For mannys witte yt maketh sharpe.
Next his chaumber besyde hys stody
Hys harper’s chaumber was fast thereby
And many tymes by nyghtes and dayys
He had solace of notes and layys.
Most readers are aware that Grosteste is commonly represented as an enemy to papal supremacy, and is rather favourably treated, in consequence, by some historians who find great consolation in the thought that he died excommunicate. That he opposed the nomination of foreigners to English benefices, and that in very bold language, is quite certain, but the rest of the story belongs to our mediæval myths. It is supposed to have been conjured out of the anathemas attached to the Bull of provisors, the execution of which he resisted. It is scarcely necessary to observe that petitions would hardly have been presented to the Holy See in the next reign for the canonisation of one who had died under the censures of the Church, and in these petitions there is not to be found the smallest allusion to his having even incurred any sort of disgrace. More than this, Wood tells us that just before the death of Innocent IV., that Pontiff granted to the university four new Bulls containing great privileges, which had been procured through the interest of Grosteste. In point of fact, however bold and uncompromising he may have been in resisting what he deemed a practical abuse, there was no English Divine who ever expressed himself with more hearty loyalty towards the chair of St. Peter than “Holy Robert.” He plainly declared that to refuse obedience to the Supreme Pastor was “as the sin of witchcraft and idolatry,” and even Mr. Berington is forced to allow that his language regarding the authority of the Holy See is so “adulatory,” that the attempt to rank him among its enemies must be deemed a total failure.
It would carry us too far to attempt anything like a particular account of the Franciscan scholars, who flourished at Oxford during the time of Grosteste. One among them, it need hardly be said, towers above all the rest, his celebrity having survived undiminished to our own day. Roger Bacon, a west countryman by birth, and a pupil of St. Edmund’s, had passed from Oxford to Paris, where he received his doctor’s degree, and then returning to the English university, spent forty years of his life in studying and lecturing upon the sciences. He had acquired the Greek, Hebrew, and Oriental languages in Paris, and wrote grammars of the two first-named tongues which are said to be preserved in MS. at St. Peter’s College, Cambridge. But it was as a natural philosopher that he chiefly distinguished himself above his contemporaries, and anticipated the discoveries of later science. At this time the physical sciences were chiefly cultivated by the Arabians, who presented them in a mystic and fanciful shape, which did not render them less acceptable to mediæval students. The study of physics was understood to include mathematics, alchemy, astrology, medicine, and mechanics, each of which received its own colouring of romance. Thus a certain Arabian physician put forth the theory that medicines could only be properly mixed according to the principles of music, and no one ventured to doubt the connection of astronomy with the medical science. Bacon was certainly not less credulous than his contemporaries, but he was more experimental, and hence, though he does not seem to have done much towards establishing truer scientific principles, he obtained many brilliant results. The long list of his writings includes treatises on Optics (then called Perspective), Mathematics, Chemistry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, the Tides, and the Reformation of the Calendar; and, as is well known, he was familiar with the properties of mirrors, and appears to have been acquainted with the principle both of the microscope and the telescope, and with the powers of steam and of gunpowder. It is not to be doubted that he was greatly in advance of his age in scientific knowledge, and it was probably his skill in the use of optical and mechanical instruments, which earned for him the vulgar reputation of dealing in magic. Charges of this sort are commonly enough explained as arising out of the ignorance of the multitudes, who thought every man who could read Greek to be possessed of unlawful knowledge. But besides the awe with which a semibarbarous age naturally regarded one possessed of secrets not revealed to the vulgar herd, it must be remembered that Bacon’s science sometimes clothed itself in very suspicious language. He declared that his wonderful tube possessed the power of beholding, not distant objects only, but future events; and his enthusiastic language in praise of his favourite science may read to us as simple nonsense, but was understood in his own day to imply something very like a magic art. He was not a whit less disposed than his contemporaries to credit the wildest theories of the alchemists, but believed in the possibility of contriving lamps that should burn for ever, magic crystals, the elixir of life, and the philosopher’s stone, and wrote treatises on the two last-named subjects. It is plain, indeed, that he only expected to realise these schemes by an application of the secret powers of nature, and not by any forbidden arts. Yet it sounded startling to simple ears to hear of schemes whereby one man might draw a thousand to himself, might raise himself into the air and fly, or manage a ship with his single arm; not to speak of his boastful offer to teach any man Hebrew in three days, Greek in another three, and the whole course of arithmetic and geometry in a week.[250] Unfavourable rumours having reached the ears of Jerome of Ascoli, then general of his order, he was prohibited from teaching, and for a time imprisoned; but in 1264, Cardinal Fulcodi, formerly legate in England, becoming Pope under the title of Clement IV., Bacon despatched to Rome his favourite disciple, John of London, who placed in the Pontiff’s hands all his master’s books and instruments, an examination of which appears to have justified him in the opinion of his judges. Clement bestowed great marks of favour both on the master and scholar, and it was at his suggestion that Bacon made that collection of his chief philosophical views which is known as the Opus Majus. When Jerome of Ascoli himself became Pope Nicholas IV., Bacon was again imprisoned, but as Wood shows, the assertion that he died in confinement during the pontificate of Nicholas is clearly an error, for his death did not take place till 1292, he having survived the Pope four years, and having before his death recovered his liberty, and published several theological works.
