11. Matthew Paris, also a monk of St. Albans, wrote, under the title of Historia Major, a History of England, commencing from the remotest times, and coming down to 1259, the year in which he died. It was long believed that the entire work was original, but it has been lately discovered that the whole of the earlier portion, down to 1235, is taken from the Flores Historiarum of Roger of Wendover. So far as it is a contemporary authority, this bulky work has always been considered as of the highest value. Allowance must, however, be made for the prejudices of a monk when he writes of the secular clergy; perhaps for those of an Englishman when he writes of the court of Rome. With the Historia Major is printed a continuation to the year 1272, supposed to be by Rishanger. Paris also wrote the Historia Minor, from the Conquest to 1253, lately printed in the Rolls series.

12, 13. Nicholas Trivet, a Dominican, and Ranulph Higden, a monk of St. Werburgh's, in Chester, composed, the one a valuable and well-written series of Annals, extending from 1135 to 1307, the other a work entitled Polychronicon, which comes down to 1357.

This was the standard work on general history and geography towards the end of the fourteenth and all through the fifteenth century. The Latin MSS. of it are prodigiously numerous. No doubt Chaucer made use of it; it is quoted by writers in the Wyclif controversy,' and Henry of Knyghton, writing about the year 1400, excerpts largely from it. It is divided into seven books, of which the first is a sketch of Universal Geography, taken from Pliny, Solinus, Beda, &c., and the second contains a summary of Universal History from the Creation to the destruction of the Jewish temple. The entire work is being edited by Mr. Babington for the Master of the Rolls, and will fill many volumes of the series.

'Fasciculi Zizaniorum (Rolls series) p. 256.

Law and Medicine: other Prose Writings.

Early in our period the study of laws and jurisprudence was revived, and carried on with the eagerness and exclusiveness which are incidental to revivals. Up to the twelfth century the Roman law had been known either by tradition or imperfect copies. But the Pisans, when they took Amalfii, in 1137, are said to have discovered an entire copy of the Pandects of Justinian-the work in which (together with its sister publications, the Codex and Institute) the laws of the Roman empire were by the orders of that emperor (about the year 534) collected, classified, and explained. Copies of the treasure were soon multiplied, and it was studied, among others, by Gratian, a monk of Bologna, who conceived the idea of collecting and arranging in a similar way what may be called the statutory and traditional law of the Christian Church. He published, in 1151, under the name of Decretum, a collection of the canons of councils, the decrees of popes, and the maxims of the more ancient Fathers, all which branches are included under the general term of Canon Law. The fame of Gratian and his work drew students to Bologna from all parts of Europe, and noted schools of canonists and civilians (for the Roman, or civil, was studied there pari passu with the canon law) grew up at that city. English ecclesiastics resorted there in great numbers, and imported the legal knowledge thus gained into the ecclesiastical courts of their own country. These courts, both on account of the greater simplicity and clearness of the law administered in them, and as less open to be tampered with by royal or aristocratic influences, were much resorted to by the laity in preference to the temporal or common law courts. They were consequently the object

'See, however, Hallam's Literature of Europe, vol. i. p. 62.

of keen ill-will among the lawyers, and of jealousy or opposition on the part of the crown. But they seem to have had this good effect, if no other-that their rivalry stimulated the lawyers to polish, digest, and present in a rational and consistent form, the ancient common law of the land, which otherwise could not have stood its ground against its twin foreign rivals. Hence arose, near the end of the twelfth century, the work of chief justiciary Ranulf de Glanville, On the Laws and Customs of England,' the earliest extant treatise upon English law.

The chief seat of medical science during this period was the University of Salerno in Italy. This university was in existence before the time of Charlemagne, who founded a college in it. It was known as 'the city or commonwealth of Hippocrates' (civitas Hippocratica), and was at the zenith of its reputation in the twelfth century; early in which the Schola Salernitana, a learned poem in leonine, or rhyming Latin verses, on the mode of preserving health, was composed and published. In 1225 the University received from the Emperor, Frederick II., the exclusive right of granting medical degrees in his dominions. Like all other sciences at this period, medicine was greatly indebted to the researches of the Arabians, for profiting by which, Salerno, from its position on the Mediterranean, was singularly well fitted.

John of Salisbury, born about 1120, passed fifteen years of his youth and manhood, between 1136 and 1151, in studying and teaching in France. In the latter year he was made secretary to Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, and continued to hold the same office under Thomas à Becket, whose violent death he is said to have narrowly escaped sharing. In 1176 he was appointed bishop of Chartres, where he died in 1180. His works are miscellaneous in their contents, and seem to proceed upon no well-defined

1 Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus regni Angliæ.

general plan. The Polycraticus de Nugis Curialium et Vestigiis Philosophorum was completed in 1156. The 'frivolities of the courtiers,' by which he means all that Bunyan would describe as merchandise in the markets of the city of Vanity, are examined and censured with a prolix seriousness which is more edifying than entertaining. By the footsteps of the philosophers' are meant those philosophical doctrines which were worthy to be generally received and followed. A treatise in Latin elegiacs, entitled Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum, has much the same argument as the Polycraticus. The Metalogicus, composed about 1160, is a prose treatise in six books, and, according to Mr. Wright, 'contains valuable materials for the history of scholastic philosophy during the twelfth century, and furnishes portraits of the leaders of the different sects by one who had lived and studied in their society.'

Walter Map, archdeacon of Oxford, whose Latin poems we shall consider presently, wrote also a book De Nugis Curialium, edited by Mr. Wright for the Camden Society in 1850. This is a very miscellaneous, but also a very amusing book, being full of interesting allusions to contemporary events, manners, and persons.

Science.

Here, too, but for the name of one great Englishman, there would be nothing to detain us long. We have seen how astronomy, and the subsidiary sciences of arithmetic and geometry, were included in the old Quadrivium, the course of study which had struggled down from the Roman Empire. The reason of this lay in the absolute necessity of the thing; for without some degree of astronomical knowledge the calendar could not be computed, and the very church feasts could not be fixed to their proper dates. Moreover, the ignis fatuus of astrology

the delusive belief that human events were influenced by the aspects and conjunctions of the heavenly bodies-led on the student, duped for the benefit of his race, to a more careful study of the phenomena of the heavens than he would otherwise have bestowed. But, besides these longestablished studies, scientific teaching in other branches had been ardently commenced in France by Gerbert, as we have seen, early in the eleventh century. But in spite of the intrinsic attractiveness of such studies, they languished and dwindled away. One cause of this is to be found in the suspicion and dislike with which they were popularly regarded. Gerbert was believed to have been a magician, and to have sold his soul to the evil one. Roger Bacon was popularly regarded in England as a sorcerer down to the reign of James I. To trace this feeling to its sources would be a very curious inquiry, but it is one foreign to our present purpose. The second principal cause of this scientific sterility lay in the superior attractiveness of scholasticism. It was pleasanter to be disputatious than to be thoughtful; easier to gain a victory in dialectics than to solve a problem in mechanics. Moreover, men could not distinguish between the applicability of the scholastic method to a subject, such as theology, in which the postulates or first principles were fixed, and its applicability to subjects of which the postulates either had to be discovered, or were liable to progressive change. They tried nature, not by an appeal to facts, but by certain physical or metaphysical canons which they supposed to be impregnable. Thus Roger Bacon says that it was the general belief in his time that hot water exposed to a low temperature in a vessel would freeze sooner than the same quantity of cold water, because, say the metaphysicians, contrarium excitatur per contrarium-contraries reciprocally produce each other. But I have tried it,' he says, with amusing earnestness, and it is not the fact, but the very reverse.' It thus happened that Roger

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