Guy de Chauliac has been given the name of the father of modern surgery. Any one who wants to see why should read the text-book on surgery that {135} Chauliac wrote and which for two centuries after his time (he died about the middle of the fourteenth century) continued to be the most used text-book of surgery in the medical schools of Europe. Chauliac, for instance, describes the treatment of conditions within all three of the important cavities of the body, the skull, the thorax and the abdomen. Pagel has three closely-printed pages in small type of t.i.tles alone of subjects in surgery which Chauliac treated with distinction. His description of instruments and methods of operation is especially full and suggestive. He describes the pa.s.sage of a catheter, for instance, with the accuracy and complete technique of a man who knew the difficulties of it in complicated cases from practical experience. He even recognizes the dangers for the patient from the presence of anatomical anomalies of various kinds and describes certain of the more important of them. He has very exact indications for trephining. For empyema he advises opening of the chest and indicates where and how. He says very frankly that in wounds of the abdomen the patient will die if the intestines have been perforated and left untreated, and he describes a method of suturing wounds of the intestines in order to save the patient"s life.
His treatment of bone surgery and of fractures and dislocations is especially interesting and shows how far these very practical men had reached conclusions resembling those of our time. {136} It was in hernia particularly that Chauliac"s surgical genius manifested itself.
He operated for hernia and its radical cure, placing the patient in an exaggerated Trendelenberg position, head down, feet fastened to a slanting board. For such work anatomy had to be known very well, and Chauliac had made special studies at Bologna under Bertruccio, the successor of Mondino. Chauliac once declared that the surgeon ignorant of anatomy carves the human body as a blind man would carve wood. Of ulcers of all kinds Chauliac writes from a knowledge evidently derived from experience. Of ulcers due to cancer he has much to say. He considers them hopeless unless they can be excised at a very early stage and the incision followed by caustics. For carcinomatous ulcers there is not much that we can do beyond this, even in our day. It is no wonder that the great historians of medicine have been unanimous in praise of this wonderful scientific genius. For my lecture on "Old-Time Medical Education," before the Johns Hopkins Historical Club, last year, I quoted some of those opinions. Portal, for instance, says of him, "It may be averred that Guy de Chauliac said nearly everything that modern surgeons say and that his work is of infinite price, but unfortunately too little pondered." Malgaigne declares Chauliac"s "Chirurgia Magna," "A masterpiece of learned and luminous writing." Pagel says, "Chauliac represents the summit of attainment in mediaeval {137} surgery, and he laid the foundation of that primacy in surgery which the French maintained down to the nineteenth century." Professor Clifford Allb.u.t.t says of Chauliac"s treatise, "This great work I have studied carefully and not without prejudice; yet I cannot wonder that Fallopius compared the author with Hippocrates or that John Freind calls him the prince of surgeons. The book is rich, aphoristic, orderly and precise." In a word it has all the qualities that are usually said to be lacking in the work of mediaeval scientists, and it is a standing reproach to those who ignorantly have made so little of the work of these wonderful men of the olden time, who antic.i.p.ated so many of the features of our modern medicine and surgery that we are p.r.o.ne to think of as representing climaxes in human progress, indications of a wonderful human evolution.
Two other names of great professors of surgery deserve to be mentioned because they make it very clear that this wonderful development of surgery was not confined to France and Italy, but made itself felt all over Europe. One of these is John Ypermann, a surgeon of the early fourteenth century, of whom almost nothing was known until about twenty-five years ago, when the Belgian historian, Broeck, brought to light his works and gathered some details of his life. He was a pupil of Lanfranc, and at the end of the thirteenth century studied at Paris on a scholarship voted by his native town of Ypres, {138} which provided maintenance and tuition fees for him at the great French university expressly in order that he might become expert in surgery.
We are likely to think of Ypres as an unimportant town, but it was one of the great industrial centres of Europe and one of the most populous, busy towns of Flanders in the Middle Ages, noted for its manufacture of linens and fine laces. The famous Cloth Hall, erected in the thirteenth century, one of the most beautiful architectural monuments in Europe, and one of the finest buildings of its kind in the world, was the result of the same spirit that sent Ypermann to Paris.
