STRODE  ,

RALPH" (ft . 1350-1400), English schoolman, was probably a native of the West Midlands . He was a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, before 136o, and famous as a teacher of logic and philosophy and a writer on educational subjects . He belonged, like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura, to that " School of the Middle " which mediated between realists and nominalists . Besides his Logica, which has not survived, he wrote Consequentiae, a treatise on the syllogism, and Obligationes or Scholastica militia, a series of " formal exercises in scholastic dialectics." He had some not unfriendly controversy with hi's colleague John Wyclif, against whom he defended the possession of wealth by the clergy, _and held that in the Church abuses were better than disturbance . He also attacked Wyclif's doctrine of predestination . His positions are gathered from Wyclif's Responsiones ad Rodolphum Strodum (MS . 3926, Vienna Imperial Library) . Strode is also associated with John Gower in Chaucer's dedication of Troylus and Cryseyde, and Strode himself, according to the 15th-century Vetus catalogus of fellows of Merton, was a " poeta nobilis." Leland and Bale confirm this testimony, and Professor I . Gollancz has suggested the identification of the Phantasma Radulphi attributed to Strode in the Vetus catalogus with the beautiful 14th-century elegiac poem The Pearl . If this hold good, Strode wrote also Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight . From 1375 to 1385 this Strode or another of the same name was common sergeant of the city of London; he died in 1387 .

See Prantl, Geschichte der Logik; for an

attempt to distinguish between Strode the schoolman and Strode the poet, see J . T . T . Brown, in The Scottish Antiquary (1897), vol. xii .