Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Spain, and Flanders likewise had their own centres, more local, however, than those of Italy, all of them under the new form of universities, and all more or less emancipated from the strictly monastic spirit of the older centres of learning. Vienna, Erfurt, Heidelberg, and Wittenberg were the foremost in Germany; Cracow was founded by a saint, the holy Hedwige of Poland; and Prague, which gave so much trouble and anxiety to the church in former times and hardly less in our own day, owes much of its glory to the holy women of the middle ages. Thus Dombrowka, a princess of Bohemia, married to a Polish chief, and Hedwige, the great queen and patron saint of Poland, established colleges there and endowed them liberally. Salamanca had a wider reputation, and fell heir to all the brilliant learning of the Arabian and Jewish schools, whose influence on Christian thought in the days of S. Thomas of Aquin had been so dangerous. All the scientific knowledge of the East thus became its natural property, while the intensely Catholic mind of the Spaniards held them aloof from what was poisonous in Eastern philosophy. And here let us stop to remark that Spain, ranked as it has always been among the Latin nations, nevertheless owes its first Christian traditions, and, no doubt, also its imperial notions of universal sway, to the vigorous Gothic races, mingled with the Frankish and Burgundian blood brought in by intermarriage with the Merovingian princes of France. There is something in Spanish history, in Spanish perseverance, we might almost say in Spanish toughness, that reveals the Visigoth, the man of the northern forests, with his indomitable energy and insatiable thirst for the sole rule of land and sea. Alcala, the creation of Cardinal Ximenes, and Coimbra, besides twenty-four colleges dignified by the name of universities, make up the quota contributed by Spain to the intellectual progress of Europe. We wish we had more space and time to devote to them.
Flanders, the home of art in the middle ages, and the model of dignified and successful civic government, was not fated to be behind-hand in the world of letters. As early as 1360, a gay scholar of the University of Paris, and a native of Deventer, returned to his birthplace with the halo of success and worldly fame about him. After a few years of vain display, Gerard of Deventer suddenly, through the agency of a holy companion, became an altered and converted man. Having fitted himself for a spiritual [pg 154] career by a three years' seclusion among the Carthusians, he returned to his native city and instituted a congregation of Canons Regular, whom he entrusted to a disciple of his, a former canon of Utrecht. He himself died soon after, but under his successor, Florentius, the school grew in importance and renown till, in 1393, a scholar entered its cloisters, by name Thomas Hammerlein, now known to the Christian world as Thomas à Kempis, the reputed author of The Following of Christ. His life is too entirely spiritual to be mentioned here, but of the institute in which he was reared the same rule will not apply. Although the aim of the Deventer school was to revive the old monastic ideal, and although its spirit seems forcibly to remind us of Bede and Rabanus of Fulda, still it gave forth scholars like the “Illustrious Nicholas of Cusa, the son of a poor fisherman, who won his doctor's cap at Padua, and became renowned for his Greek, Hebrew, and mathematical learning.”[97] It is also told of the Deventer brethren that they “displayed extraordinary zeal in promoting the new art of printing, and that one of the earliest Flemish presses was set up in their college.”[98] The famous Erasmus passed his first years of study at Deventer in the latter end of the XVth century, and drew from his masters the prediction that he would “one day be the light of his age.” The later Flemish University of Louvain, founded in 1425, by Duke John of Brabant, was eminently an orthodox institution, and became, in the XVIth century, “one of the soundest nurseries of the faith,” as well as the chief seat of learning in Flanders. Even Erasmus owned in his letters that the schools of Louvain were considered second only to those of Paris. Here, as usual, the Dominicans were foremost in the breach, and enjoyed great privileges, while their influence made itself powerfully felt throughout the university. S. Thomas of Aquin was, of course, the recognized authority followed by the whole university in matters of theology.
Ireland was not so fortunate during the scholastic as during the monastic era of intellectual development, but what benefits she had she owed them again to the same institution which had educated her sons in olden days. The first University of Dublin was founded in 1320, and had for its first master a Dominican friar. It soon decayed for want of funds and in consequence of the troubles of the times, but the Dominicans would not let learning perish, if they could help it. In 1428, a century later, they opened a free “high school” on Usher's Island, where they taught gratuitously all branches of knowledge, from grammar to theology, and admitted all students, lay and ecclesiastical. Between this college and their convent in the city they built a stone bridge, the only erection of such solid material known in Dublin for two centuries afterwards, and, says Mr. Wyse in a speech on Education delivered at Cork in 1844, “it is an interesting fact in the history of education in Ireland that the only stone bridge in the capital of the kingdom was built by one of the monastic orders as a communication between a convent and its college, a thoroughfare thrown across a dangerous river for teachers and scholars to frequent halls of learning where the whole range of the sciences of the day was taught gratuitously.”[99] A few years later, the four Mendicant orders, headed by the Dominicans, obtained from Pope Sixtus IV. a brief constituting their Dublin schools one [pg 155] university, with the same ecclesiastical rights and privileges enjoyed by the great University of Oxford, and this body corporate is mentioned as in active exercise of its powers just before the “Reformation.” It showed the general destruction brought by the apostasy of England on all monastic bodies, but such as it was it was the church's creation, and a fitting successor to those centres of rare learning, the Columbanian monasteries of the VIIth and VIIIth centuries.