After his return Ypermann settled down in his native town and obtained great renown not only at home, so that in that part of the country an expert surgeon is still spoken of as an Ypermann, but he became famous throughout all the Teutonic countries. He is the author of two books in Flemish. One of these is on medicine. Pagel calls it an unimportant compilation. The terms that occur in it, however, are enough to show us how much more than we are likely to think, these old masters in medicine discussed problems that are still puzzling us. He treats of dropsy, rheumatism, under which occur the terms coryza and catarrh, icterus, phthisis (he calls the tuberculous tysiken), apoplexy, epilepsy, frenzy, lethargy, fallen palate, cough, shortness of breath, lung abscess, hemorrhage, blood-spitting, liver abscess, hardening of the spleen, affections of the kidney, {139} b.l.o.o.d.y urine, diabetes, incontinence of urine, dysuria, strangury, gonorrhea and involuntary seminal emissions--all these terms are quoted directly from Pagel.
His work in medicine, however, is as nothing compared to his writings on surgery. A special feature of his book is the presence of seventy ill.u.s.trations of instruments of the most various kinds, together with a plate showing the anatomical features of the st.i.tching of a wound in the head. Even Pagel"s brief account of its contents will be a source of never-ending surprise for those who think that surgery has developed entirely in our time. Even in this work on surgery, however, there are many things that we now treat under medicine. As this gives us an opportunity to show how much more of medicine was known at this time than is usually thought, I venture to quote some of Pagel"s brief resume of the contents of a single chapter. This is a chapter devoted to intoxications, which includes the effect of cantharides as well as alcohol, and treats of the bites of snakes, scorpions and of the fatal effects of wounds due to the bite of mad dogs.
The other great surgeon and surgical writer of the time, for there must have been many distinguished surgeons and only a few writers, if we can trust to common experience in that matter, was John Ardern, an English surgeon. He was educated in Montpellier, practised for a time in France, then settled for some years in the {140} small town of Newark in Nottinghamshire, and then for nearly thirty years in London.
His "Practice of Surgery," as yet existing only in ma.n.u.script, is another one of these wonderful contributions to the applied sciences of anatomy and medicine at a time when such applications are often supposed to have been absent. He was an expert operator and had a wide reputation for his success in the treatment of diseases of the r.e.c.t.u.m.
He was the inventor of a new clyster apparatus. Daremberg, the medical historian, who saw a copy of Ardern"s ma.n.u.script in St. John"s College, Oxford, says that it contained numerous ill.u.s.trations of instruments and operations. We fortunately possess an excellent ma.n.u.script copy in the Surgeon General"s Library at Washington, and sometime it is hoped this will be edited and published.
The most interesting feature of the work of all of these men is their dependence on personal observation and not on authority. Guy de Chauliac"s position in this matter can be very well appreciated from his criticism of John of Gaddesden"s book in which he bewails the blind following of those who had gone before. His bitterest reproach for many of his predecessors was that, "They followed one another like cranes, whether for fear or love he would not say." Pagel praises Ypermann for the well-marked striving which he has noted in him to free himself from the bondage of authority, and because most of his therapeutic {141} descriptions rest upon his own experience. William of Salicet, at the beginning of this great period of surgery, had insisted that notes of cases were the most valuable sources of wisdom in medicine and surgery. The last of them, Ardern, gave statistics of his cases and was quite as proud as any modern surgeon of the large number that he had operated on. He gives these carefully and accurately.
I have dwelt on the medical side of these universities mainly, of course, because this is more familiar to me as a historian of medicine than their work in other scientific departments, but also to a great extent because the medical schools gathered unto themselves nearly all the scientific knowledge of the time. Botany, mineralogy, climatology, meteorology were all studied for the sake of what could be learned from them for the benefit of medicine. Even astronomy which was then the old astrology, was cultivated seriously, because of the supposed effect of the stars on human const.i.tutions. For this we surely cannot blame these mediaeval students of science since four centuries later Galileo and even Kepler were still making horoscopes for their patrons and laying down laws from astronomy that were supposed to be applicable to medicine. Even Copernicus studied astronomy and medicine side by side and this combination of studies was not at all infrequent.
