Part 220

"Tradition reports that a school had … been founded at Utrecht, by some zealous missionary, in the time of Charles Martel, at which his son Pepin received his education. However this may have been, the renown of the Utrecht School of St. Martin is of very ancient date. … During the invasion by the Normans, this school at Utrecht was suppressed, but was reëstablished in 917, and regained its former renown. The Emperor, Henry the Fowler, placed here his three sons, Otto, Henry and Bruno, to be educated, of whom the last became afterward archbishop of Cologne and archduke of Lottringen, and was noted for his extraordinary learning and friendship for the poet Prudentius. At the beginning of the 12th century, Utrecht possessed no less than five flourishing schools, several of which had each a 'rector' in addition to the priests who had the general control. At about the same time, several convents became distinguished as educational institutions, especially those of Egmond, Nymwegen, Middleburg, in Zealand, and Aduwert, near Gröningen. {699} In Holland, as in Belgium, in addition to the schools that were attached to the cathedrals, convents, and chapters, there were established in the course of the twelfth century, by the more wealthy communities, public schools especially designed for the instruction of the citizens and laity. It is also worthy of notice that the authority to open such schools was always derived from the counts—by whom it was conferred, sometimes upon the cities as an especial privilege, and sometimes upon merely private persons as a mark of particular favor. The jurisdiction of the feudal lords was the same here as in Belgium; but while in the latter country, with the exception perhaps of the elementary schools in some of the cities, the right of supervision everywhere devolved upon the chapters, instruction in these public schools of Holland was wholly withdrawn from the clergy, and they were made essentially secular in their character. The privilege of thus establishing schools was conferred upon some of the cities at the following dates:

Dort, by Count Floris V., A. D. 1290; the Hague, 1322; Leyden, 1324; and Rotterdam in 1328, by William III.; Delft and Amsterdam, in 1334, by William IV.; Leyden again, 1357; Haarlem, 1389; Alkmar, 1398; Hoorn, 1358 and 1390; the Hague, 1393; Schiedam and Ondewater, 1394; and Rotterdam, in 1402, by Albert of Bavaria.

These schools, adds Stallaert, on the authority of Buddingh, were generally styled 'School en Schryfambacht,' 'Schoole en Kostern,' (school and writing offices, schools and clerks' houses,) and the 'Schoolmijsters' (school-masters) were looked upon as professional men or craftsmen—as was the case also in Belgium, where they formed distinct guilds and fraternities. These public schools of Holland were divided into 'large' and 'small' schools, (groote en bijschoolen,) Latin being taught in the first division. The institution at Zwolle, attained special notoriety in the fourteenth century, under the direction of the celebrated Johan Cele. According to Thomas à Kempis and Ten Bussche, its pupils numbered about a thousand, gathered from Holland, Belgium, and the principal provinces of Germany."

_Public Instruction in Holland (Barnard's American Journal of Education, volume 14)._

EDUCATION: England. Early Oxford.

"The University of Oxford did not spring into being in any particular year, or at the bidding of any particular founder: it was not established by any formal charter of incorporation. Taking its rise in a small and obscure association of teachers and learners, it developed spontaneously into a large and important body, long before its existence was recognised by prince or by prelate. There were certainly schools at Oxford in the reign of Henry I., but the previous history of the place does not throw much light on their origin, or explain the causes of their popularity. The town seems to have grown up under the shadow of a nunnery, which is said to have been founded by St. Frideswyde as far back as the eighth century. Its authentic annals, however, begin with the year 912, when it was occupied and annexed by Edward the Elder, King of the West Saxons. … Oxford was considered a place of great strategical importance in the eleventh century. Its position on the borders of Mercia and Wessex rendered it also, particularly convenient for parleys between Englishmen and Danes, and for great national assemblies. … Retaining for a while its rank as one of the chief centres of political life in the south of England, and as a suitable meeting-place for parliaments and synods, Oxford became thenceforward more and more distinctively known as a seat of learning and a nursery of clerks. The schools which existed at Oxford before the reign of King John, are so seldom and so briefly noticed in contemporary records, that it would be difficult to show how they developed into a great university, if it were not for the analogy of kindred institutions in other countries. There can be little doubt, however, that the idea of a university, the systems of degrees and faculties, and the nomenclature of the chief academical officers, were alike imported into England from abroad. … In the earliest and broadest sense of the term, a university had no necessary connexion with schools or literature, being merely a community of individuals bound together by some more or less acknowledged tie. Regarded collectively in this light, the inhabitants of any particular town might be said to constitute a university, and in point of fact the Commonalty of the townsmen of Oxford was sometimes described as a university in formal documents of the middle ages. The term was, however, specially applied to the whole body of persons frequenting the schools of a large studium. Ultimately it came to be employed in a technical sense as synonymous with studium, to denote the institution itself. This last use of the term seems to be of English origin, for the University of Oxford is mentioned as such in writs and ordinances of the years 1238, 1240, and 1253, whereas the greater seat of learning on the banks of the Seine was, until the year 1263, styled 'the University of the Masters,' or 'the University of the Scholars,' of Paris. The system of academical degrees dates from the second half of the twelfth century."

