Of them that gave him wherewith to scholaie.
The account that Bocking gives of St. Richard’s student life is hardly less graphic. Like the poor Cambridge scholar before spoken of, who had to run about to keep his feet warm, Richard never saw a fire. But, unlike him, he was seldom able to afford himself the luxury of beef or even mutton, then reckoned as ordinary “scholar’s fare.” “So entirely,” says Bocking, “was he carried away with the love of learning, that he gave but little thought to the necessities of the body. For, as he used afterwards to relate, having two companions with him in his poor chamber, the three had but one tunic each, and one hooded gown between them. One of them at a time, therefore, put on the gown and went to hear the lectures, leaving the other two in their lodgings, after which they in their turn put on the gown and so went to lecture. Their food was bread, with a very little wine, and salad, or other such poor sort of viands. For then poverty did not allow them to eat flesh or fish except on Sundays and high days, or when any friends were their guests. Nevertheless, the saint was wont to affirm that no period of his life had ever been more joyful and delightful.” His love of Oxford induced him to return thither a second time, instead of taking his master’s degree at Paris; and for some years after graduating at the English university he taught in his own school, “liberally dispensing to others what he had himself acquired.” After a while he repaired to Bologna, and there spent seven years in the study of the canon law. And in 1235 we find him once more at Oxford, where he was unanimously chosen Chancellor of the University. He does not seem to have filled this office for any great length of time, for Robert Grosteste and St. Edmund of Canterbury were both anxious to draw him to their respective dioceses, St. Edmund succeeded, and appointed him his chancellor, and a close friendship sprang up between the two saints, which is thus eloquently described by Bocking:—“In all things,” he says, “Richard had an eye to the peace and quiet of his lord and archbishop, who, as he knew, had chosen Mary’s better part. And the archbishop exceedingly rejoiced that by the discreet affection and loving discretion of his chancellor he was saved from the tumult of outward business; while the chancellor was in like manner glad to learn from the holy and heavenly conversation of his prelate. Each leaned on each, the saint on the saint, the master on the disciple, the disciple on the master, the father on the son, and the son on the father. To one who looked on them religiously, they seemed like the two cherubim stretching their wings over the ark of the Lord—the church of Canterbury; each with holy eye gazing on the other, and touching each other with the wings of holy love; their faces, that is, their wills, ever turned towards the Mercy-seat.”
Richard followed his friend into exile, and was with him both at Pontigny and at Soissy, where he died. Up to that time St. Richard had not given much time to the study of theology, and had only received minor orders on his appointment to the Chancellorship of Canterbury. He had made himself known rather as a man of practical sense than of profound intellect, and the tie that bound him to St. Edmund drew something of its strength from the very contrast of their natural characters. But the snapping of that bond was the heart wound destined to draw St. Richard to yet more excellent things. The tree must be pierced to give out its most precious balm, the leaf must be bruised to yield its fragrant odours. The strong, manly heart of the Worcestershire yeoman was bowed in anguish over Edmund’s grave; but the anguish softened, refined, and elevated his nature; it drew heaven nearer to him, and him nearer to heaven; so that, conceiving a distaste for all secular studies, he retired to Orleans, and set himself to study theology in the convent of Dominican Friars.
This was not his first acquaintance with the Friar Preachers, who had established themselves in the Jews’ quarter of Oxford before St. Richard’s residence there as Chancellor. The excellence of their theological schools was therefore well known to him; and after studying with them for two or three years, and receiving ordination as a priest from the hands of the Bishop of Orleans, he returned to England, and for some time exercised the office of parish priest of Deal. Boniface of Savoy, the successor of St. Edmund in the primacy, soon found him out, and compelled him to resume the office of chancellor; but, before doing so, Richard, whose desire was to lead a poor and apostolic life, took a vow to join the Dominican Order, trusting that such an obligation would stand in the way of his retaining any public dignity. He was never able actually to fulfil this vow; yet, as Bocking remarks, the after circumstances of his life may be regarded as a sort of virtual accomplishment of it, “inasmuch as for many years he led the life of a true Friar Preacher, preaching Jesus Christ in poverty, and labouring for the salvation of souls, stripped of all worldly possessions.”
