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Updated: June 5, 2025
An opportunity then offered for him to get a wider education. The son of a neighbour who had commenced scholar, returned home for a time, and offered to take Butzbach with him when he went off again to pursue his courses for his degree.
So on they went into Bohemia, where at the town of Kaaden the rector of the school was able to allot them a room just a bare, unfurnished chamber, in which they were permitted to settle. Such teaching as Butzbach received was spasmodic and ineffectual, and after two years of this bondage he ran away.
On his return, Butzbach was apprenticed to Aschaffenburg, to learn the trade of tailoring; and having mastered this, he procured for himself, in 1496, the position of a lay-brother in the Benedictine Abbey of Johannisberg in the Rheingau, opposite Bingen. His duties were manifold.
The consent of his parents was obtained; and the scholar having received a liberal contribution towards expenses, and Butzbach being equipped with new clothes, the pair set out together. The boy was now ten, and looked forward hopefully to the future; but the scholar quickly showed himself in his true colours.
Every sort of bullying was tried on them for two days at the mines, but they still refused. They were then sent back to Giessen and sentenced to eighteen months' punishment at Butzbach all but Dent, who managed some way to fool the doctor pretending he was sick! That they fared badly there, I found out afterwards, though I never saw any of them.
The scholar treated him shamefully and beat him often; and as it was a well-known practice for fags, when begging, to eat up delicacies at once, instead of bringing them in, Butzbach was sometimes subjected to the regular test, being required to fill his mouth with water and then spit it out into a basin for his master to examine whether there were traces of fat.
But Aleander was not alone in his powers of speech, and others besides Parisians could listen. Butzbach tells us, not without humour, of a certain Baldwin Bessel of Haarlem, a learned physician with a wonderful memory, who was summoned to Laach to heal their Abbot, who lay sick.
Anyway, Butzbach is the only person who mentions him, and he would have preferred a little less eloquence and a little more medicine; for the Abbot, instead of recovering, died under the hands of the new Cicero in two days. Besides lecturing at the university, young men also maintained themselves by working for the printers, correcting proof-sheets and composing complimentary prefaces and verses.
This last, as being the work of a master in the school, deserves attention; and also for its intrinsic interest. As its title implies, it is cast in the form of a letter, addressed to a friend Pancratius; and it is dated from Deventer 10 July 1489 nine years before Butzbach entered the school.
Ten miles next morning brought them to Laach; and when they came over the hill, and saw the great abbey with its towers and dome beside the lake, which even in winter could smile amid its woods, Butzbach felt that in all his travels he had seen no sight more lovely.
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