Some of the larger of our English abbeys had not only schools within their own precincts, but others dependent on them in the neighbouring towns. Thus the school of Dunstable was dependent on the abbey of St. Alban’s, and in 1180 was governed by a pupil of that abbey, who in every way deserves mention as one of the most remarkable scholars of his time. Alexander Neckham was foster-brother to Richard I., and educated in the claustral school of St. Alban’s. Being appointed regent of the Dunstable school, he taught there for some time with considerable success, and thence proceeded to Paris, where he studied and professed for seven years. At the end of that time he returned to England, and resumed his former functions at Dunstable. At last, wishing to enter the monastic state, he is said to have applied for admission to the abbot of St. Alban’s, in an epistle commencing with the words, “Si vis, veniam,” to which the abbot, who loved a joke, replied, “Si bonus es, venias,—si nequam nequaquam.” The pun on his name (Neckam) appears to have disgusted him; at any rate, instead of a Benedictine, he became an Augustinian, and took the habit in the priory of Cirencester, about the year 1187. He was a universal scholar, a proficient in canon law, medicine, and theology, the best Latin poet of his age, and remarkable for the purity of his style. Like a true scholastic, he was a great lover of grammar, and wrote several works on the subject, which are still preserved in MS., some at Oxford, some at Cambridge, and some in the British Museum. He was also the author of a set of tracts, common enough in later times, for teaching scholars the Latin names of different articles by connecting them in a sort of descriptive narrative. To this work he gives the title of De nominibus Utensilibus, in which he describes every apartment of a house, from the kitchen to the bedrooms, with the furniture, dress, &c., in use in the twelfth century. An interlinear version is given in French, and at the end are grammatical notes and comments. He has also left a poem on the monastic character, another on science, in which he treats with some sublimity of the creation of the angels, stars, and elements; of the birds, fishes, rivers, and principal towns in England; of the earth, with her metals, plants, fruits, and animals; and of the seven liberal arts. His remarks on natural history are original and sagacious, specially those contained in his treatise De Rerum Naturis. In his poems he praises his country with its pastures, cornfields, and running streams, and celebrates the good qualities of its sons. “The feathered birds of Lybia, and pheasants,” he says, “often enrich thy tables, O Anglia. Nowhere are there more joyous countenances at the festive board, more gracious hosts, more profuse hospitality. The adornment of the table could not be more exquisite, or the service more prompt and cheerful. The Englishman, by nature and from his boyhood, gives gifts worthy to be given; and no age is too old to give.” After adding much on the liberality of his countrymen, he observes, that they are fond of hunting, and that they have a very subtle genius for mechanics, as well as for the liberal arts.
The character here bestowed on our countrymen corresponds well enough with the more satirical portraiture of Nigel Wireker, who, in his Speculum Stultorum, whilst lashing the follies of the world in general, and the universities in particular, describes the English students at Paris, as “noble in look and manner, full of strong sense brightened with wit, lavish with their money, and haters of everything sordid, whilst their tables groan with dishes, and the drinking knows no laws.”
The students who frequented the English seminaries were seldom of the nobler class. So late as the reign of Henry II., the Anglo-Norman barons preferred sending their sons to French schools and universities, out of a nervous dread lest their Norman speech should be barbarised by any admixture of the English accent. Even in the English schools for the higher orders, the native tongue was never used. Children were taught the French tongue from their cradle; and this custom, introduced at the Conquest, continued to prevail down to the reign of Edward III. However, it was not easy to preserve the Norman dialect pure from Saxon adulteration in a Saxon land, and hence the sly allusions which Chaucer throws out to the difference between the French of Paris and that of the school of “Stratford atte Bowe.” Robert of Gloucester, who felt the absurdity of the system, and was one of the first writers after the Conquest who ventured to use the English language for literary purposes, after telling us that the Norman spoke nothing but French, and “their children did teche,” observes that, unless a man know French, men talk of him but little, and that none but “low men” now hold to their national speech—a thing not to be found in any other country. “But I wot well,” he continues, “that it is well to know both, for the more a man knoweth, the more worth he is.”