The medical schools, then, are the real index of {142} the serious interest of the mediaeval universities in science. Our scientific departments in modern universities have developed other interests, because of various applications that these have to life and its concerns. Always in scientific universities applied science is sure to encroach upon the domain of pure science, and no one knows that better than we do, for we have been bewailing the presence of machine shops and boiler factories on the university grounds. The old universities did not teach applied mechanics or engineering, but that does not mean that these subjects were not taught. There were special technical schools conducted by the gilds by means of apprenticeship and the journeyman training, which enabled them to teach those who cared to have it all the knowledge necessary for construction work of various kinds. The wonderful architectural engineering exhibited in the cathedrals, university buildings, town halls and castles of this time, and the magnificent bridges, some of which are still in existence, show us that the technical subjects were by no means neglected.
[Footnote 9] Our mediaeval forefathers in education had the wisdom not to let the technical subjects interfere with pure science too much, as they inevitably do whenever the two are brought too closely together.
Culture is always overshadowed by the practical, but not to the ultimate benefit of the race.
[Footnote 9: See Address on "Ideal Education of the Ma.s.ses."]
The proof for us here in America, close at {143} hand, that these universities of the Middle Ages were thoroughly scientific in spirit and not only capable of, but actually active and successful in scientific investigation, is to be found in our earliest American universities. We are p.r.o.ne to think, because of the curiously defective way in which our histories of education have been written, that the only things worth while talking about in the origins of education here in America are to be found in English America. Recent investigations have shown how utterly deceived we were by foolish self-conceit in this matter. Long before the English-American universities were founded, and still longer before they began to do any serious work in education, there were important universities having literally thousands of students in attendance in the Spanish-American countries. The University of Mexico and the University of Lima in Peru were both founded about the middle of the sixteenth century. Harvard came nearly a century later, Yale a full century and a half, Princeton more than two centuries. The contrast between our English-American inst.i.tutions of learning, however, and their Spanish-American rivals in accomplishment and numbers in attendance is still more striking than the mere dates of foundation.
Of course there were chairs of many sciences, strange as that may seem to us with our ridiculous traditions with regard to the history of education. These Spanish-American universities were {144} the direct descendants of the old mediaeval universities. They were in close relationship with Salamanca, Valladolid and Alcala. They were the progeny of scientific universities and they were, of course, occupied mainly with science. In spite of the fact that already the influence of the Renaissance, with its cla.s.sical studies as the basis of education, had begun to make itself felt, these Spanish-American universities retained, to a great extent, the scientific curriculum.
Nor must it be thought that they were shilly-shally inst.i.tutions of learning, doing nothing in reality, but making a great pretence of studying many things. To know the very opposite we turn to Bourne, himself at the time a professor at Yale, and writing one of the volumes of a series edited by Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, who holds the chair of history at Harvard, to be told in very definite emphatic terms how successfully investigations in science and scientific education were carried on in Mexico. Professor Bourne says:
"Not all the inst.i.tutions of learning founded in Mexico in the sixteenth century can be enumerated here, but it is not too much to say that in number, range of studies and standard of attainments by the officers they surpa.s.sed anything existing in English America until the nineteenth century. _Mexican scholars made distinguished achievements in some branches of science, particularly medicine and surgery, but pre-eminently linguistics, history and anthropology._ {145} Dictionaries and grammars of the native languages and histories of the Mexican inst.i.tutions are an imposing proof of their scholarly devotion and intellectual activity. Conspicuous are Toribio de Motolinia"s "Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espana,"
Duran"s "Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espana," but most important of all Sahagun"s great work on Mexican life and religion."
