It was not uncommon in those ‘Dark Ages’ for a young noble to resign the comfort of the château and the glamour of a courtly life in this way. The scholastic fever, which was soon to inflame the youth of the whole of Europe, had already set in. You could not travel far over the rough roads of France without meeting some foot-sore scholar, making for the nearest large monastery or episcopal town. Before many years, it is true, there was a change, as the keen-eyed Jew watched the progress of the fever. There arose an elaborate system of conveyance from town to town, an organisation of messengers to run between the château and the school, a smiling group of banks and bankers. But in the earlier days, and, to some extent, even later, the scholar wandered afoot through the long provinces of France. Here and there a noble or a wealthy merchant would fly past in his silks and furs, with a body-guard of a dozen stout fellows; or a poor clerk would jog along on his ass, looking anxiously towards each wood or rock that bordered the road ahead. Robbers, frequently in the service of the lord of the land, infested every province. It was safest to don the coarse frieze tunic of the pilgrim, without pockets, sling your little wax tablets and style at your girdle, strap a wallet of bread and herbs and salt on your back, and laugh at the nervous folk who peeped out from their coaches over a hedge of pikes and daggers. Few monasteries refused a meal or a rough bed to the wandering scholar. Rarely was any fee exacted for the lesson given. For the rest, none were too proud to earn a few sous by sweeping, or drawing water, or amusing with a tune on the reed-flute: or to wear the cast-off tunics of their masters.
It is fitting that we should first find little Pierre—Master Roscelin recalls him in later years as ‘the smallest of my pupils’—under the care of a rationalist scholar. Love was the first rock on which the fair promise of his early manhood was shattered, but throughout the long, sternly religious years that followed, it was his restless application of reason to the veiled dogmas of faith that brought endless cruelty and humiliation upon him. Now, Jean Roscelin, canon of Compiègne, was the rationalist of his day. As Abélard was fated to do, he had attempted to unveil the super-sacred doctrine of the Trinity; not in the spirit of irreverent conceit, with which people credited both him and Abélard, but for the help of those who were afflicted with a keen intellect and an honest heart. For this he had been banished from England in 1093, and from the kingdom of France, and had settled in one or other of the Gaulish provinces.
Mme. Guizot, in her very careful study of Abélard, sees no evidence for the statement that he studied under Roscelin, but the fact is now beyond dispute. Otto von Freising, a contemporary historian, says that he ‘had Roscelin for his first master’; Aventinus and others also speak of Roscelin as an early teacher of his. Roscelin himself, in a letter which it seems ‘frivolous,’ as Deutsch says, to hesitate to accept, claims that Abélard sat at his feet—it was the literal practice in those days—‘from boyhood to youth.’ Abélard, on the other hand, writes that he attended Roscelin’s lectures ‘for a short time’; but this correspondence took place at a moment when the one would be greatly disposed to exaggerate and the other to attenuate. An anonymous anecdote, which we shall examine presently, pretends that he found Roscelin unsatisfactory, but ‘controlled his feeling so far as to remain under Roscelin for a year.’ It is clear enough that he spent a few of his earlier years on the hay-strewn floor of Master Roscelin’s lecture-hall.
There is some uncertainty as to the locality, but a sufficient indication to impart an interest to the question. Roscelin says it was at the ‘Locensis ecclesia.’ This is easily understood if we interpret it to mean the monastery of Locmenach[2] in Brittany. The monks of St. Gildas, on the coast of Brittany, a wild band whose closer acquaintance we shall make later on, had established a branch monastery at Locmenach. As will appear in due time, they would be likely to have small scruple about increasing its revenue by erecting a chair for one of the most famous dialecticians in Christendom, in spite of his condemnation for heresy at London and Soissons. We have no special information about the manner of school-life at Locmenach, save that we know the monks of St. Gildas to have been the living antithesis to the good monks of Bec; but it is interesting to find Abélard studying dialectics under a famous rationalist, and in a monastery that was subject to the Abbey of St. Gildas of Rhuys. The dark pages of his later history will give point to the dual circumstance.
