Alfred versus Danes

After establishing the Danelaw that was supposed to bring peace between the Danes/Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons of the south, Alfred thought that his reign had eliminated major military engagements. With the death of Guthrum, with whom he had negotiated the peace, Vikings apparently did not feel obligated to honor the borders.

A fleet of 330 ships arrived on English shores in 893, including wives and children, indicating their intent to colonize, not just plunder and go. They settled At Appledore and Milton, both in Kent, and Alfred set up men to keep an eye on their movements. Alfred started talks with Hastein, the Viking chieftain in Milton, but while doing so, the group at Appledore started moving northwestward. Alfred's eldest son, Edward, defeated them in Surrey. A siege at Exeter was defeated by Alfred. There were other battles, until by 895 the Danes were running out of food and supplies. They retreated to the Thames, and fortified themselves 20 miles north of London, but they were outmaneuvered by Alfred who blocked the river. In 897 they retreated, some to Northumbria, some to East Anglia, some to their ships and back to Europe.

Alfred lamented the effect of Danish raids on England, especially education:

...learning had declined so thoroughly in England that there were very few men on this side of the Humber who could understand their divine services in English or even translate a single letter from Latin into English: and I suppose that there were not many beyond the Humber either. [Alfred's preface to his translation of Pastoral Care]

Manuscript production also suffered during these years; there was also much destruction of manuscripts when Danes burned churches and monasteries. An 873 document is so poorly made that a historian suggests the scribe did not even know Latin. Alfred had established a school for his own children and others, where they studied both English and Latin. He encouraged learning, especially in English, for everyone who had a mind to apply themselves.

His reign produced many other improvements and changes in the culture, and I'll talk about them tomorrow, before we sk the question: Was Alfred really great?

The Inns of Court

To my surprise, I have used "law" or "laws" (should really get around to combining them) as keywords in 43 posts (out of nearly 800), but have never mentioned the Inns of Court, where civil law was learned.

In the early Middle Ages, law was taught by the clergy, but Pope Honorius III in 1218 forbade the clergy to practice civil law. Then, in 1234, Henry III forbade law schools within the London city limits. Laymen interested in teaching law moved outside London and looked for buildings or collections of buildings to buy or rent, and the guilds in which they worked evolved into the Inns of Court. Four Inns exist: The Honorable Societies of Lincoln's Inn, the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple, and Gray's Inn. They truly were inns, because students lived as well as learned there. They are all near each other.

Although Lincoln's Inn claims the earliest records going back to 1422 (incidentally, the picture above is the Lincoln's Inn library) we know that lawyers lived in the Temple as early as 1320, though not as teachers. In 1337 the place was divided into the Inner Temple, and the Middle Temple (as distinct from an Outer Temple that existed). By 1388 they were two distinct groups. In 1620, a meeting of senior judges decreed that all four were considered equal in order of precedence, regardless of when they may have been founded.

Like the seven subjects of the University curriculum, law students were expected to spend seven years learning the law, mostly by attending court and asking questions afterward. Their experience included dining communally with practicing barristers for networking and additional knowledge. It wasn't until the mid-18th century that common law became. subject for study in universities.

The Inns of Court recognized three levels: student (learning law), barrister (practicing law), and master of the bench (called "bencher"). Benchers were senior members of the Inns, and could be appointed by existing benchers when still a barrister. An appointed High Court Judge was automatically a bencher. Benchers were the governing body of their respective Inn. Their duties were to admit students, "graduate" students, and appoint other benchers. One bencher was appointed Treasurer for a term on one year.

But I know the question nagging at you is "Why were they called the Inner and Middle Temple?" You either know why, and are wondering if I'll address the subject, or don't know why, and are hoping I'll answer your question. Good news for both: I'll answer the question tomorrow.

If you are curious what the seven subjects were, you can find a list in this post, or you can learn more about them (and much more) here.

The Five-Paragraph Essay

Found on Pinterest...seriously

The five-paragraph essay was treated as the cornerstone of English classes when I was growing up: it was drummed into me when I was a high school student, and it was a necessity in the English Department at my first teaching job. Despite the fact that a topic does not always fall into three points, enforcing the structure of five paragraphs was considered an ideal way to teach essay writing.

The formal parts of the five-paragraph can be found all over, and of course on Wikipedia:

• Introduction: Introducing a topic. An important part of this is the three-pronged thesis.
• Body paragraph 1: Explaining the first part of the three-pronged thesis
• Body paragraph 2: Explaining the second part of the three-pronged thesis
• Body paragraph 3: Explaining the third part of the three-pronged thesis
• Conclusion: Summing up points and restating thesis

Wikipedia informs me that it is also called (I don't recall ever seeing these terms before today) the "hamburger essay" [see illustration above], "one three one," and the "three-tier essay."

Looking for the origin of the five-paragraph format takes us back in time past the nuns who taught me, past John Dewey, past McGuffey Readers; we have to look back to the first century CE, to a work that was mistakenly attributed to Cicero.

