Episcopal control proved to be a very mixed blessing for the mediaeval universities of northern Europe. When tempered with understanding and restraint, episcopal power was a most benevolent force which could serve to promote the best interests of nascent university structures. In so many instances, episcopal aid was a veritable sine qua non of university survival. For example, it is hard to imagine that the fifteenth-century Scottish universities could have survived at all without the sustained, enlightened treatment that they received at the hands of their episcopal sponsors. In this sense, the term ‘episcopal control’ bears misleading connotations. For the Scottish bishops had no thought of effecting a permanent episcopal stranglehold over the universities they had brought into being. On the contrary, they freely gave of their wealth and energies in the realization that adequate endowments and organizational maturity would inevitably bring full independent status to these university guilds. To this extent, the bishops who founded the universities of St Andrews (1413), Glasgow (1451), and Aberdeen (1494–5) are truly representative of the magnanimous and liberal episcopal outlook which pervaded the university scene in northern Europe towards the close of the mediaeval period. This contrasts strikingly with earlier episcopal attitudes. For in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries episcopal authority had all too often been channelled in a direction aggressively antithetical to the growth of the corporate independence of the university guilds. The notorious efforts of the bishop of Paris and the chancellor of Notre Dame to stifle the independence of the Parisian masters is but an extreme example of the kind of complete divorce that could arise between the academic guild and the ecclesiastical authorities.

In the middle of the fourteenth century Sir John Mandeville, travelling through Macedonia, came across the grave of Aristotle. In a place called Strages, he writes, ‘there is an altar upon his tomb, and there they make solemn feast ilk a year, as he were a saint. And upon his altar they hold their great counsel and assembly; and they trow that, through inspiration of God and him, they shall have the better counsel’.

In the thirteenth century the tomb of Plato was said to exist in a church at Konia in Asia Minor. There was a spring and a river of Plato nearby, for it was believed that ‘the plain of Konia was once a sea, which Plato caused to disappear’. In the chapel of the Panagia Portaitissa in the monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos one may still see among the rows of saints and prophets painted on the walls the figures of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and even Thucydides. At the lowest level of enlightenment in the Byzantine world the ancient philosophers were revered as magicians or prophets. But among educated people Plato and Aristotle were universally admired for their literary merits, if for no other reason. It was they who, in their differing ways, had set the style and standard of literacy for all Greek Christian writers, philosophers, and theologians.

One aspect of the character of Walter Reynolds, archbishop of Canterbury 1314–1327, was darkened by three contemporary chroniclers whose words have been accepted with little question by some historians of more modern times—his supposed illiteracy. The question is this: Did Edward II choose a primate for all England who was seriously defective in learning? Even if literacy in medieval usage meant strictly a knowledge of Latin, was Reynolds illiterate?

This notion comes to us originally from the three chronicles most hostile to Reynolds: 1) the Flores Historiarum: ‘vir siquidem laicus et in tantum illiteratus ut nomen proprium declinare penitus ignorabat’; 2) the Vita Edwardi Secundi: ‘simplex clericus et minus competenter litteratus’; and 3) the chronicle of Lanercost: ‘homo quasi illiteratus, et, secundum judicium humanum, tam ratione vitae quam scientiae omni gradu dignitatis indignus.’

From time to time it has been pointed out that Wyclif had a quite exceptional grasp of papal-hierocratic theory. Although its bitter opponent, his extensive knowledge of the refinements of the theory, his almost intuitive appreciation of its most fundamental principles, indicate a depth of penetration into hierocratic ideology which many supporters of papal supremacy must themselves have envied. His effectiveness as an anti-papal writer during the polemics of the 1370s and 1380s lay less in the novelty and originality of his own system of thought, and in the consistency with which he repeated himself, but rather in his superior ability to detect the weakest points in his adversaries’ chain of argument. He not only knew exactly where to thrust between the links, but, more important, how to aim for the pivots of the system, so that the whole hierocratic theory might be turned on its head.

The legal historian can scarcely help but encounter the world of academic learning in his studies. He meets the university teachers among his auctores; he finds the mode of their writing often determined by university exercises; in court records and formulary books he encounters graduates holding offices in the courts; he even finds the occasional wayward student who because of his impecunious ways or his transgression of the peace has been cited to appear in court. It is from a formulary book that a case of more than passing interest has come to light concerning Oxford in the early fifteenth century.

Perhaps the earliest use of trilinguis, to refer to the biblical tongues and the claim to proficiency in them, is in Jerome, Apology against Rufinus, 401 A.D., where Jerome reminded Rufinus of his own status as a scholar, ‘Ego philosophus, rhetor, grammaticus, dialecticus, Hebraeus, Latinus trilinguis’. Erasmus who owed so much to Jerome in biblical studies and in his conception of renewal for the life of the Church and Christian society by such studies, would have omitted ‘dialecticus’ from Jerome’s roll-call of his own attainments. For Erasmus the ‘philosophia Christi’ based on trilingual learning was the ground of renewal in personal and public Christian life, of renewal in the Church, and of renewal in the respublica litterarum. As he saw it, disaster came upon the Church’s thinking when dialectics were introduced into theology, mastered it, and produced ‘some of the pseudo-theologians of our time whose brains are rotten, their language barbarous, their intellects dull, their learning a bed of thorns, their manners rough, their life hypocritical, their talk full of venom, and their hearts as black as ink’.

The level of literacy amongst the parochial clergy of the sixteenth century is a matter sometimes neglected and sometimes misunderstood, for the evidence is not wholly clear beyond dispute and still far from complete. Estimates of the general condition may have been affected greatly and unduly by the Tudor convention of overstatement. When Archbishop Lee declared to Cromwell in 1535, in referring to the clergy of his diocese, that no learned man would take the livings there because of the poverty of the livings, and that he did not know more than twelve secular priests in his diocese that could preach, it would be prudent to discover if possible whether this statement is due to overstatement or to some prejudice, or whether it is not far from a true appraisal of the situation. Yet definite evidence of the required nature, free from overstatement or bias, or where overstatement or bias may be detected on sure grounds, is not always easy to find, and beyond all this lies the need for appreciation soundly based of the general position of the clergy in relation both to the Church and to society, which must not be lost to view.

Plurality is, of course, a subject with a long history. One Elizabethan apologist argued that the Old Testament prophets were not tied to any particular synagogue, while St Peter, the Apostle of the Jews, had the cure of the whole nation, and St Paul of the Gentiles, being encumbered with the care of all the churches, a greater plurality even than that of St Peter. Less tendentiously one may add that it engaged the attention of the fathers at Chalcedon in 451, was condemned by the third and fourth Lateran councils, the legatine assemblies of Otto and Ottobon—and many others besides.

The two great English universities did not consider the study of history to be of sufficient importance to warrant the foundation of specific lectureships until the early seventeenth century. The subject was not considered to be an academic discipline worthy of learned appreciation for its own sake. During the preceding centuries the study of history had been regarded as a most useful adjunct to the study of theology and philosophy. The writings of early historians had been read and, indeed, histories written. Much good work had been done, but on the whole, the study of history had been in the hands of scholars whose main interest lay elsewhere.