_H. C. M. Lyte, A History of the University of Oxford, chapter 1._

"In the early Oxford … of the twelfth and most of the thirteenth centuries, colleges with their statutes were unknown. The University was the only corporation of the learned, and she struggled into existence after hard fights with the town, the Jews, the Friars, the Papal courts. The history of the University begins with the thirteenth century. She may be said to have come into being as soon as she possessed common funds and rents, as soon as fines were assigned, or benefactions contributed to the maintenance of scholars. Now the first recorded fine is the payment of fifty-two shillings by the townsmen of Oxford as part of the compensation for the hanging of certain clerks. In the year 1214 the Papal Legate, in a letter to his 'beloved sons in Christ, the burgesses of Oxford,' bade them excuse the 'scholars studying in Oxford' half the rent of their halls, or hospitia, for the space of ten years. The burghers were also to do penance, and to feast the poorer students once a year; but the important point is, that they had to pay that large yearly fine 'propter suspendium clericorum'—all for the hanging of the clerks. Twenty-six years after this decision of the Legate, Robert Grossteste, the great Bishop of Lincoln, organized the payment and distribution of the fine, and founded the first of the chests, the chest of St. Frideswyde. {700} These chests were a kind of Mont de Piété, and to found them was at first the favourite form of benefaction. Money was left in this or that chest, from which students and masters would borrow, on the security of pledges, which were generally books, cups, daggers, and so forth. Now, in this affair of 1214 we have a strange passage of history, which happily illustrates the growth of the University. The beginning of the whole affair was the quarrel with the town, which in 1209, had hanged two clerks, 'in contempt of clerical liberty.' The matter was taken up by the Legate—in those bad years of King John, the Pope's viceroy in England—and out of the humiliation of the town the University gained money, privileges, and halls at low rental. These were precisely the things that the University wanted. About these matters there was a constant strife, in which the Kings as a rule, took part with the University. … Thus gradually the University got the command of the police, obtained privileges which enslaved the city, and became masters where they had once been despised, starveling scholars. … The result, in the long run, was that the University received from Edward III. 'a most large charter, containing many liberties, some that they had before, and others that he had taken away from the town.' Thus Edward granted to the University 'the custody of the assize of bread, wine, and ale,' the supervising of measures and weights, the sole power of clearing the streets of the town and suburbs. Moreover, the Mayor and the chief Burghers were condemned yearly to a sort of public penance and humiliation on St. Scholastica's Day. Thus, by the middle of the fourteenth century, the strife of Town and Gown had ended in the complete victory of the latter."

