The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume III. Renascence and Reformation.
§ 6. English students at Paris
The desire for classical learning spread widely. Students who could not go to Italy went to Paris, where teachers congregated. It was noticed there that the young Englishmen who came to the colleges in the French capital belonged, for the most part, to the aristocracy or to the moneyed classes. They were able to live in pensionats or boarding-houses, and did not share the hard life of the great majority of Parisian students, whose fate made them inmates of a college or drove them to high-priced miserable garrets in the streets about the Place Maubert. In the pensionats, students lived under the care of a preceptor, and the best teachers the city afforded were hired to teach them the branches of learning they had come to acquire. Erasmus himself made the acquaintance of Englishmen by teaching in one of these boarding-houses. There he taught William Blount, lord Mountjoy, who brought him to England, Thomas Gray, Robert Fisher, cousin of John, afterwards bishop of Rochester, and the head of the boarding-house himself, who, most probably, was an Englishman of gentle birth from the Border (Semi-Scotus).
Royalty, even in the person of Henry VII, recognised the advantages of the classical renascence. Linacre, as has been said, was engaged to instruct the heir-apparent, Arthur, prince of Wales; the studious habits of young lord Mountjoy occasioned his selection to be elder companion to prince Henry. The part taken by Margaret, countess of Richmond and Derby, in establishing homes of the classical renascence in Cambridge has been discussed in a previous chapter of this work.