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Cambridge had no moral genius like Grosseteste to impress his strong personality upon the movement which the friars stirred, no commanding intellect like that of Roger Bacon to attract and dazzle and lead into quite new regions of thought the ardent and eager spirits who felt that a new era had begun; no Occam or Duns Scotus or Bradwardine; no John Wielif to kindle a new flame say, rather, to take up the torch which had dropped from Bradwardine's hand, and continue the race which the others had run so well.
So the mere occurrence of John Farley's name helps us to write the history of the book from within a hundred years of its making until the present day. Procured by Grosseteste some time before 1254, it passes to Oxford, and remains there till the Grey Friar's Convent is dissolved by Henry VIII. Then there is a gap of a generation at most.
But with the English nation grew an English church; Grosseteste denounced the dominance of aliens in the church, while Simon de Montfort denounced it in the state. It was, however, by secular authority that the English church was differentiated from the church abroad.
Even the Savoyards partially fell away from the court, and a convocation of clergy at Merton, presided over by Archbishop Boniface, drew up canons in the spirit of Grosseteste. In parliament all that Henry could get was a promise to adjourn the question of supply until a commission had drafted a programme of reform.
A second decree ordered all the faithful to seize Hus and deliver him to be burned; Bethlehem Chapel was to be leveled with the ground. As Bishop Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln before him, Hus now appealed from the Pope to Jesus Christ, the Supreme Head of the Church. The excitement grew greater. Bloody conflicts loomed ahead. On the royal request Hus left Prag in the autumn of 1412. Hus in Exile.
Thus it was that toward 1215, or pretty nearly contemporaneously with the epoch when men like Grosseteste began to show restlessness under the extortionate corruption of the Church, the villein was discovered to be able to defend his claim to some portion of the increment in the value of the land which he tilled and which was due to his labor: and this title the manorial courts recognized, because they could not help it, as a sort of tenant right, calling it a customary tenancy by base service.
Under their teaching a new school of theology had arisen at Oxford; the great Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste, was its first lecturer, the most enlightened prelate of the day; and now Adam de Maresco, a warm friend of Earl Simon, was at its head. To his care the earl determined to commend young Martin.
Grosseteste, who also had preferred the teachings of experience to the appeal to the sages of the past, was the only academic leader that escaped Bacon's scathing censure.
He had studied under Edmund and Grosseteste at Oxford, and also in Paris and Bologna. Returning from Europe, he became Chancellor of the University of Oxford, then of the diocese of Canterbury. Having withdrawn again to France, he was ordained priest at Orleans, and then worked as vicar at Deal, from which post he was called upon to occupy again his earlier office at Canterbury.
He presided over the diocese of Lincoln at the precise moment when Saint Louis was building the Sainte Chapelle, but Grosseteste in 1250 denounced in a sermon at Lyons the scandals of the papal court with a ferocity which hardly was surpassed at any later day. To attempt even an abstract of the thought of the English Reformation would lead too far, however fascinating the subject might be.
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