of their literature which is corrupt and reprehensible, without also receiving the evidence furnished by poetry of a totally opposite description.
We must not conclude our notice of the English writers of the Lancastrian period without briefly noticing the names of two learned monks. The first was John Capgrave, author of the Legenda Sanctorum Angliæ, which Leland says was chiefly derived from an earlier collection of saints’ lives by John of Tynemouth, a monk of St. Alban’s, who died in 1370. Capgrave also produced other learned works, a MS. copy of one of which, a commentary on the Book of Genesis, is preserved in the library of Oriel College, and contains in its initial letter a portrait of the author presenting his book to Duke Humphrey, whose autograph is at the end of the volume. The other religious writer was Walter Hilton, a Carthusian monk of Shene. His “Scale of Perfection,” an invaluable spiritual treatise, which formed the favourite study of Sir Thomas More, has been reprinted, but a considerable number of his other spiritual works exist in manuscript in the British Museum, and yet await an editor.
If the English did not compose many books at this period, they bought and transcribed them with great diligence. More books were copied during the first half of the fifteenth century than during any previous century and a half. Book collectors were enterprising enough to take journeys into Italy, and returned laden with literary treasures; among whom, besides Fleming, already noticed, were Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, the friend of Pius II.; John Free, a British ecclesiastic, afterwards Bishop of Worcester; Millyng, Abbot of Westminster; and Sellynge, Prior of Canterbury; all of whom had studied the classical literature at Padua, or in Guarini’s Florentine school. In the household accounts of Sir John Howard, founder of the house of Norfolk, is a bill for the transcribing, illuminating, and “flourishing” of books. Enormous sums were spent by literary dandies on bookbinding. Edward IV. is said to have spent as much on binding a book as was then the price of an ox, and “caused thereafter to be delivered to his binder six yards of velvet, ditto of silk, besides laces, tassels, and gilt nails.” The Lancastrian princes were all patrons of letters: Henry V., as we know, was a scholar of Queen’s, though, judging from his life after leaving the university, we can hardly suppose him to have been at that time much of a reading man. At a later period, however, he seems to have had literary tastes, and in order to gratify them he did not always return the books he borrowed. After his death, petitions were presented from the Countess of Westmoreland and the Prior of Christchurch, praying that certain books borrowed of them by the King might be restored. Those lent by the Prior consisted of the works of St. Gregory. His son, Henry VI., was the very type of a scholar; whilst his uncle Beaufort, Cardinal and Bishop of Winchester, and his two brothers, the Regent, Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, were all distinguished as men of learning. Duke Humphrey was beyond all doubt the most munificent patron of letters that had yet appeared in England, and did his best to redeem her schools from the charge of barbarism brought against them by Poggio and the other classic scholars of Italy. He was a great book collector, and the copies he caused to be transcribed were all of the most costly and splendid description, written on vellum and adorned with illuminations: 129 such manuscripts[302] were bequeathed by him to the University of Oxford, of which one, and one alone, remains. All the others were destroyed by the pious visitors of Edward VI., who considered that everything that was enriched with illuminations must be a popish missal, and therefore only fit to be cast to the flames. The solitary survivor is a copy of Valerius Maximus, the index to which is written by the hand of Humphrey’s dear and learned friend Whethamstede, Abbot of St. Alban’s.
Humphrey’s patronage was not confined to English scholars. Heeren prints a Latin epistle, addressed by him to the Italian Decembrio, who had presented him with a translation of Plato De Republica. He employed several learned French and Italian translators, and to him Leonard Aretino dedicated his version of Aristotle, the presentation copy of which is preserved in the Bodleian. Pope Pius II., in a letter written about the middle of the century, mentions the fact that the duke had sent into Italy and procured several professors to explain the Latin poets and orators in his own country. And Vossius speaks of a certain master from Ferrara, to whom he gives the name of Titus Livius, and who, he says, came into England by the invitation of the Duke of Gloucester, and while there wrote a life of Henry V., and dedicated it to his son Henry VI. This life has been republished by Heeren. The real name of the author is unknown, and he probably assumed that of the Latin historian to indicate that he imitated his style.
