39. Less homely philosophy is represented by the writings of Duns Scotus and William Occam. Duns Scotus was the elder of the two. He died in 1308, and his work falls wholly within the period of Edward I.'s reign. Occam survived him nearly forty years. John Duns, called Scotus, and by the Parisians the Subtle Doctor, was, like Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar. He was first educated by the Franciscans of Newcastle, who sent him to Oxford. There he first studied, and then taught, for three years, opposing the doctrines of Thomas Aquinas with a success that is said (fabulously) to have attracted to Oxford 30,000 students. The Franciscans then sent Duns to Paris, where he took the degree of Doctor. In 1307 he had charge of the Theological School at Toulouse-less liberal than that of Paris—and there he sustained, with two hundred arguments, the Immaculate Conception. In 1308 Duns Scotus died. The followers of Thomas Aquinas, who called themselves Thomists, called the followers of Duns Scotus Scotists, or, with a contemptuous application of their chief's name, Dunces. Thomas Aquinas held that the faculties were distinguished, not only from each other, but from the essence of the mind, really and not nominally. Duns Scotus denied all real difference either between the several faculties or between the faculties and the mind, allowing only a nominal distinction between them.

William Occam was a pupil of Duns Scotus, and also a Franciscan. As his master was called the Subtle, so he was called the Invincible Doctor, and he carried on, with a broader spirit of philosophy, the war of the Nominalists against the Realists. The doctrine of Scotus and Occam is that which has prevailed in the latter ages of philosophy. Occam especially distinguished himself by the practical good sense which he brought into acute discussions of logic and metaphysics, and those studies owed much of their safe advancement in his day to contact with the English character. Occam's philosophy was not all speculative. While he attacked powerfully the despotism of mere dogmas, and encouraged each thinker to individual inquiry, he gave a workaday turn to his philosophy by boldly arguing against the domination of the Pope in temporal affairs. He was persecuted, but he never flinched; and he died firm to his sense of truth, at Munich, in 1347.

40. We have passed with Occam from the reign of Edward I. through that of Edward II. (1307-1327), and shall do the same

гo A.D. 1338.J

ROBERT OF BRUNNE.

93.

when speaking of Robert of Brunne, whose Handlynge Synne, written soon after the year 1300, is the last book of Edward I.'s time that has yet to be described. Robert Mannyng, of Brunne, now Bourn, seven or eight miles from Market Deeping, in Lincolnshire, was a canon of the Gilbertine order, who, from 1288 to 1303, professed in the priory of Sempringham, where nuns and monks fulfilled in one house a common vow. Afterwards he was removed to other Lincolnshire priories of the same order at Brimwake and Sixhill. "Handlynge Synne" is his translation of the French words, "Manuel des Péchés," forming the title of a book in French verse ascribed to Bishop Grosseteste, but really written in French by another Englishman, William of Waddington, a Yorkshire town two or three miles from Clitheroe. Of this book Robert of Brunne made a free amplified translation into English verse for the edification of the common people at their games and festivals. He omitted what he thought dull in his original, and added new stories; the purpose of the work being to give religious instruction in the form of moral anecdotes or tales on the subject of the Ten Commandments, the seven deadly sins, sacrilege, the seven sacraments, and the twelve graces of thrift. Some years afterwards, between 1327 and 1338, Robert of Brunne, then living in the house of Sixhill, made, at the request of his prior, Robert of Malton, a popular translation into English verse of the French rhyming Chronicle of Peter Langtoft. It was begun at the time of the death of Edward II., written in the first years of Edward III., and designed, like the "Handlynge Synne," for wholesome recreation of the people at their merry meetings, because it became all Englishmen to know the history of their own land.

To the fourteenth century belongs a Northumbrian poem in about 24,000 lines, called Cursor Mundi; or, the Cursur o' the World, which carries the Scripture story of the world, with curious intermixed legend, through seven ages, from Creation to the other side of Doomsday. During this century also there was continual translation of the most famous French Metrical Romances.

41. Richard Aungervyle was born in the year 1281, at Bury St. Edmund's, in Suffolk, and has therefore usually been called, from his birthplace, Richard de Bury. His father was a Norman knight, who died in middle life, and left him to the care of his maternal uncles, who sent him to continue his studies at Oxford. There he distinguished himself so much by his acquire

ments that he was appointed tutor to Prince Edward, afterwards King Edward III. In that office Richard of Bury preserved at court, for some time, a discreet silence between conflicting parties, while he won the hearty goodwill of his pupil. In 1325, when Queen Isabel betook herself to Paris, Richard of Bury happened to be serving Edward II. as his treasurer, in Guienne. The time was now come for safe and energetic action in his pupil's interest. Richard Aungervyle at once gave up to the queen, for advancement of her cause, the money which he had collected in Guienne for Edward II. Edward's lieutenant in Guienne sent a troop of lancers to arrest the disloyal treasurer, who was pursued by them to the very gates of Paris, where he took refuge with the Franciscans. In September, 1326, Queen Isabel and her son landed in Suffolk with an army. Their declared object was the removal of the king's favourite Hugh de Spenser. Lancastrians and royalists, therefore, alike flocked to their standard; but the result of the movement was the deposition of King Edward II. by the next Parliament that met; and thus, in January, 1327, the prince whom Richard Aungervyle had sedulously served, became, early in his fifteenth year, King Edward III. Eight months later, the deposed king was murdered in Berkeley Castle by two of his keepers, his son ruling at that time under the control of Isabel and Mortimer. Three years later, in 1330, Mortimer was impeached and hanged as a traitor, and Edward III. was king, free from dictation.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

