requirements of different religious orders, while others were, CHAPL for a long time, little more than lodging-houses for poor students in the receipt of a scanty allowance for their suppert (boursiers), and under the direction of a master'. The most important, both from its subsequent celebrity and from the fact that it would appear to be the earliest example of a more secular foundation, that is to say a college for the secular clergy, was the Sorbonne, founded about the Top year 1250 by Robert de Sorbonne, the domestic chaplain of St. Louis. Originally capable of supporting only sixteen poor scholars, four of whom were to be elected from each 'nation, and who were to devote themselves to the study of theology, it eventually became the most illustrious foundation of the university, and formed, in many respects, the model of our earliest English colleges. For a time, however, the modest merit of this society was obscured by the splendour of a later foundation of the fourteenth century. In the year 1305, Jeanne of Navarre, the consort of Philip The Chap the Fair, founded the great college which she named after the country of her birth. In wealth and external importat ce the college of Navarre far surpassed the Sorbonne. I: was endowed with revenues sufficient for the maintenance of twenty scholars in grammar, thirty in logic, and twenty in theology, and the ablest teachers were retained as in

fans, de St. Honoré, de St. Nicholas da Louvre, des– Bernhardins, des lisa Fufins de la Rue St. Victor, de Nochonne, de Calvi, des An rustins, des Carties, des Promontrés, de (

du Trosorter, d Harcourt, and dewleta The circum tances of the foulton of the Chen de Catata ple and the motives in which the dhe n'y conjectures it may have taken its rise, are somewhat Bila car - "Pot expugnatam Constattotopolim a Francis et Veneti saro folere junctia Ph 150 Au. puty rose Litctim ecritum est co, Comm Con tantin po itatum ad

CHAP. L structors in each faculty. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was the foremost foundation of the university, nor can it be denied that many eminent men received their education within its walls; among them was Nicolas Oresme', afterwards master of the college; Clamanges, no unworthy representative of the school of Gasparin and Aretino; Pierre d'Ailly, afterwards bishop of Cambray; and the celebrated Gerson. But though poverty was here, as at the Sorbonne, among the conditions prescribed by the founders as essential to the admission of a scholar, the associations of the college with rank and wealth soon developed an ambitious, worldly spirit that little harmonized with the aims and occupations of the true student. High office in the State or in the Church were the prizes to which it became a tradition among its more able sons to aspire; and such prizes were rarely to be won in that age without a corresponding sacrifice of integrity and independence. The influence acquired by the college of Navarre was unhappily made subservient to the designs and wishes of its patrons, and the value of the degrees conferred by the university and the efficiency of the examinations are stated to have equally suffered from the interference and the favouritism resulting from these courtly relations". In the year 1308 was founded the College de Bayeux by the bishop of that see, designed especially for the study of medicine and the civil law; and the Collége de Laon, in 1314,

Other Col

leges of the fourteenth Century.

1 For a brief account of this remarkable man see Egger, L'Hellén isme en France, 1 128-130. Oresme was one of the earliest political economists, and his treatises on mathe matics and his linguist c attainments constitute a phenomenon almost as singular when taken in connexion with the age in which they appeared, As the culture of Roger Bacon in the previous century. Of his acquaintance with Greek we shall have occusion to speak in another place.

Ce fut un malheur pour une corporation qui avait besoin d'indé. pendanco, de s'êtro laisser dominer

par les hommes de cette maison, trop accoutumés à faire la volonté des rois et des princes pour être de bon conseillers dans les temps difficiles. On le vit bien quand éclatèrent, deux siècles après, les guerres de religions. L'ascendant que Navarre avait pris sur le corps enseignant, loin de le fortiser contre des périls qu'il faillait braver, l'affaiblit et l'énerva, en lui 6tant peu à peu, de connivence avec des protecteurs puissants, la liberté de ses leçons et la publicité de ses examens,' Le Clerc, Etat des Lettres au Quatorzième Siè cle, 1 266, 267.

represented a similar design. The institution of the Collége de Plessis-Sorbonne, for forty scholars, in 1323; of the College de Bourgogne, for twenty students of philosophy, in 1332; of Lisieux, for twenty-four poor scholars, in 1336,-are among the more important of no less than seventeen foundations which we find rising in... existence with the half century that followed the creation of the college of Navarre.

