In the reign of Philip le Bel a provost of Paris dared to hang a scholar. The rector immediately closed all classes until reparation was made, and on the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin the curés of Paris assembled and went in procession, bearing a cross and holy water to the provost’s house, against which each cast a stone, crying, in a loud voice—“Make honourable reparation, thou cursed Satan, to thy mother Holy Church, whose privileges thou hast injured, or suffer the fate of Dathan and Abiram.” The king dismissed his provost, caused ample compensation to be made, and the schools were reopened.
In 1404 some pages belonging to the royal chamberlain brutally spurred their horses through a procession of scholars wending to the church of St. Catherine. They were stoned by the angry scholars, whereupon they drew sword and attacked them, pursuing them even into the church. The rector demanded satisfaction, but the chamberlain, Charles de Savoisy, was a court functionary, and nothing was done. The rector then closed all the schools and the king ordered the Parlement to do instant justice. The sentence was an exemplary one. The chamberlain’s house was to be demolished, an annuity of one hundred livres to be paid for the maintenance of five chaplaincies under the patronage of the university, a thousand livres compensation to be paid to the injured scholars and a like sum to the university. Three of the chamberlain’s men were to do penance in their shirts, torch in hand, before the churches of St. Genevieve, St. Catherine and St. Sévérin, to suffer a whipping at the cross roads, and to be banished for three years. In 1406 permission was given for the house to be rebuilt, but the university resisted the decree and only gave way one hundred and twelve years later, on condition that the terms of the original condemnation and sentence were inscribed on the new house.
The famous Prés aux Clercs (Clerks’ Meadow) was the theatre of many a fight with the powerful abbots of St. Germain des Prés. From earliest times the students had been wont to take the air in the meadow, which lay between the monastery and the river, and soon claimed the privilege as an acquired right. In 1192 the inhabitants of the monastic suburb resented their insolence, and a free fight ensued, in which several scholars were wounded and one was killed. The rector inculpated the abbot, and each appealed to Rome, with what result is unknown. After nearly a century of strained relations and minor troubles the abbots in 1278 had walls and other buildings erected on the way to the meadow. The scholars met in force and demolished them. The abbot, who was equal to the occasion, rang his bells, called his vassals to arms and sent a force to seize the gates of the city that gave on the suburb, to prevent reinforcements reaching the scholars. His retainers then attacked the rioters, killed several and wounded many. The rector complained to the papal legate and threatened to close the schools if reparation were not made and justice done within fifteen days, whereupon the legate ordered the provost of the monastery to be expelled for five years. The royal council forced the abbot to exile ten of his vassals, to endow two chantries for the repose of the souls of slain clercs and compensate their fathers by fines of two hundred and four hundred livres respectively, and to pay the rector two hundred livres to be distributed among poor scholars.
The rector claimed right of jurisdiction over the parchments exposed for sale in Paris and its neighbourhood, and attended with his sworn experts the great Fair of Landry at St. Denis, instituted in 877. The students accompanied him with much uproar. At this season the Landry gifts were made by the students to the masters, consisting of a lemon larded with pieces of gold or silver in a crystal glass. The ceremony was accompanied by the sound of drums and musical instruments and was followed by a holiday. Innumerable were the complaints on this and other occasions of the rowdyism of the scholars, their practical jokes and dissolute habits.
Many circumstances contributed to make Paris the capital of the intellectual world in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. France has ever been the home of great enthusiasms and has not feared “to follow where airy voices lead.” The conception and enforcement of a Truce of God (Trève de Dieu) whereby all acts of hostility in private or public wars ceased during certain days of the week or on church festivals; the noble ideal of Christian chivalry; the first crusade—all had their origin in France. The crusaders carried the prestige of the French name and diffused the French idiom over Europe. It was a French monk preaching in France who gave voice to the general enthusiasm; a French pope approved his impassioned oration; a French shout “Dieu le veut” became the crusader’s war-cry. The conquest of the Holy Land was organised by the French, its first Christian king was a French knight, its laws were indited in French, and to this day every Christian in the East is a Frank whatever tongue he may speak. In the thirteenth century Brunetto Latini wrote his most famous work, the Livres dou Trésor, in French, because it was la parleure plus delitable, il plus commune à toutes gens (“the most delightful of languages and the most common to all peoples.”) Martin da Canale composed his story of Venice in French for the same reason, and Marco Polo dictated his travels in French in a Genoese prison. When St. Francis was sending the brothers to establish the order in distant lands, he himself chose France, but was dissuaded by his friend, Cardinal Ugolin. “When inebriated with love and compassion for Christ,” says the writer of the Speculum, “and overflowing with sweetest melody of the Spirit, ofttimes would he find utterance in the French tongue; the strains of the divine whisperings which his ear had caught he would express in a French song of joyous exultation, and making the gestures of one playing a viol, he would sing in French of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Never in the history of civilisation were men possessed with such passion for the spiritual life or such faith in the reasoning faculty as in the thirteenth century in Paris. The holiest mysteries were analysed and defined; everywhere was a search for new things. Conservative Churchmen became alarmed and complained of disputants and blasphemers exercising their wits at every street corner. The four camel-loads of manuscripts, the works and commentaries of Aristotle, brought by the Jews from Spain—a monstrous and mutilated version translated from Greek into Arabic and from Arabic into Latin—became the battle-ground of the schools. The Church at first forbade the study of Aristotle, then by the genius of Aquinas, Christianised and absorbed him. His works became a kind of intellectual tennis-ball bandied between the Averroists, who carried their teachings to a logical consequence, and the more orthodox followers of Aquinas. For three years the faculty was torn asunder by the rival factions. Siger of Brabant, whose eternal light Dante saw refulgent amid other doctors of the Church in the heaven of the Sun, was an Averroist; Siger—
“Che leggendo nel vico degli strami
Sillogizzò invidiosi veri.”[71]