1. EDWARD III., aged fifteen, came to his throne in the year 1327. Geoffrey Chaucer was born in the year 1328. Some think that the date of his birth should be placed about eleven years later, for a reason that will presently appear. Other men of great mark were Chaucer's contemporaries, differing little from him in age: John Gower, William Langlande, author of "The Vision of Piers Plowman," and John Wiclif.

In their young days, Richard of Bury rose to the height of his good fortune, and produced a Latin treatise on the love of

TO A.D. 1344.]

RICHARD OF BURY.

95

books and the right use of them, called Philobiblon, which is a pleasant prelude to the noble strain of literature that was about to follow. Whether Isabel and Mortimer ruled Edward, or Edward acted for himself, there was only favour and a full reward for his past services to be enjoyed by the king's old tutor who, at a critical time, had committed himself to the cause of queen and prince. He was at once made Steward of the Palace and Treasurer of the Wardrobe; that office he resigned when in 1329 he was made Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. In 1330, when his age was forty-nine, he was sent in great state as ambassador to Pope John XXII., at Avignon, and there met Petrarch, who was at that time twenty-six years old. Petrarch, knowing that Richard of Bury was a great scholar, who had collected the largest library in England, asked him for some information on the subject of the "farthest Thule," which Richard said that he thought he could find in one of his books when he got home, and promised to send, but, as Petrarch told one of his correspondents, he forgot to send it. He might well forget, for he was very busy. The pope had promised him the next bishopric vacant in England, and that proved to be the bishopric of Durham. Pope and king nominated Richard of Bury, but the Chapter resisted the pope's interference, and elected a very fit man from among themselves. The king was determined, and Richard of Bury, forced upon Durham as its bishop, was consecrated in December, 1333. Not long before this he had been appointed Treasurer of the Kingdom, and not many months later he was made Lord Chancellor. He was employed afterwards by the king as his ambassador, that he might use his wit in carrying out the peaceful policy that he advised. His wealth and influence were very great, and he made generous use of them. In politics his voice was on the side of peace and goodwill. When his desires for peace were frustrated, he closed his career as a statesman. In his diocese he was a most liberal friend to the poor. As a scholar he was the friend of all who sought knowledge, and gave to all true students who asked for it-with his hospitality while they were studying at Durham-free access to that valuable library which it had been the chief pleasure of his life to collect. He had used his private fortune and his influence in Church and State as a collector of books, applying to them the counsel of Solomon, "Buy wisdom, and sell it not." Travelling friars searched for him among the book chests of foreign monasteries. Suitors in

Chancery knew that the gift of a rare volume would induce the Chancellor, not to pervert justice but to expedite the hearing of their suits. The books, collected with enthusiasm, were not treasured as a miser's hoard. When he withdrew from participation in the too warlike policy of Edward III., Richard de Bury, confining himself to the duties of his diocese, lived retired among his beloved parchments, still drawing to himself as chaplains and companions the most learned English scholars of his time. To be his chaplain, and by scholarship to win the household affection of a man so influential with the king, was a step to promotion sure enough to satisfy ambitious minds; while life with Richard Aungervyle housed the scholar among books, and gave him hourly access to the best library in England. "It is to be considered," said this Bishop of Durham, in his Latin Philobiblon, written when Geoffrey Chaucer was sixteen years old, "what convenience of teaching is in books-how easily, how secretly, how safely in books we bear, without shame, the poverty of human ignorance. These are masters who instruct us without rod and cane, without words and wrath, and for no clothes or money. If you approach them they are not asleep; if you question them they are not secret; if you go astray they do not grumble at you; they know not how to laugh if you are ignorant. O books, ye only are liberal and free who pay tribute to all who ask it, and enfranchise all who serve you faithfully!" In his Philobiblon, Richard de Bury enforced the right spirit of study and right care of books, and it is noticeable that, orthodox bishop as he was, no book of the time spoke more severely than his of the degradation of the clergy, of the sensuality and ignorance of monks and friars. The main object of Richard de Bury's work was practical. He was within a year of his death when he wrote it, and he desired not only to justify his life-long enthusiasm as a book collector, but to make the treasures which he had held in his lifetime as a trust for the benefit of all good scholarship in England, useful after his death for ever. Philobiblon ended, therefore, with a plan for the bequest of his books to Oxford on conditions that were to secure their perpetual usefulness, not merely to the particular hall which he proposed to endow in association with his library, but to the whole University. He did accordingly endow a hall, which the monks of Durham had begun to build in the north suburbs of Oxford, and did leave to it his famous library. Aungervyle's library remained at Durham College for the use of the university