CHAPTER VII.
JOHN OF SALISBURY.
Johannes Parvus, John Little or Short—little, according to his own paraphrase, in name, less in skill, least in worth—was born at Salisbury, it seems of English stock,[1] about the middle of Henry the First's reign. The year of his birth is commonly given as 1110; but this is evidently a mere calculation from the date of his death, 1180, on the presumption that he was then seventy years old, and it is contradicted by his own statement that he was but a lad, adolescens admodum, when he went to Paris in 1136. Studies in those days began early, and it is nearly inconceivable that a man of six-and-twenty should enter, as John did, upon a course of education lasting ten or twelve years. We shall certainly be safer then if we place his birth between 1115 and 1120.[2] As a child, he tells us, he was sent to a priest, as the manner was, to learn his Psalms. The teacher happened to have a
- ↑ This is a plausible inference from John's language in the Entheticus, ver. 137 sqq., in which he ridicules the courtier who is anxious to pass as a Norman; so that the authors of the Histoire littéraire de la France 14. 89, should seem to be in error in writing his name Petit. See the biography by professor C. Schaarschmidt, librarian at Bonn, to which reference has frequently been made in the foregoing pages; a model book to which I cannot too heartily express my obligations. My citations from the Entheticus refer to the edition by C. Petersen, Hamburg 1843, of the Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum, and not to the other poem bearing the same title which is prefixed to the Policraticus. Peterson's commentaries are learned and valuable, but vitiated by a constant endeavour to bring the author into connexion with Oxford, which is a pure delusion: cf. Schaarschmidt 11-21. [In the present edition I have adjusted the references to the Policraticus to the volumes and pages of the admirable edition of that work published by Mr. C. C. J. Webb; Oxford 1909. I have also altered the numbering of the letters so as to agree with that in J. A. Giles's edition of John's Works, vol. 1, 2; Oxford 1848.]
- ↑ Petersen, p. 73, thinks not before the latter date; Dr. Schaarschmidt, p. 10, between 1110 and 1120.
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