Besides the great monastic and cathedral schools, there existed in London and other large towns certain public schools, of which Fitz Stephen has given a lively description, doubtless familiar to the reader. “On holidays,” he says, “it is usual for these schools to hold public assemblies in the church, in which the scholars engage in logical disputations, some using enthymems, and others perfect syllogisms; some aiming at nothing but to gain the victory, and make an ostentatious display of their acuteness; while others have in view the investigation of truth. Artful sophists on these occasions acquire great applause, some by a prodigious inundation of words, and others by their specious but fallacious arguments. After the disputation, other scholars deliver rhetorical declamations, in which they observe all the rules of art, and neglect no topic of persuasion. Even the younger boys in the different schools contend against each other about the principles of grammar, and the preterites and supines of verbs. There are some who, in epigrams, rhymes, and verses, use that trivial raillery so much practised by the ancients, freely attacking their companions with Fescennine license, but suppressing the names, touching with Socratic wit the failings of their school-fellows, or even of greater personages, or biting them more keenly with a Theonine tooth.”[245] It was in one of these London schools that St. Thomas of Canterbury received his early education, after leaving the school of the Canons Regular at Merton, and before proceeding to the university. The masters were generally some of those professors whom Oxford and Paris sent forth at this time in such abundance that not only cities, but villages also, had their learned teachers, as Roger Bacon testifies. They were, of course, skilled in the disputatious sciences of the day, and extremely well fitted to train a generation of “artful sophists.”
There was one private school of this period of which we must give a more particular notice, associated as it is with the history of St. Gilbert of Sempringham, the founder of the only religious order which we can claim as strictly of English growth. He was the son of a Norman knight of Lincolnshire and a Saxon mother, inheriting more of the Saxon than the Norman temperament. In youth he showed no taste for the chase or the tilt-yard, and gave no promise of intellectual superiority to make up for his deficiency in manly accomplishments. But as he grew in years a studious disposition began to manifest itself, in consequence of which his father sent him to study at Paris, where he remained until he had received his master’s degree, and, with it, license to open a school. The school of Sempringham very soon became famous. It received pupils of both sexes, who were trained not merely in the rudiments of learning, but also in a holy life; for, says the biographer of the Saint, the scholars, though they wore a secular garb, lived under a kind of monastic discipline. They were not allowed to play and wander about like other children, but were obliged to keep silence in the church and in the dormitory, where the boys all slept together, and were only supposed to speak in certain appointed places. They had, moreover, set hours for study and prayer, and, in a word, were trained in the rules of strict discipline. “For, from his childish years, it had been the one thought of Gilbert how he could best win souls to God, and profit them by word and example; wherefore, keeping himself unspotted from the world, he occupied himself incessantly in holy and spiritual things.”
After a time, two churches were founded on his father’s manor, and Gilbert was instituted rector of the parishes of Sempringham and Torington; although, not being at that time in holy orders, he was obliged to appoint a chaplain to serve the church in his stead. However, he acted as rector in so far as regarded the government of his parish and his school. He catechised and instructed his parishioners, and that with such success that we are told the greater number of those who heard him served God as if under regular monastic discipline, although remaining seculars: he was earnest in his endeavours to withdraw them from the revelries so attractive to their class, and to accustom them to the practice of the works of mercy; he particularly made it his aim to instruct them in the ritual and ceremonies of the Church; and at length it came to be said that you might tell a parishioner of Sempringham by his way of entering church, the humility of his attitude, and the devotion he exhibited in prayer.
