T H E W A N D E R I N G S C H O L A R S

HELEN J A N E W A D D E L L Was bom in 1889

in Tokyo, where her North Irish parents were mis­
sionaries. She received her education in Ireland at
Victoria College and Queens University in Belfast.
She held honorary doctorates from Belfast, Durham,
St. Andrews, and Columbia, and was elected a
member of the Irish Academy of Letters in 1932.
Among her works are: a translation of Lyrics
from the Chinese ( 19 13 ) ; a translation of M edieval
Latin Lyrics (19 29 ); Peter Abelard, a novel (19 3 3 );
T h e A bbé Prévost (19 3 3 ) ; and Poetry in the Dark
Ages (1947)* T h e W andering Scholars was first
published in 1927.
THE W ANDERING SCHOLARS

H E L E N W A D D E L L

Anchor Books

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.

GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

I961
 Reprinted by permission of
Constable and Company, Ltd., London
Cover by Antonio Frasconi
Typography by Joseph P. Ascherl
 Note to the Sixth Edition

T hat this edition is less imperfect than its predecessors is

a good deal due to the kindness of several readers, espe­
cially of Professor C. H. Haskins, Professor E. F. Jacob,
Miss E. M . Jamison, Mr. Henry Broadbent, and Mr. A. L.
Poole. The text has been revised, a table of biographical
dates added, and since much has been written on the
mediaeval Latin lyric since 1926, when this book went to
press, a new list of authorities has been compiled.
The five years which have passed since its first publica­
tion have only deepened the note of apology of the orig­
inal preface. For in spite of its title, this is far from being
an adequate history of the Vagantes, tamquam folium a
vento rapitur, et quasi scintilla in arundinete, leaves
caught by the wind, sparks in the brushwood, of me­
diaeval literature and history. It is the record, as they ap­
peared to one reader, of the visitations of lyric beauty as
fugitive and swift as they, in mediaeval verse: not among
the vernaculars, which have all mens praise, but in the
Low Latin which seemed for long enough no better than
the discoloured stubble of harvests long since gathered.
This deprecation of the title raises another question.
The trend of modem scholarship is to abandon the old
romantic name of Vagantenlieder, goliard poetry, and to
call the whole corpus of this kind of verse, “secular clerical
lyric.”1 Wilhelm Meyer came even to speak of the
Vagantenmythus, and (though one remembers that An­
drew Lang once disposed of Mr. Gladstone as a solar

1 I have myself preferred to call it, as in Chapter IX, ‘'The

Scholars’ Lyric,” for this covers both religious ana profane, and
the Archpoet, like Sedulius Scotus before him, Villon and Dun­
bar after him, was capable of both.
vi Note to the Sixth Edition
myth) there was reason for his exasperation. Golias,
richly gifted and ubiquitous though he was, did not write
all the lyrics of the great age; and before crediting him, as
even the cautious Schumann does, with the Bacchanalian
verse, it is sobering to reflect that the greatest drinking
song in English,
“Back and sides go bare, go bare,”
is laid to the charge of a Prebendar of Durham.
The truth is that, with very few exceptions, there is no
pigeon-holing possible. We cannot often say that this was
written by a vagabond and this by an archdeacon: one
tremendous indictment of the Curia that suggests the
embittered vagans was in fact the work of the Chancellor
of Notre Dame. And apart from the inveterate roman­
ticism of the human mind, there was some justification
for the instinct that grouped these lyrics of satire and love
and wine as Vagantenlieder or goliardie verse, just as
Herrick, a Devonshire rector, is liable to be called a Cava­
lier lyrist. The name of Golias, ancestor of Pantagruel and
Panurge alike, is mighty yet. The Carmina Burana may
be, as its latest editor suggests, an anthology commissioned
by a wealthy amateur, bishop or abbot, and not, in the old
romantic hypothesis, the copy of a goliards song-book.
Yet it cannot be too often remembered that lyrics in the
Middle Ages were made to be sung, not to be read; and
that some of these at any rate were sung for bread. The
Archpoet at the beginning of the tradition, and Villon at
the end, have stamped their image on this ancient coinage.
The date and place of the actual compilation of the
Carmina Burana have been brought in question by its
latest editors.2 Wilhelm Meyer, to whose years of patient
and inspired work on the text they give affectionate recog-

2 Carmina Burana: mit Benutzung der Vorarbeiten Wilhelm

Meyers kritisch herausgegeben von Alfons Hilka und Otto
Schumann. Bd. i. n . Heidelberg, 1930.
 Note to the Sixth Edition vii
nitìon, held that the manuscript was written about 1225,
and in the Moselle valley. Otto Schumann is convinced,
from the dialect of the German poems scattered through
it, that it was written in Bavaria, possibly in Benedict-
beuem itself: he holds, moreover, that it must be dated in
the last years of the thirteenth century. He admits that the
handwriting of one of the three copyists at work upon it
suggests the earlier date, as well as the use of the old-
fashioned neums instead of choral notation: but this he
explains by the remoteness of the region of its origin. The
“Stilcharacter” of the German lyrics belongs, he says, to
late minnesong; and in the form of a section of the Latin
poems, lovesongs and springsongs, he detects the signs of
the decay of the art. “Confronted with such clear internal
evidence as we have here, the arguments from palaeog­
raphy must retire into the background.” The doctrine may
seem heretical; but the application of it is an admirable
piece of reasoning. The actual “deutlich inhaltliche Kri­
terien” will be found in his article, “Die deutsche Lieder
der Carmina Burana,” Germanisch-Romanische Monats­
schrift, 1926, and are summarised in the masterly if con­
troversial preface to the critical text. His conclusion is that
by setting it in the closing years of the thirteenth century,
the Carmina finds its place among its kindred, the great
M SS. of Middle High German lovesong. “For mediaeval
Latin, as for Middle High German poetry, the burst of
bloom was over: and men were fain to gather the harvest
into bams.” It is a lovely metaphor: dangerous only if it
suggests that their ingathering was autumn fruit already
touched with frost, and not this miracle of bud and
blossom.
H . w.
Primrose H ill, Septem ber, 1932.
 Preface

T h is study of the Vagantes is little more than the scaffold­

ing of its subject. It was begun as an introduction to a
book of translations from mediaeval Latin lyric, soon to
be published, and outgrew the original intention, without
outgrowing its limitations. The historical interest of the
Vagantes as one of the earliest disintegrating forces in the
mediaeval church has been left on one side; with it, their
place in literary history, in the development of satire and
the secularising of the stage. They have been studied only
as the inheritors of the pagan learning, the classic tradi­
tion that came to its wild flowering in the rhyming Latin
lyric of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
To Professor Saintsbury, in whom that lyric Ends its last
and greatest lover, the book owes more than actual accom­
plishment may warrant; and his running commentary on
manuscript and proof has sometimes found its way into
footnotes that hardly need his initials for identification.
To Professor Gregory Smith for unwearying suggestion
and criticism, again both in manuscript and proof, I have
to acknowledge what is only the most recently incurred of
many debts. Mr. Robin Rower has been good enough to
read in proof the chapter on the Irish scholars, and to give
me the use of his delightful version of Pangur Ban.
M y last debt is to two colleges in Oxford: to Lady
Margaret Hall, which made me Susette Taylor Fellow for
the two years in Paris in which the research for the book
was completed, and pursued me with many kindnesses
during the third in which it was written; and to Somer­
ville College, whose hospitality to a vagans six years ago
saw it first begun.
HELEN WADDELL.
London, December, 1926.
ix
 C O N TEN TS

Note to Sixth Edition v

Preface . . . ix
Introduction. The Pagan learning . xiii
I. THE BREAK WITH THE PAGAN TRADITION I

II. FORTUNATUS TO SEDULIUS OF LIEGE 25

III. THE TENTH CENTURY 69

IV. THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING IN FRANCE . 89
V. HUMANISM IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE
TWELFTH CENTURY 113

VI. PARIS AND ORLEANS 1 33

VII. THE ARCHPOET 1 59

V III. THE ORDO VAGORUM 175

IX. THE SCHOLARS’ LYRIC 2 11

APPENDICES

A. Latin originals of Lyrics translated in the text 241

B. Extracts from the Travelling Accounts of
Bishop Wolfger of Passau, 1203-4 257
C. Indulgence given by Surianus, Arch-Primate
of the Wandering Scholars, 1209 . 261
D. T h e Departing of my Books; He laments his
“dergie,” lost at dice 265
E. Councils on the Clericus vagus or joculator 269
Table of Biographical Dates . 301

Bibliography 307

Index 339
xi
 INTRODUCTION

T h e Pagan Learning

T h e r e is no beginning, this side the classics, to a history

of mediaeval Latin; its roots take hold too firmly on the
kingdoms of the dead. The scholar's lyric of the twelfth
century seems as new a miracle as the first crocus; but
its earth is the leafdrift of centuries of forgotten scholar­
ship. His emotional background is of his own time; his
literary background is pagan, and such furniture as his
mind contains is classical or pseudo-classical. The great
Age of the Augustans is to us a thing set in amber, a
civilisation distinct and remote like the Chinese: there is
a whole world of literature, created in another language,
between us and them. T o the mediaeval scholar, with no
sense of perspective, but a strong sense of continuity,
Virgil and Cicero are but upper reaches of the river that
still flows past his door. The language in which they
wrote is still the medium of the artist, even the creative
artist: it was so, even in the seventeenth century, to
Milton, still more to Bacon. Gautier de Châtillon wrote
an epic on Alexander, and the scholars of the next gen­
eration compare him with Virgil just as naturally as
Macaulay compares Jane Austen with Shakespeare. An­
other scholar, lecturing on the two kinds of poetry, met­
rical and rhythmic, says that Virgil is the best example of
the first, Primas of the second, just as naturally as a lec­
turer on blank verse and the heroic couplet would in­
stance Milton and Pope.1 The gulf between the god of

1 Thomas of Capua. See Thurot, Notices et Extraits, xxii. 2.

418.
sdii
XIV Introduction
Renaissance idolatry and the disreputable canon of Or­
leans does not exist for him: they simply used the same
medium in different ways. Moreover, the sacred canon of
classical Latin is not yet closed: a thirteenth century text
book ranges from Ovid and Cicero to Gautier de Châtillon
and Matthew of Vendôme, as our own range from
Chaucer to William Morris and Swinburne.2 Peter of
Blois, archdeacon of Bath, thinks it was very good for his
style that he once had to learn by heart the letters of
Hildebert; those letters had been written only a generation
before, but were already models of prose composition:®
and as for his own works, Peter modestly concludes that
they will outlast ruin and flood and fire and the manifold
procession of the centuries.4 Latin in the twelfth century
was a study of as much practical importance as English
composition in the twentieth. It was not only the language
of literature, of the Church, of the law-courts, of all edu­
cated men, but of ordinary correspondence: the language
in which a student will write home for a pair of boots,6 or
suggest that it is the part of a discreet sister to inflame the
affection of the relations, nay, even the brother-in-law, of
a deserving scholar, who at the moment has neither sheets
to his bed, nor shirt to his back, and in which she will re­
ply that she is sending him two pairs of sheets and ioo
sol., but not a word to my husband, or "I shall be dead and
destroyed [mortua essem penitus et destructa]. I think he
means to send you something him self’;6 or, a more deli­
cate matter, to a sweetheart, that he sees a fellow-student
ruffling it in the girdle he had given her, and fears her
favours have gone with it. “I could stand the loss of the
belt,” says he magnificently.7 Clearly, an even livelier lan­
guage than the Latin of Erasmus or More.

* Laborintus. Text in Farai, Les Arts poétiques du XII* et du

X III* Siècle. *Chart. Univ. Paris, i. 27. ‘ Peter of Blois,
Epist. 77. Migne, P.L. 207, c. 238. * BiW. Ec. Ch. 1855, p. 454.
Cf. B.N. MS. Lat. 1093 f. 82 v. ' I b. 8653. f- 13- TIF.
1093, f. 67 v.
 T h e Pagan Learning. XV

Petrarch has too long been taken at his own valuation,

the first to whom the ancient world was solid, more than
a fiat decorated surface; to whom Virgil and Cicero were
brother and father, rather than a book of Sibylline magic
and an impersonal fountain of rhetoric. “What says our
Arbiter," says John of Salisbury affectionately every few
pages; it is as though the archdeacon has the Arbiter of
Elegance by the arm. Those who come to John for in­
formation on contemporary manners do so warily; he may
so easily be thinking of the court of Augustus, not of
Henry II. Not many knew the classics as John did; but
such as they do know they treat with friendliness, as dis­
tinguished contemporaries. Homer was a clerk marvellous,
says Benoit de Sainte-More; there was not much that
Homer did not know. Sallust, too, Sallust was a clerk
marvellous, and Sallust had a nephew, Cornelius Nepos,
who was also a great clerk, and lectured at Athens. And
one day when he went to look in an armoire for a book on
grammar, before his lecture, he found instead a diary
written by a Trojan called Dares, who was shut up in
Troy all through the siege, who also was a great clerk but
a fighter too. And of course it is better to believe Dares
than Homer, who was bom by his own showing a hun­
dred years after Troy was burnt, and had his facts only by
hearsay: but all the same Homer was a great clerk.8 Then
there is the thirteenth century story of the two clerks who
went to the tomb of Ovid to ask what in his opinion was
the best line he ever wrote: to whom a sonorous voice
made answer,

"Virtue it is to abstain even from that which is lawful.”

And the worst line? ventured the second student.

“Whatsoever delights is accounted by Jove to be right­

eous.” *

* Roman de Troie, i. 11. 45 et seq.

XVI Introduction
Much edified, and moved by the chastening of so great a
talent, the two fell to prayer, Paternosters and Aves, for
the redemption of the enlightened spirit, but a third time
the great voice boomed upon them,
“I like not Paternosters: travellers, go your way.”9

To the scholars who invented that story, Ovid was some­

thing more than one of the “auctores” ; in the old phrase
of divinity, they had recognised his person.
Moreover, to return to Benoît de Sainte-More, this in­
terest in the right way of it at Troy is not merely academic.
Not one of the barbarian races but believed they had an­
cestors in the Great Dispersion; to have fought on the
right side at Troy was to have come over with the Con­
queror. The tendency had been noticed very early. Cicero
sneered in the House at the pretensions of the half-baked
barbarians shouldering themselves into the mellow radi­
ance of the Roman orbit.10 Cassiodorus the undefeated
discovered an ancestor in Troy for his enormous client,
Theodoric himself;11 and the Normans sat more firmly on
the English throne when Geoffrey of Monmouth and
Wace traced out their common Trojan ancestry with
Arthur and the Britons, with an industry worthy of the
College of Arms. Western Europe was an immense family
party; and Trojan, unlike Greek, remains an adjective of
unequivocal praise. Dares, the Trojan diarist, was much
more popular in Western libraries than Dictys, the equally
impudent forgery on the side of the Greeks; while Dictys
was much tasted in the Eastern Empire.
This liveliness is not the popular impression of me­
diaeval scholarship; but this is a good deal due to the
diabolic and immortal parody of the sixteenth century, of
Erasmus, of Rabelais, of the Ejnstolae Obscurorum

®BM. MS. Harl. 219 f. 12. Wright, Latin Stories, p. 43.

10 Joly, Benoît de Sainte-More, p. 1 1 7.
11 Hodgkin, iii. 294.
 T h e Pagan Learning xvii
Virorum. "Ista est via qua debemus studere in poetria
. . . Sallust and such like poets.”12 It was true enough
(or the fifteenth century outside Italy, and for the four­
teenth, when theology and law and the commercial spirit
among them had killed the study of classics at the U ni­
versities. Already in the thirteenth century John of Gar­
land complained that the grass was withering in the
ancient fields,
“withers the Latin tongue,
The springtime fields of the old poets are bare.
Across the flowering fields the North wind blows,
And they are winter-starved.”
H e would have had the poets restored by law if he
could.18 Yet only a quarter century before a good Puritan
grammarian had complained that the old gods were wor­
shipped again at Orleans, that Faunus and Bacchus had
their altars and their feasts,
“Sacrificare deis nos edocet Aurelianis
Indicens festum Fauni, Iovis atque Liei.”14
Professorial commentary on the classics, from the days
of Virgilius Maro of Toulouse to Brother Conrad Dollen-
kopf,18 was sapless enough: it is not often, perhaps, in­
toxicating. But the effect of the actual reading of the
classics is evident on the minds that they took captive, in
the splendid melancholy prose of St. Peter Damian and
John of Salisbury; in the unbroken chain of lyric from

“ Efist. Obscurorum Virorum, i. 7; i. 28.

u “emarcet lingua latina
Auctorum vernans exaruit area, pratum
Florigerum boreas flatu livente perussit.”
Quoted by Delisle, Les Écoles d’Orléans, p. 8. See Paetow, The
Arts Course at Mediaeval Universities, pp. 16, 18, 42.
“ Alexandre de Ville-Dieu, Ecclesiale, Thurbot, ib. 115 .
“ Efist. Obsc. Vir. 1. 28.
xviii Introduction
Paul the Deacon’s sonnet in praise of Lake Garda to the
crystalline enchantment of

“Dum Dianae vitrea

Sero lampas oritur”;

above all, in the persisting dread of the Church. “W e are

in danger, we who read the writings of the pagan poets,”
was said, not by Jerome in the fourth century face to face
with a paganism dying indeed, yet dying dangerously, but
by Nicholas, Chancellor of the University of Paris in
1285.16 “Not by burning incense, but by a too ardent read­
ing of the poets,” says Jacques de Vitry, “do we worship
the gods.” 17 The opposition is not the natural antagonism
of the illiterate to a knowledge too high for it, the crass­
ness of the Philistines. There are instances of that. Greg­
ory the Great was not an imaginative man; and when the
report reached him “which we cannot mention without a
blush,” that the Bishop of Vienne was expounding gram­
mar to his friends, his scolding is precisely Jack Cade’s
complaint to Lord Say: “It will be proved to thy face that
thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and
a verb and such abominable words as no Christian ear
can endure to hear.”18 But for the most part the opposition
came from men who had found in pagan literature a place
unholy but enchanted, the shore of the lotus, the coast of
the Sirens. “And not only pagan literature,” says Paulinus
of Noia, “but the whole sensible appearance of things
Qomnes rerum temporcdium species) in the lotus flower; so
men forget their own land, which is God, the country of

16 Hauréau, Notices et Extraits, iv. p. 155.

17 Thurot, op. cit. p. 202. Jacques is quoting Isidore of Seville,
De Sum. Bon. c. 13.
18 Greg. Evist. ix. 54. The jest is Hauréau’s. See Poole, Illustra­
tions of Mediaeval Thought, p. 7. Yet in justice to Gregory, Gra-
tian explains that he rebuked the bishop not because he taught
grammar, but because he taught it in place of the Evangel.
( Decret. i. Dist. 37, c. 8.)
 The Pagan Learning • xix
us all.”10 “The whole sensible appearance of things,”—it
is the mystics dread, Buddhist or Christian, of the Great
Illusion, and in a single sentence Paulinus has pierced to
the secret antagonism, deeper than any occasional wanton­
ness or cult of the gods, between the old poets and the
new faith, has revealed unconsciously that which is at
once the weakness and the strength of Latin literature, its
absorption in the actual. For with what else but “the
sensible appearance of things” is that literature concerned:
at its greatest in Lucretius' “austerity of rapture,” denying
all that lies beyond the flaming ramparts of the world; at
its loveliest in lines from the Georgies, the blue smoke
mounting at evening from the little farms, and the shadow
of the hills on the plain. “How shall I be rid of these
things?” says the novice in Cassian's Dialogues. “At mass,
in the very act of contrition, the old stories flaunt before
my mind, the shameless loves, the sight of the old heroes
going into battle.”20 They accused Jerome of breaking his
vow never again to read the poets, when reminiscences of
them crowded every page, and he made answer that he
must needs drink of the water of Lethe if he is to forget.
“Dye your wool once purple, and what water will cleanse
it of that stain?”21 There is a poet in Jerome buried in the
theologian, and his metaphor is absolute for mediaeval
literature.
Remains, that the Church continued to teach the clas­
sics; that only for the Church, the memory of them would
have vanished from Europe. It is true that scholarship
took long to recover from Gregory's aversion: like his own
story of the horse that was lent to Bishop Boniface, and
was never the same again “after the session of so great a
pontiff,” 'post sessionem tanti pontificis,22 But Gregory
himself had a hearty belief in education: and education19

19 Migne, P.L. bd. Epist. 16. 20Ih. xlix. 74. 21lb. xxii.
“Apol. ad Lib. Ruf/' 30. 22Greg. Dial. iii. 2.
XX Introduction
for the sixth century meant the Roman training for the
Forum.33 The Church inherited the Roman respect for
eloquence. “The holy writings do not teach the art of
eloquence,” said Socrates the Historian, “and by elo­
quence a man defends the truth.”34 St. Jerome confesses
that for long enough the uncouth style of the Prophets
grated upon him; even after a night of contrition and
agony one sees him reaching for Plautus as a man reaches
for his pipe.33 S t Peter Damian owns to the same dis­
taste.36 It is to be remembered that the Vulgate, with all
its greatness, is not the masterpiece of Latin prose that the
Authorised version is of English; and the mediaeval
scholar had more critical sense than he has credit for.37
‘T o forbid wholly the reading of the pagan authors,” says
Gratian, “is to cloud and weaken the intellect.”33 Augus­
tine is strong for rhetoric as a liberal discipline, and would
have you spoil the pagans of their grace of style as the
Israelites spoiled the Egyptians.39 “Better grammarians
than heretics,” says Abelard briefly, therein quoting Isi­
dore:30 and Clement I insists that secular learning is
necessary to the right understanding of Holy W rit31
Gregory himself in a passage so extraordinary that its
genuineness has been questioned, comments on the Isra­
elites going down to the Philistines to sharpen their

"S e e Boissier, La Fin du Paganisme, i. 171-304.

"Soc. Hist. Eccles. iii. 16.
"Jerome, Efist. xxii. Migne, P.L. xxii. c. 416.
" Migne, P.L. 144, c. 85z.
" See John of Salisbury’s account of the teaching of Classics at
Chartres, Metal, i. 24, and his own appreciation of the style of
Ecclesiastes (iv. 3$). Also Peter of Blois, Ep. 76, rebuking his
poetic namesake, who had declared the speech of the Gospels
“durum, insipidumin, infantilem.”
" Gratian, Decret, i. 37, c. 8.
"Augustine, De Doct. Christ, ii. 37; ii. 17; ii. 40.
"M igne, P.L. 178, c. 1043. The whole question is argued by
Abelard in the Introductio ad Theologiam, ii. cap. 1, 2, and again
less favourably, in Theol. Christ, ii. (Migne, 178, c. 12 0 6 -12 11).
“ Clement I, Epist. 4, quoted by Gratian, Decret, i. 37, c. 14.
 The Pagan Learning xxi
knives, and explains it by the Christian use of the pagan
learning. Christian simplicity is in the heights; pagan
learning is in the plain; we go down to the Philistines to
make subtle our wits. Moses was learned in the wisdom of
the Egyptians: Isaiah, the greatest of the prophets, was
urbanus et instructus, a gendeman and a scholar; St. Paul,
the Aposde par excellence, as versed in secular letters as
afterwards in spiritual.82 And so, in spite of Gregory’s de­
fence of his own bad grammar, which one gathers was
partly due to indigestion as well as to holy zeal,88 the di­
vine oracles continued to be subject to the rules of
Donatus, and Priscian continued to illustrate for genera­
tions of schoolboys the nominative absolute and the deter­
rent paradigm by lines and half-lines of pagan poetry,
sometimes incendiary enough. Alexandre de Ville-Dieu
at the beginning of die thirteenth century fell foul of the
old grammars and wrote a new one, illustrating as far as
possible from Christian poets.84 Gone the great names of
Hector and Achilles and Agamemnon: he exercises his
faculty and the quantitative rules on Melchisedech and
Noah and Abimelech. His grammar, the Doctrinale, had
an immense success. "The old apostate” fell into obscurity:
and one consequence of it is the trough into which Latin
scholarship descended in the prose of the fourteenth cen­
tury.86
Ermenrich of Ellwangen was no humanist, even for the
ninth century, unless his anxious disclaimer of any regard
for Virgil leaves him a litde suspect; but he is sound on
the function of the classics in education. Writing a gram­
matical treatise to the Abbot of St. Gall, he suddenly be­
comes conscious that he has quoted an inordinate number

"Migne, P.L. 79, c. 356.

“ Migne, P.L. 75, Praef. Moral, c. 516.
** Alexandre de Ville-Dieu, Doctrinale, ed. D. Reichling (Kehr-
bach, Monumenta Germaniae Paedagogica, Bd. xii. 1893).
“ See the mocking praises of the Doctrinale in the Epist. Obsc.
Vir. i. 6, 7, 9, 18; ii. 46.
xxii Introduction
of times from the pagan Virgil, and hastens to clear him­
self. “Not that I have any wish to see him, whom I believe
to be in a Very Bad Place, and besides the sight of him
terrifies me. Often indeed when I have been reading him,
and after reading put him under my head, in that first
sleep which should be sweetest after toil, comes to me a
dark monster carrying a codex with a pen behind its ear
as one about to write, and mocks at me . . . but I wak­
ing sign the cross and hurling the book far from me again
give my limbs to sleep. . . . Let us leave him, my father,
let us leave him, liar that he is, sunk with Apollo and the
Muses in the foulest swamp of the Styx. There let him
hug Proserpine and listen to Orpheus fiddling for his
Eurydice from the infernal gods. . . . The King of
Heaven sets his curse on suchlike leasings. W hy then do I
harp upon them? . . . Since even as dung spread upon
the field enriches it to good harvest, so the filthy writings
of the pagan poets are a mighty aid to divine elo­
quence.”86 It is not a handsome metaphor, but it is very
near being absolute.
How to manure the right seed, without turning it into
the degenerate plant of a strange vine, was the problem of
mediaeval scholarship. "The songs of the poets are the
food of demons,” says Jerome, “the pagan learning, the
pomps of rhetoric; their suavity is a delight to all men.
. . . The very priests of God are reading comedies, sing­
ing the love songs of the Bucolics, turning over Virgil:
and that which was a necessity in boyhood, they make the
guilty pleasure of their maturity.”37 T he better the
Ciceronian, the worse, as a rule, the Christian.88 The lan­
guage of the Missal was the language of Virgil and Ovid;
and Virgil and Ovid are the great enchanters. Now, it
was Dr. Opimian’s view that a bald head in women is a*

**E. Dümmler, Efist. Ermenric. ad Grim. p. 29.

mJerome, E-pist. xxi. Migne, P.L. 22, c. 385-6.
“ lb., Epist. xxii.
 T he Pagan Learning xxiii
wise precaution against solicitation: that Venus, hairless,
has no power against the heart. With something of the
same conviction St. Jerome lighted on the text in Deuter­
onomy setting forth the conditions on which an Israelite
might take unto himself a captive maid, and applied it to
pagan poetry. 'Whatsoever is in her of love, of wanton­
ness, of idolatry, I shave; and having made of her an
Israelite indeed, I beget sons unto the Lord.”30 That text
is the most popular quotation of orthodox scholarship for
the next eight centuries. Yet by some miracle the goddess
escapes disfiguring; even as the statue of Venus which
Magister Gregorius saw in Rome escaped the holy zeal,
multo sudore, of the Blessed Gregory. It was a statue of
the goddess as she showed herself to Paris in the fatal
judgment: "and that image was fashioned of Parian
marble with so marvellous and inexplicable art that rather
did she seem a living creature than a statue. Blushing she
stood . . . and it seemed to the beholder that the blood
manded in that snow-white face. And because of her
amazing beauty and I know not what magical persuasion
I was drawn three times to visit her, though she was dis­
tant two miles from my lodging.”40 “Nescio quam ma­
gicam 'persuasionem“: the history of it is the history of
mediaeval lyric.

II
But "to come to a more ordinary opening of him,” as
Sir Philip Sidney would say, what was the fonds classique
of the average twelfth century scholar? Here again it is
dangerous to go for evidence to John of Salisbury's library:
he would be a scholar in any age, and was head and
shoulders above his own. Even two smaller men, Alex­
ander Neckam and Eberhard the German, who both drew

89lb., Epist. lxx. P.L. 22, c. 666.

40Magister Gregorius, de Mirabilibus Urbis Romae, Journal of
Roman Studies, ix. 51.
xxiv Introduction
up courses in Arts, perhaps a little exaggerated their read­
ing: it is the eternal temptation of bibliographers. But
they were both practical schoolmasters. Not much is
known of Eberhard, except that he had starved as a stu­
dent in Paris and in Orleans, but found the Muses there,
and that he was a schoolmaster with no illusions about
his profession.41 His book, the Laborintus, written before
1280, comes at the very end of the great age of mediaeval
scholarship. But Neckam42 was an English scholar of
some distinction, taught in Paris in the last quarter of
the twelfth century ( “he knew the dty, even to its
stenches”4®), then in Dunstable, and died Abbot of Ciren­
cester in 12 17 ; an honest man, with a hearty faith in the
power of the decent mind to select.
Given the rudiments, Donatus is his threshold of
knowledge, and with Donatus one studies “that useful
compendium of morality which is vulgarly ascribed to
Cato” : Cato is the father of the copy-book headline, and
very valuable to students writing home,44 even more so to
the less scholarly parent making suitable reply. From
Theodulus let him pass to the “Egglogas” of the Bucolics,
the satirists and the historians, for Alexander believed
that hoys are apt to imitate the heroic. Statius he finds
jocund, the Aeneid divine, and he would have you read
Lucan, and know the horror of civil war; Juvenal is to
he treasured in the heart, and he would have one read all
Horace, Satires, Epistles, Odes, Epodes, and the Art of
Poetry; Ovid’s Elegies, and the Metamorphoses also, but
above all let you be familiar with the De Rem edio Amoris.

a Text edited by Fatal, Les Arts Poétiques du XII* et du XIII*

Siècle. 1923. Vide 11. 944-950.
“Afflixit corpus Parisiana fames. . . .
. . . Aurilianis, alumna
Auctorum, Musae fons, Heliconis apex.”
“ Haskins, Mediaeval Science, p. 356 et seq.
“ Ifc. p. 364.
“ B.N. MS. 1093, f. 82 V.
 T he Pagan Learning XXV

The Art of Love he does not mention, but no mediaeval

clerk who had Latin enough to spell his way through
Cato was likely to omit that book, which even Sir John
Paston owned, and lent, and earnestly desired again.
Some men of weight would withdraw the amatorious
poems and the satires from the hands of young men, but
Alexander thinks it enough to leave them with Virgils
warning,
“You gather flowers and fresh-grown strawberries,
Fly hence, O youths, a cold snake lurks in the grass."
Some would have it that the Fasti should not be read,
and here one catches an echo of the outcry against Or­
leans where Satan had his seat, and where Arnulf the
Redheaded lectured on the Fasti with a knowledge of the
intimacies of paganism that scandalised less erudite
rivals.45 Similarly, though Sallust and Tully, De Oratore,
and the Tusculan Disputations and De Fato, De Am icitia,
De Senectute are very commendable, and the Paradoxa,
the book De M ultitudine Deorum is disapproved by some.
Tully, De Officiis, is exceeding useful. Martial and Pe­
tronius contain much that is profitable, but much that is
unfit for any ear. The brevity of Symmachus begets ad­
miration. H e commends Solinus on the Marvels of the
World, and Sidonius and Suetonius and Quintus Curtius
and Trogus Pompeius [Justin] and Titus Livius and
Chrysippus, and you may find it profitable to read Seneca,
A d Lucilium and D e Quaestionibus Physicis and De
Beneficiis, nor are his Tragedies and Declamations un­
profitable. The student of Grammar should attend lec­
tures on the Barbarismus of Donatus, and the Major Pris-
cian and the book of Constructions; also Rémy and
Priscian on metre and quantity, and Priscian on accent,
although some deny his authorship. There follows a
further list for rhetoric (Cicero and Quintilian) and logic,

45 Hist. Litt. xxix. 576.

xxvi Introductum
music, mathematics, medicine, civil and canon law, and
finally, for the “mature scholar," theology, but the literary
texts suffice. Add to this from the gloss and from the still
richer list of Eberhard, Persius, Claudian, Plautus, Ter­
ence, a few writers of the Silver Age, Arator, Prudentius,
Sedulius, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Martianus
Capella, and half a dozen contemporaries, some of them
making their reputations when Neckam was a student in
Paris, but standard authors to Eberhard, fifty years later.
The list is at least respectable.
There are gaps, notably Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus,
and the great name of Lucretius, though the Byronic
glamour about the first three was well known, for to a
Love’s Assize of the twelfth century Catullus comes with
Lesbia, Propertius with Cynthia, Tibullus with Delio.46
The general impression is of an almost unfamiliar rich­
ness. The truth is that the Middle Ages profited imagi­
natively, if not in technique, by their use of the Classical
Apocrypha. The limitation of the classical canon has left
the average reader with the impression of a literature com­
posed wholly in the eighteenth century. Because Cicero
wrote as a senator should, and too many of Virgil’s lines
begin At pius Aeneas, and Juvenal’s best translator is Dr.
Johnson, and Horace’s wildest dissipations tinkle like the
teacups at Strawberry Hill, we have forgotten that Apu-
leius wrote as strange a novel of adventure as exists in
European literature; that Petronius created the only figure
on whom Falstaffs belt would even slackly have hung;
that Claudian, though something of a crustacean, achieved
in the “Old Man of Verona” a grey autumnal peace all
but comparable with the Leech-Gatherer; that the Pump-
kinification of the D ivine Claudius is funnier than
Byron’s Vision of Judgm ent; that the Copa Syrisca has
the sensuous cynicism of the eighteen-nineties, and a*

**Metamorphosis Goliae. Wright, Latin Poems attributed to

Walter Mapes, 27.
 The Pagan Learning xxvii
virility that they had not; that the Pervigilium Veneris
remained alone in literature till Keats wrote the Ode to a
Nightingale and the Hym n to Pan; forgotten, above all,
a score of lovely lyrics buried in the anthologies of the
sixth and ninth and tenth centuries:
“Lady Venus, what's to do,
If the loved loves not again?
Beauty passes, youth's undone,
Violets wither, spite of dew,
Roses shrivel in the sun,
Lilies all their whiteness stain.
Lady, take these home to you,
And who loves thee, love again."47
or, their first lines only:
“Dreams, dreams that mock us with their Hitting shadows,"48
“Canst thou paint a maid of such a whiteness
As Love himself hath made?"49
“Not fair enough is she that's only fair."50
“Laid on my bed in silence of the night,"51
“Sister art to Phoebus, Lady Moon?"62
“By day mine eyes, by night my soul desires thee,"53
ending with the sheer Shakespearean splendour of
“Still let me love, though I may not possess.”64
“Classical Latin poetry," says Rémy de Gourmont, “died
of the Virgilian perfection"; and there is truth in it,
though not as he devised.
Virgil himself they read as we do not, thanks partly to
a glut of inferior and more accessible romances. Dido,

47Anthologia Latina, i. 24.

48Anthologia Latina, ii. 651. 49Ik i. 23.
60Ik i. 479. n lb. ii. 697. 52 lb. ii. 693.
88lb. ii. 702. “ Ik ii. 712.
xxviii Introduction
Queen of Carthage, was the romantic heroine of the
Middle Ages. They could not read the Unes in Homer
where the old men on the wall hushed their swallows’
chattering as Helen passed by; they knew her only in
Dictys, sweet-natured, long-limbed and golden-haired, or
in the amazing flashlight vision of Virgil, crouching on
the steps of the Temple of Vesta in the light of the fires,
“Erynnis to her father’s house and Troy.” She is Absolute
Beauty, even as Venus generosa. But Dido they took to
their hearts, wrote lament after lament for her, cried over
her as the young men of the eighteenth century cried over
Manon Lescaut. St. Augustine broke his heart for her;56
and the schoolboy Alcuin, waking at night and watching
the devils nip the toes of the other monks in the dormi­
tory, called anxiously to mind that he had scamped the
Psalms to read the Aeneid.58 Nor in this do they show
their simplicity. To come back to Dido after much novel
reading is to recognise a great heroine in the hands of a
great novelist. From the first scene to the last—the gracious
welcome, self-possessed and royal, of the sea-tossed wan­
derers, the empty banquet hall with the lights out and the
household asleep, and the queen stealing down in the
light of the dying stars to lie huddled on the couch where
Aeneas that night had lain, the surrender in the cave in
the blackness of the thunderstorm, the night when the
owl cries with its note of doom, the pitiful sorrowful
dreaming in Virgil’s loveliest lines of herself always alone,
always abandoned, wandering on long roads companion­
less, seeking her people far from her own land, the last
murmur, her cheek crushed against the couch that had
been their bed—“At least I die”—they saw for the first
time “the ambiguous face of woman as she is.” It is the
romantic quality in Latin that captured the imagination*

* Conf. i. 13.
“ Jaffé, Mon. Alcuin, p. 7.
 The Pagan Learning xxix
of the Middle Ages, as well as of the Elizabethans; the
mystery of the untrodden wood in Lucan,
"Lucus erat longo nunquam violatus ab aevo,”
quoted by the seventh-century monk who wrote the life
of St. Sequanus, the wood of Statius and of Spenser,
"Not perceable with power of anie starre,”
the headland where the clouds rest, and the wearied stars,
"ubi prona dies longos super aequora fines
exigit atque ingens medio natat umbra profundo”
that is also the mount of Purgatory. They found there
too the sense of pity. The passages chosen for the eleventh-
century anthology that once belonged to St. Augustine’s
in Canterbury, were not the fights, but the laments, the
dream of Aeneas seeing the bloodstained corpse of Hector
with the poignant amazing cry
"O lux Dardaniae!”
the lament of the mother in the Thebaid for the child left
in the wood with its wide baby’s smile and small noises
of delight, of the young wife for the husband slain by her
brother—a situation like enough the Edda.67 Anatole
France was haunted all his life long by the vision of Dido
in the Fields of Sorrow, half-guessed, half-seen,
"Like him who sees the light of the new moon
Rising, or thinks he sees, faint through the clouds” ;
at seventeen he found in the forest of myrtles some sur­
cease of his own unrest. But the path was beaten long
before him,
“With footing wome, and leading inward farre.”
Yet, granted Virgil and Ovid, it is in the last three cen-

67The Cambridge Songs, edited by K. Breul, 1915, pp. 19, 18,

17 -
XXX Introduction
tunes of the Empire, the centuries of which the classical
scholar is rightly impatient, seeing only mere glimmerings
and decays, that the spiritual foundations of the Middle
Ages were laid. It is hardly possible to exaggerate their
importance; the centuries of Augustine and Jerome and
Ambrose; of the Confessions, the D e Civitate D ei, the
Vulgate translation of the Bible, the first of the Latin
hymns; the massive strategic common-sense of Gregory
the Great; the moulding of the Liturgy; the T e Deum;
the founding of the Benedictine order that kept the gates
of knowledge for Europe; the codifying of Roman law;
the inspiration of Cassiodorus to "utilise the vast leisure of
the convent" in copying manuscripts, and thereby open­
ing a window in the Middle Ages on a prospect like his
own Scyllaee, "a city set above the bosom of the Adriatic,
clinging like a bunch of grapes to the hillside, and gazing
at its pleasure over green fields and the blue backs of the
waves. It sees the sun at his rising, . . . the light is clear
and fair, . . . men go lightly there, sensu liberior / ’69
And in the smaller things, the every-day business of the
schools, they are the centuries of Donatus and Priscian,
the schoolmasters of Europe for a thousand years; of
Martianus Capella, sometimes the only text book, whose
Marriage of M ercury and Philology was famous even on
the Elizabethan stage; and though it bound on the Middle
Ages a grievous burden of allegory, yet after all was the
only wedding to which a clerk might legitimately go, and
had some sense of roses and precious stones and even the
spring meadows where the lambs go wagging their tails;
of Boethius’ translation of Euclid, his treatise on Arith­
metic and Music, his translation and comment on Aris­
totle, the “builder-oak” of scholastic philosophy; above all
his Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison, the book
of most serene and kindly wisdom that the Middle Ages

“ Cass. Variae, xii. 1 5.

 The Pagan Learning . xxxi
knew. Not Augustine himself breaks his mind upon eter­
nity as Boethius did.

“There is in G od, some say

A deep but dazzling darkness . . .
O for that night, that I in Him
Might live invisible and dim.”

That is Augustine's mood, at his height of abnegation;

but Boethius sees not so much infinite darkness, as a
multitude of quiet stars.

“If Light can thus conceal, wherefore not Life?”

No verse, not even Milton's, is so haunted with the

austere and sonorous music of their names; and in Theo­
doricus dungeon, in presence of torture and imminence of
death, the ex-senator steadies his soul on their unchanging
way,
“Look to the highest of the heights of heaven,
See where the stars still keep their ancient peace.”59

He is both mystic and stoic, but without the contempts

of either; a lover of life and unafraid of death, but neither
its shadow nor the light of the world to come has taken
from the greenness of the grass. It was fortunate for the
sanity of the Middle Ages that the man who taught them
so much of their philosophy, whose book was “for the
youngest in our schools,”60 was of a temperament so hu­
mane and so serene; that the maxime scrutator magnarum
rerum ,91 “mightiest observer of mighty things,” who de­
fined eternity with an exulting plenitude that no man
has approached before or since, had gone to gather violets
in a spring wood, and watched with a sore heart a bird
in a cage that had caught a glimpse of waving trees and

59De Cons. Phtl. iv. 6.

90Ser Lappo Mazzei, Florentine notary, xiv. cent., quoted by
Ker, The Dark Ages, 1 06. 61 Maximian, Eleg. iii.
xxxii Introduction
now grieved its heart out, scattering its seed with small
impotent claws.62 Two men wrote what might serve for
his epitaph, and revealed themselves in doing it:

“So by the Gothic Bacchanalian sword

Died Roman freedom: consul and exile, thou
Laid greatness down to win it in thy death.
. . . that intellect divine,
Naught yielding to the genius of the Greeks,
Doth hold the world in fee.”63

Thus far Gerbert, perhaps the most astute scholar and

statesman of the mediaeval popes. It is the Brutus in
Boethius that he reveres, the mens divina; it is for Dante
to recognise the diviner wisdom of the heart.

“Nessun maggior dolore

Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria,” 64

is a memory of “in omne adversitate fortunae infeli-

cissimum est genus infortunii fuisse felicem,”65 and his,
too, the ineffable sunrise at the end of the Paradiso,

“The love that sways the sun and the other stars.”66

Dante saw him among the twelve “living and victorious

splendours,”

“Here in the vision of all good rejoices

That sainted soul . . .
The body, whence that soul was reft, now lies
Down in Cieldaro, but the soul from exile
And martyr's pain hath come unto this peace.” 67

Yet the real achievement is that the soul had come unto

“ De Cons. Phil. v. 6; i. 6; iii. 2. 88Migne, P.L. 139, 287.

64Inferno, v. 121. 66Cons. Phil. ii. iv.
MCons. Phil. ii. 8. Paradiso, xxxiii. 145.
mParadiso, x. 124. J. Sandys1 translation.
 The Pagan Learning xxxiii
this peace before it left the body; had endured its travail,

‘T h is discord in the pact of things,

This endless war ’twixt truth and truth/'68

and found its reconciliation in what is perhaps the deepest

word of mediaeval philosophy or religion, “simplicitas
D ei,” the simplicity of G od.

68Cons. Phil. y. 3.
T H E W A N D E R I N G S C H O L A R S
 CHAPTER I

T h e Break with the Pagan Tradition

S t . A u g u s t i n e and Boethius brought the sense of infinity

into Latin prose: Latin verse began with it, in Lucretius,
and lost it again for centuries. And even in Lucretius, it
is rather the infinite of negation; a space that the swiftest
lightning leaves still in darkness; immortal Death to ease
our mortal life. After him, eternity becomes a sort of
superlative of time; an adjective for Rome, a compliment
to an Emperor, in the mood of Statius watching the stars
already crowding up to make room for Domitian; a lover’s
cry, holding his mistress, that for this the envious gods
deny us immortality; the long night for sleeping, una nox
dormienda, like Herrick’s
“All love, all liking, all delight
Lie drowned with us in endless night."

But the sense that besieges every gate and inlet of the
poetry of Donne, that leaves St. Paul beating about for
words of length and breadth and depth and height,
stumbling on the threshold of the fourth dimension, the
tanto oltraggio, the mighty outrage on the experience of
the human mind of Dante’s final ecstasy, of this it is
empty. By the middle of the fourth century the Vulgate
translation was not yet begun: Latin had a Virgilian cento
of the Life of our Lord written by a Spanish priest; a
shrill Apocalypse from the African Commodianus: in
Milan, the new and haunting cadence of the Ambrosian
chant, that melted the heart of Augustine but left him
2 The W andering Scholars
questioning whether religion might safely ally itself with
delight so exquisite of the senses. But the main current
of Latin verse went its way as peacefully as Ausonius'
own Moselle. Like him, it dallies in its old age not always
with the innocence of love: with anagram and compli­
ment, enamelled fragments of philosophy, the fading of
roses, the flavour of oysters. And suddenly, in the midst
of this lacquered correspondence, this pleasant Chinese
game of painted ivories, of flowers and characters and
dragons and seasons, the great wind blows. It broke upon
Paulinus, a middle-aged scholarly senator of some distinc­
tion in letters and some service to the State, of immense
wealth and married to a wife of rank and fortune equal to
his own, drove him into exile in Spain, to sell estates that
were themselves a little kingdom, and to end his days in
Noia, serving the altar of a village saint.
It was not a spectacular conversion. Even the sale of
the great estates, the regna Paulini,1 was done gradually,
without drama: there was no halt, dazzled with excess
of light, on the Damascus road. Paulinus wakened under
the countenance of eternity as a man might waken sleep­
ing out of doors at sunrise. But the finality of the experi­
ence is absolute. His old friend Ausonius wanders round
it, bewildered and estranged, fumbling for the key to it—
solitude, romantic scenery, that Spanish wife of his—
wringing impotent hands. But for all his vast gentleness,
Paulinus goes his way with a kind of instinctive fatality,
the terrible simplicity of a man walking in his sleep.
There is no agony of repentance, no great regret for the
past; “As a dream when one awaketh, so shalt thou
despise their image” ; no railing on mortality. It is hardly
substantial enough for that: “a shadow at sunset,” he
calls it, occidui temporis umbra. “Cry not to Apollo and
the Muses to bring me back; you call to deaf things and
1 Ausonius, Efist. 27. 116.
 Break with Pagan Tradition 3
vain, sine num ine nomina. . . . N o more do I seek the
word from woods and hill-tops, but from the Word . . .
God the source, God the kindling fire, . . . Flower of
God.”2
It is hardly fantastic to take the parting of these two
as the parting of the ways in literature. Ceci tuera cela.
Ausonius is the last of the untroubled age, the last to
whom Roman eloquence was as invincible as Roman
arms; he died before the legend of both was broken at
the sack of Rome in 410. H e had reason to believe in
eloquence: it had brought him from the chair of rhetoric
at Bordeaux to the consulate. Yet there is nothing of
the politician in Ausonius; he is very near Pliny’s defini­
tion of the scholasticus, "nihil aut est simplicius, aut
sincerius aut melius,”3 and his amazing honours were
due to nothing but an old pupil’s gratitude. Ausonius
and Sulpicius Severus, barrister and biographer before
Anatole France of the Desert Fathers, the father of French
prose although he writes in Latin,4 are the first represent­
atives in literature of the French haute bourgeoisie, per­
haps the most intellectual in Europe. In his old age
Ausonius wrote his Memoirs, the vie intime of a profes­
sional family, in a French university town: the father a
doctor, better read in Greek than in Latin (Ausonius’ an­
cestry is Gallic, not Rom an):6 the grandmother sunburnt
and strict, but kindly, the mother bonne ménagère, the

’ Ausonius, Epist. xxxi. 19-30, n o - 11 5 , 45-50.

* Pliny I. Epist. 3.
’ Sulpicius Severus, c. 363-425; bom at Toulouse; lost his
young wife and renounced the world, but not its humours. Vide
Dialogus I, on the five men in the desert, and one of them a Gaul,
confronted by half a loaf. “Fads inhumane qui nos Gallos homines
cogis exemplo angelorum vivere:—and anyhow I am convinced
that for the sheer pleasure of eating the angels eat themselves.*'
Migne, P.L. xx. c. 187.
'Ausonius, Epicedion in Patrem, 9.
4 T h e W andering Scholars
merry aunt Aemilia who was something of a garçon, with
a profound contempt for her own sex and for matrimony,
who studied medicine and died, still a bachelor, at the
age of sixty-three: Aemilia the Dryad, tender and young,
whose marriage torches lighted her to death: the dis­
tinguished uncle, the pride of the connection, barrister of
Toulouse and professor at Constantinople.6 Ausonius went
to college at Toulouse, but to literature rather than to law.
At twenty-five he is in the chair of rhetoric at Bordeaux,
and collecting material for yet another book of remi­
niscences,78kindly common-room gossip, without a spark
of malice to cheer it: at fifty-five, so famous that he is
summoned by the Emperor to take charge of his only son.
Valentinian was a violent man and kept bears, who were
believed to dine on those whom he disliked: but his own
cub was as gentle as the schoolmaster chosen to instruct
him, and when Gratian succeeded his father, there was no
honour in the empire too great for his old tutor. In the
four years between 376 and 380, Ausonius saw his father,
at ninety, honorary prefect of Illyricum, his son and son-
in-law proconsuls of Africa, his nephew prefect of Rome:
himself praetorian prefect of Gaul, including Spain,
Africa, and Southern Britain as well as France, and in the
next year consul, an eminence at which he never ceased
to regard himself with awe. In 383 the Emperor was as­
sassinated: Ausonius comes back from the noise of the
captains, not unwillingly, to Bordeaux, to settle down on
his farvum herediolum *—not so very little, for in tilth and
vineyard9 and wood there were a thousand acres—"the
nest of my old age”—to superintend the education of his
little grandson, grow Paestum roses, write his memoirs,

6Parentalia, 5. 2. 6. 25. 3.
7 Commemoratio Professorum Burdigàlensium.
8De Herediolo.
8 “To this day it boasts itself as Château-Ausone, one of the two
best of the St. Emilion clarets.” G. S.
 Break with Pagan Tradition 5
and engage in that kind of correspondence which is cir­
culated in manuscript among our private friends.
There is something Chinese about Ausonius. H e re­
minds one of half-a-dozen provincial governors in the
Dictionary of Chinese Biography: of Han Yü, whose
friends washed their hands in rose water before opening
the manuscript of his poems, and who rid his province of
a large and pestiferous crocodile by addressing to it a
written censure, committed to the river along with a pig
and a goat, a censure still regarded as a model of Chinese
prose composition: of Po Chü-i, sitting on the terrace
under the peach trees in blossom.

“Sometimes I sweep the flagstones of the terrace;

Sometimes in the wind I raise my cup and drink. . . .
Alone drinking, alone singing my songs.
I do not notice that the moon is level with the steps . . .
. . . The people of Pa do not care for flowers . . .
But their Governor General, alone with his cup of wine,
Sits till evening and will not stir from the place.” 10

Ausonius walks in his formal garden before sunrise, and

watches the frost sharp on the blades of long .grass and
sitting in fat globes on the cabbage leaves, and the Paes­
tum roses laugh at him.

‘T ell me now, did dawn come first, or roses?

Or did the Cyprian stain them from one shell?”

and so to the thought of their brief passing,

“So long as a day is long, so short is the life of a rose,”

and thence to the “Gather ye rosebuds” motif, which

Ronsard caught from him after twelve hundred years and
made exquisite, and the Cavalier lyrists more exquisite
10A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems; translated by Arthur
Waley, p. 152.
6 T h e W andering Scholars
still.11 He is a Roman citizen, but at heart a countryman
of the Gironde.
“What colour are they now, thy quiet waters?
The evening star has brought the evening light,
And filled the river with the green hill-side.
The hill-tops waver in the rippling water,
Trembles the absent vine and swells the grape
In thy dear crystal.”12
Cupido Cruciatur is the new romantic imagination work­
ing upon Virgil, himself romantic enough, and in one
passage he has set himself in direct concurrence with his
master, and surpassed him, even as Keats surpassed his
master Spenser. It is the Fields of the Sorrowful Lovers—
“They wander in deep woods, in mournful light,
Amid long reeds and drowsy-headed poppies,
And lakes where no wave laps, and voiceless streams,
Along whose banks in the dim light grow old
Flowers that were once bewailèd names of Kings.”13
This is that strangeness, without which beauty is not
made perfect.
u De Rosis Nascentibus, 9:
“ . . . caulibus et patulis teretes condudere guttas.
15. “Ambigeres, raperetne rosis Aurora ruborem,
an dant et flores tingeret orta dies. . . .
communis Paphie dea sideris et dea floris
praeripit unius muricis esse habitum. . . .
quam longa una dies, aetas tam longa rosarum. . . •
collige, virgo, rosas, dum flos novus et nova pubes."
“ Mosella, 192-5 :
“Quis color ille vadis, seras cum propulit umbras
Hesperus et viridi perfudit monte Mosellam,
tota natant crispis iuga motibus et tremit absens
pampinus et vitreis vindemia turget in undis."
u Cupido Cruciatur, 5-9 :
“Errantes silva in magna et sub luce maligna
inter harundineasque comas gravidumque papaver,
et tacitos sine labe lacus, sine murmure rivos:
quorum per ripas nebuloso lumine marcent
fleti, olim regum et puerorum nomina, flores."
 Break with Pagan Tradition 7
For his religion, Christian and pagan are words too
absolute: he will write of Easter or a Vigil of Venus with
the same temperate pleasure. Like Milton, he has an
exquisite self-regard. “Let me not be to myself a cause
of shame," says he in his morning prayer. “Take from
me the power of doing ill: give me the tranquil power
of doing good."14 His paganism is purely romantic: great
conservative that he is, he would no doubt have joined
with Symmachus in his appeal that the Altar of Victory
should be restored to the Senate House, but he would
never have conceived the sentence in which that appeal
comes to its close—"Not by one path alone may men come
at so great a mystery."16 The wife of his youth died after
a few years: he had written her a lyric in life exquisite
and tender;16 another after thirty-six years, tenderer still.
Lights 0’ love,
“Saucy, fair, and hard to please,
Strike her, she takes flight to kisses,”17
had beguiled his leisure, but not the emptiness of his
heart, and it cries out to her still. But her children are
with him, and his prayer is that in the last dark his ashes
may cry to hers that they yet live.18 It is his only im­
mortality.
But, in this again Chinese, it was friendship and not
love that broke his heart, and wrung from him his greatest
elegy. There is a vast and pleasant correspondence : to
“ Ephemeris, Oratio, 60-65:
“nec causa pudoris
sim mihi . . . male posse facultas
nulla sit et bene posse adsit tranquilla potestas.”
“ Symmachus, Epist. x. 3:
“uno itinere non potest pervenire ad tam grande secretum.”
“ Epigrammata, 40:
“nec ferat ulla dies ut commutemur in aevo,
quin tibi sim iuvenis tuque puella mihi.”
17 Epigrammata, 89, “caesaque ad oscula confugiat.”
“ Parentalia, ix.
8 T he W andering Scholars
Theon, commending the excellence and lamenting the
fewness of his oysters: to Theon, who will not come to
see him because he owes Ausonius 14 philips, witness the
I.O .U . written with reluctance; dear philips, if they are
to cost him his society; so pay up, or pay in kind with
your good company: to Theon, complaining of the bad­
ness of his verses, over against the goodness of his apples;
who would think they were chips of the same block? But
it is not for you to go to school, nor for a royal tutor like
me to teach the art of scribbling to a country bumpkin
like you.19 T o Symmachus, verses, after a night of wine
and Butes, “But do you read them also a little flown and”
—the incomparable word for that state of solution and
relaxation—"dilutior; for it is outrageous that a strictly
abstemious reader should sit in judgment on a poet a
little drunk.” 20 But to one man the tone changes; still
light-hearted, yet with an immense respect for a talent
that he believes greater than his own. Paulinus, governor
of a province and consul before he was thirty, was the
pupil of whom a Roman master dreamed: Ausonius is
never weary of recalling that in the consulship the pupil
had preceded his master. Now with political honours
behind him, he had come to settle down on the Aquitaine
estate, and follow the laurel of Apollo which no less surely
awaited him. One notes that Rome is no longer the goal
of poets, and the Midi with its tradition of Greek culture
will be the nucleus of light for centuries. It was De­
siderim at Vienne that the Blessed Gregory wrote in wrath
and grief, for that he sang the songs of Apollo, and the
grammarians of Toulouse argue over the vocative of ego
amid the crash of empires.21 There are four letters to

“ Ausonius, Epist. 15. 16. 14. 17.

*° Griphus: “sed tu quoque hoc ipsum paulo hilarior et dilutior
lege: namque iniurium est de poeta male sobrio lectorem ab-
stemium iudicare.”
“ Vergilius Maro, Epist. de Proti. (Teubner), p. 123.
 Break with Pagan Tradition 9
Paulinus, casual and gay, thanks for a new savoury, a
harassed bailiff, an exchange of verses, affectionate chiding
of the younger man’s reluctance to create.28 Then, sud­
denly, emptiness and silence. Paulinus had taken a sudden
journey into Spain, presumably on some business con­
nected with his wife’s estates, but no man certainly knew
the reason. He gave no explanation, took leave of no one,
not even so much as the salve of courteous enemies for
which Ausonius pleaded. No message came from him.
Lover and friend he had put far from him, and his ac­
quaintance into darkness. There followed four years of
impenetrable and cruel silence.
Four years is a long time at seventy, and Ausonius
loved him. Letter follows letter, of affectionate raillery
—a pox upon this Spain!—of passionate appeal that
checked itself for lack of dignity and still broke out afresh,
of bitter and wounding reproach.28 Yet it seems not wholly
to have been Paulinus’ fault, unless that he had de­
liberately gone into retreat so strait that no rumour from
his old world could reach him. At the end of the four years
three letters came to him by a single messenger, and he
hastens to make what amends he could.24 At best, it is
written from a great way off. Apollo, the Muses, the dusty
laurels, what were these to the man
“Whom Joy hath overtaken as a flood,"
whom ‘long eternity” has greeted with its “individual
kiss”? The small tuneful business of the old days is too
clearly the dance of gnats above a stream in summer.
Ausonius had not spared him; there is a trace of Rutilius
Namatianus’ bitterness against this new Circe of a religion
that made men’s minds brutal, not their bodies;25 but
"Ausonius, Epist. 19. 20. 21. 22.
“ Epist. 23. 24. “cum Pontius Paulinus iunior quartis iam lit­
teris non respondisset, sic ad eum scriptum est.”
“ Paulinus, Carmina, x.
"Rutilius Claudius Namatianus, De Reditu Suo, 519-526.
io T he W andering Scholars
Paulinus has no resentment. He has chosen. Henceforth
his mind is a torch, flaming through the secrets of eter­
nity.2® But his heart aches for his old master, and the
gratitude, all but adoration, he lavishes upon him might
have deceived most men. It did not deceive Ausonius.
The letter in which he makes answer is poignant enough;
but the superscription is more poignant still—‘T o Pauli­
nus, when he had answered other things, but had not said
that he would come.”27 Eternity? He words me, he words
me. One thing was clear to Ausonius:
“Nous n’irons plus au bois,
Les lauriers sont coupés.”
And this time he gives up argument, speaks no longer of
a lost career, of great promise starved, but pleads for love's
sake only.
“And so, Paulinus, you cast off the yoke—”
There follow pages that have only one parallel, the cry
from Po Chü-i in exile, four centuries later—“O Wei-chih,
Wei-chih! This night, this heart. Do you know them or
not? Lo Tien bows his head.” Then Ausonius falls to
dreaming; he hears the grating of the boat on the beach,
the shouting of the people in the street, the footsteps, the
familiar knock on the door.
“Is’t true? or only true that those who love
Make for themselves their dreams?”28
That wounding spearhead of Virgil reached its mark.
Paulinus answered in something like an agony of love
and compassion. Once again he pleaded the mystery that
no man sees from without: then the crying of his own
38Paulinus, Carmina, x.
37 Ausonius, E'pist, 25.
x Epist. XX V. lines 131--2:
“et sua praeteriens iam iam tua limina pulsat,
credimus? an qui amant ipsi sibi somnia fingunt?"
 Break with Pagan Tradition II

heart silenced the sober elegiacs, and he breaks into one

of the loveliest lyric measures of the ancient world.

“I, through all chances that are given to mortals

And through all fates that be,
So long as this close prison shall contain me,
Yea, though a world shall sunder me and thee,
‘Thee shall I hold, in every fibre woven,
Not with dumb lips nor with averted face
Shall I behold thee, in my mind embrace thee,
Instant and present, thou, in every place.
‘Tea, when the prison of this flesh is broken,
And from the earth I shall have gone my way,
Whereso'er in the wide universe I stay me,
There shall I bear thee, as I do to-day.
“Think not the end, that from my body frees me,
Breaks and unshackles from my love to thee.
Triumphs the soul above its house in ruin,
Deathless, begot of immortality.
“Still must she keep her senses and affections,
Hold them as dear as life itself to be,
Could she choose death, then might she choose for­
getting:
Living, remembering, to eternity.”20

After this there is silence. Whether Ausonius laid it to

his heart, or wrote again above it, “But did not say that
he would come,0 there is no showing. A few years saw
him go down to his grave, a shock of com fully ripe, full
of years and honour, his children and grandchildren to
mourn him: the same years saw Paulinus parish priest
of the shrine of St. Felix at Noia.

“To guard thy altar through the silent night,

And sweep thy floor and keep thy door by day,
And watch thy candles bum—”
Ä Paulinus, Carni, xi. For Latin text see Appendix A.
12 T h e W andering Scholars
“voilà le rêve de ce sénateur et de ce consulaire."*0 Year
after year his devotion to his saint brings an ode for his
feast, the 14th of January, cheerful and sweet, like a robin
singing in the snows: the loveliest written for that eternal
April of the heart which was to flower in the twelfth
century, the faint clear colouring of the first spring flowers,
crocus and almond blossom. But never again is he the
lark singing at heaven’s gate: never again so stung by
the lacrimae rerum, the blindness and the pain of solitary
hearts, the suffering divinity of human passion, as to
transmute its anguish into ecstasy.
There follow the idyllic years of a pastoral; scholarly
letters, poems passionate only in brooding on the Cross;
the story of how St. Felix brought back two pigs; visits
of great ones, bishops and scholars; his own episcopate.
Sulpicius Severus recommends a cook; he hears that all
Paulinus’ cooks have left him in disgust at his scanty fare:
wherefore he sends a slave, “innocent of pepper, but
maker of a good vegetable soup, a hard man on a garden,
and reckless in foraging for firewood. Take him as a
son.”81 The last legend of his life has him still in a garden.
In 410 when Rome had fallen and the broken rout of the
fugitives came streaming down past Noia, Paulinus spent
the last of that royal fortune in ransoming such as he
could of the prisoners, made bare even St. Felix’s shrine
to buy back St. Felix’s sons. At the last moment came
a poor widow, pleading for her only son: Paulinus’ hands
were empty, but he sold himself, bought back the boy,
and was shipped with the rest of the slaves to Africa.
He was a good man in a garden and lived happily with
*° Boissier, La Fin du Paganisme, ii. jp. 107:
“Et foribus servire tuis, tua Emina mane
Munditiis curare sines; et nocte vidssim
Excubiis servare piis: et munere in isto
Claudere promeritam defesso corpore vitam.”
Carm. xii. Migne, P.L. 61, c. 463.
“ Paul. Epist. XXii. Migne, P.L. 61, c. 255.
 Break with Pagan Tradition 13
the son-in-law of Genserie, no one knowing the rank of
the old man who brought fresh fruit and salad every day
to the table. Then the Vandal King came to dine, and
recognised trembling the face that he had seen in a dream,
the vision of his own judgment by such another: the
gardener was questioned, confessed his old dignity and
was sent back to Italy, and a ship-load of his fellow-
captives for indemnity. Gregory the Great tells it, not
vouching for the truth of it:82 but it is a gracious soil from
which such legends spring. The last act of his life blos­
soms in the dust; for on his deathbed this great lover of
Christ and H is Church restored to communion all those
whom for grievous error he had barred from the Sacra­
ments. Jews and infidels, says his biographer and disciple,
followed him to his grave, weeping as for their father.83
It is the most fragrant chapter in the history of the saints.

n
The sharp severance in the life of Paulinus is the history
in litde of the literature that came after: of Sedulius of the
Carmen Paschale, who had once been like to devote all
the force of his mind to vanity and secular studies, but the
mist cleared; his feet wandering in the deep thickets came
out at last on the flowering sward of God:84 of Sidonius
Apollinaris, patrician turned churchman a little, like John
Donne, against his will, and, again like Donne, misliking
the poetry of his youth, shepherding his people against
the shock of the Burgundian invasion, prisoner among the
barbarians for two years and thereafter adored by them,
a little to his own embarrassment—
“They do not come to you at dawn,
Breathing out leeks and ardour,
“ Greg. Dial. iii. 1. Migne, P.L. 77, c. 216.
“ Uranius Presbyter, De oh. S. Paul. Migne, 53, c. 860, 863.
“ Migne, P.L. 19, c. 535.
14 T h e W andering Scholars
Great friendly souls, with appetites
Much bigger than your larder—”86
holding at Clermont the last stronghold of Roman culture
in Auvergne, and dying at last in his cathedral, with the
wailing of his people in his ears. Ennodius, born at Arles,
brought up by Deuterius the grammarian whose reverend
bald head was as the moon in its fulness,36 whose boyish
dream it was to be numbered with the goodly company
of poets—“a poem swept me among the angelic host”—
and if he might attain thereto the world was under his
feet,87 came at the last to “hate the very name of liberal
studies.”38 “Those who seek Him from secular studies
He refuses not: but that we should go to them from
His brightness He will not suffer: one is the way and hard
that leads to Christ.”39 The scholar’s education as one
sees it in Ennodius’ college exercises40 was still purely
pagan, and the battle between the Muses and Christ, even
as it was for Anselm of Bisate long after, "either company
so sweet, so fair, my heart cried out for both.” In its
sharpness the gods who to the untroubled pagan, to
Claudian for instance, are little but machines, recover
something of their “faded splendour wan.” Sidonius Apol­
linaris saw Venus asleep with her cheek pillowed on her
rounded arm, and violets withering in her hair.41 This is
“ Sid. Apol. Carni, xii. Ad Catulinum.
“ Ennod. Carm. ii. 104. Migne, P.L. 63, c. 354.
mEnnod. Eucharist. Ih. c. 245. “Nam elevatus insanis succes­
sibus poetarum me gregi . . . indideram. . . . Angelorum choris
me fluxum et tenerum poema miscebat, et si evenisset ut essem
clarorum versuum servata lege formator, sub pedibus meis sub­
jectum quidquid coeli tegitur axe, cernebam."
“ Ih. Epist. ix. i.
* Ennod. Eucharist. Epist. ix. 9.
40Ib. Dictiones, 25. 20. 16. 26. 28.
41 Sid. Apol. Carm. x. lines 47-9:
“Dia recurvato demiserat ora lacerto
Mollia: marcebant violae graviorque sopore
Coeperat attritu florum descendere cervix.”
 Break with Pagan Tradition 15
not the dignified figure of the Aeneid, “vera incessu patuit
dea/' but Botticelli’s Venus, with “the roses browned a
litde at the stalk,” the tender dangerous goddess of the
mediaeval legends. Ennodius, who “hates the very name
of Uberai studies,” saw her asleep by the sea, and Cupid
coming to waken her, bitterly complaining,
"Rare in die vast fields of the centuries,
Rare is love's harvest:”
the grey cult of virginity has taken the colour from the
world. “Fear not,” says his mother, “the gods are never
so dangerous as when they awake from sleep.”42 And,
indeed, Venus is never so lovely as in the last centuries
of her defeat, when her last poets even as her first
'Tashioned the wave-bom Dione from wedding of
shower and spray.”43
T he old worn-out jest of the taking of Mars and Venus
in the net is fresh again. They gather roses for her,
soUcitous that the thorns will not prick those tender
breasts, spread her couch again, not with gold and purple,
but with hyacinths and violets: Cupid does sentry-go,
marvelling at the weight of Mars’ spear. And when the
old fraud is played again, and Vulcan’s chain-net falls
about the lovers, Mars will not try to break free, lest the
chains should hurt her wrists.44
For though the cypress is withering at the top, the
Latin genius is not yet sterile, and a new and lovely
rhythm comes to supplant the old, the trochaic tetrameter
of the Pervigilium Veneris, of “Amnis ibat inter arva valle
fusus frigida.” It belongs to the African school of the
fourth century, but only as to its godfathers, its literary
“ F.nnod. Carm. i. iv.
a Pervigilium Veneris, line 11 . “Fecit undantem Dionen de
mantis imbribus.”
“ De concubitu Martis et Veneris. Anthologie Latina, 253. Poet.
Lat. Min. i. 72.
16 T h e W andering Scholars
sponsoring, (or it is a far older thing than that. It was the
marching song of Caesar's legions,45 as old as the tramp
of marching men: and it was to have a long history.
Hilarius took it for the Church Militant: it reached
Ireland, where the legions themselves had never been, and
became the basis of most Irish metres:46 in the ninth cen­
tury it is a wild lament for the slaughter at Fontenay:47
at the end of the tenth century a wandering scholar sang
it in the Rhine valley.48 It sets itself again to trampling
horses’ feet, when Guillaume IX, Duke of Aquitaine, sang
to it “Qu’una donna s’es clamada de sos gardadors a
mei,”49 and then in Venice to a chamber melody,

“A Toccata of Galuppi,"

and so back to the soldiers again,

"Where the dawn comes up like thunder outer China

'crost the bay.”

But for the most part the old wom-out themes are set to
the old tunes: Dracontius in Africa, with his M edea,
Orestes, the obscure single-speech poets of the Poetae
Latini M inores. But the flame leaps highest before its final
sinking: it was left for an Etruscan, the subtle and lux­
urious race that was before Rome, to write the dirge of
Roman youth.
The Elegies of Maximian were a mediaeval school text;
so we gather from the indignant snorts of Alexandre de
Ville-Dieu, who eamesdy strove to supplant it with less
“ Suit Div. Jul. c. 49. "Milites eius inter cetera carmina qualia
currum prosequentes ioculariter canunt, etiam illud vulgatissimum
pronuntiaverunt, ‘Ecce Caesar nunc triumphat qui subegit Gal­
bas.’ ”
“ Kuno Meyer, Primer of Irish Metrics, p. xiii.
41 Coussemaker, Hist, de l'Harmonie au moyen âge, p. 86.
“ Cambridge Songs (ed. Breul), p. 54.
" Chansons de Guillaume IX Çed. Jeanroy), iii.
 Break with Pagan Tradition 17
inflammable matter.60 It was an odd choice for schoolboys,
for Maximian has the erotic psychology of Maupassant:
yet it is a stout heart that could warm itself at that fire.
It is one of the strangest documents of the human mind:
Ecclesiastes without its austere reconciliation: the “ossa
arida of the Valley of Dead Pleasures,” but no breath
from the four winds will blow upon these slain. One does
not read Maximian without a strange catharsis, a purging
by pity and—if not terror—fear: the legend of so many
mediaeval gravestones cries out from it: "As I am now,
so shalt thou some day be.” It is an autobiography, written
with a terrible sincerity, redeemed from over-intimacy by
the inhumanity of the art: a consummate egotism, aware
of every failing of its power, every circumstance and
squalor of its decline, mocking even the impulse that
drugs the present with its garrulous resurrection of the
past.
The stories are as short as Maupassant’s, and told with
his irony: the innocent half-idyll of his schoolboy passion
at sixteen, crumpling up under the older man’s shout of
laughter “In love, and chaste!” with yet one more twist
of mockery at the close; his early manhood, fastidious and
arrogant, bareheaded in wind and rain, swimming the
Tiber in winter, but able to drink Father Bacchus under
the table, swinging unmoved through the laughter and
hurried flights of the soft Roman dusk: his dream-love
of Candida, the dancer, seen for one night and dreamed
of for many, and every song she sang running in his head
—it might be Pendennis and the Fotheringay: the lament
for Lycoris, the love of his life, who left him, and here
the mood is for once not Gallic irony, but a heavy oppres­
sion of the senses shot through with the lightnings of the

“ Alexandre de Ville-Dieu, Doctrinale, 11. 3-4:

"Iamque legent pueri pro nugis Maximiani
quae veteres sociis nolebant pandere caris."
18 T he W andering Scholars
spirit that is nearer Donne than anything in Latin litera­
ture: the brief St. Martin’s Summer of his Embassy at
Constantinople, and the Greek who once again beguiled
the Etruscan, and kindled the white ash to a momentary
fire. It sank again: the girl falls to sobbing on the floor,
and he to watching, grimly assuring her of a more ade­
quate lover. She rounded on him, ‘I t is not that! It is the
general chaos of the world,” youth for the first time face
to face with the knowledge that "this also will pass,”
the blankness of annihilation. Then comes the last elegy,
the waking from the drug of memory, his cry on sluggish
Death—
T rise, a corpse already wept, and live,”
Rome’s ghost since her decease.

m
If the “crépuscule des dieux” still lingers in the sixth
century in Rome, the “rear of darkness thin” had long
been scattered in Spain. It is characteristic that Pruden­
tius should begin his Book of Hours with a song for cock­
crow, for the simplicity, the clarity of his verse has some­
thing of that knife-edge cleaving of the darkness. He
came to poetry late, after a lifetime of law and of high
office under Theodosius, the great Spanish gentleman
whose life Ties like a ruined sea-wall amidst the fierce
barbarian tide.”61 At fifty-seven, Prudentius renounced
the world: entered the cloister, and with it the kingdom
of heaven. H e has the directness, the closeness to the
object that is part of the physical necessity of childhood,
and the experienced wisdom of old age. Blake has it, in
whom the child and the Ancient of Days have equal
parts: there are traces of it in the later work of Thomas
Hardy. Compare with "T he Oxen,”
“ Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, i. 587.
 Break with Pagan Tradition 19
“yet I feel
If some one said on Christmas Eve
Come, let us see the oxen kneel
. . . I should go with him in the gloom
Hoping it might be so”

the first verse of A d Gallicinium ,

“Thence is it, as we all believe,

At this same hour of quiet,
The jocund crowing of the cock,
Christ came back from the lower world.”62

The verse is so simple that there is no translating it.

