The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  We hear of no special university buildings. Apparently, in the twelfth century, the lectures were given in the cloisters of Notre Dame, St. Genevieve, St. Victor, or other ecclesiastic structures; but in the thirteenth century we find teachers hiring private rooms for their classes. The masters, who came to be called also professores, proclaimers, were tonsured clerics, who, before the fifteenth century, lost their position if they married. Teaching was by lectures, largely for the reason that not every student could afford to buy all the texts to be studied, and could not always secure copies from the libraries. The students sat on pavement or floor, and took many notes. The burden on their memories was so severe that many mnemonic devices were contrived, usually in the form of verses pregnant with meaning and repulsive in form. University regulations forbade the teacher to read his lecture; he was required to speak extempore; he was even forbidden to “drawl.”49 Students graciously warned newcomers not to pay for a course until they had attended three lectures. William of Conches, in the twelfth century, complained that teachers gave easy courses to gain popularity, students, and fees; and that the elective system by which each student had a wide choice among teachers and subjects was lowering the standard of education.50

  The teaching was occasionally enlivened by public disputations among the masters, advanced students, and distinguished visitors. Usually the discussion followed a set form, the scholastica disputatio: the question was stated; a negative answer was given, and was defended by scriptural and patristic quotations, and by reasoning in the form of objections; a positive answer followed, defended by quotations from the Bible and the Fathers of the Church, and by reasoned replies to the objections. This scholastica disputatio determined the finished form of the Scholastic philosophy in St. Thomas Aquinas. In addition to such formal quaestiones disputatae there were informal discussions called quodlibeta—“whatever you please”—where the disputants took up any question that might be propounded at the moment. These looser debates also created a literary form, as in the minor writings of St. Thomas. Such debates, formal or informal, sharpened the medieval mind, and gave scope for much freedom of thought and speech; in some men, however, they tended to promote a cleverness that could prove anything, or a logorrhea that piled mountains of argument on trivial points.

  Most of the students lived in hospicia or guesthouses hired by organized student groups. Sometimes a hospital would board poor students at a nominal fee; so the Hôtel-Dieu, adjoining Notre Dame, set aside a room for “poor clerks.” In 1180 Jocius of London bought this apartment, and thereafter shared with the hospital in providing lodging and meals for eighteen students in it. By 1231 this group of students had taken larger quarters, but they still called themselves the Collège des dix-huit—the College of Eighteen. Other hospicia or residence halls were established by monastic orders, or churches, or philanthropists, with endowments (bursae) or annuities that reduced the cost of living for the student. In 1257 Robert de Sorbon, chaplain to St. Louis, endowed the “House of Sorbonne” for sixteen theological students; additional benefactions from Louis and others provided more accommodations, and raised the number of scholarships to thirty-six; out of this “house” grew the College of the Sorbonne.* Further “colleges”—collegia in the old sense of associations—were founded after 1300; masters came to live in them, served as tutors, heard recitations, and “read” texts with the students. In the fifteenth century the masters gave courses in the residence halls; such courses increased in number, courses given outside decreased, and the college became a hall of education as well as a student dwelling place. A similar evolution of the college out of the hospicium occurred at Oxford, Montpellier, and Toulouse. The university began as an association of teachers dealing with associations of students, and became an association of faculties and colleges.

  Among the residence halls at Paris were two designed for student members or novices of the Dominican or the Franciscan Order. The Dominicans had from their inception stressed education as a means of combating heresy; they established their own system of schools, of which the Dominican studium generale at Cologne was the most renowned; and they had similar institutions at Bologna and Oxford. Many friars became masters, and taught in the halls of their orders. In 1232 Alexander of Hales, one of the ablest teachers in Paris, joined the Franciscans, and continued his public courses in their Convent of the Cordeliers. Year by year the number of friars lecturing at Paris increased, and their nonmonastic audiences grew. The secular masters mourned that they were left sitting at their desks “like lonely sparrows on the housetops”; to which the friars replied that the secular masters ate and drank too much, and became lazy and dull.51 In 1253 a student was killed in a street brawl; the city authorities arrested several students, and ignored their right and demand to be tried by the University masters or the bishop; the masters, in protest, ordered a cessation of lectures. Two Dominican teachers and one Franciscan, all members of the masters’ association, refused to obey the order to cease talk; the association suspended them from membership; they appealed to Alexander IV, who (1255) ordered the university of masters to readmit them. To avoid compliance, the masters disbanded; the Pope excommunicated them; students and populace attacked the friars in the streets. After six years of controversy a compromise was reached: the reorganized masters admitted the monastic masters, who pledged full obedience to “university” statutes thereafter; but the faculty of arts permanently excluded all monks from membership. The University of Paris, once a favorite of the popes, became hostile to the papacy, supported the kings against the pontiffs, and formed in later days the center of the “Gallican” movement that sought to separate the French Church from Rome.

