of the Caledonians. Having explored the coasts of Fife and Forfar, he gained a decisive victory over the Caledonians under Galgacus at the Graupian hill (see Britain, Roman.) His successes, however, had aroused the envy and suspicion of Domitian. He was recalled to Rome, where he lived a life of studied retirement, to avoid the possibility of giving offence to the tyrant. He died in 93, poisoned, it was rumoured, by the emperor’s orders. The Life of Agricola by his son-in-law Tacitus is practically a panegyric or funeral oration.
See Urlichs, De Vita et Honoribus Agricolae (1868); Dio Cassius xxxix. 50, lxvi. 20: Mommsen, Provinces of the Roman Empire (Eng. trans., 1886), i. 183-184, 194.
AGRICOLA, JOHANN FRIEDRICH (1720–1774), German musician, was born at Dobitschen in Saxe-Altenburg, on the 4th of January 1720. While a student of law at Leipzig he studied music under Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1741 he went to Berlin, where he studied musical composition. He was soon generally recognized as one of the most skilful organists of his time; and in 1751, as the result of a comic opera, Il Filosofo convinto in amore, performed at Potsdam, he was made court composer to Frederick the Great. He died in Berlin on the 1st of December 1774. In 1759, on the death of Karl Heinrich Graun, he was appointed conductor of the royal orchestra. Besides several operas of merit, he composed instrumental pieces and church music. His reputation chiefly rests, however, on his theoretical and critical writings on musical subjects. He wrote under the pseudonym of Flavio Anicio Olibrio.
AGRICOLA (originally Schneider, then Schnitter), JOHANNES (1494–1566), German Protestant reformer, was born on the 20th of April 1494, at Eisleben, whence he is sometimes called Magister Islebius. He studied at Wittenberg, where he soon gained the friendship of Luther. In 1519 he accompanied Luther to the great assembly of German divines at Leipzig, and acted as recording secretary. After teaching for some time in Wittenberg, he went to Frankfort in 1525 to establish the reformed mode of worship. He had resided there only a month when he was called to Eisleben, where he remained till 1526 as teacher in the school of St Andrew, and preacher in the Nicolai church. In 1536 he was recalled to teach in Wittenberg, and was welcomed by Luther. Almost immediately, however, a controversy, which had been begun ten years before and been temporarily silenced, broke out more violently than ever. Agricola was the first to teach the views which Luther was the first to stigmatize by the now well-known name Antinomian (q.v.), maintaining that while the unregenerate were still under the Mosaic law, Christians were entirely free from it, being under the gospel alone. In consequence of the bitter controversy with Luther that resulted, Agricola in 1540 left Wittenberg secretly for Berlin, where he published a letter addressed to the elector of Saxony, which was generally interpreted as a recantation of his obnoxious views. Luther, however, seems not to have so accepted it, and Agricola remained at Berlin. The elector Joachim II. of Brandenburg, having taken him into his favour, appointed him court preacher and general superintendent. He held both offices until his death in 1566, and his career in Brandenburg was one of great activity and influence. Along with Julius von Pflug, bishop of Naumburg-Zeitz, and Michael Helding, titular bishop of Sidon. he prepared the Augsburg Interim of 1548. He endeavoured in vain to appease the Adiaphoristic controversy (see Adiaphorists.) He died during an epidemic of plague on the 22nd of September 1566. Agricola wrote a number of theological works which are now of little interest. He was the first to make a collection of German proverbs which he illustrated with a commentary. The most complete edition, which contains seven hundred and fifty proverbs, is that published at Wittenberg in 1592; a modern one is that of Latendorf, 1862.
See Cordes, Joh. Agricola’s Schriften möglichst verzeichnet (Altona, 1817); Life by G. Kawerau (1881), who also wrote the notice in Hauck-Herzog, Realencyk. für prot. Theol., where other literature is cited.
AGRICOLA, MARTIN (c. 1500–1556), German musician, was born about 1500 in Lower Silesia. His German name was Sohr or Sore. From 1524 till his death he lived at Magdeburg, where he occupied the post of teacher or cantor in the Protestant school. The senator and music-printer Rhau, of Wittenberg, was a close friend of Agricola, whose theoretical works, providing valuable material concerning the change from the old to the new system of notation, he published. Agricola was also the first to harmonize in four parts Luther’s chorale, Ein’ feste Burg.
Four other Agricolas[1] are known as composers between the end of the 15th century and the middle of the 17th.
In the 18th century we find Burney, in the course of his tour in Germany (1772), much impressed by Johann Friedrich Agricola (1720–1774), court composer and director of the royal chapel to Frederick the Great. This Agricola was a pupil of Bach, and a fine organist and clever writer on music, especially on operatic style, the problems of which were beginning to be raised by French writers-and composers in preparation for the work of Gluck.
AGRICOLA, RODOLPHUS (properly Roelof Huysmann) (1443–1485), Dutch scholar, was born at Baflo, near Groningen, in 1443. He was educated at Louvain, where he graduated as master of arts. After residing for some time in Paris, he went in 1476 to Ferrara in Italy, and attended the lectures of the celebrated Theodorus Gaza (1400–1478) on the Greek language. Having visited Pavia and Rome, he returned to his native country about 1479, and was soon afterwards appointed syndic of Groningen. In 1482, on the invitation of Johann von Dalberg, bishop of Worms (1445–1503), whose friendship he had gained in Italy, he accepted a professorship at Heidelberg, and for three years delivered lectures there and at Worms on the literature of Greece and Rome. By his personal influence much more than by his writings he did much for the promotion of learning in Germany; and Erasmus and other critics of the generation immediately succeeding his own are full of his praises. In his opposition to the scholastic philosophy he in some degree anticipated the great intellectual revolution in which many of his pupils were conspicuous actors. He died at Heidelberg on the 28th of October 1485. His principal work is De inventione dialectica, libri iii., in which he attempts to change the scholastic philosophy of the day.
See T. F. Tresling, Vita et Merita Rudolphi Agricolae (Groningen, 1830); v. Bezold, R. Agricola (München, 1884): and Ihm, Der Humanist R. Agricola, sein Leben und seine Schriften (Paderb., 1893).
AGRICULTURAL GANGS, groups of women, girls and boys organized by an independent gang-master, under whose supervision they execute agricultural piece-work for farmers in certain parts of England. They are sometimes called “public gangs” to distinguish them from “private gangs” consisting of workers engaged by the farmer himself, and undertaking work solely for him, under his own supervision or under that of one of his men. The system was for long prevalent in the counties of Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, and is still to be found in a much modified form in the fen district. The practice dates from the latter years of the reign of George III., when the low-lying, marshy lands surrounding the basin of the Wash were being rapidly drained and converted into rich alluvial districts. The unreformed condition of the poor-law, under which the support of the poor fell upon each individual parish, instead of a union of parishes, made landlords reluctant to erect cottages on the reclaimed land for the benefit of their tenants. Labour had to be obtained for the cultivation of these new lands, and that of women, girls and boys, being cheaper than the labour of men, was consequently very largely employed. The tendency to moral and physical ruin which resulted from this nomadic life was so great that an inquiry into the condition of agricultural child-labour was included in the reference to the commission on child-labour appointed in 1862, and the results were so startling that the Agricultural Gangs Act was passed in 1867, forbidding the employment of any child under eight years old, and of any female under a male gangmaster unless a female licensed to act as gang-mistress were also
- ↑ Alexander, died 1506; Johann, flor. 1600; Wolfgang Christoph, flor. 1630; and George Ludwig, 1643–1676.