Paulinus of Noia has a slow sweetness that gives a more
cumbered language time to overtake him; but here, to
add a word for the sake of accent or rhyme is to smudge
the outline. Again, in the Hymn for M orning—

“O Night and Dark,

O huddled sullen clouds,
Light enters in: the sky
Whitens.
Christ comes! Depart! Depart!

“The mist sheers apart

Cleft by the sun's spear.
Colour comes back to things
From his bright face.”53

One is a long way from rosy-fingered Aurora and the

quadriga of Apollo; but not so far from dawn. Easter
E ve has the clear shining of the sixth century mosaics in
San Apollinare Nuovo at Ravenna, where virgin after
white virgin stands with scarlet anemones and lilies at her
feet, in a field of living green.
“ Prudentius, Cathemerinon, i. lines 65-69. Migne, P.L. 59,
c. 781. See Appendix A.
" Cath. ii. 11. 1-8. Migne, P.L. 59, c. 785. See Appendix A.
20 T he W andering Scholars
‘T h e earth is sweet with roses,
And rich with marigold,
And violets and crocus
Are wet with running streams. . . .
“And through the grassy meadows,
The blessed spirits go,
Their white feet shod with lilies,
And as they go they sing."54

Loveliest of all, the Burial of the Dead.

“Take him, earth, for cherishing,

To thy tender breast receive him.
Body of a man I give thee,
Noble even in its ruin. . . .
“Once again the shining way
Leads to ample Paradise,
Leading to the woods again
That the Snake once lost for men.
‘Take, O take him, mighty Leader,
Bring again thy servant's soul
To that house from which he wandered,
Exiled, erring, long ago.
“But for us, heap earth about him,
Earth with leaves and violets strewn,
Grave his name and pour the fragrant
Balm upon the icy stone."55

Prudentius is not an innovator; Ambrose was before

him in rhythm, Hilary in rhyme. But his verse has more
of the swiftness of the lyric, less the tread of the proces­
sional chant. His Hym n for M orning is even the first
aubade, though its cry is to the faithful heart, rather than
to the sleeping lover. And in his Book of Martyrs he un­
locks the treasure of the Golden Legend, the Lives of the
**Cath. V. 11. 11 3 - 1 1 7 , 121-25. Ik. c. 826. See Appendix A.
85 Migne, 59, c. 884-8. Cath. x. 11. 125 et seq. See Appendix A
 Break with Pagan Tradition 21
Saints that Anatole France knew (or the last and secret
hiding place of romance. It was a long time before love
captured the chansons de geste, of which the lives of the
strong saints, the “Athletes of God,”66 are the forerunners:
but here it waits on the very threshold, the basket of red
roses which the virgins trample under foot. The Church
might decry bodily beauty, but not in the persons of its
saints, and the first love scenes are the pleading of kings'
sons and emperors with these fair women, vowed to the
Eternal Lover. With what passion the scene of the re­
nunciation could be handled is realised in the thirteenth
century St. Alexis, when the young man, vowed to chas­
tity, comes on his wedding night to the room where his
bride is laid. H e stands there, looking down at her—

'Asses y ardent candoiles et lanternes.”57

The line is worth a page of passionate soliloquy: the

intensity of the silence in which one is conscious of the
quiet candle flame. That is eight centuries away: but
Prudentius has the promise of it.
So, in his most famous and most considerable work,
the Psychomachia, the Battle of the Soul, he has done
more than set the stage for the struggle between the
spirit and the flesh. The battle between the Virtues and
the Vices, suitably habited, is everywhere, after him, in
mediaeval literature. Herrad von Landsberg drew a pic­
ture of the rout of Luxuria for her nuns, the upset
chariot, the roses and the trampled violets.58 Faust sent
her, called Lechery by that time, packing from the stage,
to give place for the star-dawn of Helen, and in turn
became an allegory for the Renaissance. But they have
MBangor Antiphonary. Muratori, Anecdot. ix. 139.
w Li Roumans de Saint Alessin, 1. 125 (G. Paris, La Vie de St.
Alexis, Btbl. de VEcole des Hautes Etudes, vii. p. 225).
“ Hortus Deliciarum, Herrad von Landsberg (Soc. pour la Con­
servation des Monuments Historiques d'Alsace, 1901).
22 T h e W andering Scholars
fallen from their first grace on the Elizabethan stage«
This is Marlowe's “hot whore" as Prudentius saw her.
“Come from the confines of the sunset world,
Luxury, lavish of her ruined fame,
Loose-haired, wild-eyed, her voice a dying fall,
Lost in delight . . .
Flowershod and swaying from the wine cup,
Each step a fragrance."59
It is the first promise of La Belle Dante sans M erci.
“I met a Lady in the meads
Full beautiful, a faery's child.
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild. . • .
“1 made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone,
She looked at me as she did love
And made sweet moan."
“O strange new war!" cried Prudentius; for Love and
Pleasure and Beauty fought beside her, and their weapons
were violets and the petals of a rose. The day is all but
lost, when Temperance holds up the Holy Rood—
“Dat tergum fugitivus Amor—"
he was to run the Middle Ages, with a price upon his
head; Pleasure flies, heedless of the sharp stones under
her tender naked feet; Luxuria dies choking at the feet of
Faith, and the story ends in a triumph through the shout­
ing streets.
The value of it is deeper than the provision of new and
decorative machinery for poets; deeper than its lesson
for faith and morals. It is the first artistic expression of
the eternal problem, of Spenser's Faerie Q ueene, of Keats's
H yperion. This is no fight with dragons, of ugly lusts
wMigne, P.L. lx. c. 46. See Appendix A. Psychomachia, 1L
310-320.
 Break with Pagan Tradition 23
conquered by ugly things, but the harder problem for the
artist, the strife between Beauty and Beauty, the one
destructive of the other. And the solution, for Prudentius,
as for Spenser, as for Keats, is not the hideous mortifica­
tions of St. Simeon Stylites, but the vision that Marlowe
caught at in a half-realized symbol—
“Women and unwedded maids
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than have the white breasts of the Queen of Love”
—the vision of "Beauty not as luxury but as power.”
Once again for this austere and gracious allegory, as for
so much of its mysticism and its chivalry, its ardours and
endurances, the world is in debt to Spain.
 CHAPTER 11

Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège

i
F o r t u n a t u s had his name out of a fairy tale: a good
name for a man who was to be a sort of Mercury between
two worlds. He had his youth and his learning in
Ravenna: when he left it, it was to step into a world where
the barbarians were masters, except where Gregory in
Rome was building, without sound of axe or hammer, a
stronger house than Caesar’s: in North Italy the Lom­
bards: the Goths in Spain: the Burgundians in Auvergne:
the Franks in France and the Low Countries: and on
every frontier the menace of the Huns. Yet the barbarians
are no longer officially barbarians. Cassiodorus did a sym­
bolic act when he sent a lute player to Chlovis in France,
with the pious hope, aside to Boethius, that he might have
the efficacy of Orpheus on the brutes.1 The Church taught
the good monsters language, and their profit on’t was they
knew how to swear and also to write verses. By the end
of the sixth century Chlovis’ grandson Chilperic is figur­
ing on the portal of Notre Dame as Apollo, lyre and all,2
and adding four new letters to the alphabet, demanding
even that the old manuscripts be pumiced over, and re­
written with the improved spelling. H e even wrote verses,
about which Fortunatus was polite in other verses, though
Gregory of Tours said they went on lame feet.3 His father,
Clothar I, captured a child princess in a raid on Thuringia,
killed her kinsmen and brother, and had her formed in
1 Cassiodorus, Variae ii. 40.
* Ozanam, La civilisation chrétienne chez les francs, p. 417.
* Gregory of Tours, Hist. Franc, vi. 46.
26 The W andering Scholars
Latin letters, to make her the finer for his palate, to find
in the end that he had fashioned the exquisite St. Rade­
gunde of Poitiers. His brother Sigebert married Brunhild
of Spain, and to the wedding of names straight out of a
saga came Venus and Cupid, doves and wings and zone
and all. They were part of the baggage that the last of
the Italian poets brought with him to the North.
No one knows what errand brought him out of Italy.
Bom near Trevisa, he licked up, as he says himself, a few
drops of grammar and rhetoric at Ravenna, and lost a
little of his rust on the grindstone of the law.4 There, too,
he came near losing his eyesight. But a drop of oil from
the lamp burning before the shrine of St. Martin in the
church of St. Paul and St. John restored it;6 and possibly
a visit to the sovereign shrine of the saint at Tours was
the original motive of a sentimental journey a little like
Sterne's. At any rate, the wedding of Sigebert and Brun­
hild found him at the Frankish Court in time to write
them an Epithalamium:6 the “seven feet of patron" does
not scare Him, as it scared the Muse of Sidonius Apol­
linaris.7 His does not cough even at the name of Gogo,
frim icier of one of the barbarians, and by way of being
a poet himself.8 Fortunatus wanders through the terrifying
courts of the giants, a little like Gulliver, timid, gay, and
ready to admire, and his experiences, for the most part
happy, gave him material for eleven books of collected
verse. His wanderings brought him to Poitiers where
Radegunde lived in the abbey she had founded, “an
angel-watered lily." It was an apple-orchard in blossom
to his luxury-loving, exquisite and peaceful soul: he
4Vita S. Mart. i. 25-35.
§Ih. iv. 687-701.
6Carm. x. 16; vi. 1.
TSid. Apoi. Carmina, xii. Ad Catulinum:
“ How can I write a six-foot line
With seven feet of patron?”
8Carm. vii. 1-4.
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of 'Liège 27
settled down beside her, was ordained priest, and ended
his days as bishop, a life so gende and blameless that they
made him a saint. H e loved Radegunde and Agnes, the
"daughter of her spirit,” as Cowper loved Mrs. Unwin
and Lady Hesketh, and when ill tongues said ill things
about their intimacy, he cleared himself to her in a poem
that is not yet cracked in the ring.9
His admirations are without number: and if he did
not include his own verses among them, he enjoyed him­
self in writing them as few poets do. His life of St. Martin
is the pipe of the least of his sparrows, he says: but it
has immense zest. If St. Martin is going to cure a leper,
never a leper so foul: the kiss that heals him has the
waters of Jordan in it. The scene at the Emperor’s Ban­
quet spurs him to terrific efforts of upholstering; but at
the vision of the Bridegroom the verse marches in a kind
of carapace of precious stones. The doors of Zion set him
off again: no renaissance tyrant, no Jew of Malta, gloried
in jewels, their colour and sound, as Fortunatus did. In
the fields, his thumb breaks off lilies and his nail snaps
off roses, and he walks on violets and finally goes to sleep
amid all odours at once.10 At the last, the coat he has
made for Martin is poor rough stuff, camelskin: it ought
to be silk and gold thread, amethyst and white, with a
crown of roses and lilies and precious stones.11 But any­
how, go, little book, and ask your pardon at Tours, and
thence to Paris, and trot through Italy, with greetings
from Fortunatus to his friends and genuflexions at the
tombs of the saints, till you come to Ravenna, to the
church of St. Paul and St. John and the shrine of the
Blessed Martin: and there abide.12
“Go, little book,” said Sidonius, a century earlier, “but
• Carni, xi. 6.
10Vita S. Mart. iv. 1—6.
u Ib. iv. 621-30.
“ Vita S. Mart. iv. 630-712.
28 T h e W andering Scholars
take not the great roads whose arches are marked with
Caesar’s eternal name : take you the little familiar ways.”13
It is the little byways that Fortunatus made accessible to
men for whom die Roman road of the epic was too stately.
He left the fashion for those litde letters in verse that are
so great a part of monastic literature, and that once or
twice, in Notker, in Walafrid Strabo, in Hrabanus
Maurus, even in Alcuin, come very near great lyric. His
influence is everywhere in the earlier Middle Age: and
when Angilbert attempts his shadowy forecasting of the
Chanson de Roland, the hunt and the vision of the Holy
War, he is thinking of Fortunatus, rather than of Virgil.14
Sensitive and swift, a great occasion moved him to great­
ness: the coming of the relics to the church at Poitiers
(always a moment of high and terrible emotion), gave
him the inspiration of the greatest Processional of the
Middle Ages, the "Vexilla Regis prodeunt” that became
the chosen hymn of the Crusaders.15 Both this and the
other ‘Tange lingua gloriosi” are a mystic’s Dream of the
Rood. It is not as the Latins took it, the symbol and
the sign: to Fortunatus, it is still the tree as it grew in the
forest, foredoomed to its great and terrible destiny. In
Northumberland again comes the Dream of the Rood,
again in Cornwall. It is the dream of men who later made
their cathedral aisles in the pattern of forest rides, in
whose mythology, the mind of the race, not of the in­
dividual, was the other sacred Tree, Ig-Drasil, where
Woden hung for nine days and nine nights that he might
solve the riddle of the world. Radegunde came of that
stock: and she was his finest inspiration.
He wrote for her, kindled by her passion of pity, the
“ Sid. Apol. Carm. xxiv. Ad Libellum, 11. i—10.
“ Tardi, “Fortunatus et Angilbert.” Archiv. Lat. Med. Aev.
1925. P- 30 .

u Dante took it for the opening line of the last canto of the
Inferno, "VexUla regis prodeunt Inferni.” I am indebted for the
reminder to Professor Saintsbury.
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of ‘L iège 29
story of the little Spanish princess, brought north to marry
Chilperic, and in a year so foully murdered by his mis­
tress.18 Her mother comes with her as far as Toledo, and
there must turn. And the parting, haunted as it is, is
agonising.
“Who will come running now, arms held out, for my
kisses?
. . . Big as you were, I carried you, so dear, so light.
So many times I kissed you, in your sleep . . .
You gone, it is from other children’s faces
That I must kiss the tears.”
She was too innocent to hold a man who had known
Fredegunde’s satisfactions: in a few years her small trag­
edy was forgotten, and Fredegunde side by side with
Chilperic at the Synod at Bemy Rivière. One could have
spared the felicitations of Fortunatus on that occasion,17
but he was a courtier poet. He writes an epitaph, gravely
and gready, and his
‘Where are now the arms of Hector,”18
is not unworthy of its great descendant. But he is happiest
in the art that carves on a cherry stone, that fastens a
lyric on the handle of a basket of chestnuts to send to his
lady and abbess:19 he ransacks the garden for roses, but
can find only violets: may his love transmute them.20
H e loves good cheer and country things as Herrick did:
an indifferent poet, but an artist, and aware of every
fault he has. And in the grim if humorous world of
Gregory of Tours, brutal and debauched, his aperçus
of lovely things, a green parrot on a tapestry, violets and
primroses on the altar at Easter, moonlight on a church
“ Carni, vi. 5.

"Ifc.ix. I.
“ II», vii. 12.
19lb. xi. 13.
“ lb. viii. 6.
30 T he W andering Scholars
floor,21 are proof that the sense of beauty lingered, even
in an age where Chilperic figured as Apollo.

n
Fortunatus died at Poitiers in 609: Gregory the Great
in 604: Isidore of Seville, leaving the Encyclopedia Bri­
tannica of the Middle Ages behind him as his monument,
in 636: and for a while it seemed that they had taken
Latin letters to their graves with them. It was low tide
on the Continent of Europe,22 except for one deep pool at
Toulouse where the grammarian Virgilius Maro agitated
strangely on the secret tongues of Latin, and told his story
of the two scholars who argued for fifteen days and nights
without sleeping or eating on the frequentative of the
verb to he, till it almost came to knives,23 rather like the
monsters one expects to find stranded in an ebb. It is
impossible that the tradition of Latin letters should be
forgotten wholly in Provence and Aquitaine. Yet the
Mediterranean is a tideless sea: and when the old learn­
ing comes again, it is with the urge of the Atlantic behind
it.
M any extravagant things have been written about the
Irish Golden Age: but in the sober scholar’s prose of
Bede, the story is miraculous enough. That fierce and
resdess quality which had made the pagan Irish the
terror of Western Europe, seems to have emptied itself
into the love of learning and the love of God: and it is
the peculiar distinction of Irish mediaeval scholarship
and the salvation of literature in Europe that the one in
no way conflicted with the other.24 Sedulius of Liège saw9 1

91Carni, iii. 13; viii. 7; iii. 7.

23 Gregory of Tours, Hist. Franc. Praef.
* Vergilius Maro Grammaticus, Ejpist. de Verbo (Teubner, p.
138). De Catalogo Grammaticorum, pp. 88-90.
“ Poole, Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought, p. io et seq.
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 31
Christ a more gracious Apollo.25 Zimmer has a theory
that Ireland, secure from invasion in the shelter of the
Four Seas, had long been the refuge of the timid scholars
of Gaul, driven like thistledown before the barbarian
blast, and that even in the fifth century the Irish schools
were notable. There is support for it in a casual reference
by Columbanus to the judgment of Irish scholars in the
fifth century on Victorinus of Aquitaine, the philoso­
pher.26 Also, still earlier, one remembers Jerome behaving
very like Dr. Johnson to Pelagius, “sodden with porridge”
as with heresy.27 At any rate, by the sixth century the
Irish schools were the most famous in Europe. The schol­
ars came by the old trade routes, the three days’ journey
from the Loire to Cork—in 550 a shipload of fifty landed
there—or up the Irish Sea to Bangor. That such a one
"forsaking his own country sojourned in Ireland for the
love of God and of learning” becomes a commonplace
of biography. Bede, writing of the great plague of 664,
speaks of its ravages among the scholars: “many of the
nobles of the English nation and lesser men also had
set out thither, forsaking their native island either for the
grace of sacred learning or a more austere life. And some
of them indeed soon dedicated themselves faithfully to
the monastic life, others rejoiced rather to give them­
selves to learning, going about from one master’s cell to
another. A ll these the Irish willingly received, and saw to
it to supply them with food day by day without cost, and
books for their studies, and teaching, free of charge.”28
They were not all of them saintly. St. Comgall had a
master whose way of life perplexed his ardent disciple
and grieved him: for he was a fine scholar “though of a
“ Poet. Lot. Car. iii. Sed. Scot. Carni, ii. 80.
" Epist. i. Migne, Ixxx, c. 261.
47 “Praegravatus Scotorum pultibus." Migne, xxiv. c. 682.
44Bede, Hist. Ecoles, iii. 27.
32 T he W andering Scholars
nature frail in pleasure.”2® Side by side with the innocent
story of the three clerks who went on pilgrimage to sea
without provision, that being God’s business, only that
the youngest said, “I think I will take the little cat” :
how they came to an island and halted there to recite the
Psalms for the day and the litde cat went down and fished
for them a great salmon: how they doubted, not seeing
the hand of the Lord in the paw of the little cat, untU
they roused again from their devotions to see the salmon
brandering on a fire of coals, which brought them too
near the shore of Lake Tiberias to doubt:30 and side by
side with the story of St. Brendan who would listen to no
harping since the day that the Archangel Gabriel in the
form of a white bird sat on the altar and sang to him,
leaving him deaf to all earthlier music,31 is another story,
the far-off anticipation of Heloïse and Abelard: of the
clerk who loved a nun, the handmaid of St. Molaisse:
and when her time came she sent him away, fearing his
curse upon her lover—‘I t is enough,” said she, “that I
should be ruined”—and herself faced the wrath of the
Sain t So it was she who was cursed, and she died in
childbed and was buried, not in consecrated ground, but
in the middle of the Bog of Leighlin: and her lover came
again to find her dead, and built himself a hut of wattles
beside the grave, and prayed day and night for her soul.
W hen more than a year had passed, S t Fursa came to
see his brother saint, and as they sat he asked him what
great saint was buried in the bog. “N o saint,” said the
outraged holy man, “but an idol, a devil of a nun.” “N ay
then, a saint,” said Fursa, “for I see a service of angels
between heaven and her grave.” So the dead nun was
lifted from her grave in the peat, and buried in holy

" Acta SS. X V . 581.

viii.
*® Whitley Stokes, Lives of Saints from the Booh of Lismore ,
“ Ih. xiii.
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 33
ground, and as for the clerk, St. Fursa took him with
him, and he became a holy man.32 The same St. Fursa
crossed the sea to England where he founded a monastery
in East Anglia, and thence to France, to die the patron
saint of Péronne.83 Cathaldus, patron saint of Tarentum,
was once schoolmaster in the monastery of Lismore, and
his office still recites the scholars of many nations who
came to hear him.34 Virgilius, Bishop of Salzburg and a
thing of dread to Boniface, because he lectured on the
antipodes which is to deny Christ and His Church, was
once Abbot of Aghaboe.35 They have an odd grace, the
names of wild earth side by side with the sophistication
of the older world, something of the strangeness of the
Irish glosses in the ninth century manuscripts of Berne
and Leyden and St. G all:88 “W e are from Inch-madoc,
Cairbre and I,” and most moving of all to one who re­
members the low grey ruins on the island in Strangford
Lough, “Mahee of Nendrum.”87 It is a long way from
the grey peace of Strangford Lough to the eagle’s perch
of St. Gall, but one manuscript went farther yet, to the
monastery of St. Paul in Carinthia. It is the commonplace
book of a scholar at Reichenau, but the compiler of it had
known one of those moments of detached and humorous
vision that are the salt of scholarship.

“ Whitley Stokes, Lives of Saints from the Book of Lismore, x.

“ Bede, Hist. Ecoles, iii. 19.
“ Ussher, Brit. Ecc. Ant. c. 16.
“ Todd, St. Patrick, p. 64. Gougaud, Les chrétientés celtiques,
p. 243. Annals of the Four Masters (O’Donovan), i. 391.
“ Vide Whitley Stokes, Thesaurus Paleohibemicus, ii. pp. xx;
xxxii-iv; 290-96. Lindsay, “Early Irish Minuscule Script,” St.
Andrews Univ. Pubi. vi. 1910. The Leyden Prisdan was written
by Dubthach and finished at three o’clock, n th April, 838. Is
this the same Dubthach who invented the Cryptogram of Bamberg
for the confusion of all scholars at the Breton Court? (Gougaud,
p. 244.)
"These are in the margin of the Prisdan MS. at St. Gall,
Codex 904.
34 T h e W andering Scholars
T and Pangur Bdn my cat,
T is a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.
“ T is a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.
“ ’Gainst the wall he sets his eye,
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
’Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.
“So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Bân, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.”38

The other half-obliterated fragment is less the scholar

than the exile dreaming at the fire.
T wish the wood of Allabair and Argatbran between
fire and wall. If this . . . may it be com and milk that
I see. If it be not . . . may it be wolves and deer and
wandering on the mountains and warriors of the Feni
that I see.” And this:
“My heardet: God from Heaven, He is the thatcher who
hath thatched it.
A house wherein wet rain pours not, a place wherein
thou fearest not spear points,
Bright as though in a garden, and it without a fence
round it.”89

Another Irishman came to Carinthia, and found small

hospitality there,40 but an equal sickness for home.
88Translated by Robin Flower.
39Translations in Thesaur. Paleohtb. ii. 293-4.
40 “Onward, where the rude Carinthian boor,
Against the houseless stranger shuts the door.”
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 35
“In all my wanderings round this world of care,
In all my griefs—and God has given my share—
I still had hopes my latest hours to crown,
Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down. . . .
Around my fire an evening group to draw,
And tell of all I felt and all I saw. . . .
And as a hare whom hounds and horns pursue,
Pants to that place from whence at first she flew,
I still had hopes, my long vexations past,
Here to return, and die at home at last.”

There are nine hundred years between: but “wandering,”

as Walafrid Strabo, secure in his garden at Reichenau,
wonderingly noted, was still “a second nature to the Irish
race/141
Reichenau itself, where Walafrid weeded his garden, if
not actually an Irish foundation, at any rate owed its
fame to its Irish scholars. For when St. Columba turned
his back on Derry with the lament that is the loveliest
of the older Irish poems, and founded his monastery at
Iona, it was the beginning of the other movement, the
centrifugal, and this is more important even than the first,
the centripetal, which had brought so many scholars to
the Irish schools. Their fame persisted:42 even in the
twelfth century St. Bernard of Clairvaux speaks with
honour of Bangor.43 Clonmacnoise at the end of the
eighth century had Coelchu, whom Alcuin himself called
Noster Magister, and writes him from Charlemagne's
court all the gossip of the journey and of recent politics,
“for I know you curious of such things. . . . I know not

41 Walafrid Strabo, De Mirae. S. Galli, c. 47. In Carm. 45 he

teases his friend Probus for his “Irish fashion” of going away.
u Higden has a story (c. 1050) of a famous scholar in Ireland,
Barbaras, a man of wonderful religion, who had a great school of
clerks “and lewd men and maydens,” but “for he schare the
maydens in manere of his scolers, he was put out of Ireland.”
Trevisa's Higden, vii. p. 183.
**Vita S. Malachiae, vi. Migne, clxxxii. c. 1082.
36 T h e W andering Scholars
wherein I have sinned, that for so long I have not de­
served to see the sweetness of your letters." Charlemagne
sends 50 siclos, Alcuin 50, and a phial of oil for consecra­
tion, “for I know it is hard to get it in Britain."44 Clonfert
on the Shannon, six times burnt, four times plundered by
the Danes, survived till the Norman invasion in 117 2 . In
the tenth century Maelbrighde, Abbot of Armagh, died,
“head of the piety of Ireland and of the greater part of
Europe,” said the Four Masters, which may well have
been, for the tenth century saw little piety anywhere else:
he had presented King Athelstan with a marvellously
illuminated gospel.48 But the claim of the Irish schools
is not so much in the intricate treasure of their manuscript,
as in the other pattern which they wove into the history of
Europe. Bangor, where Columbanus leamt the lighter
Greek metres and the secret of his exquisite and melan­
choly prose, has now Marine Gardens and a promenade:
Clonmacnoise, "St. Ciaran’s plain of crosses,” survives in
a few ruined arches, and the echoing beauty of its name.
But St. Gall is still a stronghold: and Bobbio, though
fallen on degenerate and illiterate days, yielded at the end
of the fifteenth century the remnants of a great classical
library.46 St. Martin’s of Cologne, where the Archpoet
saw his vision of the terra ridentium , the country of the
laughing, and praised the Abbot for his free hand in
wine,47 was an Irish foundation, restored to them in 974,
and only finally taken over by the other “Scots” in the

“ M. G. H. Efist. Car. ii. ep. 7. The intimacy of the letter sug­

gests a strong personal affection, as though Alcuin himself had
been a student at Clonmacnoise. Ducange rates the siclus at two
silver denarii.
“ Armitage Robinson, The Times of St. Dunsten, pp. 55-59.
MThere is a tenth century catalogue of the library at Bobbio: an
astonishing number of grammarians and real intelligence in the
method of entry. Muratori, Ant. iii. 43.
*' Manitius, Die Gedichte des Archipoeta, ix. p. 54.
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 37

fourteenth century.48 St. Peters of Ratisbon was founded

in 1076 by Marianus Scotus. St. James, built by the aid of
Conor O'Brian, King of Munster, in 111 9 , became the
mother house of a dozen Irish monasteries, in Würzburg,
Nuremberg, Eichstädt, Vienna, Prague.49 But the great
age is the century of Columba and Columbanus. Iona did
for England what the Roman Augustine failed to do. On
the Continent, Columbanus and his disciples founded
over a hundred monasteries, some of them the greatest
strongholds of learning in the Middle Ages: Luxeuil,
Bobbio, St. Gall, St. Bertin, Jumièges, St. Riquier, Remire-
mont. In fifty years they had accepted the kindlier rule of
St. Benedict, for the Rule of Columbanus was merciless
to human weakness—‘‘Let a man go to bed when he
sleeps on his feet before he reaches it"50—but it had the
positive austerity that is the driving force of the great
apostolates. Columbanus himself was an austere man, for
all his personal beauty:51 “prince of Druids," John of
Tritheim calls him :52 he confronted Brunhild, Fortunatus'
Brunhild, now wicked and old, like a second John the
Baptist, and was driven from France for it. But squirrels
came and sat on his shoulder and ran in and out of his
cowl: he was a lover of Ovid and beguiled his wistful old
age with experiments in Greek metres: and when Valery
the gardener at Luxeuil came into his classroom and
brought the smell of roses with him, Columbanus would
48 Haddan, Scots on the Continent ( Remains of A. W. Haddan,

g
p. 286-8). Wattenbach, Irish Monasteries in Germany, trans, by
eeves, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 1859, pp. 227-246, 295-
313-
49 Nuovi Studi Medievali, i. 228.
50 S. Columban. Regula Cænobialis, cap. ix. (Migne, 80, 216).
“Lassus ad stratum veniat: ambulansque dormiat, necdum ex­
pleto somno exsurgere compellatur.“
61 The Church has been an unconscious Platonist in insisting on
the beauty of her saints.
“ “velut olim Druidum princeps.“ De Script, Eccl. QOyera His­
torica, 1601, p. 244).
38 T h e W andering Scholars
stop in his lecture to cry, "N ay then, it is thou, beloved,
who art lord and abbot of this monastery.”58
It is to be observed of the Irish foundations that they
were built in solitary places and then made of them a
garden: the first reclaiming of the Vosges is the work of
the monks of Luxeuil. It would have been better for
literature if this craving for the soil which is the root and
ground of Irish poetry had taken seisin of their Latin
verse. It is too academic, for all its occasional loveliness:
poetry that is to be read “by strong men and thieves and
deacons” needs to touch the earth once in every genera­
tion. There is now and then a greenness in the dry tree,
a single verse in a tenth century love song, a whole lyric
early in the eleventh: but it is not till the twelfth that it
finds where its great strength lies. There is nothing in the
earlier Latin verse to equal the Exile Song by Columba,
the meeting of King Guaire and the hermit (tenth cen­
tury) or the fragment, once again a gloss from the Priscian
M S. of St. Gall.
“A hedge of trees surrounds me: a blackbird’s lay sings
to me, praise which I will not hide,
Above my booklet the lined one, the trilling of the
bird sings to me.
In a grey mantle the cuckoo chants to me from the tops
of the bushes.
May the Lord protect me from doom! I write well under
the greenwood.”54
The wisdom of Irish verse is the vision of Finn after he
had eaten the Salmon of Knowledge, not
"The triple temporality
Under the countenance of eternity,”
or Art on her knees to Nature craving the gift of life, or
any of the complicated visions of the great clerk Jean de
“ Vita S t Walerid. Acta SS. ist April, p. 18.
“ Translation in Thesaur. Paleohib. ii. 290.
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 39
Meung at the end of the thirteenth century. “Finn, what
do you see?” And he said that he saw May Day, and
swallows skimming and haze on the lake and the rushes
talking, heather and black peat, and the sea asleep.55
“What are the three lasting things?” they asked Cormac,
and the answer came, “Grass and copper and yew.”56
Their Latin verse is beaten copper: the Irish has the grass
and the yew. It is the incommunicable gift, incommuni­
cable in mere scholarship. But what the Irish scholars did
give, was their feeling for classical literature: their han­
dling, sensitive and fearless, of paganism. One sees it in
Columbanus, whose verse is a mosaic of the old mythology,
still more in Sedulius of Liège, two centuries later. He
is writing a song for the Nativity: the choir is to sing it
on Christmas morning.

“It is the time of snow, sparkling with light sincere:

The day that Christ was bom: it is the time of snow."

He tells the story: the kindly oxen, the patient Joseph,

the coming of the wise men from the East, with their gifts
of royalty and death. From the West now they come,
with no gift but their learning only. And Mary, says
Sedulius, does not say them nay.57

in
At first derivative, never wholly unaffected by the Irish
tradition,58 is the English tradition of scholarship. Bede
takes pains to show how much Northumberland and
“ Mac gnimartha Finn, edited in the Revue Celtique, v. 195
et seq.
“ Kuno Meyer, Instructions of King Cormac, p. 39.
“ P.L.C. iii. Sedulius Scottus, Carm. ii. xi. p. 179.
68Vide William of Malmesbury on the restoration of Glaston­
bury by Irish scholars, and his critical appreciation of twelfth cen­
tury Irish scholarship. (Stubbs, Memorials of St. Dunstan, pp.
256-7.)
40 T h e W andering Scholars
Mercia owed to the Irish scholars, but with the coming
of St. Paul's fellow-townsman, Theodore of Tarsus, to
the see of Canterbury with Hadrian the African as his
scholasticus, the schools of Canterbury begin to rival those
across the Irish Sea. So at least thought Aldhelm, Bishop
of Sherborne and pupil of Hadrian, and yearned for some
occasion when the mighty boar, Theodore, might try his
tusks on these yapping Irish hounds, with their sharp
filed teeth of grammar. Aldhelm's friend, Eahfrid, had
gone across the water, and Aldhelm, who doth something
affect the letter, reproaches him for it in a really terrify­
ing document, evidently intended to demonstrate that
learning and elegance abode at home.69 Aldhelm in this
mood betrays something of the grandiloquent barbarian :eo
even his ordinary prose is full of surprises for the reader
of Cicero, and something of a hurdle race. Nevertheless
he was mightily learned for his age, and could drop the
bishops and the scholar's weeds and stand like a gleeman
on the bridge at Sherborne, singing fragments of the
Gospels and scraps of clowning, that the Devil might not
have all the good tunes. Of the experiments in Latin
verse once ascribed to him (though Henry Bradley bonae
memoriae was inclined to give them to his contemporary
Ethelwald),61 one is a description of a storm on the
" M. G. H., Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, Epist. v. p. 488.
80It has been suggested that Aldhelm is doing it for fun, and
that this kind of language was highly esteemed on the other side
of the “enormes dodrantium glareas/’ Yet all the prose documents,
the letters of Columbanus, of Cummian, of the anonymous Irish
scholar to Aldhelm himself (Ussher, Epist. Hih. 35) are as free
from it as Bede, and there is not a trace of it in John Scotus Eri-
gena. Hisperica Fantina is a bantling no nation is anxious to claim.
But the sources of the astonishing jargon would he an amusing if
unprofitable quest. The style of Martianus Capella is thoroughly
vicious, and Virgilius Maro of Toulouse with his secret Latin
known only to the initiate sets just the kind of riddle to intrigue
the barbarian mind. But perhaps it is better to read again “Com­
ment Pantagruel rencontra un Limousin,” and leave it at that.
61 English Hist. Review, xv. 291.
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 41
Cornish coast which the Northumbrian Swinburne would
be hard put to it to beat.
“Storm and destruction shattering,
Strike fear upon the world.
The winds are out, and through high heaven
Their Bacchanals are hurled.”

But the last line is a poor substitute for the very rip
of thunder in the
“Baccharentur in aethere,”

of the original.
“Along the pathways of the sea
The salt waves rise in foam.”62

—for the first time, unless indeed the Seafarer be older, an

English poet has entered on his kingdom of the sea.
O f Bede, of the next generation and of all time, there
is no need to speak. He is the massif of English scholar­
ship. His cell at Jarrow, and the books that Benedict
Biscop brought in so many journeys from Rome, bounded
him in a nutshell and made him king of infinite space.
The historians claim him as the first modem historian:
the critics as the first modem prosodist. He had a delicate
ear: wrote an admirable book on metre with an apprecia­
tion of the new system of accent rather than quantity
very rare in a classical scholar, even in the sixteenth
century.63 He is a greater critic than craftsman: there
are cadences in his prose lovelier than anything in his
poetry—“Bum now your candle as long as ye will: it
has naught to do with me, for my light comedi when the
“ “Per pelagi itinera
Salsa spumabant aequora.”
Aldhelm, Carni. Rhythm i. Op. cit, p. 524.
For text and discussion of authorship see Ehwald, op. cit. 519 ff.
68Bede, De Arte Metrica, c. xxiv. De rhythmo. Migne, xc. c.
173. See Ker, The Dark Ages, pp. 144, 200.
42 T h e W andering Scholars
day breaketh.”64 But the poet is in the strange burst of
weeping that took him under a tree in the open, in a line
or two of his vision of hell—

''Where is no voice unless of bitter weeping,

No face, unless the face of the tormentors"

and the wistful beauty of his heaven—

"Nor any night

To snatch the splendour of the gracious light:
Nor sorrow comes, nor tears, nor tired old age."66

IV

It was at the Court of Charlemagne that three traditions

met: the old rhetorical school of Italy in Peter of Pisa
and Paul the Deacon, the old scholar and the young that
Charlemagne brought back with him as booty from his
Italian wars; the Irish, under Clement and Dungal; the
English under Alcuin, Bedes grandson after the spirit;
and, perhaps, a fourth in Theodulfus, the great Spaniard
from the Narbonese. Peter of Pisa taught grammar, says
Eginhard, noting that to grammar above all the arts the
Italians cleave;66 Paul writes court poetry, one exquisite
line on the dead baby Hildegard,
"So small a maid to leave so great a sorrow,"67
64Bede, Eccles. Hist. iv. 8.
* Migne, PJL. 94, c. 634, 636.
“Dum sedi, subito planctu turbatus amaro. . . .
“Vox ubi nulla sonat, durus nisi fletus ubique,
Non nisi tortorum facies ubi cernitur ulla. . • .
Nox ubi nulla rapit splendorem lucis amoenae
Non dolor aut gemitus veniet nec fessa senectus.”
68Eginhard, Vita Car. Mag. c. 25. Cf. Radulfus Glaber QHist.
n. xii.) on the heresy of Vilgardus: “studio artis grammaticae
magis assiduus quam frequens, sicut Italiae mos semper fuit artes
negligere ceteras, illam sectari.”
67 Poet. Lat. Car. i. Paulus Diae. Carnu xxiv.
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 43
but his heart is in Italy, and his loveliest sonnet is for
Lake Como, with its scent of myrtles and its everlasting
spring;68 his fame is less for his verse than for his History
of the Lombards, written in the monastery of Monte
Cassino, to which he wins his long desired return. For
the Irishmen, there is the Monk of St. Gall's story of the
two who came in a trading ship to France, and stood with
the rest of the merchants crying in the fair that they had
wisdom to sell; for they knew that if men get anything
for nothing they think little of it. It came to the ears of
Charlemagne, that Athenian lover of strange things, and
he sent for them and asked the price. “Proper places
and noble souls,” said they, “and such things as we cannot
travel without, food and wherewith to be clothed.” And
Charlemagne received them joyously, and kept them in
his own house; but having to go on a campaign, he set
one of them, Clement, over a school in which rich and
poor sat together, and the other he sent into Italy, to the
monastery of St. Augustine of Pavia.69 In May, 1925,
the University of Pavia celebrated its eleven hundredth
anniversary, its foundation by decree of Lothair under
Dungal the Irishman, as the centre of liberal studies for
the minor schools of Lombardy.
But it is Alcuin who is the doyen of the Caroline ren­
aissance; the old piping shepherd of his own eclogues,70
and much nearer that than the “Horace” of his own
choosing. H e came from the school of York because
Charlemagne desired that his empire with himself should
go to school; and the picture of Charlemagne with his
slate under his pillow so that he could sit up and make

88lb. Carm, iv.

88Monachus S. Galli, Gesta Car. Mag. i. 1 ÇM. G. H. Script, ii.
P- 7 3 0 -
70Conflictio Veris et Hiemis. Alcuin, Carm. 58 (Poet. Lat. Car.
i. p. 270).
44 T h e W andering Scholars

his letters in the middle of the night is very engaging.71

He never learnt to write with ease, hut he read with
passion, and was a still more passionate musician. There
was nothing that Charlemagne did not wish to learn;
and his scholarship is primary in the best sense. He is
not content with Donatus and Virgil: he demanded a
Frankish grammar and a collection of Frankish ballads.72
“W hy cannot I have twelve such ministers?” he cried,
when they read him of Augustine and Jerome; to which
Alcuin controlling himself with some difficulty replied:
“The Most High had but these two: and wilt thou have
twelve?”78 With what mixture of poetry, pedantry and
steady common-sense Alcuin managed his strange me­
nagerie is evident in the text books that he wrote for it;
he had ten years of it; and earned his retreat in the most
gracious of all the French provinces, the aquatint land­
scapes of Touraine.
But he enjoyed himself; the evidence of it is a letter
written during his two years’ absence in England to his
friend, Joseph the Irishman, still at Court. H e begins
with news of their common friend and “master,” of Clon-
macnoise; encloses five pounds silver, with commissions
for goatskins and paints, a really good sulphur and other
colours for illumination. Then follows a cri de cœur that
might be from Dr. Middleton. “But woe is me! There
is death in the pot, O man of God! The wine is gone
from our wineskins, and bitter beer rageth in our bellies.
And because we have it not, do thou drink in our name
and lead a joyful day; sad to us, for we have not where­
with to gladden us, and barely wherewith to strengthen.

n Eginhard, Vit. Car. Mag. c. 25. M. G. H. Script, ii. p. 457.

” lb. c. 29. “Inchoavit et grammaticam patrii sermonis.” See
Hauréau, Charlemagne et sa cour. Hauréau notes that the Frank­
ish Grammar had to wait for the sixteenth century.
™ Monachus S. Galli, i. c. 9 (M. G. H. Script, ii. p. 734).
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 45
. . . Uinter the physician promised me two crates of
wine, excellent and clear” : he proceeds to arrangements
for its transport. “Alas! that you are so far away. I see
you, a young goat among the vineyards. Farewell.”74
This is hardly the heavy pedant of the text books;
and though he himself initiated the “Charles—Father”
type of school book, his own are written by a poet as well
as a scholar. “What is speech?” says Pepin, Charlemagne's
unfortunate eldest son. “The betrayer of the soul.” “What
is a man?” “The slave of death, the guest of an inn, a
wayfarer passing.” “What is sleep?” ‘T h e image of
death.”75 There spoke Cynewulf's contemporary. The
story of his enmity to Virgil in his old age may be true;76
it hardly tallies with the evidence of his own verse, or
with his trick of fastening the names of pagan poets to his
friends and scholars. But the sensitiveness that bound him
to the Aeneid when he was a schoolboy never hardens:
the transience of lovely things, the pitiful slow descent
of strong men to tired old age, the cruelty of life that will
not stay, is always with him,77 and all heaven's height
for him is only this:
“The happy house where friend from friend divides not,
And what he loves, he hath for evermore.”78

Amor is friendship to Alcuin, as to all the earlier Middle

Age,79 and again to the sixteenth century Renaissance; and
his loveliest lyric is his song to the cuckoo, the lament
74M. G. H. E'pist. Car. ii. ep. 8.
n Disputatio Pi'p'pini (Migne, io i , c. 975).
76Vita Alcuini, cap. x. Mon. Alcuini, p. 24.
77 Poet. Lat. Car. i. Alcuin, Carni, ix.
78lb. Carm. xi.
79lb. Carni. 55:
“Tu requies mentis, tu mihi dulcis amor.
. . . O quando optandi veniet mihi tempus amoris,
Quando erit illa dies qua . . . te cernere possim?”
46 T he W andering Scholars
for his vanished scholar.80 There is an equal gulf of years
and imagination between it and "Too quick despairer,
wherefore wilt thou go?” but Alcuin and Matthew Arnold
had heard the cuckoo’s parting cry above the shining
water meadows alike of Oxford and Touraine, and each
had known it for the dirge of the unretuming springtime
of the heart, the sorrow of Persephone’s garden. It was
in Touraine, in the abbey that he had made the most
famous school of manuscript, out of Ireland, in Europe,81
Touraine that was to be the cradle of many poets from
the twelfth century to the sixteenth, that Alcuin died.
The lament that his scholar Fredegis wrote for him and
his cell left empty is the loveliest in the Middle Age:
“O litde house, O dear and sweet my dwelling,
O litde house, for ever fare thee well.
The trees stand round thee with their sighing branches,
A litde flowering wood for ever fair.
Small streams about thee, . . .” 82
It has the silvered light of the Loire, the faint and ex­
quisite landscapes of Ronsard and Du Bellay.
There was a good deal of verse about the court; even if
that famous clerk who surpassed them all for singing
vanished suddenly from the Emperor’s presence and left
behind him only a litde foully burning coal, evidence of
the Satanic origin of his great gifts.83 None of the verse
that has come down to us is incendiary enough to justify
that; not even Angilbert’s, the worldiest, courtier and
80Ih. Carm. 57. Cf. Epist. 286:
“Heu, cuculus nobis fuerat cantare suetus
Quae te nunc rapuit hora nefanda tuis?
. . . Non pereat cuculus, veniet sub tempore veris
Et nobis veniens carmine laeta det.
Quis sdt, si veniat? . . .”
81 See Delisle, UEcole calligraphique de Tours au IX* siècle.
82 P.L.C. i. p. 243. Alcuin, Carm. 23.
“ Monachus S. Galli, Vit. Car. 1, 33 (M. G. H. Script, ii. p.
746).
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 47

counsellor, passionate, ardent and beauty-loving, successful

lover of one of Charlemagne's jealously guarded daugh­
ters, abbot of St. Riquier in a mood of penitence, but
still magnificent in his bearing, the first of the great
princes of the Church. He loved a song with a refrain;
loved jongleurs and gauds ( “thy care," said Alcuin sadly,
who loved him, called him Homer, and shook his head
over him, “should be for singing clerks rather than for
dancing bears").84 It was a rich life, broken by penitence
and passion; he died in St. Riquier, even as his master
lay dying in Aix la Chapelle; left his magnificent library
of 200 manuscripts to his monastery, and a memory so
ardent that his very epitaph suggests something of the
strong lover of life that lay beneath it:
“O King, give Angilbert thy rest,
Father and King.
O Law, give him the eternal life of law,
For thou art Law.
O Light, give ever unto him thy light,
For thou art Light.
O Peace, give unto him eternal peace,
For thou art Peace."85
Theodulfus in Charles' court has a little the counte­
nance of Malvolio. For it was a lively court; there are
echoes of it in Alcuin's warning against the “crowned
doves," the naughty princesses;86 even by contrast with
the snowy days when Charlemagne moped like an owl,
and even Delia would not sing, and the poet slinks away
with an empty belly, and the boys sulk, till the sun comes
out and David reaches for his harp, and all good things
84 “ nec tibi sit ursorum saltantium cura sed clericorum psallen-
tiu m ” ( E p . 244). T h e p u n w as m ade to Fredegis, bu t see E p . 175,
237.
œ Poet. Lat. Car. i. p. 356.
“ "coronatae colum bae,” Efist. 244.
48 T he W andering Scholars
come again.87 Theodulfus was a judge and wrote ad­
mirable verse, with judicial solemnity; a man of taste, for
they brought him vases to tempt him in the Southern
circuit,88 and he himself designed other vases, a fair
woman suckling a child, for an image of the kind earth;89
a sound scholar, founder of the schools of Orleans beside
which the University of Paris is a mushroom; the first to
antagonise Love, the winged wanton, the sceleratus, in his
own name.90 One other thing he antagonised, the Irish
scholars at the court, whom he describes in language
which has since become almost traditional. Shall the
Spaniard (Goth) make league with the Scot? as well with
the south wind; could it be other than itself, it would be
Irish. It is his levity he cannot abide—in eye, in hand, in
mind and foot.
“And flashing now he pounces here, now there.”
He has learnt all things, but to him nothing is fixed,
nothing secure; swift to argument, “striking the living
dead with a naughty gibe.”91 There, for Spanish gravity,
was the rub. But the jest has evaporated, and the laughter;
the spleen abides. Theodulfus was to suffer worse disaster;
in prison, suspect of treason, he wrote the hymn that is
still sung on Palm Sunday,
“Gloria, laus et honor tibi.”
His is the first great name in the schools of Orleans that
were to father many scholars and many poets.
Of the identity of the Irishman who provoked him,
one knows nothing; Clement, Dungal,92 Dicuil the geog-
81 Poet. bat. Car. i. Alcuin, Carni. 40.
æIh. Theod. Carni. 28. Contra Indices, line 79. See Delisle,
Les Bibles de Théodulfe.
89Ih. Carni. 47.
90Poet. Lat. Car. i. Theod., Carni. 45.
91 lb. Carni, xxv. lines 1 59 et seq., xxvii. line 65.
92See Traube, O Roma Nobilis, pp. 332-357.
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 49
rapher,93 to whom certainly 'nothing was fixed or secure/'
'T h is saith Solinus,” writes Dicuil, "but I believe it not
for---- " and he goes on to tell what he heard from Brother
Fidelis, talking to his master Suibhne when he himself
was a boy.94 Brother Fidelis had himself an inquiring
mind; he measured one of the Pyramids, which he took
to be Joseph's granaries, and the measurements are still
found exact; sailed from the Nile to the Red Sea by a
canal, inspected the place where Moses crossed it, and
wished to stop the boat so as to look for the wheel tracks
of Pharaoh's chariots in the sand, but the boatmen re­
fused, which must have been a grief of mind to him.95
Dicuil ranges from the marvel of the midnight sun to the
habits of the “corcodrillus," and has an enchanting pas­
sage on the sea birds in the Faroes; he is a thorough scien­
tist, for in his work on the changes of the moon he refuses
to discuss the question of the tides, being now far inland,
and leaves it to ingenious persons in the sea's neighbour­
hood.06 It is John Scotus' contempt for authority, stripped
of its veil of Platonism. Even “Hibemicus Exul," who
sang his way into the Emperor's good graces, has left an
epic that is an exaltation not so much of the Imperial
greatness as of the dignity of poetry. "So long as the
mighty axis of the starry sphere revolves, and dark night
is driven off by the shining stars, so long as Phosphor rises
“ See Dümmler, Neues Archiv der Gesellsch. f. alt. deutsche.
Geschichte. 1879, Bd. iv. Mario Esposito, “An Unpublished As­
tronomical Treatise by Dicuil." Proceedings of the Irish Academy,
voi. xxvi. pp. 378-446 Ci907).
“ Dicuil, Liber De Mensura Orbis Terrae Cedited Parthey,
1870), p. 25.
“ Dicuil, Liber De Mensura Orbis Terrae Cedited Parthey,
1870), pp. 26-27.
“ Liber de Astronomia, iv. 5. "Quamvis de concordia immutabi­
liter stabili maris et lunae convenienter in hoc loco narrari debuit,
tamen quoniam sum procul separatus a mare, ingeniosis habitanti­
bus iuxta mare eam nuntiare relinquo."
50 The W andering Scholars
splendid from towering waves, and the swift wind lashes
the deep, so long as the rivers foam down to the sea, and
the clouds touch the threatening peaks and the valleys lie
low with their bogs, and the high hills rear their jagged
crests, so long as the splendour of kings blazes with ruddy
gold— ” one expects the familiar climax of Latin com­
pliment, the eternity of Caesar, but instead :
“Age after age the Muses' gifts abide."97
So that it is Charles, and not his harper, who is likely to
be in debt. It is the eternal arrogance of letters, Hiber-
nicus Exul at the court of Charlemagne: Jonathan Swift
at the court of St. James.

With the death of Charlemagne, “ King David” to

Alcuin and Angilbert, the genial tradition breaks. Louis
the Pious succeeded him, who “never showed his white
teeth in a smile,” said the Puritan chronicler approv­
ingly;98 and the music makers and the jongleurs vanish
from the presence like flies in winter. He had little of
Charlemagne's immense curiosity, though his marriage
with the beautiful Judith of Aquitaine brought him a late
flowering; and in his reign the Church begins to bear hard
on the wandering Irishmen. For the charmed circle that
had so long saved Ireland from invasion is broken: in 795
the Northmen landed in Rechra and sacked the mon­
astery, in 822, Bangor, “and the relics of Comgall were
shaken from the shrine.”99 For the next hundred years
the monasteries stand like battered rocks, washed over at
every high tide, and in town after town of Europe one
mP.L.C. i. Hibemicus Exul, Carm. ii. lines 24-33.
98Theganus, De Gestis Ludov. Pit (M. G. H. Script, ii. 594)*
mAnnals of the Four Masters (O'Donovan), i. 435.
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 51
begins to find fugitive scholars. The St. Gall Prisdan,100
itself an exile, tells its own story: the lazy peace of the
scriptorium is in the delicate leisurely script of the text,
the little spurts of conversation, mosdy from Cairbre,
in the margin, after the fashion known to all who have
sat side by side in “prep.” ; grumbles at new parchment
and a bad pen: “I will go then, if you would rather.” "It
is dark to me.” But Prisdan has of course only one half
of the conversation; some other manuscript once knew
what Maellecan had said to provoke the heavy cynicism
of “Love will last as long as property lasts, O Maellecan,”
and the romantic Maellecans rejoinder. “O my hand!”
says Cairbre, and invokes the good offices of Patrick and
Bridget on Maelbrigte, “that he may not be angry with
me for the writing that is written this day.” “A blessing
on the soul of Fergus! I am very cold.” One says Amen
to that prayer; for Fergus' hands have been a great while
cold. “Sunday of a warm Easter” : what magic is in two
Irish words to bring again the April sunlight on the page,
and the buzzing of the bees in the hives at the head of
the cloister garden, bees that died of cold eleven hundred
years ago.
“Bitter is the wind to-night; it tosses the ocean's white
hair.
I fear not the coursing of the clear sea by the fierce
heroes from Lochlann.”101
Cairbre and Dongus and Maelpatric had found that there
were worse things than writers cramp or the wrath of
Maelbrigte for a slovenly page; that terror brooded be­
hind the stillness of quiet moonlight nights. And then
the clear night came and the pirates with it; and Priscian,
100 St. Gall. MS. 904. Traube ( Sedulius Scottus, pp. 347-8)
thinks it written by Sedulius' circle, and brought with them to the
Continent. See Nigra, Reliquie Celtiche, i. 1-15 . Mario Esposito,
Hibemo-Latin MSS. in the Libraries of Switzerland, i. 78-9.
^W hitley Stokes, Thes. Paleohib. ii. pp. XX—xxii, 290.
52 T h e W andering Scholars
hurriedly snatched up and sale in the darkness of his
scholar’s wallet, did not see Clonfert or Clonmacnoise
roaring red to heaven; or else, warned in time, the two
had determined to “walk the world,” which is the apostolic
phrase of the Irish romances for all of Europe beyond
the Four Seas, and had gone while the going was good;
At any rate, some time in the middle of the century,
Priscian was in Cologne, and lent a blank page for the
rough draft of a Latin poem to Gunther, a bishop notori­
ously generous to wandering scholars; and a fellow-scholar
and better Latinist corrects it here and there.102 But
whether or not Gunther came up to expectation does not
appear; and it was not before the tenth century that
Priscian found refuge in St. Gall. About 850 two famous
Irishmen had halted there “to salute their compatriot,”
Ekkehard says, on their way back from Rome, the good
bishop Marcus and his nephew Marcellus. Marcellus was
not hard to persuade to go no further.108 He was a mighty
scholar, both in classics and divinity, and an exquisite
musician:104 the Abbot entreated him to take over the
charge of the school, and let him and his uncle abide with
them, and their countrymen go their way home. The
bishop was persuaded, but the pilgrims knowing who had
lost them their master so raged against the young man
that he gave them their money through a window, fearing
they would do him a mischief. Old Marcus came down
to the courtyard, wearing his stole, to bless them, and
watch them make their slow way down the pass and fol­
low them with the eyes of the mind across France to the
valley of the Loire and so to Nantes, or through Germany
and the Low Countries, there to take ship for home.
10* Lindsay, Early Irish Minuscule Script, p. 43. Text in Nigra,
Reliquie Celtiche, pp. 6-7, “Umbrifera quadam nocte.” Also in
Poet. Lat. Car. iii. 238.
“ * Ekkehard, Casus S. Galli (M. G. H. Script, ii. 78-9).
101 Ih. p. 94. "In divinis eque potens et humanis: septem li­
berales eos duxit ad artes; maxime autem ad musicam.”
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 53
Marcellus was happy; he had three scholars, Notker,
Tutilo, Ratpert, would have rejoiced any master. But the
bishop was an old man; the Alps are not so friendly as
the blue Wicklow hills, and though he never reached
Ireland again he seems to have left “the nest that the
Irishmen built” to live in quiet “a holy old man,” says
Heric of Auxerre, at St. Medard.106
St. Gall has his name in the Book of the Dead: the
pallium and the gold were offered to the shrine; the
manuscripts to the library. Priscian was not, it seems,
among them, for the catalogue of the library made towards
the end of the century does not mention him among the
books “scottice scripti.” He may have come to it when
Notker, Marcellus’ pupil, was librarian, when many works
were added to the library, and if so, he lived through yet
another raid. In 925 the Huns swept up the pass, found
the monastery deserted except for Heribald who was a
little weak in the head, and had refused to leave because
the chamberlain had not given him his shoe leather for
the year. The Huns were uglier than the Danes, but
better natured. When Heribald cried at them to stop
when they were breaking in the wine casks, for what are
we to drink when you are gone away? they shouted with
laughter and left them. And when he told them they
ought not to talk in church and they beat him, they were
sorry and gave him wine to make up for it; “which is more
than any of you would have done,” said Heribald.106 For
105 Acta SS. July, vii. 283.
108 Ekkehard, Casus S. Galli, iii. M. G. H. Script, ii. pp. 105,
106, 109.
“When they [the monks on their return] asked Heribald how he
himself had liked ‘the so numerous guests of S t Gall/ he said,
T he very best; take my word for it, I never remember seeing
cheerier souls in our cloister, or better givers of meat and drink.
. . . I don't deny there was one thing I did not like, that they had
so litde behaviour. I tell you the truth, I never saw such behaviour
in the cloister of St. Gall, they were as wild in the cloister and the
church as if they were in the fields/ ”
54 T h e W andering Scholars

the Huns rode away, and the monks came back again,
and the books are carried back from Reichenau, and
Priscian is back on his shelf, a new shelf, for they had set
fire to the library.107 That is the last alarm;108 he has lain
there, mellowing his parchments, through the leisure of
nine hundred years.
Not all Irish bishops were welcomed so heartily as
Marcus, who after all had his pallium from Rome. Even
in the eighth century the continental councils look a little
crookedly at these odd phenomena, bishops without a
diocese, like snails without a shell. It was the peculiarity
of the Irish church that “bishop” denoted only spiritual
rank, and involved no charge.

“Not poor was the family of Mochta [abbot of Louth]»

Three hundred priests and one hundred bishops,
Sixty singing men. . . .
They ploughed not, they reaped not, they dried not
com;
They laboured not, save at learning only.”109

'Those who say they are bishops and are not” are to
find closed doors, and no clerk is to accept ordination
from them; nor are they to presume to take the cure of
souls, or assist in Mass, unless the bishop of the diocese
is satisfied of their genuineness.110 It was doubtless neces­
sary. A good many of the exiles had more scholarship
than sanctity, and some little of either, with Bacchus
107 There is a chance that he may have been until now at Rei­
chenau, where the books were sent for safety, and whence they re­
turned, the same in number, but “not their very selves,” says
Ekkehard, so that the Reichenau Priscian may have supplanted St.
Gall's. St. Gall had two Priscians before the raid, but neither of
them in the Irish script
108Not quite the last: there was the threat of the French Revolu­
tionary Army in 1798. See Clark, The Abbey of S t Gall, 273-4.
108 Todd, Life of St. Patrick, p. 30.
110 Council at Vemeuil, xi. De episcopis vagantibus. Council at
Chalons, 813, xliii. (S e e Appendix E).
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 55
nearer their elbow than Apollo. Most of the drinking
songs of the ninth century come from the Irish111 and
the biographer of the blessed Rodbert112 says harshly
de Scotis that they are deceivers, wanderers, stragglers.
The old guest-houses on the pilgrim roads, founded by
pious Irish kings and nobles, fall into decay, and can give
hospitality no longer; even the brethren who have served
God all their lives, says one council kindly, are forced to
beg their bread.113 That Council was held under Charles
the Bald, Louis' youngest and best loved son. For Charles
had a good deal of his mother's intellectual ardour, and
his grandfather's enormous zest. He loved foreigners, even
as Charlemagne did; Greece, says Heric of Auxerre,
wailed to see her best scholars go to France; and almost
all Hibernia arrived, “a herd of philosophers," on our
shore.114*Heric did not intend to be funny; and the Irish
scholar Martin lecturing on Greek at Laon is sober
enough. His lectures had a success; even in the tenth
century they are being copied, one manuscript crossing
the frontier into Spain, to Ripoll.116 But one man stands
head and shoulders above his contemporary scholars:
head and shoulders, some hold, above the Middle Ages:
John Scotus Erigena, “the belated disciple of Plato,

111 Poet. Lot. Car. iii. 198, 215, 690. See Zimmer, Irish Element
in Mediaeval Culture, pp. 106-7, on the decay of the Irish mon­
asteries in the thirteenth century. See also Nicolaus de Bibera,
Carmen Satiricum, on the “Scoti qui cum fuerint bene poti,” thir­
teenth century, at Erfurt ( Geschichts-quellen des Provinz Sachsen,
1870).
m Deceptores, gyrovagi, cursores. Baluze, Capit. Reg. Prone, ii.
743 -
m M. G. H. Capit. Prone. Reg. ii. c. 34. Council held at
Rheims, 846.
ué Acta SS. July 7th.
Martin was a pupil of John Scotus: died 875. See M. L.
Laistner, “Notes on Greek from Lectures of Martin of Laon.” Bul­
letin of ]ohn Rylands Library, 1923, pp. 421 et seq. Greek verse
in Poet. LaU Car. iii. 696-7.
56 T he W andering Scholars
the last representative of the Greek spirit in the West/'116
Erigena belongs to the history of philosophy, not of
literature, except that every Platonist is at heart a poet
A jester, too; he broke even on his patron the wit that
had upset Theodulfus. “What is there between sottum
et Scottum?” said Charles one night when the wine was
in them both. “The breadth of the table, Sire,” said
John. His translation of the Greek pseudo-Dionysius is
still scholarly;117 his original work, De Naturae Divisione,
is in a still greater tradition. The N ew Aristotle was con­
demned by the University of Paris in 12 15 , Erigena in
1225; it had taken the theologians three centuries to recog­
nise, and then unwittingly, the order to which he belongs.
John himself seems to have left France after his patron's
death. Legend says that he was killed in an access of fury
by his students at Malmesbury, and Dostoevsky, who
knew the torture which the average mind endures in
being forced to think, would have understood the mur­
der, or the martyrdom.
It is to be observed that the centre of gravity of litera­
ture and learning is moving eastward; has left the valley
of the Loire for the Meuse and the Rhine. Liège in the
ninth century inaugurates the tradition of scholarship in
the Low Countries that reaches its height in Erasmus.
John Scotus lectured in Rheims; Hincmar, the archbishop,
is the greatest power in France. For a century or two one
will hear more of Fulda and Reichenau and Tegemsee
than of Orleans or Tours. Alcuin lives again in his best
scholar, Hrabanus Maurus, who came from Fulda to study
poetry under him at Tours,118 but went back to his own
116 R. L. Poole, Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought, p. 45. See
also Hauréau, Les Ecoles d'Irlande ( Singularités historiques et
littéraires'): Bett, Johannes Scotus Erigena.
117 “Je&n Scot sait le grec . . . autant qu'un érudit du XVI
siècle, et sa traduction du faux Denys est encore aujourd’hui dans
toutes les mains.” (Hauréau, op. cit. p. 31.)
118 Poet. Lot. Car. ii. Hraban. Maur. Carm. i.
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 57
monastery to be scholasticus, served it as abbot for twenty
years, and died archbishop of Mainz. He has left an un­
bridled metrical correspondence with bishops and arch­
bishops, but one or two have other claims to poetry than
their form.
"Then live, my strength, anchor of weary ships,
Safe shore and land at last, thou, for my wreck,
My honour, my strong city, my sure peace."119

It is greatly said; but he should not have said it twice,

once to Bishop Samuel, and once to Grimoald, abbot of
St. Gall. There is a descant on the old theme “Beauty
vanishes, beauty passes," but with a rare freshness of
direct observation:
“Violets whiten, lilies darken;
Even while we speak, the grass
Springs up, ripens, withereth."120

Finer still, ‘T o Eigilus, on the Book that he Wrote"—

“No work of men s hands, but the weary years
Besiege and take it; comes its evil day.
The written word alone flouts destiny,
Revives the past, and gives the lie to Death."121

It is the first articulate Credo of the scholars religion.

His pupil, Walafrid Strabo, came to him from Rei-
nft Poet. Lat. Car. ii. Hraban. Maui. Conn. xxv. p. 188.
120lb. Carm. xxxvii. p. 193.
111 lb. Carm. xjd. p. 186. Hrabanus amplifies the marvellous an­
ticipation of the Dies Irae in St. Columba’s Altus Prosator, in his
De Fide Catholica Rhythmus. Carm. xxxix. p. 202:
“In quo cessat mulierum
Amor et desiderium
hominumque contentio,
mundi huius et cupido,
cum caelo, terra, ardore
conflagrant atque lumine.
Tuba primi archangeli
Strepente admirabili. . . .”
Admirable indeed, but not yet “Tuba minim spargens sonum.”
58 T h e W andering Scholars
chenau and was bitterly cold, and woefully homesick.122
He wrote in sapphics; three centuries later another scholar
will be hankering after his happy valley, this time in
rhyme, but the heartache is the same, and the doubt if
scholarship is worth the exile. It was, to Walafrid; his
Gloss on Holy Writ, a kind of biblical encyclopedia, was
one of the first mediaeval books which the Renaissance
thought it worth while to print; it went into fresh edi­
tions, even in the seventeenth century. But the work that
keeps his memory green is not the Glossa Ordinaria, but
the garden that he made in the wilderness of academic
verse, his plot of ground at Reichenau, of sage and rue
and southern-wood, poppy and penny-royal, mint and pars­
ley and radishes, and, for love’s sake only, gladioli and
lilies and roses, even though only plain German roses, no
Tyrian purple nor the scarlet splendour of France.123 Like
Johnny Crow, the abbot of Reichenau did dig and sow
till he made a little garden; he tells us all about it, from
the very beginning; how the nettles were everywhere,
and how weeds link up underground; how his seeds, a
tiny crop, sprang up, and how he watered them very care­
fully, sprinkling with his hands, it being dangerous to
water from a bucket, by reason of its fierce impetus.124
The spring showers were gracious, and the moon was
tender to it; but bright Phoebus in his strength was too
much for some of the weaklings, and they died. He grew
ambrosia, but whether this was the ambrosia of the old
gods he knows not,125 and even though it is a vanity it
pleases him to look upon his poppies and remember that
when Ceres sought Persephone and found her not, they

121 Poet. Lot. Car. ii. p. 412. Walafrid Strabo, Carm. lxxv.
“ * Poet. Lat. Car. ii. p. 348. Walafrid Strabo, De Cultura Hor­
torum, 26.
134 Ih. p. 336. II. Difficultas Assumpti Laboris. 111. Instantia
Cultoris.
“ lb. xxiii. p. 348.
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of. Liège 59
had given her a brief oblivion of her pain.120 History has
been very tender to the stooping figure with the watering
pot, and in one poem that figure straightens itself with an
undreamt-of dignity.

“When the moons splendour shines in naked heaven,

Stand thou and gaze beneath the open sky.
See how that radiance from her lamp is riven,
And in one splendour foldeth gloriously
Two that have loved, and now divided far,
Bound by love's bond, in heart together are.

“What though thy lovers eyes in vain desire thee,

Seek for love’s face, and find that face denied?
Let that light be between us for a token;
Take this poor verse that love and faith inscribe.
Love, art thou true? and fast love’s chain about thee?
Then for all time, O love, God give thee joy!”127

He was a friend of the doomed Gottschalk, and if his

name is hidden in the ascription “Ad Amicum”—Walafrid
does not often leave his poems anonymous—one would
gladly believe the imprisonment lighted by some such
tenderness, for of tenderness Gottschalk had little and
needed much. There is no halo about that scarred and
tormented figure, unless the dark flame of his black and
passionate sincerity. He was brought an oblate, like the
child Samuel, to the monastery of Fulda, a knight’s son
with restless blood in him, and growing up fought for
liberty like a caged panther. At sixteen a council of
bishops granted his appeal, but his abbot, Hrabanus
Maurus, strong on prerogative, carried the case to the
Emperor, and Gottschalk was doomed, “condemned for
life to the order of St. Benedict.” But there are other
ways of escape; at eighteen Gottschalk discovered St.

110 lb . xvi. p. 344.

m Poet. Lat. Car. ii. p. 403. Carni. lix.
6o The W andering Scholars
Augustine, and wrung from him the secret of his pas­
sionate peace; in 835 he was ordained priest. There are
natures doomed to be unfortunate, to find the bitter in
the sweet; the doctrine which he wrested from Augustine
and thereafter preached through France and Italy to the
terror of many was predestination not only to grace, but
to damnation. The Church in consternation brought in
John Scotus to refute him, and though, '"before the Irish
philosopher could be checked, he had refuted Sin and
Hell,” 128 it took them three centuries to find it out. Gott-
schalk’s book went to the flames first; he burnt it himself
after torture, like one dead. They condemned him to soli­
tary confinement; but somehow this indomitable malig­
nant129 secured ink and parchment and the book appears
again. There followed further accusations, further
vengeance on this man found hereticus et incorrigtbilis.
Twenty years later, in 870, the long misery ended.
Gottschalk, dying, begged for the sacrament from which
he had so long been barred. It was promised him, and
Christian burial, after he should sign a recantation drawn
up for him by Hincmar. He refused, and died without
the sacraments. “A worthy end to such a life,” says
Hincmar, speaking more wisely than he knew.130 There
is no grace about Gottschalk; he had seen truth and it
blinded him.
With that doomed history, there is a shadow on his
verse, the most musical that was written in Europe for
centuries. One with the refrain,

“O God, and what shall be the end of me?”

128 Ker, The Dark Ages, p. 162.

128 Hincmar, De Una et non Trina Deitate (Migne, 125, c. 506):
“Gothescalcus pertinacissimus damnatus est.”
120 lb. c. 613. “ Sicque indignam vitam digna morte finivit, et
abiit in locum suum.” For the whole story with documents see
Traube's Preface to Gottschalk's Poems, Poet. Lat. Car. iii. pp.
707-20.
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 6i
is cruel reading, in the light of what that end was indeed
to be. Another, written in the Marches of Friuli,

“O quid iubes, pusiole,” 181

has the aching sweetness of the flute, a melody of inter­

woven rhyme and echo that is heard nowhere else, unless
in the Irish metres of the debide.182 That same intricate
rhyming has led Traube to insist on the influence of the
Irish Dunchad, who was teaching in St. Rémy at Rheims
while Gottschalk was discovering Augustine at Orbaix.188
It is not to say that rhyme had its origin in Ireland. Ennius
was rhyming in the Republic; it may be that rhyme be­
longs to the original genius of the Latin tongue, the lyric
Ariel imprisoned in the cleft oak of the Greek metres.
Moreover, there is no rhyme in such primitive Irish verse
as remains. But once crossed with the Latin genius, Irish
rhyme becomes as intricate and subtle as the designs of
the Book of Kells, and Thumeysen has counted two hun­
dred and eighty measures, founded for the most part on
the lovely rhythm of the Pervigilium Veneris.134

“O quid iubes, pusiole,

Quare mandas, filiole,
Carmen dulce me cantare
Cum sim longe exui valde
Intra mare.
O cur iubes canere?” 135

m “0 quid iubes, pusiole” is set to music in a ninth century

MS., formerly of St. Martial of Limoges. Facsimile and musical
score in Coussemaker, Hist, de l'harmonie au moyen âge, pi. ii.
p . V.

See Irische Texte, iii. pp. 14 7 -15 1.