The scientific products of these universities in America are interesting because almost as a rule we know absolutely nothing about them in English America, and, therefore, conclude there must have been none. The first book written on a medical topic in America was the "Secretos de Chirurgia," written by Dr. Pedrarias de Benavides, which was published at Valladolid in Spain in 1567. The first book on medicine actually published in this country was "Opera Medicinalia,"
by Francis...o...b..avo. [Footnote 10] On Columbus" second expedition, however, a Dr. Chanca who had been physician-in-ordinary to the King and Queen of Spain, was sent with the expedition as what we would now call a scientific attache. On his return he wrote a volume of scientific observations that he had made in America. Some of these were doubtless written while he was over here, though the book was published in Spain. Dr. Ybarra of New York recently published a resume of this in the Smithsonian Publications and an article on it in the _Journal of the American Medical a.s.sociation_. {146} It shows very well how wide were the scientific interests of the physicians of the time and how ardent their investigation of science, for there is scarcely a phase of modern science that would be touched on by the corps of scientists now attached to such an expedition which does not receive some serious treatment in Dr. Chanca"s book. Thus early did the Spanish-Americans take up scientific investigation seriously.
[Footnote 10: Published in Mexico, 1570.]
Professor Bourne of Yale, in his chapter on the "Transmission of the European Culture," in the third volume of the American Nation Series, [Footnote 11] says (p. 17): "Early in the eighteenth century the Lima University [Lima, Peru] counted nearly 2,000 students and numbered about one hundred and eighty doctors [in its faculty] in theology, civil and canon law, medicine and the arts. Ulloa reports that "the university makes a stately appearance from without, and its inside is decorated with suitable ornaments." _There were chairs of all the sciences_, and "some of the professors have, notwithstanding the vast distance, gained the applause of the literati of Europe." The coming of the Jesuits contributed much to the real educational work in America. They established colleges, one of which, the little Jesuit College at Juli, on Lake t.i.ticaca, became a seat of genuine learning."
[Footnote 11: Harpers, New York, 1908.]
A distinguished professor of medicine in this country to whose attention this state of medical {147} education in the Spanish-American countries, so different from what is thought, was called, said: "What a surprise it is to find that while we have been accustomed to think that the _primum mobile_ [the active initiative]
in education in this country came from the Anglo-Saxons, we now find that they were long antic.i.p.ated in every department of education by the Spaniards, though we have been rather accustomed to despise them for their backwardness." With regard to the establishment of the first American medical school, it is no longer a surprise to find that it was established in Mexico, just as soon as we realize that the Mexican University was closely in touch with the traditions of the mediaeval universities generally and these all established medical schools as university departments. The standards of these mediaeval medical schools were transported to America and maintained. Our medical schools in the United States got away from the universities, became mere preparatory inst.i.tutions, granted degrees for just as little study as possible, two terms of four months each in most cases, sometimes given in the same calendar year and requiring no preliminary training. We are reforming this now for a generation, but just inasmuch as we are, far from advancing, we are going straight back to the mediaeval universities and their standards and methods.
With all this evidence before us it seems perfectly clear that these old mediaeval universities {148} must be considered to have been scientific universities in our fullest modern sense of the term. They devoted all their time to the study of phenomena around them and the attempt to find the principles underlying them. They went at it somewhat differently in many departments of science than those which are now employed, but in all their practical work at least, they antic.i.p.ated our methods as well as many of our results. The great professors wrote text-books and students who were ardent in the pursuit of knowledge copied out those text-books by hand. They had no way of easily multiplying them almost indefinitely, as we have at the present time. Probably nothing shows so well the enthusiastic zeal of these times in the pursuit of scientific knowledge as the fact that so many copies of these textbooks still remain for us. Much has been lost by war and fire, and still more by wanton destruction by people who could not understand, for there were many intervening generations that sold these old ma.n.u.scripts by the ton for the use of grocers to wrap up b.u.t.ter and any other commodity. If we only had the wealth of ma.n.u.script that was originally created it would be easy to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, and show the wonderful scientific scholarship of these mediaeval universities.
