Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/471

TO AD 1399.] Robert Trail, Primate of Scotland, who built the castle of St. Andrews, and died in 1401, leaving a great name for strict discipline and wisdom. It is singular that, during this period, the doctrines of "Wycliffe, which had made such a ferment in England, appear to have excited little or no attention in Scotland.

During the period now under review, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the language of the learned was still Latin, and the circle of education still included little more than the Trivium and Quadrivium of the former age, that is, the course of three sciences—grammar, rhetoric, and logic; and the course of four—music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. The grammar was almost exclusively confined to the Latin, for Roger Bacon says that there were not more than three or four persons in his time that knew anything of Greek or the Oriental languages; nay, so gross was the ignorance of the students of the time of the common elementary forms of Latin itself, that Kilwarby, Archbishop of Canterbury, on a visit to Oxford in 1276, upbraided the students with such corruptions as these:—"Ego currit; tu currit; curren est ego," &c.



When grammar was so defective the rhetoric taught could not be very profound. The mendicant friars seem to have cultivated it with tho greatest assiduity, as necessary to give effect to their harangues, and Bederic de Bury, provincial of the Augustinians, in the fourteenth century, was greatly admired for the eloquence of his preaching.

But logic was the all-absorbing study of tho time. The clergy who had attended the Crusaders had brought back from the East a knowledge of Aristotle, through Latin translations and the commentaries of his Arabian admirers. His logic was now applied not only to such metaphysics