CHAP. L from the new alliance, became its avowed friends, while the popes, its first and most ardent promoters, adopted towards it a policy of mistrust, coldness, and opposition; and the chancellor of the cathedral, on whom it devolved, as the representative of the pontifical authority, to admit the licentiates of the higher faculty, and whose claims even amounted to a kind of perpetual presidency, ceased not, so long as his office continued to exist, to persecute the university to which he could not dictate. The force of this criticism will be more apparent when we have passed under review the new culture and the tendencies of thought that riveted the attention of Europe upon Paris throughout the thirteenth century; but, before proceeding to this important subject, it will be well to mark the rapid extension of the movement of which the two most conspicuous examples have already occupied our attention. Other of the Thirteenth Padua Vicenza The only other universities in France that trace back their origin to the thirteenth century are those of Toulouse and Montpellier; but in Italy the impetus communicated by Montpellier. the study of the civil law bore fruit in every direction. In the year 1222 the civil discords that prevailed at Bologna drove a large body of students and professors to Padua, where they established a school of the new learning, the commencement of that illustrious university. A similar migration in 1204 had already given birth to the university of Vicenza. Pisa Vercelli, Pisa, Vercelli, Arezzo, and Ferrara rose in the same century; while in our own country Oxford and Cambridge appear Cambridge emerging from an obscurity which, greatly as it has exercised the imaginative faculty of some eminent antiquarians, seems to indicate that the period and circumstances of these foundations belong to a field of enquiry which the secker for real knowledge will most prudently forego. It may however be observed that such data as we possess would appear to point to an origin similar to that assigned to the university of Paris; the school in connexion with the priory of St Frideswyde, and that of the conventual church at Ely, being Arezzo, Ferrara Oxford and Probable origin of the Universities of Oxford and Cam bridge. 1 Etat des Lettres au Quatorzième Siècle, 1 262. probably the institution from whence the universities of HAP Oxford and Cambridge respectively sprang'. The scattered links which serve to mark the connexion between the times of Bede and Alcuin and those of Robert Grosseteste are few and imperfect. The chain of continuity was snapped asunder by the Danish invasions, and it would it Framah here be of small profit minutely to investigate the evidence ki for a tradition which can scarcely be said to have existed. Learning, to use the expression of William of Malmesbury, was buried in the grave of Eede for four centuries'. The invader, carrying his ravages now up the Thames and now up the Humber, devastated the eastern regions with fire and sword. The noble libraries which Theodore and the ablats Hadrian and Benedict had founded were given to the flames. In the year 870 the town of Cambridge was totally destroyed'. The monasteries of the Benedictines, the chief guardians of the karning, appear to have been completely broken up; it is not at all improbable,' says Mr Kemble, that in the middle of the tenth century there was not a genuine Benedictine Society left in England! The exertions of King Alfred restored the schools and formed new libraries; and, under the auspices of St. Dunstan, the Benedicting order, renovated Tee Rest at its sources by the recent establishment of the Cluniae Pharma branch on the continent, was again established. During the reign of Eadgar, when the land had rest from invasion, no Extre less than forty convents of this order were founded. But once again the Danes swept over the country and the work Second Invasion, extension of time Order. CHAP. L of devastation was repeated; Oxford was burnt to the ground in the year 1009; a like fate overtook Cambridge in the following year; the library at Canterbury perished in the samo visitation. The Benedictines indeed survived, and, when the reign of Knut restored tranquillity, notwithstanding the traditional jealousy of the secular clergy, their foundations Subsequent rapidly multiplied. Under the patronage of Eadward the Bee Confessor the order became still further strengthened and extended. The rival foundations of St Augustine and Christ. Church at Canterbury, those of Abingdon, St Alban's, Bury, Ely, Glastonbury, Malmesbury, Winchester, Westminster, and Rochester, all professed the Benedictine rule. Odo, the haughty bishop of Bayeux, refused to recognise any but a Benedictine as a true monk. But though the monasteries. once more flourished, the losses to literature were for a long timo irreparablo. With the second Danish invasion, authors, whom Alcuin and Aelfred had known and studied, disappear for centuries: it may indeed be doubted whether the flames that at different times consumed the libraries of Rome, Alexandria, and Constantinople, inflicted a more appreciable loss upon the progress of education in western Europe. At the time of the Conquest, if we may credit the testimony of a competent though somewhat prejudiced witness, an acquaintance with grammar marked out the possessor as a prodigy. Such, in briefest narrative, were the vicissitudes through which learning in England had passed at the time when she once more bowed before the conquering sword, and other and more humanising influences began to give fashion to her culture and her institutions. Of Vacarius, and his lectures at Oxford on the civil law in the middle of the twelfth century, we have already spoken; it was probably about twenty years before that an English ecclesiastic returning from Paris, and commiserating the low 1 "Periisse autem iam tunc per Danicas aliasque eruptiones omnem priscam in Anglia eruditionem, luculentus est testis Guilielmus Malmes buriensis,Conquaestoris revoprox. imus. (Lib. 11.) 'Literarum,' inquit ille, 'et religionis studia obsoleverant non paucis ante adventum Normannorum annis. Clerici literatura tumultuaria contenti vix Sacramentorum verba balbutiebant; stupori et miraculo erat caeteris, qui grammati cam nosset." Conringius, De Antiquitatibus Academicis, p. 282. my essayed to rekindle and a love for letters At Pullen have been R-A Ses of Peter Lotharl g points of difference; t and the elaborately ve regard to Patristic taral method of interVrward by Anthony Wood at that period at Oxford'. Leland, informs us that els, and left no stone might furish in the ful lleurs continuing ar his doctrine, profieng rt space the University ¿ Exercises, which were the There appears to be no - most led should be rejected t of various aut'u ritice, Ps, and it is with caently rut he should tench at ol reason for believing tury, sehoods existed at Wreketines as their founod over by teachers from 1 consi korabile attention lynd despite that the ure browed from the there gratiar ΠΑΡ. Ι. 84 CAP schools to a studium generale, or, as we call it, an university, cannot be traced; the probability however, almost amounting to a certainty, is that it was effected by a nearly wholesale adoption of the regulations of the university of Paris'. of Le ution as a The earliest authentic legal instrument,' to use the erity of language of Cooper, containing any recognition of Cambridge university, is a writ of the second year of Henry III, addressed to the sheriff of the town, commanding all clerks who had been excommunicated for their adhesion to Louis the son of the King of France, and who had not been absolved, to depart the realm before the middle of Lent; those who failed to yield obedience to this mandate to be arrested. If,' observes Cooper, (as seems very probable) the word clerk is used in this writ as denoting a scholar, this appears to be the earliest authentic legal instrument referring to the existence of a University in this place". Our university history would accordingly seem to date from the Commencement of our true national history, from the time when the Norman element having become fused with the Saxon element, and the invader driven from our shores, the genius of the people found comparatively free scope, and the national character began to assume its distinctive form. Galling evidence of the Conquest still exhibited itself, it is true, in the Poitevin who ruled in the royal councils, and the Italian who monopolized the richest benefices; but the isolation from the Continent which followed on the expulsion of Prince Louis could not fail to develope in an insular race a more bold and independent spirit. The first half of the thirteenth century in England has been not inaptly designated the age of Robert Grosseteste.' The cold commendation with which Hallam dismisses the memory of that eminent reformer must appear altogether inadequate to those familiar with more recent investigations of the period. The encourager of Greek learning, the interpreter of Aristotle, the patron of the mendicant orders, the chastiser of monastic corruption, the fearless champion of the national 41251 1 Munimenta Academica, p. xliv. * Annals, 1 37. |