Cambridge; but a large number remained and continued their studies in Oxford. "All evil comes from the North," said a south English monk, in allusion to these

events.

Next came the days of that famous English bishop, Grossetete, a teacher at Oxford, afterwards Chancellor of the University and Bishop of Lincoln. A friend to Roger Bacon, and of the "New Learning" of his time, he led the crusade against church abuses. Grossetete effectually protected the Oxonians from the consequences of a disturbance, in 1238, in which they had resisted with temporary success the appointment of foreigners to benefices. The "good Robert of Lincoln " became famous in song and story, for he sided with the nation in this struggle; and when, after his death, strenuous appeals for his canonization were sent to Rome, the Pope stigmatized him as a heretic. The farsighted and patriotic Earl, Simon de Montfort, was supported by Bishop Grossetete. The important part Oxford played in this movement is shown by the assemblage of Montfort's noted parliament of 1258 at that place. And the "Provisions of Oxford" were the result. At both Oxford and Cambridge the Northern men opposed the king, and many of them fought in Montfort's army, aided to gain the victory of Lewes, and laid down their lives for the cause of popular rights by the fatal Evesham bridge, where their leader perished.

There were dreadful "town and gown" struggles in 1296, and again in 1355, on the latter occasion several hundred persons being killed. Royal authority had to be invoked to restore confidence. The permanent ascendency of the University dates from this time. But there were countless frays which are merely mentioned in chroniclers.

Sometimes one element, sometimes another, predominated. Banners were displayed, and pitched battles fought. In 1389 the Northern men conquered the Southerns,

1 When the leader of the students shot the brother of the Papal Legate with a "cloth-yard arrow" and killed him, and the Legate fled and concealed himself. Huber's Hist. Eng. U. Vol. 1.

and driving them down the slope, shouted, "Kill the Italians," so several of their foes were then and there slaughtered. We must bear in mind the fact that Oxford was the focus of English religious and intellectual life; the monks were better supported, and were more strongly opposed at Oxford than elsewhere. The thoughts of the nation converged thither. In the actions of Grossetete, Earl Simon, and the Oxonians lie foreshadowings of the time when nobles and bishops would aid weavers, shop-keepers, and farmers to "break the bonds of Rome." See what brave words Shakspere has put into the mouth of King John (as a message to Innocent III):

"Tell him this tale, and from the mouth of England Add this much more, that no Italian priest Shall tithe or toll in our dominion."

And in Grosstete's day many who were not weak nor ignoble believed this doctrine, and added to it the vow, "nor appoint foreigners to fill our benefices." On such selfish hinges the doors of reform begin to move. When it comes to Marston Moors, Sieges of Leyden, and Vaudois Martyrdoms, men of another style take the lead.

For many years after the accession of Edward I., Oxford, despite the outbreaks noted in the previous paragraph, enjoyed comparative quiet, and laid the foundation of the great religious and literary movements of the fourteenth century. Three men were eminent in this epoch-Robert Langland, priest and Fellow of Oriel College, author of "Piers Plowman's" fierce attack on corrupt ecclesiastics; John Wyclif, Fellow of Merton College, teacher of theology, translator of the Bible; and Geoffrey Chaucer, "first singer of our English Isle," whom both Oxford and Cambridge claim. The nation grew every day more at enmity with the monasteries, four hundred of which held a fifth of the kingdom, and with the mendicant friars, who had lost their pristine virtues. The people were ready, and Wyclif of Oxford was the only man in England fit to lead religious reform. John of Gaunt and other nobles were persuaded into temporary support of

any doctrines that should clip the wings of certain bishops. Lollardism grew, and took deep root in secret places: John Ball, the priest, and Wat Tyler, with his rude-weaponed yeomanry singing their communistic songs, marched to London; everywhere bitter proverbs, gibes, and ballads showed the public feeling. But Wyclif's movement had not unified the conflicting elements sufficiently to make it at once successful. It became stored-up force for the next great struggle, a century later.

The political side of the case is interesting. A long dispute between the crown and Rome began in 1306, in the famous "Limiting Act," intended to prevent superiors residing abroad from taxing English ecclesiastical houses. This was followed by stronger acts, till the great council of 1389 was called; but even this failed, and the Pope excommunicated the bishops who had supported the crown. The parliament of 139293 stubbornly took up the venerable dispute, and the three estates, Lords, Bishops, and Commons, successfully resisted the wave of foreign ecclesiastical encroachment. The key-notes to this complicated story are the facts that the Pope was dependent on France, and France was the enemy of England.