See Traube, Poet. Lat. Car. iii. 7 10 -11, note.
134 Mittelirische Verslehren: Thumeysen, Irische Texte, iii.
1-182.
185 Poet. Lat. Car. iii. p. 731.
62 T he W andering Scholars
is the despair of translators, just as the loveliest of the
Irish metres baffles the ear. Professor Raleigh caught the
ghost of “Truagan Truag” in
‘Though our songs
Cannot banish ancient wrongs,
Though they follow where die rose
Goes;” 136
and Browning's "Love among the Ruins,”
“Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles,
Miles and miles”
is the echo of another, though deaf to its hidden recur­
ring melodies.137 Gottschalk says himself that he spent
but one year in the study of verse;138 and if that were at
Orbaix, where he read Augustine and wrote his first three
Carmina, he had his revelation of poetry there, as well as
of religion. His name is in the glosses of the Berne manu­
script of Horace and Augustine,130 and again in the Berne
Episdes of St. Paul, the Greek text believed to be written
by Sedulius;140 and applicable enough are the lines writ­
ten in the Priscian manuscript:
“Take thy couch in the prison: thou shalt need neither
down nor pallet.
Sad is it, thou servant of the rod, that the pack-saddle
of ill luck hath stuck to thee.” 141
180Quoted by Ker, The Dark Ages, p. 330.
127 bische Texte, iii. p. 150:
“Aicnead in miled rodmarb isagarb.
etir domuindr dolam dolessad.”
“ “ Traube, P.L.C. iii. p. 710. Gottschalk to Ratramnus: "metri
quoque iure solutus, quamlibet hoc modico usus sim sub tempore
pauco, namque magisterio vix uno subditus anno.”
See Traube, O Roma Nohilis, pp. 348-52. The MS. CBeme,
363) contains Horace, Augustine, a fragment of Ovid, Bede, and
the names in the margin are Fergus, Gottschalk, Sedulius, Dub-
thach, Comgan, Dungal, Cormac, Colgu, Ratramnus, Hincmar.
140 See Traube, op, cit,
141 Whidey Stokes, Thesaurus Paleohihernicus, ii. 290.
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 63
There seems to have been a colony of Irish scholars in
the district round Liège and Cologne. Both Cologne and
Liège in the middle of the ninth century had hospitable
and scholarly bishops; one Irish scholar begging for the
loan of a book, and offering Boethius, De Musica, as a
hostage, calls his lordship “flower and paradox of the holy
church of God.”142 Liège was on one route to Rome; and
the Leyden manuscript edited by Dümmler is rather like
an episcopal post bag.148 There is the Scottish 'peregrinus
returned from Rome, asking for a benefice—T am not a
grammaticus, nor am I skilled in the Latin tongue . . .
yet is Christ hidden in the hearts of his poor.” An Irish
priest, old and ill, is hindered from Rome by the infirmity
of the feet. H e will say daily Masses for the bishop’s soul,
and writes him six devout verses. Another, a simple soul,
entreats from Franco his stolen goods, a litde in the man-
mer of the Obscure Men. Because of his nation, he came
back from Rome by way of this monastery (evidently an
Irish foundation, like St. Martin’s at Cologne); and cer­
tain men who were in the same ship (probably coming
up the Meuse) stole an alb and a stole and two corporals
and a good black cloak (unam bonam nigram capam iij
uncias valentem ) and a leather coat with fasciolis
(puttees) worth ij sol. and a shirt worth ij sol., and four
worn Irish garments and a skin-coat and other matters,
“small things but necessary to me” (reliquas minutas
causas sed m ihi necessarias'). Another writes with the
indignant accent of the poor scholar that is to become
so familiar in the twelfth century, the half-resentful as­
tonishment that one cannot live by scholarship, and must
yoke oneself to a benefice. “I cannot live in such poverty,
having naught to eat or drink save exceeding bad bread
and the least particle of abominable beer.” The Irishmen
10 M. G. H. Epist. Karol, iv. p. 197.
I4Slb- PP- 195-7-
64 The W andering Scholars
liked beer as little as Alcuin did;144 another Irishman from
Soissons, a fellow scholar with the unhappy Carloman,
writes of it as one who throws boots at it, and is on his
knees to Bacchus, "invoked by thine ancient name.”146
But its great antagonist in the ninth century is the Irish­
man, Sedulius of Liège.146
It was some time after the year 840 that Sedulius came
to the évêché at Liège, with two other scholars in as bad
case as himself, tempest-tossed and sodden in a scurry of
sleet, and crossed the threshold into warmth and light,
where flowers fairer than in the gardens of the Hesperides
bloomed on the tapestries, and shivered in no wind.147
Hartgar had as good a taste in scholarship as in embroi­
deries and recognised a fine Greek scholar in his salvage.
Sedulius became his scholasticus, and slept sound of
nights, even when the wind was quiet; Liège was far
inland, and the Normans still happily employed in the
Seine and the Loire, and the monasteries of Northern
France. He met kings and emperors; wrote verses for the
Empress to embroider, and a book of conduct for Chris­
tian princes, in no way resembling Machiavelli’s, for the
young sons of Lothair I. His grievances are the grievances
of all scholars; a house that is dark, fitter for the habita­
tion of moles than of philosophers, as he gravely points
out to Hartgar; no key; abominable draughts, the east
wind as much at home inside as out;148 worse than all, a
really horrible beer. N o child of Ceres this, though it has

114 “I myself am a drinker of both,” said John of Salisbury with

his accustomed moderation, “nor do I abhor anything that can
make me drunk.” Epist. 85 (Migne, 199, c. 72).
“ * Poet. Lot. Car. iii. p. 690.
Vide Pirenne, "Sedulius de Liège" (Mémoires couronnés de
l’Académie Royale de Belgique, xxxiii).
147 Poet. Lat. Car. iii.; Sedulius Scottus, Carm. ii. 3-4, p. 168.
The Irishman Cruindmelus in his Ars Metrica daims Sedulius
as his collaborator, P.L.C. ii. p. 681.
“ * Carm. ii. 4, p. 169.
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 65
the yellow of her hair; neither Jordan nor Moselle begat
it, but the Brook Kedron; a beast of prey in a man's in­
wards. O gods, remove the creature to the Styx; and as
you love me, Bishop, a poultice, a poultice! And the
bishop chuckled, says Sedulius, and granted his re­
quest.149 The Archpoet, three hundred years later, and
he are at one on the superiority of verse well-soaked,
“carmina saturata”: one of them, sent to Count Robert,
produced no less than a hundred flagons of the “dewy
gifts of Bacchus,” 150 and he thumps out
“What a good man Robert is,
Robert's phrases flow"
on a barrel of the good Rhine wine.151 Liège seems to
have been a genial house. There is a song written for the
brethren on the feast of St. Vedast, six brethren to a
measure and six to a six-foot iambic, singing with one
voice, so that the whole world hears it.152 Then there is
a lament in Goldsmith's mock-heroics for a sheep, a pre-
latic sheep that the bishop had promised him, and that
the dogs worried, a good sheep that said no idle words,
but mystically uttered B aa and B e e , that drank nor beer
nor Bacchus, and walked upon its own feet in the way.
“Alas! that thou wert never in my field!
I do confess I did desire thee; now,
Desire wakes for thy widow and thy mother;
Yea, and thy brethren shall I ever love. Farewell.”153
One hopes that the bishop took the hint. His muse is
Egla, fairest of the Naiads; in praise of Hartgar he calls
her to kiss him with her red lips.154 Hartgar goes to Rome,
Carm. ii. ix. p. 177.
150 Carm. ii. 36, p. 201.
161 Carm. ii. 58, p. 215.
182 Carm. ii. 32. Verba Comediae, p. 198.
158 Carm. ii. 41, p. 204.
164 Carm. ii. 1, p. 166.
66 T h e W andering Scholars
and the wood nymphs wail for him, him whose learning
shines in the Church,

“Even as Apollo wandering on shining Olympus

Lightens the whole earth with his magic lamp.”155

He writes of his Irish friends, and the Celt comes out in

his metaphors. Christ defend Dermot with thy shield!156
Fergus is his arrow, Blandus the dove of God, Beuchele
a flower among warriors; these three with Marcus (is it
the Marcus who came to St. Gall?) are the four-horse
chariot of God.167 It was a peaceful life for long enough,
interrupted only by visits of great ones, and the necessary
odes.

“A writer am I, I confess it, Musicus, Orpheus the

second,
And the ox that treads out the com—1”158

The serious business of scholarship goes on; the Greek

text of St. Paul’s Episdes with an interlinear Latin trans­
lation,150 a commentary on the Psalms, a commentary on
St. Jerome; De Rectoribus Christianis, written in a very
pure Latin, the prose alternating with verse that goes
lightly from strophe to varying strophe. Christmas brings
snow and feasting; Easter the sound of wandering bees
busy in the flowers.100
** Conn. ii. 3, p. 167.
Carni, ii. 27.
181 Carm. ii. 33. Ad suos, p. 199.
Carm. ii. 49, p. 2 11. His implication is that the ox is thirsty.
“ ®MS. at Berne. See Thesaur. Palaeohib. ii. xxxiv. Traube
thinks that it is actually in Sedulius’ script: the marginalia have
the names of his circle: Dongus, Dubtnach, Fergus, Comgan,
Gottschalk, Gunther (Bp. of Cologne), Marcus.
100iii. 2. “ Surrexit Christus sol verus vespere noctis,
Surgit et hinc domini mystica messis agri.
Nunc vaga puniceis apium plebs laeta labore
Floribus instrepitans pollite meile legit.”
 Fortunatus to Sedulius of Liège 67
“I read and teach and say my prayers,
And snoring sleep.”161

Then Hartgar dies, and Franco, his successor, is oftener

in the saddle than the pulpit, for the Normans have come
a little nearer. But whether or not the enemy he had come
so far to escape found Sedulius at the last, there is no tell­
ing. The last date that can be fixed is 874, the poem to
celebrate the meeting of Charles and Louis. Seven years
after, the terrible beaked prows appear in the Meuse. At
Stavelot, an escaped fugitive coming at sunset warns the
monks of the attack planned at moonrise, and they fly
with the precious relics to the woods.162 It is the same at
Liège, at Maestricht, Tongres, St. Trond, Malmédy.
Anselm reproached the faint-heartedness of the flight in
his history of the bishops of Liège, but it is easy to be
brave a hundred years after.163 Manuscripts perished
everywhere; Hucbald of St. Amand, sitting down to
write his history, laments the loss of all his materials,164
just as historians lament the blowing up of the Four
Courts in Dublin. Some at least of Sedulius1 manuscripts
must have survived, for the verse was copied in the
twelfth century, in the manuscript now in Brussels;165
the Greek St. Paul of the ninth century, probably in his
own hand, is in Berne.166 But whether Sedulius himself
survived there is no record. One victory of Franco over
the Normans roused him to a set of swinging Sapphics,

181 ii. 74. “Aut lego vel scribo, doceo scrutorve sophiam,
Obsecro celsithronum nocte dieque meum,
Vescor, poto libens, rithmizans invoco Musas,
Dormisco stertens; oro deum vigilans.”
162 Vita St. Remacli, Acta SS. Sept, i, 705.
188 Gest. Pont. Leod. M. G. H. Script, vii. 199.
^M igne, P.L. 132, c. 829.
185 Discovered by Pertz, 1839. See Pirenne, op. cit.
186Thesaur. Palaeohib. ii. xx. 290-6.
68 The W andering Scholars
but they were still a great way off.167 Then came the
plague, and moved him to a cry of intercession:
“Saint of all saints, and King of all kingships,”168
as straight from the heart as Herrick’s Litany. There is
no need to question his devotion; the Bacchanalian verse
is only the blown spray of a profound and serious scholar­
ship; and if the fragment of Irish verse in the St. Paul is
his, “To go to Rome, much labour, little profit. The King
whom thou desirest, if thou bringest Him not with thee,
thou wilt find Him not”160—he had come at a truth that
prophets and kings had desired in vain.
** Carm. ii. 45.
m ii. 46, p. 209.
m Thesaur. Pdlaeohth. ii. 296.
 CHAPTER III

T h e Tenth Century

T h e tenth century has a bad name; but good things came

out of it. In the text-books it disputes with the seventh
the bad eminence, the nadir of the human intellect.
Archbishop Trench, a kind man, calls it the wastest place
of European literature and of the human mind.1 Radul-
fus Glaber, an ill-conditioned dog on his own showing,
but a lively historian, declares that by the end of it, the
year 1000, there was hardly a personage, religious or secu­
lar, in Europe.2 He was unlucky in his choice of a date:
the year 1000 saw the inscrutable master of all sciences,
Gerbert, in St. Peters chair; his gallant and ill-fated
scholar, Otto III, Emperor; Fulbert, “Socrates nosterv to
the admiring younger generation, teaching music and
the humanities in the school of Chartres; and Robert,
henpecked saint, poet and humourist, on the throne of
France. The truth is that the tenth century does the old
things, and does them not so well; but it also does new
things, and does them not so very ill. It saw the passing
of Charlemagne's house in France in impotence and
squalor, but in Germany the reigns of three great Em­
perors. It saw Clonfert and Clonmacnoise, St. Martin of
Tours and St. Denis sacked by the Northmen and held
to ransom, and wolves hunting in Auvergne; but before
the century was out the same Northmen were peaceful
citizens among the apple-orchards of Normandy. The
Huns burnt the library of St. Gall and spared the cellar;
1 Trench, Sacred Latin Poetry, p. 47.
a Migne, P.L. cxlii. c. 644.
70 The W andering Scholars
yet enough of both vintages was left to make the tenth
century the Golden Age of the monastery. It saw the suc­
cession of Popes as short-lived and wanton as May-flies,
but in England the reform of Dunstan, in France the
founding of Cluny, the monastery that produced the
great reforming Popes of the next century. “L'âme de
Cluny, ce fut la prière liturgique': the office, the opus
D ei, is restored to its place as the central task of the
Benedictine order, to the incalculable enriching of the
aesthetic and musical sense. The Office of the Sepulchre
and the Office of the Star, the amazing moment when
for the first time the three white-clad figures came slowly
up the cathedral aisle, pedetemptim, as those who seek
something, and the challenge,
“Quern queritis in sepulchro, O Christicolae?”
first rang from the very tomb itself, belongs to the middle
of the century:3 the plastic, dramatic imagination is set
free. From it, too, dates the beginning of modem music,
ultra-modem even, for Hucbald of St. Amand4 began
that quest for the “perfect fourth” which Holst, un­
moved by discord, still continues. The scholars of the
century can almost be counted on the fingers of one
hand; so can the lyrics. But they include the first aubade
and the first love song; and in the manuscripts that con­
tain them the lost tunes of the Middle Ages are for the
first time caught and held.5
It is true that thanks to the dangers and squalors of
the century, invasion, rebellion and faction, there is no
8Regularis Concordia of St. Ethelwold. Text in Chambers, Me­
diaeval Stage, ii. 309.
4Or rather, the unknown author of the Musica Enchiriadis
which goes by his name.
5 A tenth century MS. of St. Martial of Limoges (B. N. MS.
Lot. 1 1 8 1) contains “lam dulcis amica“ : Vatican MS. Reginensis
1462, tenth century, formerly of Fleury, the aubade. For the
facsimile and musical score of “lam dmds amica“ see Cousse-
maker, Hist, de Vharmonie au moyen âge. PI. viii. p. x, xi.
 T he Tenth Century 71
longer, at any rate in France and England, an educated
society. One misses the voluminous correspondence of
the ninth century, of Alcuin and his Venerable Fowl, of
Hrabanus Maurus, of Servatus Lupus, hoarding manu­
scripts like a magpie and clamouring like Petrarch for
more. There is scholarship, but it is not present diffusedly.
Bruno, young brother of Otto the Great and Archbishop
of Cologne, does his best to maintain a school of the
humanities there, and summoned to it an Irish bishop
from Trier to teach Greek; there are colonies of Greek
and Irish monks at Toul and at Verdun.6 From Toul,
indeed, or rather from a monastery prison in Toul, comes
the odd little tale of the calf that ran away, and his ad­
ventures with the wolf and the hedgehog and the lion and
the otter—the first rough draft of the Roman de Renard.
The writer of it says frankly that he himself had misspent
his youth nor plied his book, and the calf is his vagrant
self, and that is why the metre is so clumsy.7 At Glaston­
bury, Dunstan was brought up by Irish scholars (W illiam
of Malmesbury pauses to reflect on their continuing
reputation in music and geometry, though their Latinity
—he writes in the twelfth century—is no longer so pure
as it was).8 Begging letters addressed to his successor from
Liège prove that the fire still bums there. One clerk with
humility and confusion of metaphor pleads that as an
unworthy pup he had licked up sufficient crumbs from
under the bishop’s table (Notker of Liège was a sound
scholar) to qualify him to enter the English apiary as an
obedient bee;9 and another, about a journey and a loan
of money and a borrowed horse, bears out the Vicar of
* Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, i. 503, 505.
TEcbasis Captivi (Grimm and Schmeller, Lateinische Gedichte
des X und XI Jahrhunderts).
* Vita S. Dunstant, i. 4 (Stubbs, Memorials of St. Dunstan,
pp. 256-7).
*Vita S. Dun stani, i. 4 (Stubbs, Memorials of St. Dunstan,
P- 387)-
72 T he W andering Scholars
Wakefield's experience that the conjunction of a scholar
and a horse is not always fortunate.10 The light never
quite goes out; though Gerbert in quest of it flickers across
Europe like a will-o'-the-wisp.
Gerbert is not the first wandering scholar, but he is the
most famous; far greater than Nicholas Breakspear whose
wanderings also ended in St. Peters chair. “Can any
man,” said Panurge, “be so wise as the devils are?” “N ay,”
said Pantagruel, “save by God's especial grace.” But this
explanation of Gerbert's amazing knowledge did not occur
to his contemporaries; and by the time the legend reached
William of Malmesbury the light of the everlasting bon­
fire played about his head. He was, to William, a fugitive
monk of Fleury, by whom the ordinary arts, arithmetic,
music, astronomy and geometry, were lapped up as in­
ferior to his genius; he fled to Spain, studied magic at
Toledo, stole a codex “conscious of the whole art” from
his masters pillow by the aid of that masters daughter,
fled, was pursued, and the direction of his flight betrayed
by the stars, hung under a bridge between air, earth and
water, so as to put the stars out of their reckoning, in­
voked the devil, and was assisted by him across the Bay
of Biscay; returned to France, and became scholasticus
at Rheims, had Otto, future Emperor of Germany, Robert
Capet, soon to be King of France, and Fulbert, future
Bishop of Chartres, among his pupils, and made a water
organ and a clock, as well as a brazen head which solved
for him his problems in mathematics. Otto, Emperor after
his father, made him Archbishop of Ravenna, and after­
wards Pope. “ So did he urge his fortunes, the devil aiding
him, that nothing which ever he planned was left im­
perfect,” except perhaps that unfinished Mass in the
Chapel of Jerusalem, when the pains of death took hold
on him. His death, says William, was terrible.11
10 Tb. p. 390.
“ William of Malmesbury, Gesta Reg. Ang. ii. 167. Stubbs
(Rolls Series'), p. 193.
 T h e Tenth Century 73
William of Malmesbury’s Gerbert is a legend out of
the Arabian Nights; and his learning, even in the sober
testimony of Richer,12 who loved and admired him more
than any man living, is almost fabulous. But for scholar­
ship of the academic indisputable kind, exact, pedantic
scholarship, there is the evidence of an incomparable
letter that came about 965 to the monks at Reichenau
from Gunzo of Novara, appointed by Otto II to inaugu­
rate humane studies in Germany.13 The Ottos were
scholars without Melville’s damaging rider, "passing well,
for a Queen”; the youngest of them teases Gerbert for
lessons in Greek and arithmetic, and threatens to send
him as many poems as there are men in Gaul.14 His
father, coming back from one of the Italian campaigns
that were the curse of every German Imperial house,
brought with him Gunzo of Novara, very much as
Charlemagne did Peter of Pisa; and the long journey
was broken by a halt to enjoy the famous hospitality of
S t Gall. It was bitterly cold; Gunzo had almost to be
lifted from his horse, he complains, the recollection of his
martyrdom mounting his indignation, so powerless had
his frozen limbs become; but he thawed in warmth and
conversation, and unfortunately, his wits perhaps still
sluggish with cold, blundered into an accusative instead
of an ablative. And Ekkehard, the scholasticus, heard.
One may imagine that Ekkehard was listening critically
to the Inaugurator of Humane Studies; conscious, as he
well might be, that Otto could have found elegant schol­
arship a little nearer home. At any rate, the accusative
registered upon his retentive mind, and in due course
upon the common room. St. Gall rang with it, and with
Ekkehard’s unfeeling jest. Gunzo made no reply that he
speaks of; the mole subsides underground, though one
“ Richer, Hist. iii. 45-65. Migne, P.L. cxxxviii. c. 101-109.
” Migne, P.L. cxxxvi. c. 1283 et seq.
“ Gerbert, Epist. 153. Migne, P.L. cxxxix.
74 T h e W andering Scholars
suspects a frenzied activity. After a considerable interval
he emerges, in a letter of enormous length to the monks
of Reichenau—Cambridge to the St. Gall Oxford—detail­
ing the whole outrage, admitting his error, but adducing
twenty-eight examples from approved and standard
authors of equal eccentricity. It is academic comedy; hut
the m ilieu which provides such situations is not illiterate.
"And indeed,” Gunzo proceeds, “who knows not the
verses of that wanton monk? He openeth his mouth and
emitteth a poem, ignorant of the economy of poetry, the
interweaving of the purple patch [purpureum pannum ]
resplendent here and there, the personating of the man­
ners of the time, the observation of the decorum of
poetry. . . . I do confess that my own youth was touched
with this vice. . . . Think not that I hold the art of
poetry in contempt. I find verily that ecclesiastic persons
make use of the form; but I question if in our time a
writer of the true poem could be found.” Scriptor veri
poematis—it is the contempt of the old classical scholar,
the Gabriel Harveys, for the new-fangled rhyming. More
than a century before, Paulus Albanis, the Jew of Cor­
dova, had complained of it. Himself, he says, had written
much rhyme in his youth, but purged his work of it
later; complains that few churchmen know their own
tongue well enough to write so much as a letter of greet­
ing to a brother, but that herds of them can learnedly
expound the Arabic pomps of language, and adorn the
end of their lines with the “co-artation” of a single letter.15
The influence of Arabic poetry on the Sicilian school of
Frederick II and Piero delle Vigne is an accepted enchant­
ment. It is curious to find it anticipated by four hundred
years.
It is likely enough that the rhyming of St. Gall was
encouraged by the Irish humanist Marcellus, an even
“ Traube, Poet. Lat. Car. iii. p. 123.
 T he Tenth Century 75
keener musician than scholar, says Ekkehard.16 He had
charge of the monastic school; Iso of the “canonical,” the
oblates, “and joyous it is to recall how the house of St.
Gall under these two began to increase, and how it
flowered.”17 Iso was responsible for Salomon, future
Bishop of Constance and Abbot of St. Gall; Marcellus for
the great Three, Notker, Turilo, Ratpert, “the Senators
of our Republic,” and famous for the oddest, most charm­
ing friendship of the Middle Age.
By the time Ekkehard’s Chronicle has finished with
them, one knows Notker, Turilo, and Ratpert as inti­
mately as Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. The Three-in-One,
Ekkehard calls them, but he does not confound their sub­
stance.18 Notker, the best beloved of the three, with his
little stammer, a shy man yet “in divinis erectus,” was
gentle in all things: writing a book of instruction for
young Salomon, the future Abbot, he dissuades him from
the reading of the pagans (whom however he himself
knew, and exercised some critical faculty upon): rather
read Prosper on the active and contemplative life, and
apply it, and you will indeed be worthy of the episcopate.
Eheu, sed m ihi turn quam m olliter ossa quiescent. “Alas!
but by that time how quietly my bones will rest!”19
Turilo, the artist of the three, was much in request for
his skill in sculpture and design: festivus, says Ekkehard,
of so ready a wit that Charles put his curse on whoever
made such a man a monk; “chaste, as a true disciple of
Marcellus, who closed his eyes to women; none seeing
him could doubt him a monk of St. Gall.”20 He played
exquisitely upon the flute, and his occasions took him

M“Maxime ad musicam.” Casus ...

c. iii. M. G . H. Scriptores, ii. p. 94.
Sancti G alli, Ekkehard,

lTM. G. H . Scriptores, ii. p. 79.

“ Ib. c. 3, pp. 94-101.
” Notker, De Interpret. D iv. Script, vii.
“ Ekkehard, Casus S. Galli, 3, pp. 94, 97.
j6 T he W andering Scholars
much from the cloister, a little to Ratpert’s uneasiness.
For Ratpert, the scholar, historian of the monastery, rarely
put his foot beyond the cloister, and hardly wore out two
pairs of shoes in the year.21 Then there is the enemy,
Sindolf, the server of tables, who rose to high place in
the monastery, and worse than all caught the ear of the
Abbot: a toad of a man, who found a manuscript deli­
cately written, and cut four pages out of it with a cook’s
knife ( “as indeed is so seen to this day” ), and dirtied
them, and put them back in the place whence they were
stolen.22 But the story of how they caught him spying
through the window and took the vengeance of the Lord
upon him is straight out of Stalky and Co. In its accom­
plishment, and the manner of its telling, it is a sufficient
answer to those who accuse the Middle Ages of only
rudimentary humour.23
The Bishop, though a little tarnished by his choice of
an “auricular friend,” was a great personage: and very
nearly worthy, even in his wayward youth, of the affec­
tion that Notker lavished on him. There are three poems,
all of them curious anticipations of the sixteenth century
sonnet.24 Salomon himself composed in both languages;
but whatever lovesongs he may have written to the frail
beauty whom Notker dreaded, none have survived: the
verse that remains is worthy, unless in its very human
grieving, of a great ecclesiastic. But a charming story of
the second decade of the tenth century proves his surviv-
“ lb. p. 95. “Scholarum ab adolescentia magister, doctor planus
et benevolus, disciplinis asperior; raro praeter fratres pedem claus­
tro promovens, duos calceos annum habens, excursus mortem
nominans; saepe Tuodlonem itinerarium ut se caveret, amplexibus
monens.”
22 lb. p. 101. It happened to Notker, left solitary after the other
two were dead; and stabbed him to the heart, says Ekkehard. For
it was a copy of a Greek text of the Episdes lent by the Bishop of
Vercellae and he had made the copy “multis sudoribus.”
22 Ekkehard, Casus S. Galli, 3, pp. 95-6.
24Poet. Lat. Car. iv. i. p. 345.
 T he Tenth Century 77
ing charm, as well as the popularity of rhyming in St.
Gall.26 It was the Feast of the Innocents, afterwards the
Saturnalia of the Church; by old-established custom the
boys had a holiday, and as their manner was they lay in
wait to capture a great one and hold him to ransom: as
luck would have it, they found in their ambush the
Lord Abbot himself. Gleefully they rush him to the
cathedra of the Master, and there set him down; and the
Lord Abbot regards them with his formidable smiling.
“So you have made me magister: eh bien! the master’s
privilege. Strip!” There fell a gloom; but one gallant
sparrow pipes up that on these painful occasions the
victims may buy themselves off with a verse. Reprieve
was granted; and two of them struck off rhyming couplets
so adroitly ad hoc that the Lord Abbot set his arms about
them, gave the whole school three days’ holiday and
feasting at the expense of the Abbey, and this moreover
in perpetuo. Not often has a neck verse been so fortunate.
The couplets were in leonine hexameters: the most
popular measure of the century. Notker occasionally used
them, but his fame is in the Sequences, the vers libre
of the Middle Ages, first composed to help the monks to
carry in their minds the endless modulations of the
Alleluia. The long vowels were intended, say the liturgists,
to express that ineffable exultation when the heart is too
full for speech;26 but Notker confesses frankly that he
could never remember them himself. Then one day, as
he tells it, came a fugitive monk to St. Gall with his
service book, a fragment of wreckage from the sack of his
own monastery of Jumièges in Normandy.27 He had
words written under the notes; Notker was struck with
the idea, found it excellent, but—like many artists—the
“ Ekkehard, Casus S. Galli, p. 91.
“ Paululus, De Eoe. Off. Migne, P.L. clxxvii. c. 381. See Fiere,
The Winchester Troper.
“ Migne, P.L. cxxxi. c. 1003.
78 T h e W andering Scholars
execution paltry. So he wrote new words, and founded
the most famous school of sequences, till Adam of S t
Victor captures that supremacy for Northern France:
the stateliest for the feast of St. Michael, with Urania re­
stored again to verse.28 It is emancipation, but dangerous*
From this time on the complaints begin of clerks in the
choir singing like histriones, even of introducing vain
songs into the service; and by the twelfth century comes a
descant for three voices, “Et in fines,” accompanied by
"Dames sont en grant émoi ” 'V id e et inclina aurem taum”
interweaves and accompanies “Dieus! jet ne puis la nuit
dormir,” but for other reason than the Psalmist’s.29
There are other poets, of the historical kind; a lively
epic written by the Ekkehard with whom Gunzo had
words, the adventures of Waltharius and his gallant lady
love escaping from the Hun to Burgundy again; sequences
from no less a person than Robert of France, and the
immortal story of how Constance of Aquitaine, who
brought southern graces and southern morals in her flying
squadron to the north, took it ill that her husband should
write so many fine things, yet never one for her, where­
upon Robert composed the

“O constantia martyrum,”

and solemnly presented it.30 Flodoard of Rheims, in

whom, says a French epitaph, ‘ you will have all an­
tiquity,” wrote the Triumph of Christ and His Saints in
Palestine, with a splendid invocation,

“Lux immensa Deus,”

38Anal. Hymn. Med. Aev. 53, p. 307.
29Coussemaker, Histoire de l’harmonie au moyen âge, facsimi­
les of B.N. MS. 813. PL 27. See Ælred of Rievaulx, S'peculum
charitatis, Migne, P.L. cxcv. 571: “God taught us through his
organs, Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, how to sing; and to it we
prefer the idlest vanities of the scholars.”
90Chronicle of S. Bertin (Bouquet, Hist. x. p. 299).
 T h e Tenth Century 79
and a life of Pelagia, the most neglected and perhaps the
loveliest of the Magdalene saints.81 Aymon, monk of
Fleury, has pleasant poems on angels who showed St.
Benedict the way, and about three crows who were his
pensioners, and who followed him from Subiaco to Bene­
ventum, almost fifty miles.82 But the new things are the
anonymous lyrics, the glorious rhythms of

"O Roma nobilis, orbis et domina,”

and

“O admirabile Veneris idolum,”

and still more significant in promise, the alba of the Vati­

can M S. formerly at Fleury, and the “lam dulcis amica”
of the M S. of St. Martial of Limoges. The alba is more
precious for its Provençal burden than for other merit:
it still holds to Prudentius, and the cry might be to waken
faithful souls rather than sleeping lovers, the enemy in
ambush the Enemy of souls rather than the jealous guard­
ian. But in its own exquisite phrase,

“Dawn is near: she leans across the dark sea.”33

For Iam dulcis amica, the quatrain halts a litde, the

rhythm wavers; Ovid’s upholstery is still in the back­
ground, a litde the worse for wear. But its strength is in
the sudden impatience with which the catalogue of at­
tractions is thrust aside, the sudden liquid break like the
first bird notes in the stuffy pedant-music of the M eister­
singers:
“ Migne, cxxxv. c. 491. On the fragrance of Pelagia’s passing:
“Quae quo migrabat, spargebat aromate ventos,
Sollicitis vacuum nidoribus aera replens.”
** Sermo de S. Benedicto, ii., iii. Migne, cxxxix. c. 860.
** Poet. Lat. Car. iii. 703 n.:
“L’alba par umet mar atra sol,
Poy pasa vigil miraclar tenebras.”
8o T he W andering Scholars
“Ego fui sola in sylva
Et dilexi loca secreta—1*

“I have been in the woods alone,

I have loved hidden places.
Tumult of men I shun
And the crowding faces.
Now the snow vanishes,
Out the leaves start,
The nightingale’s singing:
Love’s in the heart.”34

It is the promise of the woods in Tristan, of a century of

lyric. Not for another two hundred years will “Birds sing
in every furrow/’ but the ploughing has begun.
lam dulcis amica was set to music; so too Gottschalk’s
“O quid iubes, pusiole,” and three of the lyrics of
Boethius.85 There is even a tenth century manuscript of
Virgil in which some of the speeches of Æneas are noted
to be sung. Most astonishing of all, two odes of Horace, to
Albius Tibullus, and to Phyllis.36

“A jar of the Albana, nine years old,

Still a full amphora, and in the garden
There’s parsley, Phyllis, for twining coronals,
And trails of ivy
To bind your shining hair.”
14 “Ego fui sola in sylva,
Et dilexi loca secreta,
Frequenter effugi tumultum
Et vitavi populum multum.
Iam nix gladesque liquescit,
Folium et herba virescit,
Philomena iam cantat in alto,
Ardet amor cordis in antro.”
®B .N . MS. 1154. Coussemaker, op. cit. PI. I. II. This is ninth
century; but there are two tenth century settings of ‘‘Iam dulds
amica,” B.N. MS. 1118 , formerly of Fleury, PI. VIII, and a MS.
of Vienna (Coussemaker, p. 108, PI. IX).
“ Coussemaker, p. 102. The Ode to Phyllis, Montpellier MS.
425, is given in facsimile, PI. X.
 T he Tenth Century 81
The rest of it is intricate with classical allusion, the other
thornier still. To read them, and to reflect on the com­
poser who chose them for setting, and the audience be­
fore which they were sung, is to revise our ideas of the
tenth century.
It is easy to exaggerate the importance of the driftwood;
a broken twig does not mean a forest. But the rudeness
of the century has been overstressed: there is courtliness
in it, as well as savagery. The people fastened ill names on
King Hugo’s mistresses, but they were names of god­
desses, Venus, Juno, and hapless Semele;87 so Liutprand
tells us in the liveliest history that has even been written.
Liutprand himself breaks out into all manner of verse,
warning us beforehand with the phrase “Exclamation of
the author upon him,” which is as good a way as any
of working off an historical prejudice. Lambert, monk of
Ardres, writing a history of the Counts of Guines, works
back through the marriage of Ralph with Rosella, some
time in the eleventh century, “Rosella so called for her
dewy fragrance and her colouring of a rose,” to the tenth
century tragedy of the loves of Sifrid the Dane and Elstrud
(called after a daughter of Alfred the Great); he was an
exile, and made welcome at the court of Arnold of
Flanders, and remained after his death with Baldwin, the
son; fell in love with Baldwin’s sister, got her with child,
fled to Guines and died there broken-hearted, because he
was separated from his love, “suam amicam.”38 There is
romantic passion there, as well as cowardice. Hroswitha
came at twenty-three to the convent of Gandesheim, and
learned Latin from the abbess Gerberga her contemporary,
and a princess; Terence bewitched her, and, aware of his
danger, she wrote herself six comedies as substitutes, “and
if you do not much like them,” says she to the learned
bishops who are to judge them, “at least they have pleased
w Antapod. iv. 13.
" Mon. Germ. Hist. Script, xxvii. 568.
82 T he W andering Scholars
myself.” Hroswitha had learned something of the heart
before she came to the convent, and phrases in her love
scenes cry out from the printed page. The Roman general
who has fought for Constantine, demanding his daughter’s
hand as the price of victory, comes back to claim it; the
girl is bride to Christ (something very like it would have
happened in the convent if Count Bernhard, Gerbergas
husband, had ever come back from his campaign), and
waits in fear and dread. But the general has had his own
vision on the batdefield; when he comes, it is to renounce
her, and vow himself Christs bachelor. Constantine, im­
mensely relieved, urges upon him the official rank of
son-in-law, and residence in the palace: “—And risk the
daily sight of her whom I love more than my friends,
more than my life, more than my soul?” It is not the
speech of the plaster saint. So the two take leave of one
another. “And may He grant,” says the girl, “that for
the severance of our bodies, it will be given to us to go
together to the eternal joy.” “Fiat, fiat!”39 A century
later, and the old canon of Rouen who wrote the St.
Alexis will finish not very differently:
“Without doubt is Saint Alexis in heaven.
He has God with him, and the angels for company.
With him the maiden to whom he made himself
strange;
Now he has her close to him—together are their souls.
I know not how to tell you how great their joy is.” 40

Dulcitius, the governor who emerges complacent and

smutty-faced from amorous encounter with saucepans and
kettles which he had embraced in mistake for the virgins
of the Lord, the said virgins meanwhile giggling through
™Hroswithae O f era, ed. Paul von Winterfeld. Gallicanus, p.
120 .
40La Vie de St. Alexis (G. Paris. Bihl. de VÉcole des Hautes
Études, viii. p. 169. See Introduction, pp. 4 3-51). Translation
by Professor Saintsbury.
 T h e Tenth Century ' 83
a peephole, is rattling farce.41 The scene in the brothel
in Abraham, where the desert saint goes to find and
bring back his fallen niece, is Bellafront and her father
over again. Some air of the desert is about the old saint
in spite of the gallant hat which he has perched upon his
head in his character of the elderly rip, and the girl, half
conscious of it, begins to cry, is rebuked by the master
of ceremonies, and by the saint himself, and tries as best
she can to play the wanton and be gay; left alone, he
discovers himself, and his fashion of dealing with his
penitent is the Age of Faith at its greatest.
“Manlike it is to sin, but devil-like to dwell in sin.
Blame not him who falls, but him who fails to rise
again. . . .”
“The mercy of God is vaster than His creature.”
"W ho despairs of God sins mortally. Shall the spark
struck from the flint set on fire the sea?”
‘T h e day breaks: let us go.”
He mounts her on his horse, lest the hardness of the
roads should wound her tender feet, and goes walking
beside her into the desert dawn.42 The same compassion,
the same understanding, is in the "Callimachus and
Drusiana," the far-off promise of Romeo and Ju liet. For
Callimachus, desperately in love with Drusiana, a married
woman, is challenged, not unlike Romeo, by his young
friends: T love.”
“What?”
“A fairness; a loveliness.”
“Meaning?"
“A woman.”
“Having said that, you have said them all!”43
The love scene is of yesterday.
“W hat made you love me?”
“ Hroswithae O f era, “Dulcibus,” pp. 129—30.
“ Hroswithae O f era, “Abraham,” pp. 154-9.
“ Zb. “Callimachus,” pp. 135-6.
84 T h e W andering Scholars
'Tour loveliness.”
“M y loveliness?”
“Assuredly.”
“What has my loveliness to do with you?”
“Nothing, alas! as yet, but I hope otherwise.”44
He swears by men and gods, and Drusiana, moved with
terror, prays for death to save her honour. She dies, and
is taken to the vaults. Callimachus bribes the ill-con­
ditioned slave who watches them to let him enter; and
finds her like Juliet as lovely fair as ever:
"O Drusiana, Drusiana, with what anguish of heart
have I worshipped thee . . . and thou didst ever reject
me. Now art thou in my power.” Enter a serpent (if
the play was ever acted in Gandesheim how fain would
we have seen that serpent) and disposes of the slave,
whereupon the lover dies for fear. Upon them, the corpse,
and the serpent, enter St. John and the grieving husband.
Christ appears, and restores the girl and Romeo, but not
the slave. Why? asks the husband. “Because,” says St.
John with admirable subdety, “through ignorance and
deceived by carnal delight this one sinned, the other
through malice only.” The snake is dismissed, for it is
felt that he might bite twice, and by the intercession of
Drusiana the slave also revives, dislikes the new atmos­
phere, and prefers to go back to the place from which he
came out.45 It is preposterous; but it is very real “criticism
of life.” And it antedates by some centuries the discovery
of romantic passion.
The “sweet south” is blowing in Germany, if any­
where. Ratherius of Liège, Bishop of Verona, has an ill
word of the Italian bishops, and himself refused to ordain
any man who had not served his apprenticeship to Uberai
studies in a monastic school, or under some learned
“ Hrosurithae Opera, "Callimachus,” p. 1 3 7 .
“ lb., pp. 139-145.
 T he Tenth Century . 85
scholar.4*46 In France, except at Rheims, the humanities are
4
little esteemed, and the reform of Cluny, though it meant
a veritable renaissance in the plastic arts and in music,
discountenanced classical scholarship. Yet its saintly abbot,
Odo, had loved Virgil with passion, and even the dream
which made him an anti-classicist for life—the exquisite
vase with serpents twining out of it, and the voice telling
him that this was the poetry of Virgil—shows him haunted
by an amazing sensitiveness to beauty.47 It is laid down
in the Customs of Cluny that in the hour of silence one
asked for a book by the gesture of turning over pages
with the hand; but if the work were by a profane author,
one scratched like a dog behind one’s ear, with implica­
tions that may be deduced, but are plainly stated in the
text.48 That rule has the impress of Maiolus, librarian of
Cluny, and later abbot; to all who had to do with him
“exemylo fuit et terrori”49 Maiolus himself had read the
books of the ancient philosophers, and the lies of Virgil,
with the result that he would henceforth neither hear
them himself nor have others read. “Sufficient unto you,”
he would say, “are the divine poets; nor have you any
need to pollute yourself with the luxurious eloquence
of Virgil”; and some have it even that he mutilated the
manuscripts, taking Jerome on the shaving of the captive
maid in the letter as well as in the spirit. Yet something
lingers. Rahingus, monk of Flavigny and charged with
all its business affairs, felt his soul grow sterile in these
things, and being bound to provide for so many bodily
needs of the brethren set himself to do something for their
souls1 good also, and so fills his scanty leisure with collect­

44“They love Bacchanalians rather than philosophers, players

than priests, minstrels than clerks.” Migne, P.L. cxxxvi. 291. See
Ozanam, Documents Inédits, p. 14.
47 Migne, P.L. cxxxiii. S. Odonis Vita, c. 89.
“ Martene, De Antiq. Mon. Rit. v. c. 18 (4).
49Vita S. Maioli, Migne, cxxxvii. 752.
86 T he W andering Scholars
ing books. His Virgil is to be kept in the house for ever.50
In the same century a monk gave Fleury a precious
Horace, hoping for that good deed that his soul might be
drawn from Hell.61 But strangest of all is the anthology
of Latin lyric that took shelter behind the vast respectable
bulk of Isidore of Seville, in the lost manuscript of Beau­
vais, where the great Spanish doctor heaves himself like a
breakwater for all the gay little craft in a perpetual Feast
of Lanterns behind his back.62 There is character in an
anthology; and the unknown scholar masked by the Codex
Isidori Bellovacensis had burst the last grape of the pagan
vintage against a palate sufficiently fine.

“ Hither your goblets brimming deep with wine,

That Love aflame may his long vigil keep.
The fire of Love kindles from burning Bacchus,
For Love and Bacchus are like-minded gods.“58

“O lovely restless eyes!

They need no tongue;
For there sits Venus, and the little Loves;
Between them sits Delight.“ 54

“Julia but now let fly at me with a handful of snow.

I have said that snow was cold; now find I that
snow is fire.“66

“I was with thee, in falseness of a dream.

O far beyond all dreams, if thou wouldst come in
truth.“ 56
“ Delisle, Un Virgile coyié au X e siècle Qi886). Deux Mss.
de VAbbaye de Flavigny, p. 5.
51 Boutaric, Vincent de Beauvais ( Revue des Quest. Hist, xvii,
p. 16).
“ Anthologie Latina, ii. pp. 153 et seq. Also Praef. iv.
“ Ik Carnt. 710.
54Ib. Carm. 714.
a Ib. 706.
mlh. 702.
 T he Tenth Century . 87
“But as for me, at least with maimed delight,
Still let me love, though I may not possess.”57

Strangest of all, the wild fragment of a half-spent revel,

the scattered oyster-shells, the ivy wreaths dishevelled,
the eager dark:

“Nay, let the torches bum;

They watch to-night: to-morrow all's forgotten.”68

They belong to the Renaissance in Italy, five centuries

away, those torches. To find them burning in the tenth
is to see strange shadows. Yet the gold lies there unminted;
the wine undrunk. Catullus, the Pervigilium Veneris, the
“Dancing girl” ;69 they have them, and cannot use them:
the creative impulse is not yet come. It is the legend
of the treasure of the Caesars that lay buried in the
Campus Martius, beneath the statue with the outstretched
arm that said “Percute h i c and many men struck the
arm and went away disbelieving. But Gerbert, by this
time Pope Sylvester II, watched and saw where the
shadow of the outstretched finger fell at noon, and marked
the place, and came back at night alone with his chamber-
lain and a lantern and a pick. And where he struck, the
earth opened, and they went down into a great hall,
where a king and queen of gold sat feasting with servitors
of gold, but all the light came from a great carbuncle in
the ceiling, and in one corner stood a boy with a bow,
and the arrow taut on the string. And Gerbert stooped
w Anthologie Latina, ii. p. 712. Professor Saintsbury's transla­
tion.
“ lb. 7 1 1.
58Ratherius of Verona refers to Catullus (Migne, P.L. cxxxvi.
c. 752) and also Walafrid Strabo. Carm. 62 is in Codex Thuanus
B.N. 8071, a late ninth century MS., also the Pervigilium Veneris;
C<ypa Syrisca in Vatican 3252, ninth century Lombard, and B.N.
792-7» tenth century. The last lines of the Capa appear in the
Carmina Burana, 178a—
“ Pone merum et talos, pereat qui crastina curat.”
88 T h e W andering Scholars
to handle the marvels that lay about him and stayed his
hand, (or a shiver ran through the still figures about him,
and he was afraid, and stood gazing only. But his cham­
berlain saw a knife with a handle curiously worked and
coveted it and secretly picked it up. The bow twanged;
with a crash the carbuncle splintered into darkness, and
round them they felt the shadowy figures rising cum
frem itu. Gerbert snatched the knife and flung it from
him; blind and stumbling they rushed from the place,
and so by lantern light back to the world they knew.60
It is another of William of Malmesbury's legends: and a
parable for other scholars than Sylvester II.
*° William of Malmesbury, Regum Gesta, ii. 167. Rolls Series.
 CHAPTER IV

T h e Revival of Learning in France

T ,” sa id Benedict of Clusa, disputing with the bishops

of Aquitaine, “I am the nephew of the abbot of Clusa.
He led me about through many places in Lombardy and
France for the sake of grammar. M y learning stood him
at 2000 sol. which he paid to my masters. For nine years
I stood at Grammar, and now am become a scholasticus.
W e were nine scholastici who learned grammar, and I
indeed am thoroughly learned. I have two large houses
filled with books, and at this moment I have not read
them all, but I meditate upon them daily. There is not in
the whole earth a book that I have not. After I have left
the schools, there will be no one under heaven so learned
as I. I shall be abbot of Clusa after the death of my
uncle. I am already chosen by all and but for the malice
of some evil monks who care for nothing but hypocrisy
and rusticity, I should have been consecrated abbot long
ago. I am the prior of Clusa, and I know well how to
make discourse, and how to write. In Aquitaine there
is no learning, they are rustics all: and if any one in
Aquitaine has learnt any grammar, he straightway thinks
himself Virgil. In France is learning, but not much.
But in Lombardy, where I mostly studied, is the fountain
of learning.”1
That speech has made the unhappy Benedict immortal.
For Adhémar, an elderly scholar, although of Aquitaine,
1 Mon. Germ. Hist. Script, iv. 109. Migne, odi. 107-8. It is no
wonder that Adhémar was roused. “For forty days of August and
September the young man alternately ate and drank, and blas­
phemed the Blessed Martial,” at his own table.
90 The Wandering Scholars
has the reporters flair. He was present at that council,
and wrote an account of its controversy in admirable
Latin; but when the nephew of the Abbot of Clusa rises
to speak, Adhémar reports in full: it is oratio recta. With
what yearning affection must his eyes have rested upon
the young man, with what flattering eagerness the stylus
must have rushed along the tablets. It is superb reporting;
never a comment, never an aside. He would not spoil its
bouquet for the world.
The council was held in 1028; and historically, the
egregious Benedict was justified. In Lombardy, at any
rate in Italy, was the fountain of learning. Himself was
hardly more than damped by its spray, and the 2000 sol.
of his uncle the abbot might have been better bestowed;
but one unlucky scholar went deep enough to drown. He
was the poor little grammarian, Vilgardus of Ravenna,
who saw Virgil and Horace and Juvenal in a dream, like
unto gods, and was thanked by them for his good offices
to their memory and promised a share in their immortality.
After that he taught openly that the words of the poets
are in all things worthy of belief, even as Holy Writ, but
expiated that heresy in the fire.2 One remembers the
other heretics, burned at Paris in the next century, of
whom Caesarius von Heisterbach speaks with bated
breath, “who say there is neither paradise nor hell, but he
who hath the knowledge of God in himself, which they
have, hath paradise in himself: and he who hath mortal
sin hath hell in himself, as it were a rotten tooth in the
mouth.” Some of them were Doctors at the University of
Paris, and one of them ten years in the Faculty of Theol­
ogy, but they held that God hath spoken in Ovid, even
as in Augustine.3 The old quarrel which had lapsed in
the harsher noises of the tenth century is roused again.
St. Peter Damian is hot against the monks who challenge
*Radulfus Glaber, Hist. 11. xii. (Migne, cxlii.)
8Caesarius von Heisterbach, Dial. Mirac. v. 22.
 Revival of Learning in France 91
the grammarians at their own idle game, and bandy
vanities with the seculars as if it were the din of a fair,4
but Damian himself was in his youth a passionate clas­
sicist. “Once was Cicero music in my ears, the songs of the
poets beguiled me, the philosophers shone upon me with
their golden phrases, the sirens enchanted my soul nigh
unto death. The Law and the Prophets, Gospel and
Epistle, the whole glorious speech of Christ and His
servants, seemed to me a poor thing and empty. I know
not what the son of Jesse whispered in my ear, so gracious
in its consonance of speech and thought, that all these
others whom I once had loved fell inarticulate and si­
lent.”5 Not wholly inarticulate: the haunting rhythms of
his own prose betray his debt. “Caligaverunt in mortem
oculi sui, et illa luminaria quae illum inant orbem ad
horam extincta swwt.”6 “Darkened in death his eyes, and
those lights which lighten the earth at that hour went
out.” The mysticism of the twelfth century is in his
sermons—on the reticence of Holy Writ, wherein “silence
itself cries out that some greatness is nigh”7—and he has
what the twelfth century mystics had not, a style that has
the plangent resonance of the violin. There are moments
when the bow scrapes wildly across the strings, and when
the terrific invective that descends like another fiery hail
on the sin of the cities of the Plain falls equally upon his
unlucky travelling companion, the poor bishop who sat
up in the inn playing chess while Damian was at his
prayers, the effect is purely comical.8 But some divinity
hedges him. They could nickname that other accuser of
the brethren at Geneva “The Accusative Case,” but for

4Damiani, De Perfectione Monachorum. Ozanam, Documents

Inédits, p. 15.
5 Migne, cxliv. 852.
• lb. 763.
7 Fb. 754-
8Migne, cxlv. 454.
92 The Wandering Scholars
Damian there is his own lightning-flash on Hildebrand,
“M y holy Satan/' The aura about him is of a man
“surer of eternity than time"; with all his denunciation
of man's flesh, he loses himself, unlike S t Bernard, in an
O altitudol before the high aspiring of his mind. “How
strange a thing is man! But half a cubit of him, and a
universe full of material things will not satisfy it." It
is not the man whose senses are blunt who makes the
sternest ascetic, and a great lover wrote the passionate
strophes of his sequence on the Song of Songs—
“Who is this that knocketh at my gate,
Breaking the sleep of the night?"9

But it is in his most famous poem,

“Ad perennis vitae fontem,"10

that the long struggle of his soul is laid bare. It is by

its satisfactions that one judges a soul, and there are
stanzas in the Paradise that have an echo in Walton's
great sentence on Donne, “His mind was liberal and
unwearied in the search of knowledge, with which his
vigorous soul is now satisfied.”

‘Tor the fount of life undying

Once the parched mind did thirst,
Cramped within its carnal prison,
Sought the soul its bonds to burst.
Struggling, gliding, soaring free,
Comes back the exile to its own country.
“Cleansed from all its dregs, the body
With the spirit knows no war,
For the mind and flesh made spirit
One in thought and feeling are.
Deep their peace and their enjoying,
From all shame and scandal far."
*Ib. 939. Carni. bdi.
10 lb. 980. Carni. 226.
 Revival of Learning in France 93
All the contrary desires of the poets are here: Wyatt's
“Nothing on earth more do I crave
Save that I have, to have it still."
Shelleys

‘Thou lovest—but n'er knew love's sad satiety."

---- Avidi et semper pleni quod habent desiderant.

“What they have they still desire,

Eager, and yet satisfied:"

Shakespeare’s

“Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,"
------ "Licet cuiquam sit diversum pro labore meritum
Caritas hoc facit suum, quod amat in altero.
Proprium sit singulorum fit commune omnium.
“Let there be a different guerdon
Unto each man for his pain,
That which I loved in another
Love hath brought to me again;
Thine and mine in full possession,
Yet 'tis common unto men:"

Milton's longing for something fixed where all is moving

“in all the changes of that which is called fortune from
without, or the wily subtleties and refluxes of man's
thought from within"—
---- “Hinc perenne tenent esse, nam transire transiit.,f

Damian is the greatest name in the century: the next

greatest are, like him, Italian, though they made their
name in France, Lanfranc, who came from the law school
of Pavia to Bee in Normandy, and thence with the Con­
queror to Canterbury: Fulbert, Chancellor and Bishop
94 T he Wandering Scholars
of Chartres.11 H e was bom in Rome, about 960; for
apologising to Einhard for not sending on a manuscript,
he explains that he himself had borrowed it from a library
in Rome, “ex natali patria.” He was Gerbert's pupil at
Rheims, while that admirable scholar was simple scholas­
ticus and not yet archbishop of that see: and about twenty-
seven came as master and chancellor to the episcopal
school at Chartres, the first of the almost unbroken suc­
cession of humanists and Platonists whose memory still
makes Chartres a holy place. “The streets are full of the
genius of Fulbert,” said an English monk, a hundred years
after his death:12*they are so still. “Almost every man of
letters in that age in France had him as master,” said
Orderic Vitalis. “At his death,” says the author of the
Life of St. Odilo, “the study of philosophy in France
perished, and the glory of the priesthood wellnigh went
out.” They likened him to a spring, from which rivers
went over all France, and history confirms them.18
Rainaldus restored the schools of Angers, so famous in the
last half of the century that many English scholars came
to study there: Berengarius the heretic, yet so gracious
that the Council had hardly the heart to damn him, re­
vived the glories of Tours, and was himself the adoration
of the still finer scholar Hildebert. “Do you remember,”
writes Adelmann to Berengar, “the evening talks he used
to have with us, our venerable Socrates, in the garden
beside the chapel . . . entreating us with tears that now
and then would break out in the midst of his talk not to
be turned aside, not to slip into a new and deceptive
way?” 14* “Our venerable Socrates” knew the dangerous

11V ide Clerval, Les Écoles de Chartres au moyen âge, pp. 58-
107. Manitius, however, gives Fulbert to Aquitaine.
12 See Clerval, Les Écoles de Chartres au moyen âge, p. 96.
“ Migne, cxliii. c. 1295. Adelmann, D e Viris Illustribus.
14 Migne, cxliii. c. 1289. Epist. ad Berengar, “sub nostro illo
venerabüi Socrate.”
 Revival of Learning in France 95
crossroads: but, strong lover of Plato that he was, he
counted beauty no enemy to holiness. St. Augustine's
dread of music is far from him: his pupil, Franco of
Cologne, is the author of the first treatise on counterpoint,
and his own song to the Nightingale, in the famous
trochaic “fifteener,” is for accompaniment by the lyre, the
monochord, and the organ. It has the first spring ecstasy
in it, for the poets before him have been greatest when
their theme was autumn and the falling of the leaf.

<rWhen the earth with spring returning buds again,

And the branches in the woods again are green,
And the sweetness of all flowers is in the grass,
Lilts the nightingale all passionate with song,
With the thrilling of her tiny swelling throat,
Flings the prophecy of spring and summer tides.
Beyond all birds that sing, clearer than flutes. . . .
Filling the woods and every little copse,
Most glorious with the rapture of the Spring. . . .
The snarer in the green wood holds his peace,
The swan falls silent, and the shrilling flute.
So small art thou, to take us all with singing,
None gave that voice, unless the King of Heaven."16

The verses go heavily: there is monotony in the single

final assonance on the vowel ä: but it is a prophecy to
unawakened earth.
The humorous breadth of the man, as well as some very
adroit rhyming, is in the skit that he wrote upon the Ab­
bot John. It is worth quoting in full, for it is the reverse
of the shield, of Damian's strained and tortured ardours:
humanism is at the gate.

The Abbot John, in stature small,

But not in godly graces,
Spake thus unto his elder friend
—Both lived in desert places—
16De Philomela. Migne, cxli. c. 348.
 The Wandering Scholars
i(l wish,” said he, “to live secure
As angels do in heaven:
No food to eat, no garment wear
Whereon men's hands have striven.”
His senior said “Be not too rash,
Brother, I counsel you,
For you may find you've bitten off
More than your teeth can chew.”
But he—“Who goes not to the war
Nor falls, nor wins the fight,”
He spake, and to remoter wilds
Naked, went out of sight.
For seven days he painfully
Endured a grassy diet,
The eighth, his famine drove him home,
He can no more abye it.
Night, and the door fast shut, all snug
Sat in his cell the other,
When a faint voice without the door
Cried “Open to me, brother.
“John, poor and needy, is without
The old familiar gate,
Let not your kindness scorn the man
Whom want did overtake.”
Then answered he, safe shut within:
“John to an angel turned him,
He contemplates the doors of heaven,
And men no more concern him.”
John had his bed without, and bore
The chills of night contrary,
And thus did penance rather more
Than was quite voluntary.
Now with the dawn, he's safe within,
And scorched with caustic sayings,
But he, intent upon his crust,
Endures it all with patience.
 Revival of Learning in France 97
All warm again, he thanks returns
God and his friend unto,
And even tries, with feeble arm,
To wield the garden hoe.
Cured of his folly, he'll let him
An angel be who can,
Himself he finds it hard enough
To be a decent man.10
The G ulf Stream, diverted for almost a century from
France, is flowing again: the rawness gone from the air.
Radulfus Glaber is genial with it: his odd prose goes with
a sudden lightness when the earlier decades of the century
are past, and climbs to an exaltation at his story of the
council where the people made their truce with God.
And though it was transient, though the horror of the
great famine of 1033 made the earth brutal, the exaltation
comes again in his speech of the first pilgrimage to the
Holy Sepulchre.17 By the time Guibert de Nogent is
writing his autobiography—Guibert was born in 1053—
he can almost fix the date of the change, the breaking of
the frost. “Shortly before that time and indeed partly
in my own time was so great a dearth of grammarians
that almost none could be found in the towns and scarce
any in the cities, and if it befell that any were found, their
learning was so slender that it could hardly equal that of
a wandering clerk in modern times.” 18 The old man who
was his own tutor had been caught up late into the new
currents, and the poor small scholar suffered many things
for not understanding an explanation which the master
could not understand himself. But there was an immense
affection between them: and when Guibert's mother
suspected the gallant lying and stripped the shirt from
“ Latin text in Cambridge Songs, ed. Breul, p. 60: Du Méril,
Poésies populaires latines antérieures au X IIe siècle, p. 189.
17 Radulfus Glaber, Hist. iv. 5. Migne, cxlii. 678-80.
18 Guibert de Nogent, De vita sua. Migne, clvi. 844.
98 The Wandering Scholars
the small scarred shoulders and cried over them, declaring
that he must give up going to school, the youngster burst
out, "If I die for it, I shan't stop till I have got my learning
and am a clerk/'19 That same mother's great beauty is
one of the things Guibert thanks God for—another proof
that the rigour is passing. “Assuredly," he says in his
own defence, lest some think he has spoken profanely
and idly in calling her fair, “assuredly, although beauty
is momentary and fickle with the restlessness of the blood,
as is the way of imaginary good, nevertheless it cannot
be denied that it is good. For if whatever God hath
willed from all eternity is fair, then all that which hath a
temporal fairness is as it were a mirror of the eternal
beauty."20 So good a Platonist was bound to be a poet,
but Guibert thinks with less complacence of the next
stage of his studies. He was now professed at Fly, and
“immersed" in poetry. Holy Writ was contemptible to
him: Ovid and the Bucolics were his pattern, the suavity
of the amorous poets bewitched him, and nothing will
do him but he must play the sedulous ape, “fashing my­
self for this only, if I might but once get even with some
poet in a courdy phrase." But from suavity he fell to
wantonness, from wantonness to sheer obscenity, and
chewed the cud of many a song so outrageous that he
could not for shame's sake confess he was the writer of it,
so fathered it on some other poet, and then basked in
his friend's praises. It passed: the Blessed Gregory gave
him something to break his mind upon,21 and the Abbot
of Nogent is remembered for his prose, his Chronicles
of the Crusade, and an autobiography in the manner of
Augustine. But the story is interesting, for it suggests the
new passion for verse in the schools.
Latin verse composition had always, of course, been
19lb. clvi. 847-
20Guibert de Nogent, De vita sua. Migne, clvi. 839.
21Ibm 872.
 Revival of Learning in France 99
taught. Charlemagne bent his great brows on the young
dandies of the palace school who failed to produce toler­
able verse,22 and Hrabanus Maurus came to Alcuin at
Tours to study metres.23 But it is towards the end of the
eleventh century that one recognises the beginning of the
craze for verse, which is almost universal in the twelfth,24
just as in Elizabethan England any man of breeding was
expected to know what to do with the music sheet set
down before him after dinner. The verse was of two sorts,
the scholar's verse in the classical metres of Hildebert and
Alphanus of Salerno and the school of Liège, and the
cantilena, the rhythmus, which the young men sang at
the corners, ‘ pleasant/' says dear old Tetbald de Vernon
who wrote the St. Alexis, because of its sound like a bell.”
They all wrote it, en pantoufles: even the great Bernard
himself in his youth at Citeaux. He was guilty of great
ease and proficiency in it, as Abelard's indiscreet terrier,
Berengarius, reminds him :25 and by the end of the twelfth
century, the writing of rhyming verse was absolutely
forbidden to the members of the Cistercian order:26 its
associations were too dangerous. Not much of it from
the eleventh century survives: perhaps small loss, judging
by the specimen Ivo of Chartres refers to, as one who
holds it in the tongs. The story is one of the liveliest of
the minor dramas hidden in that great bishop's corre­
spondence. What became of her, the girl of servile birth
who had married a man of rank, when he found out,
and appealed to the bishop for annulment of the mar­
riage? “Both canon and secular law permit,” says Ivo
22 Gesta Carol. Mag. (Monk of S t Gall), i. 3.
28Hrab. Maur. Carm. i.
24See William Fitzstephen on the verse-combats of the London
scholars, Descriptio Nobilissimae Civitatis Londoniae: Stow, Sur-
vey of London, p. 476.
“ Migne, P.L. clxxviii. c. 1857: cantiunculas mimicas et ur­
banos modulos.
26Hauréau, Poèmes Latins attribués à St. Bernard, p. 2.
ioo The Wandering Scholars
magnificently, “but the law of Nature says N ay: before
her there is neither bond nor free.”27 Did they force the
marriage on their unwilling girl, the parents who appeal
to Ivo to join with them in coercing her, and he refuses—
“That is not marriage which is the coition of two bodies:
but the union of two minds.”28 Ivo had the granite
virtues: and when his hoe lights upon the more pesti­
lential type of weedy manhood, there is little left for the
bonfire. Now John, Archdeacon of Orleans, was a pe­
culiarly pernicious weed: and to Ivo's immense disgust,
had just been elected Bishop of that see. Ivo, writing
to the Pope, does not mince matters: he does not spare
the Bishop of Orleans lately dead, who had made John
Archdeacon, nor the present Archbishop of Tours, who
had secured this final preferment, nor John himself, who
has been nick-named Flora by his fellow-canons in Orleans
(Flora being the name of a famous courtesan), and under
that name is the heroine of innumerable songs sung at
the comers by idle young men throughout all France;
“and as you well know,” says Ivo, “there are too many
of the sort. For proof of it, heres a specimen that I
caught a young man singing and took from him with
some violence.” One sees it, the graceless pup bawling it
cheerfully on his way to the Maîtrise, and the whirlwind
of the mighty Bishop round the comer, and the full buffet.
Yet apparently the election was confirmed. “Flora” had
the ear of the queen, and his moneybags were heavier than
his rival's, the Abbot of Bourgeuil. A year or two, and Ivo
is writing, not cordially, but with full consideration, to
John, Bishop of Orleans, to advise him on a point of
canon law.20
The disappointed Abbot of Bourgeuil was a poet, of that
27 Ivo, Epist. 2 2 1 ( M ig n e , cb rii.).
98Ih. Epist. 134 .
29Ivo, Epist. 66, 67, 1 6 2 . M ig n e , cbdi. 8 3 , 86, 16 3.
 Revival of Learning in France io i

valley of the Loire that is so rich in poets.808

1 Baudri first
learnt his grammar in the school of Meung that Theo-
dolfus founded, and which was afterwards to produce a
more famous poet, the Jean de Meung who wrote the
sequel to the Roman de la Rose: from Meung he went to
Angers, to study under Rainaldus, once pupil to Fulbert
at Chartres. His poems are no great matter, but they
suggest the ampler ether in which poetry is possible. He
has nothing of Hildebert's stark grandeur of phrase, the
iron structure of thought that lies behind the conceits,
nothing of Marbod's rich and vivid temper. He trims
his verses to fit the exquisite tablets that his friend the
Abbot of Séez gave him (he died Archbishop of Canter­
bury in 112 2 ) , broad enough to hold an hexameter, long
enough to take eight lines, and coated with green wax,
not black, because green is more pleasing to the eye.31
He has a little of Petrarch's childlike vanity, and, like
Petrarch, rejoices in having found a new scribe, a vagus,
young and malleable:32 the other, Hugh, though ad­
mirable, was too slow, in spite of being promised im­
mortality in the future, and his expenses to Rome on
account.33 The green tablets filled faster than they were

80Much of Baudri’s poetry is still in manuscript. The original—

MS. of Queen Christine, Vatican, 13 5 1—was coped by the Abbé
Salmon, and the copy bequeathed by him to Tours. Delisle in
Romania, Jan., 1 8 7 2 , and H. Pasquier—Un Poète Latin de VXIme
siècle—have printed a good deal of it from the Tours MS.; the
more serious verse is in Migne, clxvi. The famous poem to Adela,
Countess of Blois, describing the Bayeux tapestry, has been edited
separately by Delisle, and much commented. But a complete
edition of Baudri, as well as Marbod and Hildebert, would be
worth doing. A grudging account of him is given in the Histoire
Littéraire, xi. 9 6 - 1 1 3 .
[This note has since been happily nullified by Miss Phyllis
Abraham’s Baudri de Bouraeuil, a critical edition of the Vatican
MS.]
81 Carm. x lvii. Romania, 1 8 7 2 , pp. 2 9 - 3 0 .
** lb. x x x v i. Romania, 2 7 .
n lb. cx lv i. Romania, 3 4 . Pasquier, 7 1 *
102 The Wandering Scholars
emptied: Baudri chafes and frets, because the inspiration
is upon him, and there is no room to write.34 Baudri was
very particular about the colouring of his capitals—
Gerard, who had the Arabic art, did the illumination—
because since the verses are very indifferent, he would
like to make sure of readers by the beauty of the M S.
Mabillon declares that the Abbey of Bourgeuil was more
famous for its verses than its discipline, but it was a
pleasant place, of running streams and arbours, and in its
Abbot's verses a litde vanity and an over-sensitiveness to
the luxury of things are the gravest faults. His gift is in
that sensitiveness to beauty, his love of nature, not yet
wild, perhaps, but bird-haunted: a garden with the sound
of running water, not too loud, but a just accompaniment
to the reading of verse. It is to be sure a place remote from
Cicero, says Baudri, Cicero who had more pleasure in the
stylus and the tablets than in cabbages: yet it might be
apt enough for poets.35 His friends are scholars: to God­
frey of Rheims who reads the masters, Virgil and Ovid,
he writes pleading that if he gives the great ones a year,
give me, for friendship’s sake, a day.36 His hospitality is
encompassing, he is for ever inviting, for ever wailing a
departure: “The Muses look askance at me when you’re
away.”37 He is the perfect host, and although his friends
might learn to dread the production of the little green
tablets, many of them were poets too, and he lures them
by the promise of the garden, cherry trees and pear trees,
olive and pine, narcissus and daphne and thyme, and
you will read me your verses, and I will read you mine,
for I have been writing a lot too.38 He has one poem “On
the Day on which I was Happy” : he was up early, and
84 lb . xliv. Romania, 2 9 .
85 Carm. ccxv. Romania, p. 4 5 .
88 lb. cbd. Pasquier, p. 14 0 .
87 lb. cbod. A m icis qui ab se recesserant. Pasquier, p. 1 4 3 .
88 lb. cxci. A d A v itu m u t ad cu m veniat. Pasquier, 1 4 1 .
 Revival of Learning in France 103
there were the tablets ready, and the Muses.39 He likes
to have poetry read to him before he himself begins to
compose: and a nightingale singing in the copse.40 He
loves the Loire, the river in which the young girls bathing
shine all the whiter in its silver water:41 his worst grief
is that some one has extorted his Ovid from him—he
thinks he must have put magic on him to make him lend
it42—and that a friend has made a poem on a mole. Vae
m ihil If only he had thought of it himself!43 Charming
religieuses are among his correspondents, Muriel and
Emma and perverse Beatrice who will not write,44 and
Constance who thinks him worth many Aristotles.45 Once
only is there a spark of passion, when Constance writes
to thank him for his poems—'“And I have touched your
songs with my bare hand.”46 He does not mind confessing
to Constance that the commentary on Genesis is not get­
ting on very fast,47 but he defends himself against mascu­
line critics, righteously hurt. He does make sermons: if
he reads it is while other people are snoozing in the siesta,
and his poems he writes at night, or when he is on horse­
back.48 Some think his disappointment about Orleans
turned his thoughts to gravity: in a few years he becomes
Archbishop of Dol in Brittany, and his garden knows him

89lb. cbdii. Ad diem in qua laetatus est. Pasquier, 65.

40lb, ccxxxv. Pasquier, 68. clxxviii. De sufficientia votorum
suorum.
"Delisle, Poème à Adèle, 891-2:
“ Unda quidem Ligeris teneris infusa puellis
corpora lotarum candidiora facit.”
48Carrn, cbodii. Ad eum qui Ovidium ab eo extorsit. Pasquier,
P- 134-
43Ib, cxciii. De talpo se reprehendo. Pasquier, p. 69.
44lb, cii. Beatricem reprehendit. Pasquier, 169.
46lb, ccxxxix. “Multos Aristoteles, alter Homerus.”
44lb, ccxxxix.
47lb, ccxxxviii. Ad dominam Constantiam.
48lb, cbd. . . . xxxvi.
104 The Wandering Scholars
no more. The prose works, the History of Jerusalem, on
the Sword and Shield of Michael, on the Visitation of
the Sick, date from the episcopate. “But roses like the
roses of Bourgeuil, I have not found them here . . . and
I begin to sigh. . . . Not that I would go back, but I
would fain see flowers fairer than are here.”49
Marbod, scholasticus of Angers and Bishop of Rennes,
is a more robust type. His love is there, frankly and heart­
ily, for all the world to read, the type that the twelfth
and thirteenth century lovers sang of more lightly and
more tunefully, but with no more sincerity: snow white
and rose red, star-eyed, soft laughter, and the scarlet flame
of tenderly swelling lips, all these had the maid who
sought to give herself to me. And a handsome young man
desired her, but her eyes were on the scholasticus of
Angers. He is very stern: he reminds himself that kisses
are to be scorned. The worst of it, as he ruefully discovers,
is that to scorn kisses is to fasten them still more securely
in ones thoughts.50 Malachy, the old Irish bishop who
died thirty years later at Clairvaux, was wiser in his se­
quence of the wisdom of the spirit—
“To scorn the world, to scorn one's self, to scorn no man
at all."51
And so he begged his kisses, and thought them a king­
dom, kisses that seemed to mingle the strength and sweet­
ness of the rose. A rose the face seemed then, that's white
and buried now.
“Out of my door, O boy with wings, thou the love-
bringer,
And in my house no place for thee, O Cytherea!”52
"E p is t. ad Fisc. M ig n e , clxxi. c. 1 1 7 3 .
Carm. 1 6 :
* °M ig n e , P .L . clxxi. c. 1 6 3 5 .
“Oscula dum spemo, spernens tamen oscula cerno.”
61 “Spernere mundum, spernere sese, spernere nullum.” See
Hauréau, Mélanges Poétiques d'Hildebert de Lavardin, p. 123.
“ M a rb o d , Carmina, x v ii. M ig n e , clx x i. c. 1 6 5 5 .
 Revival of Learning in France 105
Marbod regretted the light-winged verse of his youth,
but spoke of it bravely. Once the word is spoken, there is
no recalling it: better look to the future than regret the
past.53 But he is no Puritan. Death is a harsh word, and
life a lovable.54 If a man can look out on a spring day,
the nests with the unfeathered birds, and not be touched
by it, and go unsmiling, he is intractable, and there is
strife in his heart.55 His reproof written to a censorious
monk is annihilating: “I greet you not, nor do I wish
you well.
“Nam cum sis purus, et forsitan abbas futurus,”

all the rest of us are extorres, outcasts from the kingdom

of heaven. Know that God's mercy knows not how to
measure. T e non consulto, He pities, and He hardens;
nor does any man know, till he is out of the body, on
which hand of the Most High he will find himself: the
thief on the cross: the hermit who fell at the last. So
spare, I pray, while you yourself are still at sea, to vex
with words a bark so tempest-tossed.56 Marbod s wisdom
is the wisdom of open country: when the town wearied
him, he took refuge on his uncle's farm. Green grass and
quiet trees, a soft little wind and gay, a spring well in the
grass, these things give me back to myself, they make me
abide in myself. Town takes a man out of the truth of
himself, says Marbod, with a wisdom beyond Juvenal, and
dreaming under the trees, he watches the eager present
slip back into the still grave of the past.57
63 Decent Capitulorum Liber. lb. c. 1693.
64Carm. xxxvii. c. 1671:
“Asper quippe sonus, incultaque syllaba mors est;
At affabilis est, jucundaque dictio, vita.”
68Marbod, Carmina, iv. Migne, clxxi. c. 1717.
66Marbod, Carmina, xxxv. 1b. c. 1679.
w Carmina, xxvii. :
"Herba virens et silva silens et spiritus aurae
Lenis et festivus, et fons in gramine vivus
io6 The Wandering Scholars
Marbod was a famous master: but less famous than
Hildebert of Le Mans, whose stormy life of conflicting
loyalties and ardent scholarship brought him in the end
to the archbishopric of Tours.68 He is the only modem
author whom John of Salisbury with his unerring judg­
ment included among the classics. His contemporaries
get the richness, the ornament; Hildebert, not always but
unmistakably, their austere economy. The lines on the
bar of a man's own conscience,
‘‘Myself accuser, and myself accused.”59
the bitter but experiencing satire on Love and Fortune:60
the appeal to the girl of his discriminating worship to
write to him in his exile:61 on the fading rose of the
world, the eternal Rose of G od:62 they have a new accent.
And that accent is clearest in the two lines that are the
heralds blazon of a new order of thought, the lines that
came to the mind of Magister Gregorius when for the
first time he saw Rome lie below him with its towers:
“What wert thou, Rome, unbroken, when thy ruin
Is greater than the whole world else beside?”63

Defessam mentem recreant et me mihi reddunt

Et fadunt in me consistere: nam quis in urbe
Qui non extra se rapitur. . . .
“Tempora praeterita mortis consumpsit imago
Illud tantillum spatii brevis atque pusillum
Quod vivens praesens iam praeteritum fit et absens.
Haec et plura mihi licet atque libet meditare,
Fronde sub agresti dum rure moror patrueli.“
68See Hauréau, Mélanges poétiques d’Hildehert de Lavardin.
®Migne, clxxi. c. 1280.
60lh. c. 1423.
61 lh. c. 1445.
62lh. c. 1238.
68“Quam cum primo a latere montis a longe vidissem, stupefac­
tam mentem meam . . . cuius incomprehensibilem decorem diu
admirans deo apud me gratias egi, qui magnus in universa terra
 Revival of Learning in France 107
For the first time since the passing of the Empire a man’s
eyes turn to Rome, not as the inheritance of Peter, but
the grave of a buried beauty.*64
With every rediscovery of antiquity comes the discov­
ery of the goodness of the earth. It is so seen in the
scholars of the Loire valley, still more in Sigebert of
Liège.65 It is the freshest verse in all the century, as
fresh as the names of his virgins in the fields of the
Blessed.

