Part 3 (1/2)
15. Perterreo, perterres; meaning, in pauorem conuertere.
Active.
17. Cinci (the Kenites): middle syllable long.
15. Desilio, desilis, desilii or desiliui: middle syllable short in trisyllables in the present; meaning, de aliquo salire siue descendere festinanter.
21. clauus, masc., claui: meaning, acutum ferrum, malleus, masc., mallei: meaning, martellus.
tempus, neut.: meaning, pars capitis, for which some people say timpus.
For Daniel vi, the story of Daniel in the lions' den, the commentary is even briefer:
6. surripuerunt: meaning, falso suggesserunt. Surripio, surripis, surrepsi(!): meaning, latenter rapere, subtrahere, furari.
10. comperisset; meaning, cognouisset. Comperio, comperis, comperi: fourth conjugation.
20. affatus: meaning, allocutus. From affor, affaris; and governs the accusative.
We must not exalt ourselves above the author. He is very humble. 'Let any imperfections in the book', says his preface, 'be attributed to me: and if there is anything good, let it be thought to have come from G.o.d.' He gave them of his best, explaining away such as he could of the difficulties which had confronted him. But one can imagine the disgust of even a moderate scholar if, wis.h.i.+ng to study the Bible more carefully, he could obtain access to nothing better than Mammotrectus.
Though Erasmus has not much to tell us of his time at Deventer, a fuller account of the school may be found in the autobiography of John Butzbach (_c._ 1478-1526), who for the last nineteen years of his life was Prior of Laach.[12] Indeed, his narrative is so detailed and so ill.u.s.trative of the age that it may well detain us here. He was the son of a weaver in the town of Miltenberg (hence Piemonta.n.u.s) on the Maine, above Aschaffenburg. At the age of six he was put to school and already began to learn Latin; one of his nightly exercises that he brought home with him being to get by heart a number of Latin words for vocabulary. After a few years he came into trouble with his master for laziness and truancy, and received a severe beating; his mother intervened and got the master dismissed from his post, and Butzbach was removed from the school.
[12] Butzbach's ma.n.u.scripts from Laach are now in the University Library at Bonn, but have never been printed.
I have used a German translation by D.J. Becker, Regensburg, 1869.
An opportunity then offered for him to get a wider education. The son of a neighbour who had commenced scholar, returned home for a time, and offered to take Butzbach with him when he went off again to pursue his courses for his degree. The consent of his parents was obtained; and the scholar having received a liberal contribution towards expenses, and Butzbach being equipped with new clothes, the pair set out together. The boy was now ten, and looked forward hopefully to the future; but the scholar quickly showed himself in his true colours.
He treated Butzbach as a f.a.g, made him trudge behind carrying the larger share of their bundles, and when they came to an inn feasted royally himself off the money given to him for the boy, leaving him to the charity of the innkeepers. At the end of two months the money was spent, and they had found no place of settlement. Henceforward Butzbach was set to beg, going from house to house in the villages they pa.s.sed, asking for food; and when this failed to produce enough, he was required to steal. The scholar treated him shamefully and beat him often; and as it was a well-known practice for f.a.gs, when begging, to eat up delicacies at once, instead of bringing them in, Butzbach was sometimes subjected to the regular test, being required to fill his mouth with water and then spit it out into a basin for his master to examine whether there were traces of fat.
The scholar's aim was to find some school, having attached to it a Bursa or hostel, in which they could obtain quarters; apparently he was not yet qualified for a university. They made their way to Bamberg, but there was no room for them in the Bursa. So on they went into Bohemia, where at the town of Kaaden the rector of the school was able to allot them a room--just a bare, unfurnished chamber, in which they were permitted to settle. Such teaching as Butzbach received was spasmodic and ineffectual, and after two years of this bondage he ran away. For the next five years he was in Bohemia in private service, longing for home, hating his durance among the heathen, as he called the Bohemians for following John Hus, but lacking courage to make his escape from masters who could send hors.e.m.e.n to scour the countryside for fugitive servants and string them up to trees when caught.
However, at length the opportunity came, and after varying fortunes, Butzbach made his way home to Miltenberg, to find his father dead and his mother married again.
