During this time were developing, on the borders of the Isis and the Cam, the Universities, so famous since, of Oxford and Cambridge; but their celebrity was chiefly local, and they never reached the international reputation of the one at Paris. Both towns had flourishing schools in the twelfth century; in the thirteenth, these schools were constituted into a University, on the model of Paris; they were granted privileges, and the Pope, who would not let slip this opportunity of intervening, confirmed them.[248]
The rules of discipline, the teaching, and the degrees are the same as at Paris. The turbulence is just as great; there are incessant battles; battles between the students of the North and those of the South, "boreales et australes," between the English and Irish, between the clerks and the laity. In 1214 some clerks are hung by the citizens of the town; the Pope's legate instantly makes the power of Rome felt, and avenges the insult sustained by privileged persons belonging to the Latin country. During ten years the inhabitants of Oxford shall remit the students half their rent; they shall pay down fifty-two shillings each year on St. Nicholas' day, in favour of indigent students; and they shall give a banquet to a hundred poor students. Even the bill of fare is settled by the Roman authority: bread, ale, soup, a dish of fish or of meat; and this for ever. The perpetrators of the hanging shall come barefooted, without girdle, cloak or hat, to remove their victims from their temporary resting-place, and, followed by all the citizens, bury them with their own hands in the place assigned to them in consecrated ground.
In 1252 the Irish and "Northerners" begin to fight in St. Mary's Church. They are obliged by authority to appoint twelve delegates, who negotiate a treaty of peace. In 1313 a prohibition is proclaimed against bearing names of nations, these distinctions being a constant source of quarrels. In 1334 such numbers of "Surrois" and "Norrois" clerks are imprisoned in Oxford Castle after a battle, that the sheriff declares escapes are sure to occur.[249] In 1354 a student, seated in a tavern, "in taberna vini," pours a jug of wine over the tavern-keeper's head, and breaks the jug upon it. Unfortunately the head is broken as well; the "laity" take the part of the victim, pursue the clerks, kill twenty of them, and fling their bodies "in latrinas"; they even betake themselves to the books of the students, and "slice them with knives and hatchets." During that term "oh! woe! no degrees in Logic were taken at the University of Oxford."[250] In 1364 war breaks out again between the citizens and students, "commissum fuit bellum," and lasts four days.
Regulations, frequently renewed, show the nature of the principal abuses. These laws pronounce: excommunication against the belligerents; exclusion from the University against those students who harboured "little women" (mulierculas) in their lodgings, major excommunication and imprisonment against those who amuse themselves by celebrating bacchanals in churches, masked, disguised, and crowned "with leaves or flowers"; all this about 1250. The statutes of University Hall, 1292, prohibit the fellows from fighting, from holding immodest conversations together, from telling each other love tales, "fubulas de amasiis," and from singing improper songs.[251]
The lectures bore on Aristotle, Boethius, Priscian, and Donatus; Latin and French were studied; the fellows were bound to converse together in Latin; a regulation also prescribed that the scholars should be taught Latin prosody, and accustomed to write epistles "in decent language, without emphasis or hyperbole, ... and as much as possible full of sense."[252] Objectionable passages are to be avoided; Ovid's "Art of Love" and the book of love by Pamphilus are prohibited.
From the thirteenth century foundations increase in number, both at Oxford and Cambridge. Now "chests" are created, a kind of pawnbroking institution for the benefit of scholars; now a college is created like University College, the most ancient of all, founded by William of Durham, who died in 1249, or New College, established by the illustrious Chancellor of Edward III. William of Wykeham. Sometimes books are bequeathed, as by Richard de Bury and Thomas de Cobham in the fourteenth century, or by Humphrey of Gloucester, in the fifteenth.[253] The journey to Paris continues a title to respect, but it is no longer indispensable.
III.
With these resources at hand, and encouraged by the example of rulers such as Henry "Beauclerc" and Henry II., the subjects of the kings of England latinised themselves in great numbers, and produced some of the Latin writings which enjoyed the widest reputation throughout civilised Europe. They handle the language with such facility in the twelfth century, one might believe it to be their mother-tongue; the chief monuments of English thought at this time are Latin writings. Latin tales, chronicles, satires, sermons, scientific and medical works, treatises on style, prose romances, and epics in verse, all kinds of composition are produced by Englishmen in considerable numbers.
One of them writes a poem in hexameters on the Trojan war, which doubtless bears traces of barbarism, but more resembles antique models than any other imitation made in Europe at the time. It was attributed to Cornelius Nepos, so late even as the Renaissance, though the author, Joseph of Exeter,[254] who composed it between 1178 and 1183, had dedicated his work to Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury, and mentioned in it Arthur, "flos regum Arthurus," whose return was still expected by the Britons, "Britonum ridenda fides." Joseph is acquainted with the classics; he has read Virgil, and follows to the best of his ability the precepts of Horace.[255] Differing in this from Benoit de Sainte-More and his contemporaries, he depicts heroes that are not knights, and who at their death are not buried in Gothic churches by monks chanting psalms. This may be accounted a small merit; at that time, however, it was anything but a common one, and, in truth, Joseph of Exeter alone possessed it.
In Latin poems of a more modern inspiration, much ingenuity, observation, sometimes wit, but occasionally only commonplace wisdom, were expended by Godfrey of Winchester, who composed epigrams about the commencement of the twelfth century; by Henry of Huntingdon, the historian who wrote some also; by Alexander Neckham, author of a prose treatise on the "Natures of Things"; Alain de l'Isle and John de Hauteville, who both, long before Jean de Meun, made Nature discourse, "de omni re scibili"[256]; Walter the Englishman, and Odo of Cheriton, authors in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of Latin fables,[257] and last, and above all, by Nigel Wireker, who wrote in picturesque style and flowing verse the story of Burnellus, the ass whose tail was too short.[258]