It will be seen, therefore, that the love of letters was not quite extinct in the cloisters of Saxon England; and the coming of Lanfranc blew the embers into a flame. He set himself to restore a great number of cathedral and monastic schools that had fallen into decay, and during his leisure hours liked to hear some poor scholars hold disputations in his presence on learned subjects, rewarding them with liberal gifts.
But besides his encouragement of learned men, Lanfranc did good service to the cause of letters in other ways. He often interposed his kind offices to save the ancient English foundations from the vengeance of the Conqueror. Thus, having succeeded in averting the threatened destruction of St. Alban’s Abbey, which William had doomed in consequence of the brave resistance he had met with from its abbot, Frithric, Lanfranc conferred it on a relative and pupil of his own named Paulinus, who has fallen under the lash of Matthew Paris, but who nevertheless proved an excellent abbot. He introduced the “Constitutions,” published by Lanfranc for the government of the English Benedictines, reformed a host of irregularities, and, with the help of subsidies liberally granted by the archbishop, built several useful offices, and established the first scriptorium attached to the abbey.
I know not what my readers will say when they hear that the mill, the bakehouse, and the scriptorium erected by Paulinus were all built out of the tiles and stones of the ancient Verulam, collected by his Saxon predecessors Ealdred and Eadmer, who had made some very curious excavations among the ruins of the Roman city, and had laid open a palace with its baths and its atrium. Moreover, they had dug up a number of books in good preservation, one of which was in a tongue unknown to all, and proved at last to be a British history of the “Acts of St. Alban.” The other books were in Latin, and, relating to heathen worship, were committed to the flames. This sounds barbarous to antiquarian ears, but there is worse to tell. Eadmer ordered that all the altars, urns, coins, and glass vessels discovered by the workmen should be destroyed. The day had not yet come when relics of paganism were deemed safe or fit objects for good Christians to collect in their museums, and the Vatican collection itself would probably have fared but badly in the hands of Alcuin or St. Boniface. However, the monks of St. Alban’s, though destroyers of the Verulam antiquities, were very active in setting up their scriptorium. Paulinus furnished it with twenty-eight “notable volumes,” and many others were presented by Lanfranc. There is, moreover, a distinct notice of the existence of the abbey school. Abbot Richard, who succeeded Paulinus (after the Red King had contrived to keep the abbacy vacant for five years), showed a great interest in the success of this school, and invited over from Maine a certain master named Geoffrey de Gorham, to take on him its direction. Gorham however, was rather dilatory, and by the time he arrived in England the office had been given to another. So he removed to Dunstable, and there read lectures for some time, and whilst so occupied, invented a miracle-play, said to be the first that is noticed in history, the subject being the martyrdom of St. Katherine. These sacred dramas were used as means of popular instruction, and often contained a fine vein of poetry. As time went on, and they fell out of the hands of the ecclesiastics into those of a class of writers and actors whose object it was to please, rather than to instruct the multitude, they became debased by the introduction of coarse jests and buffoonery, which abound in the specimens best known to English readers, but of which there is not the slightest trace in the earlier religious dramas. The dress and getting up of the pieces, in which there was a wonderful amount of ingenuity displayed, and even of stage trickery,[152] of course enhanced their success; and Gorham borrowed from the sacristan of St. Alban’s the choral copes of the abbey, to be used in the first representation of his play. Unfortunately, the very next night his house caught fire, and the borrowed copes, together with his own books, were all destroyed. It was a great disaster; and in atonement for his carelessness he assumed the monastic habit at St. Alban’s; and this was the reason, says Matthew Paris, that when he became abbot he was so careful to provide the choir with new rich copes.
In the midst of his many cares and anxieties, Lanfranc found time to devote to literary toils. They were useful ones, well worthy of a monk and a bishop. He corrected the text of the entire Bible, and of several of the Fathers. He never forgot Bec, and sent several youths, and among others his own nephew and namesake, there for education; and much of his correspondence with St. Anselm turns on the progress of these young men in their studies. Anselm, on his part, frankly confesses that he gets very weary of continually teaching the younger boys their declensions; and lets us know that he required his pupils to compose often in Latin, and rather in prose than in verse; that he recommended them to read Virgil and the other classics, and to be diligent in copying manuscripts. At other times his letters, treating of literary subjects, and accompanying presents of precious books to the Canterbury scriptorium, introduce allusions to the health of his scholars, evincing that paternal tenderness which was so remarkable a feature in his character.