For the substantial accuracy of Butzbach's narrative his character is sufficient warranty. He was a pious, honest man, and at the time when he wrote his autobiography at the request of his half-brother Philip, he was already a monk at Laach. But the picture of a young student's sufferings under an elder's cruelty can be paralleled with surprising closeness from the autobiography of Thomas Platter, mentioned above; the wandering from one school to another, the maltreatment, the begging, the enforced stealing, all these are reproduced with just the difference of surroundings.
Platter's account of his life at Breslau is worth quoting. 'I was ill three times in one winter, so that they were obliged to bring me into the hospital; for the travelling scholars had a particular hospital and physicians for themselves. Care was taken of the patients, and they had good beds, only the vermin were so abundant that, like many others, I lay much rather upon the floor than in the beds. Through the winter the f.a.gs lay upon the floor in the school, but the Bacchants in small chambers, of which at St. Elizabeth's there were several hundreds. But in summer, when it was hot, we lay in the church-yard, collected together gra.s.s such as is spread in summer on Sat.u.r.days in the gentlemen's streets before the doors, and lay in it like pigs in the straw. When it rained, we ran into the school, and when there was thunder, we sang the whole night with the Subcantor, responses and other sacred music. Now and then after supper in summer we went into the beerhouses to beg for beer. The drunken Polish peasants would give us so much that I often could not find my way to the school again, though only a stone's throw from it.' Platter wrote his autobiography at the age of 73, when his memories of his youth must have been growing dim; but though on this account we must not press him in details, his main outlines are doubtless correct.
On his return, Butzbach was apprenticed to Aschaffenburg, to learn the trade of tailoring; and having mastered this, he procured for himself, in 1496, the position of a lay-brother in the Benedictine Abbey of Johannisberg in the Rheingau, opposite Bingen. His duties were manifold. Besides doing the tailoring of the community, he was expected to make himself generally useful: to carry water and fetch supplies, to look after guests, to attend the Abbot when he rode abroad (on one occasion he was thrown thus into the company of Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim, whose work on the Ecclesiastical writers of his time he afterwards attempted to carry on), to help in the hay harvest, and in gathering the grapes. Before a year was out he grew tired of these humble duties, and bethought him anew of his father's wish that he should become a professed monk. He had omens too. One morning his father appeared to him as he was dressing, and smiled upon him. Another day he was sitting at his work and talking about his wish with an old monk who was sick and under his care. On the wall in front of his table he had fastened a piece of bread, to be a reminder of the host and of Christ's sufferings. Suddenly this fell to the ground. The old man started up from his place by the stove, and steadying his tottering limbs cried out aloud that this was a sign that the wish was granted. He had the reputation among his fellows of being a prophet and had foretold the day of his own death. Butzbach accepted the omen, and obtained leave to go to school again.
His choice was Deventer. One of the brethren wrote him an elegant letter to Hegius applying for admission; and though, as he says, he answered no questions in his entrance examination (which appears to have been oral), on the strength of the letter he was admitted and placed in the seventh cla.s.s, a young man of twenty amongst the little boys who were making a beginning at grammar. But he had no means of support except occasional jobs of tailor's work, and hunger drove him back to Johannisberg. There he might have continued, had not a chance meeting with his mother, when he had ridden over to Frankfort with the Abbot, given him a new spur. She could not bear to think of his remaining a Lollhard, that is a lay-brother, all his days; and pressing money privily into his hands, she besought the Abbot to let him return to Deventer. In August 1498 he was there again, was examined by Hegius, and was placed this time in the lowest cla.s.s, the eighth, in company with a number of stolid louts, who had fled to school to escape being forced to serve as soldiers. There was reason in their fears. The Duke of Gueldres was at war with the Bishop of Utrecht. A hundred prisoners had been executed in the three days before Butzbach's return, and as he strode into Deventer to take up his books again, he may have seen their scarce-cold bodies swinging on gibbets against the summer sunset. The schoolboy of to-day works in happier surroundings.
Butzbach's career henceforward was fortunate. He was taken up by a good and pious woman, Gutta Kortenhorff, who without regular vows had devoted herself to a life of abstinence and self-sacrifice; taking special pleasure in helping young men who were preparing for the Franciscan or the reformed Benedictine Orders. For nine months Butzbach lived in her house, doubtless out of grat.i.tude rendering such service as he could to his kind patroness. From the eighth cla.s.s he pa.s.sed direct into the sixth, and at Easter 1499 he was promoted into the fifth. This ent.i.tled him to admission to the Domus Pauperum maintained by the Brethren of the Common Life for boys who were intending to become monks; and so he transferred himself thither for the remainder of his course. But he suffered much from illness, and five several times made up his mind to give up and return home--once indeed this was only averted by a swelling of his feet, which for a prolonged period made it impossible for him to walk. After six months in the fifth, and a year in the fourth cla.s.s, he was moved up into the third, thus traversing in little over two years what had occupied Erasmus for something like nine.
