Speculum Stuitorum (The Mirror of Fools), is a satirical poem in about 3,800 Latin elegiac lines, which has for its hero an Ass, who goes the round of the monastic orders. His name, Brunellus, a diminutive of Brown, is taken from the scholastic logic of the day. It was first applied to the horse when a particular idea-say this horse Brunellus-had to be discussed instead of the general idea, represented, say, by horse. But when the logicians took to calling the particular idea Bucephalus, the old names of Brunellus and Favellus were transferred to the ass; and a logician would write thus: "Grant there are two men, say Socrates and Plato, of which each has an ass; precisely, Socrates Brunellus, Plato Favellus," and so forth. Taking the name of his hero, then, from the jargon of the schools he meant to satirise, Nigel Wireker represented that the Ass Brunellus found his tail too short, and went to consult Galen on the subject. The author explained that his " Ass is that monk who, not content with his own condition, wants to have his old tail pulled off, and try by all means to get a new and longer tail to grow in its place that is to say, by attaching to himself priories and abbeys." Brunellus was unlucky with his medicines, and had part of his tail, short as he thought it, bitten off by four great mastiffs. He could not go home to his friends in that state. He felt that he had an immense power of patient labour. He would go and study at the University of Paris. After seven years of hard work there, he could not remember the name of the town in which he had been living. But he was proud of his erudition. He did also remember one syllable of the town's name, and had been taught that part may stand for the whole. The sketch of Brunellus at Paris is a lively satire upon the shortcomings of the schools. Brunellus having gone straight through the sciences, it was only left for him to perfect himself in religion. He tried all the orders in succession, and ended in the resolve to construct for himself out of them a new composite order of his own. Meeting Galen, Brunellus entered into discussion with him on the state of the Church and of society, until he fell into the hand of his old master, and returned to the true duties of his life. 14. Nigel Wireker did not fight unaided in this battle against the corruption which had come into the Church with wealth and idleness. A like battle formed part of the work of the man of greatest genius among those who wrote in the time of Henry II. This was Walter Map, sometimes called Mapes, because TO A.D. 1179] UNIVERSIties. WALTER MAP 57 Walter Map the Latinised form of his name was Mapus. had, like Geoffrey of Monmouth, Celtic blood in his veins. Born, about the year 1143, on the borders of Wales, he called the Welsh his countrymen, and England "our mother." Map studied in the University of Paris, which was then in the first days of its fame. Students were gathered there from many lands; English enough were among them to form one of the four schools into which it became divided. We know what it was from Wireker's "Brunellus;" and Map tells that he saw, when he was there, town and gown riots: but an ordinance of Innocent III., dated 1215, five-and-twenty years after the death of Henry II., is the first official document in which we find the body of teachers and students gathered in Paris to have been formally called a University. The first document which speaks formally of a University of Oxford is dated 1201; and the University of Cambridge first appears by that name in a document of the year 1223. At the time, therefore, of which we now speak. the Universities were first ceasing to be places in which individual teachers and students came together for their common advantage, and they were acquiring recognition of their corporate existence by the application to them of a name at first not limited to places of education, but applied also to other organised bodies, as to a corporate town, or to an incorporated trade within a town. After his studies in Paris, Walter Map came home, and was at Court in attendance on King Henry II., who had received much good service from Map's family. In 1173, when his age was about thirty, Map was presiding at the Gloucester assizes as one of the king's ambulant judges, justices in eyre. In the same year he was with the court at Limoges, host, at the king's cost, to a foreign archbishop. He attended Henry II., probably as chaplain, during his war with his sons; represented the king at the court of Louis VII., where he was received as an intimate guest; was sent to Rome to the Lateran Council of 1179, and was hospitably entertained on the way by Henry Count of Champagne. At that Council appeared some of the Waldenses, or followers of Peter Waldo, with a Psalter and several books of the Old and New Testament in their own tongue, which they wished the Pope to license. Although Map fought stoutly against fleshly corruption of the clergy, and was an earnest Church reformer, he was not advanced beyond the dread of danger from giving the Scriptures in their own tongue to the common people. "Water," he said, “is taken from the spring, and not from the broad marshes." But the question was so far new that this Council of 1179 did not interdict Peter Waldo's Bible. Waldo himself may be remembered as another sign of the growing life of Europe in the days of Henry II. After he had become rich, as a merchant of Lyons, he gave his goods to the poor, gathered followers about him as Poor Men of Lyons, who preached in the villages, opposing a simpler faith and purer rule of life to the corruptions of the Church, and labouring to give the Bible itself to the people as the one authority in matters of religion. Waldo died in 1179, the year of Map's attendance at the Council before which some of the Waldenses came to ask for the Pope's license to their translation of Scripture. The use of it was not for. bidden until fifty years afterwards. After his return from Rome, Map was made a canon of St. Paul's, and also precentor of Lincoln. He held also the parsonage of Westbury, in Gloucestershire, but still was in attendance on the king, and especially attached to the young Prince Henry, after he had been crowned by his father. In the reign of Richard I., and the year 