Life in a Medieval City

by Frances Gies

  The cathedral windows are made from glass manufactured in the hut in the forest, but are designed and assembled in a studio near the cathedral, under the direction of the master glazier. His craft demands special knowledge (often transmitted from father to son), exceptional skill, and long experience. Like the master builder and the masons, the window maker and the workmen he commands are itinerants, moving from town to town and church to church.

  The master glazier oversees every part of the operations of his shop, but one function that he reserves for himself alone is that of drawing the picture. First he produces a small scale-drawing of the whole window on parchment, coloring in the segments. Then he draws a cartoon the size of the panel on which he is working, not on parchment, but on the wooden surface of an enormous bench or table of white ash. A panel is sketched on the table in the form of a diagram in black and white, indicating by numbers and letters which colors are to be used in each tiny section. As the big panes made by the glaziers are cut roughly to size with a hot iron under the master’s eye, each piece is laid in its correct position on the table. It does not quite fit. Using a notched tool called a grozing iron, a workman dextrously nibbles the piece’s edges to precision.

  A visitor watching the workmen fashion the legend of St. Nicholas, or the story of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, for St.-Pierre’s windows would scarcely be able to make out any picture at all. The work table is a jigsaw confusion of oddly-shaped segments, with only here and there a recognizable fragment: a purple demon, or the white and yellow robes of the virgins.

  Variations in the thickness of the glass produce colors that vary in intensity. In windows of the twelfth century this accident was used to artistic effect in the alternation of light and dark segments. But the men working on St.-Pierre’s glass do not take time to sort it out; the thirteenth century’s booming market has eliminated this subtlety of workmanship. Even so, the effects achieved are astounding, and will in centuries to come be attributed by legend to a secret process known only to medieval glaziers. In reality the master glazier has no secrets.8 He carefully paints the lines in the drapery of the garments, the features of the faces, and decorative details; then he supervises the firing of the segments in the kiln and sees that they are assembled properly. The assembly is accomplished by means of doubly-grooved lead cames bent to follow the shape of the glass segments. The cames are soldered to each other at their intersections and sealed with putty, to keep out the rain. Lead is the source of another aesthetic accident: it keeps the colors from radiating into each other when the sunlight strikes.

  The finished panel is wrapped in cloth and carried to the cathedral. Measurements do not always prove exact. If the panel turns out to be too large, it is cut down. If it is too small, it is built up with a border. As it is fastened into place, the glazier sees it against the light for the first time. Until that moment of truth he must rely on past experience and observation of other windows for his effects.

  Once the panel is made, the design is rubbed off the table and vanishes forever. Occasionally a design may be copied on parchment and used elsewhere, but this is rare. The master glazier is not aiming at immortality or even fame, though he is agreeably aware that his name is well known among glassmakers, masons, prelates, and even the general public. Yet he puts something into his work that is not merely talent and knowledge. Neither is it religious zeal. It is pride, and he can find ample justification for it in religion, for the priests say that God was a craftsman who looked on his work and found it good.

  Although he is aware of the dazzling brilliance of his windows when they are in place, as the builder is of the soaring majesty of his completed masonry, neither of them regards his work as art, or himself as an artist. They are not necessary geniuses, but all of them are intelligent men with expert skill, standing historically at the end of a remarkable series of accidents—the cross-rib vault, which led to the flying buttress and the expansion of window space, and the imperfect glazing techniques that dictated colored glass.

  Thirteenth-century bishops are delighted with the technology that gives them their incomparable cathedrals. Interestingly enough, clerical opinion in the past was not always so favorable. St.-Bernard9 wrote angrily to William, abbot of St.-Thierry, about the great Cluniac churches: “Why this excessive height, this enormous length, this unnecessary width, these sumptuous ornaments and curious paintings that draw the eyes and distract the attention from meditation?…We, the monks, who have forsaken ordinary life and who have renounced the riches and ostentation of the world…in whom do we hope to awaken devotion with these ornaments?…One could spend a whole day gaping instead of meditating on God. What ineptitude, and what expense!”