Butzbach was by temperament inclined to glorify the past; in the present he himself had a share, and therefore in his humility he thought little of it. In consequence we must not take him too literally in his account of the condition of the school; but it is too interesting to pa.s.s over. 'In the old days', he says, 'Deventer was a nursery for the Reformed Orders; they drew better boys, more suited to religion, out of the fifth cla.s.s, than they do now out of the second or first, although now much better authors are read there. Formerly there was nothing but the Parables of Alan <of lille,=”” _fl._=”” 1200=””>, the moral distichs of Cato, Aesop's Fables, and a few others, whom the moderns despise; but the boys worked hard, and made their own way over difficulties. Now when even in small schools the choicest authors are read, ancient and modern, prose and poetry, there is not the same profit; for virtue and industry are declining. With the decay of that school, religion also is decaying, especially in our Order, which drew so many good men from there. And yet it is not a hundred years since our reformation.'
He does not indicate how far back he was turning his regretful gaze; whether to the early years of the fifteenth century when Nicholas of Cues was a scholar at Deventer, or to the more recent times of Erasmus, who was about three school-generations ahead of him. But of the books used there in the last quarter of the fifteenth century we can form a clear notion from the productions of the Deventer printers, Richard Paffraet and Jacobus of Breda. School-books then as now were profitable undertakings, if printed cheap enough for the needy student; and Paffraet, with Hegius living in his house, must have had plenty of opportunities for antic.i.p.ating the school's requirements.
Between 1477 and 1499 he printed Virgil's Eclogues, Cicero's _De Senectute_ and _De Amicitia_, Horace's _Ars Poetica_, the _Axiochus_ in Agricola's translation, Cyprian's Epistles, Prudentius' poems, Juvencus' _Historia Euangelica_, and the _Legenda Aurea_: also the grammar of Alexander with the commentary of Synthius and Hegius, Agostino Dato's _Ars scribendi epistolas_, Aesop's Fables, and the _Dialogus Creaturarum_, the latter two being moralized in a way which must surely have pleased Butzbach. Jacobus of Breda, who began printing at Deventer in 1486, produced Virgil's Eclogues, Cicero's _De Senectute_ and _De Officiis_, Boethius' _De consolatione philosophiae_ and _De disciplina scholarium_, Aesop, a poem by Baptista Mantua.n.u.s, the 'Christian Virgil', Alan of Lille's _Parabolae_, Alexander, two grammatical treatises by Synthius and the _Epistola mythologica_ of Bartholomew of Cologne.
This last, as being the work of a master in the school, deserves attention; and also for its intrinsic interest. As its t.i.tle implies, it is cast in the form of a letter, addressed to a friend Pancratius; and it is dated from Deventer 10 July 1489--nine years before Butzbach entered the school. It opens with the customary apologies, and after some ordinary topics the writer, Bartholomew, says that he is sending back some books borrowed from Pancratius, including a Sidonius which he has had on loan for three years. At this point there is a transformation. Sidonius is personified and becomes the centre of a series of semi-comic incidents, which afford an opportunity for introducing various words for the common objects of everyday life; and a glossary explains many of these with precision. There is a long and vivid account of the waking of Sidonius from his three years' slumber.
The door has to be broken open, and Sidonius is found lying to all appearances dead. A feather burnt under his nose produces slight signs of life; and when a good beating with the bar of the door is threatened, he at length rouses himself. Servants come in, and their different duties are described. They fall to quarrelling and become uproarious; and in the scuffle Sidonius is hurt. A lotion is prepared for his bruises, and he is offered diet suitable for an invalid: boiled sturgeon, washed down with wine or beer, the latter being from Bremen or Hamburg.
Afterwards the room is cleared up, and thus an opportunity is given to describe it. Then a table is spread for the rest of the party, and the various requisites are specified--tablecloth and napkins, pewter plates, earthenware mugs, a salt-cellar and two bra.s.s stands for the dishes. Bread is put round to each place, chairs are brought up with cus.h.i.+ons; and jugs of wine and beer placed in the centre of the table.