For nearly thirty years it had been the aim of Gerald’s highest ambition to be the S. Thomas of his native land. He had struggled and suffered for the privileges of S. David’s in the same spirit in which Thomas had struggled and suffered for those of Canterbury, and it is by no means unlikely that had the occasion ever arisen, he would have been found ready to follow his model even unto death.[2200] But, unlike Thomas, he knew when to yield; and instead of dying for a lost cause, was content to live for posterity. Both men have had their fitting reward. Gerald the Welshman—“Giraldus Cambrensis”—still lives in his writings under the title won for him by his ardent patriotism; he lives however for us not as the champion of Welsh ecclesiastical independence, but as what he has been called by a writer of our own day—“the father of our popular literature.”[2201] Gerald’s first essay in authorship was made at the age of twenty; he was still busy with his pen when past his seventieth year;[2202] and all through the intervening half-century, every spare moment of his active, restless career was devoted to literary composition. His last years were spent in revising and embellishing the hasty productions of these earlier and briefer intervals of leisure. Even in their more finished shape, however, they still bear the impress of their origin. They breathe in all its fulness a spirit of which we catch the first faint indications in William of Malmesbury, and which may be described in one word as the spirit of modern journalism. Gerald’s wide range of subjects is only less remarkable than the ease and freedom with which he treats them. Whatever he touches—history, archæology, geography, natural science, politics, the social life and thought of the day, the physical peculiarities of Ireland and the manners and customs of its people, the picturesque scenery and traditions of his own native land, the scandals of the court and of the cloister, the petty struggle for the primacy of Wales and the great tragedy of the fall of the Angevin empire—is all alike dealt with in the bold, dashing, offhand style of a modern newspaper or magazine-article. His first important work, the Topography of Ireland, is, with due allowance for the difference between the tastes of the twelfth century and those of the nineteenth, just such a series of sketches as a special correspondent in our own day might send from some newly-colonized island in the Pacific to satisfy or to whet the curiosity of his readers at home. The book made no small stir in the contemporary world of letters. Sober, old-fashioned scholars stood aghast at this daring Welshman’s disregard of all classical traditions and literary conventionalities, at the colloquialisms of his style, and still more at the audacity of his stories.[2203] For Gerald, determined to entertain his readers no matter by what means, and secure in their universal ignorance of the country which he professed to be describing, had raked together all the marvellous and horrible tales that could be found in Irish traditionary lore or devised by the inventive genius of his Irish informants; and the more frightful and impossible these stories were, the more greedily did he seize upon them and publish them. Irish scholars, almost from that day to this, have justly declaimed against Gerald for his atrocious libels upon their country and its people; yet the fact remains that, in the words of one of his latest editors, “to his industry we are exclusively indebted for all that is known of the state of Ireland during the whole of the middle ages.”[2204] His treatise De Expugnatione Hiberniæ is by far the most complete and authentic account which we possess of the English or Norman conquest of Ireland. The Topographia, despite its glaring faults, has a special merit of its own; its author “must” (as says the writer already quoted) “take rank with the first who descried the value, and, in some respects, the proper limits of descriptive geography.”[2205]

A far better specimen of his work in this direction is his Welsh Itinerary, followed some three or four years later by a Description of Wales.[2206] Here Gerald is on familiar and congenial ground, dealing with a subject which he thoroughly knows and understands, describing a country which he ardently loves and a people with whom, although by no means blind or indulgent to their faults, he is yet heartily in sympathy, because he is one of themselves. In these treatises therefore we see him at his very best, both as a writer and as a man. In his own opinion the best of all his works was the Gemma Ecclesiastica,[2207] or Jewel of the Church, a handbook of instructions on the moral and religious duties of the priesthood, compiled for the clergy of his own archdeaconry of Brecknock. To modern readers it is interesting only for the glimpse which it affords of the social, moral and intellectual condition of the South-Welsh clergy in his day. In his Mirror of the Church[2208] the general state of religious society and ecclesiastical discipline, at home and abroad, is reflected as unsparingly as in the satires of Walter Map. The remainder of Gerald’s extant works are of the most miscellaneous character—a half-finished autobiography, a book of Invectives against his enemies political and ecclesiastical, a collection of letters, poems and speeches, a treatise on the Rights of the Church of S. David’s, some Lives of contemporary bishops, a tract nominally On the Education of Princes, but really occupied for the most part with a bitter attack upon the characters of Henry II. and his sons.[2209] All of them are, more or less, polemical pamphlets, coloured throughout by the violent personal antipathies of the writer,[2210] but valuable for the countless side-lights which they cast upon the social life of the period. As we read their bold language, we can scarcely wonder at Archbishop Hubert’s relentless determination to put down their author by every means in his power. But though Gerald the bishop-elect of S. David’s was no match for the primate of all England, Gerald the pamphleteer wielded a force against which the religious authority of the metropolitan and the hostility of the older race of scholars were both alike powerless. He and his colleagues in the new school of literature had at their back the whole strength of the class to which they belonged, a class of men who were rapidly taking the place of the clergy as leaders of the intellectual life and thought of the nation. When old-fashioned critics lifted up their protest against Gerald’s Irish Topography, he boldly carried the book down to Oxford, “where the most learned and famous English clerks were then to be found,” and read it out publicly to as many as chose to come and hear it. “And as there were three distinctions or divisions in the work, and each division occupied a day, the readings lasted three successive days. On the first day he received and entertained at his lodgings all the poor of the town; on the next day all the doctors of the different faculties, and such of their pupils as were of fame and note; on the third day the rest of the scholars, with the knights, townsmen and many burgesses.”[2211] If some of the elder teachers shook their heads, it mattered little to Gerald; their murmurs were lost in the applause of a younger generation which hailed him as one of its own most distinguished representatives.

