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 TO A.D. 1349] THOMAS BRADWARDINE 97 until that college was dissolved in the time of Henry VIII. Some of the books then went to Duke Humphrey's library, and some to Balliol College; some went to Dr. George Owen, the king's physician, when he and William Martyn obtained the site of Durham College-afterwards used for the foundation of Trinity College-from King Edward VI. 2. Among the men of mark who passed through Richard of Bury's house as chaplains, the most famous were Thomas Bradwardine and Robert Holcot. Thomas Bradwardine, of an old family named after a village on the Wye still called Bredwardine, was born either at Chichester, or at Hartfield, in the diocese of Chichester, about the year 1290. He graduated from Merton College, and became afterwards Divinity Professor, and Chancellor of the University of Oxford. He was already chancellor of his university when he lived as chaplain and friend with Richard Aungervyle, Bishop of Durham. Through his friend's influence he became chaplain and confessor to Edward III., whom he attended during his wars in France. There the uncouth scholar, whose clumsiness of manner was a jest to the pope's nephew at Avignon, would address, as priest and patriot, the English army on the eve of battle. The king annulled the election when Bradwardine was first chosen archbishop by the monks of Canterbury, saying that he "could ill spare so worthy a man, and never could see that he wished himself to be spared." But very soon the see fell vacant a second time, and then, in the year 1349, when Chaucer's age was twenty-one, Bradwardine was again elected. This time the office was accepted, and Bradwardine came to England, where, forty days after his consecration, and before he was enthroned, he died of the Great Plague, then traversing Europe. At Oxford Bradwardine had written on speculative geometry and arithmetic, on proportions of velocities, and had formed a rather thick volume of astronomical tables. But his great work was founded on University lectures against the Pelagian heresy, written later in life, and this was his De Causa Dei"On the Cause of God against Pelagius," in which he treated theological questions mathematically, and was considered to have produced a masterpiece of doctrinal argument. As the book is now printed, it forms a massive folio of 876 closelyfilled pages. Bradwardine thus earned from the pope the title of the Profound Doctor, and from Chaucer the allusion in his Nun's Priest's Tale. E "For I ne cannot bolt it to the bran As can the holy Doctor Augustin, Robert Holcot, who was also one of Richard of Bury's chaplains, also was among the victims of the Plague in 1349. He was born and educated at Northampton, became a Dominican, taught theology at Oxford, and, when he died, was general of the order of the Austin Friars. He wrote many volumes. In those on scholastic philosophy he followed Duns Scotus and William Occam as a defender of Nominalism, and he contributed to medieval theology a famous work in four books, Super Sententias (On Opinions), in which he undertakes to answer a series of questions upon points of faith. Holcot also wrote while Chaucer, a bright student, was growing into manhood. Another of Richard de Bury's chaplains was Walter Burley, who produced a library of treatises, was an expert scholar in Aristotle, and, like Holcot, maintained the more healthy philosophy of what might be called the English school against the realists. 3. John of Gaddesden, in Hertfordshire, had been physician to Edward III. when he was prince, and when he had Richard of Bury for his tutor. In the reign of Edward III. he was the king's physician; and he was the first Englishman who held that office. He wrote a famous compilation of the whole mediæval practice of physic, chiefly as derived from the Arabians by himself and by Gilbertus Anglicus and others of his predecessors, with additions from his own experience He called his book the "English Rose"-Rosa Anglica-because a treatise of medicine published some years before in France had been called the Lily. His book is shrewd, learned, and amusing to the moderns, who laugh at such a remedy for epilepsy as a boar's bladder boiled, mistletoe, and a cuckoo. 