“Gertrude, Agnes, Prisca, Cecily,

Lucia, Thekla, Petronel,
Agatha, Barbara, Juliana,
Wandering there in the fresh spring meadows,
Looking for flowers to make them a garland,
Roses red of the Passion,
Lilies and violets for love.” 66*6
8

On early morning: he has been lying listening to the

crowing of the cock: hourly at first, now every minute:
let him take the road. It is a lyric on walking, rather than
on dawn: all things are happy in the morning, and it’s

in opera hominum inestimabili decore mirificavit. Nam licet tota

Roma mat, nil tamen integrum sibi potest equiparari. Unde
quidam sic ait,
Tar tibi, Roma, nihil, cum sis prope tota ruina:
Fracta docere potes integra quanta fores/ ”
Magister Gregorius, De Mirabilibus Urbis Romae,
Rushforth {Journal of Roman Studies, ix. p. 45}.
64 “Non tamen annorum series, non flamma nec ensis
Ad plenum potuit hoc abolere decus.
Non potuit natura deos hoc ore creare
Quo miranda deum signa creavit homo.”
Hauréau, Mélanges foétiques d’Hïldebert de Lavardin,
p. 60. Migne, clxxi. c. 1409.
“ Sigebert of Liège Ç 10 30 -1112). See Dümmler, Abhandr
lungen der Kgl. Akad. der Wissenschaft, zu Berlin, 1893.
68 lb. p. 24. Passio S. Luciae. See Appendix A.
io8 T he Wandering Scholars
good to cover the ground swinging, when the body's
rested and the mind vivid, and the birds singing, so that
even a tired man would forget his weariness.67 The glori­
ous entry of the Theban Legion is a riot of jewels and
sound, but loveliest at its close—

“N o lily for me, violet or rose,

Lilies for purity, roses for passion denied,
Nor violets wan, to show with what pure fire
The bride for the bridegroom bums.
I know not how to gild my marigolds,
Proud poppies and narcissus not for me,
Nor flowers written with the names of kings.
All that this blockhead zeal of mine could find
Was privet blossom, falling as I touched it,
That never boy or girl would stoop to gather,
And of it, badly woven, ill contrived,
I twisted these poor crowns.
W ill you but deign to wear them,
Hide neath the victor's laurel this poor wreath—
Clumsy the work, a silly weight to carry,
And yet revile it not, for it is love."68

Sigebert rejects the old fountains:

“I never drank of Aganippe's well,"69

yet Liège at the end of the century held one poet who
recaptured the older lyric measures fallen so long into
rust. It is an allegory, a complaint of the Bride against
the Bridegroom, and the historical basis of it is the strug­
gle between Pope and Anti-Pope, Urban II and Clement
III, but there are good moments in i t The Church is
sometimes “Any wife to any husband"; and the metres
are astonishingly varied, glyconics, asclepiads, adonics,
mlh. p. 69.
68lh. p. 124.
* lh. p. 67.
 Revival of Learning in France 109
iambic dimeter. The whole is a credit to the school of
classics at Liège,70 but it looks back. The promise of the
future is in a less learned manuscript, that some traveller
in the Rhine valley brought back with him to the monas­
tery of St. Augustine in Canterbury, or that the Augustine
monks themselves copied from the songbook of a wander­
ing clerk.71 It is an odd mixture, fragments from Statius
and Virgil, laments for dead emperors, sequences for
Easter, for the feast of St. Katherine, the patron lady of
all scholars, Fulberts song to the nightingale, the sad
story of the Abbess' donkey, reminding one of the cow
belonging to Miss Betsy Barker in Cranford, who went
meekly forth to pasture clad in grey flannel, the really
Chaucerian malice of T he Snowchild, and one or two
scraps of good fooling.72 But the new things are the spring
songs, one in clumsy sapphics, only here and there the
authentic note, and still impersonal.78 But in the other
the marvellous close of the Pervigilium Veneris wakens
the first echo:

“With the strange cry of swans the pools are shrill:

The nightingale beneath the poplar shade
Singeth, as though remembering the passion,
Forgetful of the pain.
She sings, I hold my peace:
For when will come my spring?”

It came, in literature, sometime in the first half of the

eleventh century.
70 Notices et Extraits, xxxi. pp. 165 et seq. Seifrid, Abbot of
Tegernsee, excusing his own illiteracy by his frequent infirmity,
professes that he once drank “quidquid . . . fluentis Leodiscen-
sibus discendi aestibus flagrans” (c. 1048). Migne, cxlii. 723.
71The Cambridge Songs: A Goliard’s Song Book of the Xlth
Century: ed. K . B re u l (C a m b rid g e , 1 9 1 5 ) .
72The Cambridge Songs: A Goliard’s Song Book of the Xlth
Century: ed. K . B re u l (C a m b rid g e , 1 9 1 5 ) .
78lb. p. 63, 'Vestiunt stive tenera merorem.”
no T h e Wandering Scholars
"Softly the west wind blows,
Gaily the warm sun goes.
The earth her bosom showeth,
And with all sweetness floweth,

"Goes forth the scarlet spring,

Clad with all blossoming,
Sprinkles the fields with flowers,
Leaves on the forest.

"Dens for four-footed things,

Sweet nests for all with wings,
On every blossomed bough,
Joy ringeth now.

*1 see it with my eyes,

I hear it with my ears,
But in my heart are sighs,
And I am full of tears.

"Alone with thought I sit,

And blench, remembering it.
Sometimes I lift my head,
I neither hear nor see.

"Do thou, O Spring most fair,

Squander thy care
On flower and leaf and grain,
—Leave me alone with pain."74

By some miracle, that song has escaped destruction. For

some austere brother of St. Augustine has used his best
gall on half a dozen others, sometimes even the knife.
But there are obstinate palimpsests, and the scarred folios
have an odd enchantment. Letters stand out here and
there, V, that may be ver, for spring, or vent, come; single
words, jndchra, nidis, flores, studium, enough for any
MLatin text in The Cambridge Songs, p. 64, Levis eocsurget
Zephirus. See Appendix A
 Revival of Learning in Frqnce Ill

scholar's love song: a single phrase, ‘I n languore pereo ”76

Still the soft pipes play on,
“Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone."

The nest has been torn to pieces: but enough remains to

show it was a singing-bird's.
76lb. facsimiles 440V. 44 iv.
 CHAPTER V

Humanism in the First H alf of the

T w elfth Century

"C ar en enfer vont li beau clerc,” says Aucassin, affirming

his own willingness to go there. It is the jongleur’s recog­
nition of the new temper of scholarship. So far, humanism
had really been, in Jerome’s metaphor, the captive maid
of the theologians. The great scholars, from Alcuin to
Hildebert, had been men of approved sanctity, some of
them titular saints: Gerbert, in this as in all things the
exception, was at least a great and austere ecclesiastic.
Theoretically, the tradition holds that literature and logic
are the gymnasium of a good wit, which will in time
apply itself to divinity, but in practice men come to the
schools from benefices and parishes and canonries, and
there abide. “One must come to the schools to be a good
theologian,” says a parish priest, bitten with these strange
new ardours. "Not a bit of it,” says Robert de Sorbon,
“the great doctors save not one soul in a year.” 1 “Gram­
mar forges the Sword of the Word,” says another sermon,
"dialectic sharpens it: theology uses it,” but too many
busy themselves with the forging and the tempering only:
“they do spend their best years in fine speaking, and come
in their old age to theology, which should be the wife

1 Hauiéau, Les Propos de Maître Robert de Sorbon (Mémoires

de l’Académie des Inscriptions, xxxi. 2* partie, p. 147). See the
rebukes in the sermons quoted by Hauréau, Notices et Extraits,
vi. 209, 210, 213, 214, 230, 233, 237. Also the complaint of
Urban HI in 118 7 to the provost of the chapter at Maguelone:
“Your canons go without leave to study civil law and profane
letters” (Luchaire, La Société française sous Philippe Auguste,
p. 1 16).
1 14 The Wandering Scholars
of their youth.”2 “Think shame to yourself,” cried Peter
of Blois to one obstinate humanist. “Think shame to
yourself, O schoolboy centenarian, O antiquity still at the
elements! Your contemporaries have passed on to a higher
knowledge: you still dispute of nouns and syllables. Lucan
and Priscian, these be thy gods! See to it, for Death is
on the threshold.”8 Peter spoke consciously virtuous: he
had denied himself with frequent and vehement sighs
a distinguished career in Bologna, the stronghold of civil
law.4 Bologna was the “nursery of young archdeacons”;
Gilbert Fohot, when he was Bishop of London, had some­
times two archdeacons studying there. The statutes of
St. Paul's allowed non-residence for student canons; such
must go for not less than one year, and leave might be
given for two or three.5 But the difficulty was rather to
get them home. “If I had had five or six marks a year
to keep me in the schools,” said the masterful Abbot of
Bury St. Edmunds, “I should never have been monk or
abbot.”6 An anonymous sermon from Tours tells the
story of a scholar of Paris who shared a room with a
•Robert of Sorbon. Quoted by Haskins, The University of
Paris in the Sermons of the Thirteenth Century (American Hist.
Review, x . p. 9 . )
* Peter of Blois, Ep. vi. (to Radulfus of Beauvais), Migne, 207.
See also Epist. 76 to bis namesake, another Peter of Blois, who
spent his days in civil law, worse still in vain and amatorious
poems. Peter in his own youth had given some talent to these
amorous toys, but the dragon of Moses devoured the dragons of
Pharaoh, and he left these behind him on the very threshold of
youth.
4 Chart. Univ. Paris, p. 32 (c. 1160), “Bononensis castra milide
crebro suspiransque vehementer citius et premature deserui.”
6 Stubbs, Learning and Literature under Henry II. (Seventeen
Lectures, p. 160.)
6 Jocelini de Brakelonde Cronica, Camden Society, p. 27. Vide
Jean de S t Gilles, preaching to the University: “It is to be ob­
served that the Mother of the Lord suffered him not to be in the
schools, save three days only, nor was he Magister save for three
years and a half; and in this are those rebuked who dally forever
in the schools.” (Hauréau, Not. et Ext., vi. 234.)
 Humanism in the Twelfth Century 115
friend, and how, moved by divine prompting, he deter­
mined to enter the cloister, and tried to persuade his
roommate to do likewise. But the young man shaking
his head replied that he meant to stay the three years'
course—the triennium—at Paris, and take his master's
degree, and then to Montpellier to take his degree in
medicine, and thence to Bologna, the seven years' course,
and proceed Doctor of Law. And in the morning the other
rising early came to the bedside of his friend and found
him stark: struck by sudden death, “he who had planned
to live so fully."7 A good man asked the masters of Paris
if it were better to learn what one did not know or to
apply what one knew, and when they approved the
second, concluded upon them that they were fools and
astray in the wits, since they came to Paris from divers
places, abandoning parishes and prebends, and studied a
reading which they knew not, and the next day yet an­
other and so perpetually.8 It is the stumbling paraphrase
of Marlowe's
“Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And ever moving as the restless spheres.”

Abelard is the first of the new order: the scholar for

scholarship's sake. Patrimony and knighthood he left to
a younger brother, recognising in himself a vocation for
letters as some men might for religion:9 and though he
died in such a fashion that Peter the Venerable writes of
it with a sort of heartbroken passion of reverence, he knew
it for the breaking of the proudest scholar in Europe. It
is easy to belittle Abelard's achievement, the depth and
originality of his thinking, the harmony of his poetry, the
7 Tours MS. 468, quoted by H askins, The University of Paris
in the Sermons of the Thirteenth Century, p. 1 2 n. (A m e ric a n
Hist. Review, x.).
8 Hauréau, Notices et Extraits, iii. p. 2 4 3 (Sermon by Robert
of Sorbon).
9Hist. Cal. Migne, P .L . clxxviii. c. 1 1 4 - 1 5 .
ii6 T h e Waftdering Scholars
quality of his prose. It remains that he is one of the
makers of life, and perhaps the most powerful, in twelfth
century Europe. Paris would have had its university with­
out the magnet that drew all men thither in the great
years when “Rhinoceros indomitus” 10 lifted up his horn
on Mont St. Geneviève and the schools became a bull-
ring, where opponent after opponent tosses on the horns
of his deadly logic. His tremendous weight flung into dia­
lectic and philosophy did but incline a balance already
swaying, for north of the Alps, in this as in the other
Renaissance, the current always flows from pure human­
ism to speculative theology.
“O nightingale, give over
For an hour,
Till the heart sings,” 11
would have been written, even if Abelard had not come to
neglect the schools for a windflower of seventeen growing
in the shadow of Notre Dame, and set her lovely name to
melodies lovelier still. But he stamped himself on the
imagination of the century in a fashion beside which
Petrarch's influence on the sixteenth becomes the nice
conduct of a clouded pane. “Lucifer hath set,” said
Philippe of Harvengt when he died.12 “Was there a town
or village,” cried Heloïse, “but seethed at the word of
your coming? What eye but followed you as you went
by?” 13 “Sublime in eloquence,” wrote a man who hated
10 Vita B. Gosvini, i. 18, p. 79.
11 Carmina Buratta, cxl. 6:
‘‘Sile, philomena,
pro tempore,
surge cantilena,
de pectore.”
“ Epitaphia Abelardi, v. Migne, clxxviii. c. 103. Mediaeval
epitaphs are notoriously extravagant; yet these men have seen
some majesty:
“Nec mors cujusquam fit tanta ruina Latinis.
“ Epist. tìel. ii. Migne, clxxviii. c. 185.
 Humanism in the Twelfth Century 117
him.14 Even Guillaume of Saint Thierry who loosed the
storm upon him, said “And yet I loved him.” 15 In the
schools he kept his sword like a dancer: Goliath they
called him with the club of Hercules, another Proteus,
Hashing from philosophy to poetry, from poetry to wild
jesting:16 a scholar with the wit of a jongleur, and the
graces of a grand seigneur.11 His personality, no less than
his claim for reason against authority, was an enfranchise­
ment of the human mind. Two things show the efficacy
of that dynamic, almost daemonic force, the vibrating fear
in the letter of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, vehementissimus
Christi amator,18 but a good hater of the brethren—“He
hath ascended into heaven : he hath descended into hell” :10
and the last paragraph of the letter in which Peter the
Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, broke to Heloïse, now Abbess
of the Paraclete, that he who had been hers, tuo illo,
Master Peter Abelard, was dead. Their love had been a
street-song in Paris: the outrageous vengeance of the girls
uncle on her lover and tardily made husband had been a
blazoned scandal; Abelard himself had come to write of
it as a surgeon cauterises a wound. Peter the Venerable
was an austere man, a stem disciplinarian of his order:
but the tragic splendour of it, the marred beauty of these
star-crossed lovers whose violent delight had had so violent
an end, triumphs over the ecclesiastic's prejudice, and
at the last the gracious compassionate prose quickens into
u Vita B. Gosvini, cap. iv. p. 12.
“ Rémusat, Abelard, i. p. 185. “Dilexi et ego eum.” S. Bernard,
Efist. 326.
u Vita B. Gosvini, iv. p. 12. “Sublimis eloquentiae sed inaudi­
tarum erat et assertor novitatum. . . . Dicebat quod nullus autea
praesumpserat . . . plus vices agere joculatoris quam doctoris.”
See Otto von Freisingen on Abelard, Gesta Fred. I. c. 47 CM.
G. H. Script. XX . 376}.
17 “Elegantia morum tanta tua," Hugues Metel, quoted by
Rémusat, i. 1 81 .
“ Hist. Pontifical. M. G. H. Script, xx. 521.
“ Quoted by Otto von Freisingen, op. dt. p. 377.
118 T h e Wandering Scholars
a strange, almost lyrical exaltation. He has written of the
last days in the great monastery where Abelard, the
heretic hounded by two councils, had come to die, “and
by so coming enriched us/' says its Abbot, with almost
a shout of defiance at St. Bernard and his eager pack,
“with a wealth beyond all gold.” Peter had done what
he could, had forced him to take senior rank; and now
stands abashed before the mystery of this man's life whom
the love of God and the hate of men had broken, yet left
greater in his ruin. Content with the barest, he asked for
nothing; Peter, walking behind him in the procession of
the relics, pene stupebam, all but halted amazed at the
bearing of this man who had had the proudest name in
France, “humbler than St. Martin, lowlier than St. Ger­
main.” Constant at the sacraments, often in prayer: for
ever silent, speaking only familiarly with the brethren at
meals, or when urged sometimes to speak of divine things
in assembly: even to the last, for ever bowed over his
books Qsemper incumbebat libris). “Thus Master Peter
brought his days to their end: and he who for his supreme
mastery of learning was known well-nigh over the whole
world and in all places famous, continuing in the disciple-
ship of Him Who said ‘Leam of me, for I am meek and
lowly in heart,' so to Him passed over, as I must believe.
Him therefore, O sister most dear, him to whom once you
clung in the union of the flesh and now in that stronger
finer bond of the divine affection, with whom and under
whom you have long served the Lord, him, I say, in your
place or as another you, hath Christ taken to His breast
to comfort him, and there shall keep him, till at the com­
ing of the Lord, the voice of the archangel and the trump
of God descending, He shall restore him to your heart
again.”20
Abelard died in 1142: his stormy life is bounded by
what is perhaps the greatest half-century of the Middle
* Pet, Veri, Epist. Migne, dxxxix. 347 et seq.
 Humanism in the Twelfth Century 119
Ages. The thirteenth century is the full harvesting, the
richer in accomplishment, yet the Paris of St. Thomas
Aquinas and Saint Bonaventura has lost something of the
first madness,
'The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land.”
That first league, that first half of the twelfth century:
Abelard lecturing in Paris; Peter the Venerable travelling
in Spain and commissioning a translation of the Koran:
Adelard of Bath in Syria and Cilicia, writing his book
on natural philosophy and dedicating it to the Bishop
of Syracuse; Hermann of Dalmatia translating the
Planisphere of Ptolemy and dedicating it to Thierry of
Chartres, “the soul of Plato reincarnate, firm anchor in
the tempest-tossed flux of our studies” : Thierry lecturing
on the new Aristotle, just restored to scholarship: Paris
for the first time become the patria of the mind, the rival
in men's hearts of Rome.21 By the thirteenth century
she has a University with statutes and privileges and set
books and courses that prescribe Priscian magnum et
minorem, and then alas! omit the classics altogether.22
But in the glorious liberty of the children of Paris of the
twelfth, the scholars come up, young and old, and de­
mand the point and the line, the nature of universals, of
Fate and Free W ill, the sources of the N ile,23 dividing
in the taverns the undivided Trinity,24 and one calls to
the other to abandon this for that. Literature was to make
a man's fortune. Had not Maurice de Sully come to Paris
begging his bread, and now behold him its Bishop? And
Nicholas Breakspear, the shabby Englishman, the “spoiled
21 See Clerval, U Enseignement des Arts Libéraux à Chartres et
à Paris. John of Salisbury speaks of it as “roused from the dead
or from sleep by the knocking at the gate of an ardent talent.”
22 Chart, i. 228, 278; ii. 678; iii. 145.
28 Chart. Univ. Paris, i. 27, Peter of Blois.
24lb. 48, Stephen of Tournai.
120 The Wandering Scholars
monk” of St. Albans, sheltering under St. Denys, picking
up what crumbs of learning he could; behold him Bishop
of Albano, Cardinal Legate, Lord Pope himself. Petrus
Pictor had in vain prophesied
“How to be a beggar and a fool? Would you know it?
Let you read books and learn to be a poet/'
had in vain seen Ignorance go by in full pontificals, on a
good horse, clean and splendid and well washed in warm
water, and Aristotle barefoot on the road, the dust on
his feet and his stick, a few books of grammar in his
knapsack.25 Their disillusionment was to fill Europe with
disgruntled scholars who could not dig, but to beg were
not ashamed,26 who died under the ban of the Church,
and made great verse and grievous scandal. But that is
still to come. Men do not yet know which is utile among
the arts, but write hopefully home that “as Cato said, to
know anything is praiseworthy,”27 and they live in a garret,
with one gown for lectures among them,28 and play at
dice with the neighbour's cat for a fourth.29 The whole
“ B.N. Fonds Lat. MS. 14193, f. 1, yv.
“ Wright, Latin Poems . . . Walter Mapes, 41:
“Postquam sentit pontifex nihil posse dari:
Non est qui pro paupere spondeat scolari.
Iam mendicat misere chorus poetarum,
Nulli prodest imbui fonte literarum.”
Hauréau, Notices et Extraits, i. p. 367:
“Nihil prodest mathesis,
Nil logos, nil poesis,
A u r u m plus q u am phonesis
P on d erat.“
“ B.N. MS. 1093, f- 82.
” R ash d all, Mediaeval Universities, ii. 659. Told of S t. R ich ard
of C h ich ester (12 53), Acta SS. 3rd April, i. 278.
” Haskins, Univ. of Paris in Thirteenth Century Sermons, p.
25, n. MS. Tours, 468. “Certain clerks of Paris were playing dice,
and one who lost took a neighbours cat that frequented the
house, and said, ‘Let this fellow play with you, who is for ever
eating and never pays a penny/ and setting the dice in the four
paws of the cat he made trim throw, and he lost. And they wrote
about the cat’s neck that he had lost at play a quart of wine, and
 Humanism in the Twelfth Century 121
brief sweetness of it in the opening sentence of a story
told by an unknown Irish scholar: “In those first days
when youth in me was happy and life was swift in doing,
and I wandering in the divers cities of sweet France, for
the desire that I had of learning, gave all my might to
letters.”30*John of Salisbury writes of Paris with the sub­
dued warmth, the steady heat of his affection transfigur­
ing his sober prose.81 Guido de Bazoches becomes sheerly
lyrical: “Paris, queen among cities, moon among stars,
so gracious a valley [as it is to this day from the terraces
of St. Germain], an island of royal palaces. . . . And
on that island hath Philosophy her royal and ancient seat:
who alone, with Study her sole comrade, holding the
eternal citadel of light and immortality, hath set her vic­
torious foot on the withering flower of the fast ageing
world.”32
Philosophy, which is dialectic, was already the queen
science of Paris, as it was in the degenerate days when
Panurge disputed with the Englishman Thaumaste by
signs only: inevitably so, considering Abelard's great
fame, the discovery of fresh matter of controversy in the
N ew Aristotle, and the mediaeval passion for debate.
John of Salisbury, who held the religio grammatici, feared
it, very much as Milton did—“a sterile science, except it
conceive from without.”33 “An infamous tract of rocks,”
said Milton, “. . . not here the sounding of Apollo's
lyre: not here the dance of goddesses.”34 Giraldus Cam-
brensis, a much smaller man than either, but a shrewd

must lose his pelt unless he paid, which his master perceiving
bound the money about his neck, asking that he be not again
compelled to play, as he could not count his throw.”
80 Mon. Germ. Hist. Script, xx. 512.
81Epist. 134. Migne, 199. c. 113 .
82 Chart. Univ. Paris, i. 55.
83 Metalogicus, ii. 10. Migne, P.L. 199, c. 869.
84 Prolusions, vii.
122 The Wandering Scholars
observer, saw it for a facile and superficial triumph, and
already with the strangle-hold on literature. John is never
weary of poking fun at the new breed of the Cornificians
who come up to the schools and emerge fully qualified
Masters of Arts in so much time as a chicken shall be
feathering;35 the same jest that was in Samuel Butler's
mind when he marvelled that a chicken should be ready
for all the uses of life in three weeks, whereas it takes
three and twenty years to make a curate. It was a showy
trick and impressed the neighbours: consider your man
and your pig going to market: doth the man or the rope
lead the pig?36 “Mouse is a syllable,” mocks Giraldus
Cambrensis; “A mouse eats cheese: ergo, a syllable eats
cheese.” And he tells a long tale of a young man who
spent five years at great expense in Paris, and came home
able to prove to his father that the six eggs on the table
were twelve: whereupon the father ate the six eggs ap­
parent, and left the young man those which the hen
of his logic had laid. He was sent back to Paris with a
caution.37 In Giraldus' own youth, he says, he was at
the University and mad for logic: but an old priest of
his acquaintance took him aside, and bade him think of
the future. This logic, what avails it without an opponent
to dispute, and, even given the opponent, without a crowd
to applaud? But the man of letters sits in his chimney
comer with a book, and is his own best company.38 John
of Salisbury, fifty years before, had written on the same
theme, with that meditative gravity that brings him so
near the Religio M edici.39
* Metal, ii. 3. Migne, cxcix. c. 829. “ Fiebant ergo summi
repente philosophi: nam qui illiteratus accesserat, fere non
morabatur in scholis ulterius quam eo curriculo temporis quo
avium pulli plumescunt.“
33 Metal, i. 3. Migne, P.L. cxcix. c. 829.
37 Gir. Camb. Gem . Eccl. ii. 37 (Rolls Series, ii. 349).
38Gir. Camb. Gem. Eccl. ii. 37 (Rolls Series, ii. 350).
33 Polycrat. Prologus. Migne, cxcix. c. 385 et seq.
 Humanism in the Twelfth Century 123
The Battle of the Seven Arts, that Henri cTAndely de­
scribed in the middle of the thirteenth century, was by
that time a Hundred Years War. John of Salisbury,
writing in 1159 , has seen the first campaign. In H enris
time Orleans was the stronghold of humanism, of the poets,
already a little discredited, as they are in Elizabethan
England, for their legendary licence of lying. But in the
great age, the first half of the twelfth, it is Chartres,
Chartres where Donatus and Cicero and Aristotle still
sit meditating on the west front of the Cathedral.40 Of
the teaching of Bernard of Chartres Dr. Poole has given
a summary in pages that have John of Salisbury's own
grave charm.41 Nothing of his work survives, except a
fragment of verse42 on the Scholars Regimen, and the
great saying that the moderns are but dwarfs on the
shoulders of giants,43 which has the feeling for the past,
the sense of power in other things, that is one secret of
the efficacy of Chartres. John himself seems not to have
been taught by him, but by men whom he had taught:
but scholarship of that quality survives to the second and
third generation. The experience of literature, the critical
appreciation of it, is evident in every page. No man of
his age has the same grace of quotation, the same clean
structure of thought, the sense of the perfect period: and
when an inquiry into the Greek root of the heroic merges
"T h e west front was in building while the brothers Thierry
and Bernard were Chancellors.
41 R. L. Poole, Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought, pp. 99-106.
42 “Mens humilis, stadium querendi, vita quieta,
Scrutinium tacitum, paupertas, terra aliena,
Haec reserare solent multis obscura legendo.”
Quoted by John of Salisbury, Polycrat vii. 13. “Humility of mind,
a questioning desire, a quiet life, silent scrutiny, poverty, a strange
land, these voll resolve their problems for many.”
48“We are as dwarfs mounted on the shoulders of giants, so that
we can see more and further than they: yet not by virtue of the
keenness of our eyesight, nor through the tallness of our stature,
but because we are raised and borne aloft upon that giant mass,”
Metal, iii. 4, translated by Dr. Poole, op. cit. p. 102.
124 The Wandering Scholars
into a delicate meditation on the truth of things as the
only constancy, and thence, because his imagination is
haunted by its loveliness, through the paradox that that
which is may be the symbol of that which is not yet, to
the line from the Georgies,
"A crimson sky at dawn, and rain: at evening, light/'44
one knows oneself in the power of a great master of prose.
The submerged city of the poets is always in John's con­
sciousness: and in the strongest tides of controversy he
hears the sound of its bells.
O f the other Bernard, Bernard Sylvestris of Tours, also
it would seem a Breton, one knows less, and criticism has
reluctantly given up the endeavour to identify the two,
arguing that Bernard of Chartres might have lectured also
at Tours, even as his still more famous brother Thierry,
“The Chartrian doctor with tongue like a sword,"
lectured in Paris.45 If Bernard Sylvestris is not Bernard
of Chartres, then twelfth century scholarship was the
richer for it, in that two great Platonists were lecturing,
one in Chartres, the other in Touraine. It matters very
little, except that one covets so great a piece of imagina­
tive prose as the “De M undi Universitate”4* for the town
which of all towns in France has kept the secret of the
Middle Ages, yet brought them into the current of age­
less and hereditary beauty. For the rediscovery of the dig­
nity of the human body which is in every sculpture of
44 Metal, iv. 34. Migne, exeix. c. 937.
45 S e e C le rva l, L*Enseignement des Arts Libéraux à Chartres
et à Paris dans la première moitié du XIV siècle; Les Ecoles de
Chartres au moyen âge, p. 160; R. L. Poole, Illustrations of
Mediaeval Thought, iv. The Masters of the Schools at Paris and
Chartres ( Eng. Hist. Rev. xxxv. 326-331, 1920); H au réau ,
contradicting his first conviction of identity, Mémoires de VAca­
démie des Inscriptions, xxxi. (2), p. 99 et seq.
" B e r n a r d Sylvestris, De Mundi Universitate, edited B arach,
Bibliotheca Philosophorum Medii Aevi, i.
 Humanism in the Twelfth Century 125
Chartres, of the beauty and the abiding value of “the
whole sensible appearance of things' is brought to the
twelfth century as to the sixteenth, by the Platonists.
Bernard Sylvestris in his De Universitate did for the poets
and sculptors of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries what
Giordano Bruno in G li Heroici Furori did for Sidney and
Spenser in Elizabethan England. “God creating the
Sun and Moon” on the north portal of Chartres is the
mediaeval and Puritan godhead, powerful and serene:
but “God creating the Day and the Night,” that face of
meditation and of dream, is the artist and the philosopher,
as well as the moralist: the Logos in stone.
It is not to say that every thirteenth century sculptor,
every down at heel goliard poet, had read the De U ni­
versitate any more than the “rakehelly rout of ragged
rhymers” in Elizabethan England had read Giordano
Bruno. But these things are in the air. Provençal poetry
demands no other intellectual background than that of
its century, a May morning, the far-off singing of birds,
a hawthorn tree in blossom, a Crusade for the Holy
Sepulchre. It is the Middle Ages in the medium of a
dream. William IX of Aquitaine, the first and the earth­
iest of them, has no conception of life other than the
Church would have recognised.

“Since now I have a mind to sing,

Til make a song of that which saddens me,
That no more in Poitou or Limousin
Shall I love's servant be.

“Of prowess and of joy I had my part,

But now of them my heart hath ta’en surcease.
And now I go away to find that One
Beside whom every sinner findeth peace.

“All that which I have loved I leave behind,

The pride and all the pomp of chivalry.
126 The Wandering Scholars
Since it so pleases God I am resigned,
I pray Him have me of His company.
“And all my friends I pray when I am dead
They'll come in honour of my burying.
For I have known delight and dalliance
Both far and near, yea and in my own dwelling.
“But this day, joy and dalliance, farewell.
Farewell to vair and gris and sembeli.”47
That is a scheme of life which the Church has regretted,
but admitted. But the Latin poetry of the twelfth and
thirteenth century scholars is pagan, as Keats is pagan.
“O tender laughter of those wanton lips
That draw all eyes upon them,
Love's own lips,
Soft-swelling,
And instilling
Sweets of honey in their kissing,
Till I deny that ever I was mortal.”48
Something has unshackled it from gauging the whole of
life by measuring right and wrong. It does not defy
heaven and hell: it is unaware of them.
“When I think upon her eyes
Like twin stars,
And the mouth that were a god's
Bliss to kiss,
47Jeanroy, Chansons de Guillaume IX, xi. “Pos de chantai m'es
pres talenz.”
48Carmina Burana, 42:
“Lasciva blanda risus
omnes in se trahit visus,
labea venerea
tumentia
sed castigant errorem
leniorem
dum dulcorem
instillant, favum mellis, osculando,
ut me mortalem negem aliquando.”
 Humanism in the Twelfth Century 127
Ive transcended far, it seems,
Treasuries of ancient kings/'49
And though pagan, it is not corrupt; its altars are to
Cupid and his mother: not Priapus. The cry of Urania
to Nature “I, Natura, sequar”—
“Go thou, I follow
For no man goes astray in following thee,”50
is the bedrock of their philosophy, as it is of Bernard's.
It is a philosophy a good deal more dangerous than that
which the University of Paris burned in 1225, yet the
Church seems to have ignored it, disarmed perhaps by
the utter guilelessness of the philosopher. The treatise
was immensely popular; by the middle of the thirteenth
century it was a school book,51 and the scholars were
fortunate. For Bernard handles antiquity as Milton did,
in whose Paradise
“Pan
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance
Led on the eternal spring.”
‘T an, and the Fauns and Nereids, a harmless company,”
says Bernard, describing his world;52 and they are harm­
less, in the presence of this dreamer. “Nature made the
world brazen,” said Sir Philip Sidney, “the poets only
48 Die Gedichte Walters von Chatilion (Strecker), xxiii. p. 39:
“Dum contemplor oculos
instar duum syderum,
et labelli flosculos
dignos ore superum
transcendisse videor
gazas regum veterum/'
50Bernard Sylvestris, De Mundi Universitate, lib. ii. c. 4, lines
53-55-
61 Laborintus, lines 683-4 (Farai, Les Arts Poétiques . . . p.
361).
62 “Illic Silvani, Panes et Nerei innocui conversatione aetatis
evolvunt tempora longioris.” De Mundi Universitate, ii. 7, lines
111-115.
128 The Wandering Scholars
deliver a golden,” and Bernard is of that company. It
is a mind like Shelley’s.
His book has two sources, the Tim aeus of Plato and
the comment of Chalcidius; but the driest of the Platonic
dialogues is only the fuel for his fire. The poet in him
never sleeps; the sheer mechanism, the skeleton of phi­
losophy, stuff like the theory of the four elements, be­
comes a succession of visions. “From the confused, from
the turgid, came forth the power of Fire, and broke
up its native darkness with sudden quivering flame. . . .
water, whose plain and smooth surface gave back a rival
image, assailed by flying shadows."53 The very baldness
of his argument—“Nature brings to Nous, that is, the
Providence of God, a complaint of the confusion of the
primal matter, that is, H yle, and demands a fairer
world”64—is the dream of the Faerie Q ueene, of T h e
Tem pest, of Hyperion. And of that Providence, his prose
is the prose of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry.
“This Nous, then, is the intellect of God, God the
supreme, powerful beyond all power: its nature bom of
His Divinity. There are the types of all things living:
the eternal ideas, the intelligible world, the knowledge
of the things that are to be. There as in a clear mirror
may one see the generations, the mysterious destiny of
the creation of God. There, in kind, in species, in very
idiosyncrasy, are written those things which the first
chaos, which the world, which the elements themselves
shall bring to birth. There, graven by the finger of the
Supreme Accountant, the texture of time, the foredoomed
consequence, the disposition of the centuries. There are
the tears of the poor and the fortunes of kings; there the
soldier’s pomp, and the happier discipline of the philoso­
phers: there, whatever the reason of angels or men may
comprehend: there, whatever heaven holds in its wide
a lh. i. 2 , lines 1 0 0 - 1 0 7 .
“ De Mundi Universitate: Breviarium, p. 5.
 Humanism in the Twelfth Century 129
arches. And since these things are so, not disparate is it
from eternity, nor separate from the nature and substance
of God.”65
There are prosaic reasons for its immense success: the
first book, on the making of the world, gave opportunity
for a good deal of geography, much astronomy, a litde
materia medica, and a lively zoo of animals, more recog­
nisable than Milton’s. But the power of transfiguration
that illumines a trade route in

"As when far off at sea a fleet descried

Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds
Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles
Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring
Their spicy drugs.”

is here: the forests of Broceliande and the Celtic woods

and the Ardennes, the waters of Shiloh that go softly, and
Simois so happy if Paris had loved not or loved wisely,
the Tiber that bears Rome upon its shoulders, the Po,
that rolls towards Venice its imperious way, Silo that sees
from its pine-clad crest the white sails of twin seas.56 But
the stars are his passion—another manuscript of his on
astronomy once belonged to Pepys57—and the firmament
for him is not a blue and shining arch, but a depth where
the starry Argo is nightly launched upon a vaster sea,
where Ariadne’s crown blazes behind the shoulder of
Hercules, and Helen shines between the Great Twin
Brethren.58 The good Benedictines of the Histoire Litté­
raire hold up their hands at his clashing tale of stars:
“ lb. lib. i. 2, 152-167, p. 13.
“ De Mundi Universitate, i. 3, lines 233 et seq. 347-352.
67 Bernard Sylvestris, De Virtute et Efficacia Constellationum.
See Histoire Littéraire, xii. p. 273.
“ De Mundi Universitate, i. 3, lines io 5-124:
“ . . . Temptant aquas famosior Argos
Aethecum nullo Tiphyde temptat iter.”
“ . . . In Geminos Helenae lucentia sidera fratres/'
130 The Wandering Scholars
the fate of Hippolytus, the fall of Hector, the beauty of
Helen are written there, and with them the mystery of
the Incarnation.59 Bernard saw no incongruity; his is the
supreme beatitude of the scholar watching the divine
travail of the centuries to that diviner birth, and of the
poet, besieged by memories of the beauty that had made
beautiful old rhyme. He does not trespass on holy places:
he has seen the Light that makes about itself a darkness.
It is the theologians and not the poets who divide the un­
divided Trinity in the pothouses of Paris: Urania and
Nature cover their faces and worship before the mystery
of the triple-shafted fire.60 But there is no incongruity
in their slow descent, though Urania loses something of
her radiance, to the house of Jupiter, at whose doorposts
the twin figures stand bearing cups of absinthe and honey,
which every soul must taste: past the evil house of Satum
where no flowers grow, to the radiant house of the Sun,
one zone green as Egypt with flowers of the spring, an­
other dry and hot, a third splendid in crimson and saffron
for the light of Autumn, a fourth of ice and snow. There
they find the god of the bow and the lyre, and with him
his two daughters, Psyche and Swiftness. The rising of
Lucifer sends them on their way; they all but lose it in
the intricate confusion of the ways of Mercury and Venus,
note her fairness, with Cupid at her left breast (even
Venus, to Bernard, is something of the Madonna): and
so to the Kingdom of the Moon, above it the Elysian
fields, below a confused and passionate world. They find
Physis, in a place of woods and streams, a river plunging
by into the plain yet not with tumult, but rather with
a friendly murmuring; and there the three goddesses de­
vise the creation of man.
The poet in Bernard, as in Shakespeare himself, has
his moments of rebellion against the muddy vesture of
“ 12?. i. 3, lines 31-54.
90De Mundi Universitate, ii. 5, lines 23-35.
 Humanism in the Twelfth Century 131
decay, of lament for the “poor soul, the centre of my sinful
earth," for "the gross body’s treason.” One of his most
splendid tirades is the vision of the spirits wailing at the
house of Cancer the Crab: “From splendour to darkness,
from Heaven to the Kingdom of Dis, from eternity to
the bodies by the House of the Crab are these spirits
doomed to descend, and pure in their simple essence, they
shudder at the dull and blind habitations which they see
prepared.”61 But when he comes to the making of man
in that place of green woods and falling streams, he holds,
plainly and determinedly, the dignity of his creation. He
has his discrimination among the senses: in his glory of
sight he is in the tradition that begins with Augustine’s
"O queen light, sovereign of the senses,” and ends with
Milton’s invocation.62 O f the others, he speaks generously,
yet without that transport. O f generation itself, plainly
and fearlessly, the Greek ideal of moderation, of discre­
tion: and then the poet sees in the very physical act the
eternal war between life and death, the reweaving of the
thread that has been snapped by Atropos’ shears.63 Only,
he would have a man £x his eye upon the stars, and his
term ended, thither let him go: “hospes haud incognita,”
a guest not unknown.64 Someone, remembering it, made
it the last line of Bernard’s epitaph.
“Integrescit ex integro, pulchrescit ex pulchro, sic ex­
emplari suo aeternatur aeterno.” “Perfect from the perfect,
beautiful from the beautiful, eternal from the eternal:
from the intellectual world the sensible world was bom:
full was that which bore it, and its plenitude fashioned
it full.”65 T he war between the spirit and the flesh has
ended in a Truce of God, even as the Last Judgment of
“ De Mundi Universitate, ii. 3 , lines 6 4 - 6 9 .
“ Ih. ii. 1 4 , lines 1 5 - 4 8 . '
“ lb. ii. 1 4 , lines 1 5 3 - 1 8 2 .
“ I b. ii. 1 4 , lines 53-54.
“ Ib. i. 4 , lines 9 3 - 9 7 .
13a T h e Wandering Scholars
the western rose-window in Chartres melts into “heaven’s
own colour, blue.” St. Bernard of Clairvaux spoke of the
dungheap of the flesh: Bernard Sylvestris saw in their
strange union a discipline that made for greatness, and
the body itself a not ignoble hospice for the pilgrim soul.66
The spirit is richer for its limitations; this is the prison
that makes men free. His Adam is the Summer of Chartres
Cathedral, naked, fearless, and unbowed. He saw him as
Michelangelo did, wistful, beautiful, potent for evil
or for good, already prescient of the travail that God hath
given to the sons of men that they may be exercised in it.
“H e hath made everything beautiful in his time," con­
tinues the voice of Ecclesiastes which John of Salisbury
found so strangely poignant.67 "Also He hath set the
world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work
that God maketh from the beginning to the end.” And if
the world of Bernard Sylvestris is a dewdrop too crystalline
for philosophy or experience, it is for that moment of
vision that poets are bom.
" D e Mundi Universitate, ii. 1 0 ; ii. 1 2 , lines 10 —6 0 :
‘ ‘H u m an u m q u e gen us quam vis m ortale trahatur
C on dition e sua,
T a le reform andum , quod dem igrare superbos
Possit ad usque D eo s.”
mMetal, iv. 3 5 .
 CHAPTER VI

Paris and Orleans

"I b e l i e v e ,” said Master Konrad Unckebunck, “that the

devil is in these poets. They destroy all universities. And
I heard from an old master of Leipsic who had been
Magister for xxxvi years, and he said to me that when he
was a young man then did the University stand firm, for
there was not a poet within xx miles.” 1 It is the last
round of the fight between the humanists and the school­
men: the first was fought in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, between Paris and Orleans: and it was not the
humanists who won. Henri d’Andely made a mock epic
of it: he was for the poets, as how should he not, being
so great a lover of the wine of St. Jean d'Angély, and so
good a hater of doctors and Lombards and lawyers.2
“Paris et Orliens, ce sont ij,” says Henri, and describes
the parties in each others language, every clerk of Orleans
worth four Homers, when it came to drinking, anyhow,
and can make you fifty verses about a figleaf: to which
the poets reply by calling Dialectic cockadoodledoo.3 It
1 Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, ii. 46.
2 Héron, Œuvres d’Henri d’Andeli, p. xxiii.
* Bataille des Sept Arts, 11. 6-16 Çedited by L. J. Paetow):
“Car Logique, qui toz jors tence,
Claime les autors autoriaus,
Et les clers d’Orliens glomeriaus,
Si vaut bien chascuns iiij Omers.
Quar il boivent a grans gomers,
Et sevent bien versifier
Que d'une feuille d'un figuier
Vous feront il 1. vers.
Mais il redient que por vers
134 T h e Wandering Scholars
comes to blows. Grammar sets up her barrière among the
cornfields outside Orleans: Homer and Claudian in the
van, Persius and Donatus and Priscian, Dan Juvenal and
Dan Horace, Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Terence, Sedulius,
Prudentius, with a rearguard commanded by Ovid and
Primas of Orleans, Martial and Bernard Sylvestris. Paris,
on the other hand, has le clerc Platon and Aristotle, Law
richly mounted and Decretals riding orgulously. Theology,
Madame la haute science, withdraws to Paris, by the ad­
vice of the Chancellor, to drink the wine in her good
cellar and leave the secular studies to fight it out. Donatus
hit Plato such a blow on the chin with a verse that he
made him stagger, but Plato hit back with a sophism so
hard that Donatus fell in the mud. Aristotle unhorsed
Priscian and would have trampled him, but for his two
fine nephews the Graecismus and the Doctrinale, who
made for Aristotle’s horse and left him three-legged.
Grammar is winning, but up come reinforcements for
Logic, the Categories and the Six Principles, “two good
buyers of tripe,” said Henri rudely, for he referred to the
esteemed Chancellor of Chartres, Guibert de la Porree.
There is charge and countercharge, but Logic wins the
day. Grammar fled to Egypt, whence she came: Sir
Versifier the courteous lies in hiding somewhere in the
country round Blois: ‘I t will be thirty years,” says Henri,
“before he dares to show his face again.” W hen he does,
in the person of Jean de Meung, he is no longer noble,
and no longer courteous: but Henri did not live to read
the sequel of the Roman de la Rose.
It is regretfully that one finds a Chancellor of Chartres
in the camp of the enemy: but by the middle of the
twelfth century the supremacy is gone from her to Or­
leans. Guibert de la Portée was a profound scholar, but

Q u ’il claim en t la D yaletìq u e

P a r m a l despit q u iqu e le q u iq u e .”
 Paris and Orleans 135
his interests were theological rather than humanist. Never­
theless one holds him dear if only for his reply to the
great Bernard, who had broken Abelard. Guibert, now
Bishop of Poitiers, was the next to engage the Saint's
attention, and Guibert "is the one man whom Saint Ber­
nard of Clairvaux unsuccessfully charged with heresy."4
He stood at bay, a solid phalanx of the Fathers in folio
literally behind him, for his clerks followed him thus
armed into the council. Some time after the trial, comes a
friendly overture from Bernard, suggesting a little in­
formal conference on certain dicta of St. Hilary, to which
the Bishop replies that if the Abbot aspires to a full un­
derstanding of the subject, he must first seek fuller in­
struction in the discipline of a liberal education. John
of Salisbury savoured that story; and yet, he adds, with
characteristic fairness, though Bernard made small account
of secular studies, I have known no man pursue the art
of poetry with so much grace.5
The truth seems to be that the late twelfth century
saw the beginning of the reaction, partly utilitarian, partly
Puritan, against the purely humanistic studies of the
earlier years. "Alas," says Helinand in a university sermon
preached in Toulouse in 1229, "how seldom in these days
do virtue and learning come together. By some—I know
not what—factious bond, lust and literature cling to­
gether, a union no less prodigious than pernicious."6
Herrad von Landsberg, the very able Abbess of Hohen­
berg, made an ingenious sketch for her nuns, a rose win­
dow design of Philosophy with Plato and Socrates at her
feet, the seven liberal arts in a circle, but in the comers
of the page are four figures inscribing naughtiness, the
poets, the magicians, the idle story-tellers, each inspired

4R. L. Poole, Mediaeval Thought, p. 113 .

6Historia Pontificalis, c. 12 Çedited by R. L. Poole).
6Quoted by Wulff and Walberg, Vers de la Mort, Ane. Textes
franç. p. xxv.
136 The Wandering Scholars
by a lean black fowl of portentous neck who sits on his
shoulder and whispers in his ear.7 Alexandre de Ville-
Dieu worked himself into an ecstasy of denunciation
about the schools of Orleans, where the scholars are busy
trying to set Dagon on his seat again. The fathers have
eaten sour grapes—the sour grape, says Alexandre, is the
cult of the pagans—and now the next generation worship
Apollo and Venus, Jupiter and Bacchus. There is a regular
sect of such scholars, and the masters are as bad, above all
at Orleans where is the scorners chair in which the
righteous does not sit. Peter Riga, now, in the versified
Bible, has watered the clergy with vivifying dew, and
invites us to the river that flows from Paradise. But at the
moment the road to Paradise does not pass through Or­
leans.8 Amulfus the Red-headed (the off-scouring of the
human race, says Matthew kindly)9 was lecturing on the
Fasti with a wealth of antiquarian detail that kindles
modem critics to enthusiasm,10 but awakened in the
breast of his contemporaries such hate as only scholars
know. Matthew of Vendôme is responsible for perhaps
the dullest Art of Poetry that has ever been written, but
the preface is lively with squibs about Am ulf, and his
hair, and his wench, also it would seem red-headed; and
red being the colour of infidelity, that circumstance is
full of matter. And now, says Matthew, wiping his pen,
he will be more sparing of his barking. The sacrificing
to Bacchus was hardly more than the invocation which
7Hortus Deliciarum, Herrad von Landsberg (Facsimiles pub­
lished by the Société pour la Préservation des Mon. Hist.
d’Alsace).
8See Thurot, Notices et Extraits, xxii. 2, 114 - 116 :
“Aurelianiste via non patet ad Paradisum,
Non prius os mutet.”
® “Obprobrium hominum et abjectio plebis,” Matthew of Ven­
dôme, Ars Versipcatoria. Prologus (Farai, Les Arts Poétiques du
X I I e siècle, p. 109).
10 Hist. Litt. xxix. pp. 3 7 5 - 7 . Amulfus commented the Fasti,
De Remedio Amoris, and Lucan’s Pharsalia.
 Paris and Orleans 137
is in the drinking songs from the ninth century to the
round danced on Pompey’s galley,

“Come thou monarch of the Vine,

Plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne.”

and Pope John X II was deposed for similar practices.11

But a scrap of delicate irony in a letter of John of Salis­
bury suggests the respectful, half antiquarian attitude to
paganism. The Bishop of London, it seems, had declared
that he owned no obedience to Canterbury, and avowed
that the arch-episcopal see should be in London, where
the Archflamen of Jupiter had his seat in the days of
the religio Jovialis. “And perchance that prudent and
religious gentleman intends to restore that cult, so that
if he can in no way set up for an archbishop, he may at
least adorn himself with the title of the Archflamen.”12
There are odd traces of almost pagan luxury.18 Gilles de
Corbeil was no Puritan; held in fact that a love affair was
the best cure he knew for excessive megalomania, nothing
better than a love blandus, lasdvus, to prick the balloon
of a dangerously swelled head; but he denounces the
wanton extravagance of the wealthier prelates as hotly
as any vagabond scholar. The episcopal visitation that
he describes suggests rather a prelate of the Italian Ren­
aissance than of twelfth century France, above all the
last exaction wrung from the unhappy priest—half a
mark to buy roses for the garlands of the handsome young
men who wait upon the bishop at table.14 Gilles of Orval
u Mansi, xviii. c. 466: “Diaboli in amorem vinum bibisse. . . .
In ludo aleae Jovis, Veneris ceterorumque daemonum auxilium
poposcisse.”
12 John of Salisbury, Epist. 289. Migne, P.L. cxcix.
u Sée Ozanam, Documents Inédits, p. 19. Hauréau, Un MS.
de la Reine Christine, xvi., Altercatio Ganymedi et Helenae.
14 Veillard, Gilles de Corbeil, 396. On the luxury of the Italian
bishops, see S. Peter Damian (Muratori, Ant. ii. 310 ): “in
chrystallinis vasculis adulterata mille vina flavescunt.” And in a
138 The Wandering Scholars
has an odd story of the excesses of the clerks at Liège,
under the easy discipline of Albero the Bishop, how on
holy days such as Easter and Pentecost when they should
frequent the church even more devoudy than on other
days, they choose instead one of their mistresses, deck
her in purple and crown her and set her queen on a throne
veiled behind curtains, and sing and dance all day long
before her, the goddess of their idolatry.*15 Henry, Bishop
of Winchester, albeit heavily bearded and of a philosophic
gravity, bought statues in Rome, to the astonishment and
jesting of the light-minded, with whom Rome is always
full,16 and the regret of Magister Gregorius for the havoc
wrought among the Roman marbles by the Blessed
Gregory is very evident.17 Jacques de Lausanne has a story
that is the rude anticipation of Gautier's La Morte
Amoureuse; a young regent-master whose dead love
haunted him, sleeping and waking, till he opened her
grave, and scarred his imagination with that horror:18
and Caesarius von Heisterbach tells the livelier tale of
John, scholasticus of Prüm, whom the devil beguiled in
the guise of a fair woman, so that he lay with her, and in
the morning when the fiend with empressement declared
himself, John replied with a word “so marvellous that I
blush to say it," says Caesarius, and went his way, mock-

later century, John of Salisbury, Polycrat. viii. cap. 7, on the

banquet in Apulia, “Memini me ipsum . . . interfuisse,” with
delicacies from Constantinople, Alexandria, Tripoli, and Tyre.
15 Aegidius Aureavallis, Gesta Pont. Leod. (Bouquet, Hist. 13,
p. 616.) See also Abelard, Theologia Christiana, ii. (Migne,
clxxviii. 12 1 1) , “Ante ipsi Christi altaria . . . Veneris celebrantur
vigilae.”
16M. G. H. XX . 542, Hist. Pontificalis. “ . . . barba prolixa et
philosophi gravitate . . . spectabiliorem idola coemere, subtili et
laborioso magis quam studioso errore gentilium fabrefacta/1
17 On the destruction of the Temple of Pallas, see Magister
Gregorius, Journal of Roman Studies, ix. 1, 52.
MHauréau, Not. et Extr. iii. p. 129.
 Paris and Orleans 139
ing the devil and in no way concerned for the affair.19
Caesarius, who is as good as the Duchess at finding what
the moral of that is, is baffled for once. Not so with the
tale of the scholar of Paris “at the time our Abbot was a
student there/' who emitted contumelious words about
the holy Abraham, and died on the third day, so that all
knew that God had avenged His saint.20 The typical
scholar of mid-century Paris is not John of Salisbury,
grave, sardonic, remote, nor yet young Peter from Den­
mark, studying theology in St. Geneviève, who falls ill
of a quartan ague, and is sent home in the hope that his
native air may restore him—“a willing spirit in a fragile
body”21—but the Englishman,22 Serlon of Wilton, whose
brilliant and dissolute figure was as famous in his own
generation as his spectacular conversion in the University
sermons of the next.23 A collection of Serlon's verse, for
the most part still in manuscript, would be an addition,
not wholly edifying, to the records of English literature
in the twelfth century: he has the morals of Captain Mac-
“ Caesarius von Heisterbach, Dialogus Mirae, iii. io.
20lb. iv. 20.
21 Stephen of Tournai to Absolon of Laon, Chart. Univ. Paris,
i. p. 4 3 -
22 The English disliked foreigners in high places at home; but
they themselves are everywhere in the twelfth century. See Stubbs,
Learning under Henry II (Seventeen Lectures'). Robert of Melun
was English, Adam du Petit Pont, and Alexander Neckam, all
famous scholars in Paris. Nicholas Breakspear became Pope,
Robert Pulleyn, Papal Chancellor, Thomas Brown, advisor to the
King of Sicily, Herbert, Archbishop of Compsa, Richard, Bishop
of Syracuse, Walter, Archbishop or Palermo, John of Salisbury,
Bishop of Chartres. See Hauréau, Not. et Extr. xxxii. p. 297, on
the debt of the University pulpit to English preachers, Alexander
of Hales, Grossetête, Bacon, Duns Scotus, Richard Middleton,
William of Ockam.
28 See Walter Mapes, De Nugis Curialium (Wright), p. 70.
Hauréau, Not. et Extr. i. p. 303 et seq. Jacques de Vitry, xxxi. 3
(Crane). The MS. containing most of his poems is B.N. MS.
Lat. 6765, transcribed in part by Hauréau. I was unable to use it,
as it was on loan.
140 The Wandering Scholars
heath, the manners of Restoration Comedy, with a sug­
gestion of Walter Pater's preciousness at the last that goes
not ill with the white robes of the Cistercian Abbot. One
of his least graceless performances is a variant of

“How happy could I be with either;”24

there is a lyric of seduction with the full mannerism of

Renaissance subtlety—wherefore beauty, if not for use?

“And who knows honey sweet, who tastes it not?”

“Nature demands; Deny? It is a crime.”25

—Bernard Sylvestris' “I, Natura, sequar/' in its inevitable

consequence: a salute to the memory of the dead poet
and mighty drinker, Primas of Orleans:26 praise of a small
town in the Maritime Alps, where a man might almost
forget England:27 and a sudden eagle soar in

‘Tea, the gods fear thee, O Cyprian,

Stronger art thou than Jove.”28

He was a master much sought after, a bold and daring

logician, very much le Byron de nos jours; till one day
the University rang with the tale of his sudden conver­
sion. His favourite scholar had died: that night his master
saw him in the Pré aux Clercs weighted down with a cope
of parchment inscribed with the pagan learning that had
been his damnation, that crushed him even as if the tower
of St. Germain had hung about his neck. The sweat of
his agony stood on him in beads; a drop fell on Serlon's
hand, and burnt it to the bone. Serlon vanished from the
University, never to appear again, unless as “a certain
24Hauréau, Not. et Extr. i. p. 305.
*Ib. i. 323.
“ Not. et Extr. xxix. 2. p. 261.
2711?. i. 321.
* l b . i. p. 313.
 Paris and Orleans 14 1
master of Paris” in thirteenth century sermons.29 He
had entered religion, in the monastery of La Charité-sur-
Loire, found the Cluniae rule too slack for his new-found
austerity, which gave his poetic vein fresh argument of
bitterness, and abandoned it for the stem discipline of the
Cistercians at L ’Aumône, of which he became Abbot in
1 1 71. There is one last glimpse of him, still characteristic,
in the charming gossip of Giraldus Cambrensis: how
Giraldus in his youth paid a visit to Archbishop Baldwin,
then bishop, and found him sitting with a gaunt old man
in the white robes of an Abbot of the Cistercians, who
looked intently upon the young man as he came forward,
murmuring, "And can such beauty die?”—“a brief dis­
course,” says Giraldus, "but not without efficacy in touch­
ing my heart. And indeed,” he continues, with his wonted
modesty, "I was a young man of extraordinary charm.”30
That story is the perfect colophon.
It is significant that the Dominicans, in the first austere
years of the order, forbade the brethren to read the classics,
though they might look upon them, say, for an hour:31
and in the Metamorphosis Goliae, the great debate be­
tween Pallas and Aphrodite, it is the “cowled folk,”
populus cucullatus, who rush in and force silence on the
poets.32 But the reaction is due to other enthusiasms than
the religious. Absalon of St. Victor complains that the
students wish to study the conformation of the globe,
the nature of the elements, the place of the stars, the
nature of animals, the violence of the wind, the life of
“ Jacques de Vitry, 'Exempla (T. E. Crane?, xxxi.
80 G ir. C am b . Speculum Ecclesiae, ii. cap. 3 3 (B re w e r, iv. 1 0 5 ) .
“ “In libris gentilium et philosophorum non studeant, etsi ad
horam inspiciant. Seculares scientias non addiscant, nec etiam
artes quae liberales vocant . . . sed tantum libros theologicos tam
juvenes quam alii legant.’’ Denifle, Archiv, für Lit. und Kirch.
ii. 222, quoted by Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant, p. 31.
“ W r ig h t, Latin Poems . . . Walter Mapes, p. 3 0 .
142 T he Wandering Scholars
the herbs and roots.33 Peter of Blois makes the same com­
plaint: he himself was brought up on the classics, and he
naturally concludes that no other foundation can safely
be laid.34 For a time the classics even in Paris had been
fashionable and poets on every bush. Philippe of Harvengt
complains that too many blossom suddenly into verse, who
have scarcely been damped by the spray from the Cabal-
line fountain: that it is not enough to have caught a
glimpse of the Muses and of Helicon.35 But their day,
brief anywhere, was briefest of all in Paris. Magister
Mainerius, who had been one of Abelard’s favourite
pupils, cried one day with the voice of prophecy in the
schools, “Woe to the day when law shall kill the study of
letters,” and Giraldus Cambrensis, who heard him, saw it
fulfilled.36 Law, either civil or canon, had become the
“scientia lucrativa.”37 It is the lawyers to whom the key
of the well is given, says Guiard, Chancellor of the U ni­
versity in 1238; a young man goes to theology for two
years and gives it up for law, and is made an archdeacon,38
and though the more devout questioned as to whether an
archdeacon could be saved, a good many were prepared to
risk it. Decretists, says Gautier de Château-Thierry, are
more honoured and preferred to abbacies and bishoprics
than theologians and good confessors, for they love dung
more than souls.89 By Roger Bacon’s time civil law had
become more important than canon for an ecclesiastical

" Luchaire, La Société française sous Philippe-Auguste, p. 82.

See La Bataille des Sept Arts, 1. 91:
“Et li arcien [the arts students] n’ont mès cure
Lire fors livres de la nature [libri Aristotles de naturale philoso­
phia]."
“ Chart. Univ. Paris, i. 27.
“ Ih. 53-
" Gem. Peci. ii. 37 (ed. Brewer, ii. p. 349).
" Sermon by Guiard, Hauréau, Not. et Extr. vi. p. 226.
“ Ih.
“ Sermon by Guiard, Hauréau, Not. et Extr. vi. p. 226.
 Paris and Orleans M3
dignitary.40 Again and again in the collections of student
letters comes the request that his father will allow him to
read law, an expensive course, but of great future profit
and honour. “He who maketh his son a lawyer,” says
Ponce de Provence, “hath fashioned an engine against his
enemies, a machine for his friends/’41
Literature suffered from the new rival even more than
theology. “Here be these superficial, surface-sown gentle­
men,” says Ralph of Beauvais, “who have the impudence
to go straight from Donatus and Cato to law, both human
and divine, leaving out literature, the foundation of the
poets of love, the philosophers and the arts.”42 Giraldus
Cambrensis quotes him with approval. With what colours
of rhetoric and grace of quotation he himself lectured,
he has himself assured us: and one course of lectures
given in Oxford during which he entertained most of the
University to dinner in his lodging, was crowded out.
Giraldus is undisturbed by memories of Lucians advice
to authors, “First dine them well, and the feet of your
friends will be loud upon the floor.” It was a noble and
costly act, he says simply, and brought back the authentic
days of the old poets.43 And indeed Giraldus’ conception
of himself as the last of the humanists is very nearly
justified. Vincent of Beauvais was strong on the necessity
of grammar as a foundation, but divorced it from any
serious study of the texts: the authors and the poets are
a kind of added grace, “an appendix to the arts,” and
very pleasant if one has time for it. Vincent is a monu­
ment of patience and erudition, but there was one author
whom he conspicuously had not had time for, or he would
not have said that Petronius Arbiter was a good bishop

"Roger Bacon, Opus tertium, p. 84 (ed. Brewer, Opera In­

edita).
“ B.N. MS. 8653, f. 3, 50 V.
42Gem. Ecoles, ii. 37.
"G ir. Camb. De Rebus a se Gestis, ii. 16 (Brewer, i. 72—3).
144 The Wandering Scholars
of Bologna, who lived under Theodosius, and wrote the
lives of the Desert Fathers.44 The imps who wait on
mediaeval scholarship were busy that day. Grammar’s
foes were of her own household, “La perverse gent gram­
maire,” says Henri d'Andely crossly, “such of them as
are left in Paris, have given up Claudian and Persius,
the best books they had: it is the collapse of all good
antiquity.”46 La hone ancientez was further clouded: by
the middle of the thirteenth century the Doctrinale by
Alexandre de Ville-Dieu had supplanted Prisdan, to the
utter degradation of the poetic standard.46 For Priscians
closely-reasoned paragraphs were interrupted by strange
lightnings, just as some of us who would be hard put to it
to define metaphor and simile with the old glibness can
still remember the unearthly glory of the “example,”
“and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith like a falling star
On Lemnos the Aegean isle.”
In place of the pagan memories of Horace, of Tibullus,
“the brand that set on fire
Strong Ilion and all the Phrygës' land”
Alexander produces
Est coluber factus vel facta mistica virga.
The Serpent's made, or made the mystic wand.
and illustrates the gerund by
Presbyter essendi causa vis, clerice, radi.47
For sake of being a priest, O clerk, you fain would
shaven be.
44Boutaric, Vincent de Beauvais ( Revue des questions his­
toriques, xvii. p. 50). Vincent died c. 1264.
46La Bataille des Sept. Arts, 11. 93-98.
“ He was detested by Roger Bacon: “nunquam fuit dignus
auctoritate.” Brewer, Opera Inedita, i. 477.
47 Doctrinale, r447; 1513 (T e x t in Kehrbach, Monumenta
Germaniae Pedagogica, xii, r886).
 Paris and Orleans . 145
Eberharde Graedsm us has more tincture of the classics,
less leonine rhyming, and one chapter on “the Names of
the Muses and the Pagans” rather like an abridged clas­
sical dictionary.48 But on the whole, John of Garland was
right when he branded them both as “the monkey twins.”

“Nec sunt scripta bona quae diminuunt Helicona,”

he pleads, with almost pathetic earnestness, “They are

not good books that diminish Helicon,” and he invokes
Orleans as the last stronghold of the art of eloquence,
whose foundations are everywhere crumbling.49 Helinand,
the scholar-trouvère turned monk, gives her the same
distinction in his whirlwind summary of the universities
of mediaeval Europe. “In Paris the scholars seek the
arts, in Orleans the authors, in Bologna codices, in Salerno
gallipots, in Toledo demons—and nowhere good man­
ners.”60 That broadside was delivered in a sermon to the
students of Toulouse in 1229, but already the old su­
premacy was being undermined. In 1219 civil law was
driven by papal decree from Paris, where it was strangling
theology: it bore down on Orleans, where it strangled
literature.51 When in 1235 Gregory IX gave permission
48 Eberhardi Bethuniensis Graecistnus, ed. J. Wrobel, 1887.
48 “Vos vates magni . . .
. . . quos Aurelianis ab urbe
Orbe trahit toto, Pegasei gloria fontis,
Vos deus elegit per quos fundamina firma
Astent eloquii studio succurrere, cuius
Fundamenta labant,”
Quoted by Delisle, Les Écoles d'Orléans, p. 8.
®°Migne, P.L. 2r2, c. 603. Helinand had studied at Beauvais
under Radulfus the grammarian, a former pupil of Abelard. He
was before his conversion a famous trouvère, “as unfit for serious
labour as the bird that can only fly” (De Repar. Relapsi). See
G. Paris, Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartres, 1889.
“ See Prévostin, Chancellor of Paris, Hauréau, Not. et Extr.
iii. 166. Fournier, Hist, de la Science de Droit, iii. 5: Statuts des
Univ. françaises, i. 2. Early in the fourteenth century a master
wishes to come to Orleans to teach rhetoric and logic, but is dis-
146 T h e Wandering Scholars
for civil law to be read in Orleans, he had pronounced
sentence of banishment on many a “fallen old divinity/'
sunning himself for one brief century in the pale sunlight
of the Loire.
“From haunted spring and dale
Edg'd with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent,"

but not before he had left the springs for ever haunted:
the Latin lyrics of that brief century are still fragrant
with the flowering limetrees of Touraine. “Sir," said Dr.
Johnson sportively, “we are a nest of singing birds.”
Whether or not it were true of eighteenth century Pem­
broke, it was certainly true of twelfth and thirteenth
century Touraine.
Yet Orleans, the stronghold of humanism, was herself
responsible for the tarnishing of her greatest glory:52
above all towns in France she fostered the Ars Dictaminis,
that bastard of literature and law, the art that undermined
the serious study of antiquity.53 Its professors gave a
thorough secretarial training in official and literary cor­
respondence: Latin for working days; a prose style with­
out Cicero. The Summa Dictaminis is a cross between
a Polite Letter-writer and “Every Man his own Lawyer” :
guaranteed, without the fatigues of classical scholarship
and the long discipline of the law, to make a young man
an admirable secretary. The scholar in Orleans crying to*58

suaded; the scholars in arts are fe w , poor, and superficial; he w ill

have no audience w o rth y o f h im ( H askins, “ L ire o f M ed iaeval
Students in their Letters,“ Amer. Hist. Rev. iii. p. 222).
“ “Parnassus vertex cedet uterque tibi.“ Alexander Neckam,
quoted by Delisle, Les Écoles d'Orléans, p. 146.
58 See Stephen of Tournai, complaining of the collapse of learn­
ing in Paris (119 2 -12 0 3 ), on the beardless hoys, who sit in the
seats of the Masters. “Conscribunt et ipsi summulas suas . . .
omissis regulis artium abiectisque libris autentids . . .” Chart.
Univ. Paris, i. 48.
 Paris and Orleans 147
his friend to abandon the stagey and meretricious art of
verse for this solid employment was justified: it did, as
he said, bring a man into kings’ palaces: and kings recom­
mended him to great prelates for preferment.54 A secre­
taryship was a sure road to honour Alberic of Monte
Cassino, who compiled the first Ars Dictaminis, had
taught John de Gaeta, who in turn became Chancellor to
Urban II, and himself Pope. Albert of Morra, Chancellor
to three Popes, becomes Pope Gregory V III.55 Three papal
secretaries came from Orleans to Pope Alexander II and
Lucius III. Stephen of Tournai, writing to John of Or­
leans, “domini papae scriptori,” warns him against the
Roman climate in summer, and urges him to return to
golden poverty and good health in Orleans; but mean­
time he might put through the little business of the
excommunication of Meaux. And again, a little unkindly,
to William and Robert, secretaries to Lucius III, that
some people are gold abroad who were hardly even silver
when they were at home.56 Again and again in the letters
which the students painstakingly copied comes the re­
quest, to set the mouth watering, of king to bishop, to give
my faithful clerk N . the next canonry, and when the
bishop dallies, he is sharply reminded that opportunity
hath a baldness behind.57 It was the easiest and most
economical reward in a king's power, nor was it confined
to the thirteenth century. What else was the Deanery of
St. Patricks but the shabby payment of the Tory debt to
Swift? And if Queen Anne's feelings towards Swift were
such as he believed, there is a parallel in the delightful
story of a King Henry (surely the English Henry II)
and a certain clerk, who had long besieged him for a
bishopric. A see fell vacant; the chapter met, and elected
“ B.N. MS. Lat. 1093, f. 61; 18595, f. 17V.
“ R. L. Poole, The Papal Chancery, p. 78.
“ Stephen of Tournai, Epist. 65, 85. (Migne, ccxi. 356, 381.)
w B.N. Lat. MS. 1093, f- 59; 8653, f. 34V.
148 T he Wandering Scholars
another. The clerk in some fury taxed Henry with perfidy,
in that he had not lifted a finger to secure his election, to
which the king replied that it was so: he had not judged it
necessary, having observed that a chapter, left to itself,
invariably chose the worst. But lo! they have found a
worse than thee. Have courage, brother, it cannot always
be thus!58 These were the golden prizes held out to tempt
wavering students. Some were fortunate: some like the
Archpoet, displaying their shabby wares for a great man's
patronage, declare that they have learned to dictare.69
Reginald von Dassel was a patron of letters, and there
exists a copy of the great Summa of Bernard Sylvestris
written at his court. In the same M S. are poems by the
disreputable genius who was his laureate: and it is a
pleasant speculation if the whole is the work of the most
enigmatic figure of the Middle Ages: if the Summa is a
memory of lecture notes from Orleans, or from the class­
rooms of the great Bernard himself.80
The Art came quickly to terms with its subject. The
letter is divided into five parts, salutation, exordium,
narration, petition, conclusion. Salutations vary. Any ec­
clesiastical personage, whether clerk, or priest, or bishop,
or abbot, is John the unworthy, or the undeserving, or

58 Sermon by Jacques de Lausanne. Hauréau, Not. et Extr. ii.

153-
" “Vide, si complaceat
tibi me tenere
in scribendis litteris
certus sum valere . • •
vices in dictamine
potero supplere."
Carm. Bur. 1 6 2 .
80Pertz, Archiv. 1839, vii. p. 1008. “Twelfth century MS.
formerly at Stavelot; contains a book De Arte Dictandi, written
under die Archbishop Reginald of Cologne, and a poem to the
Emperor Frederick I, 'Salve mundi dominusJ Then Aestuans
intrinsicus to the Archbishop Rainaldus, Archicancellarie to the
same, are added, in different ink, but the same handwriting. The
poems are transcribed ( Diese Gedichte sind abgeschrieben)”
 Paris and Orleans 149
the sinful, this qualification is unnecessary for the laity.61
The scale in love-letters is nicely graded from “To the
noble and discreet lady P., adorned with every elegance,
greeting and whatever happiness and service can per­
form," to the lyrical fervours of “H alf of my soul and
light of mine eyes . . . greeting, and that delight which
is beyond all word and deed to express."62 But the love-
letters are at best an attractive side line: the sterner theme
prevails. “Sit thema," that a student is in Paris, and hard
up for funds:63 how shall he best approach the fountain,
whether father, or uncle, or archdeacon? This is the
exordium: and on the exordium Ponce de Provence is
most helpful. There is nothing so necessary, says Ponce,
as to induce a suitable frame of mind in the reader of the
petition: and in no way is this so well accomplished as by
a proverb. Ponce has the happy thought of providing
emollient proverbs for every situation: and for the better
convenience of his students these are classified and
graded: rubrics in red.

