clan, Yorkists till the death of Edward IV, and had earned and experienced the gratitude of Henry VIL. But he had the less good fortune to attract the favour of Henry VIII, and, late in life, suffered from that monarch's customary harshness. It was partly to solace his anxieties while captain of Calais, as well as 'to eschew idleness, the mother of all the vices,' that he executed the series of translations which secure to him the credit of a remarkable threefold achievement. Berners was the first to introduce to our literature the subsequently famous figure of Oberon, the fairy king; he was the first to attempt in English the ornate prose style which shortly became fashionable; and he gave to historians at once a new source-book and a new model in his famous rendering of the Chronicles of Froissart.

Lord Berners was peculiarly well fitted to execute this translation. He had himself been active at the siege of Terouenne and on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, where Henry VIII regarded himself as, in some sort, reviving the glories of old; he had visited the Spanish court of Charles V and knew something of that of France. He so thoroughly entered into the spirit of his original as to make his work rather an adoption than a translation. In his hands history is still near akin to fiction, but rather to the heroic romance than to the well worn marvels of ancient chronicles. If these remind us of Gesta Romanorum or of Sir John Mandeville, Froissart, in the dress of Berners, may be paralleled with Malory. Sir John of Hainault champions the cause of queen Isabel as would a knight of Arthur; and from orthodox romance comes the fancy picture of Bristol, the well closed city on the good port of the sea, which beats round its strong castle. While the old chronicles are wearisome, Berners conveys all the vigour and freshness of Froissart in his descriptions and conversations. Both the human interest and the chronicler's personal attitude towards it are preserved. Berners is in full sympathy with Froissart's aristocratic spirit, which places the violence of a duke of Britanny or a count of Foix on a plane above criticism though not beyond sympathy, and bestows a contemptuous pity on the crestfallen burghers of Bruges and a lofty disdain on the upstart pride of Ghent. In language, Berners follows the excellent method of earlier translators: 'In that I have not followed myne authour worde by worde yet I trust I have ensewed the true reporte of the sentence of the mater.' And he varies his narration pleasantly by a not unskilful use of inversion.

But the Froissart of Berners taught something further to the Tudor historians, of the value of well proportioned detail and

occasional quotation of witness in impressing the sense of actuality. It can hardly be said that Hall and Holinshed, the most ambitious of Tudor historians, borrow much from Berners in style; but it is evident that the new model influenced their aims and methods quite apart from its value as a new mine of information.

In Arthur of Little Britain and Huon of Bordeaux, Berners took up the prose tale, or romance, of the ordinary medieval type, most of the incidents in which are of the wildly absurd order. But the favourite of the two, Huon, is remarkable for its unusual pair of heroes. The uncouthness of Charlemagne and his court is in odd contrast to the conventional pictures of Arthur, and the whole romance is treated on a different and lower level, whether because it represents a fourteenth or even thirteenth century story, or because some folk-tale influence had been at work upon it. Huon himself is apt to remind us of the ignobly born simpleton heroes of German peasant story, and he is a bad simpleton. He runs headlong into danger, not from extravagance of knightly daring but out of stupidity, or greed, or childish impatience. He complains querulously, tries to deceive his benefactor Auberon and has no notion of either gratitude or morality. For instance, Auberon has warned him never to tell a lie, but, so soon as the paynim porter of Babylon asks whether he be a Saracen, 'Yea,' replies Huon promptly, and then reflects that Auberon will surely not be angry at such a lie, 'sen I did it not wilfully but that I forgat it!' It is only when he has committed some offence against the fairy that Huon prides himself upon being a Christian: his Saviour ought to shield him from the wrath of Auberon. And yet this perjured simpleton is incongruously represented as the only creature 'sinless' enough to be able to drink from Auberon's magic horn.

Auberon himself is half-way to being the fairy of poetry; ‘a dwarf of the fairy' is he, child of a fairy mother, 'the lady of the isle' and a mortal father, Julius Caesar (who, in the Middle Ages, obtained the same magical reputation as Vergil). Auberon, therefore, is mortal, he can weep, he falls sick; but he is never of more stature than a child of three years, and his magical powers are so absolute that he has only to wish, and his will accomplishes itself. He knows all that passes afar as he rules in his fairy capital, Momure, for he is a civilised fairy with a knowledge of politics. He is a much better Christian than Huon, and, when he dies, his corpse is buried in an abbey and his soul is carried to heaven by an innumerable company of angels.

Huon of Bordeaux was so popular as to obtain a reissue in 1601, modernised as to wording and adorned as to style'. As Berners wrote it out, the English is extremely straightforward, and bears hardly more trace of the graceful fluency of his Froissart than of the novel experiment its translator was shortly to assay.

To a modern reader, it appears, at first sight, wonderful that the most popular work of the translator of Froissart should have been his rendering of a verbose, didactic book by the Spanish secretary of Charles V, Antonio de Guevara, an author whose involutions of language rapidly captivated fashionable taste in Spain, France and England. Berners has the credit of first introducing him and his style to English readers in The Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, which so much delighted the polite world that it went through fourteen editions in half a century. The substance of this volume of tedious letters and trite reflections Guevara pretended he had discovered in an old MS, claiming for himself only the merit of bestowing 'style' upon the emperor's writing.