As it is, there cannot be the slightest doubt that these were great scientific universities. How, then, has the opposite tradition of science only {149} coming to cultivation in our time obtained a foothold; above all, how has it happened that men have insisted that there was no science in these old days because the Church was opposed to science and would not permit its study or allow of scientific investigation? If we were to believe many writers who have been taken very seriously, anatomy was conducted only under the pain of death, chemistry made one liable to all sorts of penalties and other forms of science were absolutely banned. There is no reason at all for any such declarations from what we know of the history of science. The place where such groundless a.s.sertions are found is in the so-called history of religion. The _odium theologic.u.m_ was very bitter, and ignorant men said things without knowing, and then their statements were copied by others who knew even less.
Probably there is no more serious blot on the history of education and, above all, the history of science, than the fact that men supposed to be scholarly have been so ready to accept absolutely ignorant statements with regard to the state of science during the Middle Ages. It would be amusing, if it were not so amazing, to recall the utter lack of scholarship that characterized the men who wrote such things, but above all the generations that accepted such history as solemn truth and even conferred academic dignities and degrees on such men. Take a book like Dr. Draper"s "Conflict of Science and Religion." It {150} is founded on the uttermost lack of knowledge of the subjects of which he speaks. It is true that he has consulted historical writers. They were all secondary authorities. He had never gone back to look up a single original doc.u.ment of any kind. He was a physician; supposedly at least, then, he should know the history of medicine. He knows nothing at all about the great medical schools of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; of the great period of surgery that occurred at this time he has no inkling. Had he cared really to know anything about the period he could have seen some of the text-books written by these men. Instead we have an exhibition, in his book, of the most consummate a.s.sumption of knowledge a.s.sociated with sublime ignorance and bitter condemnation for old inst.i.tutions, educational and ecclesiastical, in matters of which he knows nothing, though if he did know, his opinion would surely be just the opposite to that he has expressed.
To a great degree this is true of President White"s "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology." Secondary authorities constantly figure in it, and they are quoted from, as a rule, with the definite idea of proving a particular thesis--that theology is opposed to science. Of course it is very different to that of Draper, there is much more of true scholarship in it, but it is sad to think that the prestige of a president of a great university who had been a professor of {151} history should have been lent to statements so egregiously misleading as those which are constantly to be found in his work. Even sadder it is to think that this has been accepted by many people as a scholarly work and as representing the last word on the subject.
The "Cambridge Modern History" in its preface said, that history has been a long conspiracy against the truth and that we must now go back once more to the original doc.u.ments. "It has become impossible," the editors declare, "for the historical writers of the present age to trust without reserve even to the most respected secondary authorities. The honest student continually finds himself deserted, r.e.t.a.r.ded, misled, by the cla.s.sics of historical literature, and has to hew his own way through mult.i.tudinous transactions, periodicals and official publications in order to reach the truth." In no department of history is this expression more true than in that of education, and especially of science and the relation of educational inst.i.tutions to scientific development. No man should now dare venture to say anything about the state of science at any time in the world"s history who has not seen some of the books written at that time. Above all, no one should venture to make little of the past on the strength of what religiously prejudiced writers have said about it.
This story of the mediaeval universities is most illuminating from that standpoint. They were {152} scientific universities closely resembling our own. It has become the custom to talk of them as if they were inst.i.tutions of learning that accomplished nothing, and wasted their time over trifles. We often hear of how much time was wasted in dialectics in the Middle-Age universities, but surely it was not more than is wasted over technics in our modern university.
Hundreds of books were written about the quips and quiddities of logic, but thousands of volumes are full of technics and most of our scientific journals are crowded with it. Let us, then, if for no other reason than our fraternity with them, begin to do justice to these old universities. Their scholars were ardent and zealous, their professors were enthusiastic and laborious. The tomes they issued were larger and their writings more voluminous than those of our own professors. They are hard reading, but no one must dare to criticise them unless he has read them, and, above all, no one must make little of them without knowing something about them at first hand. This is scholarship; the secondary information that has been popular is sciolism. Let us get back to scholarship. That is what we need just now in America.