  But St.-Bernard is dead, and even his Cistercians have grown less puritanical. Few object today to the new style. Besides, St.-Bernard notwithstanding, the cathedrals’ success in creating an atmosphere of mystery and awe is of incontestable value to religion. No man, burgher or baron, can enter a Gothic cathedral without experiencing a sense of human insignificance in the presence of such majesty.

  11.

  School and Scholars

  He would dispense his instructions to his hearers gradually, in a manner commensurate with their powers of assimilation…. In view of the fact that exercise both strengthens and sharpens the mind, Bernard would bend every effort to bring his students to imitate what they were hearing. In some cases he would rely on exhortation, in others he would resort to punishments, such as flogging….

  —JOHN OF SALISBURY, describing the teaching

  methods of Bernard of Chartres, twelfth century

  Along with workmen, housewives, priests, cows, horses, and pigs, the stream of morning traffic includes a scattering of boys with close-cropped hair, carrying hand-copied Latin grammars under their arms. They are on their way to school. As they trudge along, kicking stones and horse manure and calling greetings to each other, they are only faintly conscious of the novelty of their position.

  There are no public schools in Troyes. But having taken primary instruction from a parish priest, these boys are now enrolled in the cathedral school. They are the elite of the city’s youth—mostly the sons of the well-to-do. To their inherited station in life they are adding the advantage of education, and they are placing themselves permanently above the level of weavers, peasants, and ignorant tradesmen.

  The cathedral school was not originally conceived as a secondary school. Founded in the seventh century by Bishop Ragnegisile, it remained for centuries merely a training school, turning out clerks for the diocese. The bishop himself did the teaching. Today’s boys still wear the tonsure, as a sign of what is called “a disposition toward an order.” The chancellor of the cathedral teaches theology and confers teaching licenses, but most of the instruction is in the hands of the schoolmaster and his assistant canons, who teach a distinctly secular course.

  In the schoolroom the pupils sit on the floor, all ages together. Instruction is predominantly oral and in Latin, though beginners are allowed to lapse into the vernacular. The schoolmaster lectures, and students take notes on oblong wooden tablets coated with black or green wax, using a stylus of bone, ivory, or metal. The whitish scratches it makes can be erased by rubbing with its rounded end. The scholars soon acquire a Latin shorthand: Sic hic e fal sm qd ad simlr a e pducible a do, g a e et silr hic, a n e g a n e pducible a do means Sicut hic est fallacia secundum quid ad simpliciter, A est producibile a Deo, ergo A esi. Et similiter hic, A non est, ergo A non est producibile a Deo (“Thus here is the second fallacy, which is simply, A is created by God, therefore A exists; and similarly this, A does not exist, therefore A is not created by God”). In drill, pupils repeat in chorus after the teacher and go on repeating an exercise until they have learned it by heart. Since books have to be copied by hand and writing materials are expensive, memory and oral exercises are indispensable.

  The schoolmaster reads aloud, explaining and underlining as he goes, pointing out figures of speech, rhetorical d
evices, well-chosen words, adjectives that suit the nouns they modify, metaphors that give speech a beyond-the-ordinary meaning. Though discipline may be mild, the attention of the students does not wander, for each of them must recite tomorrow part of what he has heard today.

  The lecture, the main teaching session of the day, takes place in the early afternoon. Following it, there is a period of free discussion, then drill, and finally a lesson chosen for moral and religious edification, closing with the Sixth Penitential Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer. The next morning is devoted to the “repetition,” recalling and committing to writing things learned the previous day. At this time the pupils are also required to imitate the Latin masters they are studying by writing compositions of their own, in verse and prose. They are expected to commit to memory every day a selection from Ovid or Vergil, or another Latin author. These will be helpful in writing letters or compositions, which are traditionally crammed with quotations.

