Something which reminds me what a slacker I was in school.
Book of Fire: William Tyndale, Thomas More and the Bloody Birth of the English Bible
Tyndale’s schooling gave him a thorough grounding in Latin. Boys learnt to speak and write elementary Latin in the early forms. Classes then progressed from Aesop and Terence in the third form to Horace’s epistles and Ovid’s Metmorphoses in the seventh, by way of Virgil, Cicero’s letters and Caesar’s history. In the eighth class, the science of grammar was studied in depth. Verse was rendered into prose, and vice versa, translations were made, and, though Ovid’s lascivious De arte amandi was strictly off the menu, Virgil was read out ‘voce ben sonora to bring out the majesty of his poetry’.
The Latin diet remained at the university. English had such lowly status that undergraduates were forbidden to speak it within the precincts of the hall, except at feasts and on holidays. It was compulsory for them to use Latin, although French was tolerated as an alternative in some colleges. Tyndale’s love of English – ‘our mother tongue’, he said, ‘which doth correspond with scripture better than ever Latin may’ – was eccentric. It was spoken by only three million people on their foggy island; and the English themselves largely governed, educated and prayed in Latin. A foreign scholar or cleric, such as Erasmus, lived for several years in England, and followed a lively social and academic life, without speaking any English.
The MA course began with the trivium, the ‘liberall artes’, a trio of grammar, rhetoric and logic. Tyndale will have read the Rhetoric of Aristotle, Boethius’s Topics, Cicero’s Nova Rhetorica and some works of Ovid and Priscian. His insight into rhetoric was greatly to influence his prose. The mark of all Tyndale’s writing is its brilliant resonance when read aloud. From the trivium, he moved on to the quadrivium, of arithmetic, music, astronomy and geometry. Whether Tyndale was musical or not, we do not know, though singing and playing music were a favourite student pastime; but the sense of rhythm and cadence that floods his work shows that he had a sensitive ear. He did not write poetry either and was somewhat sour to colleagues who did, and yet his images and his gift for the mood of words reveal a poetic temperament.