4. Monastic chroniclers were active still during the reign of Edward III. John of Trokelowe wrote, very early in this reign, some valuable Annals of the reign of Edward II. from 1307 to 1323. From that date they were continued by Henry of Blaneford with a fragment that came to an abrupt end in the year 1324. Some years later Robert of Avesbury, who kept the Register of the Archbishop's Court at Canterbury, began a history, De Mirabilibus Gestis Edwardi III. (Of the Admirable Deeds of King Edward IIL), which carried from the TO A.D. 1361] CHRONICLERS. RALPH HIGDEN 99 birth of Edward III. in 1313 to 1356 a short detail of public events, with simple transcripts of original documents and extracts from letters. John of Fordun, a village in Kincardine, was a patriotic Scot, secular priest and chaplain of the cathedral of Aberdeen. He had not graduated in the schools. In the reign of Edward III. John of Fordun wrote a Scotichronicon, or Chronicle of Scotland. It began with Shem, Ham, Japheth, and the origin of the Scots, and was brought down to the year 1360, in a manner that in some degree forsook the method of monastic annals, and made an approach to a formal history. In England Ralph Higden finished his Polychronicon about the year 1361; and at the close of the reign of Edward III. William Thorn was at work on a Latin Chronicle of Canterbury Abbey. 5. Ralph Higden has interest for us not only as a chronicler. His name has been variously spelt. Ranulphus or Ralph, appears sometimes as Radulphus or Randall; and Higden, by transition from Higgeden, has become Higgened or Higgenet, if the common belief be true that Ralph Higden, who wrote in his later years the "Polychronicon," is the Randall Higgenet who in his earlier days wrote the Chester miracle plays. Ralph Higden became a Benedictine monk of St. Werburgh in Chester about the year 1299, and he is believed to be the Randall Higgenet of the same abbey, of whom there was a tradition that he thrice visited Rome to get the Pope's leave for the acting of his miracle-plays at Chester in the English tongue. Leave having been obtained, the plays were said, in a note added at the end of the sixteenth century to a MS. copy of the proclamation of them, to have been first acted at Chester in the mayoralty of Sir John Arnway (1327—1328), which would be about the date of Chaucer's birth. Higden's Polychronicon, in seven books, was so called, he says, because it gave the chronicle of many times. Its first book described the countries of the known world, especially Britain; its second book gave the history of the World from the Creation to Nebuchadnezzar; the next book closed with the birth of Christ; the fourth book carried on the chronicle to the arrival of the Saxons in England; the fifth proceeded to the invasion of the Danes; the sixth to the Norman Conquest; and the seventh to Higden's own time in the reign of Edward III., his latest date being the year 1342. He died in 1363, and long after his death the Polychronicon" stood in high credit as a sketch of universal history, with special reference to England. Although not beyond doubt, it is very likely that the date assigned to the first acting at Chester of MIRACLE PLAYS in English is right, and that Ralph Higden was the author of the series. Since the days of Stephen and Henry II. religious entertainments of this form had been growing in popularity. A twelfth-century MS., found in the town library of Tours, contains three Anglo-Norman miracle-plays, as old, or nearly as old, as the plays of Hilarius, already described (ch. iii. § 9). The stage directions illustrate the first removal of the acting from the inside to the outside of the church. This must soon have become necessary, if it were only for accommodation of the increasing number of spectators. For the acting of those plays of which a MS. was found at Tours, scaffolding was built over the steps of the church, and the audience occupied the square in front. Out of the heaven of the church, Figura-God-passed to Adam in Paradise, upon a stage level with the highest steps of the church door. From that Paradise Adam and Eve were driven down a few steps to the lower stage that represented Earth. Below this, nearest to the spectators, was hell, an enclosed place in which cries were made, chains were rattled, and out of which smoke came; out of which also men and boys dressed as devils came by a door opening into a free space between the scaffolding and the semicircle of the front row of spectators. They were also directed now and then to go among the people, and passed round by them sometimes to one of the upper platforms. The original connection of these plays with the Church service was represented by the hymns of choristers. The next step in the development of the miracle-play was hastened by the complaint that the crowds who came to witness the performance, on an outside scaffolding, attached to the church, trampled the graves in the churchyards. Decrees were made to prevent this desecration of the graves, and the advance probably was rapid to the setting up of detached scaffolding for the performance of the plays-still by the clergy, choristers and parish clerks upon unconsecrated ground. In London the parish clerks had formed themselves into a harmonic guild, chartered by Henry III. in 1233, and their music was sought at the funerals and entertainments of the great. As miracle-plays increased in popularity, the parish |