The course of reading in the Schools was four years in grammar (i.e. Latin language and literature), rhetoric, and logic, before the student could be admitted a Bachelor; three years in science, viz. arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy, before inception as a Master; seven years’ study before, as a Bachelor of Theology, he could lecture on the “Sentences;”[137] and, lastly, he must study the Bible for three years, and lecture on one of the Canonical Books, before he could take his degree as a Doctor of Theology.
Students went up to the universities at an early age (fourteen or fifteen), and they went in great numbers. In the thirteenth century there were three thousand of them at Oxford. At first they lodged where they pleased, and were under no special oversight and discipline; but soon the university required that every student should be under the care of a recognized tutor; and before long bishops and lay benefactors began to build hostelries or halls, and to provide stipends for students; and out of these arose the mediæval colleges, which provided a home and discipline and tutors, and pecuniary help to poor students; Merton College, at Oxford, was the earliest, founded by Walter of Merton, Bishop of Rochester (1264). The friars, at an early date after their institution, sent their more promising members to the universities; and they cultivated the study of theology, philosophy, and natural science with so much success that within a short time their teachers were famous in all the universities of Europe, and members of their orders were promoted to the highest offices in the Church. Among Archbishops of Canterbury, Richard of Kilwardby, a Dominican, was succeeded by John of Peckham, a Franciscan.
Students of all nations flocked to the most famous seats of learning. Latin was the language in which all instruction was given, and was the lingua franca of all who pretended to learning; the students from the same country formed themselves into national clubs for mutual society and protection. The phrase, “The Republic of Letters,” in those days signified a more real cosmopolitanism than in our days, when men go to their national universities, and meet only their own countrymen there, and when even learned men have not the habit of colloquial Latin.
Our readers may remember Bishop Latimer’s naïve piece of autobiography in a sermon before the king, which affords us an example of the farmer who sent his clever son to the schools. “My father,” he says, “was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own; only he had a farm of three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half a dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able, and did find the king a harness and his horse. I remember that I buckled on his harness when he went to Blackheath field. He kept me to school, or else I had not been able to have preached before the king’s majesty now. He married my sisters with five pounds, or twenty nobles, each, having brought them up in godliness and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some alms he gave to the poor; and all this he did of the said farm” (“Sermons,” p. 101).
Besides the youths whose fathers could afford to “keep them to school” out of their own means, the system produced a great host of poor scholars, many of whom out of term-time returned to their homes and supported themselves by their labour; others, with or without a special licence permitting them, travelled round the country, alone or in groups, asking for contributions to help them to maintain themselves and complete their education. Longfellow’s “Spanish Student” and “Hyperion” help their readers to realize the groups of students, some thoughtful and ambitious, some full of the gaiety of youth, wandering from town to castle, from monastery to manor house, asking alms with a laugh and jest; and the knight and his lady gladly gave them supper and a shakedown in the hall, for the sake of their hopeful youth; and the prior or rector gave them a donation and a kind wish, with a wistful recollection of his own bygone student days; and people of all classes gave a trifle, for it was a recognized act of piety to help poor scholars.
There are survivals to our own day. The clever Irish boys who used to be picked out by their priests and sent to St. Omer’s, where they were made into scholars and Irish-French gentlemen—a charming type—some of whom rose to high station in their church, is a thing of the recent past. In Scotland, the schoolmaster is still on the outlook for those among his peasant laddies who possess the natural qualities of a scholar; and the minister is ready to give them the higher teaching where the dominie halts; and not only the parents are filled with ambition that the boy should succeed, but the whole village is proud of the honour reflected upon his birthplace.
Among this crowd of ambitious youths of all classes there were sure to be some whose career would be wrecked, by failure in intelligence, industry, and character, and these formed a rather numerous class of sham scholars and worthless clerics of whom we get glimpses from time to time.
In the Norwich Corporation records of 1521, is a copy of the examination of Sir William Green, in whose sketch of his own life we have a curiously detailed relation of the way in which many a poor man’s son became a scholar and a priest. He was the son of a labouring man, Stephen-at-Grene, at Wantlet, in Lincolnshire, and learned grammar for two years at the village school, and then went to day labour with his father. Afterwards he removed to Boston, where he lived with his aunt, labouring for his living and going to school as he had opportunity. Being evidently a clerkly lad, he was admitted to minor orders, up to that of acolyte, by “Friar Graunt,” who was a suffragan bishop in the diocese of Lincoln. After that, he went to Cambridge, where he maintained himself partly by his labour, partly on alms, and availed himself of the opportunities of learning which the university afforded. At length he found an opportunity of going to Rome with two monks of Whalley Abbey, probably as one of their attendants; and there he endeavoured to obtain the order of priesthood, which seems to have been bestowed rather indiscriminately at Rome, and without a title; but in this he was unsuccessful. On his return to England, he was for a short time thrown again on his labour for his living; but, going to Cambridge, he obtained from the vice-chancellor, Mr. Coney, a licence under seal to collect subscriptions for one year towards an exhibition, to enable him to complete his education and take his degree. Had he obtained money enough, completed his education, and obtained ordination in due course, it would have finished the story of a poor scholar in the regular way; but he fell into bad hands, forged a new poor scholar’s letter, using the seal of the old letter, then letters of orders with a forged seal, and then went about begging alms as a destitute priest;[138] and we find him in the hands of the magistrates of Norwich under the charge of being a spy.