Artibus et nostrae laudis origo fuit,
Education.
A number of years of his life were spent as teacher at Dunstable in a school under the control of the monastery of St. Albans. It was at Paris, however, that he received his higher education and also taught for a while. Scarcely any place, he wrote late in life, was better known to him than the city in whose schools he had been “a small pillar” and where he “faithfully learned and taught the arts, then turned to the study of Holy Writ, heard lectures in Canon Law, and upon Hippocrates and Galen, and did not find Civil Law distasteful.” This passage not only illustrates his own broad education in the liberal arts, the two laws, medicine, and theology, but also suggests that these four faculties were already formed or forming at Paris. Neckam visited Italy, as his humorous poem bidding Rome good-by attests, and from two of the stories which he tells in The Natures of Things[546] we may infer that he had been in Rouen and Meaux. In 1213 Neckam was elected abbot of Cirencester, and died in 1217. An amusing story is told in connection with Neckam’s first becoming a monk. He is said to have first applied for admission to a Benedictine monastery, but when the abbot made a bad pun upon his good name, saying, Si bonus es, venias; si nequam, nequaquam (If you are a good man you may come; if Neckam, by no means), he joined the Augustinians instead.[547]
The state of learning.
Neckam gives us a glimpse of the learned world of his time as well as of his own education. He thinks past times happy, when he recalls that “the greatest princes were diligent and industrious in aiding investigation of nature,” and that it was then commonly said, “An illiterate king is a crowned ass.”[548] But he is not ashamed of the schools of his own day. After speaking of the learning of Greece and Egypt in antiquity and stating that schools no longer flourish in those lands, he exclaims, “But what shall I say of Salerno and Montpellier where the diligent skill of medical students, serving the public welfare, provides remedies to the whole world against bodily ills? Italy arrogates to itself proficiency in the civil law, but celestial scripture and the liberal arts prefer Paris to all other cities as their home. And in accord with Merlin’s prophecy the wisdom now flourishes at Oxford which in his time was in process of transfer to Ireland.”[549] Neckam’s assertion that there were no schools in the Greece and Egypt of his day is interesting as implying the insignificance of Byzantine and Mohammedan learning in the second half of the twelfth century. He perhaps does not think of Constantinople as in “Greece,” but in Egypt he must certainly include Cairo, where the mosque el-Azhar, devoted in 988 to educational purposes, “has been ever since one of the chief universities of Islam.”[550] At any rate it is clear that to his mind the intellectual supremacy has now passed to western Europe.
Popular science and mechanical arts.
In his praises of learning Neckam is a little too inclined, like many other Latin writers, to speak slightingly of the vulgus or common crowd. In antiquity, he affirms, the liberal arts were the monopoly of free men; mechanical or adulterine arts were for the ignoble.[551] This does not mean, however, that his eyes are closed to the value of practical inventions, since both in The Natures of Things and his De utensilibus we find what are perhaps the earliest references to the mariner’s compass[552] and to glass mirrors.[553] Indeed, he often entertains us with popular gossip and superstition, mentioning for the first time the belief in a man in the moon,[554] and telling such stories of daily life as that of the lonely sailor whose dog helped him reef the sails and manage the ropes of the boat in crossing the Channel,[555] or of the sea-fowl whose daily cry announced to the sheep in the tidal meadow that it was time to seek higher pasture, until one day its beak was caught by the shell of an oyster it tried to devour and the sheep were drowned for lack of warning.[556]
His works.
Neckam’s writings were numerous, and, as might have been expected from his wide studies, in varied fields. They include grammatical treatises,[557] works on Ovid and classical mythology, commentaries upon the books of the Bible such as the Psalms and Song of Songs, and the writings of Aristotle, and other works of a literary, scientific, or theological character.[558] Most of them, however, if extant, are still in manuscript. Only a few have been printed;[559] among them is The Natures of Things which we shall presently consider.
Neckam is a good illustration of the humanistic movement in the twelfth century. He wrote Latin verse[560] as well as prose; took pains with and pride in his Latin style; and shows acquaintance with a large number of classical authors. He had some slight knowledge, at least, of Hebrew. He was especially addicted, according to Wright,[561] to those ingenious but philologically absurd derivations of words in which the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville had dealt, explaining, for example, the Latin word for corpse (cadaver) as compounded from the three roots seen in the words for flesh (caro), given (data), to worms (vermibus). Yet in one chapter of The Natures of Things Neckam attacks “the verbal cavils” and use of obsolete words in his time as “useless and frivolous,” and asks if one cannot be a good jurist or physician or philosopher without all this linguistic and verbal display.[562] Wright, moreover, was also impressed by Neckam’s interest in natural science, calling him “certainly one of the most remarkable English men of science in the twelfth century,”[563] and noting that “he not infrequently displays a taste for experimental science.”[564]