“Proverbs for sons to fathers.

Proverbs for fathers to sons.
Proverbs for nephews to uncles.
Proverbs for uncles to nephews.
Proverbs for relations to relations.
Proverbs for enemies to enemies.
Proverbs for friends to friends.
Proverbs for debtors to creditors.
Proverbs for creditors to debtors.64
® Alberic of Monte Cassino; Rockinger, Briefstellen und Formel-
bûcher, p. i; Quellen zur Bayerischen und deutschen Geschichte.
Munich, 1863.
®B .N . MS. Lat. 8653, f. 51 (Guido Faba).
68Giraldus Cambrensis, before he left Paris, was sorely harassed
by importunate creditors. See also the fatherly kindness of the
authorities in Bologna, Guido Faba, op. cit. f. 52.
64See note 63.
150 T h e Wandering Scholars
Proverbs for laymen to prelates.
Proverbs for prelates to laymen.
Proverbs for minor clergy to prelates.
Proverbs for prelates to minor clergy.
Proverbs for prelates to prelates.”65
That is the climax: the speech of the great whales.
Bernard's Summa, a really massive treatise on prose
composition, was abridged by the smaller Bernard of
Meung: it had an immense success; there are manu­
scripts everywhere. He was a mighty scholar: not so his
successors and rivals, Ponce de Provence and Buoncom-
pagno. Ponce was a braggart, and worthy of his name:
he is rather like Ancient Pistol, and his comedy is purely
accidental. But Buoncompagno is the dictator par ex­
cellence, the prince of letter-writers, the new untravailed
scholarship at its transient and epigrammatic best. He
never read a page of Cicero, but his prose marches with
incredible vivacity, and his running fire of satire against
his reader never flags. If Mercutio and Touchstone had
come together to compile an Art of W riting, it would have
been very like Buoncompagno's. “Magnus trutannus et
magnus trufator,” says Salimbene, and shakes his head
over him.66 He was a professor at Bologna, and his quar­
rels with the University and the tricks he played upon it
had the malice of a jackdaw. But he became puffed up
and judged his talents too great for the provinces: came
to the Roman Curia, and found, as so many better men
had done before him, that the Dative Case was the only
one to which the Curia responded. He hung about for a
while, drifted north to Florence, perhaps ashamed to come
back to the town he had left with kettledrums, and died
in great want, in hospital. One of his own best model

“ B.N. MS. Lat. 8653, f. 3, 4-

08Salimbene, Cronica, an. 1233 (M. G. H. Script. 32, pp. 77-
78).
 Paris and Orleans 151

letters is an appeal from a dying scholar in hospital in

Paris.67 It is not easy reading.
Buoncompagno had the dramatic sense. His letters are
little novels of Italy, but he is most radiantly himself
when he describes his wrestling with his jealous colleagues
in the University. For two years “perfect love and per­
fect hate”68—the phrase is his—came to their ripening,
then upon his secure hour the envious stole, and carried
off a series of lectures on “salutations” on which Buon­
compagno prided himself not a little: damped it: stained
it: smoked it like a haddock, and produced it trium-
phantly as a century-old manuscript from which Buon­
compagno had been "cribbing” without acknowledgment:
“Depositis alienis plumis, remanetis ut cornicula denu­
datus”—precisely Robert Greene's language about the up­
start crow. For once the crow lost its self-possession: it
retired confused and shamefaced, dismissed its auditors,
and lay close for nine days, in which it composed the book
called Palma, emerging with a nine times repeated “I pre­
tended that I had gone away,” to recite an entire fresh
M S. in the presence of his stricken foes, and his ineffably
exultant friends. On the crest of that wave he left Bo­
logna. Common report had it that he was gone a great way
off: but he was plotting a more exquisite vengeance. In
July "when it was hot,” he came secretly back to town,
and in a day or two the University received a letter from
a distinguished scholar, just returned from abstruse re­
searches in astronomy and magic in Toledo and Arabia.
For ten years he had conversed with Arabs and Satraps:
had journeyed beyond the Sarmatians where he heard
Uranath who maketh even the deaf asp to hear by his
enchantments, and Cataraffi who distinguishes upon the
Astrolabe of Solomon, had glanced through most of the
“ B . N . M S . L a t. 8 6 5 4 , f . 1 6 .
“ Ib. f. i a.
152 T he Wandering Scholars
works on the faculty of magic, and learned from Zin-
ziniath the comprehension of the barking of dogs and the
language of birds, even to the sparrow and the wren.
There are secrets not for the vulgar; but for the love that
he bears to the University he is prepared to reveal to it
something of the majesty of his art. “Wherefore I intimate
to you that on this day about or shortly before the hour of
noon, at which time the sun shall be in its strength, let
you come to the Piazza of St. Ambrose and there shall I
transform an ass into a lion, and thence into a winged
fowl, which shall fly before you through the air. . . .
And yet in the end the ass shall remain.” All Bologna rang
with it. Long before the hour the entire University,
masters and scholars, crowded the piazza and the roof
tops, gazing intently, while the sun grew hotter and
hotter. Hours passed: and slowly it dawned upon the
University that the ass indeed remained.69
It is a wickedness that never sleeps: in a note on ‘W hat
is irony?”70 a congratulation to those scholars who are the
“nephews” of bishops and other distinguished ecclesi­
astics:71 the lady who suspects her husband of reading in
another codex and proposes to read a little in the Digest
herself:72 the bland and exquisite satire of the sentimental
newly elected bishop, looking back to the happy days in
the University when the Castalian fountain sprinkled
him with its dews. “From the harbour of quiet, from the
paradise of scholastic discipline hath the prelatic function
dragged me. Weak are these shoulders for that load. . . .
I see you pacing at your pleasure about the ancient wells.
. . . I smell the nard. Think not I envy you your happi­
ness: I do but grieve that I myself am no longer a sharer
of your joy. Pray you, write to me: tell me how it goes
* B . N . M S . L a t. 8 6 5 4 , f. 13 V .
n lb. f. 6.
n B.N. MS. L a t. 8 6 5 4 , f. 15.
" I b. f. 2 2 .
 Paris and Orleans 153
with you: I pray in all things well.”73 Follows the reply
from paradise, a suave impudence it would be hard to
rival, even in the eighteenth century. Even before his pro­
motion to the episcopal dignity they were his, voluntarily
and freely: but their devotion has grown with his growth.
“We well believe that your little ship is as you say so
tossed in the sea of secular affairs that you can no longer
savour your accustomed joys. Yet we who remain in the
paradise of scholastic discipline would fain be in your
hell, perceiving that all who are called to that pain abide
therein with constancy nor tremble at its torments, they
being such as the victim may at any moment decline.
Sweet and suave is that pain which all men desire and
none refuse. Nevertheless it seems strange to us that you
commend yourself to our insignificance: for the less are
commended to the greater; yet humility was in that voice
that once rang out so brazen. Know that our state is joyous
by God’s grace; and by yours in your exalted station,
might yet blossom as the rose. For we desire a bishopric,
and he who desireth a bishopric, saith the Apostle, de-
sireth a good thing: and still more earnestly do we desire
to exercise that function, because we would emulate you
in that divine emulation with which you emulated the
prelatic honour.”74
T he Ars dictaminis has never yet had the study it de­
serves. The various Summae, still in manuscript in every
great European library, are a quarry not only for legal
formulae, but for life. Side by side with the formal busi­
ness of a royal chancery, letters of commendation from a
bishop for his clerk, requests for knighthood, forms of be­
quest, are love-letters ranging from doubtful equivoque to
exquisite and fantastic dreaming:76 strange aperçus into
tragedy, a husband pleading with his wife to forgive h im
a lb. f. 1 9 .
” B .N . M S . L a t 8 6 5 4 , f. i 9 v .
n lb. f. 2 2 .
154 T h e Wandering Scholars

and come back, "(or day and night my conscience scourges

me more inwardly and tears me more cruelly than ever I
struck you, innocent, with my guilty hand. Come back,
and comfort him with thy so longed-for presence, whom
now thy absence hath made desolate” : the wife’s low-
toned desperate reply, "I had thought that you would be a
husband to me, not a torturer, but my hope was cheated.
. . . I cannot bear so hard a man, and now you continu­
ally entreat and pray me to come back. I shudder, and I
fear, for to my present ills my mind conjures up the past.
If some man of great name will put his hand to it that you
will not be cruel to me, I shall come back to your bed. But
I dread and fear.”76 A father writes to a bishop to use his
influence with his son-in-law to come back to his wife; he
has left her on her father’s hands, and doubtless wastes
his substance on some harlot: follows the bishop’s grave
expostulation: the young husband’s passionate reply that
it is easier for one to bear poverty than two; he left her
where at least she might not be in actual want; for himself
his hands are daily turned to an unaccustomed toil, that
some day kindlier fate may smile on him and he may
claim her as his wife again. "God who knows all things,
knows that I have gone to no woman’s breast but hers.”77
But the Summa is above all the Book of Youth. The
scholars have it. Sit thema78 is eternal. There is the
shabby scholar, nobly bom—“would to God I had been
bom a peasant, that I might not be a laughing stock. They
call me noble, point me out as I go by, and I go with my
head down and my eyes on the ground, for my beggary
devours me. And to help things I am side by side with
parvenus, sons of nobodies, who go everywhere, entertain

™ lb. 1 0 9 3 , f. 6 6 r .
" B . N . M S . L a t. 1 0 9 3 , f. 5 9 .
™ I am in w a n t. I h ave no books an d n o clothes. P aris drinks
m on ey. W h a t tiger w o u ld refu se its kitten? (M a tth ie u de V e n ­
dôm e, Sitzungsberichte, M u n ic h , 1 8 7 2 , p . 6 1 2 . )
 Paris and Orleans 155
everybody, live in the best digs., and I sit up in my garret,
or come out in my coat with the fur worn bare, and so
gloriously poor that I can't even buy bread to fill myself.
I can't write home to my people for more, for there's my
brother to be knighted, and sisters to be married, and no
end of daily expenses that they can't avoid. And so I come
to you as to my other God, to dip your little finger in the
fountain of your liberality, and touch your wretched
nephew's tongue."79 Another, sick for home and ill; will
his sister come to see him—“I think the sight of your face
would make me well again":80 another, mournful in gaol
— 'Dearest father, when I was lately in Orleans, I had a
row with a young man and the devil ministering unto me,
I hit him on the head with a stick and now am shut up
in Orleans gaol. But the young man is free, and better of
his wound, and demanding his expenses off me, £ 10
Tours, and I can't get out until it's paid.” There are alter­
native replies to this, one kindly and without reproach,
wishing his son "health and joy," the other "health and
full repentance of your folly. People who get into prison
are as well to stay there till they realise their folly, and I
am not going to impoverish and destroy my house for the
likes of you."81 To his lady, that it has come to the ears
of her goddess-ship that he boasts of her favours—far be
it from him.82 To his love, that she will take no other into
her kindness, for though his body is far from her, his
mind is not, and when the two years' course is ended,
please God he will come back to her.83 To his father, from
hospital: he had many times told him of his poverty, but
could never yet find his way to his compassion; "and now,
brought as I am to the last extremity of shame and
" B . N . M S . L a t. 8 6 5 4 , f. 1 5 r.
80 lb. 8 6 5 3 , f. 1 3 .
° B . N . M S . L a t. 1 0 9 3 , £. 1 2 .
82 lb. 8 6 5 4 , £. 10 .
88 lb. 1 0 9 3 , f. 6 8 .
156 T h e Wandering Scholars

wretchedness, I ask your help no more/' Starvation

brought on a fever that ended in consumption, lacerar
tionem pulmonis: he had himself brought to hospital, for
there was no one to reach him a cup of water. But it is
squalid: he has lost all appetite: his lungs are gone. W ill
his father please come before he dies, “for I would have
you give the son of your loins the gift of a grave.” 84 Less
tragic, the poor scholar begging about the doors, lost in a
humorous contemplation of all the varieties of staleness
that can still be bread, and coming home with his stomach
barking:85 the outrageous jester watching the marching
and countermarching of certain insects upon his tattered
quilt like a procession of ecclesiastics86—it is

“the image of the emptiness of youth

Filled with the sound of footsteps, and that voice
Of discontent and rapture and despair.”

There are other sources for his life and manners, vivid
enough: the University sermons, with their exempla, of
Guérie d’Auxerre sitting at his window and hearing a
song sung in the street,

‘Temps s’en va
Et rien n'ai fait,
Temps s’en vient
Et ne fais rien.”

which so moved his heart that he entered religion, to

become first prior of the Dominicans at M etz:87 of the
poor clerk who was promised a benefice and danced all
day, and perhaps, poor soul, may never see it:88 of the

84lb. 8654, f. i6v.

mIb. f. 1 6 .
86lb. f. 1 6 .
87 H au réa u , Notices et Extraits, iii. 3 4 1 .
88lb. p. 288.
 Paris and Orleans 157
naughty scholars more often in the pâtisseries than in the
classroom, singing,

“Bad people, good town

Where a ha'penny buys a bun.”80

There are the records of the Nations, where after the elec­
tion of Magister John of Stralen as procurator, the first act
of his tenure was to move the adjourning of the English
nation without dissentient voice to the tavern of the Two
Swords in the Rue St. Jacques, where the elect should be
drunk in: this being done to the pleasure of the masters
then present to the amount of xxis. and ijd., of which
xvis. were due from the elect, it being his first procurator-
ship, and the remaining 5s. ijd., the same did pay and
expend, explaining that he was in no way called upon to
do so, but willing so to do, to the well pleasing of the
masters:90 or where in congregation of the English nation
on the 2nd of October the procurator of the Norman
nation complained that a college scout of that nation had
been enormously beaten without cause by a certain person
named [here there is a blank, as the accused was a friend
of the Bishop of Lisieux]. On Tuesday, 26th October, he
who struck the Norman was summoned and did confess
that he had indeed beaten the aforesaid, but subjoined
that he had not done it in despite of the University. The
witnesses agreed that a certain one wearing a white cloak
had struck the aforesaid scout, giving him one or two
buffets, and when he cried out that he was in the safe­
guard of the king and his lords, the other did but beat him
the more.01 There are the Law Reports, where the U ni­
versity holds itself aggrieved in the person of its scholar,
in that the Provost had taken a cask of wine from his
89 Noticeset Extraits, xxxii. p. 290.
90 Auctuarium Univ. Paris, i. 441. The Book of Procurators of
the English Nation, Feb. 10, 1374.
n Auct. Univ. Paris, i. 318, 2nd Oct. 1368.
158 T h e Wandering Scholars

lodging and emptied it into the gutter, to the great grief,

damage and prejudice of the said University, its Rector,
doctors, bachelors and scholars.92 But it is oratio obliqua
at best: in the actual manuscripts, the earnest appeals for
love, for money, for an assignation, for lecture notes, for—
the eternal impossibility of human relations—the assur­
ance “that you care for me even as I do for you,” for a
moment time stands still; the wall of glass, impalpable and
deadening, is broken; and one hears the very voices of the
Paris streets.
“And did you once see Shelley plain?”

Shelley? This man may have spoken to Peter Abelard.

” Fournier, Statuts, i. p. 7 9 .
 CHAPTER VII

T h e Archpoet1

O u t of the bruyant, turbulent confusion of peoples and

languages, Breton and Limousin, English and German—
for the clangour of the German tongue once so rang in the
streets of Orleans that one would have thought oneself in
the Fatherland, says a German lament for the decay of the
University in the fourteenth century2—came forth sing­
ing, in the ageless and marmoreal tongue. For Latin is the
language of the mediaeval commonwealth, in Paris, in
Bologna, in Orleans, in Oxford: the scholars “realm of
Flora and old Pan.” With all other lyric, provenance is
easy.

“Quan li jor sont lone en mai,”

—twelfth century Provençal, softer than sleep:

“ Unter den Linden,”

Walther von der Vogelweide, and no blackbird in that

meadow more liquid than he:

“Main se leva Bele Alys,”

street song in Paris, clean cut and clear:

“Bytwene Mershe and Averil

When spray biginneth to springe,”
1 For text and comment on the whole subject see Manitius, Die
Gedichte des Archipoeta, 1913; Schmeidler, Die Gedichte des
Archipoeta, 1911: Grimm, Gedichte des Mittelalters auf König
Friedrich den Staufer (Kleinere Schriften, iii. 1844).
2Fournier, Status des Univ . franç., i. 145.
i6o T h e Wandering Scholars

English, early fourteenth century, sweet and uncertain as

the first thrush:

"Lassa! la vita m’è noia,

Dolze la morte a vedere,”

thirteenth century Italian, the Sicilian school:

"Dum Dianae vitrea

Sero lampas oritur,”

—as well find the provenance of that moon rise; over a

valley in the Hartz, or the linden trees of Orleans, or the
quick flowing of the Seine, or the vast gentle Lombardy
plain. "There is no speech or language where that voice
is not heard.”

"When Diana lighteth

Late her crystal lamp,
Her pale glory kindleth
At her brother's fire:
Little straying west winds
Wander over heaven,
Moonlight falleth,
And recalleth
With a sound of lute strings shaken,
Hearts that have denied his reign
To Love again.
Hesperus, the evening star,
To all things that mortal are,
Grants the dew of sleep.
'Thrice happy sleep!
The antidote to care,
Thou dost allay the storm
Of grief and sore despair;
Through the fast-closèd gates
Thou stealest light;
Thy coining gracious is
As Love's delight.
 T h e Archpoet i6i
“Sleep through the wearied brain
Breathes a soft wind
From fields of ripening grain:
The sound
Of running water over clearest sand,
A mill wheel turning, turning slowly round,
These steal the light
From eyes weary o f sight.
“Love's sweet exchange and barter, then the brain
Sinks to repose;
Swimming in strangeness of a new delight,
The eyelids close.
Oh sweet the passing o'er from love to sleep,
But sweeter the awakening to love!
“ Under the kind branching trees
Where Philomel complains and sings,
Most sweet to lie at ease.
Sweeter to take delight
Of beauty and the night
On the fresh springing grass,
With smell of mint and thyme,
And for Love's bed, the rose.
Sleep's dew doth ever bless,
But most, distilled on lovers' weariness.''3
It is one of the timeless things: it has the memory of two
antiquities: it dreams on things to come.
D um Dianae vitrea is the height of secular Latin
poetry, even as the D ies irae of sacred: the twin peaks of
the mediaeval Parnassus. But in this same scholar's com­
monwealth, comedy never sleeps, and the parody provided
a few pages later in the same M S . brings the scholar, the
vagus, from bas-relief into the round, a globe of sinful
continents.
‘W hen the pub is sighted
In the market square
Every face is lighted
*Carm . Bur. 3 7 . Fo r the Latin text see Appendix A, p. 2 4 9 -51.
IÓ2 T h e Wandering Scholars

With its rosy flare,

Then says every cheery soul,
‘Could you find a better hole?'

“Bacchus wrangleth,
Venus wangleth
Purses that have stood long strain
To vent again,
And subometh
And transformeth
Clothes the wearers still have on
To pledge in pawn.

“Foods rich consumption, and the bacon fat---- ”4

These are the happy spirits who went to mass at St. Rémy
on Maundy Thursday in procession, each clerk leading
a herring on a string, the object being to step on the her­
ring of the man in front, while guarding your own herring
from the assault of the man behind. Mediaeval parody5 is
graceless, even blasphemous, delighting even more than
the scorpion to sting the faces of men, and the Beginning
of the Gospel according to the silver M ark has blasted the
entire Roman Curia with one triumphant breath.
“In those days the Pope spake unto the Romans, W hen
the son of man cometh to the seat of our majesty, first
say unto him, ‘Triend, wherefore art thou come?” But if
he shall continue knocking and giving nothing unto you,
cast him forth into the outer darkness/ And it came to
pass that a certain poor clerk came to the Curia of the
Lord Pope and cried, saying, ‘Have mercy on me, ye door­
keepers of the Pope, for the hand of poverty hath touched
me. For I am poor and needy, and I pray you that ye
should have compassion upon my calamity and my afflic­
tion/ But they hearing it had indignation among them-
* Carni. Bur. 176. See Appendix A, p. 251.
6 See Novati, Carni. Med. Aev. p. 66: Lehmann, Die Parodie
im Mittelalters Ci922).
 T h e Archpoet 163
selves and said, Triend, thy poverty go with thee to per­
dition: get thee behind me, Satan, for thou savourest not
the things that be of pelf. Verily, verily, I say unto thee,
thou shalt not enter into the joy of thy lord, until thou
hast given thy uttermost farthing/
“And the poor man went away and sold his cloak and
his tunic and all that he had, and gave to the cardinals
and the doorkeepers and the chamberlains. But they said,
‘And what is this among so many?1 And they cast him out,
and he going out wept bitterly and could not be com­
forted. And thereafter came to the Curia a certain rich
clerk, fat and well-fed and puffed up, who for sedition
had committed murder. He first gave to the doorkeeper,
and then to the chamberlain, and then to the cardinals.
And they took counsel among themselves, which of them
should have received most. But the Lord Pope hearing
that his cardinals and his servants had received many gifts
from the clerk fell sick nigh unto death. Then sent unto
him the rich clerk an electuary of gold and silver, and
straightway he was recovered. Then the Lord Pope called
unto him his cardinals and his servants and said unto
them, ‘Brethren, see to it that no man seduce you with
vain words. For I have given you an example, that even
as much as I take, ye should take also/ ”6
As for authorship, it is the paradox of letters that the
lyric, the most personal, most individual of the literary
kinds, is often likely to go fatherless, the love-child of the
Muses. W e know the great preachers of the Paris pulpit,
Jacques de Vitry, Robert de Sorbon, Grossetête of Lin­
coln: we know that Matthieu de Vendôme wrote the tale
of Pyramus and Thisbe, of Tobias and the fish: that
Walter of Châtillon composed an Alexandreid which em­
barrassed both Homer and Virgil, and Alain de Lille a
Complaint of Nature, full of elaborate female figures, and
Nigellus Wireker, precentor of Canterbury, the really ex-
6Caro*. Bur . xxi.
164 T h e Wandering Scholars

cellent story of how Bumellus (Burnellus being the con­

crete, as opposed to the abstract, idea of the Ass) went to
Paris to become a scholar and perhaps even a bishop, but
lost his tail and gained very little else.7 All these works,
de longue haleine, yet leave the author breath enough to
recite his authorship. But the lyrics, like their masters,
went like leaves before the wind. They light on this man’s
heap or on that, Walter Mapes, Gautier de Châtillon,
Primas of Orleans, Primas of Cologne: are shuffled here
and there in the caprice of scholarship. The greatest of
them all, a craftsman so individual that one can say Aut
Archipoeta aut Diabolus, is nameless: Punchinello, with
a mask half comic, half tragic: a ghost, but a ghost with a
cough.
He is coughing in the first lyric we have from him,
dated from internal evidence and much patient research
about 1 1 61, a dramatic cough, that suggests the gift of a
cloak: and he is coughing in the last, safe housed in St.
Martin’s cloister at Cologne.8 At the date of the first lyric,
Barbarossa’s great Chancellor, Reginald von Dassel, Arch­
bishop elect of Cologne, had been for three years ambas­
sador, with Otto, the Count Palatine, to the Pope. T he
Archpoet addresses him as a transmontanus and cries his
mercy for one, like himself, a man from beyond the
mountains: they are both exiles in Italy. The Archpoet
had a fine taste in patrons: Ragewin of Freising, writing
of Reginald von Dassel, is kindled to a paragraph of splen­
did prose. He is describing both the Chancellor and the
Palatine : “in these were innate grace of presence, nobility
of race, a wise and powerful brain, a soul undismayed:
’ Wright, Satirical Poets of the Twelfth Century, i. 11-14 5 .
See also Sandys, “English Scholars of Paris” (Camb. Hist. i.
192). Dan Russel quoted him to Chaunticlere (The Nonnes
Preestes Tale).
8 Continuam tussim patior tanquam tisicus sim,
Sentio per pulsum quod (non) a morte procul sum.
Manitius, ix. p. 14. Grimm, p. 60.
 T h e Archpoet 165
to them no labour came amiss, no situation harsh, no
enemy seemed to them formidable. They showed no
mercy to themselves for lust, or for default. Eager for
fame, lavish of largesse, they sought a mighty glory, their
riches in their honour. Young in years, marvellous in
oratory, in character wellnigh balanced, except that in the
one, by reason of his office and his order there was a cer­
tain gentleness and compassion, to the other, the severity
of the sword which for good cause he bore, did add a cer­
tain majesty. . . . From this time forward nothing was
done greatly, nothing was done exquisitely, but these two
were at the doing of it.”9

“Lavish of largesse, they sought a mighty glory” :

but when the Chancellor demands an epic on Barbarossa's

Italian campaign in one week, the Archpoet has reason
for an indignant howl.10 It is not only that the spirit of
poetry comes and goes in a whirlwind—do we not know
that the spirit of prophecy fled from Elias?—but consider
the subject. Would you have me do in a week what would
take Virgil or Homer seven years, or Lucan a quinquen­
nium? Moreover, is it for a beggar to write the conquests
of an Emperor? A poet—and poorer than all poets: noth­
ing have I, I tell you, beyond what you see. Tears for me,
but a jest for you—it is the far-off anticipation of the
amazing prologue to I Pagliacci—and think not I am
vicious, and so I'm poor. Can I dig, I that am a scholar,
and of knightly blood? but—the clown's mask is on again
—the fighting scares me: rather would I follow Virgil than
thee, Paris! To beg I am ashamed—if that were so, the
Archpoet wore his shame like a garland. He has the dia­
bolic rhyming of Don Juan, the Ariel lightness of lolan-
the, and he made his own tunes: Gilbert and Sullivan in
9Pertz, Script. Rer. Germ. Ottonis Frisingenis opera, ii. 188.
10 M a n itius, p. 32, “ Archicancellarie, vir discrete mentis.”
Grimm, p. 5 7 .
1 66 T h e Wandering Scholars

one. In June or July, Reginald held a mighty hosting in

Vienne.11 The whole herd of the jongleurs and the jug­
glers and the downs came jigging into town, breathless,
to be there before the ninth day: but a greater poet in hid­
ing watched them with despairing eyes. Only yesterday,
the Chancellors favourite, a horse to ride, and money to
spend, and Life going by like a festival: hot blood, and a
scandal about a wench—"they showed no mercy to them­
selves, for lust or for default”—and the Archpoet is fleeing
on the roads,
"Nunc vesanus plus Oreste,
Male vivens et moleste,
Trutannizans inhoneste.”
He fled, like Jonah: and like Jonah, the whale, poverty,
swallowed him.
"But, if prayer can avail,
Speak thy word unto thy whale.
And the whale, whose mouth's enormous,
Vomiting thy poet foremost,
Bidden, in thy great compassion,
Yawning widely in his fashion,
To eject him, now a bald head,
Thin and lean and famine-scalded,
But once more thy poets' poet,
Writing that all men may know it.''
The translation is a travesty of the original, the breath­
less impudent rhyming on one word only, and yet never
a rhyme that is not inevitable through all the ten lines of
it. Truly, his successor after two centuries was justified
in saying that the Archpoet maketh verses for a thousand
poets: "Yes,” replied the Pope, his patron, "and he drinks
for them too.”12 Droll, shameless, spendthrift and im­
portunate, he is inscrutable still. Now and then comes a
11 M a n itiu s, vii. p. 4 9 , n . G rim m , p. 5 4 .
u G rim m , p. 1 5.
 T h e Archpoet 167
gleam of the dangerous agate knife-edge of genius, a
gesture of the singing robes about him, and for a moment
he stands head and shoulders above the great Chancellor.
He never sustains it: a verse or two of haughty defiant
sincerity, and the comic mask is on again, the hand out­
stretched palm upwards, the impudent grin. But some­
thing remains—1 a moulted feather, an eagles feather."
Confessio Goliae is something more than the arch-type of
a generation of vagabond scholars, or the greatest drinking
song in the world: it is the first defiance by the artist of
that society which it is his thankless business to amuse:
the first cry from the House of the Potter, ‘W h y hast thou
made me thus?"
Reginald von Dassel was much at Pavia in the years of
the breaking of Milan, and Pavia, already old in scholar­
ship, had altars to Aphrodite as well as to Athene and
her owl.
“Let you bring Hippolytus
In Pavia dine him,
Never more Hippolytus
W ill the morning find him."
The Archpoet was no Hippolytus, on any day of the
week, and Reginald seems to have checked him for it
sharply. But this time the poet turns at bay,
“ Seething over inwardly
With fierce indignation,
In my bitterness of soul,
Hear my declaration.
I am of one element,
Levity my matter,
Like enough a withered leaf
For the winds to scatter.
“Since it is the property
Of the sapient
To sit firm upon a rock,
It is evident
168 T h e Wandering Scholars

That I am a fool, since I

Am a flowing river,
Never under the same sky,
Transient for ever.

“Hither, thither, masterless

Ship upon the sea,
Wandering through the ways of air,
Go the birds like me.
Bound am I by ne’er a bond,
Prisoner to no key,
Questing go I for my kind,
Find depravity.

“Never yet could I endure

Soberness and sadness,
Jests I love and sweeter than
Honey find I gladness.
Whatsoever Venus bids
Is a joy excelling,
Never in an evil heart
Did she make her dwelling.

“Down the broad way do I go,

Young and unregretting,
Wrap me in my vices up,
Virtue all forgetting,
Greedier for all delight
Than heaven to enter in:
Since the soul in me is dead,
Better save the skin.

“Pardon, pray you, good my lord,

Master of discretion,
But this death I die is sweet,
Most delicious poison.
Wounded to the quick am I
By a young girl’s beauty:
She’s beyond my touching? Well,
Can’t the mind do duty?
 T h e Archpoet 169
"Hard beyond all hardness, this
Mastering of Nature:
Who shall say his heart is clean,
Near so fair a creature?
Young are we, so hard a law,
How should we obey it?
And our bodies, they are young,
Shall they have no say in’t?
"Sit you down amid the fire,
W ill the fire not bum you?
Come to Pavia, will you
Just as chaste return you?
Pavia, where Beauty draws
Youth with finger-tips,
Youth entangled in her eyes,
Ravished with her lips.” 18

Young, consumptive, in love, the Archpoet had a short

life of it. He is sent down to Salerno to study medicine
and become a useful member of society—“It is a better
and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a
starved poet, so back to the shop, Mr. John, back to
plasters, pills and ointment boxes.” The Archpoet, more
submissive than Keats, trundles obediently down south,
falls ill of a fever, is given up, but slowly mends again
and comes home, the pallor still upon him, selling every
rag he can spare to buy bread, and begging for the rest.14
1165 finds him in the cloister of St. Martin, the cough
still “undefeated” and his voice gone, but still impudent
and still gay. He had a vision of heaven last night, he tells
his patron, saw neither Homer nor Aristotle, but had a
long talk with Augustine and got the whole truth of it
at last, of the Nominalists and the Realists, of kinds and
species, of names and things. Unluckily, later on in a
little chat with Michael the Archangel, he was warned to
“ M a n itiu s, op. ctt. p. 2 4 .
14 M a n itiu s, x. p . 6 1 . G rim m , p. 6 4 .
170 T h e Wandering Scholars

keep his knowledge to himself. Had the Archpoet even

then an impish vision of the busy spiders of the next three
hundred years? One thing he may tell his Chancellor:
he has a guardian angel of great ability, and the Sicilian
campaign will be an immense success. But no man is per­
fect, and I warn you that the Blessed Martin has a crow
to pluck with you. Certain evil-disposed persons have de­
frauded his cloister here in Cologne, and you suffer it. I
met the Blessed Martin going hot foot to tell on you, and
I had to weep myself almost dead to beg you off. So see to
it. Myself, I weeping left the country of the laughing.
Terra ridentium—he has the gift, peculiar rather to his age
than to himself, of a sudden nobility of phrase, an echo of
the
‘T uba mirum spargens sonum,”

even while the thorns crackle most briskly under the pot.
Here it is the “drenched with sudden light” of the first
moment of vision, “the holy people, the immortal folk/1
and the aching sweetness of
“The final peace, the quiet of the heart.”

The end is very near now, he says complacently: a good

deal of pain, so that it's hard to enjoy the old jokes. But
even in this state of grace
“I cannot love the name of Palatine,
For thanks to him the price is up for every cask of
wine.”

If its true, says the Archpoet firmly,

“I shall make such verses as I never made before,
All the woes that may be read in the Apocalypse
Shall fall on him, unless he frees the vine from its
eclipse.”
But for himself, the Abbot is his good shepherd: how­
ever it goes with the rest of the Abbey, for him there's no
 T h e Archpoet 171
stint in the wine, and with that the curtain drops on the
twisted grin.15 Whether or not he recovered to follow the
Chancellor in his last fatal campaign, when the plague,
rather than the Papal armies, defended Rome, there is no
evidence. Reginald von Dassel died on that plague-
stricken plain, and the news cast its shadow even in Paris:
Maecenas was dead.18 So too, Eberhard, Bishop of Spires:
there is no room for a vagabond poet among such great
ones. Better to go from St. Martin's cloister, St. Martin
who was notoriously kind to vagabonds, to find again the
country of the laughing, and this time to come no more
out.
Three generations later, Salimbene told the tale of
Philip, Archbishop of Ravenna and papal legate, who was
wont to pace through his palace chanting a responsory
or an antiphon to the praise of the Glorious Virgin, from
one comer of the palace to the other: and in every comer
in the summer time, stood a flagon of a truly remarkable
wine, cooling in ice-cold water.17 For he was a mighty
drinker, and liked not water in his wine, for which reason
he greatly delighted in a tractate that Primas made against
the mixing of the same. And this Primas, says Salimbene,
was a canon of Cologne, magnus trutannus et magnus
trufator, an astonishing versifier and a swift, who, if he
had given his heart to the love of God, would have been
mighty in divine letters, and mightily availed the Church
of God. His Apocalypse which he made I have seen, and
many other writings also . . . and when his Archbishop
checked him for his incontinence, he defended himself in
those verses which are called his Confessio .18 The business
15 M a n itiu s, ix. p. 5 4 . G rim m , p. 60 .
18 Jo h n o f Salisb u ry, Chart. Univ. Paris, i. 2 1 .
17 M . G . H. Script, x x x ii. p. 4 3 0 . “ D id A d d iso n k n o w o f the
A rch b ish o p o f R a v en n a w h e n he had the bottles p u t at both ends
o f the H o lla n d H o u se lib rary?” ( G . S . )
18Mon. Germ. Hist. Script, x x x ii. p . 8 3 .
172 T h e Wandering Scholars

of false ascription has already begun. The Confessio will

turn up in an English manuscript with a dedication to the
Bishop of Coventry (notoriously generous to lively wits)
instead of the Archbishop of Cologne:19 its author will be
credited with the thirteenth century Apocalypse, a rat­
tling broadside against the higher clergy, with Ezekiel's
vision of the four living creatures moving on wheels, the
Pope as lion, and the archdeacon as the eagle, for he seeth
his prey afar off. And Primas, the thirteenth century
canon of Cologne, will not only be identified with the
Archpoet half a century earlier, but with another Primas
of Orleans, contemporary of Abelard, an unmitigated
scoundrel, but of amazing verve, who begged and lectured
and vilified and versed from Sens to Beauvais, from
Beauvais to Amiens, from Amiens to Orleans, from Or­
leans to Paris, and very subject to being kicked down­
stairs by enraged ecclesiastics.20 And finally one and all
are comprehended in the great name of Golias, the Philis­
tine turned Bishop, father of many sons, a humour com­
pact of many simples, hearty as Friar John, malicious as
Panurge, yet touched by the bouquet of white roses that
Quintessence Queen of Entelechy carries in her exquisite
hand. Primas, Archpoet, Golias, the name is given in­
differently, the same mask, and the eyes looking out from
it, alike at least in mockery and hope. Rebels against
authority, greedy of experience, haunted by beauty,
spendthrift and generous, fastidious and gross, the tem­
perament abides. "There was in our own time a certain
parasite, Golias by name, notorious alike for his intemper­
ance and his wantonness . . . a tolerable scholar, but
without morals or discipline . . . who did vomit forth
19Wright, Walter Mapes, p. 7 5 ; perhaps Hugh o f Nunant,
who expelled monks from Coventry in favour of seculars.
“ S e e W ilh e lm M e y e r, Die Oxforder Gedichte des Primas,
Magister Hugo von Orleans, 1 9 0 7 , edited from M S . R aw lin so n ,
G . 10 9 . N o te especially N o s. x v . p. 1 5 2 ; x xiii, p. 1 5 8 .
 T h e Archpoet 173
against the Pope and the Roman Curia a succession of
famous pieces, as adroit as they were preposterous, as im­
prudent as they were impudent . . . and of his own life
and morals also, even writing his own epitaph at the last.
. . . What punishment might have been his, if the Curia
did exact corporal penalty? Yet although he may escape
the vengeance of men, hardly might he shirk the divine
fury, which suffers not that sin shall go unpunished, un­
less it be redeemed by penitence/'21 “Not inferior to any
of the former in Atheism and impietie and equall to all in
manner of punishment was one of our own nation of fresh
and late memorie . . . by profession a schollar, but by
practice a Play-maker and poet of scurrilitie who by giv­
ing too large a swinge to his own wit and suffering his lust
to have the full reines, fell (not without just desert) to
that outrage and extremitie that he denied God . . . af­
firming . . . all religion but a device of policie . . . the
manner of his death being so terrible . . . not only a
manifest figure of God's judgment but also a horrible and
fearfull lesson to all that beheld him/'22 The mask of
Golias: the death-mask of Christopher Marlowe.
21 Giraldus Cambrensis, Speculum Ecclesiae, ed. Brewer, iv. 15.
“ Thomas Beard, The Theatre of God's Judgements (second
edition 1612), p. 149.
 CHAPTER Vili

T h e O rdo Vagorum

T t i s a strange madness/' said Petrarch to his out-at-

elbows secretary, ‘'this desire to be for ever sleeping in a
strange bed." He had been a good secretary; had endeared
himself to his master by learning eleven canzone in nine
days; had copied his patron's verses in a fine and clear
script. But the task given him of transcribing Pilato's
translation of Homer was more than he could bear; he
spoke wildly of going to Constantinople to learn Greek
himself, and disappeared: was next heard of in Pisa,
penniless and starving; came back to Petrarch a reformed
prodigal, and again vanished. Ten years later Petrarch
writes to him in Rome, in friendly admonition, the sen­
tence of perplexity already quoted: the touchstone of two
temperaments. Seiden would have agreed with Petrarch,
and his dislike of sleeping out of his own bed may account
for his taking no part in the Civil Wars. Seiden would
have made a good mediaeval churchman; and Petrarch,
though indifferent even for an archdeacon,1 was in this
point sound.
For the mediaeval Church had never much approved of
wandering. “Sit in thy cell," said the Blessed Antony,
“and thy cell shall teach thee all things. The monk out
of his cell is a fish out of water."2 “Dig and sow," said
the old Abbot Luan, founder of Clonfert, little thinking
1 S e e the provision in P etrarch's w ill, if he should die in Parm a,
“ E t si Parm ae, in ecclesia m ajori, ubi per multos annos archidia-
conus fu i inutilis et sem per fere absens. Epist. (ed ited F racase tti),
iii. 5 3 9 .
* Verba Seniorum, ii. M ig n e , 73» c. 8 5 8 .
176 T h e Wandering Scholars

that he spoke to the men who were to be the scholar-

gipsies of Europe, “that you may have wherewith to eat
and drink and be clothed, for where sufficiency is, there
is stability, and where stability is, there is religion Cubi
stabilitas, ibi religio).”3 Stabilitas, perseverance in that
place where a brother had made his profession, was one
of the three obligations of the Benedictine vow. And the
rule which was absolute for the monk, the clericus re­
ligiosus, holds, though with more elasticity, for the clerk,
the clericus saecularis. No clerk may leave the diocese
without permission and letter of license from the bishop;
no bishop may receive him without such letter. Movement
by order of one's superiors is a different matter; the
strategy of the Church sends a man here and there, and so
Theodore of Tarsus founds a school of Greek studies in
England, and a Greek monk plants vines at Malmesbury,
and John of Salisbury dies Bishop of Chartres. But the
natural state of the clerical soul is static. Brother Ratpert
went about but little and hardly wore out two pairs of
shoes in the year; Turilo the artist had commissions here
and there, and Ratpert peers anxiously over the top of his
great folios after him, for the devil walks even more
briskly without than on the pavement of the cloister. The
stability of the Church goes far to stabilise Europe; it is
seen in so concrete an instance as the growing of the
towns round the episcopal palaces.4 King and Count live
in and by perpetual progresses, so much of their revenues
being in kind, and of the sort best consumed on the
premises. But the bishop is bound by canon law to abide
in his diocese,5 and industry first begins under the walls
of the évêché or the great abbey.
• Acta S S . , 4 th A u g u s t, p. 3 5 3 , note.
4 S e e A . P iren n e, Mediaeval Cities, p p. 6 3 - 4 . “ C ivitas becom es
synonym ous in the ninth cen tu ry w ith the bishopric an d the
episcopal city .”
5 See the Cone. Chalcedon, v. “De episcopis vel clericis qui a
civitate in civitatem transeunt” (Mansi, Concilia, vii. 362. See
Appendix E).
 The Ordo Vagorum - 177
I f one wished to abuse an antagonist, one called him
a gyrovagus. Abelard, who left St. Denys for the wattled
hut and oratory of the Paraclete, was a gyrovagus; Arnold
of Brescia, that firebrand tied to a fox’s tail, comes off still
worse; Gottschalk, three centuries earlier, was a gyro­
vagus; so was the recreant who betrayed the Christian
pilgrims to the Saracens. The word was consecrated. St.
Benedict had used it in a stern chapter of his rule, of those
monks whose whole life is spent, three days here, four
days there, in the hospitality of different monasteries, ever
wandering and never in one stay, and minding only their
own pleasures and their wretched gullets: "of whose un­
happy conversation it is better to be silent than to speak.”8
His anonymous commentator in the eighth century was
not so reticent; and his sketch of their habits is one of the
liveliest things in mediaeval prose. These vagabonds
count, he says, on the hospitality which the Apostle en­
joined, and the pleasure of unexpected arrival, so that all
kinds of exquisite relishes will be brought out, and many
chickens give up the ghost under the knife. Their feet are
weary with the hardness of the way, and they would like
them bathed; but they would rather have their inwards
drenched with infinite refilling of the cup than the fomen­
tation of the feet, and when the table has been cleared by
their starving host, and the crumbs swept up, they shame­
lessly insist on their mighty thirst, and if by any chance
there is no goblet handy, they’ll mix it up in the same
plate, and when they are stuffed and sodden to the pitch
of vomiting, they say it is all their hard life. And before
they go to bed, more exhausted after their labours at table
than by their journey, they tell all the toils of the way,
and beguile still more relishes and still more cups from
their host; as for the reason of their wandering, a pil­
grimage, we’ll say? or perhaps captivity. Soon they en­
quire as to the whereabouts of any neighbouring monk or
* S. Benedict, Regula. Migne, P.L. lxvi. 246. See Appendix E.
178 T h e Wandering Scholars

monastery. And there they’ll go, as men wearied, men to

whom the whole world is closed, who can find nowhere
a place of rest and refreshing for the soul, nowhere a com­
plete observance of discipline: do they not well to wander?
Wherever they go the traveller’s thirst demands goblet
hurried on goblet; pilgrims for their bellies' sake radier
than their souls’. Two days pass: the supply of relishes
diminishes: on the morning of the third day the host be­
takes himself, not to the kitchen, but to the ordinary toil
of the day: our friend begins to meditate another visit.
Suddenly he starts up as though impelled from behind:
already he sees a fresh dinner on the horizon: not far off
from that same monastery he finds another; he halts for a
little rest. Behold him now come from the Italian frontier,
and a good fresh tale all about pilgrimage or captivity, en­
tering the house with humbly bowed head, and lying hard
till all the poor host’s poverty goes into the pot and on to
the table: that host will be a well-picked bone in a day or
two. Three days, and himself and his monastery and his
habits and his discipline will be found displeasing: the
knapsacks full of dry bread are strapped up again: the un­
happy donkey recalled from his lean pasture, which would
have pleased him well enough if two days’ hospitality had
not displeased his master. Once again he is loaded up with
tunics and cowls, for you can always strip your host by
declaring you’ve only rags to cover you. Farewell, say you
to your host, and away, where other feasts already beckon.
Beaten, thumped, poked, the poor donkey humps along,
and then stands stock still, and its ears are beaten, efforts
on its rear being in vain. Pushed and pulled, it gets along
somehow: one must be in time for dinner. Once arrived,
hear the hearty voice crying: “Benedicite!” and hardly in­
side the monastery, what a thirst! . . . They go to bed,
always for these a strange bed: in the morning, their
bones tired with the fatigues of the road, they cannot rise,
even though strong and hearty at table the night before.
 The Ordo Vagorum 179
But matins once safe over, they get up, groaning and ex­
hausted. A little wine warms them, and just a morsel of
bread: they creep about the monastery, bowed with their
infirmity, though their step livens wonderfully out of
sight. . . . Day after day, walking, begging, sweating,
whining, on they go, rather than stay in one place, there
to toil, and there abide: humble at their incoming, arro­
gant and graceless at their outgoing, as if no monastery
had morals or discipline holy enough for them. For ever
wandering, they know not when the last weariness will
come upon them: nor do they know what place will give
them burial.7 The type is eternal: Jacques de Vitry, six
centuries later, tells his tale of the dormouse that went
from monastery to monastery, till finding one where the
rats scampered on the larder floor said: “Here is my place:
here will I stay.”8
Isidore of Seville with his monumental common sense
goes to the root of the matter. The clericus is like the
Levite, who had no allotment of land: his portion was the
Lord. But there are two kinds of clerks: those who live in
obedience to their head, the bishop; those who owe no
allegiance to any man, but follow their own will: they
are a hybrid, like the hippocentaurs : they have neither
religion to restrain them, nor the ordinary business of the
world to occupy them; solutos et errantes, free-lances and
vagabonds, they embrace a life of baseness and wander­
ing.9 The argument is that if they who serve the altar have
a right to live by the altar, then those who live by the altar
must at least serve it. The same argument is in the mind
of Ivo of Chartres, when the Bishop of Paris writes to the
great canonist for advice about a canon who has married.
To Ivo, the clerk above the rank of subdeacon who mar­
ries does not indeed lose his clerical privilege, but must
7 Regula Magistri, c. 1 . M ig n e , ciii. 7 3 6 .
8Jacques de V itr y , Exempla (Crane, T. F . ) , p. 3 1 , No. 71.
9 Isidore, D e E c c . Off. ii. 5 .
i8o T h e Wandering Scholars

lost his benefice. His point is that the faithful layman does
not pay the clerk to live precisely as he does.10 He is to
offer to the Lord an offering in righteousness. Exactly how
far the Church supported its clerks is a question: and
especially towards the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
the indignation against the canon discountenancing a
clerk who engages in secular business,11 yet makes no pro­
vision for him, accounts for some of the fiercest and bitter­
est invective of the scholars.12 Clerical privilege in itself
10 Ivo, Epist. 218 (Migne, 162, c. 221). See the later decretals
of Gregory IX ( Decret. Til?. III. Tit. Ill. cap. 7, 8, 9) penalising
marriage of clerks even below the rank of subdeacon. The whole
question is one of the thorniest in canon law. For a full discus­
sion, see Genestal, Privilegium Fori en France. Rockinger (Brief­
steller und Formelbücher, p. 560) quotes a letter from a bishop
excommunicating the praetor et aluaciles because they exacted
taxes from and denied clerical privilege to a cleric in major orders
who had married.
11 Gration, Decret, i. Dist. xxiii. c. 3. “ Saecularia officia nego­
tiaque abnuant.“ But in practice there was much elasticity; sug­
gested even in the canon of the Lateran Council 1215, “maxime
inhonesta.“ That a clerk should turn grocer was less intolerable
than jongleur, an occupation disgusting even in a layman. See
Innocent IV, Appar. Decret. iii.
Cf. Canons at Mayence, 813; Tribur, 895; Trosley, c. 909;
Lateran, 1215; Montpellier, 1258; Pont-Audemar, 1279; Liège,
1287; Rodez, 1289. (See Appendix E for texts.)
“ Vide the terrible story in Caesarius von Heisterbach of the
clerk who could get no benefice, committed murder to get money,
and died at the stake (Dial. Mirac. iii. 15). Cf. Richard de Bury,
Philobiblon, Prol. 7, and Wright, Latin Poems attributed to
Walter Mapes, p. 63, Goliae Querela ad Papam.
“Turpe tibi, pastor bone,
Si divina lectione
Spreta, fiam laicus.
VeZ absolve clericatu
Vel fac ut in cleri statu
perseveram clericus.
Dulcis erit mihi status
Si prebenda muneratus
redditu velalio
vivam, licet non habunde,
saltem mihi detur unde
studeam de proprio.“
 The Ordo Vagorum 1 81
was conferred by receiving tonsure at the hands of a
bishop.13 It secured relief from every tax and imposition
of the secular power: from military service (Louis X I de­
manded recruits for his army from the University of Paris,
was told that the Church had no weapon but prayers, and
offered a weekly mass instead: on the other hand, it is
pleasant to remember that after the victory of Bouvines
the University danced for seven days and nights without
stopping),14 above all, it meant freedom from trial in a
secular court of law.15 The neck verse that could save a
“ Genestal, Privilegium Fori, p. 3, et seq.: “On ne comptait
point seulement dans le clergé ceux qui par une ordination avaient
reçu quelque part de pouvoir d'ordre, c'est a dire ceux qui avaient
au moins l'un des ordres mineurs. Les simples tonsurés, n'ayant
reçu aucun ordre, faisaient cependant partie de ïordo clericalis.
. . . La tonsure . . . put de bonne heure être donnée avant les
ordres. . . . Les canonistes sont unanimes à affirmer sans justifi­
cation speciale que les tonsurés sont des clercs et jouissent des
privilèges de ceux-ci. Per primam tonsuram clericalis ordo con­
fertur, dit Innocent IV, sur le c. 11. x. de aetate et qualitate
praeficiendorum, i. 14. Cette règle étendait dans d'énormes pro­
portions le privilège clérical. Nombreux étaient ceux qui avaient
reçu régulièrement la tonsure, et qui cependant ne remplissaient
aucune fonction ecclésiastique. L'exagération était telle que
l'Église finira par la reconnaître elle-même, et que le concile de
Trente exclura des privilèges les clercs mineurs qui ne sont pas
attachés au service de l'Église" Trid. Sess. xxiii. De reform, c. 6.
“Nullus prima tonsura initiatus, aut edam in minoribus ordinibus
constitutes ante dec. quat. ann. beneficium possit obtinere. Is
etiam fori privilegio non gaudeat, nisi benehrium habeat aut
clericalem habitum et tonsuram deferens, alicuius ecclesiae ex
mandato episcopi inserviat vel in seminario clericali aut in aliqua
schola vel universitate de licentio episcopi quasi in via ad ordines
suscipiendos versetur."
u Luchaire, La Société française sous Philippe Auguste, p. 79.
15 A good many points have practical illustration in the struggle
between the “consuls" of Toulouse and the Bishop, Hugues
Mascaron. In the espiscopal towns of Languedoc, clerical privilege
had been made accessible all round; i.e. freedom from all but
ecclesiastical dues, et quasi impunité en matière de crimes.
Butchers, innkeepers, grocers, bakers were clerks, and flouted
the secular authorities. In 1295 married clerks or those who exer­
cised mechanical arts are ordered by the Seneschal to choose
between the tonsure and the trade. The Bishop appeals to the
1 82 T h e Wandering Scholars

man from hanging is a survival of it:*16 for the Church

never inflicted the death penalty. The Inquisition itself
handed its condemned to the secular power, with a recom­
mendation to mercy. This practical immunity in the
gravest offences17 was one of the causes of quarrel be­
tween Henry II and Thomas Becket: and again between
King John and the Papal legate, where the story goes that
the King threatened to hang a clerk in prison for forgery,
Pandulfus threatened excommunication on the spot, went
to look for a candle, and returning with it and bell and
book found the King shaking in his shoes.' In February,
1323, there is a long and amusing suit brought by the

King, Philippe le Bel, who rebukes the consuls, but asks the
Bishop to remind his clerks of the canon against secular business.
In 1292, Philip had instructed the consuls not to torture the
Bishop’s delinquents, nor drown them by night in the Garonne
(which had evidendy been a rough and ready way of securing
justice). In 1295 it is ruled that clerks who abandon tonsure
and habit in order to escape the Bishop’s justice “quod frequenter
contingit” are still in his jurisdiction. See Baudouin, Lettres
inédites de Philippe le Bel, pp. 11-2 7 ; Histoire de Languedoc,
ix. pp. I 74- I 75 -
See also the complaint of the Chancellor Philippe le Grève
against persons who assume the student’s garb in order to com­
mit a crime with safety, “because the provost dare not lay hands
upon them” (Haskins, “Paris University in Thirteenth Century
Sermons,” Amer. Hist. Rex>iew, x. p. 20).
16 See Richard De Bury, Philobiblon. iv. 54. Firth, “Benefit of
Clergy in the Time of Edward IV,” E.H.R. 1917, p. 175.
17 See Beugnot, Les Olim. Registre des Arrêts par la Cour du
Roi, vol. ii. p. 275. A clerk had committed murder at Mont Désir,
and was taken by the mayor and the jurats: the Bishop of Amiens
demands the clerk and his property from the mayor, who is
willing to give up the prisoner, but not to bring him to Amiens,
whereupon the Bishop puts the town under interdict (1287). In
1 31 1 , the Bishop of Morin complains that his clerk, Gerard de
Wiseme, was taken from his prison by the Bailie of Amiens, the
prison broken, and the prisoner done to death “de nocte, viliter,
inhumando” (Beugnot, ii. 542). In 1208 two prisoners in the
Castellum are claimed by the official of Paris as clerks, because
they are tonsured; but it was proved that they had managed to
tonsure themselves in prison (Beugnot, ii. 501).
 The Ordo Vagorum 183
University against Nicholas Brouillait, provost of Orleans,
and certain sergeants for offences against certain scholars,
Guillaume Jean, canon of Angers, Bernard Evrard, canon
of Orleans, Guillaume Bertrand and Hugues his brother,
clerks studying at the aforesaid studium: these coming de
spatiando in campis, from a country excursion, late one
Sunday evening, and passing through the Rue de la Bret­
tonerie to their lodging, peacefully and without weapons,
were set upon by the provost and his sergeants, with
drawn swords, dragged along by their garments and
beaten, and shut up in the prison of the Castellum, a
dungeon vile and unclean. When it was night, Jean
Angelart, clerk to the provost, came to ask them what they
would pay to be set free: they offered 30 sols. Paris: he
comes swiftly back, saying he could do nothing with his
lord, and that indeed he had been hit for naming such a
sum. Moreover it being observed that one of the prisoners
was looking out through a window to get some fresh air,
they were taken to another vile prison, and the window
then shut with an iron bar.
Representations were made to the provost that the im­
prisoned scholars were noble and wealthy men, of good
report and conversation and of great status: to which the
provost replied that £ 1 2 would set them free, and if they
were indeed of such wealth and worth, they should not
haggle over so small a sum, and that he had had ^40
from other students for less. Agreed finally on £ 6 Paris.
Further charge against the sergeants: that they took
Nicholas du Chef de Bois by his body and his garments,
he at the ninth hour wearing clerical habit and tonsure
and entering the schools to hear Nones, took him to the
Castellum, and shut him up in a wooden ark, so short and
low and narrow that a man could not abide therein nisi
in quodam glòbo, unless in globular form so that his
mouth kissed his knees, and moreover offered to the said
Nicholas insults numerous and atrocious.
184 T h e Wandering Scholars

Also, they set on Guillaume de Paris, canon of St.

Aniane, scholar of Orleans, coming on his horse from the
outskirts of the town, and threatened to take him to
prison, putting upon him that he was a monk but rode in
secular garb. U p came Jean le Chrétien, known to the
said scholar, and bargained with them for £ 12. He paid
them 50s. down, and they held him up till his servant
brought from home his Infortiatum, which was worth
^40. The remaining £ 10 was finally borrowed from Jean
de Belvoir: final result that the scholar was damnified to
the sum of £ 2 0 Tours.
The provost’s case is: first, that the scholars were carry­
ing weapons, and thereby lost clerical status: that on the
Sabbath day between Christmas and Candlemas he had
learned that malefactors were abroad, and was ad guietum
with certain persons, to the number of 20: that between
midnight and matins he found in the Bretonnerie in a
certain brothel the before-named clerks; the said brothel
they had forced to be opened to them, using violence, as
the women therein said, and made complaint to the
provost. Moreover they were carrying weapons, sticks and
knives, and in vestibus garcionum, meanly habited, so as
not to be recognised: and since they had entered the
brothel by force, the provost took them in charge.
The finding of the Court was that the provost be de­
prived of all royal office for ever, return the £ 6 Paris, and
pay to the Court a fine of £ 500.18
This, however, like immunity from income tax, is a
negative privilege at best: how was a clerk to live? Every
clerk actually employed about a church in any capacity
got something,19 although the authorities had a nasty
“ Fournier, Statuts, L 69 et seq.
“ See the Capitulary of Louis the Pious, a .d . 827, vi. 127, en­
joining that a bishop shall not ordain a multitude of clerks, but
regulate the number "secundum meritum vel reditum ecclesia­
rum." In 1294, Narbonne, called on to count its foyers for the
tax of 6 sols, tournois par feu, makes return that there are 2016
 The Ordo Vagorum 185
habit of making distribution at unpopular services, such as
matins. A certain anthem, lucrative et nourrissante, sung
before Christmas, entailed at Notre Dame de Paris a dis­
tribution of 70 rolls and 70 quarts of wine to the cathedral
clerks,*20 and when John, Duke of Bedford, was made
Canon of Notre Dame at Rouen he received his possessio
fan is et vini as part of the ceremony.21 The person in
charge of these financial arrangements was the arch­
deacon; hence the popularity of the summa “which con­
tained two-and-twenty different ways of approaching an
archdeacon on this ever delicate subject.“22 A good many
of the clerks at the universities had benefices;23 Odo,
Bishop of Paris, complains that the church of St. Marcel
has been deserted by its canons; henceforth a canon must
spend eight months in residence. If he fails to do so he is
not to receive from his prebend more than xx sol. beyond
the daily distribution. After he has completed his resi­

hearths, not counting the poor (those whose goods were under
50 sols, tournois) nor the married clerks, 26 fires; the clerks who
had benefices, 54; the unmarried clerks, without benefices, 21.
All these clerks were “pas de la communauté.“ Hist, de Langue­
doc, ix. p. 174. Langlois quotes a good story about Primas, the
preposterous cleric of Orleans, who would only sing with half of
his mouth in church, and when taxed, explained that he had only
a half-prebend; why therefore work full time? La Littérature
Goliardique: Revue Bleue. 1892, p. 810.
20Luchaire, op. cit. p. 116.
n Beaurepaire, Fondations yieuses du duc de Bedford à Rouen
CBihl. de VÊcole des Chartes, 34, p. 365).
22 Haskins, “Student Letters,“ American Hist. Review, iii. See
B.N. MS. 8653, f. 32, on the defrauding archdeacon.
“ Henry II in 1167 recalls clerks from France: “ut diligunt
reditus suos,“ let them return within three months or they lose
their income. Rashdall, Mediaeval Universities, ii. 330. In 1348,
Clement VI granted the scholars of Orleans privilege of enjoying
their benefices for three years without residence; Fournier, Statuts,
i. 1 1 5. See the complaints of Eudes de Châteauroux and Gautier
de Château-Thierry; Hauréau, Not. et Extr. vi. 209, 210, 214.
See the Council at Gerona, 1274, canon 25 (Appendix E).
1 86 The Wandering Scholars
dence, if he wishes to go on pilgrimage or to study, the
canons resident must not prevent him: but even a bona
fide scholar may be recalled. The absent canon must find
a suitable vicar, to whom he must give at least xx sol. per
annum, besides the distribution which is made to vicars.24
Some benefices were given in extreme youth, just as com­
missions were in the early nineteenth century, and the
story of the flustered nursery-maid: “Please, ma’am, I can’t
get the Colonel to take his porridge” is capped by Gilles
de Corbeil’s canon whose roving eye espied an apple
which a wicked bystander had rolled, and who dropped
the book on which his uncle the bishop was receiving his
vows to crawl after it under the feet of the crowd.25 The
Abbot Samson of Bury St. Edmund’s was kept at college
by a poor priest, out of the offerings he received for holy
water.26 John of Salisbury made his living for a while by
teaching pupils, and found it a quickening of his own
studies,27 and Abelard, says Fulk, might have made a
mighty fortune if it had not been for his reckless extrava­
gance.28 One finds the legitimate schoolmaster at St. Denis
complaining of unofficial rivalry, a wandering scholar with
a fiddle who has got round the parents with his flatteries,
and emptied the regular school.29 But again and again
comes the almost indignant cry from a starving scholar,
that he can bear it no longer: that hunger is too hard a
step-mother to learning: once to a bishop, that a man who
has come through hardship himself should have some

24Chart. Univ. Paris, i. 63.

*Veillard (C.), Gilles de Corbeil, p. 376. The youngster had
been sought for everywhere, for investiture, and was found riding
a stick.
28Jocelini de Brakélonde Cronica (Camden Society), p. 32.
See Council at Exeter (Appendix E) on the “Beneficia aquae
benedictae” as the perquisite of poor clerks in the schools, 1287.
* Metalogicus, ii. 10.
28Abelard, Epist. xvi. Migne, 178, c. 373.
29Hauréau, Not. et Extr. iv. 270.
 The Ordo Vagorum 187
sympathy.30 The delusion died hard that to come to the
University was in itself a meritorious act, deserving all
the support of one's relatives or one's church.31 And in
one point the tonsure and the soutane had a positive
value: it gave a poor clerk a claim on the charity of all
good men: it was moreover a real security, for to strike
a clerk meant excommunication, released only by a visit
of penitence to the Pope himself.32 For this reason, bishops
are cautioned against giving the tonsure and habit unless
to fit and proper persons, as it is so often a cloak for
wandering.33 For that matter the kindness for the poor
scholar still lingers; Irish students in the eighteen thirties
walking across Scotland to Edinburgh for medicine or
divinity would find a bed in the bam and milk and oat
cake left ready. One of the kindliest of the fabliaux turns
on it: the poor scholar who had stayed at the University
till he had nothing left to pawn, and reluctantly left it
to make his way as best he could home. He came that
night after a hungry day to a farmer's house, but was

80 “Qui passus est scolarium egestatem et eorum debet libentius

et maiore misericordia misereri. . . . Mihi dedit hanc comitem
et novercam acerrimam usus scolasticus qui submergit nobiles in

S
ofundo lacu miseriae et paupertatis, et compellit per ostia men-
care . . . precor . . . quoddam mihi bonum ecclesiasticum
concedendum.” B.N. MS. Lat. 1093, f- 57v. 71V0.
81 “Ex denario parentum vel ex denario ecclesiarum.” Gautier
de Château-Thierry (Hauréau, Not, et Extr. vi. 210).
82 See Fournier, Statuts de Univ, franç, i. 2.
Gregory IX (Jan- 1235), writing to the Bishop of Orleans,
regrets the interruption of studies caused by perpetual excom­
munications, seeing that in such a concourse of stuaents rixes are
bound to occur. Henceforth let the Bishop absolve at discretion,
unless the excess is “difficult and enormous.” “They rush with
their tonsured pates into frays armed knights would hesitate to
enter.” Hauréau, Not, et Extr, vi. 250. At a council at Rheims,
1148, the visit to Rome is deprecated; it affords too much oppor­
tunity to the curious and dissolute “sub pretextu adeundi domi­
num papam curiosis et dissolutis libertas evagandi.” Pertz,
M. G. H, Script, XX. 519.
“ Council at Salzburg, 1274. (See Appendix E.)
1 88 T he Wandering Scholars
chased from the door like a dog by the angry mistress, not
before he had seen a cake go into the oven, pork into the
pot, a flagon of wine to the shelf, and the parish priest
into the house, his cloak plucked about his ears. But there
was no malice in the little clerk; he went his hungry way,
met the husband returning and was heartily bustled back
again with much loud talking. The priest vanishes into
the manger, through which he anxiously regards the
situation, the host and guest sit down at the fire, while
the virtuous and aggrieved hostess protests that there is
nothing in the house—of course he has forgotten to bring
anything from town, et potati et patata. Meantime the
host begs for a story: he knows it isn’t a clerk’s job, of
course, but a great reader like him must know all kinds of
fine things. So the little clerk begins; a dull story, a
dream that he had, about walking in a wood, and meeting
a swineherd, and how the swineherd had a drove of pigs,
round pigs, fat pigs, just as round and just as fat as the
little pig that’s plumping in the pot there. “Mon Dieu!”
from the rapturous host, the lid comes off—hasty explana­
tions from Madame. The party subside to await the frui­
tion of the little pig, and the story continues: how a
wolf, a large wolf, a wicked wolf, came up and pounced
on a little pig, and how the blood flowed, red, red blood,
as red as—as the wine in yonder flagon. Fresh ebullition.
Story continues : how the clerk, furious at the wolf, looked
about and found a stone, a big stone, a round stone, as
big and round as the cake in yonder basket. A cake!
Again general post. Story continues: how the clerk took
the stone, and lifted it and looked at the wolf, and the
wolf looked at him, with great eyes, with wild eyes—just
like the eyes of the priest, looking through the bars of
the manger. There is a very fine scene, in the best fabliau
manner: and in the end the clerk goes off with the priest’s
comfortable cloak hugged round him. But mark you, says
 The Ordo Vagorum 189
the teller anxiously, he would never have said a word if
the lady had only been kind.34

II

Given clerical privilege, the abuse of it existed at least

from the fourth century. Augustine complains of the
clerical vagabonds who sell sham relics and come inquir­
ing for relations that they never had,35 and a Greek father
of the fifth century says that better scholarship is another
excuse for the road:36 Benedict, Isidore, Regula Magistri
said their say, and the Church Councils follow monoto­
nously, but with fiercer animosity in the thirteenth
century where the peuple grouillant, reinforced by so
many disappointed scholars, becomes more articulate,
abler, more dangerous. Some are bom wanderers; some
have it thrust upon them; but the word vagus denotes
often a mental quality, as well as the physical condition.37
Ekkehard's use of it is interesting: he tells a story of a
young monk of St. Gall, of a mind incorrigibly vagus, with
whom discipline could do nothing, and how on a certain
day being forbidden to go beyond the monastery, he
climbed in his restlessness the campanile—“O that I were
where I but see”—to look abroad, and missing his foot,
crashed to the ground. They sent for Notker, and all his
84Montaiglon-Reynaud, v. p. 132, et seq., Le Pauvre Clerc.
85Augustine, De Op. Monach. c. 28. Migne, 66, 257.
88St. Isidore of Pelusium. Migne, 66, 258.
87 Notker, speaking of Horace, quotes, evidently from memory:
“Pallida mors aequo pulsans pede, sive tabernas
Aut regum turres, Vivite ait, venio“
with approbation; for the rest he is to be avoided as ‘lubricus
atque vagus“ : Hartmann, Vita S. Galli. Cf. the Glossary, c. 1325,
in Muratori, Ant. ii. 33, where vagus = cupido, amator, venustus.
Helinand, the trouvère who turned monk, describes his former
temper, “Behold him closed in the cloister to whom the whole
world seemed once to be not even a cloister, but a prison.“
190 The Wandering Scholars
stammering tenderness comes out in his telling of how
the boy caught at his hand and held it till he died, com­
mending his soul to All Virgins (it was on the Common
of All Virgins he died), for he said he was at least on that
score innocent. And Notker saw to it that masses should
be said yearly for his soul.38 Some men no monastery
could hold: like the two fugitives from St. Sebastian in
Auvergne, who could bear its discipline no longer and
fled to live tumultuously: poverty brought them like the
prodigal to their senses: they begin to hanker after the
old comfortable tranquillity, the ordered peace. But they
had reason to dread their reception, and cast about them
for an emollient of their Abbot's greeting. They were in
Rome. Relics were as yet plentiful, and for sale: they
found to their delight that a complete St. Sebastian was
going at a moderate price, and made haste to secure so
suitable a present. But the custos of the relics was a
thorough scoundrel: his St. Sebastian was no other than
a Roman Emperor of a peculiarly malignant kind, well
drenched in perfumes, for as is well known, a fragrance
as of violets is one of the criteria of sanctity defunct. The
money is paid; back go the vagabonds to Auvergne with
their precious burden. Their reception at the Abbey sur­
passed their dreams; Imperial Caesar has an ovation equal
to anything he can have known in the days of his divinity:
he is safely lodged beneath the altar, during a most mov­
ing day of ceremonies and processions and chanting, and
in the evening the exhausted brethren retire to the re­
fectory to a feast worthy of the occasion. Emotion and
exhilaration was at its height when a terrific crash and
horrified shrieking from the chapel brought them running.
Whether it was that his unaccustomed surroundings irked
him past bearing, or whether, as the monks thought, the
holv place itself could not endure him, the Emperor blew
38Ekkehard, Casus S. Galli, iii.
 T he Ordo Vagorum 191
up, precisely like a bad egg, wrecking the altar in his
explosion. The sequel is very painful.39
There is also the type that the monastery itself could
not endure: men like Radulfus Glaber, who confesses
himself as frankly intolerable to live with: impudent to
his superiors, a nuisance to his equals, and a bully to the
juniors: so insufferable “with the inflation of a truculent
mind” that his first monastery drove him out, with the
less compunction that they knew him to have some “no­
tion of letters,” and therefore sure to be received else­
where. Four monasteries in turn endured him and in turn
cast him out: in one of them, St. Germain at Auxerre, he
was employed to restore the Latin inscriptions on the
tombs in the chapel.40 Cluny finally received him, but it
was the wise old Abbot of St. Benigny who turned his
intractable genius into its fitting channel: set him to write
a history of his own times, to the enriching of the more
comic kind of mediaeval scholarship. H e had a gift for
visions, especially of the devil. Once in the monastery of
St. Benigny, he saw him at dawn, a little thin man, black
eyed, retreating chin, and hair on end, humpbacked and
dirty, who rushed out of the dormitory crying: “Where is
my bachelor?” and next day a young brother, Theoderic,
a light-minded youth, threw aside the habit, and fled to
the world, but moved by compunction returned. Another
brother, from St. Mary at Meaux, fled and remained six
days “tumultuously with the seculars,” but on the seventh
day returned, and was received again after correction.
Radulfus himself fled from St. Benigny to another mon­
astery, fearing his abbot’s displeasure about something,
but saw another vision, his abbot entreating him to finish
the work he had begun.41 The monasteries took no small
pride in their distinguished members and there is a good
“ Vita S. Odilonis. Migne, cxxxii. c. 608 et seq.
" Radulfus Glaber, Hist. v. i. Migne, cxlii. 686.
“ Radulfus Glaber, op. cit. 718.
192 The Wandering Scholars
deal of jealousy among them. Even in the seventh century
an abbot writes in very strong terms to a bishop who has
given his countenance to a fugitive monk, also ordained,42
and the Abbot of St. Denis writes a very nasty letter to
the Abbot of Saint Ayoul, where Abelard had taken
temporary refuge.43 The Abbot of Bury St. Edmunds ap­
pointed a good but unlearned man as prior, and his
brethren murmured saying that no distinguished clerk
would now come to a monastery where scholarship was
so little thought of and a log of wood set in office.44 For
ambition is a great while dying, even in the religious
heart: Edward, archdeacon of London, moved by grace,
entered the monastery of Canterbury, and became secre­
tary, thanks to his knowledge of affairs. But the first ar­
dour flagged: it irked him that he should receive public
correction from men inferior to him both in rank and
learning: the world, the embraces of women, gracious
homes and easy society called him: he made all ready for
flight, and went on the appointed night to the tomb of St.
Dunstan to plead for his understanding and his grace.
Leaving the church he found the door barred by a monk
of terrible aspect, the Saint himself: tried in vain to pass
him; the third time received the sentence: 'T hou shalt
not go: but thou shalt die, and here.” For two months he
languished, confessed himself, and died a penitent.45
One sees the making of a vagus in a good many stories;
the clerk in the chapel of Queen Constance who stole a
candlestick, being hard driven for money, and lived in
terror of her wrath: and the kindly King, who had seen
it from his stall, sent for him and bade him sell the candle­
stick and make his way home: for Robert was very

42 Baluze, Formulae. Migne, P.L. lxxxvii. 867.

43 Hist, Calam. x. Migne, 178, c. 156.
44Jocelin of Brakelond (Camden Society), p. 93.
46 Eadmer, Vita S. Dunstani, 19. (Stubbs, Memorials of St.
Dunstan, pp. 24 1-5).
 The Ordo Vagorum 193
like the Abbé in Les Misérables.4 0
*46 There is another story
about a vagus and candlesticks told by Caesarius von
Heisterbach: a disreputable clerk who came to the Cis­
tercians at Clairvaux for what he could pick up, stayed
a year, but found himself no nearer the altar, religiously
guarded; took the vows, to secure his object, and then
to his amazement found himself coveting the grace of God
rather than His candlesticks, and so changed his heart that
he died Prior, and would many a time tell the story to the
edifying of his novices.47 The twelfth century injunction
that no monk or canon regular is to read either medicine
or civil law ( “though they make a pretence of doing it for
the weal of the brethren's bodies, and the better guidance
of their business” ) 48 is responsible for some defections:
a monk so doing and failing to return in two months is
excommunicated. There is a letter from a scholar-monk
in one of the Italian Summae, entreating restoration : de­
sire of learning had beguiled him to the University, but
want and remorse have disciplined him: may he come
back?49 And there is the worst type, as in the inquest in
Oxford, for instance, on the body of poor Margery of
Hereford, stabbed under the left breast, who died on
Sunday, 27th April, 1299; she had been brought by an
unknown clerk to his lodging in Brasenose, and when she
asked for the money he had promised her, he drew out his
knife and stabbed her.50 “Non inventus est” nor any goods
either, not even the “weak coverlet” which one man left

40Helgaldus, Vita Roberti Regis Franc. Migne, 141, c. 194.