_A. Lang, Oxford, chapter 2._

"To mark off the Middle Age from the Modern Period of the University is certainly very difficult. Indeed the earlier times do not form a homogeneous whole, but appear perpetually shifting and preparing for a new state. The main transition however was undoubtedly about the middle of the fourteenth century; and the Reformation, a remarkable crisis, did but confirm what had been in progress for more than a century and a half: so that the Middle Age of the University contained the thirteenth century, and barely the former half of the fourteenth. … There is no question, that during this Middle Age the English Universities were distinguished far more than ever afterwards by energy and variety of intellect. Later times cannot produce a concentration of men eminent in all the learning and science of the age, such as Oxford and Cambridge then poured forth, mightily influencing the intellectual development of all Western Christendom. Their names indeed may warn us against an undiscriminating disparagement of the Monasteries, as 'hotbeds of ignorance and stupidity'; when so many of those worthies were monks of the Benedictine, Franciscan, Dominican, Carmelite, or reformed Augustinian order. But in consequence of this surpassing celebrity, Oxford became the focus of a prodigious congregation of students, to which nothing afterwards bore comparison. The same was probably true of Cambridge in relative proportion. … A tolerably well authenticated account, attacked of late by undue scepticism, fixes [the number of] those of Oxford at thirty thousand, in the middle of the thirteenth century. The want indeed of contemporary evidence must make us cautious of yielding absolute belief to this: in fact we have no document on this matter even as old as the Reformation. … Not only did the Church and the new orders of Monks draw great numbers thither, but the Universities themselves were vast High Schools, comprising boys and even children. It is not extravagant, if Cambridge was not yet in great repute, to imagine fifteen thousand students of all ages at Oxford, and as many more attendants. Nor was it at all difficult to accommodate them in the town, when Oxford contained three hundred Halls and Inns: and as several students dwelt in one room, and were not careful for luxury, each building on an average might easily hold one hundred persons. The style of Architecture was of the simplest and cheapest kind, and might have been easily run up on a sudden demand: and a rich flat country, with abundant water carriage, needed not to want provisions. That the numbers were vast, is implied by the highly respectable evidence which we have, that as many as three thousand migrated from Oxford on the riots of 1209; although the Chronicler expressly states that not all joined in the secession. In the reign of Henry III. the reduced numbers are reckoned at fifteen thousand. After the middle of the fourteenth century, they were still as many as from three to four thousand; and after the Reformation they mount again to five thousand. On the whole therefore the computation of thirty thousand, as the maximum, may seem, if not positively true, yet the nearest approximation which we can expect. Of Cambridge we know no more than that the numbers were much lower than at Oxford. … While in the general, there was a substantial identity between the scholastic learning of Oxford and of Paris, yet Oxford was more eager in following positive science:—and this, although such studies were disparaged by the Church, and therefore by the public. Indeed originally the Church had been on the opposite side; but the speculative tendency of the times had carried her over, so that speculation and theology went hand in hand. In the middle of the thirteenth century we may name Robert Grosseteste and John Basingstock, as cultivating physical science, and (more remarkable still) the Franciscan Roger Bacon: a man whom the vulgar held to be equal to Merlin and Michael Scott as a magician, and whom posterity ranks by the noblest spirits of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in all branches of positive science,—except theology. A biography of Roger Bacon should surely be written! Unfortunately, we know nothing as to the influence of these men on their times, nor can we even learn whether the University itself was at all interested in their studies. … We have … a strange testimony to the interest which in the beginning of the fourteenth century the mass of the students took in the speculation of their elders; for the street rows were carried on under the banners of Nominalists and Realists. … The coarse and ferocious manners prevalent in the Universities of the Middle Ages are every where in singular contrast to their intellectual pretensions: but the Universities of the Continent were peaceful, decorous, dignified,—compared with those of England. The storms which were elsewhere occasional, were at Oxford the permanent atmosphere. For nearly two centuries our 'Foster Mother' of Oxford lived in a din of uninterrupted furious warfare; nation against nation, school against school, faculty against faculty. Halls, and finally Colleges, came forward as combatants; and the University, as a whole, against the Town; or against the Bishop of Lincoln; or against the Archbishop of Canterbury. Nor was Cambridge much less pugnacious."

_V. A. Huber, The English Universities, volume 1, chapter 3._

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EDUCATION: Cambridge.

