by Michael Pye
Roger Bacon, in the thirteenth century, was Grosseteste’s most obvious, even notorious follower. Francis Bacon, in the seventeenth century, looked back and patronized him: ‘like a boy who picks up a boat peg on the shore and then yearns to build his own whole boat,’ he wrote. But he was still impressed with Roger ‘having not concerned himself just with theories, but with combining them with understanding the mechanical aspects, grasping how theory reaches into practical things’.42 In his grudging way Francis Bacon acknowledged the great change that Grosseteste began, and Bacon continued.
Grosseteste taught Franciscans, Bacon was a Franciscan, and it is largely in Franciscan minds that we can track this tangle of ideas. They were the ones who went out to meet the Mongols and report on their ways (there was a Dominican, too, but his testimony is lost); so they knew about the immediate, practical prospect of disaster. They were fascinated by the end of the world, and how to calculate when it would come. Both men saw the world through mathematics as the Dominican Albertus Magnus, equally scientific in ambition, did not. Both men valued experience, even if it was a second best to Godly illumination.
Roger Bacon said experience was fundamental; it was the right way to test a mathematical result or even a revelation from God. Human agency and curiosity mattered. He much admired his contemporary Peter de Maricourt, who not only knew all kinds of science from his own experience but asked other people about theirs, going out of the study and the abbey to question soldiers and farmers and old ladies on the street and in the fields ‘to complete his philosophy’.
So Bacon also tested things. He set out to break a diamond with goat’s blood, which was an old tradition, and when that didn’t work he tried cutting other gems with diamonds, and he found the diamonds broke; he falsified his first theory, thought again and tested again. He blew bubbles from his mouth to watch the colours on the sheen of the surface. He used crystals and hexagonal stones to watch how light is refracted. He practised a rather cheap kind of science which needed no raw materials, none of the precious metals or laboratory equipment that alchemists used, but which allowed him to think about the stars he had watched, the rainbows he had seen.
He took the world into his mind. He thought his kinds of knowledge should be a weapon against the invading enemy from the East; he thought in a grand, almost strategic way. He studied and tested, he found out and brought together other people’s work, he was so obsessed with knowledge that he was annoyed at monastic duties and tried to take credit for bothering to teach at all, which was his job. He seems the perfect academic, in a closed world, a friar who did not have to count his pennies or even buy his food.
And yet the most furious argument that divided his own order, the Franciscans, all century long was about money: was it right to give up all riches and leave yourself with nothing to give away in charity? It defined them because they were so determined to be poor. It separated them from clergy making a living.
Money also shaped the new universities and how they worked. Money, in fact, shaped minds.
Gerard of Abbeville – at least we think it was him – scratched down his accounts as a theology student in Paris in the middle of the thirteenth century: sixty-four items, sixty-four payments. There were all the obvious costs – parchment, pumice, ink and candles and rent – and some that suggest he was moving or at least reorganizing his rooms: he bought chamber pots and grease lamps, a table, a lectern for reading and a solid chair (because no gentleman would keep a folding chair). The very basic things like food and drink cost him rather little, but he had to pay for ‘wine with a master’ and a tip to his landlady and fees to whoever took away all of his shit and rubbish; he was always paying people. There is also a payment to a ‘Master John’ which looks like settling a debt, and three solidi for ‘usury’; this was a student comfortable enough to dine out with friends and stand his teacher drinks, but he also knew all about debt, moneylenders and business.43
Now, Paris was a university run by its masters, its teachers. A law school like Bologna was quite different in the beginning: students wrote the contract with teachers, paid them directly and so they also wrote the rules. Other Italian universities like Perugia, and some French ones like Montpellier, were run in much the same way. Paris, and Oxford, and Orleans and later Cambridge ran on different principles. They taught theology, philosophy and liberal arts as well as providing a professional grounding in the law, so there was not the same sense that most students mostly expected to be trained to make good money. The difference meant that the ambitions and standards of the professors ruled.
