The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (34 page)

His origins, his ghostly presence on the
outskirts of the university in Paris, all fit with the sense that Grosseteste was not
quite ‘one of us’, where ‘we’ are all good and orthodox and
mannerly schoolsmen with a bit of money behind us. He quarrelled with the canons of
Lincoln Cathedral, who at once remembered
his origins, ‘so very humble’. Matthew Paris, used to the quiet and even
elegant life of a rich monastery, thought he was ‘heartless and inhuman’ for
‘the violent acts which he did in his lifetime … his canons whom he
excommunicated and harassed, his savage attacks on monks and even more savage against
nuns …’; he acted, perhaps, ‘not according to knowledge’. Matthew
Paris also felt he should point out that Grosseteste was ‘born from the very
humblest stock’; the man was simply not couth. When cardinals insisted he give
parishes to some Italian priests, he objected because they could handle the sins of the
French-speaking gentry but not all the English-speaking others. When the cardinals
persisted, Grosseteste made a scene. He went down on his knees before the priests, made
his confession in English, and then, when they did not understand a word and sat looking
puzzled, he began to hammer on his breast, he began to sob and to bellow. The priests
went off in confusion.
³⁸

Now imagine this man staring at a rainbow,
and thinking for himself.
³⁹
He began by sorting out the various
ways a full spectrum of colours can appear: in rainbows, in the spray made by millwheels
or the oars of a boat, or just by squirting water from the mouth, when sunlight shines
through a crystal, and lastly the colours that reflect off the shine of a
starling’s feathers. The reflections, he saw, were something different; but the
rainbow, like light through a crystal, was a matter of refraction, colours produced, as
he thought, ‘by the weakening of white light’ as it passed through something
dense like water or stone. So he decided that rainbows were colour made by sunlight
passing through water, the drops and spheres of water, and coming out brilliantly at an
angle of 42° to the source of the light. He had described a rainbow and also put it on
paper to think about it more clearly.

He had an idea of what a rainbow was; now he
asked how a rainbow happens. Grosseteste had watched light passing through a spherical
glass full of water and spraying an arc of colour onto a screen; so he reckoned that
water was involved, and some kind of surface where the colours could show. He knew about
lenses that ‘make things very far off seem close at hand … so that it is
possible
for us to read the smallest letters
at an incredible distance or to count sand or grain or grass or any other minute
objects’ – did he in his fifties wear the newly invented spectacles? – and he
thought a lens broke the ‘visual ray’, refracting the light.
⁴⁰
He
brought all these thoughts together to imagine the moist layers of a cloud together
forming a single lens, and he thought there must be a second cloud which worked as a
screen. He had a theory, and he set out to test if it was true or false, complete or
incomplete.

It was, of course, wrong; but it took time
to prove that. In the meantime, some of Grosseteste’s ideas on the rainbow were
still influential when Isaac Newton was working: the idea that each colour in the
rainbow was somehow a different kind of ray, created as white light was changed by
refraction. It is remarkable that he realized it is not distance that puts things out of
sight, but the increasing narrowness of the angle under which we see distant objects.
His ideas of falsification worked so well that he managed to dispose of a good many bad
theories about comets, even though he never found the truth of what they are.

He was inventing our idea of science. He
drew on ancient writers, on Aristotle and on Galen, and he presented methods that
allowed the very beginning of the methods we recognize as modern: testing theories,
falsifying some, proving some things impossible, insisting on combining observation and
ideas. He was still tentative. He said he wouldn’t ask, for example, why the moon
was a sphere, because he was sure the reasons lay outside nature and no astronomer could
know them; much later, the astronomer Kepler would show how a sphere forms because of
the various gravitational pulls of the moving planets.
⁴¹
Grosseteste
started the move to the methods that would let Kepler find out such things.

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.