Of the condition of learning in England in the second half of the fifteenth century we do not yet know all that we might. Manuscripts that men bought or had written for them, books that they read, catalogues of libraries now scattered can tell us much, even though the owners are dead and speak not. Single facts, like cards for cardhouses, will not stand alone. There is still much to be done. Great libraries are only just beginning to gather up the manuscript minutiae which their books contain; to identify handwritings; to decipher monograms; to collect facts. But some day when the work has been done, we may well hope to be able to put bone to bone and breathe new life into them in a way which will make valuable contributions to our knowledge.
There is sometimes an inclination now to underestimate the effect of the Renaissance. The writers of that age were unsparingly contemptuous of their predecessors, and their verdict was for long accepted almost without question. The reaction against this has led to an undue extolling of the Middle Ages. It is true enough that many of the Schoolmen, though the humanists speak of them as hopelessly barbarous, were capable of writing Latin which, if not strictly classical, had yet an excellence of its own. But in view of the extracts given above from Ebrardus and John Garland it can hardly be maintained that there was much knowledge of Greek in Western Europe before the Renaissance. England was not ahead of France and Germany in the fifteenth century; and if Deventer school in 1475 was fed upon the monstrosities we have seen, it is not likely that Winchester and Eton had any better fare. Some sporadic examples there may have been of men who added a knowledge of the Greek character to their reminiscences of the Graecismus; just as at the present day it is not difficult to acquire a faint acquaintance with Oriental languages, enough to recognize the formation of words and plough out the letters, without any real knowledge. Colet and Fisher only began to learn Greek in their old age. One, the son of a Lord Mayor of London, made a name for himself as a lecturer at Oxford, and was advanced to be Dean of St. Paul's; the other, as head of a house at Cambridge and Chancellor of the University, promoted the foundation of the Lady Margaret's two colleges, Christ's and St. John's, which were to bring in the spirit of the Renaissance. It is impossible to suppose that men of such position would have spent the greater part of their lives without Greek, if there had been any facilities for them to learn it when they were young. Nor again would Erasmus, when teaching Greek at Cambridge in 1511, have chosen the grammars of Gaza and Chrysoloras to lecture upon, if his audience had been capable of anything better. Eminent scholars do not teach the elements at a university if boys are already learning them at school.
The condition of things may fairly be gauged by Duke Humfrey's collections for his library at Oxford. Of 130 books which he presented to the University in 1439, not one is Greek; of 135 given in 1443, only one—a vocabulary—is certainly Greek, four more are possibly, but not probably so. A little later in the century four Oxford men were pupils of Guarino in Ferrara; Grey († 1478) brought back manuscripts to Balliol and became Bishop of Ely; Gunthorpe († 1498) took his books with him to his deanery at Wells; but to only two of the four is any definite knowledge of Greek credited—Fleming († 1483), who compiled a Greek-Latin dictionary, and Free († 1465), who translated into Latin Synesius' treatise on baldness.
A discovery recently made by Dr. James of Cambridge has thrown unexpected light on the history of English scholarship at this period; and as it affords an example of the fruits to be yielded by careful research and synthesis, it may be detailed here. New Testament scholars have long been interested in a manuscript of the Gospels known, from its present habitation in the Leicester town-library, as the Leicester Codex; its date being variously assigned to the fourteenth or fifteenth century. In the handwriting there are some marked characteristics which make it easy to recognize; and in course of time other Greek manuscripts were discovered written by the same hand, two Psalters in Cambridge libraries, a Plato and Aristotle in the cathedral library at Durham, a Psalter and part of the lexicon of Suidas in Corpus at Oxford. But no clue was forthcoming as to their origin, until Dr. James found at Leiden a small Greek manuscript in the same hand, containing some letters of Aeschines and Plato, and a colophon stating that it had been written by Emmanuel of Constantinople for George Neville, Archbishop of York, and completed on 30 Dec. 1468. Where the various manuscripts were written and from what originals is not plain—the Suidas perhaps from a manuscript belonging at one time to Grosseteste; but the classical manuscripts were probably done for Neville in England during the prosperous years before his deportation to Calais in 1472, the Psalters and Gospels probably after that date at Cambridge; for the Paston Letters show that some of his disbanded household made their way to Cambridge, and Dr. Rendel Harris has ingeniously demonstrated that one Psalter and the Gospels were in fact at Cambridge with the Franciscans early in the sixteenth century. The presence of a Greek scribe in England about 1470 is an important fact.
