John the Pupil Read online

  It is unclear whether this passage was written as a response to the early rigours of the journey, as notes for a sermon, or just as meditation: the medieval clerical mind apprehended at least four simultaneous planes of meaning: the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the eschatological. So, for example, John’s journey was an actual one; it was also a walk in Christ’s footsteps, towards the celestial city; as his soul moved closer to God, away from sin; and it was conducted in the light and darkness of the Final Judgement and impending End of All Things.

  page 25

  Towards the end of the day

  When trying to calculate the distances the companions travelled, and their likely or possible stopping points, we must remember that among the many differences between them and us was their greater hardiness and stamina. On sometimes difficult terrain, in unforgiving footwear, they would have travelled an average of over thirty miles a day. Their first day of walking would have taken them deep into Berkshire.

  page 30

  the trouble in Rochester

  What the ‘trouble’ might have been is unknown. Most of the journey from the Franciscan house just outside Oxford to Canterbury is missing in the manuscript. And this ‘trouble’ is hardly alluded to later on.

  page 48

  I did not explain … there are novelties …

  This change of tense is typical of John’s prose. Maybe these descriptions were written quickly, maybe he is not as commanding of language as he would claim to be – because, in these early passages at least, sometimes breaking through his preferred tone of modesty and humility, there is a sort of quiet boastfulness, pardonable of course in one so cloistered and young, whose aptitude for the reception of his Master’s learning was not just a cause of intimacy between teacher and pupil but a matter for performance, to demonstrate both his master’s pedagogy and his own capacity to receive it.

  page 52

  In such a way did we effect our first escape

  Glossing over some uncertainty over this episode – and were not John exercised upon a sacred trust, we would speculate as to whether he is embroidering or partly inventing a story that demonstrates his capacity on the road – we need to draw attention to this final sentence of the day’s entry.

  The impression given, sometimes overtly, is that John is writing his account of the day shortly after the events he describes – sometimes indeed he seems to be writing his Chronicle during the events: the companions break from their walk and John takes out his scribe’s paraphernalia and cuts his words into the page (see, for example, p. 55: ‘I write this through the dirt of the road’; p. 101: ‘cutting these marks’). Sometimes his discourse takes the form of an imaginary letter to his master, the friar Roger Bacon, sometimes a sermon, sometimes a rudimentary kind of history, but always the same impression is given: John is making his account shortly after the events he is describing.

  Here, however, we have a troubling anomaly: how can he know that this is the companions’ first escape from Simeon the Palmer? There are two alternatives: did he add this last line sometime afterwards?, which would indicate a greater artifice to the composition than its naive tone would indicate; or is much of the Chronicle or even its entirety written at a greater remove than it would seem from the events it describes? (John’s frequent, maybe over-frequent, use of the historical present tense is not unknown to his times, but is not found anywhere in the chronicles of his countrymen Jocelin of Brakelond and Matthew Paris.)

  Similarly, in his later account of his visit to the village of the saint, the time that elapses (three days at most: 21 to 23 July) doesn’t seem sufficient to allow for the days and nights that John describes.

  I have only once seen, and all too briefly, the original manuscript. Without being able to examine it further, these questions remain unanswered, and unanswerable. There is of course a third alternative, which is even more troubling.

  page 56

  engendered a race …

  The reference is to Genesis 6:4.

  page 60

  and the people feast and dance

  This suspicion of dancing was often recorded. Contemporary to John the Pupil, the Dominican preacher Thomas Cantimpratanus wrote: ‘If it be better to plough on a Sunday or holy day than to dance; and if servile works, such as ploughing, are a mortal sin upon holy days, therefore it is far more sinful to dance than to plough. Yet those dances which are held at the weddings of the faithful may be partly, though not wholly, excused; since it is right for those folk thus to have the consolation of a moderate joy, who have joined together in the laborious life of matrimony.’