The spirit which breathes through the pages of Gerald and Walter is the spirit of the rising universities. The word “university” indeed, as applied to the great seats of learning in the twelfth century, is somewhat of an anachronism; the earliest use of it in the modern sense, in reference to Oxford, occurs under Henry III.;[2212] and the University of Paris appears by that name for the first time in 1215,[2213] the year of our own Great Charter. But although the title was not yet in use, the institution now represented by it was one of the most important creations of the age. The school of Bologna sprang into life under the impulse given by Irnerius, a teacher who opened lectures upon the Roman civil law in 1113.[2214] Nearly forty years later, when Gratian had published his famous book on the Decretals, a school of canon law was instituted in the same city by Pope Eugene III.; and in 1158 the body of teachers who formed what we call the University won a charter of privileges from the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa.[2215] We have already, in the course of our story, had more than one glimpse of the great school of arts and theology which was growing up during the same period in Paris. There, where the study of divinity had long found a congenial home under the shadow of the cathedral church, William of Champeaux in 1109—the year of S. Anselm’s death—opened on the Mont-Ste.-Geneviève a school of logic which in a few years became the most frequented in Europe. Under his successors, Abelard and Peter Lombard (the latter of whom was made bishop of Paris in 1159), the schools of Paris became the centre of the intellectual life of Christendom.[2216] Teachers and scholars from every nation met on equal terms, as fellow-citizens of a new and world-wide commonwealth of learning, on the slopes of the “Mount,” and went forth again to carry into the most distant lands the instruction which they had acquired. There a Wiltshire lad could begin a lifelong intimacy with a youth from Champagne;—could pass from the lectures of Abelard to those of a master who, though disguised under the title of “Robert of Melun,” was in reality a fellow-countryman of his own; could enter the quadrivium under the guidance of a German teacher, make acquaintance with Aristotle by the help of another learned Englishman, and complete his theological studies, it may be, under the same Robert Pulein whom we saw lecturing at Oxford some twelve or thirteen years before.[2217] There a scholar from the Welsh marches could sit at the feet of the English master Gerard La Pucelle,[2218] and another from the depths of Pembroke could give lectures on rhetoric and could study theology with William of Blois, who in after-days came at the call of the Burgundian S. Hugh to undertake the direction of a school at Lincoln.[2219] There Ralf de Diceto was a fellow-student with Arnulf of Lisieux;[2220] there, in all likelihood, John of Salisbury met Nicolas Breakspear and Thomas Becket. Thence, we cannot doubt, came through some of these wandering scholars the impulse which called the schools of Oxford into being. The first token of their existence is the appearance of Robert Pulein in 1133. From that time forth the intellectual history of Oxford is again blank till the coming of Vacarius in 1149; and it is not till the reign of Henry II. has all but closed that we begin to discern any lasting result from the visits of these two teachers. Then, however, the words of Gerald would alone suffice to shew that the University was to all intents and purposes full-grown. It had its different “faculties” of teachers, its scholars of various grades; and the little city in the meadows by the Isis, famous already in ecclesiastical legend and in political and military history, had by this time won the character which was henceforth to be its highest and most abiding glory, as the resort of all “the most learned and renowned clerks in England.”