Duke Humphrey’s chief assistant, however, in his literary labours was the learned abbot named above, John Whethamstede of St. Alban’s. He was originally a monk of Tynemouth, in Northumberland (which was a cell of St. Alban’s), whence he removed to Gloucester Abbey; then he was made prior of Gloucester College at Oxford, in which office he had every opportunity for indulging his taste for study and his equally characteristic liberality; for he spent a considerable sum in the erection of a new library, on which he bestowed many books prefixed with verses, warning off the fingers of pilferers. He also adorned the college with painted windows, set up inscriptions under the Crucifix and other holy images, and poured out so many other benefactions on the house that he was formally declared to be its second founder.
He was elected Abbot of St. Alban’s for the first time in 1420, and having resigned his office in 1440, was elected a second time in 1451. It would be no easy matter to catalogue all his good deeds, for Whethamstede was a great reformer and builder, and setter to rights of decayed offices. In fact, he united in a very uncommon degree the literary and the practical gifts, and while busy with his books and libraries, did not forget the repairing of brew-houses and enclosing of kitchen gardens; in spite of which services, the monks very unjustly accused him of neglecting their affairs, and giving all his time to study. Weever enumerates all the multifarious decorations in the shape of painted windows, gilded and illuminated verses, and other ornaments which he set up in his abbey. “Our Lady’s Chapel,” he says, “was very curiously trimmed and depicted, and letters dispersed therein in gold.” The north part of the abbey church being somewhat dark, he made it glorious with new windows, introducing, with taste more classical than suitable, the figures of such heathen philosophers as had testified of Christ. He also expended great sums in books for the abbey library, “as well for the use of the brethren of the cloister as for the scholars;” an expression which shows that the monastic school was still kept up. These books exceeded eighty-seven in number, besides which he caused to be begun the copying of Nicholas de Lyra’s great commentary on the Bible, and employed Lydgate to translate the metrical life of St. Alban into English verse. He also added many of his own compositions, such as his Granarium, a sort of theological commonplace book, in five volumes, dedicated to Duke Humphrey. The duke was fond of visiting the abbey, to which he was a great benefactor, and employed Whethamstede in collecting books for him; and after his death, St. Alban’s was very fitly chosen as the place of his interment.
We must now for a time leave the company of princes and abbots, and take our way through the streets of London—a city which, even in the days of Henry II., was thickly populated with schoolboys, and which, thanks to his pious namesake Henry VI., kept up its name as a place of good learning in the fifteenth century. We have already seen something of the university and domestic education of Old England, but we have yet to make ourselves acquainted with the schools and scholars of the middle class. The English Commons were at this precise period fast rising in wealth and importance, and the number among them who sought a good education for their children was every year on the increase. The London citizens particularly were men of intelligence and enterprise, fully conscious of the weighty position they held in the State, and perfectly well qualified to fill it. Nor let the fastidious reader scorn the idea of scholarship as associated with that of a community of mercers and fishmongers; for it is a fact of which England has no cause to be ashamed, that many of her greatest public men, and not a few of her best scholars, have risen from the mercantile and working classes. Lord mayors and aldermen have not unfrequently spent the wealth they have amassed by trade in foundations of charity or learning. Thus, Elsing Spittal, at Cripplegate, was founded in 1329, by a London mercer, for the sustentation of a hundred blind men; St. Lawrence’s College, in 1332, by Lord Mayor Poulteney; St. Michael’s College, by Sir William Walworth, of Wat Tyler-slaying celebrity; and Leadenhall College, by Sir Simon Eyre, another lord mayor and draper, who provided that a school should be attached to his college under the care of three schoolmasters and an usher. His wishes do not seem to have been carried out, but in 1446 his beautiful chapel was given over to the newly-established confraternity of the Holy Trinity; and some of the priests belonging to this society, says Stowe, celebrated divine service in this chapel every market day for the market people.
