The growing fame of the university of Oxford was a matter of national importance. Down to the early years of the thirteenth century a young English clerk who was anxious to study found his only career abroad, and was too often cut off altogether from his mother country. Among the last of this type were the Paris mathematician, John of Holywood or Halifax, Robert Curzon, cardinal, legate, theologian, and crusader, and Alexander of Hales. Stephen Langton, who did important work in revising the text of the Vulgate, might well have been one of those lost to England but for the wisdom of Innocent III who restored him, in the fulness of his reputation and powers, to the service of the English Church. Not many years younger than Langton was his successor Edmund of Abingdon, but the difference was enough to make the younger primate a student of the Oxford schools in early life. Though he left Oxford for Paris, Edmund returned to an active career in England, when experience convinced him of the vanity of scholastic success. Bishop Grosseteste, another early Oxford teacher of eminence, probably studied at Paris, for so late as 1240 he held up to the Oxford masters of theology the example of their Paris brethren for their imitation. The double allegiance of Edmund and Grosseteste was typical. A long catalogue of eminent names adorned the annals of Oxford in the thirteenth century, but the most distinguished of her earlier sons were drawn away from her by the superior attractions of Paris. England furnished at least her share of the great names of thirteenth century scholasticism, but of very few of these could it be said that their main obligation was to the English university. It was at Paris that the academic organisation developed which Oxford adopted. At Paris the great intellectual conflicts of the century were fought. There the ferment seethed round that introduction of Aristotle's teaching from Moorish sources which led to the outspoken pantheism of an Amaury of Bène. There also was the reconciliation effected between the new teacher and the old faith which made Aristotle the pillar of the new scholasticism that was to justify by reason the ways of God to man. In Paris also was fought the contest between the aggressive mendicant friars and the secular doctors whom they wished to supplant in the divinity schools.
There is little evidence of even a pale reflection of these struggles in contemporary Oxford. English scholars bore their full share in the fight. It was the Englishman Curzon who condemned the heresies of Amaury of Bène. Another Englishman, Alexander of Hales, issued in his Summa Theologiæ the first effective reconciliation of Aristotelian metaphysic with Christian doctrine which his Paris pupils, Thomas Aquinas, the Italian, and Albert the Great, the German, were to work out in detail in the next generation. Hales was the first secular doctor in Europe who in 1222, in the full pride of his powers, abandoned his position in the university to embrace the voluntary poverty of the Franciscans and resume his teaching, not in the regular schools but in a Minorite convent. And at the same time another English doctor at Paris, John of St. Giles, notable as a physician as well as a theologian, dramatically marked his conversion to the Dominican order by assuming its habit in the midst of a sermon on the virtues of poverty. All these famous Englishmen worked and taught at Paris, and it was only a generation later that their successors could establish on the Thames the traditions so long upheld on the banks of the Seine.
The establishment of the Dominicans and Franciscans at Oxford gave an immense impetus to the activity of the university. The Franciscans appointed as the first lector of their Oxford convent the famous secular teacher Grosseteste, who ever after held the Minorites in the closest estimation. Grosseteste was the greatest scholar of his day, knowing Greek and Hebrew as well as the accustomed studies of the period. A clear and independent thinker, he was not, like so many of his contemporaries, overborne by the weight of authority, but appealed to observation and experience in terms which make him the precursor of Roger Bacon. Grosseteste's successor as lector was himself a Minorite, Adam Marsh, whose reputation was so great that Grosseteste was afraid to leave him when sick in a French town, lest the Paris masters should persuade him to teach in their schools. Adam's loyalty to his native university withstood any such temptation, and from that time Oxford began to hold up its head against Paris. Even before this, Grosseteste persuaded John of St. Giles to transfer his teaching from Paris to Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his life.