47 Caesarius von Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum (Strange)
i. 3. “Quemdam clericum actu trutanum, quales per diversas vagari
solent provincias.” Cf. “Dii clerc Golias qui volt roher s*Ahaie.,t
Méon, Nouveau Recueil, ii. 447.
“ Alexander III, 1163. Chart. Univ. Paris, i. 3, repeated by
Boniface Vili “ut periculosa religiosis evagandi materia subtra­
hatur“ (Sexti Decret. iii. Tit. 24. c. 2). See Appendix E.
48Guido Faba, B.N. MS. 8653, f. 52.
80Rogers, Oxford City Documents, p. 154.
194 The Wandering Scholars
behind him in his haste. But these enforced recruits are
not the true vagus, though the like of them made the
order an abomination to all decent men. The vagus is
bom, not made: none shall be accounted fit, say the "new
decretals" of the Ordo Vagorum who is not of an incon­
stant and jocund mind, a worlds wanderer—

“et recurrat
et transcurrat
et discurrat
in orbe rotunda.”51

There are minor conditions: that he shall never be up

in time for matins, for there are 'phantasmata abroad in
the early morning, which is the reason why early risers
are never quite sane: that no man may have two coats:
if he is given a tunic he must, to live honestly, im­
mediately dice away his cloak, and he who enjoys the
possession of a shirt shall in no case extend the privilege
to breeches: two pairs of boots means excommunication.
But first and last, it is the life of the road.

“Let no one in his travelling

Go against the wind,
Let him not, because he's poor,
Look as though he whined.
Let him set before himself
Hope beguiling.
Ever after sorrow comes
Fate that's smiling.''52
a Carm. Buratta, 1 7 7 :
“Nunquam erit habilis
Qui non est instabilis
Et corde iocundo
Non sit vagus mundo . . .”
“ Carni. Buratta, 1 93 :
“Ordo noster prohibet
matutinas plane
sunt quedam phantasmata
que vagantur mane,
 The Ordo Vagorum 195
“They live by their vices,” say the Church Councils:
a hard saying, but not so damning as it sounds. From
the mediaeval point of view it would have applied equally
well to Goldsmith, who jigged his way through Europe
with a flute and a trick of Latin disputation: the flute
got him bite and sup from the country folk; his argu­
mentative tongue and dog-Latin three days' board and
lodging in a monastery, for that was the prize of a victory
in debate: and possibly it was in some of the older mo­
nastic libraries that he picked up his odd and unexpected
knowledge of the Middle Ages, of Liutprand for instance,
whom he thoroughly enjoyed. The twelfth and thirteenth
century vagus was very like him: and the music-making
that would have damned Goldsmith damned these also.
From the fourth century the “clericus inter epulas can­
tans" singing at banquets, had been singled out for
discipline: he was to lose his office, though not yet his
privilege.53 For the Puritan attack on the stage in the

per que nobis veniunt

visiones vane;
sed qui tunc surrexerit
non est mentis sane . . .

"Nemo in itinere
contrarius sit ventis,
nec a paupertate
ferat vultum dolentis,
sed spem sibi proponat
semper consulentis,
nam post grande malum
sors sequitur gaudentis.”
° See Appendix E, p. 270.
The jongleur's profession was the most degrading a clerk could
have; but it was also the most natural. It was a clerk's business
to sing. A singing master, touting for custom, declares it is the
foundation of all ecclesiastical functions (B.N. MS. 8654, f. 14),
and the tragic emperor, Henry IV, the mediaeval Lear, came beg­
ging to his own church at Spires, to be taken in as a clerk, urging
mat he could read and sing in the choir. See the story in Caesarius
von Heisterbach (iv. 9) of the clerks who sang loudly and
196 The Wandering Scholars
seventeenth century is emasculate in comparison with the
mediaeval onslaught on the jongleur and the mime:
above all on the goliard, the clerk who had abandoned his
business of edifying for this degrading business of the
amuseur. A set of clerical reprobates keep company down
the centuries: the clericum inter ejpulas cantantem; cleri­
cum scurrilibus joculatorem; clericum qui tabernas in­
traret; clericum vel monachum fugitivum vel vagum .54
Not many councils refrain from pillorying one at least:
and sometimes all four appear in the dock together. There
are interesting variations in the attack. Toledo in the
seventh century uses Petrarch's own word “illa vesania,"
and empowers any ecclesiastical authority to lay the
vagabond by the heels and do his best to reclaim him,
though one feels that the severity tails off at the last: and
canons less wordy come from Autun, Berghamsted, Ire­
land.55 Boniface in the eighth century speaks his mind
on pilgrimage, on which the gravest minds in the Church
had always some reserve: forbids the pilgrimage to Rome
wholly to women and nuns: “there is not a town in France
or Italy,” he says, “where there is not an English harlot
or adulteress.”56 In the ninth, Benedict of Aniane re­
hearses what everyone else has said: the ninth century
councils are a small body of divinity, and explain the
reasons of things at length, how music, for instance,
softens the virility of the mind, and is to be dreaded by
ecclesiastics,57 and even by laymen: while the Irish vaga-

in a sack. And the clerks who sang so that they scared the crows
from the steeple. Hauréau, Robert de Sorbon, p. 16.
54 See Appendix E.
“ Mansi, Concilia, x. 769; xi. 123; xii. 112 , 12 1.
“ Labbé et Cossart, Concilia, vi. 1565. Ep. Bonifac. ad Cuthbert.
“De corrigendis vitiis Anglonim.”
“ Mansi, xiv. 813.
 The Ordo Vagorum 197
bonds come in for a full share of denunciation. The
Emperor is implored not to encourage absentee clerics
about the Court, and to have a strict inquisition made in
Italy to recall fugitives, for Italy seems to have become
a kind of Paradise for free souls.58 They were already at
their trick of parody, for San Zeno's first communion ad­
dresses were made the basis of a wicked F east of St.
Cyprian, attended by most of the worthies of both Testa­
ments, not at their best, but with just enough dreadful
resemblance to make it a useful help to memory. So at
least the great Hrabanus Maurus saw it; and actually com­
mends it to Lothair II.50 Also the good wine of Angers
which the Three Musketeers so loved got its fame early, in

“Once there was an Abbot, Abbot of Angers,”

whose long saturation in it ended in making him incor­

ruptible, at least as to the flesh.60 It may have been one
of the songs sung by the three young men of the fam ilia,
the household of the timid Abbot of Ferrières, who sat up
late at night when all decent monks were in bed, roaring
catches without mitigation or remorse of voice till they
rolled in drunken slumber above the very pavement where
the good St. Aldricus slept his last sleep. Yet God un­
willing to have his saint's repose thus profaned, removed
the three delinquents, and the faithful coming to mass
next morning found them variously disposed in the street
beyond the bridge.61 Shortly after, the Abbot gave up his
riotous charge, and died in peace, a simple monk of
Fleury: the rule passed into the stronger hands of Servatus
Lupus, whose scholarship did not interfere with his sense
88M. G. H. Concilia Car. Aev. i. 675. See Appendix E.
89Poet. Lat. Car. iv. 857 ff. Epist. Car. v. 506. See Novati,
Studi critici, p. 178 ff.: Lapotre, Mélanges d'archéologie . . •
1901.
60Poet. Lat. Car. iv. p. 591.
®Migne, P.L. cv. 807.
198 The Wandering Scholars
of discipline.62 In the first decades of the tenth century,
under Walter of Sens, appears the council, the bone of
controversy, against the ribald clerks 'w ho are vulgarly
called the family of Golias,” the first apparition of the
genial Pantagruelian prelate whose sons are as the sands
of the sea, who ate and drank more at one sitting than
the Blessed Martin did in his whole life,63 and whose
countenance appears so often in the thirteenth century
councils,
“As though through dungeon grate he peered
With broad and burning face.”
The authenticity of the council has been justly disputed:
Golias makes that one meteoric appearance, and darkness
swallows him until the first decade of the thirteenth
century: his presence in the text is almost certainly a
clerical error.64 But the presence of his offspring, the
ribalds, in the century is past controversy:65 and the
familiar quartet continues to appear in the dock. The
sack of so many monasteries by the Northmen, the intru­
sion of lively secular clerks, and their final expulsion
(leaving the monasteries like rotting timber, says an
“ Radulfus Tortaire, Migne, clx. 1200, on Gaubert, “vir
timoratus qui etiam abbatis offido functus fuerat, sed sibi sub­
jectorum mores nequaquam emendare valens.” I am indebted for
the reference to Mr. J. W. Thompson's extremely interesting
article on the authenticity of the Council of Sens, in Studies in
Philology, 1923, but the monastery is Ferrières, not St. Columba
of Sens.
88Summa of Simon of Tournai, c. 1202, "praelatus ille Golias
qui una nocte millia michas et venalia exhausit et fora, et in
salsamentis plus illa nocte quam sanctus Martinus tota vita sua
consumpsit.” Hauréau, Not. et Extr. i. 169.
84See Génestal, Priv. Fori, p. 165. Quoted in Appendix E, p.
278.
66See Appendix E. The Ecbasis Captivi was written to beguile
die tedium of a monastic prison, evidently by a vagus under dis­
cipline—M e vero vacuo, claustrali carcere septo. St. Goslin, Bishop
of Toul, 922, took in hand a general reform. St. Aper espedally
had sunk very low. See Voigt, Quellen und Forschungen zur
Sprache . . . der germanischen Völker, viii. pp. 4-8.
 The Ordo Vagorum 199
English charter indignantly)66 added enormously to the
crowd on the roads:67 and the glimpses that one gets of
the clerks of St. Ghislain, who lost their saint by taking
him about to fairs,68 is worthy of the worst traditions.
Eleventh century letters of licence for a clerk going on a
journey describe the vagus as the fraud that he is, but
hasten to add, 'T h e present bearer is not such.”69 The
twelfth century with its craze for scholarship, and the utter
disillusionment that followed it, increased still further the
wandering population.70 There are the genuine scholars,
like Nicholas Breakspear or John of Salisbury, or later,
Reuchlin and Ulrich von Hutten, making their difficult
way from one great school to another,71 or the less am-
MMansi, xix. 47. Edgar’s Charter to Malmesbury, 974 a.d.
mWilliam of Malmesbury complains that that monastery was
become a stabulum clericorum; yet the body of the blessed Ald-
helm was discovered by these irregulares et vagos. ( Gesta Reg.
Ang. ii. 147.) The clerks at Winchester were offered their choice
between regular profession or surrender of the monastery, and
chose “mollem vitam, tunc tota insula incertis vagabantur sedibus.”
68Analecta Boll. Rainer. Miracula St. Ghislani, ix.; Armitage
Robinson, Life and Times of St. Dunstan, p. 137.
89From Alberic of Monte Cassino: Rockinger, Briefsteller und
Formelbücher, p. 35.
70Carm. Bur. 89:
“O ars dialectica
Nunquam esses cognita,
Quae tot facis clericos
Exsules et miseros.”
n Dr. Johnson himself would have been a vagus, if the mood
had lasted that took him in his rooms above the gateway in Pem­
broke, when Dr. Panting, the Master, passing underneath, heard
a burst of soliloquy, “Well, I have a mind to see what is done in
other places of learning. I’ll go and visit the Universities abroad.
I’ll go to France and Italy. I’ll go to Padua—and I’ll mind my
business.” Ulrich von Hutten ran away from Fulda to appear an
undergraduate at Cologne, thence to Erfurt, Frankfort, Leipsic,
read law at Bologna, and there discovered Aristophanes and
Lucian, whence the E'pistolae Obscurorum Virorum. Reuchlin
studied at Freiburg, was singing-man to the Margrave of Baden,
studied Greek at Paris and at Basle, jurisprudence at Orleans and
Poitiers.
200 The Wandering Scholars
bitious, going home for the holidays.72 There is the baser
type, the unfrocked or runaway monk or clerk, and the
type, not so base but just as irreclaimable, “the drunken
M .A.,” the scholar without influence or money to get
him a benefice, who has found that Homer himself, with­
out money in his purse to get him an audience, may go
and live as the flies do. For himself he has done with the
scholar's vigils and the scholar's fasts: a roast is better
than cheerless salads, and your warm bed, and a wench,73
and his Litany runs “From scanty dinner and a bad cook:
from a poor supper and a bad night: and from drinking
wine that has turned, Good Lord deliver us/'74 By the
beginning of the thirteenth century they have actually a
burlesque order, with Golias for its legendary Grand­
master. An English goliard, writing, like Mr. Verdant
Green, to headquarters in France, propounds a series of
points on which he would be resolved, such as whether
it is better to make love to Rose or Agnes: to eat boiled
beef or little fishes driven into the net: resolve him that
no longer he may live without decorum.75 The late twelfth
72 “When I came home from the schools in the summer, my
father hardly knew me, I was so blackened Qdenigratus') with
tramping in the sun” (Robert of Sorbon, quoted by Haskins,
“Paris University in Thirteenth Century Sermons,” Amer. Hist.
Rev. X . 24).
n Latin Poems . . . Walter Mapes, 157:
“Adora pecuniam, qui deos adoras.
Cur struis armaria? cur libros honoras?
longas fac Parisiis vel Athenis moras?
Si nihil attuleris, ibis, Homere, foras! . . .
ipse licet venias musis comitatus, Homere. . . .
quis ferret vigilias frigidam-que cellam
tutius est iacuisse toro et tenuisse puellam. . . .
malo saginatas carnes quam triste legumen.”
See Petrus Pictor, B.N. MS. Lat. 14 19 1, f. 12
“Poenitet esse probum, poenitet esse poetam,
Qui numquam duco noctemve diemve quietem.”
74 Montaiglon, Recueil des poésies françaises, vii. p. 67.
75Latin Poems . . . Walter Mapes, p. 69. See also Carmina
Burana, 177, on the visit of Simon to the brethren in Alsace; 193,
 The Ordo Vagorum 201

and early thirteenth centuries saw religious orders spring­

ing up like mushrooms, and there is probably little more
substance in the ordo vagorum than in the rest of their
impish parodies. But something of the kind must have
existed, for the Church councils speak of it as both an
ordo and a secta,76 And now at last the battle is joined.
The long patience of the Church is exhausted; and in
12 3 1 she launches, not indeed excommunication, but the
second heaviest thunderbolt, degradation:77 the clericus
found vagus is henceforth clericus no longer: he is to be
shaven, so that no trace may be left of that order to which
he is a disgrace: henceforth he will go out from the
bishops or the monastery prison, an Ishmaelite indeed.78
The vagus is stripped of his dearest possession, the one
thing that set him apart from the "people without the
law,” the other gentlemen of the road, the clowns and the
tumblers and the performing monkeys and the dancing
bears, he who had held his head so high, because he knew
his Lucan and his Ovid, and broke his wildest jests in the
ancient tongue.79 To lay him by the heels, the Church
will even call in the secular arm: repudiation—in the
Middle Ages—could no further go. Any ecclesiastic har­
em the Constitution of the Order; 195, on its resemblance to the
Apostles.
78Council of Salzburg, 1291. See Appendix E.
77 Council at Rouen, 12 31; Château-Gonthier, 1231; Sens, 1239.
See Appendix E. From one standpoint excommunication is die
lighter, for a clerk, though excommunicate, has still the protection
of the Church.
78Salzburg, 1291.
79Cf. the Archpoet (Manitius, p. 37) ;
“Presides Italici, presides avari,
potius idolatre debent nominari
vix quadrantem tribuunt pauperi scolari,
qui per dona talia poterit ditari?
Doleo, cum video leccatores multos
penitus inutiles penitusque stultos,
nulla prorsus animi ratione fultos,
sericis et variis indumentis cultos.”
202 The Wandering Scholars
bouring or countenancing such persons is himself liable to
fine and suspension.80 It has its effect: after this, de­
generacy is swift. The word goliard soon becomes the
vilest in the language. By the end of the fourteenth cen­
tury the law courts use it as equivalent to the brothel-
keeper.81
There is no denying that the Church had good reasons
for its exasperation. If Homer knocked at the gates of the
Curia in vain, and was driven off to live with the flies, he
soon develops the wasp's, not to say the hornet's, sting.
The Albigensian heresy had left the Church sensitive; a
good deal of dirty linen had been washed in public, and
the vagi undertake that task with a dreadful glee. They
say no harder things than Innocent III said at the Lateran
Council in 12 15 , but they say them in portable form:
a folio of parchment is less dangerous than an indecent
distich about the morals of the Papal legate sung all over
Paris.82 And the distichs are not all of them indecent.
Golias, the jovial shepherd of so many black sheep, is the
“ Council at S. Hippolyte (Passau), 1284. See Appendix E.
Cf. Salimbene’s account of the Bishop of Parma (op. cit. p. 62),
who was all things to all men, cum clericis clericus . . . magnus
dispensator; largus, liberalis, curialis, but gave over much trufatari-
bus, for which he was accused before the Pope. A fine scholar,
notably in canon law, and an expert at chess. He had for a long
time indulged one Gherardino Segalelli, who had founded an
Apostolic order; after a horrid scandal he dismissed them the
diocese; and to so great madness did their leader come that he
turned jongleur, “in habitu historionum incedit et factus joculator
per plateas et vicos salticando vadit” (pp. 256, 619).
81 See Génestal, Privilegium Fori, p. 235.
“ Matthew Paris, Chron. Maj. 1229. Cf. Hilarii Versi et Ludi,
Champollion Figeac, xiv. Papa Scholasticus. Compare Hamlet on
the ill word of the players with Salimbene’s story of the wisdom
of the Cardinal Octavian, Papal Legate in Lombardy, 1247, when
during a procession a joculator cried, "Room for the man who
betrayed tne Roman Curia, and many times tricked the Church.”
And the Cardinal sent money, saying, “pecuniae obediunt omnia,”
so well judging that the joculator crossed over to another place
on the route, and cried that there was no better Cardinal, and
worthy to be Pope on his return.
 The Ordo Vagorum 203
archetype of the loose-living prelate; but a good many of
his satires against his fellow-churchmen have the weight
of a real indignation behind them, and something of the
coldness of Swift's steel. 'T h eir God is their belly: and
they obey that which is written, Seek first the Kingdom
of God .”83 And once or twice there is the apocalyptic
power, the genius of Ezekiel or of Blake—
"O truth of Christ,
O most dear rarity,
0 most rare Charity,
Where dwellst thou now?
In the Valley of Vision?
On Pharaoh's throne?
On high with Nero?
With Timon alone?"
Follows a vision of Truth bound and tortured at the
judgment seat. . . . Then Love replied:
"Man, wherefore didst thou doubt?
Not where thou wast wont to find
My dwelling, in the southern wind.
Not Decretal and not Bull,
Not in casque nor yet in cowl.
But on the road from Jericho,
1 come with a wounded man."84

Moral indignation is a heady wine on an empty stom­

ach, and their stomachs were often empty. "The hunger
of the order," "famine de povre clerc" passed into a
proverb.85 The vagus who wrote his animal story in the
monastery prison at Toul says that if you speak it right
through it may get you a piece of bread.86 One of their
88 Wright, T., Latin Poems, attributed to Walter Mayes, p. xl.
"Magister Golias de quodam abbate."
84Carm. Bur. xciii.
“ Bedier, Les Fabliaux, p. 391.
*Ecbasis Captivi, 1. 42. “Si recitas totam, panis mercabere
tortam.”
204 The Wandering Scholars |
songs ends suddenly and dramatically, with a clutch at a
preferred shirt.87 “They go about in public naked/1 saysi
the Council at Salzburg, ‘lie in bake-ovens, frequent,
taverns, games, harlots, earn their bread by their vices i
and cling with inveterate obstinacy to their sect, so that
no hope of their amendment remaineth.”88

“Et ne nos inducas: desire

Must take you, God, such life to share.
Barefoot in your shirt you go
Through the heat and through the snow.”80

“Many a jest I've broken,

Many a penny spent,
In many a square and many an inn,
And whoe'er it displeases, I’ll do it again;
For if they chase me, I shall fly,
And if they kill me, I shall die.”90

“They cling with inveterate obstinacy to their sect,”

say the perplexed Bishops in council: for “the wind that
lifts when the sails are loosed” did not stir in the chapter
house of Salzburg. But it stirs in everything the goliards
have written.
m “Camisia
Detur! Pia
Virgo solvat pretium!”
Notices et Extraits, xxxii. p. 297,
“ Mansi, xxiv. 1077. See Appendix E.
® Jubinal, Jongleurs et Trouvères, “Paternoster du Vin,” p. 69 s
“Et ne nos inducas: envie
Vous doinst Diex de mener tel vie,
S'irez en langes et deschaus
Et par les froiz et par les chaus!”
90 “J'ai mainte parole espandue,
Et mainte maille despendue,
Et dedans taverne et en place,
Encore ferai, cui qu'il displace,
Car s'on me chace, je fuirai
Et s'on me tue, je morrai.”
“Le Dit des Boulangers,” Jongleurs et Trouvères, p. 138.
 The Ordo Vagorum 205
“a Tentrée de mai
A Orliens, la bone cité
Ou j'ai par mainte fois esté,
L'aventure est et bone et bele,
Et le rime fraiche et nouvele.”91
The goliard of the later days is Panurge at his ungentle-
manly worst: but the original goliard, starved cat though
he is, has more of Pantagruel than Panurge. His oracle
is the oracle of the Holy Bottle, T rinql Bacchus and
Scacchus are his gods, but he can sing, and the songs
that he jigged out in taverns and alehouses, in monastic
refectories after supper, at the tables of easy-going prel­
ates,92 caught the ear of Europe. Whatever his life was,
the songs that were his repertoire would challenge most
Elizabethan or seventeenth century anthologies either for
melody or for romantic passion, and for comedy, go far
beyond them. Even at his wickedest, he is never louche:
he is only magnus trutannus et magnus trufator, like
Salimbene's crow.93 He was not really Salimbene's crow:
01 Montaiglon-Raynaud, vi. 13 9 .
02See the complaint of Absalon of St. Victor on the secular
prelates, “in palatio ubique resonat cantus de gestibus Hectoris,
mensa ferculis, thalamus iocis impudicis jocundus est” (Hauréau,
Not. et Ext. iv. 30), and the continual complaint of Church
councils. There were not many like Foulques, Bishop of Toulouse,
who “when he heard any song sung which he had composed while
yet he was in saeculo [Foulques, the scourge of the Provençal
heretics, was once a famous trouvère], on that same day did eat
naught but bread and water. And it befell that once when he was
at the court of the King of France, at table a certain jongleur
began to sing one of his songs and straightway the Bishop de­
manded water to be brought to him, and did eat nothing save
bread and water.”—Sermon by Robert de Sorbon (H auréau, Mem.
Acad. Inscr. xxxi. 2). “You know Foulques* glorious speech to
Dante in the IXth Paradiso on the way certain things are not
repented of in heaven?** G.S.
“Non però qui si pente, ma si ride
non della colpa, ch* a mente non toma,
ma del valor ch* ordinò e provide.**
03 Salimbene, M. G. H. xxxii. p. 391. The phrase haunts Salim-
bene like a refrain: he never wearies of it.
2 6
o The Wandering Scholars
he belonged to the papal legate, Gregory of Montelongo,
but he was a maximus truffator, and when the house was
full of pilgrims, for it was near the river, the crow would
get up in the middle of the night when all were sound
asleep and cry in a shipman’s voice: 'W ho’s for Bologna?
Come! come! come! Quick! quick! quick! Up! up! Come!
come! Bring your baggage! All aboard! All aboard! Port
your helm!” and up would rise the stranger guests, who
knew not the truffas and deceptions of that crow, and
wait with all their goods all night on the river bank,
marvelling greatly. That fowl was inspired by Golias, and
came to a bad end : a blind beggar whose shins he used to
nip threw his stick at him, and he trailed a broken wing.
The goliard, too, trails a broken wing. One hears of
jongleurs who came to fortune. William the Conqueror
gave his minstrel "three vills and five carucates of land”
in Gloucestershire:04 Walther von der Vogelweide, in a
higher rank, got his litde fief, tired at last of warming
himself at another man’s fire. But one seldom hears of a
goliard coming to good. Nicholas, a clericus vagus, whom
they called the archpoet, fell sick and thought he was
going to die and came to the Cistercians at Heisterbach,
and was received with some ado into the order. But when
the devil was well, cum quadam irrisione, he cast aside
the cowl and fled.95 And Theobald, famous all over
Cologne for his wild jesting, given wholly to wine and
dice, came to the Order and was received as a novice and
edified them all for a while, washing clothes and drinking
94C h am b ers, The Mediaeval Stage, i. 43.
06H eisterbach w a s kinder than some monasteries. P h ilip o f
O ttisberg, canon o f C o lo gn e, stu d ying under R u d o lf in Paris, w as
touched b y divin e grace and left the school, g ivin g all his fine
clothes to the poor scholars, and cam e to the C istercian s at Bonne-
v au x , asking to be m ade a novice. B u t the brethren seeing him
cappa trita atque vetusta ju d ged him to be a scholarem pauperem
et vagum and at first refused him adm ission. C ae s. von H eister­
bach, i. 38: ii. 15.
 The Ordo Vagorum 207
the water they were washed in, to the discomforting of his
inwards and the casting out of the devil of pride. And
then he took leave, to go to see his friends in France, he
said, and indeed came back, but the old habit had gripped
him. He disappeared, this time for good. Another vagus,
drifting past the monastery, gave them news of him. He
had gone back to his old life but in the end died in
penitence, confessing himself to a secular priest.96 They
are clear-sighted enough. They know what ails them.
Surian, parodist of Eberhard II, Archbishop of Salzburg,
knew the brevity of that summer day, the swallow's rest­
lessness, and with it, inerti stultitia, the inertia of folly.
Driven out by the laymen, turned away at the door by the
clerks, "bats are we,” says the Archbishop of the Wan­
derers, "that find no place either with beast or bird.”07
They know the full rigour of their inordinate order,
rigorem inordinati nostri ordinis, but they abide by it.
They will write a Dicers' Mass with a "Fraud to thee,
Decius,''98 but Decius is the third person of their Trinity,
and they politely offer membership to the Almighty Him­
self if he will learn to throw a main.99 One thing they
share with Villon: they have no sentiment in them. The

96Caes. von Heist, iv. 6.

97 Surian is writing a burlesque dispensation to free the church
of which the good Sighard is archdeacon from any further extor­
tion by the Wanderers. It is an astonishing document; the Arch­
poet's Confessio in prose, with the bittemess distilled from half
a century of vagabondage added. The full text is a complete
commentary on the church councils denouncing the order. For
text and translation see Appendix C.
98C arm, Bur. 189, ‘Incipit Officium Lusorum." Vide Barbazon,
Fabliaux et Contes, iv. 485.
99 “Et je vous dis par fin convent
que vous serez de nostre gent,
S’aus trois dez vous poez amordre
Par tens porrez entrer en l'ordre.
Et ne nos inducas, envie
Vous doinst Diex de mener tel vie."
“Paternoster du Vin" CJongleurs et Trouvères, p. 70).
2o8 T h e Wandering Scholars
word is a naked sword. Ronsard wrote an epitaph for a
dead actor,
‘‘Never while you lived, Memable,
Had you either house or table.
Never, poor soul, did you see
On your fire a pot to be.
Death to you is profitable,
Now you need not pot nor table,
And what you never had before,
You've a house, for evermore.”
It is consummate, but no goliard would have written it;
it is too tender. What they did write was the Credo au
Ribaut.100
A goliard is dying: the priest sent for in haste speaks
comfortable words: have comfort, good son: let him but
recite his Credo.
“That will I, Sir, and hear me now.
Credo—in dice I well believe,
That got me often bite and sup,
And many a time hath had me drunk,
And many a time delivered me
From every stitch and every penny.
In Dewnt—never with my will
Gave Him a thought nor ever will.
The other day I took a shirt
From a ribald and I diced it,
And lost, and never gave it back.
If I die, he can have mine.
Put it in writing, *tis my will,
I would not like it were forgot.
Patrem—at St. Denis in France,
Good Sir, I had a father once,
Omnipotentem in his having,
Money and horses and fine wearing,
And by the dice that thieveth all things
I lost and gamed it all away. . . .
100 Barbazon-Méon. iv. p. 445.
 The Ordo Vagorum 209

Creatorem who made all

I've denied—He has his will
Of me now. I know Im dying,
Nothing here but bone and hide.
Coeli-—of heaven ever think?
Nay, but the wine that I could drink.
Et terrae—there was all my joy.
Do you think that I believe
More in Jhesum than the tavern
Better love I him who's host
There, than Christum filium eius.
Watch the roast turn on the spit,
And the wine that's clear and green,
Orleans, Rochelle, Auxerre,
That's the joy that's unicum.
• • • • • •

To drink and wench and play at dice

Seem to me no such mighty sins. . . .
Never man I know descendit
Ad infemum for a game.
Ask thou something else of me. . . .
Ad caelos will no man go
Because he aped a holy show.
But he who sedit by a lass
And hath his three dice in his hand
Is in the tavern better set
Than ad dexteram Dei patris.
I'd like well to be come again
Venturus where I squandered most—
'T would be in Paris, by my soul,
There was a girl there, she was fair. . . .
Credo in wine that's fair to see,
And in a barrel of my host
More than in the Holy Ghost.
The tavern is my sweetheart, yea,
And Holy Church is not for me.
Remissionem of the bill
You'll not get that, my dear, for nothing,
You'll give your hat, or cape, or coat. . . .
aio The Wandering Scholars
But when I've drunk a good strong wine
That leaves me well and warm within,
Little I care for 'peccatorum.
Et corporis—the body's lust
I do perform. Sir Priest, I chafe
At thinking of that other life.
I tell you, 'tis not worth a straw.
And I would pray to the Lord God
That He will in no kind of way
Resurrectionem make of me,
So long as I may drench the place
With good wine where ITI be laid,
And so pray I of all my friends
That if I can't, themselves will do't,
And leave me a full pot of wine
Which I may to the Judgment bring. . . #
Vitam aeternam wilt Thou give,
0 Lord God? wilt Thou forgive
All my evil, well I know it,
Amen. Priest, I now am through with't.
Through with life. Death hath its pain.
Too much. . . . Too much. . . . This agony—
I'm dying. I to God commend you.
1 ask it of you—Pray for me."
 CHAPTER IX

T h e Scholars' Lyric

"A nd thereafter/' said Abelard, T made no new songs of

the mysteries of philosophy, but of Love's secrets only.”1
In this, as in so many things, Abelard is the protagonist
of the new scholarship. He came to love late: fastidious­
ness and a white heat of the intellect had kept him chaste,
and he had small interest in lay society.2 The old canon
had no scruple in bringing the mightiest scholar in Paris
under the same roof with his niece;3 was inordinately
flattered that this man who had cardinals as scholars
should think the girl, Hypatia though she was,4 worth his
pains. Abelard was to read with her in such leisure as
his weightier studies left him. No opportunity was want­
ing: the same trance fell on the quiet house in the Rue
des Chantres as on the ship becalmed off the Cornish
coast: and the two drank together a cup as fatal as the
love draught of Tristan and Isolde. As famous too: the
songs that he made for her went over all France. He had
1 Hist. Cal. cap. vi. P.L. clxxviii. c. 128.
2 lb. V. c. 1 26. “Quia igitur scortorum immunditiam semper
abhorrebam, et ab excessu et frequentatione nobilum feminarum
studii scholaris assiduitate revocabar, nec laicarum conversationem
multum noveram, prava mihi . . . fortuna . . . nacta est occasionem
qua me facilius de sublimitatis huius fastigio prosterneret.“
8 Cap. vi. “Quanta eius simplicitas esset vehementer admiratus.“
Abelard was at least moved by it. “Non facile de his quos pluri­
mum diligimus, turpitudinem suspicamur,“ and bitterly accused
himself “de summa proditione“ (c. 128, 129).
4“Tu . . . et mulieres omnes evicisti, et pene viros universos
superasti.“ Peter the Venerable, Epist. Migne, clxxxix. c. 347.
212 The Wandering Scholars
two gifts, to win any womans heart, said Heloïse, gifts
rare in a philosopher, of making and singing, making
both in the classic metres and the new rhyming, and set­
ting them to airs so lovely that even the unlettered knew
his name.5 Not one of them remains. All that is left of
Abelard's verse are the Hours that he wrote for her when
the sword lay between them and she was Abbess of the
Paraclete, and half a dozen laments, of Dinah for her
ruined lover, for the daughter of Jephthah dead in her
virginity, of David over Jonathan.6 The metres are
exquisite: the matter like enough his own sorrowful for­
tunes and the treatment poignant enough to suggest what
that gift might have been, with passion triumphant in­
stead of crucified.

“Low in thy grave with thee

Happy to lie,
Since there's no greater thing left Love to do,
And to live after thee
Is but to die,
For with but half a soul what can Life do?

“So share thy victory

Or else thy grave,
Either to rescue thee, or with thee lie;
Ending that life for thee,
That thou didst save,
So Death, that sundereth, might bring more nigh.*
*Epist. ii. Migne, P.L. clxxviii. c. 185. “Duo autem, fateor, tibi
specialiter inerant, quibus feminarum quarumlibet animos stadm
allicere poteras, dictandi videlicet et cantandi gratia. Quae ceteros
minime philosophos assecutos esse novimus . . . pleraque amatorio
metro vel rhythmo composita reliquisti carmina, quae prae nimia
suavitate tam dictaminis quam cantus saepius frequentata, tuum
in ore omnium nomen incessanter tenebant, ut etiam illiterates
melodiae dulcedo tui non sineret immemores esse. . . . Et cum
horum pars maxima carminum nostros decantaret amores, multis
me regionibus brevi tempore nuntiavit.”
•Migne, P.L. clxxviii. Planctus Varii, c. 1817, et seq.
 The Scholars* Lyric 213
‘Teace, O my stricken Lute!
Thy strings are sleeping.
Would that my heart could still
Its bitter weeping!”7

Abelard himself was merciless to that memory, and

one may be sure that no fragment of the love songs would
be found among his own papers. But it is hardly possible
that the songs of so famous a singer should perish wholly:
and here and there in the anonymous songbooks of the
century, a lyric may have caught something of the "shat­
tering ecstasy of their fire.”

‘Take thou this rose, O rose,

Since love's own flower it is,
And by that rose
Thy lover captive is.”8

"I suffer,
Yea, I die,
But this mine agony
I count all bliss,
T“Vel confossus pariter ‘Triumphi participem
Monier felidter Vel ruinae comitem.
Quum, quod amor faciat Ut te vel eriperem,
Majus hoc non habeat Vel tecum occumberem.

“Et me post te vivere “Vitam pro te finiens,

Mori sit assidue, Quam salvasti totiens,
Nec ad vitam anima Ut et mors nos jungeret
Satis est dimidia. Magis quam disjungeret

“Do quietem fidibus.

Vellem ut et planctibus
Sic possem et fletibus!”
Migne, clxxviii. c. 1822.
8
Carmina Burana, 147:
“Suscipe Flos florem
quia flos designat amorem.
Dio de flore
nimio sum captus amore.”
214 Tfee Wandering Scholars
Since death is life again
Upon thy lips.”0
The influence of the actual lyric must have been potent
enough: the power of the actual story on the imagination
of his student generation incalculable. It is not that the
undergraduate of any generation needs notable examples:
but there was a difference between this over-mastering
passion staged before their eyes, with its tragic end to
give it consecration like that of Tristan or of Lancelot,
and the casual encounters of the Rue St. Jacques, the
amorous hesitations between Rose and Agnes. The proof
of it is the fashion in which the story was remembered.
In the Metamorphosis, the twelfth century Love's Assize,
Heloïse comes solitary among the great lovers of the
world, still seeking the “Palatine,” now a stranger to the
heart where once she held him.10 Jean de Meung was the
vrai bourgeois, the type of clerk whose conception of love
was based chiefly on Juvenal and the Ars Am andi and
his own apparently squalid experiences: but he translated
the Letters, and in his speech of Heloïse comes as near
reverence as his ill-conditioned and extremely able mind
permits. That is at the end of the thirteenth century: by
the fifteenth Villon has set Heloïse among the Dames du
temps jadis,
“Où est la tres sage Hellois,
Pour qui fut chastré et puis moyne
Pierre Esbaillart à Saint Denis?
Pour son amour ot cette essoyne . . .
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?”
9Carmina Buratta, 42:
“ A m a re crucior, morior
vu ln ere, quo glorior.
E ia si m e sanare
un o vellet osculo
qu e cor felici iaculo
gaudet vuln erare.”
10 Metamorphosis Goliae, 2 13 -17 . ( W r ig h t , Latin Poems . . .
Walter Mapes, p. 29.)
 The Scholars’ Lyric. 215
It was more than two hundred years since Peter the
Venerable had brought Abelard’s body to be buried in the
Paraclete, and had been thanked in Heloïse’s stark phrase,
"You have given us the body of our master."11 But for
such as these the memory of youth is long.

Already, in the earlier decades of the twelfth century,

the scholars were praising their ladies in rhymes and
verses. The war between Athene and Aphrodite that is
the conceit of so many of their songs, and that beguiled
Shakespeare himself into writing the undergraduate com­
edy of Love's Labour's Lost, had already begun. Sometime,
probably towards the middle of the century, a lively
clerk invented a burlesque church council, held at Remire-
mont in the ides of April, to decide whether it is better to
be loved by a clerk than by a cavalier.12 Remiremont had
a gallant reputation: and its beautiful Abbess Judith II
was the sovereign lady of the unknown Spanish poet-
monk of Ripoll.18 No layman was present at the council,
only honesti clerici from Toul, true lovers: also were all
veteran ladies excluded, to whom all joy and desire of
youth is tedious. The quasi evangelium was from Ovid,
doctor egregius, and thereafter love songs were sung by
the two Elizabeths. The cardinal lady opened the session
garlanded with a thousand flowers of May, herself flower
of the world, Spring’s own child.
11 Petrus Ven. Epist. xxi. (Migne, P.L., cboorix. c. 427).
u Concilium in Monte Romanci, edited from MS. Trier, 1081,
by Waitz (.Zeitschrift für deutsch. Alterth. vii) and by W. Meyer,
Das Liebescondl in Remiremont, 1914. See Langlois (E.),
Origines et Sources du Roman de la Rose, 1891, pp. 6 et seq.; P.
Mayer, Romania, 1886, pp. 333 et seq. The nightingale is the
champion of the clerks in Florence et Blanchefleur, ana conquers
the perroquet. But in the English version, Melior et Ydoine, the
knights have it.
u L ’escole poetice di Ripoll: Archivum Medii Aevi Latinitatis
Ç1925), p. 196.
2i6 The Wandering Scholars
“If you were April's lady,
And I were Lord of May—”

“Vos, quarum est gloria amor et lascivia

Atque delectatio Aprilis cum Maio—”

“You, whose glory is love and dalliance and the delight

of April with May, to you hath Love, god of all lovers
wheresoever they be, sent me to visit you and inquire into
your manner of life: so hath May determined and April
counselled it. Mine is it to correct, and mine to spare.”
The two Elizabeths, de Fauçon and de Granges, uphold
the courtly and honourable love of the clerks, their erudi­
tion in loving, and their “industry” ; what they have loved
with sweetness, they leave not lightly. A daring voice is
raised on behalf of the knights, their courage, and their
deeds to win their lady's grace, but borne down. The
knight blazons his love everywhere: .he cannot hold his
tongue about it. But the clerks are discreet, as well as
courtly. The whole country laughs with their joyousness:
they praise us in all manner of rhymes and verses. Hence­
forth let there be no more knightly lovers: one lover shall
suffice: and transgression be atoned by no light penitence.
Follows excommunication of the rebels, and a universal
Amen. The clerks prided themselves as much as the
trouvères on their knowledge of the subtleties of love,14
14 Vide Langlois, op. cit.; also Pamphilus (ed. Baudouin),
twelfth century, and André le Chapelain, De Amore, who records
the judgments of the Courts of Love. See also the romance of
Galeran, on the chaplain of the Abbess of Beauséjour, good,
debonair and compassionate, who knew
“biau deduitz
En francoys et en latin/'
and the Roman de Guillaume de Dol, on the preferences of the
Bishop of Chartres ( 11. 356-63),
“li vesque de Chartres
S’amast miex iloec qu’en .i. sane [synod], • • •
Tantes faces cleres, vermeilles.
Et ces douz viz Ions et traitiz
Et ces biaus sorcils porvoutiz.”
 T h e Scholars' Lyric 217
and one of the most ambitious poems in the Carmina
Burana is a midnight vision of Love in anger at the spoil­
ing of his temple and the profaning of his mysteries by
the vulgar.15 Chrétien de Troyes had translated the Ars
Amandi about the middle of the century, and Ovid was a
mystery no longer. But Love might have spared his wrath.
The secret of the scholar's lyric is not in Ovid, but rather
in the “wish" copied at the back of a vocabulary of Guil­
laume le Breton, “And I wish that all times were April
and May, and every month renew all fruits again, and
every day fleurs de lis and gillyflower and violets and roses
wherever one goes, and woods in leaf and meadows green,
and every lover should have his lass, and they to love each
other with a sure heart and true, and to everyone his
pleasure and a gay heart."16 If that world ever was, it is
between the folios of the manuscript of Benedictbeuern:
and if too many of the writers had forgotten Hildebert's
warning, have

“Lost the eternal April for the sake of a passing spring"17

they have left another April, eternal in another fashion,
in its stained and wrinkled pages.
For this thirteenth century manuscript,18 copied not al­
ways intelligently from various lost originals, one of them
evidently a scholar's songbook, and found a hundred years
ago among the debris of a secularised monastery, is the
15 Carmina Burana, 156.
18 Hist. Litt, xxxix. 597.
17Hildebert, Carmina. Migne, clxxi. x. 1285: “Ne pro vere
brevi longo careamus Aprili.”
“ See the full description of the MS. in Meyer's Fragmenta
Burana, pp. 5-17 Ç1901), and, with important modifications, in
the preface to the critical text by Hilka and Schumann (19 3 1).
The MS. is an anthology copied by three hands, and has delight­
ful illuminations, a kind of fantastic fairyland, two young lovers
for Suscipe Flos florem, a drinking scene for Potatores exquisiti.
Meyer judged it written in the Moselle valley c. 1225, Schumann
in Bavaria c. 1300 Çyiàe p. vii, supra).
2i8 T h e W andering Scholars
evidence of a lost world. One of its most sounding odes is
a commination, as remorseless as Milton’s, of the flocking
shadows pale, and the yellow-skirted fays:
"By that unspoken name of dread,
The tetra-grammaton of God,
I exorcise you, Ghosts and Fauns,
Nymphs and Sirens, Hamadryads.
Satyrs and ye Household Gods,
Get ye gone and make your home
In Chaos: trouble us no more.”19
But, again like Milton’s folk, they escape from the murk:
and the scholars even in broad sunlight see the Dryads
slip from the bark of a linden tree of Touraine—
“Estivantur Dryades
Colle sub umbroso.’'20
To the Augustans, as to Dr. Johnson, the gods were
“images of which time has tarnished the splendour.” But
to the twelfth and thirteenth century, they have been
dead and are alive again: they are part of the resurrection
miracle of the Northern Spring.
For this is the amazing discovery of mediaeval lyric.
Spring comes slowly up that way, but when it comes it is
an ecstasy. In the North far more than in the South,
Persephone comes actually from the dead. It is a new
thing, and their own. With the exception of the Pervigi­
lium Veneris, the spring song hardly exists in Latin litera­
ture. Here it wells up in the theological centuries very
19 Carmina Burana, x x x .
“ P er nom en m irabile atque ineffabile
D e i tetragram m aton,
U t expaveatis et exhorreatis:
V o s exorcizo, L a rv e , F a u n i, M an es,
N y m p h e , Siren e, H am adriades,
S a tyri, In cu b i, Penates,
u t cito abeatis, chaos incolatis,
ne vas corrum patis christianitatis.”
« I h . 49-
 The Scholars' Lyric 219
much as the lyric Ah aestatis forihus springs from the dry
ground of the Benedictbeuem play of the Nativity. There
has been a long and scholarly discussion between the
Archisynagogus and St. Augustine on the possibility of
the Virgin Birth: a Flight into Egypt, Joseph with a prolix
beard,21 say the stage directions, leading the Mother and
Child. They are met by the King of Egypt and his comi-
tatus, singing, and this is the song.

“At the gates of summer,

Love standeth us to greet.
The earth, to do him honour,
Burgeons beneath his feet.
'The flowers that aye attend him
Laugh at the golden prime;
Should Venus not befriend them,
They die before their time.
“Of all things the beginning
Was on an April mom;
In Spring the earth remembereth
The day that she was bom.
“And so the feast of Venus,
Wherever Love holds sway,
By mortal and immortal
Is kept a holiday.”22

The scholars were strong in faith when they challenged

Mary Virgin with that enchantment.
Nor is it the full-blown spring, the May morning of
Provence, of the Roman de la Rose, of English fifteenth
century convention. These, like Meredith, are the poets
of February, when this years birds begin calling in the
twilight trees, of January itself, those days of incredible
a Carmina Buratta, p. 85:
“Cui assedeat Joseph in habitu honesto et prolixa barba.”
22Carmina Buratta, p. 91 (from the Ludus scenicus de nativitate
Domini). See Appendix A.
220 T h e W andering Scholars
sweetness, the first stirring of the blood, the first mounting
of the sap, so much more poignant than the full burgeon-

“New Year has brought renewing, winter's gone,

Short daylight lengthens and the winds are still.
The year's first month of January's here,
And in my mind the tides still ebb and How
For a girl's sake."23

It is the background of wild earth, of rain-washed April,

that gives their earthiest passion its amazing cleanness.
The background of Ovid's love, of Tibullus, of Propertius,
is urban Roman society; the barred door and the lamp,
the wine-cup and the garlands, the bed where the ex­
quisite body is laid: at its most rustic in Horace, a garden,
and the figure of a garden god: or in the Copa, the arbour
in the inn garden outside the city wall. Tibullus only is
haunted by visions of a wider sky, of the old druid stone
with the garlands on it: of himself at the plough, his
love's white feet in the wine press. But he rouses himself:
dreams, dreams—

“Dulcius urbe quid est? An villa sit apta puellae?"

“Is there aught sweeter than town? And see you your
love on a farm?"

That, he knows, belongs to the youth of the world, le beau

temps de jadis, when Venus herself went straying to the
fields. But for these, le beau temps de jadis is come again,
with the memory of a thousand springs in the blood.
n Ib. 51:
“Anni novi rediit novitas,
hiemis cedit asperitas
breves dies prolongantur,
elementa temperantur.
Subintrante Januario
mens aestu languet vario
propter puellam quam diligo."
 The Scholars' Lyric 2
21

“O Spring the long-desired,

The lover's hour!
O flaming torch of joy,
Sap of each flower,
All hail!
O jocund company
Of many flowers,
O many-coloured light,
All hail,
And foster our delight!
The birds sing out in chorus.
0 youth, joy is before us,
Cold winter has passed on,
And the Spring winds are come!

“The earth's aflame again

With flowers bright,
The fields are green again,
The shadows deep,
Woods are in leaf again,
There is no living thing
That is not gay again.
With face of light
Garbed with delight.
Love is reborn.
And Beauty wakes from sleep."24

For the love of these poems, it is not Dante's, nor Pe­

trarch's, nor the dream love of Provence. Take Jaufré
Rudel's 'Tamour de lonh”—

<fWhen the days lengthen in the month of May,

Well pleased am I to hear the birds
Sing far away.
And when from that place I am gone,
1 hang my head and make dull moan,
Since she my heart is set upon
Is far away.
* Cariti. Buratta, n 8 . S e e A p p e n d ix A .
222 T h e W andering Scholars
“So far, that song of birds, flower o* the thorn,
Please me no more than winter mom,
With ice and sleet.
Ah, would I were a pilgrim over sea,
With staff and scrip and cloak to cover me,
That some day I might kneel me on one knee
Before her feet.
“Most sad, most joyous shall I go away,
Let me have seen her for a single day,
My love afar,
I shall not see her, for her land and mine
Are sundered, and the ways are hard to find,
So many ways, and I shall lose my way,
So wills it God.
“Yet shall I know no other love but hers,
And if not hers, no other love at all.
She hath surpassed all.
So fair she is, so noble, I would be
A captive with the hosts of paynimrie
In a far land, if so be upon me
Her eyes might fall.
“God, who hath made all things in earth that are,
That made my love, and set her thus afar,
Grant me this grace,
That I may some day come within a room,
Or in some garden gloom
Look on her face.
‘I t will not be, for at my birth they said
That one had set this doom upon my head,
—God curse him among men!—
That I should love, and not till I be dead,
Be loved again.”25
Set it beside this, the nearest approach in Latin lyric to
the translunary passion of Provence.
* Jean roy, A ., Les Chansons de Jaujré Rudel, v :
“ L a n q u a n li jo m son lone en m ay
M ’es belhs dous chans d ’auzeUis de lo n h .”
 The Scholars* Lyric 223

“By the dread force of love am I thus worn,

On the wheel of desire am I thus tom,
I stifle in the fire.
O Merciful, bid thou my torment cease . . .

“Mourns now the heart for that which made it glad.

The day that first of thee it knowledge had,
It chose thee for its love,
Chose thee, unsullied, none beside thee, none.

“O virgin lily, come thou to mine aid,

Thine exile prays thee to be comforted,
He knows not what he does,
And if thou wilt not succour him, he dies.

“O thou on whom Desire hath no power,

Thou in whom Chastity’s reborn in flower,
Sweet still regard,
Thou who hast Truth about thee for a cloak,

“I sing to thee, I sing to thee alone,

Despise him not who asks this only boon,
That he may worship thee,
Thou who dost shine above him like a star.”26

This man has not “fallen in love with the Countess of

Tripoli for the good that he heard tell of her from the
pilgrims that came from Antioch.”27 The woman is flesh
and blood. It is this directness, the I and thou of passion
that is their strength. It is sensual enough: there is no
disguising that its end is possession:

“If she whom I desire would stoop to love me,

I should look down on Jove,
If for one night my lady would lie by me,
And I kiss the mouth I love,
MCarm. Bur. 158. See Appendix A.
27 Chansons de Jaufré Rudel, p. 21. “J auires Rudels de Blaia
si fo moût gentils om, princes de Blaia: et enamoret se de la
comtessa de Tripol, ses vezer, per lo ben qu’el n'auzi dire als
pelegrins que venguen d'Antiocha.”
224 The W andering Scholars
Then come Death unrelenting,
With quiet breath consenting,
I go forth unrepenting,
Content, content, content,
That such delight were ever to me lent!”28
Now and then, but very rarely, it is the speech of the
libertine and the braggart;29 now and then the bluntness
of the pastoral,30 and the pastoral is better in old French
than in the scholar's speech. Once there is the directness
of a child's song, even of folk song—
“She stood in her scarlet gown,
If any one touched her,
The gown rustled.
Eia!
She stood in her scarlet gown,
Her face like a rose,
And her mouth like a flower.
Eia!”31
But even this has an exquisite sophistication. At its most
sensual, the woman confers. There is not a snigger nor a
sneer from end to end of it: downright anger: once a
wholly delightful defiance,
“I would have a man live in manly fashion,
Yea, I shall love, but with an equal passion.”32
Yet even this ends, laughably, ruefully, with Benedict on
his knees for mercy. And this from the clerks, who are
credited with having brought the scorn of women into
mediaeval literature, cette haine des femmes, faite de
mépris, de curiosité, de crainte, de d ésir *3 There is not
"Carm . Bur. 167.
29Ih. 45, 57.
90Ih. 63.
« Ih . 138.
** Carm. Bur. 139.
88Bédier, Les Fabliaux, p. 398.
 The Scholars' Lyric . 225
much scorn or hatred here, and if fear, it is in Milton's
sense, of the terror that is in love and beauty—
“I trembled at the shining of thy star/'34

The truth is that the Carmina are not only the last
flowering of the Latin tongue: they are, like the Cavalier
lyric, the poetry of an aristocracy of privilege. Diverse as
the authors are, from the Chancellor of Paris to a nameless
goliard, they belong alike to the ordo clericalis: and that
goliard, as one thirteenth century canonist grimly ob­
served,35 wore his tonsure patentem et latam, flaunted the
evidence of the order he disgraced. Long before the cen­
tury ended he was stripped of it:
“Vente, gresle, gelle, j'ay mon pain cuit.
Je suis paillart, la paillarde me suit . . .
Nous deffuyons onneur, il nous deffuit,
En ce bordeau où tenons nostre estât/'

But the Carmina, many of them written in the twelfth,

all of them before the last decades of the thirteenth, cen­
tury, belong to the moment before the degradation, when
scholarship was still of great price, and the clerks held
by their order. Their contemporaries are Tristan ,36 the
prose romances of the Vulgate Arthur (themselves attrib­
uted by the M SS. to clerical authorship), the Roman de
Guillaum e de Dol, with its snatches of lyric intolerably
sweet: the good brief moment before the bourgeois shoul­
ders himself into literature, before Jean de Meung laid his
not overclean hands upon the rose. The middle class come
late into literature, as into history. In the twelfth century
the merchant has ceased to be the “piepoudrous," and is a
84Carni» Bur. 157.
86Hostiensis, quoted by Génestal, Priv. For. 165.
86“Béroul, à en juger par sa connaissance de l’antiquité, par
certaines de ses prétentions, serait un clerc . . . Chrétien de
Troyes, esprit tout muni de souvenirs érudits auxquels on recon­
naît le clerc/’ Farai, Les Jongleurs en France au moyen âge, p. 199.
2
2Ó The W andering Scholars
recognised factor in the community.37 In the thirteenth
century literature, always sensitive to a new public, adapts
itself to this new audience, lusty, humorous, and gross. It
is true that there is no water-tight division, the romance
and the epic to the château, the fabliau to the town. A
knightly audience was not squeamish. William IX, Duke
of Aquitaine, has a chanson of two ladies and a cat that
need not blush to find itself beside any fabliau, and the
Jeu de la Reine produced as scandalous equivoques in the
hall as on the village green. But roughly, Shakespeare’s
finding on the taste of the groundling holds, "Give him a
jig, or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps,” and Chaucers fit­
ting of the tale to the teller is equally significant. The
Knight and the Squire and the Man of Law and the
Clerk have it, over against the Shipman, and the Miller
and the Reeve.

"It is an impossible,” said the Wyf of Bath,

'That any derke wol speken good of wyves
But if it be of holy seintes lyves—”

but in practice it is the Clerk of Oxenford who tells the

tale of the patient Griselda, and it is the Marchant
wedded but two months who lets his burden down. It is
true that the Church denounces woman as incarnate
temptation, denounces bodily beauty;38 love itself, gra­
tissimus error;39 is too near the sweetest sin of the seven
to be much countenanced,40 and marriage is the last
shift.41 It is the inevitable result of its ascetic ideal, its
” Pireime, Mediaeval Towns, p. 127 ff.
38Gregory the Great, more suo, sums the whole matter, "A
certain nun, fair after the putridity of the flesh.” Dialog. I. 4.
89John of Garland, quoted in Romania, 1875, p. 384.
40“The sirens have the faces of women, because nothing so
estranges men from God as the love of women.” Honorius
d'Autun, Speculum Ecclesiae (Migne, cbodi. c. 855-7).
41 Cf. Gryll Grange, eh. vii.
“Dr. Opimian: I never pretended to this sort of spiritualism. I
 The Scholars* Lyric 227
absolute severance between the physical and spiritual
nature of man. When asceticism is the positive good, love
and licence are but degrees of negative comparison. But
in practice, the situation is nearer the old story, surely the
second oldest in the world, in the form Caesarius von
Heisterbach tells it, of the Abbot and the monk riding out
together and the young man seeing women for the first
time. “They be demons/' said the Abbot. “I thought," said
the young man, “that they were the fairest things that
ever I saw."*42 “There is no such solace under heaven,"
says Robert of Brunne,43 “of all that a man may have, as
the true love of a good woman." The whole story is in the
statue above the south portal of Chartres, the Devil carry­
ing the Courtesan to hell, the Devil a gross fantastic
humorous horror, but the woman slung across his shoul­
ders has been modelled in a passion of pity, the tender­
ness of the breasts, the despair of the beautiful doomed
head and the trailing hair. It is Blake's Triumph of Satan
over Eve, the serpent about her coil upon coil, the terrible
triumphant head at peace upon her breasts, and the look
frozen upon the unconscious face, Heloïse's cry of despair
upon herself as the ruin of her lover.
It is not to say that satire upon woman is not a distinct
branch of mediaeval clerical literature. It is to this day the
fonds of most music-hall jokes, thanks to that obscure in­
stinct for which “woman, in herself and without any effort

followed the advice of St. Paul, who says it is better to marry . . .

Mrs. Opimian: You need not finish the quotation.”
Yet there is good divinity in praise of marriage. Even in the
late Middle Ages, Robert de Sorbon in a sermon on marriage is
tolerant, even idealistic (Hauréau, Notices et Extraits, i. 188). Cf.
supra, the judgment by Ivo of Chartres.
42 Cf. Chaunteclere's free translation for Dame Pertelote of
“In principio,
Mulier est hominis confusio.
(Madame, the sentence of this Latine is,
Woman is mannes joye and mannes bliss).”
“ Robert of Brunne, Handlying Synne, E.E.T.S. p. 69.
228 T he W andering Scholars
on her part, is always News.” But the bourgeois is a far
richer vein than the clerical. Bernard of Morlaix is rough
tongued enough in the De Contemptu M undi: and Golias
in his De Conjuge N on Ducenda is profoundly grateful
to the three angels who come to dissuade him from matri­
mony. But there is nothing in Latin to touch the sheer
brutality of the vernacular. "I always bless God,” said
William Morris, “for making anything so strong as an
onion” ; it is the ideal temper in which to approach the
grosser half of mediaeval literature. It is true that Jean de
Meung, the mediaeval Diogenes, is a clerk, but he is too
often taken as the representative of his order, his Roman
as the outrage of clerical prejudice on the chivalrous
Dream of the Rose. But the author of the first Roman
seems himself to have been a clerk: his successor wrote
at the end of the thirteenth century, in the first blast of
the east wind that blows for nearly two centuries. And
still earlier than Guillaume de Lorris, another clerk
dreamed of the garden and the lover and the Rose: the
first rough draft of it is in the Carmina .44 Henri d’Andely,
himself a clerk, ended his Lai d’Aristote with a warning
to those who think evil of love and lovers: just as Lyly,
for all his aspic, laid down the rules of governance: “In
those that are not in love, reverent thoughts of love: in
those that be, faithful vows.”45 A good many of the
fabliaux have been laid to the clerical charge, but it is to
be observed that those most certainly of clerical authorship
are the funniest, and the least indecent.46 They are ribald
enough, but not often obscene, and the Lardier qui parle
Latin is glorious comedy. Such malevolence as they have
is unleashed, not against the woman, but the full fed
porker, the priest. It is the eternal rancour of the Have-
44Carmina Burana, 50.
45 Love's Metamorphosis, Act II, Sc. 1.
46Le Pauvre Mercier, Les Trois Dames qui trovèrent Vanel, Le
Pauvre Clerc, Le Credo au Rtbaut, Le Lardier qui parle Latin,
Le lai d'Aristote.
 T he Scholars' Lyric . 229
nots against the Haves. The situation as the clerk saw it
was very simple, guilty Capital and innocent Labour, the
clerk thin and scholarly, over against Dives, fat and sleek
with good living and incontinence.47 There is nothing in
Protestant literature fiercer, though a good deal that is
grosser, than the invective of the Carmina when Rome
and the great ones are in question.
“W ilt thou have a love song or a song of good life?”
asks Feste, and Sir Andrew's hasty “A love song, a love
song. I care not for good life” is representative enough of
the goliardi audience. Yet the songs of good life (includ­
ing too often the bad life of his ecclesiastical superiors)
are almost a third of the Carmina: and carefully arranged
by themselves. The Archpoet himself told the story of the
Gospels with some tenderness to his monkish audience,
though it winds up, adroitly enough, with the outstretched
begging hand. Some clerks, like Gamier de Pont-Sainte-
Maxence, who made a scoop in the martyrdom of St.
Thomas à Becket, reciting it on the tomb of “le baron”
himself, profited mightily by the gifts of the faithful.48
Such as these, who kept their tongues off their superiors
and told devout tales, are described even in a Penitentiary
as rather more tolerable.49 But the immortality of the
Carmina is in the love songs and the drinking songs. M thi
est propositum is surely the greatest drinking song in the
world;

“In taberna quando sumus

Non curamus quid sit humus,”
47 Notices et Extraits, xxxii. p. 286:
“Est scolaris humilis, simplex, iustus, castus,
Pallidus et gracilis, labor premit vastus.
Dives est horribilis, plenus magni fastus,
Luxuriae facilis, plenus vini, bene pastus.”
48La Vie de S. Thomas le Martyr, ed. Walberg, pp. 2 10 -11.
49 Penitential of Thomas of Càhham, Bishop of Salisbury. Text
in Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, ii. p. 262.
230 T h e W andering Scholars
shares the second place with
“Back and sides go bare, go bare":

and whoever was the author of the first, vagabond or

episcopal secretary, the other lies at the door of a learned
Prebendary of Durham. The writer of the Paternoster aux
Goliardois rounds on his greedy tavern-keeper, but checks
himself with one of those stabbing thrusts of recognition,
so poignant because so unconscious, that are Villon’s
strength—
"Da nobis hodie: domage
Ne lui doit fere, ne anui,
Quar tout le bien me vient de lui.”60

These, too, found their warmest welcome in an inn. And

if their women are its lights 0’ love, there is little trace of
it in their verse: they have youth lambent about their
heads. Primas himself, scurrilous dog that he is, broke his
heart when Flora left him at the time of flowers, though
she was all men’s stale.61 The grace is upon them that is
on Greene and Marlowe and Peele,
“Beauty, the silver dew that falls in May.”

O f the prosody of the Latin lyric compared with the

vernacular, a book may some day be written: would have
been written, if Professor Ker had lived to finish his study
of metre. But to handle it demands a knowledge of
five vernaculars at their thorniest transition, Provençal,
Middle German, Italian, Old French, Anglo-Norman, as
well as Middle English: lacking that equipment the
amateur is like to find himself launched in a cockleshell
upon a very dangerous sea. And indeed upon the whole
“ “ Paternoster d u V i n ,” Ju b in al, Jongleurs et Trouvères, p. 7 0 .
“ “ T e m p u s erat florum , cu m flos m eus, optim us horum ,
L iq u it Flo ra thorum , fons fletus, causa dolorum .”
M e y e r, Die Oxforder Gedichte des Primas, Magister
Hugo von Orleans, v i. p . 1 2 7 .
 T he Scholars9 Lyric 231
question of origins, ballad, lyric, dramatic, there is wisdom
in the nursery story of the centipede, who
"was happy quite
Until the Toad, in fun,
Said Tray which leg goes after which?'
Which worked his mind to such a pitch,
He lay distracted in a ditch,
Considering how to run.”

"Such affliction,” says Daniel, "doth laboursome curiosity

still lay upon our best delights." Which came first:
"Ich sih die liehte heide
in grüner varwe stan.
dar siiln wir alle gehen,
die sumerzit enphahen,”

or this—
"Ut mei misereatur,
Ut me recipiat,
et declinetur ad me,
et ita desinat!”

or this—
"Quan la douss' aura venta
deves vostre pais
vejaire m’es qu'en senta
odor de paradis.”

The resolving of precedence might be an agreeable

exercise: but it is almost enough to know that each exists:
that as early as the twelfth century the loveliest of all
rhythms was shaping itself in three languages to its last
and absolute perfection—
"By brooks too broad for leaping
The light-foot boys are laid,
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.”
232 T he W andering Scholars
Of its combination, richer though not lovelier with a sec­
ond quatrain of triple rhyme, and final echo, the stanza
of 'In a drear-nighted December,1” and of
“There go the loves that wither,
The old loves with wearier wings,
And all dead years draw thither,
And all disastrous things.
Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
Red strays of ruined springs.”
there is no instance earlier than Dryden. Adam of St.
Victor is fumbling for it, the mesmeric beat of the triple
rhyme, with the break in the fourth line for relief, but he
uses a longer line, and trochees are brisker than iambics.
His metre is too stately for most of the Vaganten. The
Archpoet's Confession,
“Down the broad way do I go
Young and unregretting,”
gave the tempo to most of his brother-vagabonds: when
they break from it, it is when some forgotten tune has
caught their ear, sometimes as in
‘Vidi
Viridi
Phyllidem sub tilia,”52

the whistle of a blackbird. One thing at least is beyond

controversy, that Latin was the schoolmaster of both the
Romance and the German tongues: and the scholar's
practice in a language immutable yet all but infinitely
adaptable is invaluable to hobble-de-hoy languages not
quite sure what to do with their feet. The folk-song
origin, at any rate, seems to have gone by the board.
M. Bédier, once its apostle, joyously rends his own pam-
** Carmina Bur. 57.
 T h e Scholars* Lyric . 233
phlet of twenty years ago, and scoffs at the “mugissements
vagues de la Muse populaire.” Only Tibullus, that obsti­
nate lover of country things, still insists that the first
metres were beaten out to the rhythm of the flails: and
perhaps Joachim du Bellay writing the Vanneur would
have agreed with him. It is a piece of sentiment: a
memory of the Before Time of which Sir Philip Sidney
said rudely that “what that Before Time was, I think
scarcely Sphinx can tell.”
Provenance is another riddle, but here one is on surer
ground. The Benedictbeuem Manuscript has fifty Ger­
man lyrics scattered among the Latin, and is written by
German scribes: Benedictbeuem itself was a Benedictine
monastery in Upper Bavaria: the heaviest and most con­
tinuous broadside of Church Councils was directed from
Würzburg, Salzburg, Cologne, St. Hippolyte in the dio­
cese of Passau: the Eberhardini, an alternative name for
the goliardi, are possibly nicknamed after Eberhard, Arch­
bishop of Salzburg, once gloriously parodied by a wander­
ing scholar.53 But this proves nothing. The first threats of
degradation come from Sens and Rouen, are echoed in
Liège, Cahors, Toul. A Tarragon Council complains of
clerks turning jongleurs.54 Bishop Wolfger gives half a
talent in Rome to a French vagus with a guitar, and sets
it among his travelling accounts.55 The originals from
which the Carmina Burana were copied may have been
the property of a German scholar, and one is tempted to
connect them with the days when the German tongue
rang in the streets of Orleans as in the fatherland.56 One
of the most naïve of the German lyrics,
88S e e Fran tzen , Die Vagantendichtung, N eo-philologus, v.
1920, pp. 62, 63. M a y e r, Archiv. f. öst. Gesch.-Quellen. vi. (see
A p p en d ices B and C ) . O n the scribes, see S ch u m an n , Carni. Bur.
ii. p. 70.*
64Vide A p p e n d ix E.
66Se e A p p e n d ix B .
66Fournier, Status, i. p. 145.
2-34 The W andering Scholars
<fWere the world all mine
From the sea to the Rhine,
Fd give it all
If so be the Queen of England
Lay in my arms”57
is surely the work of a German student, haunted by a
passing glimpse of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and perhaps
as surely her slave as Bertrand de Bom. But the best
things in the Carmina are in other manuscripts, in S t
Omer, in the Vatican M S. of Queen Christine, in the
Harleian and Arundel M SS. of the British Museum, and
scattered singly through every great European library.
The Germans claim the tilia for the Fatherland, but there
are tilleuls in Touraine: the Italians will have Phyllis and
Flora for Italy, because of the landscape and its pines. The
macaronics are sometimes German, sometimes Italian,
sometimes Provençal.58 The truth is that the goliard, like
the Latin tongue, knew no frontiers: “se nuis me dit,
‘Guamiers, ou vas?* tuz li munz est miens envirun” :50
and the nightingale needs no interpreter.
mCarm. Bur. 108 a:
"Were div werk alle min
Von deme mere unze an den Rin
Des wolt ih mih darben
Daz div Chünegin von Engellant
Lege an minen armen.”
“ Com . Bur., 79, "Audi bela mia
mille modos Veneris
da hizevaleria.”
8 1 , "a remender
statim vivus fierem
fer un baiser.”
138, "Stetit puella, bi einem bourne,
scripsit amorem an eime hübe.”
141, "O mi dilectissima
vultu serenissima . . .
Manda liet, mande liet,
min geselle chumet niet.”
“ Gamier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, Vie de St. Thomas, ed.
Walberg, p. 2 11.
 The Scholars* Lyric 235
“Veni, veni, venias,
ne me morì facias.
hyrca, hyrca, nazaza,
Trillirivosl”60
But the good minute goes. By the end of the thirteenth
century the vernaculars have come to their strength:
Latin in creative literature is doomed, though so great an
artist as Milton, four centuries later, had not yet realised
it. The revival of learning brought only contempt for
this bastard-rhyming, such contempt as a professional
gardener might have for the small scarlet buds of a rose
that has grown wild. Some of the gayer choruses are still
shouted in German universities: M ihi est propositum
is in every anthology: Phyllis and Flora appears as “The
sweete and civili contention of two amorous Ladyes
Translated out of Latin by R. S. Esquire. Aut Marte vel
Mercurio. Imprinted at London by W . W . for Richard
Jones, 1598.” But they are fragments of a sunk argosy.
Of the absolute value of the Carmina as literature, there
can be two opinions. The verse is sometimes pedantic: it
makes love a little like Gabriel Harvey at Cambridge who
used “everie night after supper to walke on the market hill
to show himselfe,” and if “the wenches gave him never so
little an amorous regard, he presently boords them with a
set speech of the first gathering together of Societies and
the distinction of amor and amicitia out of Tullie’s of­
fices.”61 The classical scholar airs his Chronos, the logician
his distinctions: though for its lovers, even this has its own
odd pleasure. Even at its most spontaneous, it has not the
sudden miracle of the earliest vernacular lyric. It can hold
its own against Provençal, but hardly against
“Lenten ys come with love to toune.”
00Carm. Bur. 136.
91 “Have with you” ( Works of Thomas Nash, McKerrow, iii.
79).
236 T he W andering Scholars
or—
“O man that diggest the tomb,
And puttest my darling from me,
Make not the grave too narrow/’62
or—
“Christ! that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!”
and the snatches of German verse in the Carmina are like
dew on the grass of a heavy summer. Whatever one’s
prejudice in favour of the older, richer language, there
are times when all the scholars verse is no better than
“Aristote,” watching from his window the young girl bare­
foot in the dew, ungirdled in her smock, plucking flowers
for her hair and singing “not too loud,”
“Or la voi, la voi, la voi,
La fontaine y sort serie,”
and suddenly finding himself lean and dry and old.63 It
is the contrast between the thrushes in February and the
violin. Even the rock-hewn crystal of Dum Dianae vitrea
seems sophisticated beside the shaken dewdrop of the old­
est French lyric. But to grant this is to give away nothing.
“Whenas that Rubie which you weare,
Sunk from the tip of your soft eare,
Will last to be a precious stone,
When all your world of Beautie’s gone.”
In the last resort, the mediaeval scholar’s lyric has value
only for those to whom the richest thing in life is the
sense of the past: who believe as Milton did in his ex­
ultant scholar’s youth that to read history so is “to be
present as it were in every age, to extend and stretch life
backward from the womb, and thus extort from unwilling
82 Irische Texte, ii. 174.
68Montaiglon-Reynaud, ii. 137, Le Lai d*Aristote.
 The Scholars9 Lyric . 237
Fate a certain foregone immortality” ; who have little use
for Keats in his first Spenserian mood, but recognise his
godhead when contact with the older literatures has
brought him austerity and power.
“A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air,"
“Sweet peas on tiptoe for a flight,”
are good, but
“Far from the fiery noon and eve's one star
Sat grey-haired Satum, quiet as a stone . . •
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud.”
“Mother of Hermes and still youthful Maia,”
“O Hearkener to the loud clapping shears,”
this is the utterance of the early gods. Anatole France,
in this at least conservative, dedicated “Le G énie Latin”
as “un acte de foi et damour pour cette tradition grecque
et latine, toute de sagesse et de beauté, hors de laquelle il
n'est qu'erreur et trouble” : an exaggeration, but a valiant
exaggeration in an age when the classics have met a
deadlier enemy than the Blessed Gregory. Some altars are
safe: some debts will never be dishonoured.
“O Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that frighted thou let'st fall
From Diss wagon! daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty;”
—that is the English genius:
“violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,
Or Cytherea's breath;''
and this the Latin. Who shall choose between them?
“That faire field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flours,
238 The W andering Scholars
Herself a fairer Floure, by gloomie Dis
Was gatherd, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world.”
“to have quite set free
His half regain'd Eurydice.”
“And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
The Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
The tongueless vigil and all the pain.”
—these are the eternised sacrifices, on which generation
after generation throws its incense. But these others, who
served a ruinous altar and got a scanty living by it: the
grammarians of Toulouse sitting up at nights to argue the
frequentative of the verb to be: Rahingus of Flavigny
filling his scanty leisure with copying Virgil: Froumund
of Tegernsee collating manuscripts of Persius with chil-
blained hands: Primas shivering and mocking in his
shabby cloak, writing a lament for Troy with Baccha­
nalian tears: the Archpoet coughing his heart out on the
Lombard roads; a century of nameless vagabonds: on
these the iniquity of oblivion hath blindly scattered her
poppy. They kept the imagination of Europe alive: held
untouched by their rags and poverty and squalor the
Beauty that had made beautiful old rhyme. And for those
of us who are the conservatives of letters, for whom litera­
ture obeys the eternal movement of the tides, for whom
the heavens themselves are old, there remains the stark
simplicity of Terence—“In truth they have deserved to be
remembered of us.”
“O no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose.”
APPENDICES
 APPENDIX A

Latin Originals of Lyrics Translated

in the T ex t

I
PAULINUS OF NOLA TO AUSONIUS
E go te per omne quod datum mortalibus
et destinatum saeculum est,
claudente donec continebor corpore,
discernar orbe quolibet,

Nec ore longe, nec remotum lumine,

tenebo fibris insitum,
videbo corde, mente complectar pia,
ubique praesentem mihi.