The Scotch universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen have been purposely left out, as we have no records of them at hand; of the latter, the remains of which we happened to visit some years ago, it will suffice to say that it possesses a library, the germs of which are due to Catholic collectors, and still has some very fine specimens of illuminated manuscripts. The wood carvings of the choir stalls and screen, of Flemish workmanship, are very beautiful, and the collegiate chapel, still existing, bears marks of the harmony and symmetry natural to the grand worship it once typified.
We have left Oxford to the last, since its history is perhaps almost unique. No university of its day can match it; its vitality has outlasted the “Reformation” itself, and its spirit and statutes remain to this moment as obstinately Catholic as in the days of Bacon and Duns Scotus. True, infidelity has not respected it, but no more did it respect the University of Paris in the XIIIth century, and far more vigorous than its great mediæval rival, Oxford still epitomizes the genius of a nation, while Paris has lost every vestige of its former academical sway. Its beginnings are lost in the ages of fable, for tradition asserts that long before Alfred there were schools and disputations there. The schools of Osney Abbey, and the Benedictine school in connection with Winchcomb Abbey, are among the earliest foundations, but as yet (in 1175) there were no buildings of any architectural pretensions. About that time a great fire destroyed the greater part of the city, and for a long while very little order prevailed among its motley inhabitants. Robert Pulleyn, an English scholar from Paris, who had set up a school in 1133 and in 1142, went to Rome, was made cardinal there, and obtained many ecclesiastical privileges for the Oxford scholars. Law already began to be studied in this century, but a historian of the time complains bitterly that “purity of speech had decayed, philosophy was neglected, and nothing but Parisian quirks prevailed. Had the monastic schools retained their ascendency,” he says, “polite letters would never have fallen into such neglect.”[100] In the XIIIth century there were 30,000 students at Oxford, though many among them were “a set of varlets who pretended to be scholars,” and passed their time in thieving and villany. The brawls of these said “varlets” were to the full as violent as those of the Rue Coupegueule, and much of the same kind of license disgraced Oxford as it did Paris. Nationality seems to have been a common pretext for fights, and S. George's, S. Patrick's, and S. David's days were, instead of peaceful festivals, days of bloodshed and plunder. At last every demonstration on these days had to be forbidden under pain of excommunication. “Town and gown” fights too were frequent, and even internecine battles took place among the scholars themselves over a false quantity in pronunciation or a disputed axiom in philosophy. The fare in those days seems to have been [pg 156] scanty; here for instance is a collegiate menu: “At ten of the clock they go to dinner, whereat they be content with a penny piece of beef among four, having a few pottage made of the broth of the said beef, with salt and oatmeal and nothing else.” When they went to bed, “they were fain to run up and down half an hour to get a heat on their feet,” and what the beds were may be surmised from the fact of the students lodging where they could, generally in lofts over the burghers' shops, as at Paris.
In the earlier part of the XIIIth century Cambridge was founded, and Peter of Blois, the continuator of Ingulphus, tells us that from this “little fountain (the first lectures given successively in the same barn, on various subjects, by three or four monks of Croyland) of Cottenham, the abbot's manor near Cambridge, which has swelled to a great river, we now behold the whole city of God made glad, and teachers issuing from Cambridge, after the likeness of the Holy Paradise.” Cambridge seems to have cultivated the Anglo-Saxon tongue, as Tavistock also did, a monastic school where the language was regularly taught “to assist the monks in deciphering their own ancient charters.”