The intense intellectual activity of the thirteenth century flowed in more than one channel, and Englishmen took their full share both in building up and in destroying. Two Englishmen of the next generation mark in different ways the reaction against the moderate Aristotelianism and orthodox rationalism which their countryman Hales first brought into vogue. These were the Franciscan friars, Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus. Bacon, though he studied at Paris as well as at Oxford, is much more closely identified with England than with the Continent. His sceptical, practical intellect led him to heap scorn on Hales and his followers and to plunge into audacities of speculation which cost him long seclusions in his convent and enforced abstinence from writing and study. In his war against the Aristotelians, the intrepid friar upheld recourse to experiment and observation as superior to deference to authority, in language which stands in strange contrast to the traditions of the thirteenth century. Grosseteste, who also had preferred the teachings of experience to the appeal to the sages of the past, was the only academic leader that escaped Bacon's scathing censure. When his order kept him silent, Roger was bidden to resume his pen by Pope Clement IV. A generation still later, Duns Scotus, probably a Lowland Scot, who taught at Paris and died at Cologne in 1308, emphasised, sharply enough, but in less drastic fashion, the reaction against the teaching of Hales and Aquinas, by accepting a dualism between reason and authority that broke away from the Thomist tradition of the thirteenth century and prepared the way for the scholastic decadence of the fourteenth. After France, England took a leading part in all these movements; and even in France English scholars had a large share in making that land the special home of the Studium, as Italy was of the Sacerdotium and Germany of the Imperium.
This intellectual ferment had its results on practical life. Though the university was cosmopolitan, the individual members of it were not the less good citizens. A patriot like Grosseteste strove to his uttermost to keep Englishmen for Oxford or to win them back from Paris. Oxford clerks fought the battle of England against the legate Otto, and we shall see them siding with Montfort. The eminently practical temper of the academic class could not neglect the world of action for the abstract pursuit of science. Eager as men were to know, to prove, and to inquire, the age had little of the mystical temperament about it. The studies which made for worldly success, such as civil and canon law, attracted the thousands for whom philosophy or theology had little attraction. Never before was there a career so fully opened to talent. The academic teacher's fame took him from the lecture-room to the court, from the university to the episcopal throne, and so it was that the university influenced action almost as profoundly as it influenced thought, and affected all classes of society alike. The struggles of poor students like Edmund of Abingdon or Grosseteste must not make us think that the universities of this period were exclusively frequented by humble scholars. The academic career of a rich baron's son like Thomas of Cantilupe, living in his own hired house at Paris with a train of chaplains and tutors, receiving the visits of the French king, and feeding poor scholars with the remnants from his table, is as characteristic as the more common picture of the student begging his way from one seat of learning to another, and suffering the severest privations rather than desert his studies. Yet the function of the studium as promoting a healthy circulation between the various orders of medieval society, must not be ignored.
Partly to help on the poor, partly to encourage men to devote themselves to the pursuit of knowledge, endowments began to arise which soon enhanced the splendour of universities though they lessened their mobility and their freedom. The mendicant convents at Paris and Oxford prepared the way for secular foundations, at first small and insignificant, like that which, in the days of Henry III., John Balliol established at Oxford for the maintenance of poor scholars, but soon increasing in magnitude and distinction. The great college set up by St. Louis' confessor at Paris for the endowment of scholars, desirous of studying the unlucrative but vital subject of theology, was soon imitated by the chancellor of Henry III. Side by side with Robert of Sorbon's college of 1257, arose Walter of Merton's foundation of 1263, and twenty years later Bishop Balsham's college of Peterhouse extended the "rule of Merton" to Cambridge.
The academic movement was not all clear gain. The humanism, of the twelfth century was crushed beneath the weight of the specialised science and encyclopædic learning of the thirteenth. We should seek in vain among most theologians or the philosophers of our period for any spark of literary art; and the tendency dominant in them affected for evil all works written in Latin. Even the historians show a falling away from the example of William of Malmesbury or of Roger of Hoveden. The one English chronicler of the thirteenth century who is a considerable man of letters, Matthew Paris, belongs to the early half of it, before the academic tradition was fully established, and even with him prolixity impairs the art without injuring the colour of his work. The age of Edward I., the great time of triumphant scholasticism, is recorded in chronicles so dreary that it is hard to make the dry bones live. Walter of Hemingburgh, the most attractive historian of the time, belongs to the next generation: and his excellencies are only great in comparison with his fellows. Something of this decadence may be attributed to the falling away of the elder monastic types, whose higher life withered up from want of able recruits, for the secular and mendicant careers offered opportunities so stimulating that few men of purpose, or earnest spiritual character, cared to enter a Benedictine or a Cistercian house of religion. Something more may be assigned to the growing claims of the vulgar tongue on literary aspirants. But the chief cause of the literary defects of thirteenth century writers must be set down to the doctrine that the study of "arts"—of grammar, rhetoric and the rest—was only worthy of schoolboys and novices, and was only a preliminary to the specialised faculties which left little room for artistic presentation. Science in short nearly killed literature.