So again in 1418, William of Sevenoaks, who from a foundling had made his way to civic honours, built and endowed a college in his native place, and a free school for the townsmen’s children; and, not to multiply examples, the renowned Sir Richard Whittington, mercer and Lord Mayor of London, after founding his noble College and Hospital of St. Michael’s Royal, and repairing St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, built at his own expense the great library of the Grey Friars, and expended a considerable sum in furnishing it with reading pews, and causing to be transcribed a fair copy of Nicholas de Lyra for the friars’ use. Men of this stamp were solicitous to see their city provided with good schools, and in 1446 we find a petition presented to Parliament by four city priests, begging the honourable Commons to take into consideration the great number of grammar-schools that had formerly existed in the metropolis, and the fact that many of them had lately fallen into decay. The petitioners go on to say that many persons now resort to London to be informed of grammar, through lack of good schoolmasters in the provinces, “wherefore it were expedient that in London were a sufficient number of scholes and good informers in grammar; for where there is gret number of lerners, and few techers, the maisters wax rich of money, and the lerners poorer in cunning, agenst all virtue and order of weal publik.” They entreat therefore that schools may be opened in each of their parishes, and persons learned in grammar set over them “there to teach to all that will learn.” In compliance with this petition, we find the good king Henry VI. founding no fewer than eight grammar-schools in this and the following year. And Mercers’ School was likewise established in connection with the Mercers’ Company.
Stowe describes the grammatical disputations kept up between the scholars of these academies even in his time, and lets us know that the scholars of St. Paul’s were wont to call those of St. Anthony’s “Antonie pigs,” by reason that St. Anthony is usually figured with a pig following him; and that they in their turn retaliated on their rivals the sobriquet of “pigeons,” many such birds being wont to make their haunt in the spire of St. Paul’s church. And it was their custom when they met one another in the street to provoke one another to disputation with the words Salve tu quoque; placetne disputare? To which, if the answer were Placet, they fell to words, and soon to blows also, the satchels full of grammars serving as convenient weapons, which oftentimes bursting in the fray, the books were scattered about in heaps to the great trouble of the passers-by. The least admirable thing recorded of the London schoolboys, however, is their taste for cock-fighting. On Shrove Tuesday every schoolboy in London brought a cock to his master, and the whole of that forenoon, says Fitz Stephen, “is spent by them in seeing the cocks fight in their schoolroom.” No wonder that Colet, among other retrenchments, prohibited his scholars of St. Paul’s from taking part in these Shrovetide cock-fightings, as a description of sport eminently fitted to foster in the boyish nature those brutal tendencies which are perhaps indigenous to the soil. That a taste for learning and a generous disposition to encourage it were to be found among not a few of the London citizens of this period is sufficiently clear; and among many names that might be given of founders of schools and lovers of letters, that of John Carpenter, town clerk of London in the reigns of Henry V. and Henry VI., must not be omitted. He was executor to Whittington, and the personal friend of two at least of those four priests above named who had petitioned Parliament for the establishment of more schools. These were Thomas Neel, Master of the Hospital of St. Thomas de Acon, and Incumbent of St. Mary, Colechurch; and William Lichfield, Rector of Allhallows the Great. Lichfield was a considerable writer both in prose and verse, whom Stowe calls “a great student and a famous preacher.” These two excellent ecclesiastics took part in many good works with John Carpenter, and probably assisted him in making that collection of books, afterwards mentioned in his will. Carpenter seems also to have had a taste for the arts; for the famous Dance of Death painted in the cloisters of old St. Paul’s, was placed there at his expense, with accompanying verses from the pen of Lydgate. It is, however, as an encourager of liberal education that he claims a place in these pages, and the benefaction by which he left certain tenements in the city “for finding and bringing up four poor men’s children with meat, drink, apparel, and learning, at the schools in the universities, for ever,” was the foundation which has since grown into the City of London School.[303]