  A letter from Gerald of Wales to the archbishop of Canterbury quotes in five pages three times from the Book of Wisdom, twice from St. Jerome, once each from Proverbs, Psalms, Vergil, and Ovid, and seven times from Horace. A letter written by Nicolas of Clairvaux1 to the bishop of Auxerre, whose see was renowned for its wines, runs:

  In the words of the Gospel, they have no more wine. (John 2:3). Do not send me the wine of sorrow (Psalm 59:5), but the wine which rejoices the heart of man (Psalm 103:15), whose color is excellent, the savor very fine, and whose agreeable odor (Exodus 29:18) testifies to its quality. It is in these three elements that it manifests its perfection, and the cord with three strands does not easily break (Eccl. 4:12).

  The wines of our region are turbid and do not come from those plants which grow in your region in a state of blessedness; their juice has not passed from one nation to another, and from one kingdom to another people (Psalm 104:13)…. Send separately to the abbot and to me; the Jews do not deal with the Samaritans (John 4:9).

  Theoretically, the curriculum consists of the “seven liberal arts.”2 But schools rarely teach all seven of the arts, and the emphasis is very unequal. These “arts” are “liberal” because their purpose is not moneymaking and because they are worthy of a free man. There are seven mainly because people are fond of the number seven, one of the keys to a numerologically ordered universe. In the sixth century Boethius divided the liberal arts into the trivium and quadrivium (“three roads” and “four roads”). The trivium comprises the literary subjects: grammar, rhetoric, and logic; the quadrivium the scientific: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

  The bishops’ schools of the sixth to ninth centuries offered little more than what was indispensable for clerks—Latin, enough arithmetic and astronomy for the computation of Easter and other movable feasts, and music for the chant. Monastic schools taught a similar curriculum. Like the episcopal schools, they were internal—that is, they trained their own personnel. When they occasionally received children of princes and nobles, it was rather as pages than as regular pupils. Parish priests, too, trained their own successors.

  “Music,” one of the Seven Liberal Arts, is among the sculptured figures of the Royal Portal of Chartres Cathedral. She holds a psaltery in her lap, has a vielle, an early version of the violin, beside her, and plays a set of bells.

  After Charlemagne’s time the bishops’ schools began to expand and to take outside pupils, boys from the town and boarding scholars. Gradually they came to eclipse the monastic schools. This urbanization and secularization created an educational revolution during the eleventh century. In the hundred years that followed, the cathedral schools became international centers of adult scholarship as well as training schools for the diocesan clergy. The emphasis was on grammar and rhetoric, with theology, philosophy, and canon law as added disciplines. The most famous school was at Chartres, where, under the direction of the great schoolmaster Bernard (not to be confused with St.-Bernard of Clairvaux) there was a revival of classical literary humanism.

  Now, in the thirteenth century, the function of higher education has been largely absorbed by the universities. Where universities are within easy reach, the cathedral schools restrict themselves chiefly to grammar, rhetoric and the rudiments of logic. In remote districts, cathedral schools teach a curriculum similar to that of the universities.

  The grammar of the cathedral school embraces not only linguistics but writing, spelling, composition, speech, and general literature, including poetry and history. Pupils must master the elements of Latin by memorizing the Ars Minor of Donatus, a fourth-century authority. Ten pages of question-and-answer supply a knowledge of the eight parts of speech. From this the student proceeds to the same author’s Ars Grammatica, and then to Priscian’s Grammatical Commentary, a sixth-century work. Donatus and Priscian wrote for pupils to whom Latin was a native language, and are not ideally suited for northwest Europe in 1250. Two new manuals in verse are beginning to replace them, Alexander of Villedieu’s Doctrinale3 and the Grecismus of Eberhard of Bethune (so-called because it includes some Greek etymology).