It was the same with the vulgar tongues as with Latin. French remained the common language of the higher classes of English society, and the history of French literature belongs to the history of the western world rather than to that of England. The share taken in it by English-born writers is less important than in the great age of romance when the contact of Celt and Norman on British soil added the Arthurian legend to the world's stock of poetic material. The practical motive, which destroyed the art of so many Latin writers, impaired the literary value of much written in the vernacular. We have technical works in French and even in English, such as Walter of Henley's treatise on Husbandry, composed in French for the guidance of stewards of manors, and translated, it is said by Grosseteste, into English for the benefit of a wider public. Grosseteste is also said to have drawn up in French a handbook of rules for the management of a great estate, and he certainly wrote French poetry. The legal literature, written in Latin or French, and illustrated by such names as Bracton, Britton, and "Fleta," shows that there was growing up a school of earnest students of English law who, though anxious, like Bracton, to bring their conclusions under the rules of Roman jurisprudence, began to treat their science with an independence which secured for English custom the opportunity of independent development. Of more literary interest than such technicalities were the rhyming chronicles, handed on from the previous age, of which one of the best, the recently discovered history of the great William Marshal, has already been noticed. The spontaneity of this poem proves that its language was still the natural speech of the writer, and impels its French editor to claim for it a French origin. As the century grew older there was no difficulty in deciding whether French works were written by Englishmen or Frenchmen. The Yorkshire French of Peter Langtoft's Chronicle, and the jargon of the Year Books, attest how the political separation of the two lands, and the preponderance in northern France of the dialect of Paris, placed the insular French speech in strong contrast to the language of polite society beyond the Channel. Yet barbarous as Anglo-French became, it retained the freshness of a living tongue, and gained some ground at the expense of Latin, notably in the law courts and in official documents.
English was slowly making its way upwards. There was a public ready to read vernacular books, and not at home with French. For their sake a great literature of translations and adaptations was made, beginning with Layamon's English version of Wace's Brut, which by the end of the century made the cycle of French romance accessible to the English reader. Many works of edification and devotion were written in English; and Robert of Gloucester's rhyming history appealed to a larger public than the Yorkshire French of Langtoft. It is significant of the trend of events that the early fourteenth century saw Langtoft himself done into English by Robert Mannyng, of Bourne. While as yet no continuous works of high merit were written in English, there was no lack of experiments, of novelties, and of adaptations. Much evidence of depth of feeling, power of expression, and careful art lies hidden away in half-forgotten anonymous lyrics, satires, and romances. The language in which these works were written was steadily becoming more like our modern English. The dialectical differences become less acute; the inflections begin to drop away; the vocabulary gradually absorbs a larger romance element, and the prosody drops from the forms of the West Saxon period into measures and modes that reflect a living connexion with the contemporary poetry of France. Thus, even in the literature of a not too literary age, we find abundant tokens of that strenuous national life which was manifesting itself in so many different ways.
Art rather than literature reflected the deeper currents of the thirteenth century. Architecture, the great art of the middle age, was in its perfection. The inchoate gothic which the Cistercians brought from Burgundy to the Yorkshire dales, and William of Sens transplanted from his birthplace to Canterbury, was superseded by the more developed art of St. Hugh's choir at Lincoln. In the next generation the new style, imported from northern France, struck out ways of its own, less soaring, less rigidly logical, yet of unequalled grace and picturesqueness, such as we see in Salisbury cathedral, which altogether dates from the reign of Henry III. Here also, as in literature, foreign models stood side by side with native products. Henry III.'s favourite foundation at Westminster reproduced on English soil the towering loftiness, the vaulted roofs, the short choir, and the ring of apsidal chapels, of the great French minsters. This was even more emphatically the case with the decorations, the goldsmith's and metal work, the sculpture, painting, and glass, which the best artists of France set up in honour of the English king's favourite saint. In these crafts English work would not as yet bear a comparison with foreign, and even the glories of the statuary of the façade of Wells cannot approach the sculptured porches of Amiens or Paris. As the century advanced some of the fashions of the French builders, notably as regards window tracery, were taken up in the early "Decorated" of the reign of Edward I.; and here the claims of English to essential equality with French building can perhaps be better substantiated than in the infancy of the art. But all these comparisons are misleading. The impulse to gothic art came to England from France, like the impulse to many other things. Its working out was conducted on English local lines, ever becoming more divergent from those of the prototype, though not seldom stimulated by the constant intercourse of the two lands.