There is one other, and less reliable, account of Abélard in his school-days. In an anecdote which is found in one or two older writers, and on the margin of an old Abélard manuscript, it is stated that he studied mathematics under a certain Master Tirricus. The anecdote is generally rejected as valueless, on the ground that it contains clear trace of the work of a ‘constructive imagination’; but Mr. Poole points out that ‘there is no reason to doubt’ the authenticity of the substance of the narrative, and it seems to me that the fictional element may be reduced to a very slender quantity. The story runs that Tirric, or Theodoric, one day found Abélard shedding tears of fruitless perspiration over mathematical problems. He had already, it is said, mastered the higher branches of knowledge, and was even teaching, but had omitted mathematics, and was endeavouring to remedy the omission by taking private lessons from Tirric. Noting his effort, the master is represented to say: ‘What more can the sated dog do than lick the bacon?’ ‘To lick the bacon’ is, in the crude Latinity of the age, bajare lardum, and the story pretends the phrase afforded a nickname for Pierre (Bajolard or Baiolard), and was eventually rounded into Abélard or Abailard. The construction is so crude, and the probability that Abélard is a surname needing no legendary interpretation is so high, that the whole anecdote is often contemptuously rejected. It is surely much more reasonable to read the phrase as a pun on Abélard’s name, which some later writer, to whom the name was unfamiliar, has taken in a constructive sense.[3]
There are several good reasons for retaining the historical framework of the anecdote. It is a fact that Abélard never mastered mathematics; chancing to mention arithmetic in one of his works, he says, ‘Of that art I confess myself wholly ignorant.’ It was unfortunate for mathematics. Most probably the puerility of that liberal art, in its early mediæval form, repelled him. In the next place, there was a distinguished master living in France of the name of Tirric, or Theodoric, who is said to have had a leaning to mathematics. He taught in the episcopal school at Chartres, long famous for the lectures of his brother Bernard. Finally, a Master Tirric (presumably the same) turns up at Abélard’s trial in 1121, and boldly and caustically scourges papal legate and bishops alike. However, if we attribute so much authority to the story, it clearly refers to a later date. The picture of Abélard, already a teacher, sated with knowledge, coming ‘in private’ to repair an omission in the course of his studies, must be relegated to one of the intervals in his teaching at Paris, not, as Mr. Poole thinks, to the period between leaving Roscelin and arriving at Paris.
Abélard himself merely says that he ‘went wherever dialectics flourished.’ For five or six years he wandered from school to school, drawn onward continually by the fame of schools and of masters. Schools were plentiful, and the age was already rich in great teachers. Charlemagne had inaugurated the scholastic age two hundred years before with the founding of the Palace School, and had directed that every monastery and every episcopal town should give instruction. With periods of languor the Benedictines had sustained the scholastic tradition through the soulless age that followed, and the second half of the eleventh century saw a brisk development. There was the great abbey of Bec, in Normandy, where St. Anselm still detained crowds of pupils after the departure of Lanfranc. But at Bec the students were not part of a ‘great undisciplined horde,’ as Rashdall calls the students of the early Middle Ages. With its careful regulations, its bare-back castigations, its expurgated classics, and its ever watchful monks, it contrived at once to cultivate the mind (in moderation) and to guard the sanctity of faith and morals. Cluny, in the south, had a similar school at its gates, and the same control of the scholars it lodged and fed. St. Denis, near Paris, had another famous Benedictine school. The forty monasteries that William of Dijon had recently reformed had opened free schools for the wandering pupils, and even fed the poorer youths.
Then there were men of European fame teaching in the cathedral cloisters of the larger towns. At Chartres, good Bishop Ivo—the only lawyer who ever lived and died in the odour of sanctity—had spent much energy in the improvement of his school. Little John, or John of Salisbury, has left us a proud record of its life at a slightly later date, when Tirric and his brother Bernard presided over it. At Tournai, Master Eudes of Orleans, the peripatetic of the time, walked the cloisters all day with his questioning scholars, and gathered them before the cathedral door of an evening to explain the profound mysteries of the solid spheres that whirled overhead, and of the tiny, immortal fires that were set in them. Other famous episcopal schools were those of Tours, Rheims, Angers, and Laon. But every bishop had his master or masters for the teaching of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics (the trivium), and in the larger towns were ‘lectors’ of the other four liberal arts (the quadrivium), music, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy. Theology was taught under the watchful eye of the bishop and his chapter, and in time chairs of Hebrew, and, with the progress of the Saracenic invasion of the intellectual world, even of Arabic, were founded. At the abbey of St. Denis, monk Baldwin, sometime physician to the King of England, taught and practised the art of healing. At Chartres, also, medicine was taught somewhat later; and there are stories of teachers of law. And beside all these, there were the private masters, ‘coaches,’ etc., who opened schools wherever any number of scholars forgathered.
Thus the historical imagination can readily picture all that is contained in the brief phrase with which Abélard dismisses the five or six years of his studies. ‘There was no regular curriculum in those days,’ Mr. Rashdall says, in his study of the ‘Universities of Europe’; but the seven liberal arts were taught, and were gradually arranging themselves in a series under the pressure of circumstances. Music Abélard certainly studied; before many years his songs were sung through the length and breadth of France. None of his contemporaries made a more eager and profitable study of what was called grammar—that is, not merely an exercise in the rules of Donatus and Priscian, but a close acquaintance with the great Latin poets and historians. Rhetoric and dialectics he revelled in—‘I went wherever dialectics flourished.’ To so good purpose did he advance in this work of loosening the tongue and sharpening the wit, that throughout his life the proudest orators and thinkers of Christendom shrank in dismay from the thought of a verbal encounter with him. ‘I am a child beside him,’ pleaded Bernard of Clairvaux, at a time when France, and even Rome, trembled at the sound of his own voice. But we must defer for a few pages the consideration of mediæval dialectics.
‘Illi soli patuit quicquid scibile erat,’