  No educational institution since Aristotle has rivaled the influence of the University of Paris. For three centuries it drew to itself not only the largest number of students, but the greatest dynasty of intellectually distinguished men. Abélard, John of Salisbury, Albertus Magnus, Siger of Brabant, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, William of Occam—these are almost the history of philosophy from 1100 to 1400. There must have been great teachers at Paris to produce these greater ones, and an atmosphere of mental exhilaration that comes only to the peaks of human history. Furthermore, through those centuries, the University of Paris was a power in both Church and state. It was an influential organ of opinion; in the fourteenth century a hotbed of free speculation; in the fifteenth a citadel of orthodoxy and conservatism. It cannot be said to have played “no mean role” in the condemnation of Joan of Arc.

  Other universities shared in giving France the cultural leadership of Europe. Orléans had had a school of law as far back as the ninth century; in the twelfth it rivaled Chartres as a center of classical and literary studies; in the thirteenth it was second only to Bologna in the teaching of civil and canon law. Hardly less famous was the school of law at Angers, which in 1432 became one of the major universities of France. Toulouse owed its university to its heresies: in 1229 Gregory IX compelled Count Raymond to pledge himself to pay the salaries of fourteen professors—in theology, canon law, and the arts—who should be sent from Paris to Toulouse to combat the Albigensian heresy by their influence on Aquitanian youth.

  The most renowned of the French universities outside of Paris was at Montpellier. Situated on the Mediterranean halfway between Marseille and Spain, that city enjoyed a stirring mixture of French, Greek, Spanish, and Jewish blood and culture, with a sprinkling of Italian merchants, and some remnants of the Moorish colony that had once held the town. Commerce was active there. Whether through the influence of Salernian or Arabic or Jewish medicine, Montpellier, at an unknown date, established a school of medicine that soon outshone Salerno; schools of law, theology, and the “arts” were added; and though these colleges were independent, their propinquity and co-operation earned for Montpellier a high repute. The university declined in the fourteenth century, but the school of medicine revived in the Renaissance; and in 1537 one François Rabelais gave there, in Greek
, a course of lectures on Hippocrates.

  VII. UNIVERSITIES OF ENGLAND

  Oxford, like the equivalently named Bosporus, developed as a cattle crossing; the Thames narrowed and grew shallow at that point; a fortress was built there in 912, a market formed, and Kings Cnut and Harold held gemots there long before the University arose. Presumably there were schools at Oxford in Cnut’s days, but we hear of no cathedral school. About 1117 we find mention of a “master at Oxenford.” In 1133 Robert Pullen, a theologian, came from Paris and lectured at Oxford on theology.52 By steps now lost to history, the schools of Oxford became in the twelfth century a studium generale or university—“no man can say when.”53 In 1209, according to a contemporary estimate, there were 3000 students and teachers at Oxford.54 As at Paris there were four faculties: arts, theology, medicine, and canon law. In England the teaching of civil law escaped the universities, and lodged at the Inns of Court in London. Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, the Inner and the Middle Temple were the fourteenth-century descendants of the homes or chambers in which judges and teachers of the law, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, received students as apprentices.

  At Oxford, as at Paris and Cambridge, the colleges began as endowed residence halls for poor students. At an early date they became also lecture halls; masters dwelt in them with the students; and by the end of the thirteenth century the aulae or halls had become the physical and pedagogical constituents of the University. About 1260 Sir John de Balliol of Scotland (father of the Scotch king of 1292), as penance for an unknown crime, established at Oxford a “House of Balliol” to maintain, by a grant of eight pence ($8) a week, certain poor scholars called socii, “fellows.” Three years later Walter de Merton founded and endowed the “House of the Scholars of Merton,” first at Maiden, soon at Oxford, to care for as many students as its income could support. These revenues were repeatedly doubled by the rise of land values, so that Archbishop Peckham in 1284 complained that the “poor scholars” were receiving additional allowances for “delicate living.”55 In general the English colleges grew wealthy not only by fellowship grants and other gifts, but through the rise in the value of the estates with which they were endowed. About 1280 a bequest by William of Durham, Archbishop of Rouen, established University Hall, now University College; the modest beginnings of these famous colleges is shown in the terms of foundation, which provided for four masters and such scholars as might care to board with them. The masters chose one of their number as “senior fellow” to manage the hall; in time he or his successors appropriated those titles of “master” or “principal” by which the heads of the English colleges are known today. The University of Oxford in the thirteenth century was the association of these colleges under a “university” or guild of masters, themselves governed by regents and a chancellor of their own choosing, who in turn was subject to the bishop of Lincoln and the king.

