In the Curteys Register of Bury-St.-Edmund’s (in the time of Abbot Sampson xii c.) we have the students of dialectic distinguished from the students of grammar and the latter from other scholars—“dialecticos glomerellos seu discipulos,” and “glomerellos seu discipulos indistincte”; surely a clear reference to two branches of the trivium. The use of the word glomerel in O.E. law to signify an officer who adjusts disputes between scholars and townsmen, is obviously the result of a misinterpretation of Balsham’s rescript of 1276 “Inprimis volumus et ordinamus quod magister glomeriae Cant. qui pro tempore fuerit, audiat et dicedat universas glomerellorum ex parte rea existentium.... Ita quod sive sint scholares sive laici qui glomerellos velint convenire ... per viam judicialis indaginis, hoc faciat coram magistro glomeriae....” The form of the latter’s oath to the Archdeacon of Ely and the functions which fell to the master of glomery when the school became decadent, may also have led to the mistake (which was made by Spelman as regards the Cambridge glomerels). Cf. i. p. 14, iv. p. 207 n., and Fuller, Prickett-Wright Ed. pp. 52-4. The second of these editors, indeed, was the first to call attention (in 1840) to the irrefutable evidence in the Cole and Baker MSS. as to the meaning of master and school of glomery, and to light on the confirmation from the university of Orléans in the verses of the troubadour Rutebeuf. For glomery, see also Peacock, Appendix A, xxxii-xxxvi.
The foundation of God’s House in 1439 was due to Parson Byngham’s zealous desire to remedy “the default and lack of scolemaisters of gramer,” following on the Black Death. In a touching letter to the king (Henry VI.) Byngham points out “how greatly the clergy of your realm is like to be empeired and febled” by the default, and relates that “over the est parte of the wey ledyng from Hampton” to Coventry alone, “and no ferther north yan Rypon,” 70 schools were empty for lack of teachers. “For all liberall sciences used in your seid universitees certein lyflode is ordeyned, savyng only for gramer.”
[272] See chapter i. p. 33.
[273] Royal Injunctions to the university of 1535, requiring the denial of papal supremacy. “King Henry stung with the dilatory pleas of the canonists at Rome in point of his marriage, did in revenge destroy their whole hive throughout his own universities,” Fuller. The last Cambridge doctor in canon law “commenced” in this reign.
[274] The usual course is to take the special medical examinations with the First Part of the natural sciences tripos. Sometimes however these are taken in addition to the ordinary B.A. degree. The last of the three M.B. examinations is divided into two parts, of which Part I. is taken at the end of the fourth year of medical study, and Part II. after six years, three of which must have been spent in medical and surgical practice and hospital work. The keeping of the “act” is not intended to be a mere form, and students are advised to prepare for it during the years of their hospital practice.
[275] The degrees of bachelor of surgery (a registrable qualification) and master of surgery require no separate examination; the candidate must have done all that is required of a bachelor of medicine; but bachelors of surgery who are not also masters of arts cannot incept until three years have passed since they took the B.C., and masters of arts must have become legally qualified surgeons.
[276] Whitgift’s thesis for the D.D. degree (1570) was “Papa est ille anti-Christus“—‘the pope is himself anti-Christ.’
[277] Erasm. Epist. (London 1642), Liber secundus, Epist. 10. Letter to Bullock dated from the Palace at Rochester, August 31, 1516.
[278] Or were relegated to the previous examinations.
[279] Till then it had meant Aristotle: the statutes of Queens’ and Christ’s, framed within 50 years of one another, provide for its teaching—“the natural, moral, and metaphysical philosophy of Aristotle”; and even in Fuller’s time these metaphysics were the study of the bachelor of arts: “Let a sophister begin with his axioms, a batchelor of art proceed to his metaphysicks, a master to his mathematicks, and a divine conclude with his controversies and comments on scripture....”