Rhetorica ad Herennium ["Rehetoric: for Herennius"] was a very popular early book on rhetoric. Because Cicero wrote a well-known book on rhetoric (called De inventione ["Concerning the art of discovery"], he was given credit (right up through the Renaissance) for writing this more-complete book. In it, the author offers a format for an argument that may sound familiar to you:

• Exordium — Exhorting your reader to listen to your topic
• Narratio — Narrating/explaining what your topic is
• Divisio — Dividing your topic into main points
• Confirmatio — Confirming your points with arguments (usually three)
• Refutatio — Offering opposing arguments & refuting them
• Conclusio — Concluding your essay with a summary of your arguments

The Refutatio is often a part of a larger essay. The five-paragraph essay can be boiled down to

• Paragraph 1: Narratio + Divisio
• Paragraph 2-4: Confirmatio
• Paragraph 5: Conclusio

...and I spent my teenage years hoping never to be constrained in that way again!

You can read the Rhetorica ad Herennium here.

The College of Sorbonne

A university meeting

Today is the birthday of the founder of the Sorbonne. The Collège of Sorbonne is arguably the best-known college in France, its name becoming synonymous with excellence, especially in the field of theology. It was founded in 1257 by Robert de Sorbon.

Robert de Sorbon (9 October 1201-15 August 1274) was born in a lower-class family in the Champagne-Ardennes region of northeast France, a wild part of the country prone to spawn legends and tales of adventure. Robert joined the church and studied at Reims and Paris. His devout bearing brought him to the attention of Louis IX, and he was named canon of Cambrai (next door to the Ardennes region) in 1251.

He became a teacher in 1253; in 1257 he created a college in Paris which he called Maison de Sorbonne [House of Sorbon] to teach theology to students who could not otherwise afford a university education. The Maison grew in popularity, however, and was endorsed by the King and by Pope Alexander IV (previously mentioned here and here). The College of Sorbonne grew to become the heart of the University of Paris (which produced such lights as Jean Buridan as well as conflicts). Sorbon became its chancellor until his death in 1274.

Sorbon created an academic environment that was (in the words of one scholar) "as opposed to mere hostel foundations and elementary forms of collegial living."

... Robert of Sorbon, formulated the central idea of the future college system in exemplary fashion: vivere socialiter et collegialiter, et moraliter, et scholariter*—a formulation which implies the existence of a study community organized in the form of a brotherhood and living together in regulated and moral fashion. [P. Glorieux, Les Origines du collège de Sorbon, quoted in A History of the University in Europe: Volume 1, Universities in the Middle Ages]

Among the students were Pope Clement VI and Nicholas Oresme.

*[roughly] "To live socially and collegially and morally and scholarly"

The Liberal Alcuin of York

Tiffany window of Charlemagne and Alcuin
at LaFayette College (1898)

Alcuin of York has been mentioned before, primarily in his relationship to intellectual puzzles. This does a disservice to a man who was revered as a scholar and saint, and is one of the primary movers behind the Carolingian Renascence.

We know little about the early life of Alcuin (c.735-804). He came to the cathedral school of York under Archbishop Ecgbert (died 766), who took a great interest in Alcuin's schooling. It was here that Alcuin blossomed into a scholar of liberal studies, helping to develop the curriculum of the York cathedral school to embrace the Trivium (Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic) and Quadrivium (Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, and Astronomy). Alcuin himself wrote a textbook on the former, leaving the latter to his student, our old friend Hrabanus Maurus (previously mentioned here).

Sometime after Ecgbert died, Alcuin became the head of the school.* In 781, on his way home from a trip to Rome to see the pope (his mission was to petition the pope to confirm York as an archbishopric, the second in England after Canterbury), he met, for the second time, Charlemagne, who convinced him to stay and help promote learning in Charlemagne's kingdom.

Alcuin settled in the palace school at Aachen in 782, working alongside several of the intellectual lights of the 8th century, such as Peter of Pisa, a grammarian brought there to teach Latin, and Paulinus of Aquileia, a theologian and grammarian who became a good friend of Alcuin's, maintaining a relationship through letters even after Paulinus left the court to take up the position of Patriarch of Aquileia.

The other way that Alcuin was "liberal" is in his attitude toward pagans. Charlemagne followed the not-uncommon Christian royal practice of outlawing paganism, offering conquered pagan peoples the choice of conversion or death. Alcuin objected to this, and made his reasons clear to Charlemagne:

"Faith is a free act of the will, not a forced act. We must appeal to the conscience, not compel it by violence. You can force people to be baptized, but you cannot force them to believe."

Charlemagne eventually abolished the death penalty for paganism.

Alcuin died on the 19th of May 804.

*This school still exists today as St. Peter's.