Anselm, who had been elected abbot of Bec on the death of Herluin, during his visits to England became personally known to the Conqueror, whose furious passions were restrained in presence of the gentle saint, who won both his love and his reverence. It was whilst at Canterbury, on a visit to his friend Lanfranc, that the abbot of Bec made his first acquaintance with his future biographer, the young Saxon Eadmer. This was the time when he so sweetly defended the memory of the Anglo-Saxon saints from the contempt with which Lanfranc was disposed to regard them; and possibly this circumstance may have had some share in securing him the confidence and affection of Eadmer, who then held the office of precentor in the cathedral of Canterbury.
Lanfranc died in 1089, having survived the great Conqueror nearly two years. The events which, four years later, placed St. Anselm on the archiepiscopal throne of Canterbury, and his heroic struggles against the usurpations of the temporal power in the reigns of William Rufus and Henry I., scarcely fall within our present subject, though they form not the least important chapter in our national Church history. But the succession to the primacy of another great scholar was an event which made itself felt in the world of letters, and kindled extraordinary ardour for learned pursuits among the English clergy. This spirit was certainly encouraged by the Norman kings, who, ferocious tyrants as they were, all more or less exhibited a taste for letters. The Conqueror took special care of the education of his children. Henry Beauclerk was educated at Abingdon Abbey, under the care of Faricius, an Italian monk of Malmsbury. The proficiency of the young prince as displayed by his version of Æsop’s fables, is commonly said to have earned him his learned sobriquet; but Mr. Wright, in his “Biographia Britannica,” calls his authorship in question. Both his sisters, and his two queens, Matilda of Scotland and Adeliza of Louvaine, were patrons of letters. Some epistles from Matilda to St. Anselm are preserved, which display no mean degree of scholarship, if they were really the production of her own pen. The encouragement of these two princesses quickened the imagination of a host of versifiers, who began to neglect the composition of hexameters in limping Latin, and to substitute in their room songs and romances in Norman-French. The Anglo-Saxon tongue was, of course, never heard at court; and some writers, like William of Malmsbury, went so far as to omit the Saxon names of men and places, through an over-delicate fear of distressing refined organs by such barbarous sounds. A new literature meanwhile sprang up, bearing the impress of an age of knight-errantry. Alexander, Arthur, and Charlemagne found themselves transformed from historic personages into heroes of quaint and extravagant fictions, full of hippogrifs, dragons, and enchanted castles, where distressed damsels were held captive by wicked magicians, in order to be delivered by the prowess of doughty knights—a style of composition to which we give a name borrowed from the language used by the narrators, that, namely, of the Romance dialect of France. Among the accumulation of rubbish written in this dialect, which was about this time poured forth into the world, one book of a higher character appears, the production of Prior Guichard of Beaulieu. It is a sermon in verse on the vices of the age, and appears to have been written to be actually recited, for he begins by telling his hearers that he is going to talk to them, not in Latin, but in the vernacular, that every one may understand what he says. De la Rue, who notices this curious poem, observes that the mention of a sermon in verse need not cause surprise, as at that epoch it was a common thing for the Anglo-Norman clergy to read to the people on Sundays and holy-days the lives of the saints in French verse. Nine such versified lives are still preserved, the production of Boson, nephew to Pope Alexander II. The mediæval preachers had sometimes recourse to strange expedients in order to rouse the slumbering attention of their hearers. Vincent of Beauvais tells us that in his time it was a common thing to lighten a dull subject by introducing one of Æsop’s fables, a practice which he does not absolutely condemn, but recommends to be used sparingly.
Besides the disciples reared in our native schools, a large number of English scholars were to be found, who mingled with the graver pursuits of learning something of that spirit of knight-errantry and wild adventure which characterised the times. Arabic Spain was just then regarded as the fountain-head of science. The Moorish sovereigns of Cordova had collected an immense library in their capital, and are reported to have had seventy others in different parts of their dominions. Thither, then, wandered many an English student, attracted rather than repelled by the tales of glamour associated with a Moslem land. One of these scholar adventurers was Athelhard of Bath, the greatest man of science who appeared in England before the time of Roger Bacon. In the reign of the Red King he had left his own country to study at Tours and Laon, in which latter place he opened a school. Thence he proceeded to Salerno, Greece, Asia Minor, and Spain, increasing his stock of learning, and returned at last, after a long absence, in the reign of Henry I. After this he opened a school in Normandy, where he taught the Arabic sciences, in spite of the prejudices which many felt against learning acquired from so suspicious a source. Among those who so objected was Athelhard’s own nephew; and in defence of his favourite studies the English master wrote a book, in which he reminds his nephew of an agreement formerly made between them, that one should gather all the learning taught by the Arabs, while the other should, in like manner, study the wisdom of the Franks. This book is written in the form of a colloquy, in which the nephew is made to appear as the champion of the old system of education, and the uncle of the new.