“Old Oxford” was not the imposing pile of ecclesiastical buildings its later representative is now. Osney and S. Frideswide stood like castles in its surrounding meadows, but the main body of the university consisted in straw-thatched houses and timber schools. There were pilgrimage wells where, on Rogation Days, various blessings were invoked on the fruits of the earth, and these were called by our forefathers “Gospel places.” It was a sort of religious “Maying,” the students carrying poles adorned with flowers and singing the Benedicite. The streets bore singular names—“School Street,” “Logic Lane,” “Street of the Seven Deadly Sins.” Here is the “Schedesyerde,” where abode the sellers of parchment, the schedes or sheets of which gave their name to the locality. The schools can be distinguished by pithy inscriptions over dingy-looking doors—Ama scientiam, Impostu ras fuge, Litteras disce—but you will look in vain for public schools or collegiate piles. In these humble schools many great scholars were reared: S. Edmund of Canterbury, who, for instance, unless he chanced to spend it in relieving the distress of some poor scholar or little orphan child, left the money his pupils paid him lying loose on the window-sill, where he would strew it with ashes, saying, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust”; or, again, S. Richard, Edmund's friend, and afterwards his chancellor at Canterbury, who while at Oxford was so poor that he could seldom allow himself the luxury of mutton, then reckoned as ordinary scholar's fare, and who lodged with two companions, of whom we hear the Parisian tale of the single gown worn alternately at lecture by each, while the others remained at home; Robert Grossetêle, the Franciscan, a universal genius and a most holy man, a zealous lover of natural science, and so well versed in the Scriptures that one of his modern biographers has candidly admitted that his “wonderful knowledge of them might probably be worth remark in our day, though in its own not more than was possessed by all theological students”; Roger Bacon, the greatest natural philosopher who appeared in England before the time of Newton; and Alexander of Hales, “the Irrefragable Doctor,” who also taught in the Franciscan schools of Paris—were among prominent Oxford scholars of the middle ages. Then the marvellous Duns Scotus a scholar [pg 157] of Merton and afterwards a Franciscan monk, an Abelard in brilliancy, versatility, and keenness of argument, who, disputing one day before the doctors of the Sorbonne (to whom he was personally unknown), was interrupted by one of them with this exclamation, “This must be either an angel from heaven, a demon from hell, or Duns Scotus from Oxford!” A similar legend is told of Alanus de Insulis, a Paris doctor, who, having left the schools and become a lay-brother at Citeaux, accompanied the abbot to Rome to take charge of his horses. Being allowed to sit at the abbot's feet during the council against the Albigenses, and finding the scales inclining in favor of the heretics, he rose, and, begging the abbot's blessing, suddenly poured forth his irresistible arguments and defeated the sophistry of the Albigenses, who, baffled and furious, exclaimed, “This must be either the devil himself or Alanus.”
Thomas of Cantilupe, the son of the Earl of Pembroke, was another representative Oxford scholar. Of noble birth and great intellectual powers, he rose to the highest dignities of the realm, and, though Oxford was still a scene of violent disorders, he preserved his purity and calmness through all its dangers. The collegiate system soon came to put an end to this state of things, and Merton was the first college, properly so-called, where moral order and architectural proportions received some attention. The aspect of the university now rapidly changed. Lollardism seriously affected the great seat of learning, and at first its doctrines were much upheld by the jealous secular teachers, who saw in his calumnies a weapon to be used against the saintly and successful friars; the tone of the university declined, and literature was wofully neglected for a time. However, as Lollardism faded from men's minds, a revival of letters took place, and in the XVIth century Erasmus, who was very kindly entertained and welcomed at Oxford, pays the following tribute to its literary proficiency: “I have found here classic erudition, and that not trite and shallow, but profound and accurate, both Latin and Greek, so that I no longer sigh for Italy.”[101] And again: “I think, from my very soul, there is no country where abound so many men skilled in every kind of learning as there are here”[102] (in England). His own Greek learning was chiefly acquired at Oxford, for, previous to his coming hither, his knowledge of that language was very superficial.
We have lingered over the history of mediæval Oxford longer than our readers may be inclined to think reasonable, and we must confess that our interest in the only institution of the middle ages which stands yet unimpaired in glory, influence, and renown, has led us beyond the limits we had honestly proposed to ourselves.
Little now remains to be said. We have come upon the uninviting times when reason broke away from faith and carried desolation in its headlong course through the field of the human intellect. A literary and philosophical madness settled on men's minds, and Babel seemed to have come again, except where the calm round of old studies was pursued with the old spirit of quies within the sphere of the ancient faith. All beyond was confusion and hurry; every one set up as a teacher before having been a disciple; each man dictated and no one listened; each would be the originator of a system which his first follower was sure to alter, with the perspective of having his alterations remodelled again by [pg 158] his first pupil, and so on ad libitum, till systems came to be called by men's names, and to vary in meaning according to the particular temper of each one that undertook to explain them.