[Sidenote: Revolution of discipline.]

[Sidenote: Memorable fate of Duns Scotus.]

The discipline was not neglected: "we have enjoined the religious
students,"[498] Leyton wrote to Cromwell, "that none of them, for no
manner of cause, shall come within any tavern, inn, or alehouse, or any
other house, whatsoever it be, within the town and suburbs. [Each
offender] once so taken, to be sent home to his cloyster. Without doubt,
this act is greatly lamented of all honest women of the town; and
especially of their laundresses, that may not now once enter within the
gates, much less within the chambers, whereunto they were right well
accustomed. I doubt not, but for this thing, only the honest matrons
will sue to you for redress."[499] These were sharp measures; we lose
our breath at their rapidity and violence. The saddest vicissitude was
that which befell the famous Duns--Duns Scotus, the greatest of the
Schoolmen, the constructor of the _memoria technica_ of ignorance, the
ancient text-book of _a priori_ knowledge, established for centuries the
supreme despot in the Oxford lecture-rooms. "We have set Duns in
Bocardo," says Leyton. He was thrown down from his high estate, and from
being lord of the Oxford intellect, was "made the common servant of all
men;" condemned by official sentence to the lowest degradation to which
book can be submitted.[500] Some copies escaped this worst fate; but for
changed uses thenceforward. The second occasion on which the visitors
came to New College, they "found the great Quadrant Court full of the
leaves of Duns, the wind blowing them into every corner; and one Mr.
Greenfield, a gentleman of Buckinghamshire, gathering up part of the
same book leaves, as he said, to make him sewers or blawnsheres, to keep
the deer within his wood, thereby to have the better cry with his
hounds."[501]

To such base uses all things return at last; dust unto dust, when the
life has died out of them, and the living world needs their
companionship no longer.

[Sidenote: Progress of the visitors.]

[Sidenote: Uniformity of result.]

[Sidenote: The _animus improbus_.]

On leaving Oxford, the visitors spread over England, north, south, east,
and west. We trace Legh in rapid progress through Bedfordshire,
Cambridgeshire, Lincoln, Yorkshire, and Northumberland; Leyton through
Middlesex, Kent, Sussex, Hants, Somersetshire, and Devon. They appeared
at monastery after monastery, with prompt, decisive question