I do not know whether we should conclude that Athelhard gained very much from his Arabic masters; for if he studied at Cordova the causes of earthquakes, eclipses, and tides, we find from his Quæstiones that he had also devoted a considerable portion of his time to investigating the reason why plants cannot be produced in fire, why the nose is made to hang over the mouth, why the human forehead is not furnished with horns, whether the stars are animals, whether on that hypothesis they have any appetite, with other equally singular and puerile questions. In spite of these eccentricities, however, Athelhard was a really learned man. He translated Euclid and other mathematical works out of the Arabic, and is styled by Vincent of Beauvais, “the Philosopher of England.” A few years later we find another Englishman, named Robert de Retines, studying at Evora in company with a certain Hermann of Dalmatia, who is called a most acute and erudite scholar. Robert had travelled in search of learning through France, Italy, Dalmatia, Greece, and Asia Minor, and finally made his way into Spain, where Peter of Cluny found the two friends studying astrology at Evora. Peter’s journey into Spain was undertaken with the view of obtaining more exact information as to the Mohammedan doctrines and writings, and he induced the two scholars to give up their unprofitable pursuits, and employ their knowledge of Arabic in translating the Koran. This they did in 1143. Robert afterwards became archdeacon of Pampeluna; he did not, however, entirely forsake his own country, but returning thither, wrote a translation of the Saxon Chronicle, which is preserved in the Bodleian library, and which is dedicated to Peter of Cluny. His friend Hermann, who is styled “a most acute and profound scholastic,” produced a translation of Ptolemy’s “Planisphere,” which he addressed to his old Spanish preceptor Theodoricus, and from the preface to this book we find that the school at which they studied was not Arabic, but Christian, a fact of some importance, as it is very generally stated that the Spanish academies resorted to at this time by European students were those of the Arabic masters, who are represented as alone possessing any knowledge of the mathematical sciences. It is clear however that now, as in the time of Gerbert, there existed Christian schools in Spain, no less efficient than those of the Moors, and that it was to these that many of the French and English scholars resorted for the purposes of study.
To the names of these learned Englishmen I must add that of Odericus Vitalis, the course of whose education is best given in his own words in that short summary of his life with which he concludes his history. “I was baptized,” he says, “at Attingham, a village in England, which stands on the bank of the great river Severn. There, by the ministry of Odericus the priest, Thou didst regenerate me with water and the Holy Ghost. When I was five years old I was sent to school at Shrewsbury, and offered Thee my services in the lowest order of the clergy in the Church of SS. Peter and Paul. While there, Siward, a priest of great eminence, instructed me for five years in the letters of Carmenta Nicostrata,[153] and taught me psalms and hymns, with other necessary learning. I was ten years old when I crossed the British sea, and arrived in Normandy, an exile, unknown to all, and knowing no one. But supported by Thy goodness, I found the utmost kindness and attention from these foreigners. I was professed a monk in the monastery of St. Evroult, by the venerable abbot Mainier, in the eleventh year of my age, and he gave me the name of Vitalis, in place of that which I received in England, and which seemed barbarous to the ears of the Normans. In this monastery, through Thy goodness, I have lived fifty-six years, loved and honoured by my brethren far more than I have deserved. Bearing the heat and burden of the day in a strange land, I have laboured among Thy servants, and as Thou art faithful, I fear not but I shall receive the penny which Thou hast promised.”
He elsewhere tells us that his master in this abbey was John of Rheims, a disciple of the famous school of that city, who was an author of no mean fame, and composed a great number of works both in prose and verse. It does not appear that he ever studied in any other academy, but whatever learning he afterwards attained must have been acquired within the walls of his own monastery, and he could scarcely have found his way to a better school. In the eleventh century there was no branch of learning which was not cultivated among the monks of St. Evroult; music, medicine, poetry, painting, and the mechanical arts, all found there able professors. The history of Odericus leaves us in no doubt as to the extent of his literary attainments. He quotes most of the ancient classical writers, and many of the Fathers of the Church, and the intelligence of his mind is displayed by the way in which he collected the materials of his work. Nothing escaped his notice, and from the lips of some wandering Crusader or passing pilgrim he gathered up the tales and episodes with which he enlivened his pages, giving them in many parts the lively colouring of a romance. One day a monk of Winchester who stopped at the abbey for a few hours chanced to show him a life of St. William, copies of which were then rare in Normandy. Odericus, in raptures at the sight of the treasure, longed to copy it, but the traveller was in haste, and the fingers of Odericus were benumbed with cold, for it was the depth of winter. However, the opportunity was not to be lost, and seizing his tablets he with great difficulty took such notes from the manuscript as enabled him afterwards, at his leisure, to compose a life of the founder of St. Gellone. His “Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy,” which occupied twenty years in its compilation, is the only work he has left to posterity.