Et cum solutus corporali carcere,

terraque provolavero,
quo me locant axe communis Pater
illic quoque animo te geram.

Neque finis idem qui meo me corpore

et amore laxabit tuo.
mens quippe, lapsis quae superstes artubus
de stirpe durat coeliti.

Sensus necesse est simul et affectus suos

teneat aeque ut vitam suam,
et ut mori sic oblivisci non capit,
perenne vivax et memor.
Carmina, xi.
242 T he W andering Scholars

II
PRUDENTIUS
Ad Gallicinium
Inde est, quod omnes credimus
illo quietis tempore,
quo gallus exsultans canit,
Christum redisse ex inferis.
Cathemerinon, 1 . 11. 65-69

III
Hymnus Matutinus
Nox, et tenebrae, et nubila
confusa mundi et turbida,
lux intrat, albescit polus,
Christus venit, discedite!

Caligo terrae scinditur

percussa solis spiculo,
rebusque iam color redit
vultu nitentis sideris.
Cath. n. 11. 1-8

IV
De Novo Lumine Paschalis Sahhati
Illic purpureis tecta rosariis
omnis fragrat humus, calthaque pinguia,
et molles violas, et tenues crocos
fundit fonticulis uda fugacibus.

Felices animae prata per herbida

concentu parili suave sonatibus
hymnorum modulis dulce canunt melos,
calcant et pedibus lilia candidis.
Cath. v. 11. i i 3 - 1 1 7 , 1 2 1 - 1 2 5
 Appendix A 243

V
Hymnus circa Exsequias Defuncti
Nunc suscipe, terra, fovendum
gremioque hunc concipe molli,
hominis tibi membra sequestro,
generosa et fragmina credo.
. . . Patet ecce fidelibus ampli
via lucida iam paradisi,
licet et nemus illud adire
homini quod ademerat anguis.
Illic, precor, optime ductor,
famulam tibi praecipe mentem,
genitali in sede sacrari,
quam liquerat exsul et errans.
Nos tecta fovebimus ossa,
violis et fronde frequenti;
titulumque et frigida saxa
liquido spargemus odore.
Cath. X. 11. 125 et seq.

VI
Venerat occiduis mundi de finibus hostis
Luxuria, extinctae iamdudum prodiga famae,
delibuta comas, oculis vaga, languida voce,
perdita deliciis . . .
lapsanti per vina et balsama gressu,
ebria calcatis ad bellum floribus ibat.
Psychomachia, 11. 310-320.

VII
HRABANUS MAURUS
Ad Eigilum de libro quem scripsit
Nullum opus exsurgit quod non annosa vetustas
expugnet, quod non vertat iniqua dies.
244 T h e W andering Scholars
Grammata sola carent fato, mortemque repellunt,
praeterita renovant, grammata sola biblis.
Carm. x x l

V ffl
Dulcissimo Fratri . . . GrimaLdo
Vive, meae vires, lassarumque anchora rerum,
Naufragio et litus tutaque terra meo,
solus honor nobis, urbs tu fidissima semper,
curisque afficto tuta quies animo.
Carm. vl

IX
Dum loquimur, seges alta viret, maturiet, aret,
canescunt violae, lilia fusca cadunt.
Carm. xxxvn. 11. 9, 10.

X
WALAFRID STRABO
Ad Amicum
Cum splendor lunae fulgescat ab aethere purae,
Tu sta sub divo cernens speculamine miro,
Qualiter ex lima splendescat lampade pura
et splendore suo caros amplectitur uno
corpore divisos, sed mentis amore ligatos.
Si facies faciem spectare nequivit amantem,
hoc saltim nobis lumen sit pignus amoris,
hos tibi versiculos fidus transmisit amicus,
si de parte tua fidei stat fixa catena,
nunc precor, ut valeas felix per saecula cuncta.
Carm. l i x .
 Appendix A 245

XI
ST. PETER DAMIAN
De Gloria Paradisi
Ad perennis vitae fontem mens sitivit arida
claustra camis praesto frangi clausa querit anima,
gliscit, ambit, eluctatur, exsul fruì patria.

. . . Omni labe defaecati camis bella nesciunt

caro facta spiritalis et mens unum sentiunt,
pace multa perimentes scandalum non perierunt.
Carm. ccvi.

XII
ST. FULBERT OF CHARTRES
De Luscinia
Cum telluris, vere novo, producuntur germina,
nemorosa circumcirca frondescunt et brachia;
Fragrat odor cum suavis florida per gramina
hilarescit Philomela, dulcis sonus conscia,
et extendens modulando gutturis spiramina,
reddit veris et aestivi temporis praeconia.
. . . Vocis eius pulcritudo clarior quam cithera,
vincitur omnis cantando volucrum catervula,
implet sylvas atque cuncta modulis arbustula
gloriosa valde facta veris prae laetitia.
. . . Cedit auceps ad frondosa resonans umbracula.
Cedit cignus et suavis ipsius melodia;
quamvis enim videaris corpore premodica,
tamen cuncti capiuntur hac tua melodia.
Nemo dedit voci tuae haec dulcia carmina,
nisi solus Rex caelestis qui gubernat omnia.
Carmina xvm.
246 T he W andering Scholars

XIII
DB JOHANNE ABBATE
Johannes aba, parvulus Johannes opis indigus
statura, non virtutibus, notis assistat foribus,
ita maiori socio nec spernat tua pietas
quocum erat in heremo: quem redigit necessitas/

Volo/ dicebat, ‘vivere Respondit ille deintus,

sicut angelus secure, ‘Johannes, factus angelus,
nec veste nec cibo frui miratur celi cardines,
qui laboretur manibus/ ultra non curat homines/

Respondit frater, ‘Moneo Foris Johannes excubat

ne sis incepti properus, malamque noctem tolerat,
frater, quod tibi post modum et preter voluntariam
sit non cepisse satius/ hanc agit penitentiam.

At ille, ‘Qui non dimicat Facto mane recipitur

non cadit, neque superat/ satisque verbis uritur,
Ait, et nudus heremum sed intentus ad crustula
inferiorem penetrat. fert patienter omnia.

Septem dies gramineo Refocillatus domino

vix ibi durat pabulo, gratias egit et socio,
octava fames imperat Dehinc rastellum brachiis
ut ad sodalem redeat. temptat movere languidis.

Qui sero, clausa ianua, Castigatur angustia

tutus sedet in cellula, de levitate nimia,
cum minor voce debili cum angelus non potuit
appellat, ‘Frater, aperi: vir bonus esse didicit.
Carmina xxv.
 Appendix A 247

XIV
SIGBBERT OF LlÉGB
[Dümmler, Abhandlungen der Kgl. Akad. der Wissensch.
zu Berlin, 1893, p. 23 et seq.\
Hinc virginalis sancta frequentia
Gerdrudis, Agnes, Prisca, Cecilia,
Lucia, Petronilla, Tecla,
Agatha, Barbara, Juliana . . .
He pervagantes prata recentia,
pro velle querunt serta decentia,
rosas legentes passionis,
lilia vel violas amoris.
Passio Sanctae budae, 19.

XV
Conatus roseas Thebeis ferre coronas . . .
lilia nulla mihi, viole nulle, rosa nulla,
lilia munditie rosa camis mortificande,
nec per pallorem viole testantur amorem
quo pia sponsa calet, quo sponsus mutuo languet,
proximus atque deus, non bis tingunt mihi coccum.
Nescia luteola vaccinia pingere caltha,
non cum narcisso mihi summa papavera carpo,
hic flores desunt inscripti nomina regum.
Quod solum potui studio ludente socordi
alba ligustra mihi iam sponte cadentia legi,
pollice nec pueri dignata nec ungue puelle,
inde rudi textu, non coniuncto bene textu
consemi parvas has qualescunque coronas.
Vos, O Thebei, gratissima nomina regi,
votis posco piis, hec serta locare velitis
inter victrices lauros ederasque virentes.
Si rude vilet opus, si rerum futile pondus,
at non vilescat, pia quod devotio praestat.
Passio Sanctorum Thebeorum, Epilogue, 11. 1054—77.
248 T he W andering Scholars

XVI
THE CAMBRIDGE SONGS
Levis exsurgit Zephyrus,
et sol procedit tepidus,
iam terra sinus aperit,
dulcore sui diffluit
Ver purpuratus exiit,
ornatus suos induit,
aspergit terram floribus,
ligna silvarum frondibus.

Struunt lustra quadrupedes,

et dulces nidos volucres,
inter ligna florentia
sua decantant guadia.

Quod oculis dum video

et auribus dum audio,
heu, pro tantis gaudiis
tantis inflor suspiriis.

Cum mihi sola sedeo,

et hec revolvans palleo,
si forte caput sublevo,
ned audio nec video.

Tu saltem, Veris gratia,

exaudi et considera
frondes, flores, et gramina,
nam mea languet anima.

XVII
CARMINA BURANA
Dum Diane vitrea
sero lampas oritur,
et a fratris rosea
 Appendix A 249
luce dum succenditur,
dulcis aura zephyri
spirans omnes etheri,
nubes tollit,
sic emollit
vi chordarum pectora,
et inmutat
cor, quod nutat
ad amoris pignora.
Letum iubar hesperi
gratiorem
dat humorem
roris sporiferi
mortalium generi.

O quam felix est

antidotum soporis,
quod curarum tempestates
sedat et doloris!
Dum surrepit clausis
oculorum poris,
ipsum gaudio equiparat
dulcedini amoris.

Morpheus in mentem
trahit inpellentem
ventum lenem
segetes maturas,
murmura rivorum
per arenas puras,
circulares ambitus
molendinorum,
qui furantur somno
lumen oculorum.

Post blanda Veneris

commercia
lassatur cerebri
substantia.
250 T h e W andering Scholars

Hinc caligantes mira novitate

oculi nantes in palpebrarum rate!
Hei, quam felix transitus amoris ad soporem,
sed suavior regressus soporis ad amorem!

Fronde sub arboris amena,

dum querens canit philomena,
suave est quiescere,
suavius ludere
in gramine
cum virgine
speciosa.

Si variarum
odor herbarum
spiraverit,
si dederit
thonim rosa,
dulciter soporis alimonia
post Veneris defessa commercia
captatur,
dum lassis instillatur.
Carmina Burana, 37.

X V III
Dum domus lapidea
foro sita cernitur,
et a fratris rosea
visus dum allicitur,
dulcis, ferunt socii,
locus hic est hospitii.

Bacchus tollat,
Venus molliat
vi bursarum pectora,
et inmutet
et computet
vestes in pignora.
 Appendix A 251
Molles cibos edere,
inpinguari,
dilatari
studeamus ex adipe,
alacriter bibere.
Carmina Burana, 176.

XIX
Estuans intrinsecus
ira vehementi
in amaritudine
loquar mee menti:
factus de materia,
levis elementi
similis sum folio
de quo ludunt venti.

Cum sit enim proprium

viro sapienti
supra petram ponere
sedem fundamenti,
stultus ego comparor
fluvio labenti,
sub eodem aere
nunquam permanenti.

Feror ego veluti

sine nauta navis,
ut per vias aeris
vaga fertur avis,
non me tenent vincula,
non me tenet clavis,
quero mihi similes,
et adiungor pravis.

Mihi cordis gravitas

res videtur gravis;
iocus est amabilis
dulciorque favis;
252 T h e W andering Scholars

quicquid Venus imperat

labor est suavis,
que numquam in cordibus
habitat ignavis.
Via lata gradior
more iuventutis,
inplico me vitiis
inmemor virtutis,
voluptatis avidus
magis quam salutis,
mortuus in anima
curam gero cutis.

Presili discretissime,
veniam te precor:
morte bona morior,
nece dulci necor,
meum pectus sauciat
puellarum decor,
et quas tactu nequeo,
saltem corde mechor.
Res est arduissima
vincere naturam,
in aspectu virginis
mentem esse puram;
iuvenes non possumus
legem sequi duram,
leviumque corporum
non habere curam.
Quis in igne positus
igne non uratur?
Quis Papie demorans
castus habeatur,
ubi Venus digito
iuvenes venatur,
oculis inlaqueat,
facie predatur?
Manitius, Archtpoeta, p. 24.
 Appendix A *53

XX
Ab estatis foribus
amor nos salutat.
Humus picta floribus
faciem conmutat.
Flores amoriferi
iam arrident tempori,
perit absque Venere
flos etatis tenere.
Omnium principium
dies est vernalis,
vere mundus celebrat
diem sui natalis.
Omnes huius temporis
dies fesri Veneris.
Regna Iovis omnia
hec agant sollemnia.
Carmina Burana, 46.

XXI
Salve ver optatum,
amantibus gratum,
gaudiorum
fax multorum,
florum incrementum;
multitudo florum
et color colorum
salvetote,
et estote
iocorum augmentum!
Dulcis avium concentus
sonat, gaudeat iuventus.
Hiems seva transiit,
nam lenis spirat ventus.
Tellus purpurata
floribus et prata
254 T he W andering Scholars
revirescunt,
umbre crescunt,
nemus redimitur,
lascivit natura
omnis creatura;
leto vultu,
claro cultu,
ardor investitur;
Venus subditos titillat,
dum nature nectar stillat,
sic ardor venereus
amantibus scintillat.
Carmina Burana, 1 18.

X X II
Dira vi amoris teror,
et venereo axe vehor,
igne ferventi suffocatus.
Deme, pia, cruciatus.

Ignis vivi tu scintilla,

discurrens cordis ad vexilla
igni incumbens non pauxillo
conclusi mentis te sigillo.

Meret cor, quod gaudebat;

die, quo te cognoscebat,
singularem et pudicam
te adoptabat in amicam.

Profert pectoris singultus

et mastitie tumultus,
nam amoris tui vigor
urget me, et illi ligor.

Virginale lilium,
tuum presta subsidium;
missus in exilium
querit a te consilium.
 Appendix A 255
Nescit quid agat, moritur,
amore tui vehitur,
telo necatur Veneris,
sibi ni subveneris.

Iure Veneris orbata,

castitas redintegrata,
vultu decenti perornata,
veste sopbie decorata.

Psallo dbi soli,

despicere me noli,
per me precor velis coli,
lucens ut stella poli.
Carmina Burana, 158.

X XIII
Si me dignetur quam desidero,
felicitate Iovem supero.
Nocte cum illa si dormiero,
si sua labra semel suxero,
mortem subire,
placenter obire,
vitamque finire
libens potero,
hei potero, hei potero, hei potero,
tanta si gaudia recepero.
Carmina Burana, 167.
 APPENDIX B

Extracts from the Travelling Accounts

of Bishop W olfger of Passau, 1 2 0 3 - 4

[Full text in I. Zingerle, Reiserechnungen Wolfger's von Ellen-

brechtskirchen, 1877: re-edited in part by Höfer, Reiserechnungen
der Bischof Wolfger von Passau ( Beiträge zur Geschichte der
deutschen Spräche, xvii. 1892).
The MS. was found by Professor Wolf in the Archives of Cividale
in Friuli, in 1874.]

Bishop wolfger’s account book should stand him in stead

at the Day of Judgment; it is as good a heart as Mr. Pepys.
No churchman might give anything but bite and sup to a
jongleur; there was good divinity against it. The istriones and
the ioculatores were limbs of Satan; to share with them the
funds of the church was in the same order of things as the
betrayal of Judas; and above all did this apply to the apostate,
the clerk turned jongleur. But the bishop’s soft heart and a
human hankering after vanity betray him on every page;
entries such as xxx den. to a bald apostate from Einsdorf,
and ij sol. to an old joculator in a red tunic at Ferrara, and
xxx den. to a scholar vagus, and a talent to the jongleur
Flordamor at Bologna, and worst of all, a whole talent to one
who brought the bishop ivory dice, are as frequent as the
legitimate xii den. for parchment, and dim. tal. for wax (the
bishop used a vast quantity of wax), and vii den. to his
laundress, and iii den. for a bath, and ii den. to a man who
brought a puppy from Passau, and a shirt and trousers to a
Bohemian, and ij sol. to a poor old man, and half a talent
for the bishop’s rain-coat Qpallio episcopi pluviali), and half
a talent for furs for lining his hood, and xxvii sol., this at
Rome for polishing topazes for his ring, and xxviii den. at
night, at Modena, to a scholar. Two entries have made the
account book famous: to Walter von der Vogelweide for a
258 T he W andering Scholars
fur coat, V sol. longos; to a certain bishop of the Eberhardini
([vide pp. 262, 286 ff.), and another mime at Florence, half a
talent; to the lord bishop, xii den. frisac. And one entry stands
alone: Sabbato apud Crugelar nihil expendimus.

Zingerle, p. 2. 22nd Sept. In die Sancti Mauritii dedit

magister Heinricus in monte Gotwico venatori de
pattavia xxiiij den. . . . Nuncio regis hungarie pro
tunica briij den. pro calceis, v den. Eidem ad redemp­
tionem pignorum lx den. pro duabus manticis ad
capellam et ad vestimenta episcopi dim. tal. et xxvii
den. pro cera, dim. tal. vi den. • • . per percameno,
xij den.
p. 3. . . . Cuidam qui episcopo attulit illam eburneam
aleam tal . . . ioculatori cuidam xii den. Gerardo • . .
pro falconibus vi den. • • • cuidam derico xii den.
Hugoni pro redemptione pignorum lxxx den. • • .
Calvo istrioni xxx den. . . .
p. 4. Cuidam vetulo pauperi ii sol. . . . Nundo de pattavia
qui attulit catulum ij sol. Apud Wiennam . . . pro
caligis episcopi bdj den. • • • Boemo pro camisia et
bracis xix den.
p. 8. [Oct. 25th.] pro pallio episcopo pluviali xii sol. longos
et dim. pro variis pelliculis ad furrendam cucullam,
dim. tal. . . . pro preparandis veteris sellis et ima
nova v. sol. long. . . . cuidam vago scolari xxx den.
Lottici vii den.
p. 9. Apud Niwenburch cuidam clerico dim. tal. . . . xiij
den. Waltero de Vogelweide pro pellido v. sol. longos.
Cuidam calvo apostate de Enstorf xxiiij den.
p. io. Lottiri ii den. pro quibusdam minutis agendis v den.
. . . cuidam nudo garcioni xij den. . . . Lottici pro
lavando et lieno vij den. Item incisori vestium iiij den.
. . . Incisoribus pro potu iiij den.
p. 22. [At Passau. Jan. 3rd, 1204.] Pro mantica et pro
camisia et bracis Ulrici gardonis xxviiij den. . . . pro
ferramentis x den. . . . pro reparanda cathedra vi den.
p. 24. Equis camere iiij den. quando versus Ebbilzperch
descendimus. Cuidam monacho schoto lx den.
 Appendix B 259
p. 25. Aput Sonn, unum scolaribus xxiiii den. frisac. . . .
item cuidam scolari iiii den. frisac.
Aput Villacum Dietmaro . . . pro emendis asinis v
marc. . . . Inter diversos histriones distribuebantur
aput Paduam xxxii sol.
Aput Ferrariam in palmis cuidam vetulo joculatori
in rufa tunica v sol.
Aput Bononiam Flordamor ioculatori tal. bon.
p. 26. In Pascha aput Florentiam cuidam Ebberhardinorum
episcopo et cuidam alii mimo dim. tal. ver. domino
episcopo xii den. frisac.
Apud Senas . . . cuidam cantatrici et duobus iocula-
toribus vij sol.
Apud Roman . . . cuidam pauperi clerico xii den.
• . . ibidem in dominica misericordia solvi cuidam
Romano de antiquo debito dim. tal.
p. 27. De parando anulo episcopi et poliendis thopazis xvii
sol. . . . cuidam pauperi clerico v sol.
Illi francigene cum giga et socio suo dim. tal. . • .
cuidam alii clerico in viridi tunica, ii sol.
p. 28. Apud Bononiam duobus vagis Suevis. tal. bon. . . .
scolari de Aquilegia ii mare. Cuidam pingui Saxonico
clerico in nigris vestibus dim. marc,
p. 29. Aput Veronam . . . ioculatori cum cultellis tal. veron.
cuidam scolari pro tunica xxviii sol. veron. Johanni
Salzburgensi scolari tal. veron.
p. 34. Sabbato apud Crugelar nihil expendimus,
p. 37. Burchardo scolari Roman percurrenti pro calciis viii
den. et ii tal. veron.
p. 45. . . . In nocte apud Bononiam pro gramine vi. soi.
bon. pro cera xviij sol. bon . . . pro balneo iij den.
p. 50. Nocte apud Mutinam . . . Burchardo scolari Romam
recurrenti tal bon. . . . Burchardo pro calceis v sol.
. . . pro bursa ad piper xxv den. pro duabus servorum
braccis xlij den.
 APPENDIX C

Indulgence Given by Surianus, Arch-Primate

of the W andering Scholars, 120 9

[Theodor Mayer, who edited the text, speaks of it as “ this ex­

traordinary document, copied on a loose leaf of parchment in an
old Register of the Canonry of St. Pölten,” Archiv. für Öster­
reichische Geschichts-Quellen, Bd. vi. pp. 316 -18 (1851).]

In nomine summe et individue vanitads, Surianus diudna

fatuorum favente demencia per Austriam Stiriam, Bawariam
et Moraviam presul et archiprimas vagorum scolarium, omni­
bus eiusdem secte professoribus, sociis, et successoribus uni­
versis, fame siti frigore nuditate perpetuo laborare. Quia
cruda simplicitate et inerti stulticia impellente nos nostri
propositi nondum piget, immo eadem mens est, ut bona
summa putemus aliena vivere quadra [Juvenal, Sat. v j :
mobiles et instabiles instar hyrundinum victum per aëra
queritandum ac et illae quocunque inconstantis mutabilis et
mirabilis animi nostri levitas nos impegerit, tamquam folium
quod a vento rapitur et quasi scintilla in arundineto, in-
fatigabiliter fatigati discurrimus, et interdum iuxta rigorem
inordinati nostri ordinis ludibria et verbera experti, qualia nec
Sarmentis iniquas Cesaris ad mensas vel vilis Galba tulisset1
[lacuna in M S.], egentes, angustiati, afflicti, fame prodigi, fame
sitique tabidi, frigore tremuli, gelu rigidi, rictu tumidi, habitu
miseri, vestiti lintheolo super nudo, uno semper pede nudo, a
domibus laicorum expulsi, ab hostiis clericorum sepe repulsi
utpote vespertiliones quibus nec inter quadrupedia nec inter
volatilia locus datur, stipem tamen, tamquam in diebus roga­
tionum nati, semper rogare cogimur alienam: dignum est ut
et nos quandoque iustis petendum desideriis favorabiliter
11 have kept Mayer’s reading, but the reference is evidently to
Juvenal, Sat. v. 11. 3-4.
“ Si potes illa pati, quae nec S armentus iniquas
Caesaris ad mensas, nec vilis Gabba tulisset.”
2Ó2 T h e W andering Scholars
annuamus. Eapropter vestre indisfcrete discretioni] notum
esse volumus per presentes, quod nos inclinati precibus vene­
rabilis in Christo fratris Sighardi ecclesie sci [licet?] . . . pti
per austriam archidiaconi recognoscentes beneficia, que nobis
in eadem ecclesia, pene a cunis usque ad ca[nos liberalliter
sunt impensa, ipsam ecclesiam cum suis officialibus eximimus
ab exacdone immo potius vexatione qua eos tam in festo
patroni quam dedicationis quin immo per circulum anni
indebite vexabamus, de nostra . . . era liberalitate, voluntate
quoque et connivenda cathedralium sociorum, contradictores
ab ingressu tabeme perpetuo suspendentes. N ulli ergo
claustrali secularive persone, nostrum inordinatum ordinem
professe, liceat hanc nostre donacionis exemtionisve paginam
temerare vel ei edam ausu temerario contraire, si nostram
irradonabilem fatuam et indescretam effugere voluerit ul-
donem. Acta sunt hec anno dni. mccix presidente sacrosancte
sedi Romane Innocendo III anno pontificatus sui xi, im­
perante serenissimo Romanorum imperatore Hanrico, prind-
patum vero austrie gerente piissimo et illustrissimo duce
Leopoldo, pontificatus nostri anno ultimo. Datum sub divo
per manum prothonotarii nostri spiritus, sigillis nostris, proprio
videlicet et universitatis appensis. Testibus quoque fideliter
subnotatis.

[“In the name of the supreme and undivided Vanity,

Surianus, by grace of the continuing insanity of fools prelate
and archbishop of the Wandering Scholars throughout Aus­
tria, Styria, Bavaria, and Moravia, to all members, fellows,
and followers of that order, hunger, thirst, cold, nakedness,
in perpetual exercise. Since, moved by crude simplicity and
the inertia of folly, it does not yet repent us of our vow, yea
moreover since the same mind is in us to account it the
supreme good to live upon other men, swift and unstable
as the swallows seeking their food through the air, hither,
thither, wheresoever the levity of our inconstant, fickle and
singular mind may drive us, like a leaf caught up by the
wind or a spark of fire in the brushwood we wander, un-
weariedly weary, and withal experiencing, in accordance with
 Appendix C 263
the rigour of our inordinate order, mocks and blows such as
neither Sarmentus at the iniquitous banquets of Caesar nor
the wretch Gabba bore . . . needy, povertystricken, suffering,
broken in reputation, consumed with hunger and thirst,
shivering with cold, stiff with frost, swollen with wind, beg­
garly in habit, a linen clout on our bare backs, one foot for
ever unshod, driven out from the houses of the laity, turned
away from the doors of the clergy, bats that can find no place
either with beast or bird, for ever driven, like those that are
born in the days of Rogations, to beg a stranger9s bread: fitting
is it, therefore, that we should graciously receive the just
desires of our petitioners. W herefore be it known to your
indiscreet discretion by these presents, that we, moved by the
prayers of our venerable brother in Christ, Sighard, arch­
deacon of the church . . . in Austria, and recognising the
benefits which, from cradle to white hair, have been bestowed
on us in the aforesaid church, we release that church afore­
said with its officials from the exaction, yea rather harrying
wherewith we have unrighteously harassed them at the feast
of the patron, and of the dedication, yea verily, throughout
the circuit of the year, of our own liberality and good pleasure,
and with the connivance of our official colleagues, suspending
objectors from ingress to taverns in perpetuity. To no person,
therefore, religious or secular, being a member of our in­
ordinate order, is it permitted to violate this our donation or
exemption, or with rash attempt to contravene it, if he would
escape our irrational absurd and indiscreet vengeance. Granted
in the year of Our Lord 1209, Innocent III presiding over
the most H oly Roman See in the eleventh year of his pon­
tificate, the most serene Henry Emperor of the Romans,2
the most pious and illustrious Duke Leopold exercising the
2 “imperatore Hanrico99 presents a riddle. The Emperor Henry
VI died in 1198: in 1209, Otto IV was emperor, and was suc­
ceeded in 1 2 1 1 by Frederick Ü, whose infant son, Henry, was
crowned King of Sicily in 1212.
Dr. Coulton makes the admirable suggestion that the lacuna
ecclesie sci . . . pti (which Mayer has supplied with sci[licet])
represents the abbreviation for Sancti Hippolyti, i.e. St. Pölten,
from which the document derives.
264 T h e W andering Scholars

principate of Austria, in the last year of our own pontificate.

G iven in the open hy the hand of our spiritual prothonotary,
and our seals, that is to say our own proper and that of our
order, appended• A nd thus truly witnessed by the under­
signed:]
 APPENDIX D

T h e Departing of M y Books

[Méon, Nouveau Recueil de Contes et Fabliaux.]

He laments the loss of his “clergie” at dice

E a c h man asks and each will speir
What is come of all my gear,
And how I be so desperate
To have neither cloak nor hat,
Coat ne surcote ne good tabard—
All is done and lost at hazard!
Game of hazard confoundeth me,
All is lost by mine own folie.
Dice hath cost me all my lere,
Dice hath cost me all my gear,
Turned my revel into woe.
Never a town in France, I know,
Never a château I call to mind,
Where I have not left some book behind!
At Gandalus above La Ferté,
There left I my A.B.C.,
My Paternoster at Soissons,
And my Credo at Monléon,
My Seven Psalms are at Tournai,
My Fifteen Psalms are at Cambrai,
My Psalter is at Besançon,
And my Calendar at Dijon.
Back I came through Pontarlie
And there I sold my Litany.
And at the town of the great salt mine
I drank my Missal down in wine.
266 T he W andering Scholars
At the spicers in Montpellier
Left I my Antiphonary.
M y Graduale and Legenda
1 left at Châteaudun behind me.
M y body of Divinity
Left I at Paris, in the dty.
And all my Arts and all my Physic
And all my canticles and music.
The greater part of all my authors
Left I at St. Martin at Tours.
Donatus is at Orleans,
And my Chansons at Amiens.
At Chartres I left Theodulus,
At Rouen my Avienus.
Ovid abideth at Namur,
Philosophy is at Saumur,
At Bouvines above Dinant
There lost I Ovid le grant.
M y Regimen is at Bruyères,
And my Glosses at Mézières.
M y Lucan and my Juvenal
I clean forgot at Bonival.
Statius the great and eke Virgile
I lost at dice in Abbéville.
M y Alexander is at Guerre,
And my Graedsmus at Auxerre.
Tobit lieth in Compiègne,
—Never handle him again—
M y Doctrinale is at Sens,
And my most wit with it gone.
Gone is thus my whole clergie,
Even thus as I do tell ye,
Lost in all these divers ways,
All my books for all my days,
Never to be bought again,
Unless I find me some good men
Who will give me of their pelf.
It may be that God Himself
 Appendix D 267
W ill give some bourgeois grace and gumption
To bargain with me on presumption,
That when I come back to the cloister,
I make a prayer with all the chapter,
God of all his sins acquit him!
 APPENDIX E

Councils Relating to the C lericus Vagus or

Joculator

C ouncil at N icaea, 325 a .d.

XV. Quod non oporteat ex civitate in civitatem migrare
. . . neque episcopus, neque presbyter neque diaconus.
xvi. Quicunque temere . . . recesserunt ab ecclesia, sive
presbyteri, sive diaconi, sive in quocumque alio ecclesiastico
ordine fuerint: hi nequaquam in alia ecclesia recipi debent
sed omni necessitate cogi eos par est redire in paroeceas suas:
pertinaces vero excommunicari oportet.
mansi, Concilia, 11. 902.

C ouncil at L aodicaea, c. 360 a.d.

liv. Quod non oporteat sacerdotes aut clericos quibus­
cumque spectaculis in scenis [cenis] aut in nuptiis interesse,
sed antequam thymelici ingrediantur exsurgere eos convenit
atque inde discedere. [This canon is frequently repeated in
later Councils.]
MANSI, H. 582.

C ouncil at C arthage, 398 a.d.

XV. Ut episcopi et presbyteri et diaconi vel clerici . . .
neque ullo turpi vel inhonesto negotio victum quaerant.
xxvii. Ut clerici, edendi vel bibendi causa tabernas non
ingrediantur, nisi peregrinationis necessitate compulsi.
mansi, ui. 883.

S t . A ugustine : De Opera Monachorum, c. 28

Tam multos hypocritas sub habitu monachorum usque
quaque dispersit hostis scilicet humani generis circumeuntes
270 T he W andering Scholars
provincias, nusquam missos, nusquam fixos, nusquam stantes,
nusquam sedentes. Alii membra martyrum . . . venditant . . .
alii parentes aut consanguineos suos in illa vel illa regione
se audisse vivere et ad eos pergere mentiuntur; et omnes
petunt, omnes exigunt aut sumptus lucrosae egestatis, aut
simulatae pretium sanctitatis.
MiGNE, P.L. 66, c. 257.

C ouncil at C arthagb, 436 a .d.

(Rather, a collection of statutes from various African
Councils)
lx. Clericum scurrilem et verbis turpis iocularem ab officio
retrahendum.
bd. Clericum per creaturam jurantem acerrime objurgan­
dum: si perstiterit in vitio, excommunicandum.
bdi. Clericum inter epulas cantantem, supradictae sen­
tentiae severitate coercendum.
mansi, m. 956.

C ouncil of C halcedon, 451 a .d.

V. De episcopo vel clericis qui a civitate in civitatem
transeunt.
X. Non licere clerico in duarum civitatum ecclesiis eodem
tempore in catalogum referri . . . tamquam ad majorem
confugit propter inanis gloriae cupiditatem.
xiii. Externos clericos et ignotos . . . sine proprii episcopi
. . . litteris nusquam ullo modo ministrare. . .
mansi, vn. 362.

S t . Isidore of Pelusium to a G yrovagus, Philip by

N ame , c . 450 a.d.
Loca subinde commutans pinguiorem potius ut videtur men­
sam quam firmiorem et solidiorem eruditionem quaerens . . .
MiGNE, P.L. 66, c. 258.
 Appendix E 271

C o u n c il a t T o u r s, 461 a .d .

xii. Ut clerici non absque sacerdotum suorum com­

mendatione ad alienas provincias vel civitates ambulare
disponant*
m a n s i, vn. 946*

Sixth C en tury

C o u n c il at A gdb (N a rb o n n e), 506 a .d .

lxx. Clericum scurrilem et verbis turpibus joculatorem ab

officio detrahendum. [Cf. Toledo, c. x x i i l a .d . 694.]
m a n s i , vili. 336.

C o u n c i l at O r l e a n s , 5 1 i a .d.
xix. De Monachis vagis.
Ipsi qui fuerint pervagati, ubi inventi . . . sub custodia
revocentur. [Cf. Autun, c. x. a .d. 760.]
mansi, vm. 354.

C o u n c il a t A u xerre, 578 a .d .

xl. Non licet presbytero inter epulas cantare vel saltare.

m a n s i , ix. 9 15 .

St . B e n e d ic t , R e g u l a .
Monachorum quator esse genera manifestum est. . . .
Quartum vero genus est monachorum quod nominatur gyro-
vagum qui tota vita sua per diversas provincias ternis aut quat
emis diebus per diversorum cellas hospitantur, semper vagi
et nunquam stabiles, et propriis voluptatibus et gulae illecebris
servientes. . . .
MIGNB, P.L. 66, 246.
272 The W andering Scholars

Seven th C en tu ry

C ouncil at T oledo, c. 684 a.d.

V. Dios autem quos tantum extrema vesania occupant ut
incertis locis vagi, atque morum depravationibus inhonesti,
ullam prorsus nec stabilitatem sedis nec honestatem mentis
habere extiterint cogniti, quicumque ex sacerdotibus vel
ministris vagantes reperiret, aut si fas est in propriis locis
cenobio suis rectoribus eos reformet: aut si difficile est, pro
sola honestate, vigore suae potestatis erudiendos inclinet.
mansi, X. 769.

C ouncil at T rullo , 692 a .d.

bdi. . . . statuentes ut nullus vir deinceps muliebri veste
induatur, vel mulier veste viro conveniente. Sed neque
comicas, vel satyricas, vel tragicas personas induat. . . . Si
sint quidem clerici, deponi iubemus.
mansi, xi. 971*

C ouncil at Berghamsted, 698 a.d.

Si tonsuratus irregulariter vagetur, semel ei hospitium con­
cedatur, et hoc non fiat, nisi licentiam habeat.
mansi, xn. 1 1 2.

C anons from Ireland, S eventh C entury

Clericus verbis turpibus iocularis degradetur.
Clericus inter epulas cantans, fidem non aedificans, sed
auribus . . . pruriens, excommunis sit.
mansi, xn. 12 1.

E ig h th C en tu ry

C ouncil of C loveshob, 747 a.d.

xii. U t presbyteri saecularium poetarum modo in ecclesia
non garriant, ne tragico sono sacrorum verborum composi-
 Appendix E 273
tìonem . . . corrumpant . . . sed simplicem sanctamque
melodiam secundum morem ecclesiae sectentur.
XX. Ut provideant episcopi in suis parochiis ut sint monas­
teria iuxta vocabulum nominis sui, id est, honesta silentium,
quietorum atque pro Deo laborantium habitacula, et non sint
ludicrarum artium receptacula, hoc est poetarum, citharis­
tarum, musicorum, scurrarum.
mansi, xn. 399.

Regula M agistri
De generibus monachorum (see translation, p. 179 ff.)«
For Latin text, see M ignb, P.L. 103, c. 735, et seq.

E gbert of Y ork, 748 a .d.

xviii. Ut nullus presbyter ebendi aut bibendi causa
gradiatur in tabernas.
mansi, xn. 415.

C ouncil at V erneuil , 755 a.d.

10. Ut monachi, qui veraciter regulariter vivunt, ad Ro­
mam vel aliubi vagandi non permittantur, nisi obedientiam
abbatis sui exerceant.
1 1 . De episcopis vagantibus qui parochias non habent, nec
scimus ordinationem eorum qualiter fuit; placuit . . . ut in
alterius parrochia ministrare . . . non debeant, sine iussione
episcopi cuius parrochia est.
M . G. H . Cap. Reg. Franc. (ed. Boretius), 1. p. 35.

A dmonitio Generalis, 789 a.d.

iii. Fugitivi clerici et peregrini a nullo recipiantur nec
ordinentur sine commend, litt.
xiv. Monachi et clerici tabernas non ingrediantur,
xxiv. Nec episcopi nec clerici transmigrentur de civitate in
dvitatem.
Cap. Reg. Franc. 1. 54.
274 T he W andering Scholars

C a p it u l a r y o f C h arlem ag n e, 789 a .d .

xix. Ut nulla abbatissa foras monasterio exire non prae­

sumat sine nostra iussione, nec sibi subditas facere permittat
. . . et nullatenus ibi winileodas scribere vel mittere prae­
sumant. (See Lot, W inileodas. Archiv. M ed. Lat. 1925,
p. 10 2 .)
Cap. Reg. Franc. 1. 63.

C o u n c il a t F r iu l i, 796-7 a .d .

vi. Nullus sub ecclesiastico canone constitus . . . in

canticis saecularibus aut in resoluta et immoderata laetitia, in
liris et tibiis et his similibus lusibus . . . ob inanis laetitiae
fluxum audeat . . . abuti.
M . G. H . Cone. Aev. Car. 1. p. 1 9 1 .

C a p it u l a r y of C h arlem ag n e, 797 ad.

xxvii. De clericis; nequaquam de ecclesia ad aliam ec­

clesiam transmigrentur neque recipiantur sine conscientia
episcopi et litteris commendatitiis de cuius diocesia fuerunt,
ne forte discordia exinde veniat in ecclesia. Et ubi modo tales
reperti fuerint, omnes ad eorum ecclesiam redeant, et nullus
eum post se retinere audeat, postquam episcopus aut abbas
suus eum recipere voluerit.
Cap. Reg. Franc. L 76.

C o u n c il a t 798 a .d .
R is p h a c h ,
X V . Istis gyrovagis qui circumeunt mundum et seducunt

multos, dicunt se esse episcopos quod non sunt, et . . .

ecclesias Dei praesumunt sacrare, clericos ordinare . . . N one
to he received without strict examination.
M . G . H . Cone. Aev. Car. 1. p. 200.
 Appendix E *75

N in th C en tury

C ouncil at A ix-la -Chapelle , 802 a.d.

xxii. Canonici . . . nequaquam foris vagari sinantur. . . .
Non per vicos neque per villas ad ecclesiam vicini vel termi­
nantes sine magisterio vel disciplina . . . luxoriando vel
fornicando, vel edam cetera iniqua operando quae consendri
absordum est.
xxiii. Presbiteri clericos quos secum habent sollicite prae­
videant, ut canonice vivant, non inanis lusibus vel conviviis
saecularibus, vel candcis vel luxoriosis usum habeant.
Cap. Reg. Franc, i. 94.

M ainz, 813 a .d.

xiv. De negotio saeculari. Ministri autem altaris Domini
vel monachi . . . ut a negotiis saecularibus omnino absti­
neant . . . turpe lucrum, munera iniusta accipere vel dare,
pro aliquo saeculari conquestu pretio aliquem conducere . . .
turpis verbi vel facti joculatorem esse vel iocum saeculare dili­
gere, aleas amare, ornamentum inconveniens proposito suo
querere, in deliciis vivere velle, gulam et ebrietatem sequi.
M. G. H. Cone. Aev. Car. 1. p. 264.
xxii. De clericis vagis sive acephalis, id est de his qui sunt
sine capite neque in servitio domini nostri neque sub episcopo
neque sub abbate, sed sine canonica vel regulari vita degentes
. . . praecipimus ut ubicumque inventi fuerint, episcopi sine
ulla mora eos sub custodia constringant canonica et nullatenus
eos amplius ita errabundos et vagos secundum desideria
voluptatum suarum vivere permittant. Sin autem episcopis
suis canonice obedire noluerint, excommunicentur usque ad
iudicium archepiscopi regionis illius.
Cone. Aev. Car. 1. p. 267.
xxxi. De fugitivis clericis.
Such to be searched for and sent back to their bishops. Each
bishop to make inquiry among his priests and clerks, whence
they came.
Cone. Aev. Car. 1. p. 268.
276 The W andering Scholars

C ouncil of C halons, 813 a .d.

ix. General prohibition of histriones and obscene jesting.
xliii. Sunt in quibusdam locis Scotti qui se dicunt episcopos
esse et multos négligentes absque licentia dominorum suorum
seu magistrorum presbyteros et diacones ordinant; such ordi­
nation to be null.
xliv. . . . Presbyteros vilicos esse non debere, in tabemis
bibere, cancellarios publicos esse, nundinas insolenter pera­
grare, Romam sive Turonam sine licentia episcopi sui
adire. . . .
Cone. Aev. Car. 1. 276, 282.

C ouncil of T ours, 813 a .d .

viii. Ab omnibus quaecumque ad aurium et ad oculorum

pertinent illecebras, unde vigor animi emolliri posse credatur,
quod de aliquibus generibus musicorum, aliisque nonnullis
rebus sentiri potest Dei sacerdotes abstinere debent. . . .
M a n s i, xtv. 84.

C ouncil at A ix -l a-Chapelle , 816 a .d.

De clericis et monachis non manentibus in suo proposito.
[This council is a complete corpus of divinity and disci­
pline.]
M. G . H. Cone. Aev. Car. 1. 368.

C ouncil a t Rome, 826 a .d .

xxviii. Monks who are such in habit only . . . to be re­
turned to their own monasteries, or to another, prospectu
congruo.
Cone. Aev. Car. 1. 579.

C apitulary, 827 a .d., collected for L ouis the Pious

by Benedict and A nsegisus
i. 3. Fugitivi clerici et peregrini . . . not to be received.
M a n s i , Condì, xv. Appendix, p. 475.
 Appendix E 277
xxii. Nec monachi nec clerici nec presbyteri in saecularia
negotia transeant.
xxiv. Nec episcopus nec clerici transmigrent de civitate in
civitatem.
lb. p. 477.
vi. 127. Ne passim episcopus multitudinem clericorum
faciat, sed secundum meritum vel reditum ecclesiarum nu­
merus moderetur.
lb. p. 631.

C o u n c i l a t P a r i s , 829 a .d .
xxxvi. An unhappy custom has arisen in our time, that
many subject to ecclesiastical rule, deserting their vow and
their place, . . . make their way wherever their desire per-
suadeth them. They are received not only by bishops and
abbots, but by counts and nobles. It is entreated, and the im­
perial power appealed to, that no layman shall receive a clerk
of this kind. And especially that no Italian bishop, abbot,
count, or noble shall presume to receive clerks fleeing thither
from Germany and from Gaul.
M. G. H. Cone. Aev. Car. 1. 635.
xiii. The king is besought ‘ ut sacerdotes et levitae et se­
quentis ordinis clerici qui in diversas imperii partes maxi-
meque in Italiae regionem fuga lapsi sunt . . . per missos
vestros diligenter perquirantur et in praesentiam vestram
venire compellantur et . . . unicuique ecclesiae a qua per
contumaciam defecerunt restituantur.”
xiv. That monks, priests, and clerks be discouraged from
coming about the palace.
Cone. Aev. Car. 1. 675.

C o u n c i l a t A i x -l a - C h a p e l l e , 836 a .d .
viii. Against priests disgracing their order in taverns in­
honeste et impudice, in drinking bouts and feasting. . . .
xxii., xxiii. Against priests who hang about the palace,
fearing canonical penalty for a crime committed in their
parish.
278 T h e Wandering Scholars

Monks forbidden in publicis locis . . . discurrere. Fieri

potest ut quidam . . . perpetrato scelere in monasterio
causam vagandi potius eligat quam regularibus disciplinis
subiacere.
Cone. Aev. Car. 1. 7 12 .

C o u n c i l a t M a i n z , 847 a .d .
xiii. Canonici et monachi forbidden verbi vel facti jocu­
latorem esse, vel iocum saecularem diligere.
m a n s i , xrv. 907.

S ynod h eld at 849 a .d .

P a v ia ,
Let there be removed front the episcopal table . . . cuncta
argumenta turpitudinis . • . fatuorum stultiloquia.
m a n s i , XIV. 930.

S y n o d a t R o m e , 835 a .d .
ix. Ordain no more clerks than can be provided for.
m a n s i , xrv. 1004.

C a p it u l a of W a lt er of 858 a .d .
Or lean s, c.

xvi. Ut presbyteri, vel reliqui ordinis ecclesiastici . . . in

tabernis non bibant nec scurrilitatibus cachinnum moventi­
bus consuescant.
xvii. At banquets “rusticis cantilensis caveant nec salta­
trices in modum filiae Heriodiadis coram se turpes facere
ludos permittant.”
m a n s i , XV. 507.

C a p i t u l a o f H i n c m a r o f R h e i m s , c . 859 a .d .
xiv. Ut nullus presbytorum . . . nec plausus et risus in­
conditos et fabulas inanes ibi ferre aut cantare praesumat, nec
turpia joca cum urso vel tomatricibus ante se fieri permittat.
m a n s i , XV. 478.
 Appendix E 279

C o u n c il at T 860 a .d .
o u r s,

V. Quia . . . plurima loca Deo sacrata incensa vel vastata

sunt a perfidiis Christianis et a crudeli etiam gente North-
mannorum, aut hac occasione multi lascivi clerici et monachi
relicto religionis habitu retro abierunt, et absque ulla canonica
licentia et reverentia vagabundi feruntur, ab ovile gregis Dei
errantes . . . let them return to their bishops and abbots and
remain under their discipline.
m a n s i , XV. 560.

C o u n c il a t W o r m s, 868 a .d .

xviii. Priests, deacons, or clerks found without licence of

ambulandi shall not assist in celebration.
m a n s i , XV. 872.

C o u n c il a t T 895 a .d .
rebu r,

xxvi. Monachus fuga regularis disciplinae elapsus . . .

to be discountenanced on every side, that shamefaced and
poverty-stricken he may return. Si autem tam irreverens et
pertinax est • . . ergastulo decoqui possit poenitudinis igne
purgatorio.
xxvii. Clerici qui semel in clericatu deputati sunt, neque
ad militiam neque ad aliam veniant dignitatem mundanam;
et hoc tentantes et penitentiam non agentes quo minus re­
deant ad hoc quod propter Deum primitus eligere, anathe­
matizari. Nos autem statuimus ut clericus ecclesiastice
nutritus, in ecclesia coram populo legens vel cantans, si post
modum relicto clericatus habitu, a castris dominicis quibus
adscriptus est, profugus et apostata elabitur, et ad saeculum
egreditur, ab episcopo canonice coerceatur, ut ad sinum
matris ecclesiae revertatur. Quod si in hac indisciplinatione
perdurat, ut comam nutriat, constringatur ut iterum de­
tondeatur et postea nec uxorem accipiat, nec sacrum ordinem
attingat.
mansi, xviii. 146.
28 o T he W andering Scholars

Tenth Century

T h e D e p o s i t i o n o f P o p e J o h n XII
Diaboli in amorem vinum bibisse omnes tam clerici quam
laici acclamarunt. In ludo aleae Jovis, Veneris, ceterorumque
daemonum auxilium poposcisse dixerunt.
m a n s i , xvm. 466.

C o u n c i l a t T r o s l e y , 909 a .d .
(Inaugurates the reform of Cluny)
iii. De monasteriorum vero non statu sed lapsu.
The pillage and spoiling of the heathen have left the
monasteries under alien heads. Some driven by poverty
abandon the septa, and take to worldly trades not only in­
distinguishable a vulgo, sed propter infima quae sectantur
opera, despectionis expositi sunt ludibrio.
Let there be no occasion evagandi.
m a n s i , x v m . 270, 272.

[Spurious]
C o u n c il u n d e r W alter , A 913
r c h b is h o p o f Sen s, a .d .

xiii. Statuimus quod clerici ribaldi, maxime qui vulgo

dicuntur de familia Goliae per episcopos, archdioconos, of­
ficiales et decanos Christianitatis tonderi praecipiantur vel
etiam radi, ita quod eis non remaneat tonsura clericalis; ita
tamen quod sine periculo et scandalo ita fiant.
m a n s i , xvm. 324.

[“Il ne faut pas aller chercher trop haut mention des goli-
ards. . . . En tout état de cause on ne saurait faire état du
texte cité par M. Farai, d'après Labbé et Mansi, comme un
concile de Sens de 913. Le c. 9. mentionne les dispositions
d'un concile général sur le costume des clercs. Ce ne peut
être que le concile de Latran de 1215. Le c. 13 cite, parmi les
autorités écclésiastiques chargées de sévir contre les goliards,
les officiaux. Il ne saurait être question d'officiaux au X*
 A p p en dix E 281
siècle. D'ailleurs, le même texte est reproduit par Mansi lui-
même comme un concile de Sens de 1239.”] (Gènestal,
Privilegium Fori, p. 165.)

C ouncil at A ltheim , 916 a.d.

xxvii. Fugitive clerks to be excommunicated unless they
returned to their church.
mansi, xvin. 329.

C anons under King E dgar, c. a.d. 967

lviii. Docemus etiam ut nullus sacerdos fit cerevisiarius,
nec aliquo modo scurram agat secum ipso vel aliis; sed sit,
sicut ordinem eius decet, prudens et venerandus.
bdv. . . . ut sacerdos non sit venator . . . neo potator
sed incumbat libris suis.
mansi, xvm. 517.

E dgar to Dunst an, 967 a .d.

Iam domus clericorum putentur prostibula meretricum,
conciliabulum histrionum. Ibi aleae, ibi saltus et cantus, ibi
usque ad medium noctis spatium protractae in clamore et
horrore vigiliae.
mansi, xvm. 527.

E dgar' s C harter to M almesbury , 974 a.d.

• . . monasteria quae velut muscivis scindulis, cariosis
tabulis tigno tenus visibiliter diruta. . . . Idiotis nempe
clericis ejectis, nullis regularis religionis disciplinae sub*
jectus . • .
mansi, XIX. 47.

Leges Presbyterum N orthumbrensium

Si presbyter ebrietati deditus sit, vel scurrilis aut cerevisarius
fuerit, hoc compenset
mansi, xrx. 69.
282 T he W andering Scholars

C apitula of A tto, Bishop of V ercelli

xliv. Clericum scurrilem et verbis turpibus jocularem ab
officio retrahendum.
xlvi. Clericum inter epulas cantantem supradictae sen­
tentiae severitate coercendum [i.e. degradetur ab officio].
m a n s i , XIX. 253.

Synod at M ont N otre Dame , under A dalbero of

Rheims, c . 970 a.d.
Complaint against monkish disorder, desertion of monas­
teries, wearing of orange, and shoes with beaks and ears.
RICHER, Hist. HI. 45 ( m IGNE, 138, C. 98).

Eleven th C en tu ry

L etter of L icence for a C lerk

Athene of Monte Cassino
[Rockinger, Briefstellen und Formelbücher in Quellen zur
Bayerischen und Deutschen Geschichte, Munich, 1863]
Quoniam clericorum plerique diabolice fraudis suggestione
decepti, cum longius a propria civitate destiterant instabiles et
vagabundi, nec urbis sua statione contenti ab antistite proprio
licentiam ad alia loca conmigrandi accepisse se verbis lit­
terisque mendacibus confiteri non metuunt. . . .

L aws of E dward the C onfessor

i . Omnis clericus et etiam scholaris et omnes eorum res et

possessiones ubicumque fuerit, pacem Dei et sanctae ecclesiae

habeant.
MANSI, XIX. 715.

L etter
of N icholas II to the Bishops of G aul ,
A quitaine, and G ascony, 1059 a .d.
Against those clerks who reject the tonsure and depart from
the order . . . Julianistas apostatas.
mansi, X
IX. 873.
 Appendix E 283

C ouncil at Rouen, 1072 a.d.

xii. Ut monachi vagi ad monasteria sua redire compel­
lantur.
XV. De clericis uxoratis ( priests, deacons, subdeacons), ut
ecclesiis non ministrent nec fructus percipiant.
mansi, XX. 35, 38.

C ouncil at Rome, 1074 a .d.

Ne hi qui culpis urgentibus ab ordine sunt depositi quasi
ab omni clericatu liberi, militent saeculo more laicali.
mansi, XX. 399.

C ouncil at M alfi (A pulia), 1090 a.d.

ix. Quia novum hoc tempore clericorum Acephalorum
genus emersit, qui morantur in curiis, et viris et feminis ad
sui ordinis dedecus subditi . . . Let no one maintain such
without the bishop's leave, or should he be a bishop, without
leave of his metropolitan.
MANSI, XX. 723.

C ouncil at Szabolch (H ungary)

xvii. Contra dericos et religiosos vagabundos.
mansi, XX. 769.
Marbod on the wandering monks, who can only endure
three or four years of the monastic tedium.
“Effectique vagi, currunt per devia pagi,
lam mundo viles propter causas monachiles
lam monachi viles, ut regi transfuga miles.”
MiGNB, P.L. 1 7 1 , 1669.

T w e lfth C en tu ry

H istory of Farfa, 1122 a.d.

After the peace between pope and emperor, the monks re­
turn as men spoiled and robbed; they sing in black cowls and
284 T he W andering Scholars
everyday garb in the choir. Adolescentes quoque vel iuniores
fratres cantuum neumas et organa solita respuebant, et non
spirituali honestate et gravitate sed istrionum more canere
studebant, et multas nenias extraneasque cantilenas satage­
bant, nec huius loci consuetudinem sed diversarium partium
levitates et extollentias quas in exteris lods quibus degebant
audierant vel viderant, exercere curabant.1
M. G. H. Script, xi. 583.

C ouncil at C lermont, 1130 à .d.

V. Prava consuetudi et detestabilis . . . monks and regu-

lar canons study temporal law and medicine.

X. Si quis . . . in clericos vel monachos manus iniecerit,
anathemati subjaceat.
mansi, XXI. 438.
The canon against the study of medicine and civil law by
regulars is repeated at Rheims, 1 1 3 1 : Lateran Council, 1 1 3 9 :
Tours, 1163. The canon against striking clerks, at Rheims,
1 1 3 1 : London, 1138 : Lateran, 1 139. Canons against clerical
truancy appear in Toulouse, 1119 ; Lateran, 1179 : Rouen,
1189 : and Toul, 1192.

Th irteenth C en tu ry

C ouncil at London, 1200 a .d.

X. Clerks must not go to taverns. Hence arise contentions
and quarrels; and laymen striking clerks incident in canonem.
1 Cf. Ælred of Rievaulx, Speculum Charitatis, n. 23 (Migne,
P.L. cxcv. 571). Gerhoh of Augsberg describes the laxity of
church and cloister at Augsburg wnen he was magister scholarum
there in 1122; how the refectory was empty unless a Herod play
was toward, or ludis aliis aut spectaculis quasi-theatralibus: and
he laments his own share in these follies—non solum interfui sed
praefui ÇP.L. cxciv. 809). Cf. the chapter De spectaculis theatricis
in his De Investigatione Antichristi, written c. 116 1. (Scheibel-
berger, Gerhohi Opera Inedita, 1. 25).
 Appendix E 285
These are sent to the pope, hut the clerks remain unpunished,
which is not fair.
m a n s i , xxn. 718.

Decretal o f Innocent III, 1207.

( Issued to the Archbishop of Gnesen in Poland.)
Cum decorem domus Domini . . . diligere vos oporteat
. . . [follows a complaint against the sons of canons being
admitted ad ministerium altaris], interdum ludi fiunt in
eisdem ecclesiis theatrales, et non solum ad ludibriorum spec­
tacula introducuntur in eas monstra larvarum, verum etiam
in tribus anni festivitatibus quae continue Natalem Christi
sequuntur, diaconi, presbiteri et subdiaconi vicissim insaniae
suae ludibria exercentes, per gesticulationum suarum debac-
chationes obscenas in conspectu populi decus faciunt clericale
vilescere . . . mandamus quatenus . . . ludibriorum con­
suetudinem . . . curetis e vestris ecclesiis . . . exstirpare.
MIGNE, P.L. ccxv. 1070.

C onstitutions o f C ardinal G ualo at Paris, i 208 a .d.

i. Excommunications of priests and clerks, who, after ad­
monition, have women in keeping: married clerks in minor
orders excepted, but these may hold no benefice.
viii. Ut cum magistris et scholaribus agatur indulgentius.
As much as may be “cum Deo et honeste,” this rigour is tem­
pered to masters and scholars: a general admonition precedes,
then a particular, nominatim et in scholis, finally excommuni­
cation.
m a n s i , xxn. 763.

C ouncil at Paris, 1212 a .d.

iv. No one having the pastoral care shall learn the secular
sciences. . . . If he has a licence from his bishop to go to the
schools, it shall be to learn veram litteram aut sacram paginam.
mansi, xxn. 845.
xvi. Ne in domibus clericorum . . . inhonestas commes-
286 T he W andering Scholars
sationes vel ludos talorum fieri permittant, vel conventionem
ribaldorum ibi recipiant.
mansi, xxn. 823.

C ouncil at Roubn, 1214 a.d.

ii. Prelates are not to hear matins in bed.
mansi, xxn. 917.

L ateran C ouncil (IV ), 1215 a.d.

xvi. Clerici officia vel commercia saecularia non exerceant,
maxime inhonesta. Mimis, ioculatoribus et histrionibus non
intendant et tabernas prorsus evitent, nisi in itinere, . . . ad
aleas vel taxillos non ludant.
xiii. Prelates as well as minor clergy spend half the night
in superfluous feasting and illicit confabulation, not to men­
tion other things, then sleep in a syncope, hardly to be awak­
ened even ad diurnum concentum avium.
mansi, xxn. 1003, 1006.

Provincial C ouncil at T rêves , 1227 a.d.

ix. Item praecipimus ut omnes sacerdotes non permittant
trutannos et alios vagos scholares aut goliardos cantare versus
super Sanctus et Agnus Dei aut alias in missis vel in divinis
officiis.
mansi, xxm. 33.

C ouncil at Rouen, 1231 a .d.

viii. Statuimus quod clerici ribaudi, maxime qui dicuntur
de familia Goliae, per episcopos, archdiaconos, officiales et
decanos Christianitatis tonderi praecipiantur, vel etiam radi,
ita quod eis tonsura non remaneat clericalis; ita tamen quod
sine scandalo et periculo ista fiant.
m a n s i , xm. 2 15 .
 Appendix E 287

C ouncil at C hateau Gonthier, 1231 a .d.

xxi. De Goliardis.
Item in concilio provinciali statuimus quad clerid ribaldi,
maxime qui Goliardi nuncupantur, per episcopos et alios pre-
latos praecipiantur . . . etc.
m a n s i , xxm. 237.

C onstitutions of Bonfilius, Bishop of S ens, 1232 a .d .

No clerk to play at dice . . . to go into a tavern, or sus­
picious place . . . or to allow joculatores to perform in
church at the time of the Office, or to eat at table with clerks.
m a n s i , xxm, 244.

D ecretales G rego rhIX, c. 1234.

Lib. iii. tit. i, cap. xn. Cum decorem . . . [repeats the
Decretal of Innocent III of 1207, with the alteration of tribus
festivitatibus to aliquibus . . . ].
Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. Freidberg, ii. 452.

C ouncil a t Sens , 1239 a .d .

xiii. Statuimus quod clerid ribaldi . . . de familia Goliae
. . . etc.
MANSI, xxm. 512.

Innocent IV, Apparatus super Decretalibus [Gregorii IX],

c. 1245
De vita et honestate dericorum. xii. Cum decorum domus
. . . . (Theatrales) Mimi et histriones nullo tempore post
poenitentiam sunt promovendi nisi per dispensationem pape
• • . hoc intelligo de his qui publice coram populis faciunt
gesticulationes sui corporis . . . si enim in occulto etiam
coram pluribus aliis saltaret vel corizaret, non prohiberetur a
promotione post poenitentiam. Idem etiam videtur si semel
tantum vel etiam pluries fecisset coram populo dummodo non
288 The W andering Scholars
assuefecisset nec esset infamis. Infamia enim et vilitas per­
sonarum est causa quare promoveri prohibentur, et non pec­
catum, quia sine peccato hoc fieri posset, quia David et plures
alii saltaverunt sine peccato. Qui etiam hoc faceret ad con­
solationem alicuius infirmi vel ex alia iusta causa non pec­
caret, sed assuescere in his non posset esse sine infamia et
nota vilitatis et maxime in his qui querunt inde lucrum. Illud
autem certum est quod si habet beneficium alias officium
histrionis in aliqua curia quod ille promoveri non potest. . . .
(Theatrales) sic dicti quia fiunt in theatro, id est loco ad
theorandum sive ad speculandum apto.
(Larvarum) larvae dicuntur deformitates hominum, sive
per appositiones pellium sive colorum.
(Ludibria) nedum quod monachi vel alii clerici exerceant
ludibria, sed edam in eorum habitu exercere prohibentur.
. . . Aliqua autem ad compunctionem fieri non prohibentur,
puta presepe Domini et sepultura et consimilia. . . .
Ed. Lyons, 1525, Uh. in. /. i3 3 T.

H o s t ie n s is , Lectura in Decretales Gregorii IX

[I have only seen this passage in its skeleton form in numerous
editions of the Summa of Hostiensis, under the titulus De Sen­
tentia Excommunicationis: it is here quoted from Génestal, Privi­
legium Fori, p. 1 6 5 . Henry of Segusio was a canonist in Paris
before 1 2 4 4 , and died Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia (hence his name)
in 1 2 7 1 . ]
Quid de goliardis, numquid qui tales percutit est excom-
municatus? Videtur quod sic, nam clerici sunt et tonsuram
deferunt patentem et latam, unde non licet ignorantiam al­
legare. Nec obstat lascivia sive vanitas, quia etiam tales semper
privilegium retinent nisi trina monitione premissa incorrigi-
biles sint. Sed contra, quia vilitas vitae tales gaudere non
patitur privilegio clericali . . . Solve: si de novo incipiant,
et spes correctionis sit, quousque trina monitio praecesserit,
privilegium retinent . . . si vero notorii sint, puta nudi ince­
dunt, in fumis iacent, tabernas ludos et meretrices fre­
quentant et in errore iam inveterati sunt, ita quod nec spes
correctionis est, reatus huius modi omne privilegium excludit.
. . . Sed quando dicentur inveterati? Hoc arbitrabitur bonus
 Appendix E 289
iudex, cum non sit iure cautum . . . tutius tamen esset si
papa illud determinaret et tempus hoc limitaret et videretur
annus sufficere.

C ouncil a t Béziers, 1255 a .d .

xxiv. Nullus omnino ad taxillos ludat, sive aleis, sive scads.
Scolas etiam deciorum prohibemus.
m a n s i , xxm. 882.

C ouncil at Gerona (C atalonia), 1274 a.d.

XXV. Beneficed clerks unable to speak Latin, unless their
age forbids hope, to be sent for the triennium to the schools,
and may hold their benefices.
mansi, xxm. 935.

C o u n c il a t M 1258 a .d .
o n t p e l l ie r ,

iii. Clerid mercimonia publice exercentes, operatorium

sive mensam . . . pro vendendis mercibus . . . vel scho­
lares . . . qui tonsuram dimiserint . . . qui mechanicas
artes exerceant aut qui operas suas aliis locaverint vilia exer­
cendo quamdiu notabiles se reddiderint . . . these are in no
way defended by the Church from taxation; but the privilege
of canon remains.
m a n s i , xxm. 992.

Provincial C ouncil a t M ainz, 1259 a.d.

De clericis vagabundis est statutum et prohibetur quod
nullis a clericis vel personis ecclesiasticis recipi nec dari quid­
quam debeat eisdem, cum vitam ducant reprobam et infamem.
m a n s i , xxm. 997.

Synod at V a l e n t i a , 1261 a .d.

Against clerks who dice, drink, wear green and yellow gar­
ments, and carry arms.
m a n s i , xxm. 1055-6 -7.
290 T he W andering Scholars

C ouncil at M ainz, 1261 a .d.

xvii. Clerid et vagabundi quos vulgus Eberhardinos vocat
quorum vita Deo odibilis edam laicos scandalizat . . . a
clericis vel personis Ecclesiasdcis recipi prohibemus, firmiter
statuentes ne aliquid dent iisdem; nolumus tamen ut huius-
modi occasione statuti Concilii, vel Scholares pauperes, quos
quando justa eos necessitas peregrinari compellit, a caritatis
operibus excludantur. The aforesaid Eberhardini, who live a
reprobate and infamous life, are to be admitted neither to
Holy Orders nor to a benefice, lest our ministry be made a
scandal, unless by long emendation of morals and worthy con­
versation the Diocesan is satisfied that their previous infamy
is expiated.
m a n s i , xxm. 1086.

C ouncil a t A vignon, 1270 a .d .

viii. No clerk who verbis vel factis graviter dehonestaverit
a dignitary of the Church shall be admitted to any benefice
without satisfaction given.
MANSI, XXIV. 1 8 .

C ouncil at S alzburg, 1274 a .d.

xii. The clerk in holy orders, monk or regular canon, not a
traveller, who goes into a tavern, without evident, reasonable
and worthy cause, and there eats and drinks . . . to be sus­
pended from office, until he has fasted for a day; if he has
played there at dice, fast for two days. At the third offence,
the bishop deprives him of his benefice; if not beneficed, he is
punished at the bishop's pleasure.
XV. Let no prelate give the tonsure to man or woman, un­
less they profess a recognised Rule and are going to a definite
place, for otherwise the habit gives materiam vagandi et op­
portunitatem deliquendi.
xvi. De vagis scholaribus.
Sub vagorum scholarium nomine quidam per Salzburg-
ensem provinciam discurrentes, monasteriis et ecclesiis se
 Appendix E 291
exhibent adeo onerosos, quod per eorum importunitatis au­
daciam nonnunquam clerici illud eis erogare coguntur de quo
fuit necessitatibus pauperum providendum: denegantibus sibi
suffragia, per quae occasionem nutriunt malae vitae, calumnias
inferunt; conferentibus sibi quod postulant vituperium ex­
istant; reverentia clericali utique multum detrahitur dum
blasphemia huiusmodi se personas ecclesiasticas profitentur.
Ut autem viri huiusmodi per subtractionem nostri et nobis
subditorum suffragii resipiscere compellantur, auctoritate
sacri concilii prohibemus, ne quis prelatorum, plebanorum,
aut vicariorum, seu quaecumque persona ecclesiastica, post
spatium duorum mensium, infra quem terminum de ordinata
sibi vita provideant, ipsis aliquid beneficii, vel juvaminis ero­
gare praesumat. Qui contrarium fecerit, tamdiu ab ingressu
ecclesiae sit suspensus, donec in subsidium terrae sanctae
usualis monetae conferat unam libram. Hanc tamen constitu­
tionem extendi nolumus ad pauperes advenas, et pro necessi­
tatibus suis publice mendicantes.
m a n s i , XXIV. 140, 141.

Penitential of T homas of C abham

(on the three kinds of histriones. The vagi are not described
as clerks, hut the description tallies')
Sunt etiam alii qui nihil operantur, sed criminose agunt,
non habentes certum domicilium, sed sequuntur curias mag­
natum et dicunt opprobria et ignominias de absentibus ut
placeant aliis. Tales etiam damnabiles sunt, quia prohibet
Apostolus cum talibus cibum sumere, et dicuntur tales scurrae
vagi, quia ad nihil utiles sunt, nisi ad devorandum et male­
dicendum.
C hambers’s Mediaeval Stage, i i . 262.

C ouncil a t T rêves, 1277 a .d .

94. Item praecipimus ut omnes sacerdotes non permittant
trutannos et alios vagos scholares aut goliardos cantare versus
super Sanctus et Agnus Dei in missis vel in divinis officiis.
MANSI, XXIV. 201.
292 T he W andering Scholars

C ouncil at Pont-Audémar, 1279 a .d.

XX. Ut clerici . . . a saecularibus negotiis abstineant,
maxime inhonestis, quodque tonsuram deferant et habitum
clerico congruentes. After three monitions, the Church will
no longer protect them from the secular authority.
mansi, XXIV. 224.

C ouncil at Buda, 1279 a.d.

74. Monks and canons regular are wont tarn patenter
quam latenter, tam turpiter quam damnabiliter, per terram
saepius evagari.
76. Excommunication of monks going without licence to
the schools, vel aliud quam grammaticam, theologiam aut
logicam in scholis audire.
mansi, XXIV. 302, 303.

C ouncil at M unster, 1279 a .d.

ii. Ne clerici vagentur nocturno tempore per plateas, et si
quos ex justa et legitima causa transire contingat, hoc de­
center faciant sine clamore, sine fistulis, sine tympanis, et
quolibet strepitu et chorea.
V. Item propter apostatas discursores, vagos et ignotos
clericos none to he admitted to celebrate mass or exercise the
priestly function unless attested.
m a n s i , xxrv. 312 , 313 .

C ouncil a t C ologne, 1280

i. Repetition of the foregoing, against nightly divagation,
with drums, flutes and singing. Also of canon v.
MANSI, XXIV. 346.

C ouncil at S alzburg, 1281 a.d.

vi. De discursu religiosorum.
Item inhonestos et indecentes religiosorum discursus ampu-
 Appendix E 293
tare volentes . . . mancipare carceribus penitus incorrigi-
biliter obstinatos.
m a n s i , XXIV. 399.

C o u n c il a t St . H ip p o l y t e (P ö ltbn ), 1284 a .d .

Item de vagis scholaribus duximus statuendum, districte

praecipientes, ut cultellos longos et gladios ac arma deferentes
non recipiantur omnino, nec aliquales eisdem exhibeantur
consolationes. Aliis autem humanitatis causa uni vel duobus
tantum modo venientibus, et non pluribus, detur modicus
pastus in caritate; et si importuni vel infesti fuerint, vel alia
dona petiverint, puta denarios vel vestes, penitus repellantur.
The pastor so doing to he fined 60 d. and failing that, sus­
pended from his church for a month.
Admittimus tamen, si quis necessitate suadente, ex liberali-
tate vestem aliquam scholari pauperi dare voluerit propter
Deum. Vagos autem Scholares detrahentes clericis nullus
omnino clericorum modo aliquo recipiat, vel ad panem ad­
mittat, cui hoc constiterit, quod qui non fecerit, poenae sub­
jaceat praedictae. De vagis vero sacerdotibus idem.
MANSI, XXIV. 5 1 1.

C ouncil a t Ravenna, i 286 a .d.

i. An injunction against giving entertainment to jocula­
tores sent to them for that purpose by laymen, on the occasion
of a marriage or a knighting, whereby the substance of the
Church is squandered to the detriment of the poor.
m a n s i , XXIV. 615.