This era was many-sided. You must think of Chaucer, representing the fine and eloquent enthusiasm of the newly awakened genius of English literature, scorning the musty traditions, and breaking the rusted fetters of the past; healthily human, prophetic, throbbing with faint fore-knowledge, even in that hour of dawn, of the full noondays of the Elizabethan age. From the religious standpoint, austere John Wyclif is the central human figure of this fierce and seemingly futile endeavor. Broadcast over the fields he sowed the seeds of free and independent thought, and England's yeomanry kept faithful watch over each sprouting germ. The Catholics said he was the Devil sowing tares in their corn, so they called his followers Lollards (lolium). The term has also been derived from the German lollen or lullen (singers), referring to the dirge singing of the

earlier Antwerp Lollards. Vainly their enemies tried to root them out of the land and silence their voices. When the persecution began one-third of the English people were followers of Wyclif. Gray-bearded, bare-footed, clad in russet mantle, preaching from the pulpit of Oxford, hope of English hearts, championing the cause of the University he loved against the exactions of the mendicant monks, denouncing auricular confession and the transubstantiation doctrine, calling the Pope "Antichrist," and "the most accursed of clippers and pursé kervers"; ambassador of England to negotiate the Bruges convention with the Papal legate; sending out preachers to put torches of Bible texts and tracts into the dry thickets and weed-grown wildernesses-John Wyclif is no mere shadowy abstraction, but an impetuous reformer, doing noble work. After his death the leaderless Lollards listened to evil counsels, and too often sought temporal weapons. They should have remembered that a doctrine better than the old, at once more human and more divine, needs no image-breaking, takes no sword in its hands, but is content to wait for recognition, even as nature required unnumbered ages of selection to evolve the marvelous espiritu el santo flower, and as for ages more, undiscovered, it bloomed on in the solitudes of Darien.

The first martyr of the Lollards was John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, a man of much talent and influence. Condemned in 1412, he escaped, but was recaptured, and burned in 1416. It was in the previous year that the Council of Constance had, at its eighth session, pronounced anathema against the works of Wyclif. At a later period, about forty years after Wyclif's death, a strange scene occurred. The forerunners of the English Humanists of the Colet school were turning their faces towards Italy. Grocyn was a child, playing in the streets of Bristol, and Thomas Linacre was an infant in the stately minster town of Canterbury. Old men at Oxford yet told with love or with hate how Wyclif had preached from that historic pulpit. Ancient and toil-bowed 1 According to Knight.

One sunlit morning, a procession of priests, monks, and friars, armed with the decrees of Constance and the parchments of Rome, violated with their futile vengeance the precincts of the quiet yew-shaded churchyard, bore the bones of the reformer to the brook that flows into Avon, burned them to ashes, sowed them broadcast over the world, whereever waters move, or winds blow, or dramatic events strike deep root in the universal heart of humanity.

It is impossible within the limits of this article to more than indicate the forces which in England and on the continent began to shape things for the revival of Greek learning at Oxford and the age of Colet. In many places scholarly men were asking troublesome questions about the earlier ages of the church, and growing ready to oppose the cast-iron tenets of the schoolmen. The council of Pisa, in 1409, in its attempt to end the schism, marked a turn in the tide of ecclesiastical authority, for it declared that a Council could be higher than the Pope. The Councils of Constance and of Basle further developed this essential limitation.

Then grew up that system of independent ecclesiastical communities not vowed to monasticism, which took many forms, such as the Alexiani, but found their saintliest expression in the famous "Fratres Vitæ Communis" of Windesheim, which grew from the work of Gerard Groot of Deventer, and is chiefly of interest to the Christian world because of gentle and holy Thomas à Kempis, who was a brother of this order from 1400 to 1471, and wrote, besides his "Imitation of Christ,' a life of Gerard.

Another important movement was the reaction towards speculative, mystic theology. In its extreme forms it became dreamy, unreal, fantastic, and overwrought, adopting theories of Paracelsus, and organizing brotherhoods of Rosicrucians. But its nobler views have had a quiet, mighty, and growing influence on humanity ever since Plato, the

tian mysticism marked a revolt against the supreme authority of Augustine; it upheld the spiritual, the communion of the soul with God; it became a living and beautiful faith. Henry Eckart (1329) was a forerunner of the Medieval Mystics, and John Tauler, leader of a sect called "Friends of God," became their greatest preacher. Nicholas of Basle, and Martin of Mayence, near the close of the fourteenth century, were among their martyrs. A century later, the childlike and war-hating Mennonites found refuge in Holland, under the wise toleration of William of Orange; and theosophic Weigel, and meditative Böhme wrote and taught. The point to remember is that in many ways the Humanists and the Mystics wrought side by side in assaulting the dead forms and barren scholasticisms.

