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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.
Even legal documents are sometimes rhymed.
Anything written in a book has a certain sacredness, all the established authors are authorities, and all are timeless, from Aesop to Horace.
The use of Latin throughout the schools gives a wide currency to ideas and makes sources of culture accessible to everyone, even though students probably never learn to read it as proficiently as their native French, English, or German.
Latin is a cultural catalyst, but it is also an impediment to self-expression and communication.
Student lodgings, schools, and brothels are cheek by jowl, and sometimes masters and students conduct disputations on the second floor, whores and pimps on the first.
Education pays, in the thirteenth as in other centuries.
Across the bottom of the last page of many a book is written Explicit, Deo Gratias (“Finished, thank God”). Some students end with a more jocular flourish: “May the writer continue to copy, and drink good wine” “The book finished, may the master be given a fat goose”
“May the writer be given a good cow and a horse”
“For his pen’s labor, may the copyist be given a beautiful girl” “Let the writer be given a...
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Copyists are not always accurate. Authors sometimes conclude their books with the injunction: “I adjure you who shall transcribe this book, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by His Glorious coming, Who will come to judge the quick and the dead, that you compare what you transcribe and diligently correct it by the copy from which you transcribe it, and this adjuration also, and insert it in your copy.”
A verse omitted from the text is added at the top of the page, and the figure of a scribe in the margin tugs at a rope tied to the first letter of the misplaced line, while a second man leans out from the proper space on the page, ready to receive the rope and pull the line into place.
A jealous man is not wholly sane.
“You like water better than geese,”
Asking for the book when the service is over, he kisses the same page.
“Troping”—embroidering parts of the service with added words and melodies—especially at Easter and Christmas, is the source of this development.
Quem quaeritis in sepulchro?
“Though he be harder than Hell,” the Devil promises, “he shall be made soft.” He praises her beauty. “You are a gentle and tender thing, fresh as a rose, white as crystal . . . You are too tender and he is too hard. But nevertheless you are wiser and more courageous . . .”
The first effects of a food shortage are rumors, hoarding, and black-marketing.
Famine is often accompanied by its sister, pestilence.
A feudal army can rarely be kept in the field longer than a month or two.
“I am a good lawyer,” said Renard. “Often I’ve made right out of wrong and wrong out of right, as it suited me.” —ROMAN DE RENARD
Medieval cities enjoy a great deal of individual liberty, varying degrees of self-government, and little democracy.
The Lanstiers sat on the town council of Arras for three hundred years.
Another major source of revenue is the cause of violent wrangling among the competing authorities. This is justice. Whoever administers justice keeps the fines and forfeits, so kings, counts, barons, bishops, and burghers quarrel jealously over jurisdiction.
A murderer with wealthy relatives stands a better chance of escaping the gallows than a poor man—a situation not confined to the Middle Ages.
(paying wergild).
Lawyers are not particularly popular. Their pretensions are resented, and their pedantic interpretations irritate everyone. They insist on exact forms and formulas. But they are improving the administration of justice and pointing the way to guarantees for the accused that a future age will regard as indispensable.
The same priest savored the revenge of entering the church at Vespers, lighted candle in hand, pronouncing the sentence, and turning the candle upside down.
Originally the sultan demanded five hundred thousand, but when the king unhesitatingly agreed, the equally chivalrous sultan knocked off a hundred thousand livres, commenting, “By Allah, this Frank does not haggle!”
But they do not see the wisdom of journeying far over the sea to die, and die expensively at that.
The cadre of regular prostitutes has been reinforced by serving wenches, tradeswomen, and farmers’ daughters.
It is an offense to sell defective cloth abroad; below-grade or irregular material must be marketed locally.
Half of them are Italians, many from Siena. The other half are Jews and Cahorsins.
Sometimes a merchant borrows at one fair and promises to repay in installments at the next three or more, as he sells his goods.
Here, more than in anything else in this busy, knowledgeable, money-oriented city of shopkeepers, lies a portent of the future.
An unparalleled school for banking, bookkeeping, and merchandising, the fairs helped kill themselves by nourishing more efficient methods of doing business.