  page 61

  this walled town

  This is perhaps Beauvais, whose walls date from Roman times, and whose cathedral was, until its collapse in 1284, the tallest in Europe.

  page 63

  At the suburbs of Paris …

  The manuscript is particularly fragmented in the Paris sections (and there is a possibility that they are an amalgam of two separate episodes – perhaps the companions returned briefly to the city in their period of being lost – which would explain some of the apparent inconsistencies in the translation). I have taken the liberty of removing an extended discussion of the science of optics, which makes little sense in its present state. There is a possibility that portions of the Paris section (or sections) have been deliberately suppressed by followers of John’s predecessor, the Master’s earlier pupil, whom we might identify tentatively as John of Peckham, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, to protect the reputation of his later years.

  page 73

  Thrust, tongue …

  A gross parody of the first verse of Thomas Aquinas’s poem/hymn Pange Lingua Gloriosi Corporis Mysterium:

  Pange, lingua, gloriosi

  Corporis mysterium,

  Sanguinisque pretiosi,

  quem in mundi pretium

  fructus ventris generosi

  Rex effudit Gentium.

  more usually translated along the lines of:

  Acclaim, my tongue, this mystery

  Of glorious Body and precious Blood

  Which the King of nations shed for us

  A noble womb’s sole fruitful bud.

  page 73

  the Pope’s Friars

  The legend of the Pope’s Friars, or Magicians, is a verified one: two of the poems collected in Helen Waddell’s Medieval Latin Lyrics (1929) refer directly to it.

  page 75

  The woods are thick

  They are, presumably, lost in the Clairvaux Forest.

  page 76

  the twentieth book

  In fact, Augustine relates this story in the twenty-second book of De Civitate Dei. John’s normally reliable scholarship, or memory, fails him here.

  This modest but opportune punctuation mark is John’s own invention (although it might have been the result of a smudge from a fire or a careless slip of Gerald Lovelace’s knife or, conceivably, an erratum introduced in the transcription stage by the modern scribe who, like Roger Bacon’s own, will have to remain perpetually unknown), the use of which the editor has gratefully adopted.

  page 77

  Abelard’s great enemy

  A reference to the proselytiser, and mystic, Bernard of Clairvaux. Abelard is of course Peter Abelard, the great twelfth-century logician.

  page 78

  Via Francigena

  The road they are following is the traditional pilgrim and merchant route from Canterbury to Rome. Notable points along the way would be: Dover, Calais, Arras, Laon, Reims, Châlons-sur-Marne, Bar-sur-Aube, Clairvaux, Langres, Beaune, Besançon, Pontarlier, Chambéry, Mon Cenis, and then into Italy: Moncenisio, Aosta, Pavia, Piacenza, Berceto, Certaldo, Pontremoli, Lucca, Siena, San Quirico, Bolsena, Viterbo.

  We should note that this was not a single road. For example, the companions crossed the Alps at Mon Cenis; other travellers on, nominally, the same route, went into Italy by way of Switzerland at the Great San Bernard pass.

  page 83 />
  Brother Bernard is suffering … demons …

  It seems obvious to us that Bernard’s sickness is due to an infection contracted from the filthy rag he had been gagged with: but their times are not ours, and they are not us; the companions had a different notion of cause and effect, despite Roger Bacon’s efforts to unite them: in the gaps between events were angels and demons.

  This raises a historiographical point, which belongs somewhere, so I shall place it here. There are some who still believe in an unaltering substance called ‘the human condition’, as if we can know Bernard, or John, as if we could think like them, might even somehow become them. But the past is eternally different from us. That is why all historical novels are failures or, at best, metaphors, dressing up the present day in anachronistic disguise. To think we can gain a better understanding of ourselves by studying our precursors with curiosity and sympathy is tempting, but you are not I, and I am not John the Pupil, no matter how much I yearn to be; all metaphors are suspect. This is above all why we are so grateful to the collector for allowing us access to an actual past.

