Faith and Learning: The Church, Universities and Roger Bacon

A Church at the Heart of Daily Life

Every parish in Edward I’s England gathered in a stone church on Sunday. The medieval Church taught children, kept the calendar, recorded births and deaths, fed the poor, and offered the sacraments through which souls reached heaven. The Pope in Rome appointed England’s archbishops and bishops, and English kings sometimes clashed with him over taxation and appointments. By Edward’s reign two old religious orders — the Benedictines and Cistercians — were being challenged from within by a new and more austere kind of clergy: the friars.

The Friars in Edward’s England

Unlike monks, who lived enclosed in monasteries, friars lived among lay people. They went barefoot through town streets, begged for their bread and preached in the open air. They settled deliberately in the rough, growing parts of England’s cities — Greyfriars in Newgate in London, Blackfriars next to the Thames at Ludgate, similar houses at Oxford, Cambridge, York and Norwich. The Franciscans were valued for their simplicity; the Dominicans, often university trained, became the leading preachers and confessors of their day.

Edward used the friars too. They preached the cause of the crusades, served as ambassadors and were among the voices urging him toward the 1290 expulsion of the Jews. By the end of his reign, every major town in England had at least one friary and the friars had become a familiar part of the urban landscape.

The Rise of the Universities

Oxford and Cambridge had grown out of cathedral schools in the twelfth century. By Edward’s reign both were established universities. Students arrived as young as thirteen and worked through the seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy) before moving on to higher faculties of theology, canon law, civil law or medicine. Most teaching was in Latin and almost all students were in minor orders — clerks of the Church — even if they never became full priests.

Lectures were free; what students paid for was lodging and food in the masters’ halls. To bring order, wealthy patrons began endowing halls of residence with their own statutes — the first medieval colleges. Colleges at Oxford grew quickly: Merton (1264, refounded by Walter de Merton 1274), Balliol (founded by John de Balliol in the 1260s and given statutes by his widow Dervorguilla in 1282), and University College (which traced itself to a 1249 endowment). At Cambridge, Peterhouse was founded in 1284 by the Bishop of Ely. These colleges fixed Oxford and Cambridge into stable institutions that would dominate English higher learning for centuries.

Roger Bacon and Experimental Science

The most famous English scholar of the age was the Franciscan Roger Bacon (c.1219–1292), known as ‘Doctor Mirabilis’ or the ‘wonderful doctor’. Bacon studied at Oxford and Paris, joined the Franciscans in the 1250s, and produced a vast body of writing on mathematics, optics, astronomy and the philosophy of language. In 1267, at the request of Pope Clement IV, he produced his masterwork the Opus Majus — the ‘Greater Work’ — arguing that Christian learning had to combine scripture, languages, mathematics and experimental science.

Bacon’s emphasis on experiment and direct observation was unusual for his age and earned him a controversial reputation. He proposed magnifying lenses, theorised about flying machines and gunpowder, and corrected the calendar long before his ideas were accepted. His Franciscan order distrusted his independence and at one point placed him under restriction, but his writings became a foundation reference for the experimental tradition centuries later.

Duns Scotus and the ‘Subtle Doctor’

A second towering figure of the late thirteenth century was the Scotsman John Duns Scotus (c.1266–1308), who studied and lectured at Oxford in the 1290s before moving to Paris. He earned the title ‘Doctor Subtilis’ — the Subtle Doctor — for the precision of his reasoning. Where Bacon emphasised experiment, Scotus refined philosophical theology, exploring how individual things could be known and arguing for the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary — a doctrine the Church only formally accepted six centuries later. Scotus’s work was so dominant in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century universities that those who rejected it were nicknamed ‘Dunsmen’ — the origin of the modern word ‘dunce’.