Neville was released from prison through the intervention of Pope Sixtus IV, who about 1475 sent to England another Greek scribe and diplomatist, George Hermonymus of Sparta, charged with a letter to Edward IV. Besides Andronicus Contoblacas at Basle, Hermonymus was at the time the only Greek in Northern Europe who was prepared to teach his native tongue; in consequence most of the humanists of the day, Reuchlin, Erasmus, Budaeus and many others, turned to him for instruction, though he was indeed a poor teacher. He secured the Archbishop's release, and therewith a handsome reward to himself; but lingering on, he found himself compelled to spend about a year in London—in prison: some Italian merchants having trumped up against him a charge of espionage, from which he only escaped by paying the uttermost farthing. That he suffered such a disagreeable experience perhaps indicates that no one in London was much interested in him or his language.
Another Greek who was copying manuscripts in England at this time was John Serbopoulos, also of Constantinople, who between 1489 and 1500 wrote a number of Greek manuscripts at Reading: two copies of Gaza's Grammar, Isocrates ad Demonicum and ad Nicoclem, several commentators on Aristotle's Ethics, Chrysostom on St. Matthew, a Psalter and the completion of the Corpus Suidas which his fellow-countryman Emmanuel had begun. In one of his colophons (1494) he specifies Reading Abbey as his place of abode; for the others he merely says Reading. Possibly he was in the abbey the whole time; but even a temporary visit, during which he wrote Gaza and Isocrates, is an indication that one at least of the monastic houses was not hostile to the revival of learning.
Not that any doubt is possible on this point, since the researches of Abbot Gasquet into the life of William Selling, who was Prior of Christchurch, Canterbury, 1472-95. After entering the monastery, about 1448, Selling was sent to finish his studies at Canterbury College, the home of the Benedictines in Oxford.[1] In 1464 he was allowed to go with a companion, William Hadley, to Italy; where they spent two or three years over taking degrees in Theology, and heard lectures at Padua, Bologna, and Rome. Twice in later years Selling went to Italy again; and he brought back with him to England manuscripts of Homer and Euripides, and Livy, and Cicero's de Republica. Some of these have survived and are to be found in Cambridge libraries; others perished in the fire which broke out when Henry VIII's Visitors came to Canterbury to dissolve Christchurch. But Selling's interest in learning was not confined to the collection of manuscripts. A translation of a sermon of Chrysostom made by him in 1488 is extant; and an antiquarian visitor to Canterbury copied into his note-book 'certain Greek terminations, as taught by Dr. Sellinge of Christchurch'.
Another Churchman of this period who was interested in the revival of learning has recently been revealed to us by his books, John Shirwood, Bishop of Durham, 1483-93. He was an adherent of Neville whom we mentioned as the patron of Emmanuel of Constantinople; and having risen to prosperity as Neville rose, he did not desert his patron when Fortune's wheel went round. It does not appear that he was educated in Italy; but for a number of years he was in Rome, as a lawyer engaged in the Papal court; and to his good service there as King's proctor he probably owed his advancement to Durham. Whilst at Rome, he bought great numbers of the Latin classics, especially those which were coming fresh from the press of Sweynheym and Pannartz. Cicero seems to have held the first place in his affections, six volumes out of forty-two; the Orations, the Epistles, de Finibus and de Oratore, the two last being duplicated. History is well represented with Livy, Suetonius, Josephus, Plutarch, Polybius, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus; the last four in translations. In poetry he had Plautus and Terence, Horace, Martial, Juvenal, Seneca, and Statius; in archaeology Vitruvius and Frontinus; of the Fathers, Jerome, Lactantius, and the Confessions of Augustine.
Twice after becoming Bishop Shirwood went to Rome again, as ambassador; once in 1487 in company with Selling and Linacre: on the second occasion, in 1492-3, he died. His books, however, had already found their way home to Durham, where they were acquired by Foxe, Shirwood's successor in the see; and Foxe subsequently presented them to his newly-founded college of Corpus Christi in Oxford. It is interesting to contrast Shirwood's collection with books presented to the library of Durham monastery by John Auckland, who was Prior 1484-94. Not a single one of them is classical, not one printed; Aquinas, Bernard, Anselm, Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus, Chrysostom in Latin, Vincent de Beauvais, Summa Bibliorum, Tractatus de scaccario moralis iuxta mores hominum, Exempla de animalibus. The Prior's outlook was very different from the Bishop's.
Leland tells us that Shirwood had also a number of Greek books, which Tunstall found at Auckland in 1530; but only one of these has been traced, a copy of Gaza's Grammar written by John Rhosus of Crete in 1479, and bought by Shirwood at Rome. Where the rest are no one knows; doubtless scattered in many libraries, among people to whom the name of Shirwood has no meaning. One wonders why Foxe did not secure them for Corpus when he took the Latin books. He wanted Greek, but perhaps he considered the set of Aldus' Greek texts which he actually gave to Corpus, more worth having than Shirwood's manuscripts (for when Shirwood was collecting in Italy, the first book printed in Greek, the Florentine Homer, 1488, had not yet appeared): possibly he never saw them.