[4525]. sette scolers to scole. It was common in the scholastic ages for scholars to wander about gathering money to support them at the universities. In a poem in MS. Lansdowne, No. 762, the husbandman, complaining of the many burdens he supports in taxes to the court, payments to the church, and charitable contributions of different kinds, enumerates among the latter the alms to scholars:—
Than cometh clerkys of Oxford, and mak their mone,
To her scole-hire they most have money.
[4547]. Psa. xiv, 5. Qui pecuniam suam non dedit ad usuram, et munera super innocentem non accepit.
[4571]. Psa. xiv, 1.
[4593]. Matt. vii, 12. Luke vi, 31.
[4618]. the clerc of stories. Called, elsewhere, maister of stories. These names were given popularly to Peter Comestor, author of the famous Historia Scolastica, a paraphrase of the Bible history, with abundance of legendary matter added to it. The title given him by the author of Piers Ploughman is not uncommon in English treatises of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Lydgate, Minor Poems, p. 102 (Ed. Halliwell), speaks of Comestor thus:—
Maister of storyes, this doctour ful notable,
Holding a chalice here in a sonne cliere.
[4619]. Catons techyng. "Cui des videto," is the twenty-third of the "Distichorum Lemmata" of Dionysius Cato.