were 'desirous of being instructed in theology, in canon and civil law, medicine and the liberal arts' by reason of the 'dangers by sea and land, the wars, captivities and obstructions in passing to and from foreign universities.' That these dangers were no light matter was demonstrated by the conspicuous object lesson of king James I, still in the English captivity, into which he had fallen when on his way to France, as a young prince fresh from the teaching of Wardlaw himself. The good bishop secured the hearty concurrence of his prior, James Haldenstone; and, in 1413, a bull of Benedict XIII, the anti-pope whom Scotland then acknowledged and to whom Wardlaw owed his bishopric, recognised the new foundation as a studium generale. The constitution and discipline of the university was determined by the bishop's foundation charter; which, with the charters of the prior and the archdeacons of St Andrews and Lothian, was confirmed by king James in 1432 after his restoration to his kingdom. The founder constituted the bishop of St Andrews for the time being perpetual chancellor of the university and reserved, likewise, the right of final determination of disputes arising between the university and the town, saving the privileges of the prior and chapter and of the archdeacon of St Andrews. The general government of the university was remitted to an elected rector, who must be a graduate in one of the faculties and in holy orders.

The new studium generale had, in the first instance, neither special buildings nor endowment. In 1430, Wardlaw granted a tenement for the use of the masters and regents of the faculty of arts; and other well-wishers, in course of time, came forward with similar benefactions; but the teachers of the university were, for a long time, maintained on the fees of their hearers, and on the profits of benefices which they were authorised to hold under a general licence of non-residence. The 'auld pedagogy' was, in fact, an unendowed ecclesiastical seminary, served by beneficed masters, who found their pupils among youths resident or lodging in the town. The institution was much encouraged by James I, who had, during his enforced stay in England, imbibed a taste for literature in general and for poetry in particular. Under the royal charter of confirmation, the resident members of the university were exempted from every species of taxation. As in Oxford and Cambridge, the privileges of scholars were extended to those who served them.

In 1458, bishop John Kennedy, an able and worthy prelate, who was closely connected with the throne, his mother being a

daughter of Robert III, enriched the university with its first college, that of St Salvator; endowing it with parochial tithes 'as a college for theology and the arts, for divine worship and for scholastic exercises.' The numbers of the society were fixed, ad instar apostolici numeri, at thirteen persons; a provost, a licentiate in theology, a bachelor in theology, four masters of arts and six 'poor clerks.' The college set up a claim to confer degrees independently of the rector of the older foundation, and supported it by a bull of Pius II, of 1458; but the pretension was speedily relinquished on the intervention of Patrick Graham, half-brother of bishop Kennedy, and the first metropolitan of St Andrews. In 1512, John Hepburn, prior of St Andrews, converted for the purposes of a second college the buildings and property of the ancient hospital of St Leonard, which had been erected in an earlier age for the entertainment of the pilgrims who thronged to worship at the shrine of St Andrews. Hepburn enjoyed the support, not only of James IV, but of the king's illegitimate son, the young archbishop, Alexander Stewart, who was destined to fall with his father, a year later, on the fatal field of Flodden. The archbishop, a pupil of Erasmus, himself took in hand the conversion of Wardlaw's pedagogium into the college of St Mary; but his untimely death left the task to be completed, with royal and papal approval, by his successors, the two Beatons and John Hamilton (1553). The college of St Mary, which, at least after 1579, was given up entirely to the study of divinity, completed the three foundations, which remained the constituent colleges of St Andrews down to 1747; when failing revenues compelled the amalgamation of St Salvator's with St Leonard's. The historian John Major, in 1521, himself provost of St Leonard's, marvelled at the incuria of Scottish prelates, which had left Scotland without a university until 1411. The Scottish bishops of the fifteenth century made ample amends for their supine predecessors.

In January, 1450, William Turnbull, bishop of Glasgow, obtained from Nicholas V a bull, which recognised the establishment in his cathedral city of a studium generale. The bull was locally proclaimed in the following year, when statutes were drawn up and courses of study prescribed.

Yet again, in 1500, bishop Elphinstone of Aberdeen completed the erection of King's College, in 'the granite city,' having obtained papal authority in 1494. The third university of Scotland was formed on the model of its predecessors as a combination of conventual rule with the special pursuit of learning. It acquired

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a particular lustre from the person of its first principal. This was Hector Boece, correspondent of Erasmus and historian, who had held the appointment of professor of philosophy in the college of Montaigu at Paris.

The Scottish universities were directly clerical in origin; and the briefest examination of the statutes of their colleges demonstrates their thoroughly ecclesiastical character. The Scottish episcopal founders worked hand in hand not only with monks but with friars. It is noteworthy that bishop Kennedy founded a Franciscan convent in St Andrews, where the Dominicans had been established by one of his early predecessors (1272-9); and the provincial sub-prior of the Dominicans was, with the minister of the Franciscans, included among the seven electors to the provostship of St Mary's. In the result, while the Scottish university was, in its first days, an ecclesiastical seminary, its education assumed, with the advent of colleges, the purely conventual type. St Leonard's, which may be selected as a typical college, was, under its canon regular principal, as a college of philosophy and theology, a glorified monastic school.