1196, when his age was about fiftythree, Map was made Archdeacon of Oxford, but beyond that date nothing is known of him. Walter Map was a bright man of the world, with a high purpose in his life; poet and wit, a spiritual man of genius. He fought with his own weapons against the prevalent corruption of the clergy. While he was at court, there began to pass from hand to hand copies of Latin verse purporting to be poems of a certain Bishop Golias, a gluttonous dignitary, glorying in selfindulgence, his name probably derived from gula, the gullet. The verses were audacious, lively, and so true to the assumed character that some believed them to come really from a shame less bishop. Here was the corruption of the Church personified and made a by-word among men. The poems gave a new word to the language-"goliard." Walter Map was the creator of this character; but the keen satire of his lively Latin verse bred imitators, and Father Golias soon had many sons. A fashion for Golias poetry sprang up, and then the earnest man of genius had fellow-labourers in plenty. In one of Map's poems, called the Confession of Golias, the bishop is supposed to be confessing himself with the candour of despair. He reveals first the levity of his mind; he who should make his seat upon a TO A.D. 1196] JOHN OF SALISBURY 59 rock is as a ship without a mariner, a lost bird borne through pathless air. He next declares his lust. And then he remembers the tavern he has never scorned, nor ever will scorn till he hears the angels sing his requiem. Here Map, with a terrible earnestness of satire, images the heavens opening upon the drunkard priest, who lies in a tavern, where, too weak himself to hold the wine-cup, he has it put to his lips, and so dies in his shame. "What I set before me," he says, "is to die in a tavern; let there be wine put to my mouth when I am dying, that the choirs of the angels when they come, may say, 'The grace of God be on this bibber!'" "Meum est propositum in taberna mori, Vinum sit appositum morientis ori, Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori, Somebody having set these four lines to light music as a drinking song, without a suspicion of their meaning, somebody else, equally wise, has made them a reason for ticketing Walter Map as "the jovial archdeacon." Jovial, however, Walter Map may have been, for he was keen of wit, and knew how to make a light jest do the work of earnest argument. 15. Another of Map's books took one of the names of a work written at the beginning of Henry II.'s reign by John of Salisbury, a man of considerable learning, who was born about the year 1120. He also had studied at Paris. He had attended Abelard's lectures on Mont St. Geneviève, and was fellow-pupil afterwards with Thomas à Becket under an English pupil of Abelard's. John of Salisbury studied on, and as he advanced in knowledge, sought to make a living by the teaching of young noblemen. After twelve years of study and teaching, he was a penniless scholar whom a kindly French abbot took for his chaplain, and in about three years more, in 1151, was able to help to the post of secretary to Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury. When Becket became archbishop, John of Salisbury remained in office, and was his devoted follower. He shared Becket's exile, and narrowly escaped sharing his fate at the assassination. After this, John of Salisbury remained as secretary with the next archbishop, and in 1176 was made Bishop of Chartres, where he died in 1180. John of Salisbury's book was entitled Polycraticus, or De Nugis Curialium et Vestigiis Philosophorum (On the Trifles of the Courtiers and Tracks of the Philosophers). It is in eight books, which were finished in 1156. The first treats with much erudition of the vanities of hunting, dice, music, mimes, minstrelsy, magic, soothsaying, and astrology, which his second book argues to be not always contemptible. In the third book he treats of flatterers and parasites, and then comes to the remarkable feature of his work, its argu. mert for tyrannicide, which is scholastic altogether in its tone. The fourth book argues that it is only for the Church to say what tyrants shall be slain, and enters into learned disquisitions on the state and duties of a king. The fifth book treats of the king and great officials in their relation to the commonwealth. In his sixth book, John of Salisbury treats of the duties, privileges, and corruptions of the knights; and in the last two books follows the tracks of the ancient philosophers in discussing virtue and vice, true and' false glory, with return at last to the doctrine of tyrannicide under the guidance of the Church. In its pedantic way, the "Polycraticus" is interesting as a clumsily aimed return shot in the controversy between Church and State, levelled at the corruption and levity of kings and courts, and claiming for the Church a power to destroy kings at discretion. 16. The second title of this book by John of Salisbury-De Nugis Curialium (On the Trifles of the Courtiers)-was that taken by Walter Map for a book of his own, which was very different in texture. He had been asked, he says, by a friend, Geoffrey, to write something as a philosopher and poet, courtly and pleasant. He replied that poetical invention needs a quiet, concentrated mind, and that this was not to be had in the turmoil of a court. But he did accept a lighter commission, and "would endeavour to set down in a book whatever he had seen or heard that seemed to him worth note, and that had not yet been written, so that the telling should be pleasant, and the instruction should tend to morality." His work, therefore, which Is in five divisions, is a volume of trustworthy contemporary anecdote by the man who knew better than any other what was worth observing. There is no pedantry at all, no waste of words. There is not a fact or story that might not have been matter of table talk at Henry's Court. Anecdotes on subjects allied to one another are generally arranged together; but there is a new topic in every chapter, and the work is a miscellany rich in illustration of its time, and free enough in its plan to admit any fact or opinion or current event worth record. It includes bold speaking against crusading zeal, that left home duties unper |