Before the close of the fourteenth century, the Albigenses had been nearly destroyed, the Waldenses were scattered over Germany and Switzerland, the ancient Manichean doctrines, so long surviving in Bosnia, had been annihilated by the Turkish cimeter. John Huss, teacher of theology at Prague, who had been won to Augustinianism about the year 1400 by the writings of Wyclif, forms the link between Wyclif and Luther. He wrote his famous appeal from the Pope to Christ, "Tractatus de Ecclesia," and went the way of stubborn heretics in those days. John Ziska and his Taborites, and the religious wars in Bohemia and Moravia, followed. Meanwhile, in nooks and corners of Europe, in deep forests where peasants lived like rugged beasts, in crowded cities where fanatics preached, defying scourge and prison, the "signs of the times" took frightful forms. Between 1374 and 1414, the dancing mania swept over Europe, and kept breaking out for a century or more; convulsionists appeared, with their strange indifference to pain; the Adamites, Luciferians, and Turlupines held naked assemblies and midnight saturnalia; the flagellants marched in long procession across the Alps into Italy, across the Pyrenees into Spain, using their leadweighted whips on their own half-naked

bodies; prophets and prophetesses pealed forth incoherent lamentations-fierce, insane predictions, hideous and horrible doctrines, born of the overstrained and bursting hearts of mortals. All this time, let us not forget, Europe was a great and curiously fashioned whispering gallery, and at its center sat ecclesiastical Rome. Throughout Christendom, silent, watchful sleepless, pitiless, greater than kings, the ignorant monks, mumbling over their crucifixes, flitted like ghosts, and learned the secrets of every fireside.

era.

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Just on the verge of the Oxford move ment of the fifteenth century, some individual reformers deserve mention. In Flanders, a Carmelite friar, Thomas Conecte, preached such daring and prophetic reform that, being inveigled to Rome, he was burned there in 1432. The Carthusian, James of Erfurt, and John Laillier, master of the Sorbonne about 1484, also John Vitrarius of Tournay, at the same period denounced church abuses. Richrath Oberwesel, Prior John of Goch, and John Wessel, a professor at Heidelburg, taught doctrines much like Luther's. mann's book, "Reformatoren vor der Reformation" deals in a philosophic way with this To sum it all up in a few words: Long before the close of the fifteenth century there were signs of change throughout Euope; the spirit of the laity was asserting itself against the claims of the clergy; anti-sacerdotal sects were organized; Conservatist reformers, such as Gerson of Paris, had helped to shatter the outer walls; more radical reformers, such as Militz, Conrad, Mathias of Janow, Savonarola, had dealt stronger blows than they were aware; the mystics of the school of St. Victor, St. Bernard, Bonaventura, choosing intuition instead of logic, and teaching the "indwelling of the divine," had poured living streams down long-dry channels. All eyes, all hopes, were turned to the Italy of Petrarch, of Dante, and of reviving classic art and literature. Of this George Eliot says, in her "Spanish Gypsy":

"Other futures stir the world's great heart,
Europe is come to her majority,
And enters on the vast inheritance
Won from the tombs of mighty ancestors."

Mournful Petrarch had stood by while an irate father burned his precious books; a few years later the youth's ardent intellect began to assault the rubbish heaps of scholasticism and unbolt its dreary prison-houses. It was time that the spirit of a new gospel for men moved on the stagnant waste of waters; that new storms purified with new struggles all the miasma-breeding swamps. Modern criticism has found much of interest, even in Occam's nominalism and the Averroist follies; but they had become wornout creeds, cast-off garments, empty bottles thrown into the street, ashes of old fires trampled under foot. The whirlwinds were abroad to smite what Petrarch called "the nests of gloomy ignorance," and shatter, though he guessed it not, the decaying tree of hierarchical dominion. Meanwhile, what of Oxford? How drew the English humanists their inspiration from the Italian Renaissance? It is one of the most interesting pages of history.