The only other Oxford Franciscan who must be mentioned in this place, is Nicholas de Lyra, whose claim to be regarded as a native of this country is not, indeed, undisputed, though it rests on the respectable authority of Trithemius, Sixtus of Sienna, and a majority of writers. The Flemings assert that he was born at Lyre in Brabant, the French as peremptorily declare him a native of Lyra in Normandy, and the English author of the Collectanea Anglo-Minoritica, will have it that his real name was Harper, Latinised after the fashion of the day into Lyra. Equal uncertainty rests on the point whether he were by birth a Christian or a Jew, the common belief inclining to the view that he was the son of Jewish parents, though this fact is hard to reconcile with the assertion of his biographers, that he only began the study of Hebrew at an advanced age. But whatever doubt hangs over his origin, none exists as to the position he held among the scholars of the day. Biblical learning and the study of the Scriptural tongues had not quite fallen into decay, when the age could produce the author of the “Scholastic Postils,” a commentary upon every part of the Sacred Volume, which was the first commentary on the Scripture ever printed. Nicholas de Lyra had studied at the Universities of Paris and Oxford, and if it be true, as is asserted, that he did not apply himself to Greek and Hebrew learning until after his entrance into the Franciscan Order, we must allow his erudition to have been gained in the university schools. Whether himself a Jewish convert or not, his labours are said to have been undertaken in the first instance with a view to the conversion of that unhappy people, a work which, in the thirteenth century, engaged the attention of the most illustrious divines. By his writings, disputations, and sermons, Nicholas is said to have converted six thousand Jews to the faith. But his great work was far from being exclusively intended for their instruction; it became the Text Book of Biblical students, an indispensable part of every cathedral and monastic library, and laid down rules for the safe interpretation of Scripture based upon the right intelligence of the literal sense. It must be added, to the honour of English scholarship, that this important work, which fills five folio volumes, was first published at the expense of a private London citizen, and that the money paid for copying it amounted to 670 florins. Its composition occupied the author thirty-seven years, for, as he himself declares, it was begun in 1293, and not completed until 1330.
Let us now turn to an Oxford scholar of a different stamp, whose name, inseparably united to that of St. Edmund, almost closes the catalogue of our English Saints. Born of respectable parents, who owned the lands of Burford, near the little town of Wyche, in Worcestershire, Richard had very early given evidence of a scholar’s tastes, and the first fact which his biographer, Ralph Bocking,[251] records regarding him, is his determined refusal to be drawn away from his books to join in any of the village dances and revelries. But a hard fortune left him little hopes of being able to devote his life to books and learning. The death of his father, and the mismanagement of the guardians to whose care he and his brothers were consigned, reduced the family to extreme poverty. And Richard, with generous self-devotion, gave up all his own cherished plans, and entered his elder brother’s service in order, by a life of vigorous labour, to put the affairs of the family on a better footing. “He served him,” says Bocking, “in poverty and abjection, and that for many years; working, now with the plough and now with the cart, and enduring many other kinds of hard and humble toil, patiently and modestly.” Richard’s memory was long preserved and revered in his native place, and even down to the time of the great Rebellion, the Droitwich peasantry put on their best clothes on St. Richard’s day, and went to decorate with boughs and flowers a certain well dedicated to the Worcestershire saint. Aubrey, who notices this circumstance,[252] informs us that St. Richard was a person of good estate, and “a brisk young fellow that would ride over hedge and ditch;” a description which, quaint as it is, expresses well enough one feature in his thoroughly English character. He was not a dreamer or a bookworm; he did nothing by halves, and his strong, manly nature loved the practical side of everything. As a Worcestershire farmer he was just as ready to ride over hedge and ditch when that was needed, as he was, when bishop, to do his pastoral work in the guise of a poor beggar. The future chancellor of Oxford began life, in short, as a simple yeoman. His energy and perseverance had their reward, and in a few years his brother’s lands, well tilled and managed, began to yield an ample revenue. But when a prosperous fortune seemed opening before him, he refused every offer made him by his kinsfolk, and as soon as his self-imposed task was over, he bade farewell to his Worcestershire home, and betook himself to Oxford, whence, after a time, he passed on to Paris. In both universities he led the hard and mortified life of a poor scholar. For it must be remembered that this was before the time of colleges; it was the golden age when Oxford numbered her thirty thousand scholars, most of whom had scanty means of subsistence. Some were supported by the alms of private individuals, others by the great abbeys of Eynsham and Osney, which on certain festival days, bound themselves to regale the poor scholars with “honest refection.” Others went about begging and singing the “Salve Regina” at the doors of the citizens, well content to receive by way of payment a dish of broken meat from the rich man’s table. Every one will remember the picture drawn, many years later, by Chaucer, who describes the clerke of Oxenforde in his threadbare doublet, who would rather have