illage four hours to the north of
Groningen; his mother being a young woman of the place, who
subsequently married a local carrier. On 17 Feb. 1444 the priest was
elected to be warden of a college of nuns at Siloe, close to
Groningen, and in the same hour a messenger came running to him from
Baflo, claiming the reward of good news and announcing the birth of a
son. 'Good,' said the new warden; 'this is an auspicious day, for it
has twice made me father.'

From the moment he could walk, the boy was passionately fond of music;
the sound of church bells would bring him toddling out into the
street, or the thrummings of the blind beggars as they went from house
to house playing for alms; and he would follow strolling pipers out of
the gates into the country, and only be driven back by a show of
violence. When he was taken to church, all through the mass his eyes
were riveted upon the organ and its bellows; and as he grew older he
made himself a syrinx with eight or nine pipes out of willow-bark. He
was taught to ride on horseback, and early became adept in
pole-jumping whilst in the saddle, an art which the Frieslanders of
that age had evolved to help their horses across the broad rhines of
their country. In 1456, when he was just 12, he matriculated at
Erfurt, and in May 1462 at Cologne. But the course of his education is
not clear, and though it is known that he reached the M.A. at Louvain,
the date of this degree is not certain. He is also said to have been
at the University of Paris.

Of his life at Louvain some details are given by Geldenhauer (d. 1542)
in a sketch written about fifty years after Agricola's death. The
University had been founded in 1426 to meet the needs of Belgian
students, who for higher education had been obliged to go to Cologne
or Paris, or more distant universities. Agricola entered Kettle
College, which afterwards became the college of the Falcon, and soon
distinguished himself among his fellow-students. They admired the ease
with which he learnt French--not the rough dialect of Hainault, but
the polite language of the court. With many his musical tastes were a
bond of sympathy, in a way which recalls the evenings that Henry
Bradshaw used to spend among the musical societies of Bruges and Lille
when he was working in Belgian libraries; and on all sides men frankly
acknowledged his intellectual pre-eminence as they marked his quiet
readiness in debate and heard him pose the lecturers with acute