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602 MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
After the great advances of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, English science, and indeed that ofalmost the whole
west outside Italy, showed little or no originality for over a
hundred years. There were still astronomers at Oxford, and at
Cambridge, but their writings mostly copied the work oftheir
great predecessors; medicine was scarcely more alive. Thus
it came about that when, in the sixteenth century, English
scholars began once more to inquire vigorously into the probx
lems of nature, they saw their work as a revival, and especially
as a revival ofthe great days of Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, and
Merton College. One of the most interesting figures in that
revival, the mathematician Dr. John Dee, took pains to collect
manuscripts of the mathematical and physical writings espex
cially of Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Pecham, and Bradwardine.
Thomas Digges of
University College, Oxford, describes
how the pioneer work with telescopes done by his father,
Leonard, 'grew by the aide he had by one old written booke of
the same Bakons Experiments . . .*. The astronomer Robert
Recorde, with Dee and the Diggeses among the first English/
men to support the Copernican theory, wrote in recommending
astronomical books: 'Dyuers Englyshe menne haue written
right well in that argument: as Grostehed, Michell Scotte,
Batecombe, Baconthorpe, and other . . dyuers /. Later
Sir Henry Savile, Warden of Merton, linked the great past
with the greater future of English science by founding at
Oxford the chairs in Geometry and Astronomy that bear his
name.
From the science ofBede to that ofsuch a Savilian Professor
as Sir Christopher Wren, to say nothing ofNewton, is as great
a distance in achievement as it is in time. Far more than was
realized by the iconoclastic enthusiasts ofthe seventeenth cen/
tury, that achievement was the measure ofthe scientific vigour
and originality of the medieval west; and, of the western
peoples, none entered with more enthusiasm than the medieval
English upon those inquiries that have made the outlook of
the modern world scientific, its arts industrial, and its hopes
material. But it has also been from early times a virtue in the