These professors were ‘brutes’, so said Daniel of Morley, who studied law in Paris at the end of the twelfth century; they read out loud from volumes too heavy to carry, they made lead pencil notes in the margin, but otherwise they hid their ignorance by saying nothing much.44 They taught the basic texts by reading them out loud in the afternoon; students had to swear they had heard some three times over, some just once, in lecture rooms with hard benches, or sometimes straw bales for desks and chairs.45 Even the fee for an exam was spent on straw for the floor, so people could sit and watch; and since this made no more sense in the thirteenth century than it does now, there had to be a rule to stop people assuming they ought to give money also to the chancellor or his examiners.46
To stay in this dusty world of learning, students paid for the salaries of the beadles, the seals on their diplomas, a fee for matriculating, a fee that first years paid to senior students for the right to be a student, fees for moving up in the academic hierarchy and fees to persuade the lecturers to keep talking. Students needed money for the rent you paid to borrow a book to copy it, and the fee you paid to have someone else copy it; law students needed a servant to carry all their books about. They had to pay to look like students: to buy or hire student gowns. Many of them were foreigners doing all this with unfamiliar coins whose value they had to calculate in terms of their own resources, back home or in Paris. Unsurprisingly, the books of model letters for students in England show how to write about the lack of food, heat, bedding, clothes, books or parchment, and above all the lack of cash.47
Somebody had to get and handle all this money. It was complicated work, almost a system of taxation: a fee depended on what you wanted but also on who you were, your social standing and your ability to pay. In Paris the students paid a progressive kind of tax: their fees were based on the bursa, how much money they had to live on for a week. Once the sum was set, somebody had to collect. The word computus was not always a matter of holy arithmetic; in the 1320s it meant the street-by-street, house-by-house account of which students lived where, what fees to collect and from whom, name by name by name. The university acknowledged that sometimes people were told to come and pay their fees, but somehow didn’t bother, so it was very helpful to ask more directly on their doorsteps. It is likely that many philosophers and theologians spent as much time administering the money as they did writing and teaching.48
When masters rule, the running of the university becomes their business. Masters, bachelors, even stewards whose knowledge was mostly how to buy food and fuel: they could all rent a house in Oxford and set up halls or hostels, after which they had the desirable title of ‘principal’. University masters at Cambridge, Paris and Oxford were involved in working out the true rentable value of any place a student might find to live; they had to think in terms of a just price, a true value, not to mention yields and assets. From 1250 the university in Cambridge insisted they had to find a guarantee for the rent on their houses, so they needed capital or credibility to get started; Oxford wrote down the same rule in 1313. Principals were keepers of the loan chests that took pledges and financed students, collectors of university rents and proctors who enforced the students’ fines and dues. In return for the right to do all this business they had to keep their lodger students in line, which was serious work; the unattached scholars living in unlicensed rooms are denounced in an Oxford statute of 1410 as ‘sleeping by day and haunting
taverns and brothels by night, intent on robbery and homicide’.49
In Paris, students lived in ‘nations’, communities from the same territory assembled around a master who came from more or less the same place; small businesses again. Around the start of the thirteenth century the preacher Jacques de Vitry knew exactly how to tell them apart: ‘The English are drunken cowards, the French proud, soft and effeminate; the Germans are quarrelsome and foul-mouthed, the Normans vain and haughty … the Romans vicious and violent, the Sicilians tyrannical and cruel, the men of Brabant are thieves and the Flemings are debauched.’50 Their masters often had a sideline in lending students money, for students were always in need of cash. Paris students could call on official moneylenders, citizens under oath to the university, and there were more than 250 of them at any time. Pawnbrokers offered the university special rates.
Not all the Paris hostels were in the better parts of town. Jacques de Vitry was a student there in the last years of the twelfth century, in a house with a school upstairs and a brothel downstairs; which he seemed to see as trouble and not as an asset. He remembered that ‘on one level, the whores fought among themselves and with their pimps; and in the rest of the house, there were clerics shouting and arguing’.51
All this had legal pitfalls, like any business. Consider Master Petrus de Arenciaco, who taught in Paris and leased an apartment by the Seine from a rather wealthy lawyer. He then let out rooms to three students, two brothers and one other. For whatever reason, the brothers were not happy; in the autumn of 1336 they moved out with all their goods to lodge with a woman called Johanna ‘la Pucelle’ – who with that nickname may just possibly have been pure, but was certainly young and a woman. The master was left with his lease, and he started to pay rent only for himself and the one student he had left, and naturally the lawyer went to law; he seized the brothers’ goods to make them go on paying him. The brothers said the problem was the master’s, and the rent was due only from the men still living in the apartment and not them; and they won their case. Students came and went, but the masters took the blame.52
There were also rivalries, trading blocs, cartels, unfair trade practices and trade wars. Franciscans and Dominicans came to Paris to teach and to learn, but they came late, in the 1210s; masters and students from outside the religious orders were already settled and established. The friars had an awkward relationship with the university from the start, because they were not allowed to study law or the arts, the schools which swore an actual oath to the university itself;53 competition for students, and for chairs in theology, only made things worse. The friars were supported and subsidized by their orders, even though the Franciscans insisted they had nothing, not even property in common, while the secular masters had to piece together parishes and benefices, rents and student rolls to make a living. They were, in two words, unfair competition.
When celebrations went wrong in Lent 1229, and city guards arrested some students and casually killed some, the secular masters called for ‘cessatio’, which means roughly a strike. They objected to the breach of academic privilege – students were clerics and should never have been hauled off the streets – rather than the death of students, and they walked out of Paris, some for Orleans down the road, some off to Toulouse, some to Oxford and even Cambridge; the strike was the making of Cambridge. The friars stayed put in Paris, took the chance to acquire some more chairs of theology, and started a very pointed campaign against the multiple benefices on which the absent masters depended. They persuaded the Bishop of Paris to rule that two benefices disqualified a man from salvation, at least if one was worth more than fifteen Parisian pounds, and then salted the wound by insisting on teaching the ruling in their classrooms.