{153}
IDEAL POPULAR EDUCATION
{154}
"According to my view he who would be good at anything must practise that thing from his youth upwards, both in sport and earnest, in the particular way which the work requires: for example, he who is to be a good builder, should play at building children"s houses; and he who is to be a good husbandman at tilling the ground; those who have the care of their education should provide them when young with mimic tools. And they should learn beforehand the knowledge which they will afterwards require for their art. For example, the future carpenter should learn to measure or apply the line in play; and the future warrior should learn riding or some other exercise for amus.e.m.e.nt, and the teacher should endeavor to direct the children"s inclinations and pleasures by the help of amus.e.m.e.nts to their final aim in life. The sum of education is right training in the nursery.
The soul of the child in his play should be trained to that sort of excellence in which, when he grows up to manhood, he will have to be perfected. Do you agree with me thus far?"--Plato, _Laws_ (Jowett), Vol. IV, p. 173. Scribner, 1908.
"There will be gymnasia and schools in the midst of the city, and outside the city circuses (playgrounds) and open s.p.a.ces for riding places and archery. In all of these there should be instructors of the young."--Plato, _Laws_ (Jowett), Vol. IV, p. 82. Scribner, 1902.
{155}
IDEAL POPULAR EDUCATION [Footnote 12]
[Footnote 12: The material for this lecture was collected for a course on the History of Education delivered to the Sisters of Charity of Mount St. Vincent"s, at St Stephen"s Hall, New York City, in January and February, 1909. The material was subsequently developed for a similar set of lectures for the religious teachers in the parochial schools of Philadelphia in the spring of 1910.]
We have come to realize in recent years that in many ways our education of the ma.s.ses is a failure. Teaching people to read and write and occupying them with books till they are fifteen years of age, when all that they will use their power to read for is to devote themselves to three or four editions of the daily paper and the huge, overgrown Sunday papers on their only day of leisure, with perhaps occasional recourse to a cheap magazine or a cheaper novel, in order to kill time, as they frankly declare, is scarcely worth while. Indeed we have even come to realize that such education gives opportunity rather for the development of discontent than of happiness. The learning to write which enables a man to be a clerk, or a bookkeeper, the occupations that are, as a rule, the least lucrative, that are so full that there is no question of organizing them, that confine men for long hours in dark rooms very often and furnish the least possible opportunity to rise, is of itself not ideal. With some rather {156} disconnected information this is practically all that our ordinary education teaches people, and yet we spend eight years and large sums of money on it. We are just beginning to realize that other forms of education and not these superficial introductions to supposed scholarship, which can mean so little, const.i.tute realities in education.
We have come to realize that Germany, where it is said that more than sixty per cent. of the population has its opportunity for some technical training, so that men are taught the rudiments of a trade or a handicraft or some occupation other than that which shall make them mere routine servants of some one else, does far better than this. By contrast it is remarked that less than one per cent. of our children have the opportunity for such training. We are very p.r.o.ne to think, however, that the technical school is a modern idea. We a.s.sume that it owes its origin to the development of mankind in the process of evolution to a point where the recognition of the value of handiwork and craftsmanship has at length arisen. Nothing could well be less true than this. It is true that the eighteenth century saw practically no education of this kind and it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that any modern nation even began to wake up to the necessity for it. In the older times, however, and, above all, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there was a magnificent training afforded the ma.s.ses of the people in all sorts of arts and {157} crafts and trades and occupations, such as can now be obtained only in technical schools. They did not call these teaching inst.i.tutions technical schools, but they had all the benefits that we would now derive from such schools.
This training the people of these times owed to the gilds. These were, of course, of many forms, the Arts Gilds, the Crafts Gilds, the Merchants Gilds, and then the various Trades Gilds. Boys were apprenticed to men following such an occupation as the youth had expressed a liking for, or that he seemed to be adapted to, or that his parents chose for him, and then began his training. It was conducted for five or six years usually in the house of the master or tradesman to whom he was apprenticed. The master provided him with board and clothes, at least, after the first year, and he gradually trained him in the trade or craft or industry, whatever it might be.
