ancis, was kept
hard at work in 1431; on the last of April and on the 4th of May alone,
sixty-two bandits swung from Paris gibbets.[7] A more confused or
troublous time it would have been difficult to select for a start in
life. Not even a man's nationality was certain; for the people of Paris
there was no such thing as a Frenchman. The English were the English
indeed, but the French were only the Armagnacs, whom, with Joan of Arc
at their head, they had beaten back from under their ramparts not two
years before. Such public sentiment as they had centred about their dear
Duke of Burgundy, and the dear Duke had no more urgent business than to
keep out of their neighbourhood.... At least, and whether he liked it or
not, our disreputable troubadour was tubbed and swaddled as a subject of
the English crown.

We hear nothing of Villon's father, except that he was poor and of mean
extraction. His mother was given piously, which does not imply very much
in an old Frenchwoman, and quite uneducated. He had an uncle, a monk in
an abbey at Angers, who must have prospered beyond the family average,
and was reported to be worth five or six hundred crowns. Of this uncle
and his money-box the reader will hear once more. In 1448 Francis became
a student of the University of Paris; in 1450 he took the degree of
Bachelor, and in 1452 that of Master of Arts. His _bourse_, or the sum
paid weekly for his board, was of the amount of two sous. Now two sous
was about the price of a pound of salt butter in the bad times of about
1417; it was the price of half a pound in the worse times of 1419; and
in 1444, just four years before Villon joined the University, it seems
to have been taken as the average wage for a day's manual labour.[8] In
short, it cannot have been a very profuse allowance to keep a sharp-set
lad in breakfast and supper for seven mortal days; and Villon's share of
the cakes and pastry and general good cheer, to which he is never weary
of referring, must have been slender from the first.

The educational arrangements of the University of Paris were, to our way
of thinking, somewhat incomplete. Worldly and monkish elements were
presented in a curious confusion, which the youth might disentangle for
himself. If he had an opportunity, on the one hand, of acquiring much
hair-drawn divinity and a taste for formal disputation, he was put in
the way of much gross and flaunting vice upon the other. The
lecture-room of a scholastic doct