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ACQUAINTANCE WITH FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND BOOKS. 451

modern minister might subsidize the press; and the same Latin songs were current in England and Germany. The constant demand for a knowledge of French, Latin, and English, acted upon all classes of society, and when Richard I. was returning home through Austria, two of his suite were able to speak German, which they had probably picked up in the camp. A knowledge of the Bible must have been pretty widely diffused, when our kings jested out of it, and when a popular demagogue like Fitz-Osbert made Scripture the text of his discourses. The chronicles, written by ecclesiastics, are mostly tesselated with quotations from the Vulgate, which are introduced as freely as they were afterwards in Puritan phraseology. A knowledge of the best classical authors was equally common. The latest and best biographer of Giraldus Cambrensis says that "quotations from Terence, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, and Statius, from Cicero and Seneca, are thickly sown throughout his writings."s In fact, it was one misfortune of the middle ages, that the originality of its writers was overpowered by their reverence for the great masters whom they studied; and their style exhibits the chains of this generous servitude. There were two ways in which a student communicated his last results to the world. Giraldus Cam-brensis, a noisy, self-satisfied man, was fond of lecturing in public, and he tells us that scarcely a hall in Paris could con-tain the multitudes who flocked to hear him discourse on law. When he had finished his "Topography of Ireland," he read it. publicly at Oxford. On the first of the three days which it occu-pied, he entertained all the poor of the town; on the second, all the doctors of the faculties and their most distinguished pupils; on the third, the rest of the students, townsmen, and gentry.

1 In the thirteenth century, Bacon, in recommending his contemporaries to learn Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldee, observes: "Non tamen intelligo, ut quilibet sciat has linguas sicut maternam in quâ natus est, ut nos lo quimur Anglicum, Gallicum, et Latinum."-Opera Minora, vol. i., p. 433.

2 Lanfranc, Gundulf, Anselm, and Foliot, are eminent instances of men who occupied themselves with Scriptural studies.

3 Girald. Camb. Opera, Preface by Professor Brewer, p. xiv., vol. i.

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Less vain-glorious men preferred more modest recitations, or trusted to transcripts of their works being made. Anselm was compelled to publish an authoritative edition of his "Monologium," because so many copies of it were already in circulation, from notes of lectures or imperfect transcripts. Garnier's life of Becket may be said to have gone through two editions, as the indiscretion of a copyist caused the work to appear prematurely, and while still in want of many corrections. But this very fact shows that a book on any popular subject was eagerly looked for and greedily read. Our notices of collections of books are imperfect. We hear casually of Bibles at Ely and Waltham abbeys, and of miscellaneous libraries at Abingdon, Canterbury, St. Edmund's, Malmesbury, Whitby, and Peterborough. We know that Becket caused transcripts of books to be made in France, and Giraldus Cambrensis speaks of taking books with him to Paris. The mere facts that the numerous law-courts were worked by writs, that commerce and taxation required a knowledge of accounts, and that the clergy were bound to have some acquaintance with

1 Monasticon, vol. vi., p. 56; Chron. Mon. de Abingdon, vol. ii., p. 289; Chron. Joc. de Brak., p. 100. William of Malmesbury was librarian to his monastery, and bought books himself.-Lib. ii., p. 143; Hist. Nov., lib. i., p. 687. The library of Christ-church, Canterbury, having suffered under the Danes, was restored by Lanfranc and Anselm. Under Edward I. it possessed six hundred and ninety-eight volumes, in which nearly three thousand treatises were bound up. Whitby Abbey possessed at least seventy-five works in 1180 A.D. Among these are several eminent fathers, and Cicero, Homer, Juvenal, Plato, and Statius. Peterborough abbey, in the twelfth century, had also nearly eighty works, among which are several collections of Roman law. Edwardes' Memoirs of Libraries, vol. i., chap. 2. Under William Rufus, the abbot of Malmesbury stripped twelve copies of the Gospels of their ornaments to raise money for a tax; and the bishop of Ely, under Richard I., pawned thirteen copies for the king's ransom.-Maitland's Dark Ages, p. 218. These notices have been preserved accidentally. I have only quoted a few, and a much stronger case could be made out for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

2 Girald. Camb., Opera, vol. i., p. 45. John of Salisbury mentions a priest who travelled with a treatise by Anselm in his saddle-bags.-Opera, vol. v., p. 353. Wimund, bishop of Man in the twelfth century, rose from poverty and obscurity by his skill as a copyist.-Newburgh, vol. i., p. 64. In the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon spent two thousand pounds in books and experiments.-Bacon, Opera Minora, vol. i., p. 59.