The young rector himself resided in a little house which he built for himself in the churchyard, and spent most of his day in the church. After a time, however, his reputation reaching the ears of Robert Bloet, Bishop of Lincoln, he was summoned to the Episcopal Palace, and, having received minor orders, was appointed to an office in the bishop’s household, which he retained under his successor, Alexander. By the latter he was ordained priest, and promoted to the post of Penitentiary to the diocese. Greater dignities were offered to him; but Gilbert longed to return to his rustic parishioners, and, in 1130, he escaped from his court life, and with a glad heart made his way back to Sempringham. He had conceived the idea of attaching a religious house of some sort to his church, and among his former pupils he selected seven young women, for whom he built a small monastery adjoining the north wall of the church of St. Andrew. We are told that the nuns retained the learned tastes they had acquired in the founder’s school, so that at last it was found necessary to forbid them to speak Latin to one another, unless occasion should oblige them. A very considerable portion of their time was given to reading and meditation, and minute rules were given as to their manner of behaving as they read in the cloister, where they were to sit one behind another, and all looking one way, unless two chanced to be reading out of the same book. The same rule enjoined that they should ever preserve a sweet and cheerful countenance, and never exhibit signs of anger. To provide for the temporal necessities of his nuns, Gilbert appointed first a community of lay sisters, and then of lay brothers, and he conceived the idea of establishing a certain sort of religious rule among all the labourers on his paternal estate, to which, by the death of his father, he had now succeeded, and making his various farms dependent, in some sort, on the monastery, at the same time that they supplied the temporal necessities of the nuns.
Gilbert’s aim in this singular experiment was the amelioration of the lower orders; for the expressions used in speaking of those whom he selected show that they were of the very humblest class. Some were those whom he had known from childhood, the hinds and peasants attached to the manor; others were runaway serfs, for whom he obtained freedom by giving them the religious habit; and others, again, were very poor beggars. In fact, like the servant in the Gospel, he went out into the highways and hedges, and wherever he found the poor and the despised, he invited them into the house of the Lord. He did not attempt to teach these lay brethren letters, only requiring them to learn the Pater, Credo, and Miserere in Latin, but he trained them in obedience, humility, and temperance. They had constitutions of their own, admirably fitted for their state, and for giving religious discipline to a community made up of shepherds, herdsmen, and farm-labourers, who were to discharge the humble duties of their several callings under the religious garb. Some of the rules show plainly enough the kind of men for whom Gilbert was legislating; they were Saxon rustics, whose besetting sin was a love of the alehouse, and whom Gilbert accordingly forbids to drink wine, unless it be well watered, and prohibits, under any pretext, from selling anything to seculars, or from opening any house for the sale of liquor, seu, ut lingua Teutonica dicitur, tappam. It was a strange experiment this, of converting a gross rustic population into a religious community, and for a time it seemed blessed with perfect success. The institute spread rapidly, till at last Gilbert felt the necessity of providing for its more regular government, and for this purpose he applied to the Cistercians, in order that it might be grafted into their family. The request was, however, declined, and Gilbert had no other course open than to found another order of canons, who might take the spiritual direction of his convents of nuns. The foundation of this third branch of the institute did not take place till nearly twenty years after the establishment of the first convent. The first canons, like the first nuns, were chosen from Gilbert’s own scholars; seven were attached to every priory of the religious sisters, besides which, some houses were founded exclusively for the canons, and before he died Gilbert saw himself the spiritual father of fifteen hundred nuns and seven hundred canons, besides a vast number of lay brethren, whom he had rescued from their life of abject serfdom, but from whose turbulent conduct he had unhappily much to suffer. The order, in fact, declined rapidly after the death of its founder, who lived to extreme old age, being upwards of a hundred at the time of his death. Its weak point was the attempt made to unite so many forms of religious life under one government, and perhaps the hope of long preserving an austere religious discipline among an association of rural labourers savoured somewhat of a scholar’s Utopian dream.
The Gilbertine canons, however, continued for many years to cherish a love of letters, and had the chief part in the foundation of that pseudo-university of Stamford which threatened at one time to draw away the north country students from Oxford, the Stamford schools taking their rise in a Gilbertine house of studies. Among the first writers who condescended to make use of the English vernacular tongue was a Gilbertine canon named Robert Manning, who, about the beginning of the thirteenth century, considering in his heart that the “lewd,” as well as the “learned,” ought to know something of the history of their own country, and to be familiar with the deeds of kings,