disciple of Lanfranc, and his successor in the See of Canterbury, begged as a child of four to be sent to school, his mother, Ermenberg,—the granddaughter of a king, and the kinswoman of every crowned prince in Christendom,—resisted his entreaties as long as she dared, knowing too well the sufferings in store for him. A few years later she was forced to yield, and these same sufferings very nearly cost her son his life.
The boy was both studious and docile, and his teacher, fully recognizing his precocious talents, determined to force them to the utmost. In order that so active a mind should not for a moment be permitted to relax its tension, he kept the little scholar a ceaseless prisoner at his desk. Rest and recreation were alike denied him, while the utmost rigors of a discipline, of which we can form no adequate conception, wrung from the child's overworked brain an unflinching attention to his tasks. As a result of this cruel folly, "the brightest star of the eleventh century had been well-nigh quenched in its rising."[1] Mind and body alike yielded beneath the strain; and
- ↑ Life of St. Anselm, Bishop of Canterbury. By Martin Rule