Worse, John of St Giles, a secular master, took to teaching Dominican students and gave a great sermon on the beauty of voluntary poverty, which was something the seculars reckoned was quite close to heresy; after all, how can a man be charitable and virtuous if he has nothing to share or give away? Halfway through the sermon, John stepped down from the pulpit and made a quick change; he finished the sermon dressed in the Dominican habit. He was a heretic but he was also now a traitor.54
The language of this holy rivalry was all about money: about the right not to have property. But money and trade and dealing defined even the basic institutions of the universities. Each hostel owner was a source of dinner, but also of credit, and each hostel was run to make money. Suppose you had come south to Paris from some great merchant town like Bruges; the hostel at the University of Paris might seem familiar from the hostels at home where merchants stayed and did business and stored their goods.
Foreigners lodged together in those merchants’ hostels, far from home,55 and they also lodged goods and money to establish their credit, got involved in dealing and borrowing, met and talked and found things out and did business: the men who stayed in a hostel belonged to the hostel. The men in a professor’s house were much the same; they were brotherhoods with a purpose. Traders had to go to Bruges to do business. Likewise students from Flanders or Frisia had to go to Paris because there was no university in all Flanders until Louvain was founded in the 1420s. Those old traders the Frisians were still travelling – but now as students.
Money was not just the clutter and rush of traders, foreigners, people with goods and money to spend, all coming and going, to ports, to fairs, to markets, although a Paris student could see all that just by crossing the Seine to buy an apple or a loaf of bread. Money was everyone’s everyday calculation, which coins were worth what, how much silver in a coin; everyone had to know how to work things out. True, great traders paid with ingots of silver, solid bars of the kind which were used to buy land or provide a daughter with a dowry, but even they were under pressure to pay some bills with the variable coins. In Cologne a trader could be arrested if he didn’t change his ingots for coins. Flemish traders sometimes melted down coins to make new ingots, and in England the local business was done in coins but goods were sent abroad in the expectation of getting back ingots.56 Since the Church kept forbidding usury, the way to make money out of money was not to lend it out but to watch the money markets.
So money became a great issue for theologians and philosophers, at the very heart of how to define a good civic life. Money was the spiritual riddle of the age: how to define the worth of things, make a profit on it and still avoid damnation.
William of Ockham was another Franciscan. He read the newly rediscovered and fashionable Aristotle, and then he wrote of mathematics as a language for talking about things, a tool you could use to think hard about subjects even where nothing at all was being measured – a very useful figment of the imagination. In Ockham’s account, science didn’t just have to be about describing things and explaining them; it could be about measuring and calculating. What’s more, the things you can count and calculate could be quite abstract; you didn’t trip over them in the world of real objects. Maths was about the kind of statement Euclid made when he said that even if two parallel lines were extended to infinity, they would never meet; nobody expected to draw those lines, or find them in the real world, and yet the statement was useful in the real world. Thanks to equations, it was now reasonable to make comparisons between unlike things and concentrate on just one quality: you could compare the brownness of a brown horse with the brownness of a brown cow.57
In Aristotle’s thinking, money was the way you evened out the deal when you were bartering goods and services; imagine a shoemaker doing business with a housebuilder, and it’s easy to see how a bit of cash sorts out the differences between the goods each man is offering. But money had become more than this useful expedient. According to Thomas Aquinas it was a way of expressing value: the value of all the work and materials that go into building a house compared with the time and work you need to make a pair of shoes. Such trading was tolerable, more or less, but dangerous, because it led to the possibility of profit. Greed was sin, and profit was excusable only if it was not the w
hole point of a deal. Prices had to be calculated with a moral equation: a ‘just price’. Prices might change when things were plentiful or things were scarce, but out there was a fine, high notion: a ‘true’ economic value.58
Everything was in motion now. Money meant trade, and trade seemed to mean the end of the ‘perfect city’ that Aristotle imagined, strong and self-sufficient. Money was the engine of the new ways and it corrupted things: strangers came with different customs; there were never enough strong soldiers because trading requires no muscle in itself; business was thought to weaken the body and the heart. The unsettling of the world was very uncomfortable, so naturally it was generally agreed that Aristotle had the right idea about trade and merchants: doing things just for the sake of money was wrong. And yet profit, as the thirteenth-century Pietro di Giovanni Olivi learned at Paris, still happens. He wrote of ‘various chances to buy and sell things with advantage; and this comes from God’s Providence, just like all man’s other good things’. It could be a gift of God, but ‘only if it does not go beyond the proper amount’.59
A man who sells something for a profit, without carving or painting it like a craftsman, without making some material changes, is not within God’s law; the writer known as Fake Chrysostom said anyone who bought goods and sold them on for a profit, unaltered, was ‘the merchant who was thrown out of the temple’.60 The theologian Henry of Ghent was especially bothered by the man who bought at a low price and sold for a profit at once, because an object can’t change its value instantly; he implies that everything has a true value and a just price, something that should not be changed artificially.