The subjects of instruction comprised grammar, oratory, poetry, Aristotelian philosophy and the writings of Solomon as preparatory to the study of divinity. Prior Hepburn forbade the admission of a student under fifteen years of age; but the university statutes permitted determination at the age of fourteen.

From mere boys, in the Scotland of the fifteenth century, no serious preparatory equipment could be demanded. The council at Edinburgh, in 1549, urged the rectors of the universities to see to it ne ulli ad scholas Dialectices sive Artium recipiantur nisi qui Latine et grammatice loquuntur; and called upon the archdeacon of St Andrews to appoint a grammar school master for that city1. Other indications assist to show the low standard of the current Latin. There was no professor of the Humanities in St Andrews, 'the first and principal university' in the sixteenth century.

A reforming commission, in 1563, complained of the lack of teaching of sciences and 'specially they that are maist necessarie, that is to say the toungis and humanities.' James Melville testifies that, in 1571, neither Greek nor Hebrew was to be 'gottine in the land.' When at length, in 1620, a chair of Humanity was endowed in St Leonard's college, the local grammar master complained that its occupant drew off his young pupils by teaching the elements 1 Herkless and Hannay, The College of St Leonard, p. 160.

of Latin grammar. There was no professor of Greek in St Andrews until 1695. The modern superiority of Scotland in philosophy is traceable, in fact, to a belated medievalism. The Scottish reformation caught the universities of the northern kingdom still directly under church control, the clerical instructors clinging to their Aristotle and their Peter Lombard. The results were temporarily disastrous. In spite of the assertion of Hector Boece that, in early days, the university excrevit in immensum, the numbers of no Scottish university in the fifteenth or sixteenth century exceeded the membership of one of the smaller English colleges, such, for example, as Peterhouse. In 1557, there were thirty-one students in the three constituent colleges of St Andrews; in 1558 there were but three. Glasgow and Aberdeen dwindled in like fashion. Yet the Scottish universities reproduced the Parisian distribution into four nations under the local quarterings of Fife, Lothian, Angus and Albany. The description which John Major gave of his contemporary Glasgow is, with the variation of the local reference, equally applicable to St Andrews or to Aberdeen: 'The seat of an Archbishop, and of a University poorly endowed and not rich in scholars; but serviceable to the inhabitants of the west and south.'

In one particular the northern kingdom advanced beyond her southern sister. A Scottish act of parliament of 1496 declared that:

It is statute and ordanit throw all the realme that all barronis and frehaldaris that ar of substance put thair eldest sonnis and airs to the sculis fra thai be aucht or nine yeiris of age and till remane at the grammar sculis quhill thai be competentlie foundit and have perfite latyne. And therefter to remane thre yers at the sculis of Art and Jure sua that thai may have knowledge and understanding of the lawis. Throw the quhilkis Justice may reigne universalie throw all the realme1.

This enactment was enforceable by a penalty of forty pounds.

That net of compulsory education, with which nineteenth century England enmeshed her lower orders, was endeavoured to be thrown over her young nobility and lairds by the Scotland of that gallant monarch, whose courage disastrously outran his generalship on the slopes of Branxton Hill.

1 Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, 11, 289; Tytler, iv, 25.

CHAPTER XVI

TRANSITION ENGLISH SONG COLLECTIONS

IN France, a large number of manuscripts have survived from the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to testify to the songs that were sung by the gallant, the monk, the minstrel and the clerk. English literature has been less fortunate, and yet there are extant a goodly number of Middle English songs.

With the exception of two notable anthologies of love lyrics and religious poems, these songs were not committed to writing until the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The inference is not to be drawn, however, that they were mainly the product of the late Transition period, since, evidently, they had been preserved in oral form for a considerable time. This is proved by the existence of different versions of the same song, by allusions to historical events earlier than the fifteenth century, by elements of folk-song embedded in the songs, by the essential likeness of the love lyrics and religious poems to those in the two thirteenth century collections, and by the fact that certain songs are of types which were popular in France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and were probably brought to England at the time of their vogue at home. The songs can therefore be regarded as more or less representative of the whole Middle English period.

Of the folk-song element, a word may well be said at the outset, for, though no pure folk-songs have survived, the communal verse has left its impress upon these collections.

The universal characteristics of folk-poetry are, as to substance, repetitions, interjections and refrains; and, as to form, a verse accommodated to the dance. Frequent also is the call to the dance, question and answer and rustic interchange of satire. Though no one song illustrates all of these characteristics, they are all to be found in the songs taken collectively.

The refrain is so generally employed that a song without it is the exception. In the majority of cases, it is a sentence in Latin