  It was like the window we saw

  Presumably a reference to the ‘Rose Window’ of the cathedral at Reims.

  page 89

  Bernard’s designs

  Bernard’s doodles might have been lost in a library fire or had their lines scratched away and washed clean so the parchment could be reused. They might have been consumed by mould or chewed away by silverfish and cockroaches and lice; they might just have been discarded, tossed aside by a careless owner who had no thought for what he had. It is possible that they were torn up and used in the binding of a book, as pastedowns or backing in the spine or cover, to be disinterred by a lucky reader inside an antique breviary or bible.

  page 90

  with whom Brother Andrew …

  It is unclear whether the omitted words here are due to a break in the manuscript or to the modesty of John the Pupil.

  We have lost our way

  By now the companions are somewhere in the Burgundy region, perhaps in the vicinity of Beaune or Chalon-sur-Saône.

  what happened to Brother Andrew

  Again, we can only speculate what happened to Andrew, who seems particularly prey to injury and assault.

  page 93

  The gardener is Father Gabriel

  The medieval clerical mind appreciated gardens, and not just for the principles of divine harmony and proportion they could exemplify – Jesus spent the night before his arrest in the garden at Gethsemane; Augustine experienced his conversion in a garden at Milan. Frustratingly though, much of this episode is lost, as is the garden itself. It grew somewhere in the foothills of the French Alps, but there is no record of it, and no vestige, as its gardener so evidently feared.

  A further question arises: we remember that John the Pupil’s chronicle is a record of temptations and trials. What then is undergone here? It is hardly a trial for him to be in a garden, lovingly and wisely tended. Is it the test of loyalty to Master Roger?, of whose knowledge and wisdom John is at last beginning, if not to doubt, at least to sense the limits; is it the temptation to remain in this place, to abandon his mission for a man who, no matter how kind and wise he is, may only prove to be another false father? Is it the sin of pride that John is committing by presuming to be the future gardener of a new Eden? The collector has a different theory, but I have no interest in his somewhat prurient speculations.

  page 96

  You are the seal of the image of God …

  An odd quotation for John to make in this context; and he has made it earlier in his Chronicle (p. 38): it comes from the book of Ezekiel (28:12–13), describing Satan before his fall that prefigured mankind’s own.

  page 106

  her native language

  Which is presumably Occitan, the old language spoken either side of the Alps and Pyrenees.

  page 112

  There is a monastery on the very top

  This is probably the Sacra di San Michele, which, despite Brother Bernard’s silent scorn, was Benedictine.

  page 113

  I am no better than the men of Sodom

  The reference is to Genesis (19:1–10), in which the lascivious men of Sodom betrayed all traditions of hospitality to the visiting angels, by demanding that they be expelled from Lot’s house, ‘so that they may know them’.

  These will be my final references to the collector, other than to praise him for enabling this document to be, but it is quite wrong, of course, to look at the ‘relationship’ between John and the mountain girl from the perspective of twenty-first-century manners. Unlike our benefactor, I am sure that there was no sexual relationship between the two, which might account for her rather snappish remark that he ‘would prefer her sister’. One of John’s qualifications for delivery of the book was that he was a virgin. Without doubt, something occurred between John and his mountain girl, an accord, a sympathy, an affinity; this does not mean that they made love.

  Similarly, the modern reader may be unnecessarily tempted, as the collector has been, to draw anachronistic conclusions about the nature of the ‘warming’ that John performed on Andrew’s body (p. 109).

  page 116

  The battlements of their cities are carved like swallows’ tails

  The Ghibellines were the party of the Holy Roman Emperor. Their emblem was, as John writes, a red cross on a white background. The Guelphs, the party of the Pope, had a white cross on a red background. Ghibelline cities and castles were distinguished by the shape of the merlons at the top of their battlement walls, which were cut into two triangles that indeed are reminiscent of a swallow’s tail. Guelph merlons were rectangular.