C o u n c il a t Exeter, i 287 a .d .

xvii. Ut inter clericos et histriones, sicut est, ita appareat

in omnibus dispar professio. . . .
xxix. Beneficia aquae benedictae, as of old, to be the per­
quisite of poor clerks in the schools.
MANSI, XXIV. 806, 816.
294 The W andering Scholars

S t a t u t e s o f S y n o d a t L i è g e , 1287 a .d .
xii. 5. Item prohibemus, ne clerici exerceant negotia
turpia, et officia inhonesta, quae non decent clericos, qualia
sunt haec.. . . officium cambitoris, carnificis, tabernarii, pro-
cenetae, fullonis, sutoris, textoris, nec sint histriones, jocula­
tores, ballivi, forestarii saeculares, goliardi, thelonarii, ungu­
entarii, triparii, molendinarii. Si vero clerici aliqui officia talia
exercuerint, a suo prelato super hoc puniantur.
xii. 8. Statuimus propter apostatas, desertores et vagos, et
ignotos clericos . . . warning against allowing unauthorised
priests to celebrate.
MANSI, XXIV. 9IO, 9 1 1.

S t a t u t e s : C a h o r s , R o d e z , a n d T o u l , 1289 a .d .
Item praecipimus quod clerici non sint joculatores, goliardi,
seu bufones, declarantes quod si per annum illam artem
diffamatoriam exercuerint omni privilegio ecclesiastico sunt
nudati, et edam temporaliter graviori si moniti non destiterint.
Clerici conjugati . . . volentes gaudere privilegio clericali
tonsuram et vestes deferant clericales; et tunc duo privilegia
sibi retinent, quia puniri non possunt pro criminibus pecuni-
aliter nec corporaliter per judicem saecularem; et si quis
manus suas in eos temere violentas injecerit, erit excom-
municatus; alias vero nullum retinent privilegium clericale.
Item, clerici qui ex levitate, vel lascivia, vel negligentia,
tonsura demissa et habitu clericali, arma deferunt vel saecu­
laribus negotiationibus prohibitis se immiscent, et tertio
moniti desistere nolunt quousque se corrigant. Item si in
goliardia, vel histrionatu per annum fuerint vel breviori
tempore, et ter moniti non desistunt. Item bigami a foro
ecclesiastico omni clericali privilegio sunt exclusi. Clerici qui
etiam non demisso habitu clericali ut laici mercaturas et
negotiationes clericis prohibitas exercent, privilegium de non
praestandis talliis, muneribus laicalibus, post trinam moni­
tionem amittunt.
mansi, XXIV. 10 17 , 1019.
 Appendix E 295

C ouncil a t S alzburg, 1291 a .d .

De secta vagorum scholarium.
Licet contra quosdam sub vagorum scholarium nomine dis­
currentes, scurriles, maledicos, blasphemos, adulationibus im­
portune vacantes, qui se clericos in vituperium clericalis
ordinis profitentur, nonnulla pio zelo pro salubri eorum
correctione emanaverint instituta: ex his tamen nullus fructus
aut modicus iam provenit. Publice nudi incedunt, in fumis
jacent, tabernas, ludos, et meretrices frequentant, peccatis suis
victum sibi emunt, inveterati sectam suam non deserunt sicut
de eorum correctione nullus remaneat locus spei. Ideoque
prioribus statutis pro salute animarum suarum, quam quaeri­
mus, salvis: adjicimus et denunciamus in hac sacra synodo,
sub poena privilegii clericalis publice prohibentes, ne quis
sectam vagorum scholarium reprobatam assumat, seu in ea
permaneat, vel iam exercere praesumat. Alioquin eos qui
huiusmodi sectam ante hanc nostram constitutionem temere
assumptam, infra mensem, a tempore promulgationis eiusdem
constitutionis numerandum, penitus non dimiserit, et illos
qui nunc assumere praesumpserint, ipso facto statim omni
privilegio clericali exui praecipimus et nudari: volentes, ut
quandocumque a monasteriis ecclesiis, vel clericis, cuius­
cumque rei importuni vel violenti fuerint exactores, ipsis
eosdem liceat nostra auctoritate capere, invocato ad hoc, si
opus fuerit, brachio saeculari. Et eos captos nobis vel archi-
diaconis nostris assignari volumus nostro carceri, ut nobis
videbitur, includendos; ut sic reatus, omne excludat privi­
legium in his, quos vilitas vitae eo nec frui patitur, nec
guadere.
mansi, xxiv. 1077.

V ili, c. 1298 a .d .
B o n if a c e
Clerici qui, clericalis ordinis dignitati non modicum detra­
hentes, se joculatores seu goliardos faciunt aut bufones, si per
annum artem illam ignominiosam exercuerint, ipso iure, si
296 T he W andering Scholars
autem tempore breviori, et tertio moniti non resipuerint,
careant omni privilegio clericali.
SEXT. DECRET, m. i. I.

Fourteenth C en tury

C ouncil a t C ologne, 1300 a .d .

iii. Aliqui clerici utpote apostatae, discursores et vagi de
aliis provinciis et diocesibus • . . qui ab aliis diocesibus
tamquam irregulares et indigni pro eorum culpis et excessibus
sunt remoti are forbidden the regimen animarum. Any ec­
clesiastic admitting them thereto to be excommunicated.
MANSI, XXV. 1 7 .

C ouncil at S alzburg, 1310 a .d.

iii. De dericis ioculatoribus.
Item iuxta constitutionem domini Bonifacii, quae est talis
‘‘Clerici qui dericali ordini non modicum detrahentes se
ioculatores seu goliardos faciunt, aut buffones, si per annum
artem illam ignominiosam exercuerint ipso jure; si autem
tempore breviori et tertio admoniti non resipuerint, careant
omni privilegio clericali; monemus huius approbatione con­
cilii, omnes et singulos tales, ut talem habitum et vitam non
assumant, et assumptam deponant infra tres menses, quorum
unum pro primo, alterum pro secundo, et tertium pro tertio
termino peremptorio assignamus; si poenam praedictam, quam
ipso facto inddunt, voluerint evitare.”
i. De derids tabernariis.
A kindly canon moderating the rigors of the earlier clericus
non viator. If the clericus, in orders or religion, entered the
tavern to the honouring of some friend, lord, or distinguished
person, or entered it without premeditation, forgetful of the
prohibition, or for some necessary and useful cause, not
voluptuous, and there drank or ate, he shall not incur the
statutory penalty. But this moderation does not extend to
lusores, players.
MANSI, XXV. 2 2 6 .
 A p p en d ix E 297

C ouncil at T rêves, 1310 a .d.

xxviii. Contra monachos qui vadunt per civitates.
mansi, XXV. 257.

C ouncil at M ainz, 1310 a.d.

De clericis vagabundis.
Clerici vagabundi quos vulgus Eberhardinos vocat, quorum
vita est odibilis, et laicos scandalizat; priori inhaerentes con­
cilio a clericis et personis ecclesiasticis recipi prohibemus,
firmiter statuentes, ne aliquid eisdem detur. Nolumus tamen
ut huius occasione statuti clerici vel saeculares pauperes quos
quamquam iusta necessitas peregrinari compellit, a caritatis
operibus excludantur. . . . The necessitous may have alms
sine personarum differentia. Qui Eberhardini privati vitam
ducunt reprobam et infamem, ne ad sacros ordines, vel ec­
clesiastica beneficia aliquatenus admittantur, ut nostrum non
vituperetur ministerium . . . unless a long course of discretion
commends them to the diocesan.
De eisdem clericis vagabundis, qui praesumant aliquando
celebrare.
Ad huc quia clerid vagabundi qui Eberhardini vocantur
quorum vita Deo odibilis, clericos et ipsos laicos scandalizat,
discurrendo per terras in villas quae carent propriis sacerdoti­
bus aliquando celebrare praesumunt, seu quod verius est,
divina officia profanare, statuimus ut tales ad mandatum
diocesani, seu loci archidiaconi teneantur in custodia carcerali,
ad hoc si necesse fuerit, invocando auxilium brachii saecularis.
mansi, XXV. 3 1 1.

C ouncil of T arragon, 1317 a .d.

Because of frequent disputes between the secular and
ecclesiastical judges, all clerks wishing to enjoy privilege are
to present themselves within three months to the bishop or
official to be enrolled; and are to be enjoined by name to wear
habit and tonsure, and abstain a negotiationibus . . . in-
298 T he W andering Scholars
honestis . . . Mimi, histriones, vel lenones . . • cursarii seu
piratae, nisi contra infideles . . . non existant.
MANSI, XXV* 630*

C ouncil at Paris, 1323 a.d.

Against clerks wearing red, green, yellow, and white hose.
mansi, XXV. 730.

C onstitutions at Ferrara, 1332 a .d.

Ne clericus aliquis aut persona ecclesiastica habitans in
civitate Ferrariensi. . . tabernas intret ut bibat in eis. Ne cum
mulieribus vel aliis . . . in choreis cantare, saltare vel balare
. . . seu . . . lascivire vel obscenitates aut ludibria sui corporis
exercere . . . Ne ad azardium . . . aut aliquem alium ludum
inhonestum . . . nisi forte ad schacos absque taxillis . * .
ludere praesumant
m a n s i , XXV. 920*

S ynod at A rezzo, 1350 a.d.

43. De poena Clericorum choreizantium vel sonantium
Instrumenta.
MANSI, XXVI. 214.

Provincial C ouncil a t Padua, 1350 a .d .

Revokes the severe penalties against the clerks in taverns
instituted by the Archbishop of Salzburg.
m a n s i , x x v L 227.

S y n o d a t P r a g u e , 1355 a .d .
xxvi. Clerici insuper, maxime beneficati, tabardis rubeis
aut viridibus uti non debent, nec joculatores se faciant, et si
post unam aut trinam admonitionem artem illam ignominio­
sam exerceant, eo ipso privati sint omni beneficio clericali.
 A p p en dix E 299
. . . Clericos qui vagi communiter nuncupantur in domibus
suis non recolligant, nec eis aliquid munus nec parvum nec
magnum tribuant
Condi. XXVI. 390.

Provincial C ouncil at M agdeburg, 1370 a .d .

xix. Quia clerici vagabundi qui eberhardini dicuntur . . ,
Against celebration by such . . . teneantur in custodia car­
cerali.
MANSI, XXVI. 579.
 TABLE OF
BIOGRAPHICAL DATES

Abelard, 1 0 79 -114 2. Ambrose, St., c. 340-397.

Absalon of St. Victor, ob. André le Chapelain, fl. 117 4 .
1203. Angilbert, Abbot of St. Ri-
Adam du Petit Pont, 1 10 5 - quier, ob. 814.
1 1 81 , ob. Bp. of St. Asaph. Anselm of Bisate, fl. 1049.
Adam of St. Victor, fl. 113 0 - Arator, fl. 544.
1192. Archpoet, i i 3 o? - i i 65?
Adelard of Bath, fl. 110 9 - Arnold of Brescia, ob. 115 5 .
1 142. Amulfus Rufus, fl. c. 1140.
Adelmann of Liège, ob. Bp. Augustine, St., 354-430.
of Brescia, c. 1062. Ausonius, c. 3 1 0 - C . 395.
Adhémar of Chavannes, c.
Aymon of Fleury, c. 970-
988-post 1028.
post 1005.
Alanus ab Insulis (Alain de
Lille), ob. 1202.
Bacon, Roger, c. 12 14 -12 9 4 .
Alberic of Monte Cassino,
Barbarossa (Frederick I), c.
Cardinal Deacon, fl. 1079.
i i 2 3 -119 0 .
Albero, Bp. of Liège, ob.
Baudri de Bourgeuil, 1046-
1145-
113 0 .
Albert of Morra (Gregory
V III), fl. 115 7 - 118 8 . Becket, St. Thomas, 1 1 1 8 -
Alcuin, c. 735-c. 804. 117 0 .
Aldhelm, St., c. 650-709. Bede, c. 673-735.
Alexander III, Pope from Benedict, St., 480-543.
115 9 -118 1. Benedict of Aniane, c. 7 5 1-
Alexander of Hales, c. 1 1 7 5 - 821.
1245. Benedict, Biscop, ob. 690.
Alexandre de Ville-Dieu, c. Benoît de Sainte-More, fl. c.
116 0 -post 1203. 1 1 75.
Alphanus, Abp. of Salerno, Berengarius of Tours, c.
fl. 1058-1085. 1010 -10 88.
302 T h e W andering Scholars
Berengarius, disciple of Abe­ Columba, St., 521-597.
lard, fl. 1 140. Columbanus, St., 543-615.
Bernard, St., of Clairvaux,
10 9 0 -1153. Damiani, St. Peter, 1007-
Bernard of Chartres, ob. c. 1072.
112 6 . Dicuil, fl. 825.
Bernard of Meung, fl. c. Dungal, fl. 810, at Pavia,
118 0 . 825.
Bernard of Morlaix, fl. 1140. Dunstan, St., 909-988.
Bernard Sylvestris of Tours,
fl. c. 1140.
Eberhard of Beduine, fl.
Boethius, c. 470-525. 1210 .
Boniface, St., c. 680-755. Eberhard die German (un­
Boniface VIII, Pope, 1294- known: his Laborintus
1303- later than 12 13 , earlier
Breakspear, Nicholas (Adrian than 1280).
IV), c. 110 0 -115 9 . Eginhard, c. 770-840.
Bruno, St., Abp. of Cologne, Ekkehard I of St. Gall, c.
925-965. 900-973.
Bruno, Giordano, c. 1548- Ekkehard IV of St. Gall, c.
1600. 980—1060.
Buoncompagno, fl. 119 8 - Eleanor of Aquitaine, c.
I2 35- 1 1 22-1204.
Ennodius of Arles, Bp. of
Caesarius of Heisterbach, c. Pavia, 474-521.
1170-C. 1240. Ermenric of Ellwangen, ob.
Cassian (founded St. Victor 874.
at Marseilles), 360-435.
Cassiodorus, c. 490-585. Faba, Guido, fl. 1226 -124 3.
Charlemagne, c. 742-814. Flodoard of Rheims, 894-
Charles the Bald, 823-877. 966.
Chilperic, ob. 584. Fortunatus, Venandus, c.
Chrétien de Troyes, fl. c. 530-600?
1164. Foulques of Toulouse, fl.
Clement the Irishman, fl. c. 1 18 0 - 12 3 1.
800—826. Frederick II, 119 4 -12 5 0 .
Coelcu of Clonmacnoise, ob. Froumund of Tegernsee, c.
794- 960-c. 1008.
 Biographical Dates 303
Fulbert, St., of Chartres, c. Guido de Bazoches, ante
975-1029. 1 146-1203.
Fursa, St., ft. 644. Guillaume IX, 10 7 1- 112 7 .
Guillaume le Breton, oh. c.
Gamier de Pont-Sainte- 1250.
Maxence, ft. c. 1170 . Guillaume de Lorris, ft. 1230.
Gautier de Château-Thierry, Guillaume, Abbot of St.
Chancellor, oh. Bp. of Thierry, oh. c. 1148.
Paris, 1249. Gunzo of Novara, ft. 965.
Gautier de Châtillon, bom
not later than 113 5 , died Hadrian, Abbot of SS. Peter
not before 1184. and Paul at Canterbury, ft.
GeofiFrey de Vinesauf, ft. 671.
119 4 . Heiric of Auxerre, 841-c.
Gerbert (Silvester II), post 876.
940—1003. Helgaldus, ft. c. 1040.
Gilles de Corbeil, 114 0 - Helinand, ft. 1229.
1224? Heloïse, oh. 116 4 .
Gilles d'Orval, ft. 12 5 1. Henri dAndeli, ft. 1236.
Giraldus Cambrensis, 114 7 - Henry II, 113 3 - 118 9 .
1223. Henry IV, Emperor, 1050 -
Gosvin, prior of St. Médard, 1 106.
Abbot of Anchin, ft. 1 1 1 3 - Henry of Blois, Bp. of Win­
1166. chester, ft. i i 2 6 - 1 1 7 1.
Gottschalk, c. 805-870. Hermann of Dalmatia, ft.
Gratian, ft. 1 1 3 9 - 1 1 5 1 . 114 3 .
Gregorius, Magister, ft. c. Herrad von Landsberg, ob.
1200? 119 5 .
Gregory the Great, c. 540- Hilarius the Goliard, ft. 112 5 .
604. Hildebert of Le Mans, 1056-
Gregory IX, Pope 12 2 7 - 113 3 .
12 4 1. Hildebrand (Gregory V II),
Gregory of Tours, 538-594. c. 1023-1085.
Grimold, Abbot of St. Gall, Hincmar of Rheims, c. 805-
841-872. 882.
Grossetête, Robert, Bp. of Honorius d'Autun, ft. c.
Lincoln, c. 117 5 - 12 5 3 . 112 0 .
Guibert de Nogent, 10 5 3 - Hrabanus Maurus, 776-856.
112 1. Hroswitha, c. 935-post 973.
304 T h e W andering Scholars
Hucbald of St. Amand, c. Luitprand of Cremona, c.
840—
93®* 920-c. 972.
Hugh of Nunant, Bp. of Lupus, Servatus, Abt. of Fer­
Coventry, fl. 118 6 - 1 1 99. rières, c. 805-862.

Innocent III, Pope 119 8 - Maelbrigde, Abt. of Armagh,

1216. ob. 927.
Innocent IV, Pope 12 4 3 - Mainerius, Magister, fl. c.
I 2 54* 1 160.
Isidore of Pelusium, fl. c. Maiolus of Cluny, professed
440. c. 943, ob. abbot, 994.
Isidore of Seville, c. 570- Map, Walter, 1140 -120 8?
636. Marbod of Angers, 10 3 5 -
Iso of St. Gall, fl. 852-868. 112 3 .
Ivo of Chartres, 1040—1116 . Marcellus see Moengal.
Jacques de Lausanne, ob. ante Marcus, Irish bishop, ob. c.
1322. 875.
Jacques de Vitry, c. 116 0 - Martianus Capella, fl. c.
1240. 410-427.
Jean de Meung, 1250 Î- Martin of Laon, ob. 875.
1305? Martin, St., of Tours, c. 3 16 -
Jean de St. Gilles, fl. 1235. 400.
Jerome, St., c. 340-420. Matthew Paris, of St. Albans,
Jocelin of Brakelonde, fl.
ob. 1259.
117 3 -12 11. Matthew of Vendôme, fl.
John, King, 116 7 - 12 16 . 1 14 0 -118 5 .
John XII, Pope 955-964. Maurice de Sully, Bp. of
John of Garland, c. 118 0 - Paris, 116 0 -119 6 .
Maximian, fl. c. 525.
post 1252.
Moengal, fl. 853-865.
John of Ravenna, fl. 1364.
John of Salisbury, c. 1 1 1 5 -
Neckam, Alexander, 1 1 5 7 -
1180.
12 17 .
John Scotus Erigena, fl. 851.
Nicholas, Chancellor of Paris,
Josephus Scotus, ob. c. 791.
fl. 1284.
Lambert of Ardres, fl. 1194. Notker Balbulus, c. 840-
Lanfranc, 1003-1089. 912.
Lothair I, Emperor, 795-855. Notker, Bp. of Liège, ob.
Louis the Pious, 778-840. 1008.
 Biographical Dates 305
Odilo, St., of Cluny, oh. Primas, Hugh, of Orleans,
1049. io 94?- i 160?
Odo, St., of Cluny, 879-942. Priscian, fi. c. 518.
Odo, Bp. of Paris, 119 6 - Prudentius, 348-c. 405.
1208.
Orderic Vitalis, 1075-post
Radegunde, St., oh. 587.
1143- Radulfus of Beauvais, fl. c.
Otto I, 912-973.
115 5 .
Otto II, 9 55-9 8 3- Radulfus Glaber, ante 1000-
Otto III, 980-1002.
post 1046.
Otto von Freisingen, c. 1 1 1 4 -
Rahingus of Flavigny, fl. c.
1159 .
900.
Ratherius of Liège, c. 887-
Paul the Deacon, c. 720-c.
800. 974-
Ratpert of St. Gall, oh. c.
Paulinus of Noia, 3 5 3 - 4 3 1 .
890.
Paulus Albanis of Cordova,
Reginald von Dassel, oh.
.
A 851.
1 167.
Peter of Blois, 1 1 5 3 -post
Richard de Bury, 128 7-1345.
I2O4.
Richard, St., of Chichester,
Peter of Pisa, /I. c. 760-790?
c. 119 7 -12 5 3 .
Peter Riga, fi. 116 5-c. 1209.
Richer, fi. 987.
Peter the Venerable, Abbot
Robert II, King of France, c.
of Cluny, c. 10 9 4 -115 5 .
970 -10 31.
Petrus Pictor, Canon of St.
Robert of Brunne, fi. 1288-
Omer, fi. m o .
1338.
Philip, Abp. of Ravenna, fi.
1250-1270 . Robert of Melun, 110 0 -
116 7.
Philippe Auguste, 1 16 5 -
1223. Robert de Sorbon, 12 0 1-
1274.
Philippe le Bel, 12 6 8 -13 14 .
Rudel, Jaufré, fi. 114 7 .
Philippe de Grève, Chan­
cellor of Notre Dame, fi.
1 2 1 1-12 3 6 . Salimbene, 1121-p o st 1287.
Philippe of Harvengt, oh. Salomo, Abt. of St. Gall, Bp.
118 2. of Constance, c. 860-920.
Piero delle Vigne, fi. 1 2 2 1 - Samson, Abbot of Bury St.
1249. Edmunds, oh. 1 2 1 1 .
Ponce de Provence, fi. 1249? Sedulius, c. 450.
3 o6 T he W andering Scholars
Sedulius Scotus, fl. 848-874. Thierry of Chartres, fl. 1 1 26-
Serlon o£ Wilton, 1 1 1 0 - 1150 .
1200.
Servatus Lupus, Abbot of Vilgardus of Ravenna, fl. c.
Ferrières, ob. c. 862. 1000.
Sidonius Apollinaris, c. Vincent of Beauvais, ob. c.
430-c. 487. 1264.
Sigebert of Liège, c. 1030- Virgilius Maro of Toulouse,
1112 . fl. c. 630.
Virgilius, Bp. of Salzburg, fl.
Stephen of Tournai, Abt. of
746-784.
St. Geneviève, 117 6 , Bp.
of Tournai, 119 2 -12 0 3 . Walafrid Strabo, 809-849.
Sulpidus Severus, 363-425. Walther von der Vogelweide,
Symmachus, c. 345-410. c. 1170-C. 1230.
William of Malmesbury,
Tetbald of Vemon, fl. 1053. 10 8 0 Î-1142?
Theodore, Abp. of Canter­ Wireker, Nigel, c. 113 0 -fo st
bury, 602-690. 1200.
Theodulfus, Bp. of Orleans, Wolfger, Bp. of Passau, fl.
ob. 821. 119 5 -12 18 .
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Books containing valuable bibliographies have been marked

with an asterisk. T he reader is also referred to the bibliog­
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of the Cambridge History of English Literature. N ew pub­
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A.H.R. . American Historical Review. N ew

York.
Archiv. Med. Aev. Lat. Archivum Medii Aevi Latinitatis.
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Corp. SS. Ecc. Lat. . Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum
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M .G.H .SS. . . Monumenta Germaniae Historica:
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P .L.C .............................. Poetae Latini Carolini Aevi. Berlin.
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Z.F.D .A .......................... Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterthum.
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1 The word is too ambitious for what is merely a personal selec­

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Chapter I
T he Break with the Pagan T radition

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Chapter II
Fortunatus to Sedulius of L iège

A damnan. Vita S. Columbae, ed. J. T. Fowler. Oxford. 1920.

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W r i g h t , T h o m a s . Anecdota Literaria. London. 1844.
------ Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets of the Twelfth Century.
2 vols. London. 1872.
See Sedgwick, W. B., supra.
------ Reliquiae Antiquae. London. 1841.
------ Early Mysteries and other Latin Poems of the XIIth
and X lllth Centuries. London. 1838.
See Map, Walter.
Z i n g e r l b , I. V. Reiserechnungen W olfgets von Ellenbrechts•
Kirchen. Heilbronn. 1877.
 IN D E X

Abelard, xx and n., 32, H 5“ I9» I 2 *> *35> *38n., 142, 158,
177, i86n., 2 1 1 - 1 5
Absalon of St. Victor, 14 1, 20 5n.
Adam du Petit Pont, 13911.
Adam of St. Victor, 78, 232
Adelard of Bath, 1 19
Adelmann, 94
Adhémar, 89n., 90
Agde, council at, 271
Aix-la-Chapelle, 47; councils at, 275, 276, 277
Alain de Lille, 163
Àlberic of Monte Cassino, 147, i49n-> I99H»> 2,82
Albero, Bishop of Liège, 138
Albert of Morra, 147
Alcuin, xxviii, 28, 35, 42-47, 50, 56, 64, 7 1, 99, 1 1 3
Aldhelm, St., 40, 199m
Aldricus, S t, 197
Alexander III, 193m
Alexander of Hales, 139m
Alexandre de Ville-Dieu, xxi, 16, 136, 144, 266
Alphanus of Salemo, 99
Altheim, council at, 281
Ambrose, St., xxx; chant, 1, 20
Amiens, 172, i82n.
André le Chapelain, 2i6n.
Angers, 94, 10 1, 104, 197
Angilbert, 28, 46, 47, 50
Anselm of Bisate, 14
Arator, xxvi
Archpoet, 65, 148, 159-73, 20m., 229, 232, 238, 252; see
also Golias.
340 Index
Arezzo, council at, 298
Aristotle, xxx, 119 , 120, 12 1, 123, 134, 169
Arles, 14
Arnold of Brescia, 177
Amulfus Rufus, xxv, 136
Augustine, St., xx, xxviii, xxxi, 1, 44, 60-62, 78n., 90, 95,
169, 189, 219, 269
Ausonius, 2 - 1 1, 241
Autun, council at, 196
Auxerre, council at, 271
Avignon, council at, 290
Aymon of Fleury, 79

Bacon, Roger, i39n., 142, I43n.

Bangor, 3 1, 35, 50
Barbarossa, 165
Bataille des Sept Arts, i33n., i42n., i44n.
Baudri de Bourgeuil, 100-4
Becket, Thomas à, 182, 229
Bede, 30, 3 1, 39, 41, 62m
Benedict, St., 79; order of, 37, 59, 70, 176, 177-78, 233,
27i
Benedict of Aniane, 196, 276
Benedict of Clusa, 89, 90
Benedictbeuem, vii, 2 17 -19 , 233
Benoît de Sainte-More, xv, xvi
Berengarius, disciple of Abelard, 99
Berengarius of Tours, 94
Berghamsted, council at, 196, 272
Bernard, St., of Clairvaux, 35, 99, 117 , 118 , 13 1, 135
Bernard of Chartres, 123-25
Bernard of Meung, 150
Bernard of Morlaix, 228
Bernard Sylvestris, 124-32, 134, 140, 148, 150, 153
Berne MS. of St. Paul, 62, 67
Béziers, council at, 289
Bobbio, 36 and n., 37
Boethius, xxvi, xxx-xxxii, 1, 25, 63, 80
Bologna, 114 , 115 , 144, 145, 150-52, 206
 Index 341
Boniface, St., 33, 96
Boniface VIII, i93n., 295
Bourgeuil, 102, 104
Breakspear, Nicholas, 72, 119 , I39n*> 199
Bruno, Giordano, 125
Buda, council at, 292
Buoncompagno, 150-56
Bury St. Edmunds, Abbot of, 114 , 186, 192

Caesarius von Heisterbach, 90 and n., 138, 139 and n.,

i8on., 193 and n., i95n., 227
Cahors, 233, 294
Cairbre, 33, 51
Cambridge Songs, xxix, i6n., 97n., i09n., ii3 n ., 248
Canterbury, 40, 93, 10 1; monastery of St. Augustine at, 109,
19 2
Capella, Martianus, xxvi, xxx, 40m
Carintbia, monastery of St. Paul in, 33
Carmina Burana, vi and n., vii, 87m, n6n., 126m, 148m,
i6in ., 194m, 199m, 2oon., 203m, 207n., 213m , 214m,
217m , 2i8n., 219m, 22m ., 223m, 224m, 225m, 228m,
232m, 233-36, 248-50, 253-55
Carthage, councils at, 269, 270
Cassiodorus, xvi, xxx, 25 and n.
Cato, XXV, 120, 143
Catullus, xxvi, 87 and n.
Cena Cypriani, 197
Chalcedon, council at, 270
Chalddius, 128
Châlons, council at, 54m, 276
Charlemagne, 36, 42-50, 55, 73, 99, 274
Charles the Bald, 55, 56
Chartres, xx, 69, 94, 10 1, 123, 124, 132, 176, 2i6n., 227
Château-Gonthier, council at, 20m., 287
Chilperic, 25, 29, 30
Chrétien de Troyes, 217, 225
Cicero, xiii, xiv, xv, xxv, xxvi, 40, 9 1, 102, 123, 146, 150
Cistercians, 99, 140, 14 1, 193, 206 and n.
Claudian, xxvi, 134, 144
342 Index
Clement the Irishman, 42, 43, 48
Clerical privilege, 179-88
Clermont, council at, 284
Clonfert, 36, 52, 69
Clonmacnoise, 35, 36m, 44, 52, 69
Cloveshoe, council at, 272
Cluny, 70, 85, i i 7, 14 1, 191
Coelcu of Clonmacnoise, 35, 44
Cologne, 36, 52, 63, 164, 170, 1 7 1, 206 and n.; councils at,
233, 292, 296
Columba, St., 35, 37, 38
Columbanus, St., 3 1, 36-39, 40m
Comgall, St., 3 1, 50
Comgan, 62m, 66n.
Constance of Aquitaine, 78, 192
Credo au Ribaut, 208-10

Damian, St. Peter, xvii, xx, 90-97, 137m

Dares, xv, xvi
Desiderius of Vienne, xviii, 8
Dictys, xvi, xxviii
Dicuil, 48, 49 and n.
Dominicans, 14 1, 156
Donatus, xxi, xxiv, xxv, xxx, 44, 123, 134, 143, 266
Dongus, 51, 66n.
Dubthach, 33m, 02n., 66n.
Dum Dianae vitrea, 16 1, 236
Dungal, 42, 43, 48
Dunstan, St., 71 and n., 192 and n., 199m

Eberhard II, Archbishop of Salzburg, 207, 233

Eberhard of Beduine (Graedsmus), 134, 145 and n., 266
Eberhard the German (Laborintus), xxiii, xxvi, I27n.
Eberhardini, 233, 257, 259, 297
Ecbasis Captivi, 7m ., i98n., 203n.
Eginhard, 42 and n., 44m
Ekkehard I of St. Gall, 73-75, 78
Ekkehard IV of St. Gall 52 and n., 53m, 54m, 75n., 76n.,
189, i9on.
 Index 343
Eleanor of Aquitaine, 234
Ennodius of Arles, 14 and n., 15 and n.
Ermenrich of Ellwangen, xxi
Exeter, council at, i86n., 293

Faba, Guido, i49n., i93n.

Farfa, 283
Faroes, 49
Fergus, 51, 62m, 66n.
Ferrara, council at, 298
Ferrières, 197, i98n.
Fidelis, Brother, 49
Flavigny, 85, 238
Fleury, 70m, 72, 79, 197
Flodoard of Rheims, 78
Fortunatus, Vernandus, 25-30
Foulques of Toulouse, 205n.
Franco of Cologne, 95
Fredegis, 46, 47m
Friuli, 61, 257; council at, 274
Froumund of Tegernsee, 238
Fulbert, St., of Chartres, 69, 72, 93, 94 and n., 10 1, 109,
245
Fursa, St., 32, 33

Garnier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, 229, 234m

Gautier de Château-Thierry, 142, 185m, i87n.
Gautier de Châtillon, xiii, xiv, 164
Gerbert, xxxii, 69, 72, 73 and n., 87, 88, 94, 1 1 3
Gerona, council at, 185m, 289
Gherardino Segalelli, 202n.
Gilles de Corbeil, 137, 186
Gilles of Orval, 137
Giraldus Cambrensis, 12 1, 122 and n., 14 1-4 3 , I49n., 173m
Goliard, I09n., 200, 206, 208, 225, 229, 234, 280
Golias, 172, 173, 198, 200, 202, 203n.; nickname for
Abelard, 117 ; 'praelatus Ule, 198m; his familia, 197; his
Apocalypsis, 17 1 ; Confessio, 167-69, 17 1, 207, 232;
Metamorphosis, xxvi, 14 1, 214 and n.; De Conjuge non
344 Index
Ducenda, 22 8 ; Querela ad Papam, i8on.; see also
Archpoet
Goslin, Bishop of Toul, 198
Gospel according to the Silver Mark, 162
Gosvin, S t, 1 16 and n., ii7 n .
Gottschalk, 59-62, 66n., 80, 177
Gratian, xviii, xx and n., i8on.
Gregorius, Magister, xxiii, io7n., i38n.
Gregory IX, 145, i8on., i87n., 287, 288
Gregory the Great, xviii and n., xx, xxx, 8, 13 and n., 30,
98, 138, 22611.
Gregory of Montelongo, his crow, 206
Gregory of Tours, 25 and n., 3on.
Grimoaldus of St. Gall, xxi, 57
Grossetéte of Lincoln, i39n., 163
Guérie d'Auxerre, 156
Guibert de Nogent, 97 and n., 98 and n.
Guibert de la Porrée, 134, 135
Guido de Bazoches, 12 1
Guillaume IX, 16 and n., 225
Guillaume le Breton, 2 17
Guillaume de Lorris, 228
Guillaume de Saint Thierry, 1 1 7
Gunther, Bishop of Cologne, 52, 66n.
Gunzo of Novara, 73, 74, 78

Hadrian the African, 40

Hartgar of Liège, 64-67
Helgaldus, 193m
Helinand, 135, 145 and n., 1890.
Heloïse, 32, 116 , 1 17 , 2 12 - 15 , 227
Henri d'Andely, 123, 133-34 , 144, 228
Henry II, xv, 147, 182 and n.
Henry IV, Emperor, 195m
Henry, Bishop of Winchester, 138
Heribald, 53 and n.
Heric d'Auxerre, 53, 55
Hermann of Dalmatia, 119
Herrad von Landsverg, 21 and n., 135, 13611.
 Index 345
Hibemicus Exul, 49, 50
Hilarius, St., 16, 20, 135
Hilarius the Goliard, 20311.
Hildebert of Le Mans, 94, 99, io in ., 106, 113 , 2 17 and n.
Hildebrand, 92
Hincmar of Rheims, 56, 60 and n., 62m, 278
Hisperica Fantina, 40m
Homer, xv, xxviii, 134, 163, 165, 169, 175, 200, 202
Honorius d’Autun, 226m
Horace, xxiv, xxvi, 62 and n., 80, 86, 90, 134, 144, i89n.,
220
Hrabanus Maurus, 28, 56 and n., 57n., 59, 7 1, 99 and n.,
197, 243
Hroswitha, 81-84
Hucbald, 67, 70 and n.
Hugh of Nunant, 1 72m
Hugues Mascaron, 18 in.

lam dulcis amica, 70m, 79, 80 and n.

Innocent III, 202, 263, 285
Innocent IV, i8on., 287
Isidore of Pelusium, 189 and n., 270
Isidore of Seville, 30, 86, 179 and n.; Beauvais MS., 86
Iso of St. Gall, 75
Ivo of Chartres, 99, 179, 227m

Jacques de Lausanne, 138, 148m

Jacques de Vitry, xviii and n., 14m ., 163, 179 and n.
Jean de Meung, 38-39, 10 1, 134, 214, 225, 228
Jean de Saint Gilles, 1 14m
Jerome, St., xviii, xix, xx, xxii, xxx, 3 1, 44, 1 1 3
Jocelin of Brakelonde, ii4n ., i86n., i92n.
John XII, Pope, 137, 280
John, Archdeacon of Orleans, 100
John, King, 182
John of Garland, xvii, 145, 226m
John of Prüm, 138
John of Salisbury, xv, xvii, xx, xxiii, 64m, 106, ii9n., 1 2 1 -
23, 135, 137 and n., 138 and n., 17m ., 176, 186, 199
346 Index
John Scotus Erigena, 400., 49, 55 and n., 56 and n., 60
Joseph the Irishman, 44
Judith II, Abbess of Remiremont, 215
Judith of Aquitaine, 50
Jumièges, 37, 77
Juvenal, xxiv, xxvi, 90, 134, 214, 261 and n., 266

Lai d*Aristote, 228 and n., 236m

Lambert of Andres, 81
Lanfranc, 93
Laodicaea, council at, 269
Lateran Councils, i8on., 202, 286
Law, canon and civil, study of, 134, 142, 143, 145, 193. Vide
Bologna.
Leyden, MS. of Priscian, 33 and n., 63
Liège, 56, 63-67, 99, 108, 138; councils at, 233, 294
Lismore, Book of, 32m, 33m
Liutprand, 81, 195
Livy, XXV
London, council at, 284
Lothair, 43, 64
Louis the Pious, 50, i84n., 276
Lucan, xxiv, xxix, 114 , 134, 165, 266
Lucretius, xix, xxvi, 1
Luxeuil, 37, 38

Maelbrighde of Armagh, 36, 51

Magdeburg, council at, 299
Mainerius, Magister, 142
Mainz, 57; councils at, 275, 278, 289, 290, 297
Maiolus of Cluny, 85
Malfi, council at, 283
Malmesbury, 56, 176, i99n., 281
Map, Walter, xxvi n., i2on., 139m, 164, 172m, i8on.,
2oon., 203m, 214m
Marbod of Angers, 10 in., 104-6
Marcellus. See Moengal.
Marcus, 52, 54, 66 and n.
Martial, xxv, 134
 Index 347
Martin, St., 26, 27, 198 and n.
Martin of Laon, 55 and n.
Matthew Paris, 202n.
Matthew of Vendôme, xiv, 136 and n., i54n., 163
Maurice de Sully, 119
Maximian, xxxi, 16
Moengal (Marcellus), 52, 75
Monachus S. Galli, 43n., 4411.
Montpellier, council at, 289
Münster, Council at, 292

Neckam, Alexander, xxiv, xxvi, I39n., I46n.

Nicaea, council at, 269
Nicholas, Chancellor of Paris University, xviii
Nicholas, a vagus, 206
Nicolas de Bibera, 55m
Notker Balbulus, 28, 53, 75, 76m, 77, 189 and n., 190
Notker of Liège, 71

Odilo, St., 94, 19m .

Odo, Bishop of Paris, 185
Odo, St., 85
Orbaix, 61, 62
Orderic Vitalis, 94
Orleans, schools of, xvii, xxiv, xxv, 48, 56, 123, 133-58 , i7 2>
183, 184, 18 4 -8 5^ , i86n.; beloved by Goliards, 205;
councils at, 271, 278
Otto I, 72
Otto II, 73
Otto III, 69, 72
Otto, Count Palatine, 164
Otto von Freisingen, ii7 n ., 165m
Ovid, xiv, XV, xvi, xxii, xxiv, xxix, Ó2n., 79, 90, 98, 102, 103
and n., 134, 2 15, 266
Oxford, 143, 193 and n.

Padua, council at, 298

Pangur Ban, 34
Paraclete, 117 , 177, 2 15
348 Index
Paris, councils at, 277, 285, 298
Panna, Bishop of, 202n.
Paul the Deacon, xviii, 42 and n.
Paulinus erf Noia, xviii, 2, 8 -13 , 19, 241
Paulus Albanis, 74
Pavia, 43, 93, 167, 278
Persius, xxvi, 134, 144
Pervigilium Veneris, xxvii, 15 and n., 61, 87 and n., 109, 218
Peter of Blois, xiv and n., xx and n., 114 and n., 142
Peter of Pisa, 42, 73
Peter Riga, 136
Peter the Venerable, 115 , 1 17 - 19 , 21 in., 2i5n.
Petronius Arbiter, xv, xxv, xxvi, 143
Philip, Archbishop of Ravenna, 17 1 and n.
Philippe le Bel, i82n.
Philippe le Grève, i82n.
Philippe of Harvengt, 116 , 142
Phyllis and Flora, 234, 235
Piero della Vigne, 74
Plato, 55, 95, 1 19, 134, 135
Plautus, xx, xxvi
Ponce de Provence, 143, 149, 150
Pont-Audémar, council at, 292
Prague, 37; council at, 298
Primas, 172, 230, 238; of Cologne, 164, 17 1; of Orleans,
134, 164, 17 1, 172m, i85n.; see also Archpoet.
Priscian, xxi, xxv, xxx, 62, 114 , 119 , 134, 144; Leyden MS.,
33 and n.; St. Gall MS., 33n., 38, 51-54
Propertius, xxvi, 220
Prudentius, xxvi, 18-23, 79, 134, 242-43

Radegunde, St., 26, 27

Radulfus of Beauvais, ii4n ., 145m
Radulfus Glaber, 42n., 69, 9on., 97 and n., 191 and n.
Radulfus Tortaire, i98n.
Rahingus of Flavigny, 85, 238
Rainaldus of Angers, 94, 10 1
Ratherius of Liège, 84
Ratpert, 53, 75, 76, 176
 Index 349
Ravenna, 25, 26, 27; council at, 293
Reginald von Dassel, 148, 164-71
Regula Magistri, 177-78, 273
Reichenau, 35, 54 and n., 56-58, 73, 74
Remiremont, 37, 215
Reuchlin, 199 and n.
Rheims, 56, 61, 72, 85, 94; council at, 55m, i87n.
Richard, Bishop of Syracuse, 1 39n-
Richard, St., of Chicester, 1 2on.
Richard de Bury, 1 8on.
Richer, 73 and n.
Ripoll, 55, 215 and n.
Risphach, council at, 274
Robert, St. and King, 69, 78, 192, i93n.
Robert of Brunne, 227 and n.
Robert of Melun, 139 and n.
Robert de Sorbon, 1 1 3 and n., 114m , 163, 196m, 2oon.,
205m
Rodez, 294
Roman de Guillaume de Dol, 2i6n., 225
Roman de la Rose, 10 1, 134
Rome, councils at, 276, 278, 283
Rouen, councils at, 20m ., 233, 283, 286
Rudel, Jaufré, 22 1-2 4

St. Albans, 120

St. Alexis, La Vie de, 21 and n., 82 and n., 99
St. Augustine, Canterbury, 109, n o , 192
St. Bertin, 37, 78m
St. Denis, 69, 177, 186, 192
St. G all, 33 and n., 36, 38, 43, 5 1 - 5 5 , 57» 69, 73“ 77. i 8 9
and n.
St. Geneviève, 116 , 139
St. Germain d*Auxerre, 191
St. Ghislain, 199 and n.
St. Hippolyte (St. Pölten), council at, 202n., 233, 263m, 293
St. James at Radsbon, 37
St. Mardal of Limoges, 7on., 79
St. Martin at Cologne, 36, 63, 164, 170, 17 1
350 Index
St. Martin at Tours, 26-28, 69
St. Médard, 53
St. Omer, 234
St. Paul, Carinthia, 33
St. Peter at Radsbon, 37
St. Rémy, Rheims, 56, 162
St. Riquier, 37, 47
St. Sebasdan, Auvergne, 190
St. Valery, 37, 38m
Salerno, 145
Salimbene, 150 and n., 17 1, 202m, 205 and n.
Sallust, XV, xvii, XXV
Salomon, Abbot, 75-76
Salzburg, councils at, i87n., 20m., 204, 233, 290, 292, 295,
296
Sedulius, xxvi, 13, 62n., 134
Sedulius of Liège, 30, 39, 62, 64-67
Sens, 198 and n., 20in., 233, 287
Serlon of Wilton, 139, 140
Servatus Lupus, 7 1, 197
Sidonius Apollinaris, xxv, 13, 14 and n., 26 and n., 27, 28m
Sigebert of Liège, 107 and n., 109, 247
Simon of Tournai, 198m
Sindolf of St. Gall, 76
Spires, 17 1, i95n.
Statius, xxiv, xxix, 1, 109, 134, 266
Stavelot, 67
Stephen of Tournai, ii9 n ., 139m, 1460., I47n.
Suetonius, xxv, i6n.
Sulpicius Severus, 3 and n., 12
Surianus, 207 and n., 261-63
Symmachus, xxv, 7 and n., 8
Szabolch, council at, 283

Tarragon, council of, 233, 297

Tegernsee, 56, 238
Terence, xxvi, 81, 134, 238
Tetbald of Vernon, 99
Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, 40, 176
 Index 351
Theodulfus, 42, 48 and n., 56, 101
Thierry of Chartres, 1 1 9 , 1 23n.
Thomas of Cabham, 291
Tibullus, xxvi, 144, 220, 233
Toledo, 72, 145, 1 5 1 ; council at, 272
Toul, 7 1, 198m, 203, 233, 294
Toulouse, 3n., 8, 30, 145, 18 in.
Tours, 56, 94, 99, ioin ., 106, 114 , 115m ; councils at, 271,
276, 279
Trêves, councils at, 286, 291, 297
Tribur, council at, 279
Trosley, council at, 280
Trullo, council at, 272
Turilo, 53, 75, 176

Ulrich von Hutten, 202 and n.

Valentia, synod at, 54m, 289

Vemeuil, council at, 273
Verona, 84, 87m
Vienne, xviii, 166
Vilgardus of Ravenna, 90
Vincent of Veauvais, 143
Virgil, xiii, XV, xvii, xxi, xxii, xxv, xxvi, xxviii, 6, i 0 , 28, 44
45, 80, 85, 86, 90, 102, 109, 134, 163-65; Georgies ’

xix, 124; Bucolics, xxii, 98

Virgilius, Bp. of Salzburg, 33
Virgilius Maro of Toulouse, xvii, 8n., 3on., 4on.

Walafrid Strabo, 28, 35 and n., 57-59, 87n.

Walter of Chatillon, 163
Walter of Orleans, 278
Walter of Sens, 198, 280
Walther von der Vogelweide, 159, 206, 257, 258
Waltharius, 78
William of Malmesbury, 39m, 7 1 * 72 anc^ n-> 73, 88 and n
199m *’
Winchester, clerks at, i99n.
Wireker, Nigel, 163
352 Index
Wolfger of Passau, 233, 257
Worms, council at, 279
Würzburg, 37, 233

York, council at, 273

 ANCHOR BOOKS

ADAMS, HENRY Democracy and Esther A243

--------- A Henry Adams Reader A177
--------- Mont-Salnt-Michel and Chartres A166
ALAIN-FOURNIER, HENRI The Wanderer A14
ALBRIGHT, W. F. Fromthe Stone Age toChristianity A100
ALLPORT, GORDONW. The Nature of Prejudice A149
ANDRADE, E. N. DAC. An Approach to ModernPhysics Alll
--------- Sir Isaac Newton A151
ARENDT, HANNAH The Human Condition A182
ARISTOPHANES Five Comedies A57
ARON, RAYMOND On War A171
AUDEN, W. H.; GREENBERG, NOAH; KALLMAN, CHESTER An Eliza­
bethan Song Book A56
AUERBACH, ERICH Mimesis A107
BARK, WILLIAMCARROLL Origins of the Medieval World A190
BARTH, KARL Community, State and Church A221
BARZUN, JACQUES Classic, Romantic and Modern A255
---------- Darwin, Marx, Wagner A127
---------- Teacher In America A25
BATE, WALTER JACKSON Prefaces to Criticism A165
BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES The Mirror of Art A84
BEDIER, JOSEPH The Romance of Tristan and Iseult A2
BEERBOHM, MAX A Selection from “Around Theatres** A228
BEETHOVEN Letters, Journals and Conversations A206
BENTLEY, ERIC (Ed.) The Classic Theatre I: Six Italian Plays A155&
---------- The Classic Theatre II: Five German Plays A155b
---------- The Classic Theatre III: Six Spanish Plays A155c
BENTLEY, ERIC (Ed.) The Modern Theatre I, II, IH, IV, V, VI A48a,
A48b, A48c, A48d, A48e, A48f
---------- From the American Drama (The Modern Theatre IV) A48d
BERENSON, BERNARD Aesthetics and History A36
BERGSON, HENRI *'Laughter” in Comedy A87
---------- Matter and Memory A172
--------- The Two Sources of Morality and Religion A28
BETTELHEIM, BRUNO Paul and Mary: Two Case Histories from
Truants from Life A237
BISHOP, AMASA Project Sherwood, A202
BLACKMUR, R. P. Formand Value InModern Poetry A96
BRENNER, CHARLES An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis A102
BROGAN, D. W. Politics in America, A198
BROOKS, VAN WYCK America’s Coming of Age A129
BROWN, ROBERT McAFEE and GUSTAVE WEIGEL, S.J.
An American Dialogue A257
BURCKHARDT, JACOB The Age of Constantine the Great A65
BURTT, EDWIN ARTHUR The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern
Science A41
BUTTERFIELD, HERBERT and OTHERS A Short History of Science
A180
CABLE, GEORGE W. Creoles and Cajuns A179
--------- The Negro Question A144
CARY, JOYCE A Fearful Joy A242
CASSIRER, ERNST An Essay on Man A3
CASTIGLIONE, BALDESAR The Book of the Courtier A186
CHAPMAN, JOHN JAY The Selected Writings of John Jay Chapman
A161
CHASE, RICHARD The American Novel and Its Tradition A116
CHEKHOV, ANTON Peasants and Other Stories A66
CLARK, KENNETH The Nude A168
COLETTE My Mother’s House and The Vagabond A62
CONANT, JAMES B. Modern Science and Modern Man AIO
CONNOLLY, CYRIL Enemies of Promise and Other Essays, A194
CONRAD, JOSEPH Chance A113
---------- A Mirror of the Sea and A Personal Record A207
---------- The Rescue, A199
---------- The Rover A240
---------- The Secret Agent A8
---------- The Shadow-Line and Two Other Tales A178
---------- Tales of Heroes and History A228
---------- Victory A106
---------- Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories A173
COULANGES, FUSTEL DE The Ancient City A76
CRANE, HART The Complete Poems of Hart Crane A128
CROMBIE, A. C. Medieval and Early Modern Science: I, n A167a, A167b
DANTZIG, TOBIAS Number, the Language of Science A67
DICKINSON, EMILY Selected Poems and Letters A192
DIDEROT, DENIS Rameau's Nephewand Other Works A61
DOLLARD, JOHN Caste and Class in a Southern Town A95
DOSTOEVSKY, FYODOR Three Short Novels A193
DOUGHTY, C. M. Travels InArabia Deserta A50
DUBOS, RENE Mirage of Health A258
DUMAS, ALEXANDRE Adventures in Spain A211
DUPEE, F. W. Henry James A68
EDEL, LEON Literary Biography A188
ESSLIN, MARTIN Brecht: The Man and His Work A245
FERGUSSON, FRANCIS The Human Image in Dramatic Literature A124
---------- The Idea of a Theatre A4
FINCH, JAMES K. The Story of Engineering A214
FLORES, ANGEL (Ed.) An Anthology of French Poetry A134
---------- An Anthology of German Poetry A197
---------- Nineteenth Century French Tales A217
---------- Nineteenth Century German Tales A184
FLORNOY, BERTRAND The World of the Inca A137
FORSTER, E. M. Alexandria: A History and a Guide A231
FORTUNE, EDITORS OF The Exploding Metropolis A146
FRANKFORT, HENRI The Birth of Civilization in the Near East A89
FREUD, SIGMUND Civilization and Its Discontents A130
---------- The Future of an Illusion A99
---------- A General Selection fromthe Works of A115
---------- The Origins of Psychoanalysis Al12
FRY, ROGER Transformations A77
GALILEO Discoveries and Opinions A94
GARNETT, DAVID Pocahontas A157
GASTER, T. H. The Dead Sea Scriptures in English Translation A92
GEIRINGER, KARL Brahms A248
GOFFMAN, ERVING The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life A174
GOGOL, NICOLAI Tales of Good and Evil A120
CONCOURT, EDMONDand JULES DE The Concourt Journals A158
GOYA, FRANCISCO DE The Disasters of War AA1
GRANICK, DAVID The Red Executive A246
GRANVILLE-BARKER, H. and HARRISON, G. B. A Companion to
Shakespeare Studies, A191
GRAVES. ROBERT Good-Bye to All That A123
---------- The Poems of Robert Graves—Chosen by Himself A139
GREEN, HENRY Loving A18
HADAS, MOSES (Ed.) A History of Rome A78
--------- (Ed) The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca A148
--------- (Trans.) Three Greek Romances A21
HAGGIN, B. H. The Listener's Musical Companion A183
 HAHN, WALTER P. and NEPP, JOHN C. American Strategy for the
Nuclear Age A224
HALL, ROBERT A. JR. Linguistics and Your Language A201
HAMILTON, ALEXANDER, MADISON, JAMES, and JAY, JOHN The
Federalist Papers (Edited by Roy P. Fairfield) A239
HANDUN, OSCAR Race and Nationality InAmerican Life A110
HENDERSON, HAROLD An Introduction to Haiku A150
HERBERO, WILL Four Existentialist Theologians A141
--------- Protestant, Catholic, Jew A195
HINDEMITH, PAUL A Composer’s World A235
HOLT, ELIZABETH GILMORE A Documentary History of Art: I, II
A114a, Al 14b
HOOVER, CALVIN B. The Economy, Liberty and the State A241
HUIZINGA, J. The Waning of the Middle Ages A42
IBSEN, HENRIK Brand A215
--------- When We Dead Awaken and Three Other Plays A215b
JAMES, HENRY The Ambassadors A154
--------- The Awkward Age A138
--------- In the Cage and Other Tales A131
--------- Selected Letters, A204
--------- What Malsle Knew A43
JARRELL, RANDALL (Ed.) The Anchor Book of Stories A145
JASPERS, KARL Man In the Modern Age A101
JESPERSEN, OTTO Growth and Structure of the English Language A46
JEWETT, SARAH ORNE The Country of the Pointed Firs A26
JONES, ERNEST Hamlet and Oedipus A31
JUNG, C. G. Psyche and Symbol A136
KAFKA, FRANZ Amerika A49
KAUFMANN, WALTER Critique of Religion and Philosophy A252
--------- From Shakespeare to Existentialism A213
KAZIN, ALFRED On Native Grounds A69
KEATS, JOHN Selected Letters A70
KIERKEGAARD, SOREN Either/Or, I, II A181a, A181b
--------- Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death A30
--------- Selections fromthe Writings of Kierkegaard A210
KISSINGER, HENRY Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy A152
KITTO, H. D. F. Greek Tragedy A38
KRAMER, SAMUEL NOAH History Begins at Sumer A175
--------- (Ed.) Mythologies of the Ancient World A229
LASKY, MELVIN J. (Ed.) The Anchor Review: Number One A64, Num­
ber Two A109
LAWFORD, GIOVANNA The Human Frame A234
LAWRENCE, D. H. Sea and Sardinia and Selections from Twilight In
Italy A39
--------- Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence (Edited by Diana Trilling)
A230
■ Studies In Classic American Literature A5
LEAVIS, F. R. The Great Tradition A40
LERMONTOV, MIHAIL A Hero of Our Time A133
LEWIS, D. B. WYNDHAM François Villon A147
LEWIS, W. H. The Splendid Century A122
LUBELL, SAMUEL The Future of American Politics A71
LYNN, Kenneth S. The Comic Tradition In America A187
MALINOWSKI, BRONISLAW Magic, Science and Religion A23
MARX, KARL and ENGELS, FRIEDRICH Basic Writings on Politics
and Philosophy A185
MATTINGLY, HAROLD Roman Imperial Civilisation A160
MAURIAC, FRANCOIS Thérèse A79
MELVILLE, HERMAN Redburn: His First Voyage A118
MEREDITH, GEORGE “An Essay on Comedy” in Comedy A87
MERWIN, W. S. Spanish Ballads A253
METERHOFF, HANS (Ed.) The Philosophy of History in Our Time
A164
MILLER, PERRT (Ed.) The American Puritans: Their Prose and Po­
etry A80
--------- (Ed.) The American Transcendentallsts: Their Prose and Po­
etry A119
MONTAIGNE, MICHEL DE The Complete Essays, Vols. I, n, m A227a,
A227b, A227C
MURASAKI, LADT The Tale of Genjl A55
---------- The Tale of Genjl, Part n A176
MURRAY, GILBERT Five Stages of Greek Religion A51
MURRAY, MARGARET The God of the Witches A212
NEALE, J. E. Queen Elizabeth I A105
NEHRU, JAWAHARLAL Discovery of India, A200
NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of
Morals A81
ORTEGA T GASSET, JOSE The Dehumanization of Art A72
ORWELL, GEORGE A Collection of Essays A29
PANOFSKY, ERWIN Meaning Inthe Visual Arts A59
PEIRCE, CHARLES 8. Values In a Universe of Chance A126
PETERSEN, WILLIAM (Ed.) American Social Patterns A86
PETERSON, SPIRO (Ed.) The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled and Other
Criminal Fiction of Seventeenth-Century England A232
PIERSON, GEORGE W. and LUNT, DUDLEY C. Tocqueville In Americo
A189
PIRENNE, HENRI A History of Europe: I, n A156a, A156b
---------- Medieval Cities A82
POLYA, G. How to Solve It A93
POWER, EILEEN Medieval People A32
PRAZ, MARIO The Flaming Heart A132
PROUST, MARCEL Pleasures and Days and Other Writings A97
RAHV, PHILIP Discovery of Europe A208
REPS, PAUL (Ed.) Zen Flesh, Zen Bones A233
RIESMAN, DAVID Constraint and Variety In American Education A135
— The Lonely Crowd A16
- - Selected Essays fromIndividualismReconsidered A58
RILKE, RAINER MARIA Selected Letters A223
ROUGEMONT, DENIS DE Love In the Western World A121
ROURKE, CONSTANCE American Humor A12
RUSSELL, BERTRAND Mysticism and Logic A104
SANTAYANA, GEORGE Character and OpinionIn the United States A73
---------- Three Philosophical Poets A17
SCHRODINGER, ERWIN What Is Life? A88
SCIAMA, D. W. The Unity of the Universe A247
SCOTT, GEOFFREY The Architecture of Humanism A33
BHATTUCK, ROGER The Banquet Years A238
SHAW, BERNARD Shaw on Music A53
SHERRINGTON, SIR CHARLES Man on His Nature A15
SIGERIST, HENRY E. The Great Doctors A140
SNOW, C. P. The Masters: A Novel A162
8TEEGMULLER, FRANCIS The Grand Mademoiselle A203
STENDHAL The Charterhouse of Parma Al
---------- Five Short Novels of Stendhal A153
---------- On Love A103
STRINDBERG, AUGUST Six Plays A54
---------- Five Plays A219
SUZUKI, D. T. Zen Buddhism A90
8YPHER, WYLIE (Ed.) Comedy A87
---------- Four Stages of Renaissance Style A45
TAYLOR, A. E. Socrates A9
TITCHMARSH, E. C. Mathematics for the General Reader A169
TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE The European Revolution and the Corre­
spondence with Gobineau A163
- The OldRegime and the French Revolution A60
TOKLAS, ALICE B. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book A196
TRAVERSI, D. A. An Approach to Shakespeare A74
TRELAWNEY, E. J. The Last Days of Shelley and Byron A225
TREVELYAN, G. M. History of England I, II. Ill A22a( A22b, A22o
TRILLING, LIONEL The Liberal Imagination A13
---------- The Middle of the Journey A98
TROT8KY, LEON The Russian Revolution A170
TSAO HSUEH-CHIN Dreamof the Red Chamber A159
TURGENEV. IVAN Selected Tales A203
TURNER, W. J. Mozart: The Man and His Works A24
VAN DOREN, MARK Shakespeare All
VERGA, GIOVANNI The House by the Medlar Tree A47
VIDICH, ARTHUR J. and BENSMAN, JOSEPH Small Town In Mass
__ Society A216
VIRGIL The Aeneld A20
WADDELL, HELEN The Wandering Scholars A63
WALEY, ARTHUR Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China A7B
WEDGWOOD, C. V. The Thirty Years War A249
WESTON, JESSIE FromRitual to Romance A125
WHYTE, WILLIAMH., JR. The Organization Man Al17
WIENER, NORBERT The Human Use of Human Beings A34
WILDER, THORNTON Heaven’s My Destination A209
WILLEY, BASIL The Seventeenth Century Background A19
WILLIAMS, RAYMOND Culture and Society 1780-1950 A220
WILSON, EDMUND Eight Essays A37
— A Literary Chronicle: 1920-1950 A85
■ — A Piece of My Mind A143
---------- To the Finland Station A6
WOODWARD C. VANN Reunion and Reaction A83
WRIGHT, G. ERNEST and DAVID NOEL FREEDMAN, eds.
The Biblical Archaeologist Reader A250
WRIGHT, G. ERNEST and FULLER, REGINALD H. The Book of the
Acts Of God A222
YEATS, WILLIAM BUTLER The Autobiography of WilliamButler Yeats
A142
YARMOUNSKY, AVRAHM (Ed.) Soviet Short Stories A218
YOURCENAR, MARGUERITE Hadrian’s Memoirs A108
 DOLPHIN BOOKS AND DOLPHIN MASTERS

The bold face M indicates a Dolphin Master. Dolphin Masters are

Dolphin Books in the editions of greatest importance to the teacher and
student. In selecting the Dolphin Masters, the editors have taken partic­
ular pains to choose copies of the most significant edition (usually the
first) by obtaining original books or their facsimiles or by having repro­
ductions made of library copies of particularly rare editions. Facsimiles
of original title pages and other appropriate material from the first edi­
tion are Included in many Masters.

FICTION

JANE EYRE Charlotte Brontë C5

THE SCARLET LETTER Nathaniel Hawthorne C7
KIDNAPPED Robert Louis Stevenson C8
THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM William Dean Howells C9
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN Harriet Beecher Stowe M C13
THE PRAIRIE James Fenlmore Cooper C14
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY Oscar Wilde CIS
THE WAY OF ALL FLESH Samuel Butler C16
THE RED AND THE BLACK Stendhal C17
PERE GORIOT Honoré de Balzac C18
MADAME BOVARY Gustave Flaubert C19
THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD Oliver Goldsmith C20
THE MILL ON THE FLOSS George Eliot C21
JUDE THE OBSCURE Thomas Hardy C22
MANON LESCAUT Abbé Prévost C29
IVANHOE Sir Walter Scott C31
A TALE OF TWO CITIES Charles Dickens C32
NORTHANGER ABBEY and PERSUASION Jane Austen M C34
THE MOONSTONE Wilkie Collins C35
FRANKENSTEIN Mary Shelley C44
THREE MEN IN A BOAT Jerome K. Jerome C46
TALES OF THE GROTESQUE AND ARABESQUE
Edgar Allan Poe M C50
HIS MONKEY WIFE John Collier C53
LOOKING BACKWARD (2000-1887) Edward Bellamy C55
MOLL FLANDERS Daniel Defoe C56
BARCHESTER TOWERS Anthony Trollope C57
CRANFORD E. C. Gaskell C60
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE Stephen Crane C61
ADAM BEDE George Eliot C62
JOSEPH ANDREWS Henry Fielding C63
A CHRISTMAS CAROL Charles Dickens C65
VILLETTE Charlotte Brontë C66
MOBY DICK Herman Melville C70
TREASURE ISLAND Robert Louis Stevenson C72
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE Jane Austen C74
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD Thomas Hardy C75
THE LOG OF A COWBOY Andy Adams C77
BLACK BEAUTY Anna Sewell C78
GULLIVER’S TRAVELS Jonathan Swift C88
A HAZARD OP NEW FORTUNES William Dean Howells C88
QUENTIN DURWARD Sir Walter Scott C89
ALICE'S ADVENTURES UNDERGROUND and ALICE’S
ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND Lewis Carroll M C94
THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN Mark Twain C98
ROBINSON CRUSOE Daniel Defoe C103
TRISTRAM SHANDY Laurence Sterne C104
BURIED ALIVE Arnold Bennett C109
WUTHERING HEIGHTS Emily Brontë C107
PORTRAIT OF A MAN WITH RED HAIR Hugh Walpole C108
THE MARBLE FAUN Nathaniel Hawthorne C110
AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE
Oliver Wendell Holmes Cl11
MANSFIELD PARK Jane Austen C113
HARD TIMES Charles Dickens C114
THE DAMNATION OF THERON WARE Harold Frederlo C116
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE Thomas Hardy C119
THE EXPEDITION OF HUMPHRY CLINKER Tobias Smollett C120
THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND, ESQ.
William Makepeace Thackeray C121
EVELINA Fanny Burney C123
THE DAY OF THE TKIFFIDS John Wyndham C130
THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF HENRY RYECROFT
George Glsslng C131
THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER Mark Twain C133
THE WARDEN Anthony Trollope C134
TRILBY George du Maurler C135
TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES Thomas Hardy C138
NEW GRUB STREET George Glsslng C139
RODERICK RANDOM Tobias Smollett C140
DAVID HARUM Edward Noyes Westcott C148
EUGENIE GRANDET Honoré de Balzac C147
THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES Nathaniel Hawthorne C148
EMMA Jane Austen C149
SILAS MARNER George Eliot C151
RESURRECTION Leo Tolstoy C152
THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE Thomas Hardy C153
ELSIE VENNER Oliver Wendell Holmes C154
SISTER CARRIE Theodore Dreiser C160
TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA Jules Verne C167
AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS Jules Verne C168
THE PATHFINDER James Fenlmore Cooper C173
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY Jane Austen C174
BEN-HUR Lew Wallace C175
GREAT EXPECTATIONS Charles Dickens C181
OLIVER TWIST Charles Dickens C182
OMOO Herman Melville C183
KING SOLOMON’S MINES H. Rider Haggard C188
THE FANCHER TRAIN Amelia Bean C197
THE SKETCHBOOK OF GEOFFREY CRAYON, GENT.
Washington Irving M C206
THE SPY James Fenlmore Cooper C207
NANA Emile Zola C208
SHE H. Rider Haggard C210
THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS James Fenlmore Cooper C211
 POETRY AND DRAMA

THE DIVINE COMEDY OP DANTE ALIGHIERI: THE INFERNO

Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow M Cl
LEAVES OF GRASS Walt Whitman M C3
LYRICAL BALLADS William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge M C4
POEMS OF KEATS AND SHELLEY (1820) M C ll
INVITATION TO POETRY Lloyd Frankenberg C24
archy and mehltabel don marquis C26
RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM Edward FitzGerald, translator C28
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS M C33
THE GOLDENTREASURY OF ENGLISH SONGS ANDLYRICS
Francis Turner Paigrave M C45
THE DRAMATIC WORKS OF SHERIDAN
Richard Brinsley Sheridan M C47
THE DIVINE COMEDY OF DANTE ALIGHIERI: PURGATORIO
Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow M C51
THE DIVINE COMEDY OF DANTE ALIGHIERI: PARADISO
Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow M C52
DON JUAN Lord Byron C64
PARADISE LOST John Milton C73
MEN AND WOMEN Robert Browning C136
THE PLAYS OF OSCAR WILDE Oscar Wilde C137
H. M. S. PINAFORE. ANDSIX OTHER SAVOY OPERAS
W. S. Gilbert C155
THE MIKADO, AND FIVE OTHER SAVOY OPERAS
W. S. Gilbert C158
IDYLLS OF THE KING Alfred. Lord Tennyson C165
EIGHT DRAMAS OF CALDERON
Edward FitzGerald, translator M C169
PLEASURE DOME Lloyd Frankenberg C190
SIBYLLINE LEAVES Samuel TaylorColeridge M C1Ö5
SONNETS FROMTHE PORTUGUESE AND OTHER POEMS
Elizabeth Barrett Browning C209

HISTORY AND B I O G R A P H Y

THE BERNAL DIAZ CHRONICLES

Albert Idell, editor and translator C25
OUR FRIEND JAMES JOYCE Mary and Padralc Colum C27
GIANTS OF GEOLOGY Carroll Lane and Mildred Adams Fenton C36
Mr: LINCOLN’S ARMY Bruce Catton C37
BATTLES THAT CHANGED HISTORY Fletcher Pratt C38
TEACHER Helen Keller C39
THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE E. C. Gaskell M C48
COMMON SENSE and THE CRISIS Thomas Paine M C49
THE FOUR GEORGES William Makepeace Thackeray C54
TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST R. H. Dana C76
SEA FIGHTS AND SHIPWRECKS Hanson W. Baldwin C84
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN M C87
LIVES OF THE POETS [Cowley to Prior] Samuel Johnson C91
LIVES OF THE POETS TCongreve to Gray] Samuel Johnson C92
THE MAN WHO KILLED LINCOLN Philip Van Dören Stern C101
LIFE OF NELSON Robert Southey C112
THE LIFE OF SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE John Dickson Carr C117
TONGUE OF THE PROPHETS Robert St. John C118
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Anthony TroUope C128
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BENVENUTO CELLINIBenvenuto Cellini C129
THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR Thucydides Cl50
VENERABLE ANCESTOR Harry Hussey C157
BENT'S FORT David Lavender C159
BALBOA OP DARIEN Kathleen Romoll C162
THE CONQUEST OF PERU William H. Prescott C166
EXPERIMENT IN REBELLION Clifford Dowdey C17I
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN STUART MILL
John Stuart Mill C179

PH ILO S O PH Y AND R E L IG IO N

WALDEN Henry David Thoreau CIO

THE REPUBLIC AND OTHER WORKS Plato C12
THE LIFE OF JESUS Ernest Renan C59
THE MEDITATIONS OF MARCUS AURELIUS
Translated by George Long C68
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE William James C71
ON THE NATURE OF THINGS Lucretius
Translated by H. A. J. Munro C80
THE RATIONALISTS Descartes, Spinoza,Leibniz C82
THE EMPIRICISTS Locke, Berkeley, Hume C109
THE SECRET SAYINGS OF JESUS
Robert M. Grant with David Noel Freedman C163

E S S A Y S AND LE T T E R S

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE Ralph Waldo Emerson M C2

THE ESSAYS OF ELIA and THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA
Charles Lamb M C6
LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH COMIC WRITERS
William Hazlltt M C30
HAWTHORNE Henry James C58
THE ESSAYS OF FRANCIS BACON C67
THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE William Hazlltt C79
ON HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP and REPRESENTATIVE MEN
Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson C83
LIFE IN MEXICO Frances Calderón de la Barca C93
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 8ELBORNE Gilbert White C96
CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER and SUSPIRIA
DE PROFUNDIS Thomas De Qulncey M C97
THE COMPLETE ANGLER Izaak Walton C102
THE NEXT MILLION YEARS C. G. Darwin C106
AN ALMANAC OF LIBERTY William O. Douglas C119
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN FARMER
J. H. St. John Crèvecoeur C164
FABIAN ESSAYS IN SOCIALISM Edited by G. B. Shaw C170

M Y S T E R Y

BLACK PLUMES Margery Alllngham C41

THE MAN IN THE GREEN HAT Manning Coles C42
THE BELL IN THE FOG John Stephen Strange C43
THE PEOPLE AGAINST O’HARA Eleazar Lipsky C122
A STUDY IN SCARLET A THE SIGN OF FOUR
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle C124
ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle C125
MEMOIRS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES Sir Arthur Conan Doyle C126
THE HOUND OF THE Rasitrrvtt.t.igfl
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle C127
POOR HARRIET Elizabeth Fenwick C185
THE WHISPER IN THE GLOOM Nicholas Blake C186
THE LADT AND HER DOCTOR Evelyn Piper C187
A HERO FOR LEANDA Andrew Garve C189

M ISC ELLA NEOUS

A HANDBOOK TO MARRIAGE Theodor Bovet C23
SEX AND FAMILY IN THE BIBLE AND THE MIDDLE EAST
Raphael Patal C40
THE EXECUTIVE LIFE Editors Of FORTUNE C69
ZAPOTEC Helen Augur C61
CONVERSATIONS WITH TOSCANINI B. H. Haggln C85
AMERICAN WATS OF LIFE George R. Stewart C90
THE ABC OF CHILD CARE Allan Fromme, Ph.D. C95
THE AGE OF FABLE Thomas Bulflnch C1S2
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF CELLS Joseph G. Hoffman C156
MARRIAGE EAST AND WEST David and Vera Mace C161
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES Charles Darwin C172
PRIMITIVE PEOPLES TODAYEdward Weyer, Jr. C200

DOLPHIN R E F E R E N C E S E R I E S

POEMS TO REMEMBER John Kleran, editor C99

100 GREAT OPERAS AND THEIR STORIES Henry W. Simon C100
THE FAMILY HANDBOOK OF HOME NURSING ANDMEDICAL
CARE I. J. Rossman, M.D. and Doris R. Schwartz, R.N. C141
THE COMPLETE BOOK OF CHESS TACTICS Fred Reinfeld C143
THESAURUS OF ANECDOTES Edmund Fuller Cidi

DOLPHIN HANDBOOK S E R I E S

THE FINE ART OF MIXING DRINKS David A. Embury C177

HOWTO SAY A FEW WORDS David Guy Powers C178
HOWTOBE A CONSISTENT WINNER IN THE MOST POPULAR
CARD GAMES John R. Crawford C180
COOKING WITH A FRENCH TOUCH Gerald Maurois C184
BEER AND GOOD FOOD Myra Waldo C196
CREATIVE COOKING Nicholas Roosevelt C213
A NEW WAY TO BETTER ENGLISH Rudolf Flesch C214
IT’S EASY TO INCREASE YOUR VOCABULARY William Morris C215