Parochial School

One of the decrees that came out of the Fourth Lateran Council of Pope Innocent III was that "every cathedral or other church of sufficient means" was to have a master or masters who could teach Latin and theology. These masters were to be paid from the church funds, and if the particular church could not support them, then money should come from elsewhere in the diocese to support the masters. The interest of the Roman Catholic Church in providing education has a long history.

This did not start in 1215, actually: the Third Lateran Council of 1179 (called by Pope Alexander III) had already declared that it was the duty of the Church to provide free education "in order that the poor, who cannot be assisted by their parents' means, may not be deprived of the opportunity of reading and proficiency."

One wonders how carefully churches complied with this. Because the school was integral to the church it was attached to, records are not as abundant as they might be if the school were a separate legal entity with its own building, property taxes, et cetera. We have to look for more anecdotal and incidental evidence.

Among Roger Bacon's unedited works is a reference about schools existing "in every city, castle and burg." John of Salisbury (c.1120-1180), English author and bishop, mentions going with other boys as a child to be taught by the parish priest. (Note that this is long before the Lateran Council decrees; it seems they may have simply affirmed and extended a long-held practice.)

Schools for young boys stayed attached to churches for a long time. A late-medieval anecdote of Southwell Minster in Nottinghamshire (pictured here; believed to be the alma mater of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII) tells that a visiting clerk (priest) complained that the noise of the boys being schooled was so great that it disturbed the services taking place. And Shakespeare's Twelfth Night acknowledges these schools with the line "Like a pedant that/Keeps a school i' the Church." It would be a long time before schools for the young were deemed to need their own buildings.

Grammar

"Grammar" comes from the Greek gramma, meaning "letter of the alphabet" or "thing written." Their word grammatike meant "the art of letters." The Romans pulled this word into Latin unaltered, and it eventually slid into Old French where it became gramaire, and thence to Modern English and the word whose study American schoolchildren try to avoid today.

Grammar had its fans in the Classical and early Medieval eras, however, and none more zealous than Priscianus Caesariensis. We don't know too many details about Priscian, but we know he flourished around 500 CE, because that's about when his famous work on grammar appears.

According to Cassiodorus (c.485-c.585), who was writing during the administration of Theodoric of the Ostrogoths, Priscian was born in Caesarea, in what is now Algeria. Cassiodorus himself lived for a while in Constantinople, and he tells us that Priscian taught Latin in Constantinople for a time.

Priscian wrote a work called De nomine, pronomine et verbo (On noun, pronoun and verb), probably as an instructional tool for his Greek-speaking students. He also translated some Greek rhetorical exercises into Latin in Praeexercitamina (rhetorical exercises). There were also some minor works that don't concern us, because we need to talk about his 18-volume masterpiece, Institutiones grammaticae (Foundations of grammar). He patterned it works of Greek grammar by Apollonius Dyscolus and the Latin grammar of Flavius Caper. His numerous examples from Latin literature mean we have fragments of literature that would otherwise have been lost to us.

Priscian became popular: his work was quoted for the next few centuries, and copies became numerous enough—and his scholarship good enough—that this work became the standard grammar text for 1000 years after his time. We know a copy made it to England by 700; it was quoted by Bede and Aldhelm and copied by Hrabanus Maurus. It was a standard text centuries later at Oxford and Cambridge.

Manuscripts (there are about 1000 copies extant) exist from as early as the 9th century, and in 1470 it was still important enough that it was printed in Venice.

"Grammar" "School"—Part 2 of 2

Yesterday we looked at the use of the word "school" in the Middle Ages. Today, let's look at the descriptive term "grammar" when applied to schools.

There is a document from the late 11th century that refers to a scola grammatice [grammatic/grammar school]. We see that and similar phrases becoming more common in the 1200s. In 1387 we get the first reference in English to a "gramer scole" by John of Trevisa (briefly mentioned here), who is translating Ralph Higden's Polychronicon* and uses the phrase to refer to a school in Alexandria.

But what did they mean by "grammar" school? Was it all just about teaching grammar. Well, in a word, probably "yes." The term grew to distinguish those schools from the more involved curriculum of the schools that were tackling the seven Liberal Arts—Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic made up the foundational "Trivium" while the higher learning of the Quadrivium meant studying Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy. (The first three were all about mastering language, the four were all about mastering mathematics.)

What was covered in "grammar" schools? Well, it was synonymous with what a later age called the study of "letters," and comprised learning from great writings. Grammar school was all about reading great literature from the past and committing the lessons found therein to heart. One learned how the great writers—who could on rare occasions be pagan writers, but were mostly the Church Fathers, as well as the Latin Bible—constructed their brilliant sentences and built their arguments.

Of course, these great minds of the past did not write in English, and so the study of "grammar" could not truly be undertaken until one learned Latin. For young boys beginning instruction—usually at a nearby church under the tutelage of a priest—the first stage was learning Latin.

Latin grammar had been dissected and discussed at great length by scholars in the past, particularly by two Latin writers named Priscian and Donat. But let's save them for tomorrow.

*This work was an attempt to write a universal history, hence the name meaning "many times."