Hd all these colleges survived,' observes M. Le Clerc, for had they all received their full complement of scholars, the procession headed by the rector of the university, who, as it is told, was wont to enter the portals of St. Denis when the extreme rear was only at the Mathurins, would have been yet more imposing. Many however contained but five or six scholars who, while attending the regular course of instruction in the different faculties, met in general assembly on certain days for their disputations and cons rences; while others, founded for larger numbers, man'ained not more than two or three, or were completely deserted, their revenues having been lost, or the buildings having fallen into decay. At the general suppression of the stall eges in 1764, some had already ceased to exist.

Without adding to our lengthened enumeration the great episcopal schools, which must be regarded as distinct pet rutions, but including only the numerous foundations in tual connexion with the corporation of the university,as, for instance, the colleges of the different religious orders, the colleges founded for foreign students, the elementary

ls or pensions, of the existence of which, in 1392, we have mcontestable evidence, and the unattached students,we are presented with a spectacle which historians have scarcely recognised in all its significance, in this vast multile whah, undaunted by war, pestilence, and all manner dev's fl-ked to this great centre for study and increase knowledge. There was possibly something of illusion in aldis, loit notwithstanding, even the most able and most I wou'd have held that their education was defective fil they never mingled with the concourse of students at Pari

CHAP. I.

Extreme poverty of

'Towards the close of the sixteenth century, notwithstanding the disastrous religious wars, a Venetian ambassador was still able to say, "The university of Paris numbers little. less than thirty thousand students, that is to say as many as and perhaps more than all the universities of Italy put together." But Bologna, in the year 1262, was generally believed to number over twenty thousand. The enquiry naturally arises, how did this vast body of students subsist? -an enquiry which it is by no means easy to answer, for the majority had no resources of their own, and the laity had, for a long time, been contending with a new inroad upon their fortunes resulting from the rise of the Mendicants. The secular clergy, threatened with absolute ruin by the new orders, conceived the idea of themselves assuming in self-defence the pristine poverty of the evangelists. There were the poor scholars of the Sorbonne, the enfants pauvres of St. Thomas du Louvre; the election of the rector was for a long time at Saint-Julien le Pauvre; the College d'Harcourt was expressly restricted to poor students, the statutes given to this foundation in the year 1311 requiring that ibi ponantur duodecim pauperes, an oft-recurring expression: and indeed the university was entitled to proclaim itself poor, for poor it undoubtedly was.

"The capètes of Montaigne, who were also, and not without the students reason, known as a community of poor students, were however not the most to be pitied, even after the harsh reform which limited their diet to bread and water; there was a yet lower grade of scholars who subsisted only on charity, or upon what they might gain by waiting on fellow-students somewhat less needy than themselves. Of Anchier Pantalion, a nephew of Pope Urban IV, by whom he was afterwards raised to the dignity of cardinal, we are told that he began his student life by carrying from the provision market the meat for the dinners of the scholars with whom he studied. This same humble little company, which formed a kind of brotherhood with a chieftain or king at its head, included in its ranks, besides other poor youths destined to become eminent, the names of Ramus and Amyot.

The iisanguishing traits of this student life, the memoA wach survived with singular tenacity, were poverty, ent appoestion, and turbulence. The students in the Ats, the artists," whose numbers in the four

i owing to the reputation of the Parisian pirn, and partly in consequence of the of the theologians, were constantly on the .. by no means the most ill-disciplined. Older Se especially in the theological faculty, with sixteen years' course of study, achieved in grater notoriety. At the age of thirty sent at the university was still a scholar. ne of the facts which best explain the exercised by a body of students and their heals of religion and of the state. srious the inconvenience and the risk of thus a great city into a school, we have abundant at was the attraction exercised by this w're the human intellect exhausted it f perhaps yielded small fruit though they To seekers for knowledge the whole of the he was a second fatherland. The narrow yhouses, with their low archways, their damp

and halls strewn with straw', were never 1 when after many years old follow-stu aat R me or at Jerusalem, or on the fields Mence and England stood arrayed for con

mselves, Nos fuimus simul in Garla, dia; cool how they had once shouted in the ears dant menace,-Allez au clos Bruneau,

'In faenate artium, quod deti arba lares ahentes sans jest - nes in ditsfacite, se-least in terra curava Magistro et non in san.r is a it sexi bis elevat.s a terra. bee Penerek on the Statuter, Arp A p LV.

↑ Le Gere, Etat des Lettres au A/V sode, 1265–471.