In 1244 the unwelcome news reached him that he was elected Bishop of Chichester; but king Henry III., enraged that the canons had rejected his own unworthy minister and nominee, Robert Passelew, revenged himself by seizing the temporalities of the see; and when an appeal to Rome resulted in the confirmation of St. Richard’s election, the new bishop, compelled by obedience to accept the weighty charge, and consecrated at Rome by the Pope’s own hand, returned to England to find his manors confiscated and an edict published forbidding any man to assist him even with a loan. This may be taken as a fair specimen of the system steadily pursued by the English kings against the Church, from the Conquest to the Reformation; and if such examples may be adduced from the policy of him who was avowedly the most pious and least ferocious of the Plantagenets, we may judge what sort of measure was dealt to English prelates by sovereigns of more tyrannic temper. In his younger days St. Richard might probably have repelled the royal injustice with the bold courage of St. Thomas; he preferred now to meet it in the spirit of patient endurance, and taking up his residence with a poor priest of his diocese, gave England an example no less sublime than that of her martyred primate. Utterly penniless, and as dependent on the alms of the faithful as the poorest beggar, St. Richard did not on that account neglect his flock. Like a true apostle he journeyed on foot over the downs of Sussex, visiting in turns every remote village, and exercising the Pastoral office with a vigorous hand that stood in no need of courtly splendour to enforce its authority. A poor priest of Ferring, named Simon, gave him hospitality, and there, in the intervals of his toilsome journeys the bishop recreated himself with gardening, and displayed the skill in budding and grafting which he had acquired during his yeoman’s life in Worcestershire. Simon regarded the plants which the bishop tended as sacred relics, and was greatly distressed when one of the grafts was destroyed by a beast which broke through the garden fence. The next time that Richard visited Ferring he good-naturedly consoled his host by putting in another graft, which that same year bore flowers and fruit. It was during this time of outlawry and humiliation that he published his Constitutions for the reform of his diocese, in which he made special provision for the instruction of the poor. At last, about 1247, king Henry was forced by the threat of excommunication, to restore the temporalities, and Richard was joyfully welcomed to his Cathedral city. But his private habits underwent no change. He adhered to his old Oxford fare of bread and a little wine; he seldom touched flesh, and if delicacies, such as lambs or young chickens were placed on his table, would exclaim, “Poor innocents; what have ye done to deserve death! Could ye but speak, ye would surely blame our gluttony!” He rose with the lark, to say his office in the silent early hours; and if it so fell out that the birds had begun their matin-song before him, it mortified him: “Shame on me!” he would say, “that I have allowed these irrational creatures to be beforehand with me in singing God’s praises!” His hand was ever open to poor scholars, and he would take the silver goblets off his table to supply their needs. His whole life presents us with a succession of beautiful, homely, and pathetic scenes, which display to us a character wherein pastoral firmness, scholarlike acuteness, and rustic simplicity are blended together, all bound and beautified by the spirit of patience, humility, and prayer. At one time we find him baptizing a Jew whom he has converted by his learning; at another, preaching the Crusade on the Sussex sea-coast to the rough sailors who flock to hear his simple, energetic eloquence. It was whilst engaged in this last work that he was called to his reward. He died in 1252 at St. Mary’s Hospital at Dover, where he had just consecrated a church in honour of St. Edmund. In his last moments his thoughts wandered back to the Convent of Orleans, and with his parting breath he repeated the invocation, which he had so often heard repeated by the white-robed Friars:
Maria, Mater gratiæ,
Mater misericordiæ,
Tu nos ab hoste protege,
Et hora mortis suscipe.
Of the English Friar Preachers, to whom St. Richard in heart at least may be said to have belonged, and of their position in the university, something must now be said. It was on the feast of the Assumption 1221, that they first arrived at Oxford, and obtained from the canons of St. Frideswide a settlement in the Jews’ quarter of the town, where it was hoped that their learning and their preaching might win many converts. From Elizabeth Vere, countess of Oxford, they obtained a piece of ground on which they erected their first schools, known as St. Edward’s schools, where the first lecturers were the two friends Robert Bacon and Richard Fishacre, both of them old pupils of St. Edmund, of whom Matthew Paris says that England had no greater men living. The resort of scholars soon obliged them to choose some more commodious site and in 1259 they removed to St. Ebbe’s island in the south suburb, another adjoining island being occupied by the Franciscans. The extraordinary popularity enjoyed by the Dominican Order during the first century of its establishment in England is attested by every historical document. The lower classes loved them for taking the popular side in politics, while the nobles were no less forward in appreciating their merits. It became a coveted privilege to be buried in their churches, and Wood says that even in his day skeletons and hearts encased in lead were continually being disinterred from the ground formerly occupied at Oxford by the Dominican convent, supposed to be those of devout clients of the order. However, in spite of all this, they had their enemies, especially among the secular regents, who were jealous of their privileges, their popularity, and possibly also of their learning. In 1360 Richard, afterwards Archbishop of Armagh, being elected Chancellor of Oxford, was despatched by a certain party of the Oxford doctors to Rome, to lay a formal complaint before the Pope of the alleged delinquencies of the friars. One of his complaints was, oddly enough, their perseverance in collecting libraries; if he was to be believed, no one could now procure any books at Oxford on canon law, arts, or theology; they were all bought up by these insatiable friars, a charge which at least sets them in the light of being favourers of learning. The chancellor’s mission proved utterly fruitless, a result which Ayliffe attributes to the fact that “they had money wherewith to purchase the Pope’s protection.” This last-named writer, in common with most of the Post-Reformation writers, labours hard to affix the stigma of ignorance on the mendicant orders, which he denominates as locusts and caterpillars, who devoured the vital parts of learning, and involved the Oxford students in a fog of darkness but partly dispelled by “the daybreak of Wickliffe’s doctrine.” Even their vast libraries were collected, he assures us, only to lock up the treasures of knowledge from other men, and to become the food of moths and worms. And here is perhaps the place to notice the grave accusations brought against the Christian schoolmen in general, and the mendicants in particular, of bringing in a reign of literary barbarism. Fleury devotes a considerable part of his fifth discourse to this subject, and the German critics, especially Meiners, can never find enough to say condemnatory of the scholastic jargon. Hallam adopts the same line, and assures us that “the return of ignorance was chiefly owing to those worse vermin, the mendicant friars, who filled all Europe with stupid superstition.” Whether this is the best specimen that a man of letters could give of refined and polished diction may be questioned, but he goes on to remark (in a sentence which, considering the zeal of its writer for grammatical accuracy, exhibits a rather remarkable confusion of tenses),—“the writers of the thirteenth century display an incredible ignorance, not only of pure idiom, but of the common grammatical rules. Those who attempted to write verse have lost all prosody, and relapse into Leonine rhymes and barbarous acrostics. The historians use a hybrid jargon intermixed with modern words. The scholastic philosophers wholly neglected their style, and thought it no wrong to enrich the Latin, as in some degree a living language, with terms that seemed to express their meaning.... Duns Scotus and his followers in the next century carried this much further, and introduced a most barbarous and unintelligible terminology, by which the school metaphysics were rendered ridiculous in the revival of literature.”