being at that time chancellor of Chartres, who was afterwards the venerable bishop of Poitiers, leave us in no doubt as to the locality.[1] It was at Chartres therefore that John laid the foundation of his classical learning, and under Bernard's successors, William of Conches and Richard l’Évêque;[2] the latter, as he proceeds to explain, a man whose training was deficient almost in nothing, who had more heart even than speech, more knowledge than skill, more truth than vanity, more virtue than show: and the things I had learned from others I collected all again from him, and certain things too I learned which I had not before heard and which appertain to the Quadrivium, wherein formerly I had for some time followed the German Hardwin. I read also again rhetoric, which aforetime I had scarce understood when it was treated of meagrely by master Theodoric, the brother of Bernard, who also became in time chancellor of Chartres and who shared his philosophical, if not exactly his literary, interest. The same I afterwards received more plenteously at the hand of Peter Helias, a teacher who is known to us only as a grammarian, and as a grammarian of high repute;[3] his surviving works being a Commentary
- ↑ This connexion, the importance of which I have attempted to draw out in chapter iv, is due to the acute criticism of Dr. Schaarschmidt, p. 22. It may however be doubted whether John's words, 'Reperi magistrum Gilbertum,' Metal. ii. 10 p. 805, necessarily imply a previous acquaintance. I am glad to observe that M. Hauréau, who has devoted special attention to the literary history of Chartres, although he had passed the fact by in his two works on the scholastic philosophy and in his Singularités historiques et littéraires, now in the Comptesrendus of the academy of inscriptions for 1873, 3rd series, vol. 1.81, regards Dr. Schaarschmidt's hypothesis as conclusively established.
- ↑ The words Postmodum vero Richardum . . . secutus sum might lead one to suppose that John attended this master after the three years of which he speaks in relation to William of Conches: but since those years run from 1138, and since his later master Gilbert of La Porrée left Paris in 1141, it is plain that there is no possible interval between the two periods and that Richard's lectures must be included in the former. Even so there remains but a very narrow margin for Gilbert's teaching, and I suspect that John's calculations are not intended to be understood too exactly.
- ↑ When Emo, afterward abbat of Werum (Wittewierum) in Groningen, went to study at Paris, Orleans, and Oxford, about 1190, he learned his grammar principally from Priscian and Peter Helias: see the Chronicon Menconis, in Hugo's Sacrae Antiquitatis Monumenta 1. 505.