The desire to treat composition as itself an art was beginning to be felt in England, as in other countries, and Berners must have already paid attention to that peculiar manner of writing which, vigorously introduced by translations of which his own was the earliest specimen, was to receive its distinctive epithet from its most perfect example, Euphues.

The prefaces of Berners to his Froissart are his first experiments in the ornate, and not much more successful, though more lavish, than the earlier groping of Caxton. 'As said is'; 'I pray them that shall default find,' result from his preference of inversion to direct speech, and relative pronouns are a puzzle to him.

Yet perhaps these elaborate prologues are but a fresh outburst of the native love of double terms which hampered every prose writer between Chaucer and Malory. The national bent to cumulative expression must have been a good preparation to the reception of the new style when it came, by the means of translated Guevara, in a flood. What was wanting was the art to weave the customary repetitions of thought, the synonyms, antitheses and alliterative combinations into a balance and harmony of sentences. To this, neither Berners nor his nephew and literary disciple Sir F. Bryan had attained. A comparison of his Golden Book with North's rendering of it, The Dial of Princes, exhibits the crudity of the efforts of Berners in this style. He can faithfully reproduce the repetitions and run the slight idea to death, but the 'sauce of the said sweet style,' as his nephew terms it, lacks savour.

1 Cf. Sidney Lee's list in his edition of Huon, E.E.T.S.

CHAPTER XV

ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH EDUCATION.

UNIVERSITIES

AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS TO THE TIME OF COLET

In an age innocent of historical criticism, champions of Oxford and Cambridge, waging a wordy war for the honour of prior foundation, referred the establishment of their respective universities to Alfred and to Sigebert. In these days, the historians of both are content to look to the twelfth century as the birth period, not only of the English university, but of the university of Paris from which English university life drew its early inspiration.

When the twelfth century drew to a close, Paris was the English academic metropolis. Already, indeed, there were masters and students in Oxford. What was the attraction which drew them to a town that had no well based claims to high antiquity, and was, otherwise, of little consequence, it is impossible now to point out with certainty. Looking to the history of continental universities, analogy would seem to demand, as the nucleus of the concourse, a cathedral or a monastic school. But Oxford was not a bishop's seat; its diocesan was posted in far distant Lincoln. And, if monks provided or salaried the first Oxford teachers, they wholly failed to obtain, or, at any rate, to retain, control over the rising university; there is not the slightest trace of monastic influence in the organisation or studies of the earliest Oxford of historic times. The cloister school of St Frideswide may well have charged the atmosphere with the first odour of learning; but its walls at no time sheltered the university soul.

Certain, however, it is that, in the first half of the twelfth century, a number of famous names are connected with Oxford teaching. It may be that if, as Gervase of Canterbury testifies, Vacarius taught civil law at Oxford, in 1149, he did not lecture as an Oxford master, but as a member of the train of archbishop Theobald. But Theobaldus Stampensis, as a recent historian1 has pointed out, in letters written between 1101 and 1117 styles 1 Rashdall, Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 11, 333.

himself master in Oxford; Robert Pullen, afterwards cardinal and the author of Sententiarum Libri Octo, is stated, on good authority, to have taught in Oxford in 1133; and, when in 1189 Giraldus Cambrensis read his Topographia Hibernica at Oxford, 'where the most learned and famous of the clergy of England were then to be found,' he entertained 'all the doctors of the several faculties and such of their pupils as were of greater fame and repute.'

In the story of this last incident we have clear indications of an existing and of an organised Oxford university.

Modern research points to the year 1167 as the date of the birth of Oxford as a studium generale, and offers a chain of circumstantial evidence to connect it with an expulsion of alien students by the Parisian authorities and the contemporary recall by Henry II, then engaged in the contest with Becket, of all clerks holding English cures1. However this may have been, the last few years of the twelfth century furnish abundant proof of the presence in Oxford of students in considerable numbers.

In 1192, Oxford, according to Robert of Devizes, could barely maintain her clerks. In 1197, the great abbot Samson of Bury entertained a large company of Oxford masters. When the troubles of 1209 burst upon the university, scholars to the number-according to Matthew Paris-of three thousand dispersed in various directions.

It is to this last occasion that the Oxford historian refers the appearance of Cambridge as a studium generale.

The story is characteristic of the times. An Oxford clerk kills a woman-accidentally, as it is afterwards said. But the culprit flees. The town authorities search the dwelling wherein he lodged, and, in his absence, arrest two or three of his companions, who are perfectly innocent of the offence, if such it be. King John, however, is in the middle of his famous quarrel with the pope, and is ready to wreak his vengeance on any clerk. On the king's instructions, the innocent prisoners are hanged. In combined fear and indignation, the Oxford masters proclaim a suspension of studies; and the scholars scatter. Some merely retreat to Reading; others migrate further afield. Some go to Paris; some to Cambridge.

Cambridge, as a town, dates back to the days of the Roman occupation of Britain, when it represented the intersection of two great military highways and a consequent guard-post. William I made it his base for attack upon Ely, and pulled down eighteen of 2 Ibid. 11, 849.

1 Rashdall, Chap. XIL