"Various facts and circumstances … lend probability to the belief that, long before the time when we have certain evidence of the existence of Cambridge as a university, the work of instruction was there going on. The Camboritum of the Roman period, the Grantebrycgr of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Grentebrige of Domesday, must always have been a place of some importance. It was the meeting-place of two great Roman roads,—Akeman Street, running east and west, and the Via Devana, traversing the north and the south. … Confined at first to the rising ground on the left bank of the river, it numbered at the time of the Norman Conquest as many as four hundred houses, of which twenty-seven were pulled down to make way for the castle erected by William the Conqueror. … Under the castle walls, with the view, it would seem, of making some atonement for many a deed of violence and wrong, the Norman sheriff, Picot by name, founded the Church of St. Giles, and instituted in connection with it a small body of secular canons. … The year 1112 was marked by the occurrence of an event of considerable importance in connection with the subsequent history of the university. The canons of St. Giles, attended by a large concourse of the clergy and laity, crossed the river, and took up their abode in a new and spacious priory at Barnwell. … The priory at Barnwell, which always ranked among the wealthiest of the Cambridge foundations, seems from the first to have been closely associated with the university; and the earliest university exhibitions were those founded by William de Kilkenny, bishop of Ely from 1254 to 1257, for two students of divinity, who were to receive annually the sum of two marks from the priory. In the year 1133 was founded the nunnery of St. Rhadegund, which, in the reign of Henry VII., was converted into Jesus College; and in 1135 a hospital of Augustinian canons, dedicated to St. John the Evangelist, was founded by Henry Frost, a burgess of the town. … It was … a very important foundation, inasmuch as it not only became by conversion in the sixteenth century the College of St. John the Evangelist, but was also … the foundation of which Peterhouse, the earliest Cambridge college, may be said to have been in a certain sense the offshoot. … In the year 1229 there broke out at Paris a feud of more than ordinary gravity between the students and the citizens. Large numbers of the former migrated to the English shores; and Cambridge, from its proximity to the eastern coast, and as the centre where Prince Louis, but a few years before, had raised the royal standard, seems to have attracted the great majority. … The university of Cambridge, like that of Oxford, was modelled mainly on the university of Paris. Its constitution was consequently oligarchic rather than democratic, the government being entirely in the hands of the teaching body, while the bachelors and undergraduates had no share in the passing of new laws and regulations."

_J. B. Mullinger, A History of the University of Cambridge, chapters 1-2._

"The earliest existing college at Cambridge is St. Peter's, generally called Peterhouse, historically founded A. D. 1257, in the reign of Henry III. The Universities are known merely by their situation; as Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, St. Andrews'; but each college has a name, according to the taste of its founder or first members. These names may be divided into two classes, those named from the founder, as Pembroke, Clare, Gonville and Caius (this had two founders, the restorer being Dr. Kaye, who Latinized his name into Caius, always pronounced Keys), King's (from King Henry VI.),—Queens' (from the queens both of Henry VI. and Edward IV.), Sidney Sussex, and Downing;—and those named for beatified persons and objects of worship,—St. Peter's, St. John's, St. Catharine's, St. Mary Magdalene, Corpus Christi, Emmanuel, Jesus Christ's, Trinity and Trinity Hall. The apparent impiety of these names, which in one case of an ancient name now changed, was absolutely revolting, entirely passes off with a few days' use. St. Catharine's soon becomes Cats, and St. Mary Magdalene is always called Maudlin. You readily admit the superiority of Trinity over Corpus ale; go to see a friend who lives on Christ's piece; and hear with regret, that in the boat races Emmanuel has been bumped by Jesus; an epithet being probably prefixed to the last name. These names of course were given in monkish times,—Trinity by Henry VIII., but all the colleges except one were founded before the reign of James I. … The seventeen colleges … are distinct corporations. Their foundations, resources, buildings, governing authorities and students, are entirely separate from each other. Nor has any one college the least control in any other. The plan, however, is much the same in all. The presiding authority is in most cases called the Master, or speaking more generally, the Head; while the net proceeds of all the college funds—for the vast wealth supposed to belong to the University really is in the hands of the separate colleges—are distributed among certain of the graduates, called Fellows, who with the Head constitute the corporation. These corporations give board and lodging on various terms to such students as choose to enter the college and comply with its rules, in order to receive its assistance in obtaining the honors of the University; and each college offers its own peculiar inducements to students. … The whole body of the colleges, taken together, constitutes the University. All those who after residing seven years at some college, have taken the degree of Master of Arts, or a higher one, and keep their name on the college lists by a small payment, vote at the University elections for members of Parliament and all other officers, and manage its affairs. … The colleges, at certain intervals; present such students as comply with their conditions to University authorities for matriculation, for certain examinations, and for the reception of degrees; and until one receives the degree of Master of Arts, he must remain a member of some college, not necessarily one and the same, to hold any University privileges. After this stage, he may, under certain conditions, break up all his college connections, and yet remain in the University."

_W. Everett, On the Cam., lecture 1._

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EDUCATION: Spain and Portugal.