1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (10 page)

So highly did the Church come to value education that in 1179 Pope Alexander III decreed that each cathedral should maintain a schoolmaster to teach its clerks and other poor scholars for nothing. Pope Innocent III elaborated on this decree in the 1215 Lateran Council, and diocesan statutes, such as those of Salisbury in 1219, show that his instructions were followed. ‘When I was a boy,’ wrote Alexander of Canon’s Ashby around 1200, ‘the ambition of nearly all teachers was to get rich by teaching, but now, by the grace of God, there are many who teach for free.’

Before 1066 virtually no Englishman went abroad to study. But all that changed after the Norman Conquest, partly because for two or three generations England’s élites considered themselves French and it seemed natural to send the sons and nephews for whom they planned a clerical career to France. By the second quarter of the twelfth century Paris had become the acknowledged intellectual powerhouse of the Christian West, pre-eminent among a number of prestigious schools in northern France at Laon, Tours, Poitiers, Orleans and Chartres. Here the over-fifteens studied what was known as the arts course. This meant what were called the ‘seven liberal arts’, consisting of the
trivium
(grammar, rhetoric and logic) and the
quadrivium
(arithmetic, astronomy, geometry and music). In practice the greater part of their time was spent on the
trivium
, and most of all on logic. When the monks of Bury St Edmunds discussed the kind of person they would like to see as their new abbot, ‘I’, wrote Jocelin of Brakelond, ‘said I would not agree to anyone becoming abbot who did not know some logic and how to separate truth from falsehood.’ The full arts course usually took nine years, but many students stayed just a year or two, improved their Latin, learned some law and made some friends. Those who completed the whole demanding course were entitled to call themselves Masters of Arts (MAs). By 1215 half of the canons of Salisbury Cathedral were Masters.

In systematically organised debates, known as ‘disputations’, the students learned to apply the rules of formal logical reasoning and quick-witted verbal virtuosity in answer to questions posed by their masters. At popular debates known as disputations
de quodlibet
(‘about anything at all’) the questions could be put by the audience and might relate to current political controversies or subjects chosen for their humorous potential. If anyone ever debated ‘how many angels can stand on the head of a pin?’, it would have been during a joky
quodlibet
. The debating techniques honed in these sessions meant that the products of a school of advanced study had acquired skills which could be transferred to virtually any discipline. Most of them went on to careers as administrators, managers and consultants to kings, aristocrats and senior churchmen. Alexander Nequam remembered how he and a school friend had both vowed to enter a monastery, which he had, but his friend, his studies finished, was now working in the Treasury.

The most famous of the thousands of English students who travelled to the schools of France in search of the most advanced education Europe could offer was John of Salisbury, the author of
Policraticus
, The Statesman’s Book. He studied at Paris and elsewhere from 1136 to 1147. The most famous of his teachers was the brilliant Breton, Peter Abelard, who taught him logic, but two others were Englishmen, Robert Pullen and Robert of Melun, later bishop of Hereford. The latter, according to John, taught that there was often no one right answer to the most interesting questions and was always willing to argue on either side of a question.

For students who wanted to study law, Bologna offered a prestigious alternative to Paris, especially if they were interested in Roman law – that is, civil law as opposed to the canon law of the Church. But the relevance of Roman law to English law was somewhat indirect, and there is no doubt that the vast majority of English students who went to the continent chose France. A study of the masters of the embryonic University of Paris has revealed that during the period 1179–1215 more than a third of those whose origins are known came from England. Among them was Stephen Langton, one of the key figures of 1215. He taught theology in Paris and it was he who introduced the present arrangement of the Bible into books and chapters. Another was Robert of Curzon, who returned to Paris in 1215 as a papal legate and cardinal and issued the first set of university statutes. Another English student at Paris, at least according to
The Mirror of Fools
, a satire written by Nigel Whiteacre of Canterbury, was Burnellus, an ass who decided to take the arts course. ‘Then,’ he daydreamed, ‘I’ll be Master Burnell, and the crowds will shout “Here comes the great Master Burnell”.’ According to Nigel Whiteacre, the English students at Paris were already, in the late 1180s, famous for their drinking and womanising. As for Burnellus, after seven years of study at Paris all he could say was ‘hee-haw’.

By 1215, however, it was no longer quite so necessary to go abroad to complete your education. There were schools of advanced study in a few English towns: Exeter, Lincoln, London, Northampton and Oxford. At this date Oxford was pre-eminent – though still much less prestigious than Paris or Bologna. When Gerald de Barri wanted to publicise his first major work,
The Topography of Ireland
, he gave readings from it on three consecutive days at Oxford ‘because of all places in England that was where clerks were most numerous and most learned’. On the first day he entertained the poor, on the second, all the teachers as well as those scholars who had acquired some reputation, and on the third, the remaining students together with Oxford’s knights and its many burgesses. ‘It was’, Gerald said with characteristic lack of modesty, ‘a magnificent and lavish occasion.’ By the 1190s Oxford was beginning to attract a few students from the continent. But at that time there was as yet no university, just an informal gathering of lots of teachers and students in a single town. The chronicler Roger of Wendover reported the bloodshed in 1209 that led to the creation of the university.

