The Watchers by Stephen Alford Page B

manchet loaf, a bread of the best quality. Teaching followed for most of the morning, with the scholars walking in pairs to their lectures at the Collegium Romanum – the Roman College – which had been founded, like the Society of Jesus, by Ignatius Loyola. Some went to lectures in divinity, others to physic, logic or rhetoric. The students had time before their midday meal in the English College to walk in its gardens.
    Dinner in the refectory was announced by the porter’s bell. The custom, Munday wrote, was for two students to take it in turns to serve everyone at the table, helped by the butler, the porter and a poor Jesuit. Small dishes for each scholar were set out on a round table, and every boy and man helped himself, ready prepared with his trencher, knife, fork and spoon, a manchet loaf covered by a white napkin, a glass and a pot of wine standing near by. The food was very fineindeed, beginning with
antipasto
of meat, Spanish anchovies or syrup of stewed prunes and raisins. The second course was a mess of pottage. Munday, a young man with a ready appetite, enjoyed what he ate but barely knew what was in the pottage, ‘made of divers things, whose proper names I do not remember: but methought they were both good and wholesome’. Boiled and then roasted meats followed. To finish there were cheese, figs, almonds and raisins, perhaps a lemon and sugar, a pomegranate, ‘or some such sweet gear [stuff, substance]: for they know that Englishmen loveth sweetmeats’. This was indeed very fine dining.
    While the scholars ate their main meal of the day, they listened to the reading of a chapter of the Latin Vulgate Bible and then, according to Munday though contested by his Catholic opponents, from their special book of martyrs that recorded the lives of some Tudor Englishmen executed for high treason. One of the martyrs, Munday said, was John Felton, the young Catholic hanged in 1570 for pinning to the gate of the Bishop of London’s palace the bull of excommunication against Elizabeth. Munday was saying, not very subtly, that the English College in Rome trained priests whose object was to destroy Queen Elizabeth and her Protestant kingdoms.
    Excellent food and edifying verses were followed by an hour of recreation and then, once again marked by the ringing of the porter’s bell, private study mulling over the morning’s lecture. Scholars went off to the Roman College for another hour of teaching in the afternoon before returning to the English College for a further glass of wine and a quarter of manchet. After this they would withdraw to their chambers, to be called later to scholarly disputations. There was time before supper for more recreation. Munday described how after supper in winter the Jesuits gathered the scholars round a great fire to say terrible things about Elizabeth, her privy councillors and bishops. The students went back to their chambers when the bell rang, and the porter came to light the lamps by which they laid out their beds ready for the night, studying for a little while at their desks. Another bell marked the time for prayer, and priests would begin the Latin litany, the scholars giving the responses. At last they all went to bed.
    This was the steady rhythm of the community’s life in Rome. It would have been familiar to any student who had studied in a collegein Cambridge or Oxford, something Munday, of course, had not. He was a city boy, an orphan, self-sufficient, clever and enterprising, and he did not take well to the discipline of an institution with strict rules for behaviour. Punishments were very much part of the life of a young scholar in the sixteenth century, and Munday relished describing them graphically, knowing full well that his Elizabethan readers saw the Jesuits in particular as the shock troops of the Catholic Antichrist, hardened by strict discipline. Munday made everything he could of their zeal. He knew all the small punishments