THE PREFACE.

THE fifteenth century, the age of revived letters and intelligence through Europe,' was the chief era of Scotch University foundations. The University of St. Andrews was founded in the beginning of the century, Glasgow in the middle, and Aberdeen at its close. The last, like the former two, owed its birth to the Bishop of the diocese; and its founder, Bishop Elphinstone, had a large experience of what was beneficial or defective in other Universities.

The situation of the new school of learning may have, in some degree, influenced its constitution. It was represented to the Pope, that, in the north of Scotland, were some districts so distant, and separated from the places where Universities had already been established, by such obstacles of mountains and arms of the sea, and dangers of the way, that the natives remained rude, unlettered and almost barbarous, in so much that persons could hardly be found there fit for preaching the word of God, and ministering the sacraments of the Church.2

Aberdeen was held to be suf

books and Greek teachers, by the fall of Constantinople; the invention of printing, and the discovery of the New World, wakened the soundest sleepers.

2p. 4.

ficiently near' for educating the people of those rude regions; at any rate, it had the advantage of possessing a Bishop with zeal enough to give the endowment, and sufficient influence to obtain the Royal and Papal privileges necessary for a University.

While we allow for some exaggeration in stating the necessity of the new foundation, it was not easy to overstate the physical and ethnical impediments to education in the Highlands and Isles of Scotland. These, to a great degree, remain unconquered at this day. But it would be a mistake to join under the common description of barbarous ignorance the district in which the new University was founded, or indeed any part of the eastern coast or Lowlands of Scotland. Centuries before the era of our oldest University, the whole fertile land of Scotland was occupied by the same energetic tribes, whether Saxon or Danish, who colonized. England. Towns were built wherever a river's mouth gave a haven for small ships in the dangerous coast. Trade was carried on with the kindred people of Flanders, Holland, and Normandy; and the hides and wool of our mountains, the salmon of the Dee and Tay, and the herring of our seas, were exchanged against the cloths of Bruges, the wines of Bordeaux and the Rhine; and the table luxuries, as well as the ornaments of dress and art, which found admirers among us long before we appreciated what are now counted the comforts of life. A trading and friendly intercourse with the continental nations would, of itself, go far to prove some intelligence and education.

If other proof were wanting of a generally diffused education and intelligence, it might be found in the manly, homely tone of early Scotch literature. The fact that leading writers devoted themselves to produce works of history and imagination in their native tongue, shows a wholesome tendency to popularity, and proves that they looked for their readers not to a little knot of courtiers or churchmen, but to a body of native readers able to

1

understand and appreciate them. One instance of this, and that the highest, is from Aberdeen. John Barbour was Archdeacon of the diocese in the middle of the fourteenth century. He had received a Churchman's education, of course, and we know that after the usual age of education was over, he studied at Oxford and in France. His great poem shows him to have been imbued with the accomplishments of his age; and yet, long before the office man and the diplomatist had escaped from the fetters of Latin, he ventured to speak to his countrymen of their Hero in the language of their nursery and home. We may doubt as to the manner of the education of the people, but it is unreasonable to suppose that such a poet wrote for a people altogether uneducated, rude, and illiterate.

But this is not left to speculation. All the greater towns had grammar schools, from the earliest period to which our records reach. The Monks of Kelso were patrons of a burgh school of importance in the ancient town of Roxburgh in the time of William the Lion ;' and Dunfermlin had the profits of endowed schools in the burghs of Perth and Stirling at least as early. There were similar schools at Abernethy and at Glasgow. Master Thomas of Bennum writes himself "Rector scholarum de Aberdeen" in the year 1262;3 and we learn, at a later period, that these were proper burgal schools, endowed by the community, and under the patronage of the magistrates. In 1418 we find a schoolmaster of Aberdeen "Magister Scholarum burgi de Aberdene," presented by the alderman and the community; when the Chancellor of the diocese, the inducting officer, testifies him to be of good life, of honest conversation, of great literature and science, and a graduate in arts. Sixty years later, but still prior to the foundation of the University, the "Master of the

1

Registrum de Kelso, No. 409.

Reg. de Dunfermlin, No. 96.

'Registrum de Aberbrothoc, No. 254.

4

Magnae literaturae et scienciae.-Burgh Records of Aberdeen- Spalding Club, p. 5.

Grammar Schules of Abirdene" had the respectable salary of five pounds yearly, of the common gude of the toune,' until he should be provided with a benefice in the Church of St. Nicholas.' It was in the next century that Master John Marshall, master of the Grammar School of Aberdeen, "inquirit be the Provost whom of he had the same school-grantit in judgement that he had the same of the said good Town, offerand him reddy to do thame and thair bairnis service and plesour at his power."

Neither was Scotland, in the darkest ages, destitute of those church schools known all over Christendom, which formed a necessary appendage to the Cathedral and the Monastery, and which were frequently attached to churches of less importance. Reginald of Durham, a Monk of the twelfth century, in narrating a miracle of St. Cuthbert, describes a village school at Norham on Tweed, held in the Church; and nobody can read his story of the schoolboy stealing the church key, and throwing it into the river, in the hope of forcing a holiday, without being satisfied that the chronicler had in his mind a parish school for the parish boys. There were everywhere schools for teaching the boys of the choir to read and to sing; and the term Sang-school is not yet forgotten in the north, where the old choral foundation has often been the groundwork of existing and efficient grammar schools. The Monasteries, in early times, furnished education also to a higher class of pupils than those who benefited by the burgal and choral schools. In the thirteenth century, a lady of high rank made over to the Monks of Kelso a part of her dowry lands, on condition that they should maintain her son among the scholars of the best rank in the Monastery.3

Whatever may have been the course of study in those remote times, there can be no doubt that the Grammar Schools of Scot

1

Burgh Records of Aberdeen-Spalding Club, p. 37.

'Ibid., pp. 80, 97.

3

Register of Kelso, No. 173.