  By 1300 Oxford ranked next to Paris as a center of intellectual activity and influence. Its most famous graduate was Roger Bacon; other Franciscan monks, including Adam Marsh, Thomas of York, John Peckham, formed with him there a distinguished group of learned men. Their leader and inspiration, Robert Grosseteste (1175?—1253), was the finest figure in the life of Oxford in the thirteenth century. He studied law, medicine, and natural science there, graduated in 1179, took his divinity degree in 1189, and soon afterward was chosen “Master of the Oxford Schools”—the earlier form of the title of chancellor. In 1235, while still remaining head of Oxford, he became Bishop of Lincoln, and superintended the completion of the great cathedral. He energetically promoted the study of Greek and of Aristotle, and shared in the heroic effort of the thirteenth-century mind to reconcile Aristotle’s philosophy with the Christian faith. He wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and Posterior Analytics, summarized the science of his time in a Compendium Scientiarum, and worked for a reform of the calendar. He understood the principles of the microscope and the telescope, and opened many paths for Roger Bacon in mathematics and physics; it was probably he who acquainted Bacon with the magnifying property of the lens.56 Many ideas that we ascribe to Bacon—on perspective, the rainbow, tides, the calendar, the desirability of experiment—were apparently suggested to him by Grosseteste; above all, the notion that all science must be based upon mathematics, since all force, in its passage through space, follows geometrical forms and rules.57 He wrote French poetry and a treatise on husbandry, and was a lawyer and a physician as well as a theologian and a scientist. He encouraged the study of Hebrew with a view to converting the Jews; meanwhile he behaved toward them in an anomalously Christian way, and protected them as well as he could from the sadism of the mob. He was an active social reformer, always loyal to the Church, but daring to lay before Pope Innocent IV (1250) a written memorial in which he ascribed the shortcomings of the Church to the practices of the Papal Curia.58 At Oxford he established the first “chest” to make gratuitous loans to scholars.59 He was the first of a thousand brilliant minds whose achievements created the magnificent prestige of Oxford in the educational and intellectual world.

  Today Oxford is a manufacturing center as well as a university, and makes automobiles as well as dons. But Cambridge is still a city of colleges, a medieval jewel brightened with modern wealth and British good taste; everything in it pertains to its colleges, and the medieval peace of mind survives in this loveliest of university towns. Apparently its intellectual eminence must be dated from a murder at Oxford. In 1209 a woman was killed there by a student; the townspeople raided a residence hall, and hanged two or three students. The university—i.e., the association of masters—suspended operations in protest against the action of the townsfolk; and, if we may believe the usually trustworthy Matthew Paris, 3000 students, and presumably many masters, left Oxford. A large number of them, we are told, went to Cambridge and set up halls and faculties; this is the first mention we have of anything higher there than an elementary school. A second migration—of Parisian students in 1228—swelled the ranks of the student body. Monks mendicant or Benedictine came and established colleges. In 1281 the Bishop of Ely organized the first secular college in Cambridge—St. Peter’s College, now Peterhouse. The fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries saw the foundation and embellishment of additional colleges, some of them among the masterpieces of medieval architecture. All of them together, embraced by the quiet winding Cam, constitute with their campuses one of the fairest works of man.

  VIII. STUDENT LIFE

  The medieval student might be of any age. He might be a curate, a prior, an abbot, a merchant, a married man; he might be a lad of thirteen, troubled with the sudden dignity of his years. He went to Bologna, Orléans, or Montpellier to become a lawyer or a physician; to other universities he went in some cases to prepare for governmental service, usually to make a career in the Church. He encountered no entrance examinations; the only requirements were a knowledge of Latin, and ability to pay a modest fee to each master whose course he took. If he was poor he might be helped by a scholarship, or by his village, his friends, his church, or his bishop. There were thousands of such cases.60 Abbot Samson, hero of Jocelyn’s Chronicle and Carlyle’s Past and Present, owed his education to a poor priest who sold holy water to keep Samson in fees.61 A student traveling to or from a university usually received free transportation, and free food and lodging at monasteries on the way.62

  Arriving at Oxford, Paris, or Bologna, he would find himself one of a large crowd of happy, embarrassed, and eager students riding on a wave of intellectual enthusiasm that made philosophy—with a dash of heresy—as exciting as war, and a debate as fascinating as a tournament. At Paris he would have found, in 1300, some 7000 students, at Bologna 6000, at Oxford 3000;* in general the universities of Paris, Oxford, and Bologna had more students in the thirteenth century than later, probably because they had less competition. The newcomer would be received by his “nation,” and might be guided into living quarters—perhaps with some poor family; if he had the right connec
tions he might get a bed and share a room in one of the hospicia or residence halls, where his expenses would be light. In 1374 a student at Oxford paid 104 shillings ($1040) a year for bed and board, twenty ($200) for tuition, forty for clothes.65

  No specific academic dress was enjoined upon him; however, he was requested to button his robe and not go shoeless unless his robe reached to his heels.66 For distinction masters wore a cappa—a red or purple cope with miniver border and hood; sometimes they covered the head with a square biretta, topped with a tuft instead of a tassel. The student at Paris had the status and ecclesiastical immunities of a cleric: he was exempt from military service, state taxation, or secular trial; he was expected—not always compelled—to take the tonsure; if he married he could continue as a student, but he lost his clerical privileges, and could not take a degree. A judicious promiscuity, however, involved no such penalties. The monk Jacques de Vitry, about 1230, described the Parisian students as

  more dissolute than the people. They counted fornication no sin. Prostitutes dragged passing clerics to brothels almost by force, and openly through the streets; if the clerics refused to enter, the whores called them sodomites…. That abominable vice [sodomy] so filled the city that it was held a sign of honor if a man kept one or more concubines. In one and the same house there were classrooms above and a brothel beneath; upstairs masters lectured, downstairs courtesans carried on their base services; in the same house the debates of philosophers could be heard with the quarrels of courtesans and pimps.67