The Friar and the Cipher by Lawrence Goldstone Page B
Authors: Lawrence Goldstone
Tags: Fiction
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Students, and students were (and still are) a mixed blessing. By the 1190s, students and masters composed more than a tenth of Paris's total population of about 30,000. As education turned secular, more and more students entered school specifically to gain an undergraduate arts degree and become doctors, lawyers, or clerks. They came from all over Europe, and from every stratum of society. There were noblemen and peasants, French, Germans, Italians, Spanish, English, and everyone in between. The vast majority of this new transient population was between the ages of fourteen and eighteen—and they were all boys.
Paris very quickly developed into a classic college town. Twenty-first-century parents will be interested to learn that university life has not changed very much in nearly a millennium. The overwhelming preponderance of letters home, for example, were pleas for money. Since many of the fourteen-year-olds who arrived at the school had not yet had the chance to learn to write, there were the equivalent of form letters for the purpose of conniving money out of parents or patrons, with blank spaces for the student's name and his target. “A much copied exercise contained twenty-two different methods of approaching an archdeacon on this ever delicate subject,” observed Charles Haskins in his meticulously researched
Studies in Medieval Culture
.
A sample letter, composed by a teacher for the benefit of his students (upon whom he was reliant for his fees), went as follows:
I know not what to offer you, my sweet father, since I am your son, and after God, entirely your own creature—so completely yours that I can give you nothing. But if I can remember what the child's instinct prompts it to say, I might sing, as the cuckoo incessantly sings, “Da, da, da, da”: and this little song I am compelled to sing at this moment, for the money which you gave me so liberally for my studies last time is now all spent, and I am in debt to the tune of more than five shillings . . .
Hormones were also a major problem. There was quite a lot of drinking and brawling. The undergraduates fought with themselves, with the townspeople, with the masters, and with their servants. The students were
so
unruly, in fact, that sometimes the masters were forced to close down the university altogether. There was a great deal of interest in women as well. Since many of the city's landlords refused to rent to students or provide teaching space, classes were held in the seamier sections of town, often over brothels. This made the Paris prostitutes a kind of adjunct faculty.
A famous thirteenth-century minstrel named Rutebeuf summed up the situation this way:
THE SONG OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS
Much argument is heard of late,
The subject I'll attempt to state,
The student-folk of Paris town
(I speak of those in cap and gown,
Students of art, philosophy—
In short, “the University,”
And not our old-time learned men)
Have stirred up trouble here again.
To give his son a chance to stay
In Paris, growing wise each day,
Is some old peasant's one ambition.
To pay his bills and his tuition
The poor hard-working father slaves;
Sends him each farthing that he saves,
While he in misery will stay
On his scant plot of land to pray
That his hard toil may help to raise
His son to honor and to praise.
But once the son is safe in town
The story then reads upside down.
Forgetting all his pledges now,
The earnings of his father's plow
He spends for weapons, not for books.
Dawdling through city streets, he looks
To find some pretty, loitering wench,
Or idle brawl by tavern bench;
Wanders at will and prie about
Till money fails and gown wears out.—
Then he starts fresh on the old round;
Why sow good seed on barren ground?
But swaggering hauberks, as they sit
Drowning in drink their feeble wit;
While three or four of them excite
Four hundred students to a fight,
And close the University.
(Not such a great calamity!)
Why send
Paris very quickly developed into a classic college town. Twenty-first-century parents will be interested to learn that university life has not changed very much in nearly a millennium. The overwhelming preponderance of letters home, for example, were pleas for money. Since many of the fourteen-year-olds who arrived at the school had not yet had the chance to learn to write, there were the equivalent of form letters for the purpose of conniving money out of parents or patrons, with blank spaces for the student's name and his target. “A much copied exercise contained twenty-two different methods of approaching an archdeacon on this ever delicate subject,” observed Charles Haskins in his meticulously researched
Studies in Medieval Culture
.
A sample letter, composed by a teacher for the benefit of his students (upon whom he was reliant for his fees), went as follows:
I know not what to offer you, my sweet father, since I am your son, and after God, entirely your own creature—so completely yours that I can give you nothing. But if I can remember what the child's instinct prompts it to say, I might sing, as the cuckoo incessantly sings, “Da, da, da, da”: and this little song I am compelled to sing at this moment, for the money which you gave me so liberally for my studies last time is now all spent, and I am in debt to the tune of more than five shillings . . .
Hormones were also a major problem. There was quite a lot of drinking and brawling. The undergraduates fought with themselves, with the townspeople, with the masters, and with their servants. The students were
so
unruly, in fact, that sometimes the masters were forced to close down the university altogether. There was a great deal of interest in women as well. Since many of the city's landlords refused to rent to students or provide teaching space, classes were held in the seamier sections of town, often over brothels. This made the Paris prostitutes a kind of adjunct faculty.
A famous thirteenth-century minstrel named Rutebeuf summed up the situation this way:
THE SONG OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS
Much argument is heard of late,
The subject I'll attempt to state,
The student-folk of Paris town
(I speak of those in cap and gown,
Students of art, philosophy—
In short, “the University,”
And not our old-time learned men)
Have stirred up trouble here again.
To give his son a chance to stay
In Paris, growing wise each day,
Is some old peasant's one ambition.
To pay his bills and his tuition
The poor hard-working father slaves;
Sends him each farthing that he saves,
While he in misery will stay
On his scant plot of land to pray
That his hard toil may help to raise
His son to honor and to praise.
But once the son is safe in town
The story then reads upside down.
Forgetting all his pledges now,
The earnings of his father's plow
He spends for weapons, not for books.
Dawdling through city streets, he looks
To find some pretty, loitering wench,
Or idle brawl by tavern bench;
Wanders at will and prie about
Till money fails and gown wears out.—
Then he starts fresh on the old round;
Why sow good seed on barren ground?
But swaggering hauberks, as they sit
Drowning in drink their feeble wit;
While three or four of them excite
Four hundred students to a fight,
And close the University.
(Not such a great calamity!)
Why send
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