  By 1267, the Ghibellines were in retreat. Frederick II was dead, his successor Conrad was dead; the emperor was now the sixteen-year-old Conradin, Frederick’s grandson. In little more than a year, Conradin would be captured and executed, Rome would be restored to the Pope, and subsequent internecine squabbling would be between the so-called ‘White’ and ‘Black’ Guelphs. But in 1267, Italy was still in a state of civil war.

  page 117

  It is a hillside village like any other

  This is another fragmented episode. The reason for this could easily be ascribed to the depredations of time and ill-use; but there are other possible causes. John might not have had the time or attention or placidity of mind to compose an entry as assiduously as we have become used to expect. It is also possible that John might have removed passages from this episode himself, to spare a judgement upon the ‘saintly girl’, or maybe even upon himself. This would be untypical though: up till now, John has been seldom if ever sparing of anyone’s blushes, especially his own. His halting candour makes us admire him more.

  As to where and who, this is problematic: the shape of John’s journey – he would be at this point between Lucca and Florence – puts the ‘hillside village’ somewhere around Pistoia, in Tuscany. Aude is clearly one of the so-called ‘Tuscan lay saints’ who were active during this period. One might make a tentative identification with Margherita of Cortona, whose first hagiographer, the Franciscan friar Giunta Bevegnati, wrote, ‘No one was ever so greedy for gold as Margherita was to annihilate her body.’

  page 130

  The boy knight … named Prince Guido

  Of all the characters whom the companions encounter, their impetuous rescuer, Guido Cavalcanti (c.1253–1300), is the one who has been most remarked by posterity. This is partly because of his own poetic genius (with notable translations by Rossetti and Pound among many others), but largely because of his luck or otherwise in his ‘first friend’, Durante degli Alighieri, more commonly known as Dante.

  Guido’s father, the kindly freethinker Cavalcante de Cavalcanti, was placed by the poet in his Inferno, in the sixth circle of hell, reserved for heretics; he is perpetually anxious for his son, who, Dante implies (Canto X), will soon be there to join him – a malicious sly prophecy which came true: Guido died of malaria
shortly after Dante wrote these words; the disease was contracted in the swamplands of Sarzana, an exile that his former ‘first friend’ had condemned him to.

  It may be coincidental to this falling-out of friends that Guido’s wife was named Beatrice.

  page 153

  Chi è questa che vèn …

  This early poetic triumph by Guido Cavalcanti, and one that previous commentators have failed to register as displaying a direct Baconian influence, has as its first two lines:

  Who is she that comes, that everyone looks at her,

  Who makes the air tremble with clarity?

  page 172

  the eternity that Aristotle teaches

  Aristotle’s theory of the eternity of the universe, with no beginning or end, in contradiction to Christian doctrine, was answered by the Condemnation of 1210, which banned his books from the University of Paris. When the philosopher was reinstated a generation later, and there were no Frenchmen schooled to teach him, lecturers, including Roger Bacon, were brought in from Oxford, in the early 1240s.

  page 173

  where I became a pupil

  This passage might well be part of the same as the opening section – only a melancholy in its tone suggests that it belongs here, after the loss of Brother Andrew. Conversely, the opening section might be part of this one.

  And in the Spirit …

  John is quoting here, in abridged form, from The Apocalypse of Saint John (Revelation) 21:10–18.

  page 181

  I have the two books now

  John’s book is Roger Bacon’s great (and sometimes rambling) work, the Opus Majus. Immediately after John’s departure, or perhaps even before it, his master set to work on another, the abbreviated version that Daniel had been carrying, which he called the Opus Minus. As John surmises, there is also a third version, a kind of introduction to the first two, called the Opus Tertium. It is as if, restricted to his tower, unable to hasten or influence the path of his book to its intended reader, all Bacon could do was to keep composing, and dispatching, increasingly miniature versions of his great work.