Erasmus had taught at Paris. He went to Oxford (1498) to learn and to observe. His return home from London had been delayed unexpectedly. He determined to use the opportunity of paying a visit to Oxford. The reputation of the learned men there attracted him more than the company of “the gold-chained courtiers” of the capital. He was received as an inmate of S. Mary’s College, which had been built as a house for students of his own Augustinian order (1435). This house, when it was dissolved (1541), was converted into a hall for students, and then into a charitable institution (Bridewell). The site, on the east side of New Inn Hall Street, is occupied by a house and garden, now called Frewen Hall, which was chosen in 1859 as the residence of the Prince of Wales during his studies at Oxford. The west gateway, a few remains of groining and the wall facing the street north of the gate are practically all that remains of the building as Erasmus saw it, unless we reckon the roof of the chapel of B.N.C., which is said to have been taken from the chapel of S. Mary’s College. Erasmus had nothing to complain of in his welcome to Oxford. He found the prior of his college, Richard Charnock, an intelligent companion and useful friend. Colet, having heard from Charnock of his arrival, addressed to him a letter of welcome, which in the midst of its formal civility has a characteristic touch of Puritan sincerity. To this Erasmus replied in his own rhetorical fashion with a letter of elaborate compliment.
His wit, his learning and the charm of his brilliant conversation soon won him friends. Delightful himself, he found everybody delightful. The English girls were divinely pretty, and he admired their custom of kissing visitors. Erasmus made a fair show in the hunting-field, and was charmed with everything, even with our English climate.
“The air,” he wrote from Oxford, “is soft and delicious. The men are sensible and intelligent. Many of them are even learned, and not superficially either. They know their classics and so accurately that I seem to have lost little in not going to Italy. When Colet speaks I might be listening to Plato. Linacre is as deep and acute a thinker as I have ever met. Grocyn is a mine of knowledge, and Nature never formed a sweeter and happier disposition than that of Thomas More. The number of young men who are studying ancient literature here is astonishing.”
In one of his letters he gives a very lively picture of a gathering of witty divines at the house of his “sweet and amiable friend” Colet, when the latter “spoke with a sacred fury” and Erasmus himself, finding the conversation growing too serious for a social gathering, entertained the company with a happily invented tale.
At Oxford, then, the great centre of theological study, he was learning something of the methods of the theologians. They were not strange to him, for he knew Paris. But the Oxford school was in his mind when he poured forth his shafts of ridicule upon scholastic divines in his brilliant satire, “The Praise of Folly.” Yet it was at Oxford that Colet had taught him to detest the authority of Thomas Aquinas, and to apply to the study of the New Testament the knowledge and methods indicated by the study of Greek literature. His “Moria” and his “Novum Instrumentum,” therefore, the books which prepared the way for the Reformation, were his protest, and the protest of the Christian laity along with him, against the authority of the clergy and against the popular theology which was based on the errors of the Vulgate. Erasmus laid the egg and Luther hatched it—a very different bird, as the former declared. The fact was that throughout Europe the growing intelligence of the educated class was slowly but surely developing in antagonism, not merely to specific doctrines, but to the whole spirit of mediæval theology.
The Old Learning was threatened with destruction. It rose in arms against Greek and heresy. Bishops fulminated. The clergy cried Antichrist, and clamoured for sword and faggot. The Universities forbade the sale of Erasmus’s writings, and, seeing what came of the study of Greek, declared that they would have no more of it. Oxford divided itself into two bodies, who called themselves Greeks and Trojans, the Trojans enormously preponderating. The “Greeks,” the adherents of the New Learning, were assailed with every kind of ridicule. They were openly derided in the streets and abused from the pulpit. In after years Tyndale, who had been a student at Magdalen Hall, could recall how
“The old barking curs, Duns’ disciples and like draff called Scotists, the children of darkness, raged in every pulpit against Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and what sorrow the schoolmasters that taught the true Latin tongue had with them, some beating the pulpit with their fists for madness, and roaring out with open and foaming mouth, that if there were but one Terence or Vergil in the world, and that same in their sleeve, and a fire before them, they would burn them therin, though it should cost them their lives.”
News of what was going on reached the court at Abingdon. At the King’s command, More wrote to the governing body of the University to rebuke the intemperance of the Trojan clique. But the Heads of Houses were sleeping over a volcano, and More’s letter could not rouse them from their slumber. For the present the result was that the little band of pioneers in the New Learning one by one departed out of their coasts.
“The Cardinal of York,” More writes, “will not permit these studies to be meddled with.” Wolsey, of course, as well as the King, More and Archbishop Warham, the Chancellor, was on the side of the New Learning. He defrayed the expenses of many lectures, for which the University repeatedly thanked him. He engaged a famous Spanish scholar, Juan Luis Vives, to occupy his new Chair of Rhetoric; and he sent a rising English scholar, Thomas Lupset, from Paris to lecture on the Classics at Oxford.
Vives was the first Professor of Humanity (or Latin) at Corpus Christi, the first of the Renaissance colleges. His special function it was to banish all “barbarism” from the “bee-hive,” as the founder fondly called his college, by lecturing daily on the Classics. Tradition says that the professor was welcomed to his new home by a swarm of bees, which, to signify the incomparable sweetness of his eloquence, settled under the leads of his chambers.