322 THE MASTERS OF THE SCHOOLS AT July teachers he resorted to the Grammarian of Conches and heard his teaching by the space of three years. It is evident that these three years are counted from his departure from the Mount, and not, as Haureau nsisted,^ from the beginning of his residence in France. They run from the winter of 1 1 37-8 and end in 1 1 40-1 . When he has told us of the three years during which he studied under William of Conches, John proceeds to enumerate several teachers whom he attended before and after this time. After- wards, he says — ^that is, after the end of 1140 — he worked afresh over old subjects under Richard surnamed the Bishop, and entered upon some studies pertaining to the quadrivium, on which he had heard some lectures from Hardwin the German, otherwise unknown to us. He also went again through rhetoric, on which he had previously attended Master Theodoric, and afterwards learned more thoroughly from Peter Helias. He took pupils too, and made friends with Adam of the Little Bridge. It is not easy to arrange the sequence of this narrative. John concludes it by sayuig that he was induced by the narrowness of his means and by the advice of his friends to undertake the office of a teacher ; in other words, to obtain a licence giving him authority to teach. But for this a further course of study was requisite. He returned at the end of the three years {in fine triennii) and found agam Master Gilbert, whom he heard in logic and divinity ; but he was too quickly removed. This gives us a fixed date, as Gilbert of La Porree became bishop of Poitiers in 1142. John then pursued a course of theological study under Robert PuUus and Simon of Poissy ; and so nearly twelve years passed. They must have ended not later than 1 146 or early in 1 147. That John says so little about the second half of his long period of study is accounted for by the fact that the Metalogicus is a philosophical treatise. John allows himself a long digression on his studies in the arts, but only mentions his theological course summarily because it was not relevant to his subject. John does not tell us where he spent the three years, 1137-40, after he quitted Mount St. Gtenevieve, and it was usually presumed that he simply passed from the suburb into the city of Paris. In 1862, however, Carl Schaarschmidt gave reasons for supposing that he went to Chartres. His arguments are as follows.^ First, William of Conches was a Norman and became (a good deal later) the instructor of Henry, afterwards Henry II : we should not, therefore, expect to find him at Paris. Secondly, John tells us that Gilbert of La Porree was wont, when he was chancellor of Chartres, to say certain things. This, Schaarschmidt says, explains why John mentions that * on my retimi to Paris
- Mimoires de FAcaeUmie dea Inscriptions, xxxi. ii. (1884) 102, n. 1.
- Johannes Saresberiensis, pp. 22 f.