  Twelfth-and thirteenth-century writers have developed an extraordinary fondness for versifying, and almost every species of literary production appears at one time or another in verse. Historical chronicles are often written in verse. There are verse formularies for letter writing. Sermons sometimes lapse into poetry or rhythmic prose. There is a versified Bible (the Aurora of Peter Riga). Even legal documents are sometimes rhymed.

  In grammar, the student is exposed to a series of authors, pagan and Christian, with little critical evaluation or regard for chronological order. Anything written in a book has a certain sacredness, all the established authors are authorities, and all are timeless, from Aesop to Horace. Some, like the late Roman elegiac poet Maximianus, are surprisingly profane and even erotic, but they are nevertheless studied for their rhetorical artifices. Sometimes the pagan spirit of Roman poetry arouses qualms. Guibert of Nogent confesses in his autobiography that early in his monastic life he took up verse making and even fell into “certain obscene words and composed brief writings, worthless and immodest, in fact bereft of all decency,” before abandoning this shocking practice in favor of commentaries on the Scriptures. St.-Bernard himself wrote verse in his youth at Cîteaux, and was guilty of great proficiency. By the end of the twelfth century, verse writing was forbidden to members of the austere Cistercian order, but many abbots and bishops continue to write love poetry.

  All the scholars observe that grammar helps in understanding the Holy Scriptures. The Bible, they point out, is rich in figures of speech, and a study of the literary art assists in appreciating it. Like St. Jerome, they compare secular learning to a heathen slave girl; the Hebrew who wishes to marry her must cut her hair and nails; similarly, the Christian who loves secular learning must purify it from all errors so that it will be worthy to serve God.

  The authors who are so revered fulfill many needs. They dispense information about everything from medicine to history. Ovid is prized for his moral sayings. Collections of “sentences,” or apothegms containing wise saws from the writings of antique and medieval authors, are popular.

  After grammar comes rhetoric, the second of the arts in the trivium, literally the “craft of speech.” In democratic Athens and Rome speechmaking was a major element in public life. In the Middle Ages political oratory has little place, and judicial rhetoric is only beginning to reappear with the revival of Roman law. Yet students practice both these forms of eloquence as school exercises. Of more practical use is the course in letter writing.

  Logic, or dialectic, the third subject of the trivium, teaches clear thinking. It leans heavily on Aristotle. Disputation is a teaching method and a pastime. On examination and speech day at a cathedral school, the students may hold competitions in syllogisms, fictitious arguments, harangues, and epigrams.

  The scientific part of the curriculum, the quadrivium, is not much influenced by the Greek science that scholars and translators are bringing in from t
he Moslem world. The pupil at the cathedral school absorbs relatively little true scientific knowledge. He may be given a smattering of natural history from the popular encyclopedias of the Dark Ages, based on Pliny and other Roman sources. He may learn, for example, that ostriches eat iron, that elephants fear only dragons and mice, that hyenas change their sex at will, that weasels conceive by the ear and deliver by the mouth.

  The most popular subject in the quadrivium is astronomy, a mixture of science and astrology. Arithmetic involves, as earlier, the computus, a body of rules for determining the date of movable feasts. The scholar may also learn the use of the abacus, the computer of the ancient and medieval world. He learns something of the properties of numbers, especially ratio and proportion, and the propositions (without the proofs) of Euclid’s first book of geometry. As part of his geometry course he may acquire some rudiments of geography, studying a map of the world4 that shows the circular earth composed of three continents equal in size—Asia, Africa, and Europe—separated by narrow bands of water. East is at the top, Jerusalem at the center. In various places on the map one may marvel at dragons, sirens, men with dogs’ heads, men with feet turned backward, men with umbrella feet with which they protect themselves from the sun while lying down. It is not a map for finding one’s way, but for illustration and edification. More practical and less picturesque maps exist—mariners’ charts produced by sailors armed with the newly introduced compass and astrolabe, accurately delineating coastlines, capes, bays, and shallows, and locating ports of call and places for watering and victualing so that a navigator can find them easily. But the schoolboy and his teachers know nothing of such maps.