On a site less favoured by nature, Oxford’s future rival was more slowly growing up. A lift of slightly higher ground above the left bank of the river Grant—better known to us now as the Cam—on the southern margin of what was then and for five hundred years afterwards a vast tract of flood-drowned fen stretching northward as far as the Wash, there stood at the close of the seventh century—long before Oxford makes its first appearance in history—a “little waste chester”[2221] representing what had once been the Roman city of Camboritum. At the coming of the Normans the place was known as Grantebridge, and contained some three or four hundred houses, twenty-seven of which were pulled down by the Conqueror’s orders to make room for the erection of a castle.[2222] It may be that here, as at Lincoln, the inhabitants thus expelled went to make for themselves a new home beyond the river; and a church of S. Benet which still survives, and whose tower might pass for a twin-sister of Robert D’Oilly’s tower of S. Michael’s at Oxford, may have been the nucleus of a new town which sprang up half a mile to the south-east of the old one, on the right bank of the Cam. Around this new town there gathered in the course of the following century a fringe of religious foundations. The “round church” of the Holy Sepulchre, clearly a work of the time of Henry I., was probably built by some crusader whose imagination had been fired by the sight of its prototype at Jerusalem. A Benedictine nunnery, part of whose beautiful church now serves as the chapel of Jesus College, was established under the invocation of S. Radegund early in the reign of Stephen; an hospital dedicated to S. John the Evangelist was founded at some time between 1133 and 1169 under the patronage of Bishop Nigel of Ely. This hospital, like most institutions of the kind, may have been served by canons regular of the order of S. Augustine. Some years before this, however, the Augustinians had made a more important settlement in the same neighbourhood. As early as 1092 Picot the sheriff of Cambridgeshire had founded within the older town on the left bank of the river a church of S. Giles, to be served by four regular canons. In 1112 this little college was removed to Barnwell, some two miles to the north-eastward, on the opposite side of the river, where it grew into a flourishing Austin priory. Wherever there were Austin canons a school was sure to spring up ere long; so, too, we cannot doubt, it was at Cambridge. Whether the seeds of learning were first sown in the cloisters of S. John’s or of Barnwell, or under the shadow of that old S. Benet’s which seems to have been the original University church[2223]—who it was that played here the part which had been played at Oxford by Robert Pulein—we know not; but we do know that by the middle of the following century the old Grantebridge had sunk into a mere suburb of the new town beyond the river, and the existence of the schools of Cambridge had become an established fact.[2224]

The student-life of the twelfth century—whether it were the life of scholar or of teacher—had nothing either of the ease or the dignity which we associate with the college life of to-day. Colleges in the modern sense there were indeed none. Students of all ranks and ages, from boys of ten or twelve years to men in full priestly orders, lodged as they could in a sort of dames’-houses or hostels scattered up and down the streets and lanes of the city. The schools were entirely unendowed; there was no University chest, no common fund, no pecuniary aid of any kind for either scholars or teachers. The sole support of both was, at first, the power under whose sheltering wings the school had grown up—the Church. Every book, even, had to be either bought out of their own private purses or borrowed from the library of some religious establishment. We may perhaps gather some idea of what this latter resource was likely to furnish in the great educational centres from a catalogue which has been preserved to us of the library attached to Lincoln minster, at the time when the Lincoln school of theology was at the height of its fame under Gerald’s friend William of Blois and the saintly bishop Hugh. Five-and-thirty years before Hugh’s appointment to the see, the church of Lincoln possessed, in addition to the necessary service-books which were under the care of the treasurer, some thirty or forty books in the chancellor’s keeping. Among these we find, besides a number of Psalters, works of the Latin Fathers, Epistles, Gospels, and a complete Bible in two volumes, the Canons, Statutes and Decretals of the Popes;—the Decretals edited by Ivo of Chartres;—the works of Vergil: a copy of the military treatise of Vegetius, bound up with the Roman History of Eutropius, “which volume Master Gerard gave in exchange for the Consolations of Boëthius, which he lost”;—Priscian’s Grammar:—a “Mappa Mundi”: and a Book of the Foundation of Lincoln Minster, with a collection of its charters. Of nine books presented by Bishop Robert de Chesney, who died in 1166, the most noticeable were the works of Josephus and of Eusebius, and the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Somewhat later, one Warin of Hibaldstow presented to the chapter a “book of Aristotle”—doubtless a Latin version of his treatise on logic or on natural philosophy—and seven volumes, whose contents are not stated, were given by Master “Radulphus Niger” or Ralf the Black, known to us as one of the minor chroniclers of King Henry’s later years. A copy of Gratian’s great book of Decretals was presented about the same time by an archdeacon of Leicester; Gerald de Barri, probably during his residence at Lincoln at the close of Richard’s reign, added another law-book called Summula super Decreta, a copy of S. Anselm’s treatise Cur Deus Homo, and three of his own works, the Topographia Hiberniæ, the Life of Bishop Remigius, and the Gemma Sacerdotalis or Ecclesiastica; and the list closes with another copy of the Sentences, acquired seemingly in the early years of the following century.[2225]