Englishmen were among the earliest worshipers of the star of knowledge new-risen in the east. When the restless and manysided genius of the Florentines was flung into the Renaissance, and the despair of liberty became the hope of letters, Englishmen from Oxford and Cambridge sat at the feet of the stately Grecian exiles who taught the tongue of Homer in the land of Virgil. Such noted men as John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, Robert Fleming, the Papal prothonary, John Free, an eloquent London lawyer, and William Gray, Bishop of Ely, were students in Italy before the days of Colet and Grocyn. many valuable manuscripts with him to England, and gave them to Balliol College, Oxford. At the same time the fame of Aretino drew such men as Beaufort's great rival, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who, in 1439-43, enriched Oxford with priceless manuscripts. The great teachers of Bologna, Padua, Florence, attracted the brightest minds of England. It is an entire mistake to suppose that Grocyn, Linacre, and Colet transplanted humanism to Oxford. They gave it more vigorous growth, but forty years

Gray took

The last quarter of the century began. John Argyropulos, trained under the patriotic and eloquent Bessarion, became teacher of young Lorenzo de Medici; Chalcondylas and Politian were also famous teachers. In 1482 John Reuchlin, who led the humanists in Germany and won in 1516 a memorable victory over the monks of Cologne, visited Italy. Two years later appeared that unanswerable book of Agricola, "De Formando Studio," which repudiated scholastic models, appealed to literary standards, and announced the rights of the individual thinker. Cornelius Vitelli was already teaching Greek at Oxford. In 1485 Thomas Linacre, a Fellow at All Souls College, visited Italy in the train of William Selling, Prior of Canterbury, found favor with the Medicean princes, and studied under Politian. In 1488, the same year that the antique splendor of the famous Florence Homer appeared, William Grocyn, also an Oxford Fellow, followed the rising tide to Italy, studying under Chalcondylas and Politian. Five years later John Colet of Magdalen College followed Linacre and Grocyn. The three leaders of the Eng. lish humanists had appeared.

The battle ground was rapidly being transferred from Florentine lecture rooms to the halls of every university of Europe. Valla of Pavia led the attack on such forgeries as the "Donation of Constantine," and Poggio exposed the fraudulent character of the "decretals." At the great northern universities the struggle was long and doubtful. Gabriel Biel of Tübingen was the last of the noted schoolmen (1495). All progressive thinkers joined the humanist schools, though even fifty years later Melancthon met the ancient prejudices almost intact at Wittenberg. The great weapon of the humanists was comparative and enlightened criticism. It had plenty of material to work upon. But the key-note of three centuries of history will be found in a consideration of the different objects pursued by the Italian humanists on the one hand, and by the German and English humanists on the other. The first were

lowing beauty, art, glowing forms, sensuous ideals, urbane manners, culture of body and mind; the last were trying to change the accepted theory of education, and open a new field of theology, using their culture as a means, not as an end. Viewed in this light, the true significance of the less imaginative but more practical Oxford movement of 1498 bursts upon us. The longstruggling spirit of the turbulent islanders, epitomized so often in Oxford frays, seized this "new learning" as an ax to hew down unbearable evils, and lifted up the culture of Italy as a torch to light her onward path.

It is time for a few words about the outward lives of Linacre, Grocyn, and Colet. Thomas Linacre was born in 1460, educated by William Selling, and at Oxford. Cardinal de Medici, afterwards Leo X., was his companion in his classic studies in Italy. Among his friends were Aldus the Venetian printer, Leonicenus of Vicenza, and Hermolaus Barbarus. He took a degree at Padua, and returned to Oxford to shine in a brilliant circle. In 1501 he was called to Court as tutor of Prince Arthur. He became Court physician, aided to found the Royal College of Physicians, held several benefices, devoted much time to literary work, translated the "De Sphæra" of Proclus and Galen's most important treatises. Linacre was a delicate, fastidious, minutely accurate, scholarly man, whose personal influence was of the highest order. Though almost unknown by his writings, his wit, culture, wisdom, and religion won the ardent admiration of Colet, More, and Erasmus.

William Grocyn was born at Bristol in 1442, sent to Winchester College, elected to an Oxford fellowship, chosen reader in Divinity in Magdalen College, and publicly disputed before King Richard with John Taylor, then professor of theology, greatly pleasing the king. On his return from Italy he lectured on theology in Exeter College, and soon became professor of Greek. His lectures on Greek, in 1491, marked the inaugural of an era. More and Erasmus were among his scholars. Grocyn kept himself