Some pursued their studies at Cambridge, others at Reading. The dispute between the town of Oxford and the clerks dragged on for years. Before a formal settlement could be reached, the clerks had to form themselves into a corporation, a body – like a borough – with legal rights and responsibilities: the ‘university’. The English word derives from the Latin
universitas
meaning a corporation. Finally, in 1214, the town authorities agreed to do penance, to regulate the level of student rents and the price of food, and to make an annual payment to the university as financial assistance to poor students. Clearly, although Roger’s figure of 3000 masters and students was an exaggeration, there had been enough of them for the withdrawal of their purchasing power to have a damaging impact on Oxford’s economy. But the dispute had gone on for so long that one group of teachers and pupils had settled very comfortably in Cambridge. And there they stayed. Students lived in lodgings or rented houses like the unfortunates of 1209, but charitable benefactions from the later thirteenth century onwards meant that a few could be accommodated in colleges, of which the earliest was Oxford’s Merton College.

In the advanced schools of Europe you could study law and theology as well as the liberal arts. As education came to be more formally structured, these subjects were seen as suitable for higher degrees, to be embarked on by the academically inclined after they had completed the arts course. Those who took a doctorate in law expected to be offered well-paid jobs when they finally left university, probably in their thirties. Those who studied theology were more interested in thinking out problems than in making money. Theologians liked to call their subject ‘the queen of the sciences’. Law, by contrast, came to be known as one of the ‘lucrative sciences’; the other was medicine, but anyone wanting to study that was better advised to leave England.

For them there was a choice between two prestigious schools: Montpellier and Salerno. Salerno, in particular, acquired a legendary reputation, as Marie de France’s story,
The Two Lovers
, reveals. A king who could not bear to part with his daughter decided that only the man who could carry her to the top of a nearby mountain would be allowed to marry her. Many tried, but none got more than half-way up. As it happened, she fell in love with a young man and he with her but, not wanting to cause her father additional distress, she refused to elope. Fortunately she had a cunning plan.

He took her advice and when he returned from Salerno, he was much strengthened. (The rich aunt was probably based on Trotula, a woman who wrote a book on the medical care of women; Chaucer’s Wife of Bath referred to her as ‘Dame Trot’). He brought back with him a phial of a precious potion that would allow him to complete the Herculean task. She, meanwhile, trying to lose some weight for his sake, had had some success. When the time came for the test, she decided to wear nothing but her shift. He felt so invigorated by happiness that he carried her all the way without stopping once to take the potion, but at the top he collapsed and died. Burnellus the Ass was equally unfortunate. He went to Salerno in the hope of finding a specialist who could make his tail grow until it was as long as his ears. But on the way home, carrying ten jars of Salerno’s finest tail-growing mixture, he was set upon by dogs and lost all the jars as well as half of his tail.

Salerno owed its reputation to a Tunisian Muslim, known in the West, after his conversion to Christianity, as Constantine the African, and his Latin translations of the Arabic medical treatises based on the writings of the great Greek doctor Galen. John of Salisbury was not impressed:

His jaundiced words did little to impede the success of the new medicine. Kings of England employed the best doctors. At the beginning of the twelfth century Henry I’s came from the Mediterranean – men such as the converted Spanish Jew Peter Alphonsi or Italians such as Grimbald and Faricius – who became abbot of Abingdon. But by the end of the century Richard I had doctors who were Englishmen such as Warin, abbot of St Albans (1183–1195), and his brother Matthew who been trained at Salerno.

By 1200 the medical ideas of the school of Salerno were well known throughout the West. Its adherents saw the human body as having four principal members, each served by the appropriate network – the brain was served by nerves, the heart by arteries, the liver by veins and the genitals by the spermatic ducts. On this theory both men and women produced sperm. Without the first three members, the Salernitans said, the body would no longer function; without the fourth, the human race would cease to exist. They noted that although human beings looked more like monkeys than pigs, their internal organs were closer to those of pigs – an opinion not irrelevant to modern transplant surgery. There were also the four ‘humours’ – or, as we might say, principal components, corresponding to four elements: blood, which was hot and moist like air; phlegm, which was cold and moist like water; red bile or choler, hot and dry like fire; and black bile, cold and dry like earth. Hence, depending on which humour predominated, there were four ‘complexions’ or, as we might say, temperaments: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholic. According to this school, good health depended upon a balance of humours. Analysis of a patient’s urine, always bearing in mind their age and sex, was seen as a reliable guide to the balance of their humours and, thence, their health. On this subject a translation by Constantine the African of a treatise by a ninth-century North African-Jewish physician known as Isaac Judaeus was regarded as the authoritative book and remained so until the sixteenth century. When one of Henry I’s doctors, Faricius, abbot of Abingdon, was proposed as a candidate for the see of Canterbury, there were churchmen who opposed him on the grounds that they did not want an archbishop who had been accustomed to examining women’s urine. And, indeed, he was not appointed.

Many prescriptions recommended in the books of the time are simple enough, and not always dressed up in the pretentious Galenic theoretical language that John of Salisbury found so objectionable. Mugwort in wine, for example, was advised for the woman who had problems with menstruation. Steambaths were good for those who suffered from obesity. A swollen penis could be alleviated with a marshmallow compress.