Oxford and Its Story

by Cecil Headlam

Meanwhile the teaching of such scholars as Grossetete and Adam Marsh (de Marisco), the first of the Order to lecture at Oxford, was not without result. From the school of the Franciscans came forth men who earned for the University great fame throughout Europe. Friars were sent thither to study, not only from Scotland and Ireland, but from France and Acquitaine, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Germany; while many of the Franciscan schools on the Continent drew their teachers from Oxford. Duns Scotus and William Ockham were trained by these teachers; Roger Bacon, the founder of modern scientific enquiry, ended his days as one of the Order. His life, which stretched over the greater portion of the thirteenth century, was passed for the most part at Oxford; his aspirations and difficulties, his failures and achievements form an epitome, as it were, of the mental history of his age.

It was only when he had spent forty years and all his fortune in teaching and scientific research that, having gained the usual reward of scholarship, and being bankrupt in purse, bankrupt in hope, he took the advice of Grossetete, and became a Friar of the Order of S. Francis. “Unheard, buried and forgotten,” as a member of an Order which looked askance on all intellectual labour not theological, he was forbidden to publish any work under pain of forfeiture, and the penance of bread and water. Even when he was commanded by the Pope to write, the friars were so much afraid of the purport of his researches that they kept him in solitude on bread and water, and would not allow him to have access even to the few books and writings available in those days. Science, they maintained, had already reached its perfection; the world enjoyed too much light; why should he trouble himself about matters of which enough was known already? For as an enquirer Bacon was as solitary as that lone sentinel of science, the Tuscan artist in Valdarno. From the moment that the friars settled on the Universities, scholasticism had absorbed the whole mental energy of the student world. Theology found her only efficient rivals in practical studies such as medicine and law.

Yet, in spite of all difficulties and hindrances, so superhuman was Bacon’s energy, and so undaunted his courage, that within fifteen months the three great works, the Opus Majus, the Opus Minus, and the Opus Tertium were written. If this had been true of the Opus Majus alone, and if that work had not been remarkable for the boldness and originality of its views, yet as a mere feat of industry and application it would have stood almost if not quite unparalleled. For the Opus Majus was at once the Encyclopædia and the Novum Organum of the thirteenth century.

Of the Opus Minus the only MS. of the work yet known is a fragment preserved in the Bodleian Library (Digby, No. 218).

The amazing friar met with no reward for his labours. According to one story, indeed, his writings only gained for him a prison from his Order. His works were sold, allowed to rot, or nailed to the desks that they might do no harm. For Bacon’s method of study exposed him to the charge of magic. It was said that he was in alliance with the Evil One, and the tradition arose that through spiritual agency he made a brazen head and imparted to it the gift of speech, and that these magical operations were wrought by him while he was a student at Brazen Nose Hall.

Necromancy, you see, was practised by the more daring students, for was there not a certain clerk in Billyng Hall who, when he had summoned the Devil into his presence by his art, observed with astonishment that he did reverence when a priest carrying the sacrament passed without. “Thereupon the student was much disturbed and came to the conclusion that God was much the greater and that Christ should be his Lord....”

And later, was not Dr Thomas Allen of Gloucester Hall, the astrologer and mathematician to whom Bodley left his second best gown and cloak—a common sort of bequest in those days—suspected by reason of his figuring and conjuring, so that his servitor found a ready audience when, wishing to impose upon Freshmen and simple people, he used to say that sometimes he would meet the spirits coming up his master’s stairs like bees?

Apart from the tradition of the Brazen Nose, Bacon’s long residence in Oxford left other marks on the nomenclature of the place. Wood tells us that in his day a fragment of the ruined Friary was pointed out as the room where the great wizard had been wont to pursue his studies. And at a later time tradition said that Friar Bacon was wont to use as an observatory the story built over the semi-circular archway of the gate on the south bridge, and it was therefore known as Friar Bacon’s Study. The little “gate-house” must have resembled Bocardo. It was leased to a citizen named Welcome, who added a story to it, which earned it the name of “Welcome’s Folly.” So the bridge came to be called Folly Bridge, and though gate and house have disappeared, the new bridge still retains the name.