CHAPTER VII.
JOHN OF SALISBURY.
Johannes Parvus, John Little or Short a little, according to his own paraphrase, in name, less in skill, least in worth was born at Salisbury, it seems of English stock,[1] about the middle of Henry the First s reign. The year of his birth is commonly given as 1110; but this is evidently a mere calculation from the date of his death, 1180, on the presumption that he was then seventy years old, and it is contradicted by his own b statement that he was but a lad, odolescens admodum, when he went to Paris in 1136. Studies in those days began early, and it is nearly inconceivable that a man of six-and-twenty should enter, as John did, upon a course of education lasting ten or twelve years. We shall certainly be safer then if we place his birth between 1115 and 1120.[2] As a child, he tells us, he was sent to a priest, as the manner was, to learn his Psalms. The teacher happened to have a
- ↑ This is a plausible inference from John s language in the En- theticus, ver. 137 sqq., in which he ridicules the courtier who is anxious to pass as a Norman ; so that the authors of the Histoire litteraire de la France 14. 89, should seem to be in error in writing his name Petit. See the biography by professor C. Schaar- schmidt, librarian at Bonn, to which reference has frequently been made in the foregoing pages ; a model book to which I cannot too heartily express my obliga- tions. My citations from the En- theticus refer to the edition by C. Petersen, Hamburg 1843, of the Entheticus de dogmate philo- sophorum, and not to the other poem bearing the same title which is prefixed to the Policraticus. Peterson’s commentaries are learned and valuable, but vitiated by a constant endeavour to bring the author into connexion with Oxford, which is a pure delusion: cf. Sehaarschmidt 1121. [In the present edition I have adjusted the references to the Policraticus to the volumes and pages of the admirable edition of that work published by Mr. C. C. J. Webb; Oxford 1909. I have also altered the numbering of the letters KO as to agree with that in J. A. Giles’s edition of John s Works, vol. 1,2; Oxford 1848.]
- ↑ Petersen, p. 73, thinks not be- fore the latter date ; Dr. Schaar- schmidt, p. 10, between 1110 and 1120.
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