After his apprenticeship was over the young man of eighteen or so became a journeyman workman and usually wandered from his native town to other places, sometimes going even over seas in order to learn the foreign secrets of his craft or art or trade, and after three years of this, when ready to settle down, presented evidence as to his accomplishments, and if this was accepted he became a master in his gild. If he were a craftsman or an artisan he made a lock or a bolt or some more artistic piece of work in the metals base or precious, and if this sample was {158} considered worthy of them by his fellow-gildsmen he was admitted as a master in the gild. This was the highest rank of workman, and the men who held it were supposed to be able to do anything that had been done by fellow-workmen up to that time. The piece that he presented was then called a masterpiece, and it is from this that our good old English word masterpiece was derived.
This might seem a very inadequate training, and perhaps appeal to many as not deserving of the name of technical training or schooling. The only way to decide as to that, however, is to appreciate the products turned out by these workmen. It was these graduates of the apprentice-journeyman system of technical training who produced the great series of marvellous art objects which adorn the English cathedrals, the English munic.i.p.al buildings, the castles and the palaces and the monasteries of the thirteenth century. It was the graduates of these schools, or at least of this method of schooling, who produced the wonderful stained gla.s.s, the beautiful bells, the finished ironwork, the surpa.s.sing woodwork, the sculpture, the decoration,--in a word, all the artistic details of the architecture of the wonderful Gothic periods of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,--which we have learned to value so highly in recent years.
If we wanted to produce such work in our large cities now, we would have to import the workmen. These wonderful {159} products were made in cities so small that we would be apt to think them scarcely more than insignificant towns in our time. No town in England during the thirteenth century, with the possible exception of London, had more than 25,000, and most of the cathedral towns were under 15,000 in population and many of them had less than 10,000.
The extent to which this teaching went and how much it partook of the nature of real technical training can be very well appreciated from recent studies of these early times. There has probably never been more beautiful handicraftsmanship nor better products of what we now call the arts and crafts than during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when this system of educating the ma.s.ses became thoroughly organized. Any one who knows the details of the decoration of the great Gothic cathedrals or of the monasteries and castles and munic.i.p.al buildings of these centuries will be well acquainted with these marvels of accomplishment, scattered everywhere throughout England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain in this period. Something of the story of it all I tried to tell, as far as the cathedrals are concerned, in my book, "The Thirteenth the Greatest of Centuries."
Those who care to see another side of it will find it in Mr. A. Ralph Adams Cram"s "The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain." [Footnote 13] Mr.
Cram, himself a {160} successful modern architect, does not hesitate to declare some of this work as among the most beautiful that ever was made, even including the ancient Greek and Roman productions. In his searches into the ruins of these old abbeys he has found mutilated fragments so consummate in their faultless art that they deserve a place with the masterpieces of sculpture of every age.
[Footnote 13: New York, The Churchman Company, 1905.]
It was not alone, however, in the arts of sculpture and decoration, that is in those finer accomplishments that would occupy only a few of the workmen, but in every detail of adornment that these artistic craftsmen excelled. The locks and bolts, the latches and hinges, the grilles, even the very fences and gates made in wrought iron, are beautiful in every line and in the artistic efficiency of their designs. The carved woodwork is in many places a marvel. When a gate has to be moved, or a hinge is no longer used, or a lock or even a key from these early times goes out of commission, we would consider it almost a sacrilege to throw it away; it is transported to the museum--not alone because of its value as an antique but, as a rule, also because of its charm as a work of art. When a bench-end is no longer needed it, too, finds its way into the museum. As Rev. Augustus Jessopp has shown very clearly in his studies of the old English parishes, these marvels of iron and woodwork were made, in most cases, respectively by the village blacksmith and the village carpenter. In the archives of {161} some of the parishes of the Middle Ages the accounts are found showing that these men were paid for them. When the village blacksmith and the village carpenter becomes the artist artisan capable of producing such good work, then indeed is there an ideal education at work and a technical training that may be boasted of.