The analogy, therefore, of other cathedral and collegiate churches, corroborated as they are by the records of St. Paul’s itself, the knowledge that we have of the existence of schools, not only at great capitals like Canterbury, Winchester, and York, but even at small places like Warwick and Waltham, amply justify us in asserting confidently that the schoolmaster and school of St. Paul’s existed not merely before the days of Bishop Richard de Belmeis, but before the Conquest, and in all reasonable probability from the days of Bishops Wine and Earconwald.
What were these London schools? What did they teach? Lord Lyttelton[[68]] in his History of Henry II. spoke of them as “schools or rather colleges,” meaning university colleges, and Sir George Buck in 1631 described them as the Third Universitie of England.[[69]] This was because of the mention of logic, and the statement that, not indeed as Lyttelton says, “many” but other “schools” were occasionally opened “by persons of note in philosophy,” by special favour.
But to infer from this a University of London in the twelfth century is to transfer to it the ideas of the eighteenth century. The Trivium, the “trivial task” of the twelfth century school-boy, included rhetoric and dialectic as well as grammar. Grammar meant not only grammar strictly speaking, but the general study of classical literature. Rhetoric included not only the art of persuasion, the rules of oratory, but generally Latin composition, prose, and verse,[[70]] and declamation or recitation. Rhetoric was naturally incomplete without dialectic or logic, the art of argument. So powerful during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries did dialectic become, that not only did theology become almost a branch of logic but grammar itself was taught and practised “dialectically.” The “rostrum,” on which dialectic and rhetoric were practised, was to be found in the school of Winchester College as late as 1650.
The distinction drawn by Fitzstephen between the boys who capped verses and the other scholars who held debates in rhetoric and logic was not coincident with that between a grammar school and a university college. The word “boy” was used strictly, as it still was as late as the Elizabethan statutes of grammar schools, for those under fourteen years of age, who were carefully distinguished on the one hand from children or infants under seven, and from youths (juvenes) of fourteen to twenty-one. Then, as now, youths of eighteen and upwards were found in the grammar schools, and William of Wykeham, and the advisers of Henry VI. in the foundation of Eton, all Wykehamists, were no innovators raising the age of schoolboys when they prescribed nineteen as the leaving age for the scholars of Winchester and Eton.
There is therefore no necessary ground for the inference that the schools of London in the first half of the twelfth century bore any different character from that which they had in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, when the same schools are described simply as grammar schools.
On the other hand, the period of which Fitzstephen wrote was that of the origin of universities. It saw the birth of Bologna, of Paris, and of Oxford. At Paris, the university grew out of the extension and the rivalry of the schools, the grammar schools, of the cathedral church of Notre Dame and the collegiate church, as it then was, of St. Geneviéve. At Oxford there is every reason to believe that the university developed in like manner from the schools of the collegiate churches, as they then were, of St. Frideswide and St. George in the Castle.[[71]] The “University” side of the schools finally emancipated itself, at an earlier period even than at Paris, from ordinary ecclesiastical control, through the conversion of these two collegiate churches into houses of regulars, and the extinction therewith of their control of secular scholars, while the Chancellor of Lincoln was too remote to exercise any effective government such as was exercised by the Chancellor of Paris.
It was quite within the bounds of probability then that London also would develop a university out of the three ancient schools, and the permitted rivalry, by special favour, of the schools of other “doctors of philosophy.” But it was not to be. London even then was too great a commercial emporium, the prizes of successful trade were too attractive, business was too absorbing, the hum of markets and wharves was too loud for the voice of learning to make itself heard, or for schools, whether of theology or arts, to attract the pick of the intellect of the City. Paris, though the political capital, was not also the commercial capital of France, where Rouen, the independent capital of a rival power, occupied, to it, the position which the Port of London bore to London. The King’s Court and the King’s Chancery were the main avenues to success for clerks, and even so late as the reign of Henry III. the Castle of Winchester and Beaumont House at Oxford, or the Manor of Windsor, rather than the Tower of London, or even Westminster Hall, were the favourite resorts of the King’s Court, and the residence of the royal treasury and the royal chancery. Hence London never developed an Abelard and a mainly theological university like Paris. The settlement at Westminster of the royal courts, and the superior importance in England of the common law to the civil law for somewhat similar reasons, prevented London from producing an Irnerius or a Gratian and giving rise to a legal university such as that of Bologna. Indeed the greater fame of Paris and Bologna universities themselves was in the cosmopolitan spirit which, under the centralising influence of the Roman Church, made learned Europe almost a single nation, a potent obstacle to the development of a university of London.
No exact definition of a university has yet been given, nor is capable of being given, and it may be doubted whether there is any university now in existence which really corresponds to the mediæval university. But one salient mark of a university, a number of teachers and a number of adult students in the higher faculties, in theology and law, or philosophy, certainly existed at Paris in the days of Abelard, and to some extent in Oxford, but did not seemingly exist in London, or if it did exist was quenched by Henry of Blois’ mandate.
If the London schools formed a university in 1138, a fortiori did the School of York form one in 735. In Alcuin’s description of the School of York as it flourished under Archbishops Egbert and Albert, an even greater multiplicity of subjects was taught than in the three schools of London in Fitzstephen’s day. Albert, its master,[[72]] “moistened thirsty hearts with diverse streams of teaching and varied dews of learning, giving to some the science of the art of grammar, pouring on others the rivers of the tongues of orators; these he polished on the whetstone of law, those he taught to sing together in Æolian chant, making others play on the flute of Castaly, and run with the feet of lyric poets over the hills of Parnassus.” Here we get the Grammar, Song, and Rhetoric of later days. Song had in London in 1130 already been relegated to a separate school. At York there was taught also arithmetic and geometry, and the method of calculating the ecclesiastical calendar, the music of the spheres, astronomy, physiography, “the rising and falling of the wind, the movements of the sea, the earth’s quake,” and natural history, “the nature of men, cattle, birds, and beasts.” Above all, Albert taught theology. This curriculum is considerably more extensive than that of the London schools, embracing many of what we should now regard as university subjects. York afterwards branched off into three schools—the Chancellor’s Theological School; the Grammar School under the Chancellor’s deputy, who became the Schoolmaster par excellence; and the Song School under the precentor. Yet as we should not call York School under Albert or Alcuin a university merely because many subjects were taught in it, neither can we dub the London schools of the twelfth century a university.
We must therefore negative the claims of London to the possession of a university in the first half of the twelfth century. But we can at least claim that St. Paul’s School occupied the same position then as now, as the chief day-school for the sons of middle-class citizens. Becket’s biographer tells us what his education was: “Thomas spent the years of infancy, boyhood, and youth quietly in his father’s house, and in passing through the City school (scolis urbis); but when he became a young man he went to study at Paris (Parisius studuit). As soon as he came back, he was taken into public life in London, being made a clerk and accountant in the Sheriff’s office.” The true translation of scolis urbis is the city school; and the city school meant the school of the cathedral church of the City, the School of London. To this school Becket, whose father had at one time been sheriff of London, was sent. After leaving school, Becket went, in modern parlance, to Paris University before entering on professional life. He was born in 1118, so, as he may be presumed to have gone to Paris at about eighteen or nineteen years of age, he must have gone there about 1137, the time when John of Salisbury, the greatest writer of the age, was also there, sitting at the feet of Abelard, then lecturing in the College of St. Geneviéve. Mr. Rashdall, laying down a somewhat arbitrary definition, maintains that Paris was not then, strictly speaking, a university, though he admits it was such probably by the middle of the century.