CHARACTER OF MEDIEVAL KNOWLEDGE.

453

letters, and were very numerous relatively to the population, show that the elements of education were more widely diffused than is commonly supposed. It is highly probable, indeed, that learning was looked upon very much as a professional study, which a noble or a knight might altogether neglect without much discredit. But when all allowances have been made, the fame which Oxford achieved in spite of its poverty, and the numerous students who flocked to Paris for further or better instruction, are splendid evidence of our ancestors' zeal for letters. The reproaches of barbarism sometimes cast upon them may be reduced to two charges, that books were few and costly before printing was discovered, and that the facts of the mind and the relations of God to man were studied to the disparagement of experimental science.

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ANGLO-NORMAN SOCIETY.

DUALISM OF CHURCH AND STATE.-BELIEF IN SYSTEMS. SECULAR CHARACTER OF THE CHURCH.-ECCLESIASTICAL INFLUENCES ON SECULAR LIFE.-ECONOMINAL VALUE OF MONASTERIES.-LIFE IN LONDON AND IN THE COUNTRY. -HIGHER MATERIAL WELL-BEING AND DIMINISHED ARTISTIC PERCEPTIONS OF MODERN TIMES.-CONTRASTS OF SUPERSTITION AND INTOLERANCE BETWEEN ANCIENT AND MODERN TIMES.-QUESTION OF INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY.

Ir is not unusual to compare the simple organizations of Athens and Rome, which had no established church, and where the priest scarcely differed from other citizens, with the two-fold constitution of early Christian society. The fact of the contrast is undoubted, and rests upon two causes. One of these is the sharp antagonism of Christianity to the world which it regenerated. Other religions were local, and reflected the institutions and thoughts of the countries in which they were developed. But Christianity spread from a small province of the Roman empire over nations that differed from one another in population, polity, and tone of life. The gospel proscribed unsparingly both the bloodshed on which the imperial dominion was founded, and the traditional vices of the upper classes. Its preachers went further, and declared the intellect and civilization of Rome anathema. For centuries there was no thought of compromise between the church and actualities. The best men desired not so much to make the state Christian as to create a separate world outside secular society. The miseries of the times when the empire was breaking up, and the constant expectation that Christ was coming in person to judge the world, favoured this disregard of temporal monarchies. "Watch and pray, for ye know not at what time the Master cometh," was the thought that guided the conduct of early Christians. By the twelfth century these feelings had par

ATTEMPTS TO LEGISLATE FOR PRIVATE LIFE.

455

tially passed away. New nations had arisen, and a cheerful faith in actual life replaced the hope of a millennium. But nothing could now bridge over the separation of church and state, whose rival fabrics had been built up by theorists of the cloister, and warriors roughly completing the legal traditions inherited from their fathers. That the state ought to assist, perhaps to obey the church, was felt generally. But that citizenship might be Christian in itself, was a theory yet undeveloped. Only its dim outlines can be traced in chivalry.

The other cause of the twofold organization of society lies in the wealth of thought, which the tribes that broke up Europe derived from Rome. Its laws of property and succession, its municipal constitutions, were as far beyond the actual legal training of Franks and Saxons in the fifth and sixth centuries, as the metaphysics of Plato and the logic of Aristotle surpassed their capacities of abstract thought. They felt the wonder and reverence of children for the civilization whose spoils they entered upon; and even where they retained their old customs, enriched them with a meaning derived from Rome or Greece. The philosophy of their times taught them to seek all truth in the mind. Habit and speculation thus conspired to create a belief in laws rather than in lawgivers. The fiction of a "natural law," and the vague truth that there was a divine order in the universe, found expression in a hundred theories of medieval legists and schoolmen. But they dared not follow out their conclusions, and blend the two systems which they saw before them into one theocratic state. Under a pious king, Alfred or St. Louis, something like this union might seem to be realized. But no pope, however statesmanlike, were he Hildebrand or Innocent himself, could prevail against the logic of daily life, and the instinct of revolt against a commonwealth based on the destruction of moral liberty. Throughout the middle ages, therefore, church and state remained separate, yet inextricably involved, like the real and ideal in common life. Each, in the same mechanical manner, was seeking to fence in society with some perfect system which should make error impossible. Each accumulated laws

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